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Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

Keldoclock posted:

Netherlands?

ಠ_ಠ cheapskates.

Our Army ran out of bullets some time ago, they can train less and have to shout 'BANG BANG' on shooting exercises, I wish I was kidding. And these are the guys that we happily send abroad, not only the guys that stay here doing gently caress all. Some years ago we sold all our Leopard II tanks, and now we're going to borrow some German tanks to keep people trained. But at least we'll get a few F-35's!

It's always been like this, I mean, look at the state the Dutch Army was in in 1939 (to get back to the historical poo poo )....

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JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Molentik posted:

Our Army ran out of bullets some time ago, they can train less and have to shout 'BANG BANG' on shooting exercises, I wish I was kidding. And these are the guys that we happily send abroad, not only the guys that stay here doing gently caress all. Some years ago we sold all our Leopard II tanks, and now we're going to borrow some German tanks to keep people trained. But at least we'll get a few F-35's!

It's always been like this, I mean, look at the state the Dutch Army was in in 1939 (to get back to the historical poo poo )....

All I know of the Dutch Army circa WWII I learned from one Bolt Action book.

poo poo wasn't too hot back then, but they had heavily armed jeeps in Asia.

Taerkar
Dec 7, 2002

kind of into it, really

Kafouille posted:

The real reason the Marines don't get new equipment is that anytime anyone ask them what they want they insist someone should put GAU-8s on F4U Corsairs.

Considering the size of the GAU-8, I think that would literally be a gun with wings for the F4U

Jobbo_Fett
Mar 7, 2014

Slava Ukrayini

Clapping Larry
WW2 Data

We're finishing off the 122mm projectiles for the Soviet Explosives section. What does CP stand for in a projectiles designation? What projectile types were better when delivered from aircraft? How many lead balls are in a 122mm shrapnel round? That and more in the link.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Steel ammo chat:

Steel cased ammo is fine. It gets a bad rap in the US for two big reasons. First it is usually the cheap bargain bin stuff so and therefore both under loaded and inconsistently loaded. This leads both to malfunctions and poor accuracy. The other is the notion that steel cased wears out guns faster. There may be some truth to this but it is very exaggerated. There were some tests done a while ago firing AR15s until failure in really abusive tests [non stop mag dumping for thousands of rounds] that showed that while the barrels fired with steel cased and bimetal jacketed rounds burned out faster it was still long enough that the cost savings from how much cheaper the ammo was meant that even after rebarreling the total costs were still lower.

From a military standpoint steel casings are a lot cheaper and if the ammo is made well it can be just as accurate as any brass cased. Worries about "lacquer" building up inside chambers are over blown. The usual culprits are people shooting old milsurp that either has other issues or they never cleaned the grease out of the chamber properly. Most belligerent nations in ww2 used steel cased by the end. It isn't a perfect substitution but it isn't all poo poo either

Edit oh and the brass wash you see on golden bear and the like is something the soviets did at least since WW2. It's a cheap corrosion inhibitor. Brass cases don't rust in storage but steel cased ones will. Same story for every lacquer or poly coat you see on steel ammo both military and commercial.

Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Oct 19, 2015

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Molentik posted:

Our Army ran out of bullets some time ago, they can train less and have to shout 'BANG BANG' on shooting exercises, I wish I was kidding. And these are the guys that we happily send abroad, not only the guys that stay here doing gently caress all. Some years ago we sold all our Leopard II tanks, and now we're going to borrow some German tanks to keep people trained. But at least we'll get a few F-35's!

It's always been like this, I mean, look at the state the Dutch Army was in in 1939 (to get back to the historical poo poo )....

You're not alone; nearly all of NATO has up and gone their military spending.

I thoroughly appreciate the internal political pressures that practically all of Europe is facing, plus you've got the fact that there isn't a Soviet boogeyman to arm yourself against anymore. That being said, I think the long-term plan here is basically to rely on America's unwavering commitment to her allies to take care of any serious military business...which is probably a decent assumption to make. The problem is that the US military is being stretched very, very thin, and that is going to cause a significant erosion of the deterrent effect.

