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Since it seems we are now all on the same page, let me wrap it up with this: e: I will politely assume you mean that goonettes are invisible on the forums. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 00:50
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Not necessarily aristocrats but that's a legitimate Cuirassier regiment. ~Cavalry generals were still debating whether lance or saber was the better weapon in 1914~ (or so I heard. True/false?)
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Oct 21, 2015 00:51
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Keldoclock posted:Since it seems we are now all on the same page, let me wrap it up with this:
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Oct 21, 2015 00:53
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Slavvy posted:This definitely colours my judgements because there seems to be nowhere to park your AFV's without some sneaky rebels creeping up and destroying one with a missile from a good km away. Obviously it doesn't quite work that way in less open terrain. Find an ATGM and try slinging it on your back and running with it. Now imagine you just fired off a missile which probably sailed off a mile from what you were hoping to hit (unless you've spent a lot of time on a simulator or actually fired real live ones in training) and now the other side knows your position and is traversing their thermobaric Grads(probably a cheaper and more commonly available weapon system than modern ATGMs) on you.
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Oct 21, 2015 00:57
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Devlan Mud posted:Not quite. The guy front center looks like luke evans, this is weirding me out. xthetenth posted:Last I checked the US wasn't merrily drafting away trained naval architects. On the scale of screwing other arms over, that's enough times the F-35B project you could fill a carrier facsimile with them. I know they IJN and IJA were super antagonistic to each other, I've heard because they had to fight over the same pool of resources, but why was this the case exactly? Why the asinine, Kmart running of departments against each other? I don't get it at all, especially for guys up high who had to have some idea how things were actually going. It's like the Germans and not pulling elite pilots back to train dudes, it makes so little sense to me. Was it like this before ww2? Were they struggling against each other when the Japanese were messing with the Russians?
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Oct 21, 2015 01:03
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Synnr posted:The guy front center looks like luke evans, this is weirding me out. It has to do with what noble and samurai families went into what branches when poo poo went modern. We're talking centuries old clan animosities. Throw on top of that the usual jockeying for a limited pool of resources that you see in all modern militaries. It's just that in most cases the guys running the army don't have a centuries long feud brewing with the guys running the navy.
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Oct 21, 2015 01:07
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Synnr posted:I know they IJN and IJA were super antagonistic to each other, I've heard because they had to fight over the same pool of resources, but why was this the case exactly? Why the asinine, Kmart running of departments against each other? I don't get it at all, especially for guys up high who had to have some idea how things were actually going. It's like the Germans and not pulling elite pilots back to train dudes, it makes so little sense to me. At the heart of it: Japan was (and is) a small, resource-starved nation with only so much money, manpower, and material resources to go around. Both the IJA and IJN wanted the lion's share of all three. Add to it a society in dramatic upheaval from a massive and rapid forced industrialization comparable to Russia.
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Oct 21, 2015 01:08
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Slavvy posted:Thanks for a very informative post! It's basically an attempt at the old Soviet tactics for an advance without some necessary components. They would be okay (or at least mostly okay) with reliable support from artillery, aircraft, and tanks. But they have only sporadic artillery fire, no tanks, and no aircraft except possibly drones to help target artillery. So instead of showing up to a bunch of smoldering positions where they can shoot the survivors and loot anything not blown up, they walk right into a functioning tank in a hull-down position that's currently shooting at them.
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Oct 21, 2015 01:22
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Every time I see that video I'm amazed that the entire group of rebels wasn't utterly slaughtered to a man. Also, speaking of the T-64, I bought Zaloga's new book for it last night and it's a pretty decent overview and touches on some of the backroom political stuff that explains why exactly the Soviets ended up with 4 different tank lines with very similar performance. Otherwise if you want to just know dry technical details, Wikipedia is roughly equivalent so don't buy it for that. Lastly, very little talk of how it has performed in the Ukrainian Civil War, so we probably will need to wait a few more years for such details. Xerxes17 fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 01:43
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Xerxes17 posted:Every time I see that video I'm amazed that the entire group of rebels wasn't utterly slaughtered to a man. Leonid Kartsev posted:In the middle of 1976, a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, chief designer of the Kirov factory in Leningrad, N.S. Popov, convinced the leaders of the country to adopt the not so great T-80 tank. Having identical armament to T-72 and T-64A tanks, identical protection and maneuverability, the T-80 spent (according to army trials) 1.6-1.8 times as much fuel per kilometer, and despite the increased fuel capacity, had 25-30% less range. bewbies posted:For perspective's sake this was a military that 80 years before literally had general officers murdering one another. To that end, probably a good third of the major battles of the ACW featured some sort of major event that was prompted in large part by senior officers' inability to play nice with one another. T___A fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 02:59
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Keldoclock posted:Since it seems we are now all on the same page, let me wrap it up with this: Get the gently caress out Keldoclock.
