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Kaal posted:Well in terms of training and logistics then sure, firearms are much better than bows. The principal advantage of a firearm has always been that it is cheap and easy to use. But the question intentionally excluded those categories of determination in lieu of a matched battlefield comparison. imo the armor penetration was more important. crossbows were also easy to use, and longbows were cheaper than crossbows or muskets
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Nov 6, 2015 22:39
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Just chiming in with cold-war nato-affiliated Sweden's take on ERA: Added it as standard to our rebuilt centurions in the mid 80ies (not done on the s tanks); 1. not earlier because of cost and 2. not after because the regular ballistic protection on the Leo2's was deemed enough, and 3. ERA being lethal to supporting infantry. Ie. deemed very necessary in the 80's/big discussion about the danger of ERA to infantry, with possible real reason being cost-effectiveness before and after -85.
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Nov 6, 2015 22:45
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Keldoclock posted:Mountaineering stuff This was really cool. Will be interested to hear how they did at Stalingrad.
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Nov 6, 2015 22:45
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Did any other armies have armored shields like the one above for their snipers? I would imagine not, but specialist sniper equipment isn't really my forte. When I get home, I'll post some pictures of the Canadian shovel from World War I. It was meant to also be usable as a gun shield, so it had an offset hole you could poke your rifle barrel through. I believe we can all understand the problem with this idea.
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Nov 6, 2015 22:50
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chitoryu12 posted:When I get home, I'll post some pictures of the Canadian shovel from World War I. It was meant to also be usable as a gun shield, so it had an offset hole you could poke your rifle barrel through. Does this go up with American Football grenades?
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Nov 6, 2015 22:51
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Slavvy posted:Right. What doesn't make sense to me is that it isn't an either/or situation, you can have ERA and whatever built in armour the tank has. Russian tanks are always drowning in the stuff yet you hardly ever see western tanks use it, and even in the pictures you posted it's only really there to protect the tracks and wheels. The glacis and turret front aren't covered, which would make me think that either A. they had a limited amount of weight budget and decided to spend it on protecting the mobility of the vehicle or B. the effectiveness of the frontal armour is somehow reduced with ERA blocks stuck to the front. Those mountings are not to protect the tracks, they are there to protect the side of the hull. They are mounted outside of the tracks simply because there is no space to put them right up to the side armor, and the space can be integrated into the armor as an airgap. The skirts you see on an 'naked' M1A2 for example are not just for dust, they are armor and combine with the airgap the tracks run in and the side hull armor to form the main armor array for the side. Current western designs don't put them up front simply because the current armor arrays are good enough to protect versus current threats, while side armor is still vulnerable to high end RPGs, so they focus on that (See the story of the Chally 2 that got nailed by an RPG-28 on the lower glacis for a situation where they will add armor to the front). The west knows how to make ERA, the Israelis were the first ones to field it after all, they just focused their effort in large arrays of passive armor. The advantage of those is that it doesn't degrade too much after getting hit, and you don't have the gaps in coverage that ERA will give you even if it's intact. You can't mount equipment on ERA so you either have to cram everything on the roof and ruin your TC field of view or have gaps in coverage for stuff like smoke launchers and APS system modules. Not to mention that frontal armor is simply not of as much concern to designers right now, given that top attack missiles and guided artillery rounds are a thing. And while ERA tends to be lighter for the same level of protection, it's not THAT much lighter, the western arrays look big but a lot of it is air. I think a lot of the reason Russian designs use it is that they simply don't have the space to use the large and bulky airgapped armor arrays you see on western MBTs. Having an array the size of the one on an M1A2 on a T-72 you would end up with the turret front halfway up the glacis and no way for the driver to get in or see anything. ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Just chiming in with cold-war nato-affiliated Sweden's take on ERA: Added it as standard to our rebuilt centurions in the mid 80ies (not done on the s tanks); 1. not earlier because of cost and 2. not after because the regular ballistic protection on the Leo2's was deemed enough, and 3. ERA being lethal to supporting infantry. Do note that current Russian ERA uses captive plates and basically contains and vents the explosions inside the ERA canister, so it's pretty much infantry safe. It's certainly much less dangerous than the blast from the HEAT warhead that just hit said armor.  Middle ERA canister is spent, it doesn't do anything to stuff around it. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 23:02
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Just chiming in with cold-war nato-affiliated Sweden's take on ERA: Added it as standard to our rebuilt centurions in the mid 80ies (not done on the s tanks); 1. not earlier because of cost and 2. not after because the regular ballistic protection on the Leo2's was deemed enough, and 3. ERA being lethal to supporting infantry. I get that APS can be hazardous to closeby infantry, but is ERA really worse than a tank going 'boom' nearby?