Not trying to start a political discussion on the priority of military spending (full disclosure: I'm generally in favor of reducing spending), but at the same time I do not really like seeing the hollowing-out of the NATO alliance. I don't have a good solution to reconile these two thoughts, if you were wondering.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Steel ammo chat:

What about heat transfer? Brass is a lot more thermally conductive than steel is; it seems like for military applications that require a high rate of fire that would be a major concern. That being said I'm far from an expert on guns....

bewbies fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Oct 19, 2015

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Molentik posted:

Our Army ran out of bullets some time ago, they can train less and have to shout 'BANG BANG' on shooting exercises, I wish I was kidding. And these are the guys that we happily send abroad, not only the guys that stay here doing gently caress all. Some years ago we sold all our Leopard II tanks, and now we're going to borrow some German tanks to keep people trained. But at least we'll get a few F-35's!

It's always been like this, I mean, look at the state the Dutch Army was in in 1939 (to get back to the historical poo poo )....

The German army still has problems with its retarded civilian procurement. Since the Ukraine-crisis, we had to raise the amount of our battle-ready tanks by 33% and take over command of the new NATO-fast response brigade. Which leads to "hilarious" poo poo like the Bundeswehr having to rebuy and refit Leopard II-tanks we had discharged a couple years earlier. We paid for the tanks, we paid for proper discharge of them, now we have to pay again to get them back into service. The refit costs more than brand new tanks, but the civilian bureaucracy controlling procurement didn't want to pay for new tanks, you see. :shepface:

Only two of our helicopters are working and last time I checked, both of them were still at Cape Horn, helping our frigate hunting pirates. Then after we wanted to send weapons and ammo to the Peshmerga, we barely made it: First our Dutch-NATO partner was supposed to transport the stuff, but the transport plane broke down. Then our transport planes broke down. As in, first one then a second one. Luckily the third plane in this mess got repaired fast enough to get the weapons to the Peshmerga, just in time for this weird G36-scandal to confuse them.

The G36 has some aiming trouble in some edge cases, which the assholes in procurement tried to suppress, to protect Heckler & Koch apparently. Now everything is confused, since we of course still need to use the G36, since it has replaced all of our old G3s and there sure as hell isn't enough money nor time to magic up a replacement and issue is to the entire army at once. The problem is mostly a German one, since allmost every other nation on Earth would look at the slight decrease in accuracy when the gun gets too hot and just shrug.

Also I remember hearing from the Dutch in WWII! Didn't they fight like only seven days or something before the Wehrmacht overran them? :v:

Nothingtoseehere
Nov 11, 2010


Libluini posted:

The German army still has problems with its retarded civilian procurement. Since the Ukraine-crisis, we had to raise the amount of our battle-ready tanks by 33% and take over command of the new NATO-fast response brigade. Which leads to "hilarious" poo poo like the Bundeswehr having to rebuy and refit Leopard II-tanks we had discharged a couple years earlier. We paid for the tanks, we paid for proper discharge of them, now we have to pay again to get them back into service. The refit costs more than brand new tanks, but the civilian bureaucracy controlling procurement didn't want to pay for new tanks, you see. :shepface:

Only two of our helicopters are working and last time I checked, both of them were still at Cape Horn, helping our frigate hunting pirates. Then after we wanted to send weapons and ammo to the Peshmerga, we barely made it: First our Dutch-NATO partner was supposed to transport the stuff, but the transport plane broke down. Then our transport planes broke down. As in, first one then a second one. Luckily the third plane in this mess got repaired fast enough to get the weapons to the Peshmerga, just in time for this weird G36-scandal to confuse them.

The G36 has some aiming trouble in some edge cases, which the assholes in procurement tried to suppress, to protect Heckler & Koch apparently. Now everything is confused, since we of course still need to use the G36, since it has replaced all of our old G3s and there sure as hell isn't enough money nor time to magic up a replacement and issue is to the entire army at once. The problem is mostly a German one, since allmost every other nation on Earth would look at the slight decrease in accuracy when the gun gets too hot and just shrug.