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Oct 21, 2015 03:36
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I think that was a poorly worded joke and really at least he had content this time...just a lurker.
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Oct 21, 2015 04:01
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BalloonFish posted:You certainly could bake bread - the largest model of the RN's 'Brodie pattern' stove (as fitted to first-rates) had space to (theoretically) bake 80 loaves at a time. But with 850 men on board that's not going to go far and that's using all the oven space that could be better used for other meals, so fresh bread was only semi-regularly provided for the wardroom and the sick bay, with the rest of the crew being issued with biscuit. Bread using the best quality flour and kept in a sealed container only lasted about eight days at sea, so really wasn't viable as a staple in the way that the 'hard tack' biscuit was. I've mentioned this before but I have a weird fascination with rations and food preservation (ever since reading the book "Salt"), got any recommendations for books?
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Oct 21, 2015 04:54
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Klaus88 posted:Get the gently caress out Keldoclock. Seriously he's annoying as gently caress when he's expounding like an expert on poo poo he doesn't know gently caress all about but wait until he's being an idiot to poo poo on him.
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Oct 21, 2015 04:54
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Cythereal posted:ATGM-equipped forces also don't seem to be the kind of enemy the US is fighting nowadays nor is it likely to fight in the near future, thus the emphasis on MRAP vehicles. Just because the Iraqi insurgency didn't have effective ATGMs doesn't mean we don't need to be concerned with them. Indeed, I'd venture it would make strategic sense for the US to stop doing moronic counter-insurgencies and be more prepared for nearer-to-peer competitors that have equipment and weapons that can potentially seriously hurt us.
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Oct 21, 2015 04:57
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Chopstix posted:I've mentioned this before but I have a weird fascination with rations and food preservation (ever since reading the book "Salt"), got any recommendations for books? For armies of the Napoleonic era, I'm not aware of books that focus specifically on rations but there are more general organizational histories like Swords Around a Throne for Napoleon's army and Redcoat for the British army which have sections on the rations of their respective armies. For Werhmacht rations, there's an extensive two volume set: Rations of the German Wehrmacht in World War II, Rations of the German Wehrmacht in World War II: Vol.2 For a history of American military rations there's: Food in the American Military: A History. The US Army Quartermaster website also has a lot of great articles. Mirificus fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 06:16
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This probably belongs in a Photography History thread instead of a Military History thread, but how did they get those WW1 photos? I thought early cameras needed you to stand still for hours to get the picture?
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Oct 21, 2015 09:37
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Hazzard posted:This probably belongs in a Photography History thread instead of a Military History thread, but how did they get those WW1 photos? I thought early cameras needed you to stand still for hours to get the picture? If we're talking the 1860s, sure. Technology moves on. Movie cameras existed by the 1890s, remember.
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Oct 21, 2015 10:09
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Grand Prize Winner posted:~Cavalry generals were still debating whether lance or saber was the better weapon in 1914~ Nah, pretty much everyone had figured out that cav was going to serve three purposes: 1. Mobile infantry reserve 2. Scouting/recon/raiding 3. Exploiting a breakthrough The lance/saber and cuirass were more for morale/elan purposes, kind of like how modern infantry still receive some bayonet training. They are only really useful in a cav-on-cav engagement, which would happen in Scenario 2 on small scales.
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Oct 21, 2015 10:22
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Interesting how that one text dump, er, dumps on T-64 and T-80, and Ukrainians are both using and updating those two to no end. It's also interesting how T-64 was basically never exported and only given to elite units (as far as I understand). T-62 is a glorious failure/meh, but the one cold war tank book I've ever read claimed that ZTZ-59 was the worst think to have ever been given any military worldwide.