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Nov 6, 2015 23:03
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Hazzard posted:I've heard ridiculous stuff, like the Qing Government demanding a gun be in use for 40 years before replacement and the army being so far behind, that in one civil war, some rebels were excited by finding 1683 muskets in an armoury. Now I'd be excited too, but more from a history than a military aspect. This happened early in the Taiping rebellion. I don't think it was Yongan, but somewhere shortly thereafter. Maybe the imperial defense of Changsha? Anyway, they didn't just find cannons in an armory, they literally dug them up out of the ground and were happy to have them. Having so much old poo poo also meant you could forget about standardized ammunition, windage erred on the side of really, really loose. Bow/ Chinese language question: should I infer from 弓 that recurve bows date back a really, really long time?
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Nov 6, 2015 23:05
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I'm going to shitpost hard; not only am I going to be late to the piston engine aircraft discussion, but I'm also going to steal one of X's posts: http://sturgeonshouse.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/180-the-island-of-misfit-piston-engine-aircraft/#entry2788 Still, should be of interest to anyone liking weird planes. Speaking of piston engines, anyone know where I could find more on the IV-2220? I've recently developed a interest in it for some reason.
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Nov 6, 2015 23:11
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Keldoclock posted:Why don't people put stinger bars on tanks? Steel tubing shouldn't be too heavy to prevent this sort of thing. If you aren't going to pair combat engineering vehicles with your tanks everywhere you go, surely you should give them some rudimentary recovery tools? Well they used to :  It was for avoiding pretty much that situation while crossing trenches. You don't see it on anything modern because tanks are already too big to fit in a lot of places, you don't want to add another meter to it if you can help it, and tanks are already very wide and low, they don't need it ... most of the time anyway. 
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Nov 6, 2015 23:14
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LostCosmonaut posted:I'm going to shitpost hard; not only am I going to be late to the piston engine aircraft discussion, but I'm also going to steal one of X's posts: http://sturgeonshouse.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/180-the-island-of-misfit-piston-engine-aircraft/#entry2788 Screw you, I was going to steal that post!
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Nov 6, 2015 23:22
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Do tanks still steer by braking the left and right tracks separately? The Diamond DA-20 handles like that when it was on the ground, the first time I got into it and started taxiing i was slipping and sliding all over the tarmac, it took me a good 3 trips before I could manage it well, and even then there was just absolutely no possibility of going fast without taking your wheels off the ground. Have there been any tanks which instead rotated the whole catapillar track and inner rollers?
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Nov 6, 2015 23:23
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There have been a few things that used track warping to turn, bending the track by pushing a road wheel to the side, the most famous one being the Universal Carrier. But this is not scaleable to larger vehicles, it puts too much stress on the track links and is not of any real use. Tanks use brakes and differential gearing to turn, but the main idea is still for one track to spin faster than the other yes.
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Nov 6, 2015 23:31
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Hazzard posted:There's a reason George Washington wanted Pike and Longbow armed soldiers and the Duke of Wellington asked for archers to defend his cannons. There's an even better reason why they didn't get them
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Nov 6, 2015 23:32
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Keldoclock posted:Do tanks still steer by braking the left and right tracks separately? That would be some pretty hilarious engineering so ask the Swedes (no don't). I can't see anything but terrible disadvantages to a steering scheme like that. I've never heard of a tank that didn't steer by braking tracks. The Abrams control yoke thing is more like a motor scooter handlebars than the old conventional individual brake levers for each side but it still works the same.
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Nov 6, 2015 23:33
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P-Mack posted:This happened early in the Taiping rebellion. I don't think it was Yongan, but somewhere shortly thereafter. Maybe the imperial defense of Changsha? Anyway, they didn't just find cannons in an armory, they literally dug them up out of the ground and were happy to have them. I have minimal knowledge of bows, so actual like archaeology and period depictions would be best, obviously, but if you look at it in the oracle bone script, you'll so it looks pretty recurve-like with the string on the right side. Sadly not as cool as if the string was on the left. I know I've read poo poo tons about archery in pre-Han stuff and later (fuckers love archery contests), but nothing off the top of my head would tip it one way or the other. But then again I wasn't really paying attention to that. So in my o so learned capacity as Dude Who Reads Lots of Old Chinese Stuff, I'mma guess quite old but beyond that 
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Nov 6, 2015 23:38
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Squalid posted:Understanding the financial state of the Ancien Régime is difficult when you look at it through the lens of the modern bureaucratic state. Theoretically the King's power was absolute, in practice the nobility had many ways to stymie royal authority, and the (from a modern perspective) incredibly underdeveloped royal administration had limited capacity to enforce its decrees. Yeah, that's why I was thinking of the whole "needing parliament to get sweet, sweet tax money". I think the last French Revolution related thing I watched was actually about Versailles and the Louises from XIV to XVI. It mentioned these issues, but didn't quite go into detail.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:02
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LostCosmonaut posted:I'm going to shitpost hard; not only am I going to be late to the piston engine aircraft discussion, but I'm also going to steal one of X's posts: http://sturgeonshouse.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/180-the-island-of-misfit-piston-engine-aircraft/#entry2788 Talking poo poo about the BV-141? Not cool man! 