Also I remember hearing from the Dutch in WWII! Didn't they fight like only seven days or something before the Wehrmacht overran them? :v:

And I though the UK military was a clusterfuck.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands
Say, here's a question: We all know Japan in WW2 was banking on the decisive battle doctrine, and built their entire navy around the idea of an elite force smashing the absolute hell out of the enemy in a major engagement that forces them to the negotiating table. It was also noted that this influenced things like their ship designs, training programs, overall strategy, etc. The question is, did the United States have an equivalent doctrine that drove their own strategy and design decisions? For that matter, did the British? And how much of their pre-war theories about how to win a naval war survived the process of an actual war?

sullat
Jan 9, 2012

Libluini posted:

Also I remember hearing from the Dutch in WWII! Didn't they fight like only seven days or something before the Wehrmacht overran them? :v:

Dunno about that, but they fought in Indonesia for much longer. I believe they held out until 1948 or so.

Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

If you guys would like it I can do something of an effort post on the Dutch armed forces in WWII and some of its exploits. Remember, we had two separate armies! The Koninklijke Landmacht (Royal Army) in the Netherlands and the Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger (or KNIL, the Royal Dutch-Indies Army) in what is now Indonesia.

And in may 1940 the Dutch (in the Netherlands) actually capitulated after 5 days, not 7 :pseudo: , in fear of having other cities bombed like Rotterdam was. In some places the Dutch gave very good resistance, but there's only so much you can do against the 1940 Wehrmacht with an army whose equipment would make a 1918 army feel ashamed of itself... :geert:

Hazzard
Mar 16, 2013

sullat posted:

Dunno about that, but they fought in Indonesia for much longer. I believe they held out until 1948 or so.

Who was left to fight in 1948?

sullat
Jan 9, 2012

Hazzard posted:

Who was left to fight in 1948?

The Indonesians.

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

Libluini posted:



The G36 has some aiming trouble in some edge cases, which the assholes in procurement tried to suppress, to protect Heckler & Koch apparently. Now everything is confused, since we of course still need to use the G36, since it has replaced all of our old G3s and there sure as hell isn't enough money nor time to magic up a replacement and issue is to the entire army at once. The problem is mostly a German one, since allmost every other nation on Earth would look at the slight decrease in accuracy when the gun gets too hot and just shrug.

Uh, I don't think 'only hits target in 7% of cases if fired in ambient temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius' is an edge case for people fighting in a desert. There is also the fact that the gun starts to warp and shift the barrel out of alignment if it's warmed up unevenly, so make sure you turn over your gun every few minutes when you are watching an enemy position in bright sunlight! If you wonder how that wasn't caught in testing - it appears the rifles turned over for initial testing during procurement were not, in fact, identical to the production model. The production model used cheaper plastics that were less heat-resistant. Somehow that lead to problems when the gun gets hot, who could have seen that coming?

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Tomn posted:

Say, here's a question: We all know Japan in WW2 was banking on the decisive battle doctrine, and built their entire navy around the idea of an elite force smashing the absolute hell out of the enemy in a major engagement that forces them to the negotiating table. It was also noted that this influenced things like their ship designs, training programs, overall strategy, etc. The question is, did the United States have an equivalent doctrine that drove their own strategy and design decisions? For that matter, did the British? And how much of their pre-war theories about how to win a naval war survived the process of an actual war?

The US and UK definitely influenced by the same strategic naval thinking that Japan took and ran with - the Japanese naval strategy was largely based on what at the time was the traditional theory of sea power established and practiced by the Royal Navy and then refined and promulgated by American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan's sea power theory primarily was involved with the success of colonialism, and was enormously influential throughout Europe and in the United States.

However, Japan took Mahan's theory of sea power further than the US and Europe for a few main reasons. One, the naval theater of WW1 and technologies emerging at the same time poked several holes in the idea of traditional sea power - submarines, aircraft, and so on and so forth. Two, none of the Western powers were in a position to really employ traditional ideas of sea power during WW2 - the European navies were stretched thin, and the American heart of the traditional idea of sea power, the big gun battleship, was savaged at Pearl Harbor and forced the US to adopt the aircraft carrier instead. Third, the Mahan theory of sea power was reinforced by Japan's experiences during the Russo-Japanese war.