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Oct 21, 2015 10:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:Want an example of a relatively functional professional culture? The US military in WW2. There were officers who didn't like each other, but you also didn't see battles lost because General A didn't want to support the offensive of his arch nemesis General B. Another example of a professional culture which actually improved would be the German military between WW1 and WW2. In WW1 you have all sorts of back-biting poo poo like Falkenheim trying to oust von Moltke and then Ludendorf/Hindenburg trying to do the same to Falkenheim. In many cases that poo poo was successful. Lots of what amounted to back room court intrigue. WW2? The officer corps of the Wehrmacht* was a lot less likely to do poo poo like that. Yes, you have professional rivalries, but they're much more along the lines of what you see in the US. bewbies posted:For perspective's sake this was a military that 80 years before literally had general officers murdering one another. To that end, probably a good third of the major battles of the ACW featured some sort of major event that was prompted in large part by senior officers' inability to play nice with one another. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The lance/saber and cuirass were more for morale/elan purposes, kind of like how modern infantry still receive some bayonet training. They are only really useful in a cav-on-cav engagement, which would happen in Scenario 2 on small scales. and saber is fine against infantry if they're running, you ride past them and backhand them in the face with it edit: statim posted:I think that was a poorly worded joke and really at least he had content this time...just a lurker. don't slam a guy just for being unpopular if he does nothing wrong HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 11:09
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JcDent posted:Interesting how that one text dump, er, dumps on T-64 and T-80, and Ukrainians are both using and updating those two to no end. The T-62 was not that bad, it's mostly a disappointment in not quite being as good as the venerable T-55. They both have the wonderful distinction of being the last Soviet tanks made for humans to inhabit, though. I mean there's a good reason for the autoloader- less men meas less internal space which makes armor lighter- this is also the reason why it's extremely costly in weight to armor a troop carrying vehicle. The weight and cost is most of the reason the Bradley sucks. When the US got a BTR-equivalent, everything was made right. It's sad that the Stryker costs so much but that's General Dynamics gouging for you.
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Oct 21, 2015 11:52
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HEY GAL posted:So what did the German and American officer corps do right? Were the douchebags replaced by people more willing to work with others as they aged out? Was this deliberate? Did the armies recognise this was a problem and do things to create a different culture? If so, what? The two came about it from different ways: USA: A lot of the smooth running of the US Army in WWII came down to the managerial skills of George C Marshall. He is one of the greatest personnel managers in all of military history, in one of the armies that placed the most emphasis on boring-but-effective things like management and organisation. He was absolute willing to shitcan everyone and anyone who wasn't up to scratch, or even if they were up to scratch if they weren't in the right role. For example, he was the guy largely behind getting Ike in charge of D-Day, because out of all the American generals Ike was the one who was most willing to work with the British. A lot of US generals at the time loathed the British and would have nothing to do with them, and Marshall recognised that good relationship between all the Allied invasion powers was going to be absolutely critical. Marshall also cleaned house of all the old crusty generals and colonels at the start of the war who had got their positions by being in the Army a long time, rather than actual talent. This meant that the US army in WWII was a real meritocracy - if you sucked, you got canned. If you succeeded, you got promoted, fast. And even if you got canned, you could rise up in another position someplace else if that role suited you better. Thomas E Ricks has a cool talk on this here. Germany: Germany had the advantage of a long-standing land military tradition in Prussia, the oldest general staff in the world and a method of training its officers that meant all army officers were trained in roughly the same way and in the same concepts. This meant that all German officers could work off the same framework and believed in roughly the same principles, which was not true for a lot of powers coming into WWII who were still working out the ramifications of arms advances between the wars and did not have a cohesive or effective doctrine. A large proportion of the German officer corps were comprised of Prussian Junkers so there was a cultural bond there too. This is one of the reasons they had such great success in Poland, France and Barbarossa , as all German generals were very highly trained in maneuver warfare, operations and tactics, and could usually trust in their fellow generals to use their judgment effectively. It also bit them in the rear end, as there was pretty much a system wide deficiency in thinking about things like logistics and long-term strategy, largely due to a longstanding tradition of wanting to fight a short, sharp war (see Schlieffen Plan, the). Also, Germany's general did not all get along, and resulted in this gem General Sepp Dietrich on Rommel posted:What did he know of war? He constantly had himself photographed by Dr Berndt, his publicity man, for the papers back home. All he could do was stand on a tank, baton in hand and shout "I am the king of Africa."