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Nov 7, 2015 00:07
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So, the MacAdam Shield Shovel! Sam Hughes, the Canadian minister for the Department of Militia and Defense, got the idea from his personal secretary (Ena MacAdam) who had seen Swiss soldiers building fortifications in France and suggested the idea to him. It was named after her, and is a prime example of why you don't take military suggestions from the secretary. It was made of 3/16" steel, including the handle, and you were supposed to fold the handle around to expose the spike and drive it into the ground to use it as a shield. Because they used such heavy steel, it weighed over 5 pounds. As you could expect, everything went incredibly wrong. The steel couldn't deflect really any gunfire on the World War I battlefield, but they sent the shovels anyway. Somehow, at no point in the development process did a decision-maker ever realize "We are sending our soldiers a shovel with a large hole in it" and correct it. As far as anyone knows, all of them got sold for scrap. The total value of the scrap was less than the total amount of money paid for each shovel.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:16
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Yeah, if you're going to Rube Goldberg a rifle you should go for something more practical.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:21
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chitoryu12 posted:So, the MacAdam Shield Shovel! I want one purely as a novelty item.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:25
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Rabhadh posted:There's an even better reason why they didn't get them Yeah from what I've gathered on the subject Washington was a first rate spymaster and a sound strategist but a lousy tactician. I'm not sure employing pike and bow would be the best move even against loyalists and would likely be disastrous if tried against regulars.
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Nov 7, 2015 00:27
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Come to think of it, I wonder if there's an Enlightenment equivalent of the Gavin guy writing huge, barely coherent treatises on the many virtues of the longbow, its obvious superiority to the musket, and the utter incompetence of those in command (as evidenced by their refusal to use longbows).
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Nov 7, 2015 00:58
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I had some extra time this afternoon, and I thrashed about a bit to see if I could find out about sub-hunting IJN autogyros. I was confused because I have a book about IJN carriers, and the carrier that used them (the Akitsu Maru) dosen't get a mention. That is because the Akitsu Maru is a Imperial Japanese Army carrier  The autogyro it carried, the Kayaba Ka-1 was a autogyro developed from an American design. The original mission for it was as an artillery spotter and liaison aircraft, like the Fieseler Storch. At some point the IJA took over two under-construction Ocean liners, which they completed as the first real amphibious assault ships. They both had flight decks, but due to the size of the donor vessels, they couldn't use conventional aircraft. (Originally the ships were supposed to provide air cover in addition to swarms of landing boats, but this didn't work out. Instead, the IJA adapted the Ka-1 to carry small bombs, so it could operate in a anti-submarine role. It also carried the Kokusai Ki-76 to use in the same role. The Ki-76 was a aircraft patterned after the Fieseler Storch, IE a very small airplane that could take off and land in very short distances. The Ka-1 never attacked any enemy submarines, but was "quite useful" in spotting enemy submarines.  So that's actually a thing. Both the Akitsu Maru and her sister ship were used mostly as aircraft ferries, and were both sunk during the war by submarines. The Akitsu Maru in particular is somewhat notable because it was evacuating troops at the time, so the death toll in her sinking was over 2000 people. So I put the name into google image search to see if there are any other images of the Akitsu Maru and I immediately start getting some weird results. So there's a game out there called Kancolle which is about you recruiting a bunch of anthropomorphic ship-women (all corresponding to Axis warships, natch) and you send them out to fight enemy fleets - it appears to be a naval sim, or maybe some sort of collectible card game and it has an anime and they are working on a second season! Did I mention Kancolle is Japanese? I probably should have started off with that or else it sounds crazy   Good day. I am Bismarck, the nameship of the Bismarck-class battleships. You should remember it well.  Second of the Shoukaku-class aircraft carriers, the younger sister Zuikaku. The lucky carrier, you say? That's not it, I just fight with all my might... As long as I have planes, I won't lose! Anyway, my first point is...you can marry them, as a actual game feature, and I'm pretty sure that World of Ships doesn't have that. No, that's not my point. Do the World of Ships people know about this? If not, I have such sights to show them  Question, not a point. gently caress it, I'm gonna lie down, my head feels funnye: ocean liners, not airliners Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 01:09
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http://www.dmm.com/netgame/feature/kancolle.html Have fun kids! It's a free browser game which tries to make you spend money by microtransactions and waiting. Hope you've brushed up on your Japanese, or you'll be stuck trying to backwards-translate using the wiki. I'm a bit disappointed at the low budget though, the U-551's German lines are clearly voiced by a Japanese woman who doesn't speak German. Same for that Japanese destroyer who got turned over to the Soviets, her Russian is terrible. e: actually all the Kreigsmarine vessels have pretty butchered German lines. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 7, 2015 01:29
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Nebakenezzer posted:Anyway, my first point is...you can marry them, as a actual game feature, and I'm pretty sure that World of Ships doesn't have that. No, that's not my point. Do the World of Ships people know about this? If not, I have such sights to show them Yes, and you'll probably see some sort of (horrible) cross promotion at some point, like they did with Girl and Panzer.