Pre-war theories about how to win a naval war largely disappeared in the US during the war largely due to a combination of technological advance and strategic circumstance. Battleships were the traditional core of naval war, but the Americans lost many of theirs and were forced to turn to the aircraft carrier and submarine against Japan. As it happened, this came at the critical technological moment when these new and largely untested ships, which had no real place in traditional naval thinking, were coming into their own. I'm not a real naval thought guru, but my understanding is that a large part of naval success for both America and Japan came when they abandoned traditional ideas of sea power and embraced the more integrated nature of the carrier-dominated naval world, and WW2 marked the transition period away from big gun navies towards the surface/air/submarine era that's dominated naval thinking to this day.

Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

sullat posted:

Dunno about that, but they fought in Indonesia for much longer. I believe they held out until 1948 or so.

What you are thinking of are the 'Politicional Actions' a.k.a. 'We need this colony because we are loving broke because the Home Country is shot to poo poo campaign' that lasted from the end of WWII to 1950.
After the capitulation to the Japanese on the East-Indies in 1942 quite a lot of ships and planes managed to escape to either Australia (like the Hr.Ms. Abraham Crijnssen that disquised itself as a loving island) or Ceylon. The Dutch had a few squadrons that flew with the Australian Airforce in B-25's and P-40's, and the Dutch submarines actually sank more Japanese ships in the opening stages of the Pacific war than their British and American counterparts combined untill they were asked to stop because they were too agressive..

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

bewbies posted:

What about heat transfer? Brass is a lot more thermally conductive than steel is; it seems like for military applications that require a high rate of fire that would be a major concern. That being said I'm far from an expert on guns....

I've never heard of heat transfer being a major issue between steel cased and brass. I'm sure there's some small difference, but I doubt it's significant enough to cause operating problems. There was a TFR goon a while back who had a transferable MG42 that he ran with surplus steel cased. poo poo, an MG34 to boot on that score. Dude had a lot of cool stuff. Hell, for that matter the Germans used steel cased 8mm Mauser in WW2.

Where the heat transfer capabilities of casings start to become a real concern is when you're talking about getting rid of the casing all together. Then you don't have the ejecting casing acting like a disposable heat sink - all the heat that was in that hot piece of brass is now transferred directly to the chamber. That's one of the big reasons that most of the experiments in caseless assault rifles had serious problems with ammo cook offs in sustained fire. For that matter, now that I think about it a less thermally conductive steel might actually be better for situations where you are doing a lot of sustained fire - if it's less conductive less heat is getting to the chamber which means you can run it longer before you start having cook offs. That's just conjecture, though.

At the end of the day reliable MGs are kind of a big deal for any military, and especially early-mid 20th C. militaries. I steel cased hosed up guns with a high ROF to the point where they were unreliable it wouldn't have been an acceptable substitute for brass.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

ArchangeI posted:

Uh, I don't think 'only hits target in 7% of cases if fired in ambient temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius' is an edge case for people fighting in a desert. There is also the fact that the gun starts to warp and shift the barrel out of alignment if it's warmed up unevenly, so make sure you turn over your gun every few minutes when you are watching an enemy position in bright sunlight! If you wonder how that wasn't caught in testing - it appears the rifles turned over for initial testing during procurement were not, in fact, identical to the production model. The production model used cheaper plastics that were less heat-resistant. Somehow that lead to problems when the gun gets hot, who could have seen that coming?

Well, the Peshmerga tested the rifles and found them working OK. Maybe it wasn't hot enough in their desert? :v:

Besides that, the news articles I've read about this made it sound as if the problem was with the ammunition, not the rifle itself. At least Heckler & Koch claimed the usage of the wrong (as in, not from Heckler & Koch) ammunition caused the decrease in accuracy. They're probably wrong, but in any case ambient temperatures in Europe will hopefully stay under 45° Celsius for the next couple decades, which should allow us to slowly replace the G36.