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Oct 21, 2015 13:27
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Panzeh posted:The T-62 was not that bad, it's mostly a disappointment in not quite being as good as the venerable T-55. They both have the wonderful distinction of being the last Soviet tanks made for humans to inhabit, though. I mean there's a good reason for the autoloader- less men meas less internal space which makes armor lighter- this is also the reason why it's extremely costly in weight to armor a troop carrying vehicle. The weight and cost is most of the reason the Bradley sucks. They used to joke that the tank designers finally reached the ideal from their favorite song when they managed to cut down the crew to three in T-64. I'd say that if T-62 is worse than the tank it's replacing while being more expensive, it's probably not good. But the way I read it, the improvements in T-62's were not big significant enough to replace T-55s at the price. Anyone who wants to chime in on Chinese tanks, please do. Oh, oh! Why can't you bolt ATGMs on tanks like you do on IFVs? Why must it be "barrel launch or nothing?" On general staff: why did the Germans have a good long standing general staff while US army was, as far as I understand from Crotch's description, full of people who needed to be culled?
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Oct 21, 2015 13:40
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The T-62 was made as a tank killer, but then a new shell was made for the T-55 that made it just as good at tank killing. Kind of defeats the purpose of a whole new tank with a whole new gun.
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Oct 21, 2015 13:50
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JcDent posted:
Edit: misread your post, sorry. On tanks? I guess because the main gun is fine but I don' t know why they don't or can't, sorry. Maybe it's a combination of the main gun being sufficient or superior for anything an ATGM would be used for and a tank hull being designed to withstand the sorts of external explosions that would destroy an externally mounted missile but I'm just spit balling and now I want to know too. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 14:07
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Jack B Nimble posted:
I imagine externally mounted ATGMs would not mix well with explosive reactive armour. Also getting out of the tank to reload the missiles is probably not something that's going to happen, so why bother considering 1. how expensive they are and 2. tanks already have means to kill other tanks.
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Oct 21, 2015 14:27
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HEY GAL posted:So what did the German and American officer corps do right? Were the douchebags replaced by people more willing to work with others as they aged out? Was this deliberate? Did the armies recognise this was a problem and do things to create a different culture? If so, what? This is going to sound kind of  , but I think the biggest factor for the US was that it was pretty close to a legitimate meritocracy. The model of a populist army was really descended from the ACW and we followed a pretty similar model in WWII, in a lot of ways. Basically, the ACW broke the back of the old world aristocrats and whatever influence they had in the military, which meant it was possible to build a force that didn't have to worry much about crap like titles and family ties and who knows who. To wit: the majority of the best and highest ranking American of were from distinctly middle or lower class backgrounds; off the top of my head the only guys who might qualify as "aristocratic" were Marshall and Patton, both of whom clearly excelled based on their own merits anyway.As for the Germans I think that was probably more just a holdover from the old Prussian military tradition and its ability to produce quality officers in large numbers for various reasons I'm sure you're very familiar with.
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Oct 21, 2015 14:47
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Well the main reason is that you get to use the main sight of the tank to aim the ATGM, and you get the benefit the the stabilization. That's pretty huge, as the main sight on a tank is going to be about the best one around, and stabilization is great for observation even if you are not firing on the move (You can fire as soon as you have stopped instead of having to wait until the tank is still to find your target and aim at it) The second reason is that tanks don't really have any free space just laying around, and you need to keep the ATGMs somewhere. The natural thing is to keep it with you other ammo, and that means it mush have at least roughtly the same size as a tank round, so you may as well go all the way and fire it out of the tube. Third one is that you can reload pretty fast, and don't have to open the tank up to do so. This is doubly important during the Cold War as NBC conditions were assumed for a lot of these things, and you can't really open a hatch while driving around in a cloud of nerve gas.