Maybe we can try the G11 next! It is a master piece of Science, after all. No problems with ambient heat or ammunition at all. Too bad about them not working in most weather conditions. And needing special extra-expensive ammunition not compatible to the rest of NATO. But in concept, the G11 was clearly superior to the G36.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Libluini posted:

Maybe we can try the G11 next! It is a master piece of Science, after all. No problems with ambient heat or ammunition at all. Too bad about them not working in most weather conditions. And needing special extra-expensive ammunition not compatible to the rest of NATO. But in concept, the G11 was clearly superior to the G36.

Well, it did have pretty big issues with heat in a general sense.

Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

I've posted a list at the SA Mart of a shitload of MilHist books I'd like to sell because I'm quickly running out of space. Mainly WWII stuff, but also a couple of books on WWI air warfare. I would appreciate it if you guys would take a look, my prices are quite low and there are some hard to find books in there.

I have loads more that I will sell as soon as I sort through it all, but if you are looking for a particular subject I'm happy to look it up for you.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3747516

Thanks!

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

Libluini posted:

Well, the Peshmerga tested the rifles and found them working OK. Maybe it wasn't hot enough in their desert? :v:

Besides that, the news articles I've read about this made it sound as if the problem was with the ammunition, not the rifle itself. At least Heckler & Koch claimed the usage of the wrong (as in, not from Heckler & Koch) ammunition caused the decrease in accuracy. They're probably wrong, but in any case ambient temperatures in Europe will hopefully stay under 45° Celsius for the next couple decades, which should allow us to slowly replace the G36.

Maybe we can try the G11 next! It is a master piece of Science, after all. No problems with ambient heat or ammunition at all. Too bad about them not working in most weather conditions. And needing special extra-expensive ammunition not compatible to the rest of NATO. But in concept, the G11 was clearly superior to the G36.

The Bundeswehr report specifically states that the accuracy issues persist with all ammunition types and production lots. And why would they not? The only way ammunition could fix accuracy issues caused by the barrel warping out of alignment due to uneven warming in the sun is if the ammunition is guided into the target after firing. Which would be the most German solution imaginable.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

HEY GAL posted:

This is also too late; I've read French stuff from the 18th century where people are trying to figure this out, talking about how a soldier will sicken and die if given nothing but rice, but if given nothing but meat will do fine.

This is also the time when people (at least the French) start thinking about what effect rations have on morale; Vauban writes about making sure fortresses get enough tobacco.

I think I generalized my statement a bit too much. What I was referring to was specific attempts to get maximum nutrition like specific quantities of vitamins and minerals to have scientifically perfected diets. Nutritional deficiencies have been known practically since the dawn of humanity and compensated for, but it wasn't really possible until the 20th century to actually figure out what was in food that gave it its magic "Don't start rotting like a zombie for no reason" powers. Like the British navy knew that the sailors that ate fresh fruit or fruit juices didn't get scurvy, but they had no clue why beyond "Lime juice prevents scurvy". But that was perfectly fine for what they needed, so they just hurled limes at sailors and were happy.

American C-rations were mostly designed to intentionally emulate the A and B-ration meals the soldiers normally got served in field kitchens or garrison, which in turn were similar to common (white) American meals at the time to give soldiers familiar food that they would want to eat. Unfortunately, this also meant that the soldiers were reminded of crappy field kitchen food. There's only so long you can go with canned stew and white bread before you start to go crazy.

This actually brings me to another neat part of American rations: the Charlie Ration Cookbook. In Vietnam, the MCI rations were basically slightly better C-rations and thus pretty unpopular. The McIlhenny Company of Tabasco fame happened to give us a brigadier general in World War II, who encouraged the army to send a recipe book created by the company with a mini bottle of Tabasco sauce to soldiers. You can read the whole thing here. All of the recipes can be made with nothing but C-ration components and Tabasco, but they include optional ingredients like chicken, rice, and flour. It even encouraged soldiers to follow the age-old tradition of pillaging and stealing livestock to get ingredients!

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Oct 19, 2015

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME
let's bring hot sauce to vietnam

this is a great idea

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

HEY GAL posted:

let's bring hot sauce to vietnam

this is a great idea

Speaking as someone who has eaten plain canned Spam with no other accompaniments before, Tabasco is an absolute godsend to morale. It adds flavor to even the most flavorless or generically "salty, meaty" food.

Edit: I see more problems with sending them a book with racist caricatures of Asians and encouragement to steal livestock from the peasants, while simultaneously issuing them "This is the culture of Vietnam, it is a nice country, please learn the language and do not gently caress up the locals" booklets upon their arrival in the country.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Oct 19, 2015

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME
i meant it was a coals-to-newcastle sort of situation. there is already more than enough hot chile in vietnam

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Old soldiers everywhere know the value of keeping a supply of mustard on you at all times.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

HEY GAL posted:

i meant it was a coals-to-newcastle sort of situation. there is already more than enough hot chile in vietnam

Yeah, but shipping poo poo with the food makes it more likely it will actually get used. Plus, as someone who loves really spicy food and can spend an hour drifting around the section of the local Asian market that has the hot sauces and peppers, tobasco is less of a spicy sauce than it is a spiced vinegar condiment. I know lots of people who find even habanero based sauces to way too much who will splash tobasco on eggs without a second though.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Tabasco is also the #1 hot sauce in the US and was the first one to make serious market penetration. I think it may have been the first commercial, mass produced hot sauce to see major success anywhere in the world (as opposed to homemade sauces and dips that everyone in chili growing areas have made). Tabasco would be much more familiar to your average US soldier than bird's eye chilies mashed into a paste and mixed with water.

A major difference between MREs and the rations of old is that they actually acknowledge the multicultural tastes of the United States. Instead of just issuing what Midwest white families would serve for dinner, they have samples of just about every major cuisine in the country. You still get issued menus totally randomly from the list of 24, but you've at least got a chance of getting fajitas with refried beans or "Asian Beef Strips" instead of just canned meatloaf served over white bread.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

chitoryu12 posted:

It even encouraged soldiers to follow the age-old tradition of pillaging and stealing livestock to get ingredients!

I assume this was the famous 'hearts and minds' programme :shobon:

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Cyrano4747 posted:

Plus, as someone who loves really spicy food...
:(:hf::( spicy food lover in germany bro

Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

So Germany did the whole colony thing and they didn't bring back spicy foods? For shame Germany, for shame!

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

HEY GAL posted:

:(:hf::( spicy food lover in germany bro

The best luck I had out there was Vietnamese restaurants in Berlin. Go there a few times and chat up the servers and you can usually convince them to go extra spicy.

Oh yeah, and this one expat bar called The Bird. Great burgers, but they are also the only place in Germany I've ever found that does wings properly. Their spicy ones are loving insane.

edit: ^^^^^^^ food in restaurants is marked "spicy" if it has paprika in the recipe. I poo poo you not.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Cyrano4747 posted:

The best luck I had out there was Vietnamese restaurants in Berlin.
lol have you met an east german vietnamese-german? they've all been there for like thirty years and use fresh dill instead of cilantro. no spice whatsoever

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

HEY GAL posted:

lol have you met an east german vietnamese-german? they've all been there for like thirty years and use fresh dill instead of cilantro. no spice whatsoever

Hey, I'm just saying what worked for me. There one in Berlin that I went to a bunch would make it hot enough to get a decent sweat on if I asked.

Koesj
Aug 3, 2003
At least we Ersatz-Germans imported some decent stuff from the DEI and 'inspired' a great kitchen in Surinamese cooking :geno:

Molentik
Apr 30, 2013

Do the French have spicy food?

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Molentik posted:

Do the French have spicy food?

They cultivate mild peppers in some regions (only about as hot as Tabasco sauce), but French cuisine is much more about herbs and spices and complementing the flavors of the food itself. Tastes like raw onion and black pepper are likely to be the "spiciest" you get in a typical dish.