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Oct 21, 2015 14:52
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Nebakenezzer posted:Please tell me there was this unit of really aristocratic heavy horse with lances that was just hanging around, waiting to charge something.  MikeCrotch posted:This meant that the US army in WWII was a real meritocracy
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Oct 21, 2015 15:02
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none of these accounts explain what germany did right between world wars one and two. why do the ww1 generals try to destroy one anothers' careers but sepp dietrich confines himself to wicked burns on rommel
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Oct 21, 2015 15:06
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HEY GAL posted:none of these accounts explain what germany did right between world wars one and two. why do the ww1 generals try to destroy one anothers' careers but sepp dietrich confines himself to wicked burns on rommel WWI Germany was "The army with a state attached to it". Kaiser Wilhelm and the Imperial German government were hopeless at keeping their generals in line and managing them, and by 1916 the army in the form of Hindenburg and Ludendorff are just straight up running the show. Crazy as it sounds, Hitler and the Nazis did a much better job of managing the generals than they did in WWI, and the generals themselves were not running the show (like the military was in Japan in WWII).
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Oct 21, 2015 15:16
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bewbies posted:As for the Germans I think that was probably more just a holdover from the old Prussian military tradition and its ability to produce quality officers in large numbers for various reasons I'm sure you're very familiar with. One thing which I've heard about as a contributing factor was the comparatively high standard and percentage of Germans who had a shot at higher education, Germany being an extremely urbanized nation even before WW2. A lot easier to get good officers when your pool of possible recruits is a lot bigger than most other nations had at the time.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:21
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Kemper Boyd posted:One thing which I've heard about as a contributing factor was the comparatively high standard and percentage of Germans who had a shot at higher education, Germany being an extremely urbanized nation even before WW2. A lot easier to get good officers when your pool of possible recruits is a lot bigger than most other nations had at the time. A lot of German officers were Junkers from Prussia, which were aristocratic farming families though. Also Germany was not hugely urbanised by this point and had a higher proportion of its population working as farmers than say the UK or the USA.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:32
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Germany's army was very small between the wars; only 100,000 men. With the economy sucking and so many WW I veterans, they could pick and choose only the best to stick around. The US was in a similar situation, though voluntarily rather than because of a treaty. Step one of any war plan was "Spend a year building a real army and navy." So in both cases you didn't have established careerists who turned out to be bad when the shooting started.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:34
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Arquinsiel posted:Point of pedantry: "meritocracy" is a satirical term coined by Michael Young to express the idea of a society where advancement is based on merit, but those in power define merit to mean the qualities they possess, thus being functionally a self-reinforcing oligarchy. Think libertarianism with a slightly better grasp of doublespeak. Joke's on him, I guess. That word has been appropriated by the people.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:34
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JcDent posted:Interesting how that one text dump, er, dumps on T-64 and T-80, and Ukrainians are both using and updating those two to no end. The way Kartzev dumps on the T-64 is a bit rich really, considering the T-72 simply would have not existed without it, the T-72 prototypes being mostly built out of T-64 parts. The T-64 was revolutionary in it's day, and it pushed the envelope quite a bit. Quite a few of it's concepts worked out, you won't see anyone building tanks without composite armor, and even the West is coming around to autoloaders and the 3-man crew. Some of it did not work out so well, the engine had pretty much the same issues as it's conceptual sister in the Chieftain, and much of the systems were brand new and suffering developmental issues. The T-72 had the advantage of being able to take the concepts and components that worked and to discard the troublesome ones, but at the end of the day it's a cheaper T-64 with a T-34-derived engine and a worse fire control system. The reason the Ukrainians are updating the T-64 is simply the plant that produced them (And also the principal tank design team in the USSR) happened to be in Ukraine, and they kept them when the USSR fell. They inherited a significant portion of the USSR tank design expertise, and Russia ended up having to mostly stop using the T-64 and T-80 for lack of spares. As for the ZTZ-59, well it's a T-54. It's not any better or worse than any other T-54. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 15:52
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Real meritocracy means selecting your military officers based mostly on their knowledge of ancient poetry.
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Oct 21, 2015 15:55
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P-Mack posted:Real meritocracy means selecting your military officers based mostly on their knowledge of ancient poetry. So that's how Patton, a man who decided a new cavalry saber design was appropriate in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and thirteen, ended up in Europe.
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Oct 21, 2015 16:02
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| # ? May 23, 2024 20:34 |
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stop hating on archaic weapons
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Oct 21, 2015 16:06
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