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

HEY GAL posted:

This is also too late; I've read French stuff from the 18th century where people are trying to figure this out, talking about how a soldier will sicken and die if given nothing but rice, but if given nothing but meat will do fine.

This is also the time when people (at least the French) start thinking about what effect rations have on morale; Vauban writes about making sure fortresses get enough tobacco.

European Navies had reason to mess about with this topic. By the early 1600s, the Dutch East India company planted gardens at all ports of call for their sailors, and soon had identified good 'anti-scorbutics' such as citrus fruits, onions and sauerkraut. Despite the fact that the Dutch had well identified a cure - fresh fruit and vegetables - the topic of what causes scurvy was not seriously studied for 200 years. Dr. James Lind, a Scottish physician, in 1754 published A Treatise on Scurvy saying among other things "hey fresh food, especially the anti-scorbutics are really effective in preventing scurvy, maybe we should, y'know, make some sort of policy or something." Despite the fact the Treatise was widely read and translated across Europe, the Royal Navy didn't actually do anything about it until 1794, a year after the good doctor's death. Apparently they saw scurvy (like the IJA/IJN) as some sort of morale problem or lack of backbone or some such.

This problem persisted even into the 20th century. One of my favorite nonfiction books is The Worst Journey in the World, written by a survivor of Scott's last expedition to the antarctic. Despite the fact that people had known about the concept of anti-scorbutics for centuries, and seal meat is known to be a singularly good anti-scorbutic (the Inuit of Northern Canada are the only people in the world who could live on an almost totally meat diet, because seal meat contains almost all the nutrition that other peoples get from vegetables) the Scott expedition still had all sorts of problems with Scurvy. Scott and the "Antarctic" team dying on the return from the south pole was caused mostly by scurvy. On the polar trek many other expedition members also suffered from scurvy - one so badly that he had to be 'invalided' home. The expedition brought 'man-portable' food from home. This consisted of Tea/Coca, Pemmican, and two or three types of special dietary biscuits. They had been made scientifically - that is, it had been worked out how many fats and oils a person needed to burn as calories. None of these foods had vitamins. (The author, writing his book some 20 years later, actually explains all this to the reader, as in the intervening years is when the science of nutrition properly got started.)

Food on long sea voyages posed all sorts of problems besides that. While hauling huge amounts of food around at least wasn't physically taxing, unlike in say an army, you have virtually none of the preservation methods we have today - if the foodstuff could be dried, that was good, but the only way to preserve meat was by salting the poo poo out of it. When you prepared it, you needed to let it soak in fresh water, often up to 24 hours, just to make it palatable again. For reasons I'd love to have explained to me, you can't bake bread while aboard ship, so they used to make ship's biscuit - think a bread roll, but with no yeast at all - and keep it in a 'bread room', a special room aboard ship that they kept the rats out of by lining the room with copper. (No idea why that worked.) Add to these difficulties that ship's provisions were bought, even in the Navy, from viticuliers - merchants who would happily try and sell you rotten garbage in barrels labeled food.

Also if anybody can explain what the hell kind of foodstuffs ships at sea were consuming, I'd be most grateful. Ship's biscuit and salt horse, I get. Soused Hog's Face and the British definition of 'pudding' and 'duff', not so much.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Nebakenezzer posted:

For reasons I'd love to have explained to me, you can't bake bread while aboard ship
They don't want open fires? My subjects' ovens on board ships (unless it's a galley, there's no spare room in a galley) look like contemporary ovens on land, bricks and all, and it's possible that by the 18th century someone figured out that that was actually dumb as hell.

quote:

so they used to make ship's biscuit - think a bread roll, but with no yeast at all - and keep it in a 'bread room', a special room aboard ship that they kept the rats out of by lining the room with copper. (No idea why that worked.)
rat teeth can't eat copper beams

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Oct 19, 2015

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my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous

HEY GAL posted:

rat teeth can't eat copper beams

Boo this woman

BOOOO

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