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Nov 7, 2015 01:36
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Nebakenezzer posted:I had some extra time this afternoon, and I thrashed about a bit to see if I could find out about sub-hunting IJN autogyros. I was confused because I have a book about IJN carriers, and the carrier that used them (the Akitsu Maru) dosen't get a mention. That is because the Akitsu Maru is a Imperial Japanese Army carrier So the company that makes the factory shock absorbers on most Japanese cars also made an autogyro.
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Nov 7, 2015 01:48
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Yes the botes people know about kancolle and that there's an anime. Unfortunately for those hoping for a spiritual successor to Fargo or most Tarantino movies, it isn't historically correct.
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Nov 7, 2015 01:50
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Frostwerks posted:Yeah from what I've gathered on the subject Washington was a first rate spymaster and a sound strategist but a lousy tactician. I'm not sure employing pike and bow would be the best move even against loyalists and would likely be disastrous if tried against regulars. On the subject of late 18th century pikes, there was a faction in the French Revolution that had a huge boner for pikes, as somehow better representing their hot throbbing passion for democracy than firearms did. The passage excerpted below is from David Bell's The First Total War. 
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Nov 7, 2015 02:06
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Yo guys, ship waifus is a bad idea and a bad time. E: I wait for this thread to discover sword husbandos.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:09
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Can we get an anime that depicts the 30 Years War with anime girls who are anthropomorphized pikes?
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Nov 7, 2015 02:12
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Kancolle is a bizarre non-game. It's been described to me as a Skinner box with anime girls as the reward.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:18
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Hogge Wild posted:imo the armor penetration was more important. crossbows were also easy to use, and longbows were cheaper than crossbows or muskets They were actually more accurate in real field conditions in direct fire than bows or even crossbows because at their effective range there was no drop. Their armor penetration was also quite important. They also had more of a moral effect due to the noise they made. It's also important to note that firearms improved in quality as metallurgy improved, making them more accurate and reliable.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:29
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Hypha posted:Yo guys, ship waifus is a bad idea and a bad time. Link please.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:29
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Hogge Wild posted:and longbows were cheaper than crossbows or muskets Sort of. Yes, it takes less raw resources to make a bow than a musket. But life isn't quite like an endless sandbox survival game you bought on Steam. For one, English longbows were made specifically with yew. Manufacturing of longbows caused massive deforestation, to the point where shortages compelled the government to order trees cut down on private land. The 1472 Statute of Westminster made it law that a tax of four bowstaves per tun (about 252 gallons) of cargo be brought by every ship entering an English port. A vast supply network was created across Europe purely to provide a supply of appropriate wood for making longbows. By the time guns started pushing bows out completely in the 17th century, they were looking as far as the Baltic for more yew to chop down. On the other hand, muskets and crossbows can be made of just about any decent hardwood you've got lying around. Bows also weaken over time due to being stressed every time they're fired, or even just have the string pulled back to test. Eventually a bow's going to break no matter what, and you need to make a new one. And there's also training cost to be considered. Longbow men had to basically be trained from childhood to develop the strength and accuracy to pierce armor, and it only got worse as armor improved. Even as precarious a weapon as a matchlock arquebus takes orders of magnitude less time and effort to train, so you can raise a lot of totally untrained peasants of average period fitness to be useful conscripts with ranged weapons.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:55
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chitoryu12 posted:It was made of 3/16" steel, including the handle, and you were supposed to fold the handle around to expose the spike and drive it into the ground to use it as a shield. Because they used such heavy steel, it weighed over 5 pounds. I do love how they managed to design a shovel with a literal spike in it and it still ended up less popular in hand-to-hand combat than the issue BEF entrenching tool.
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Nov 7, 2015 02:57
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Trin Tragula posted:I do love how they managed to design a shovel with a literal spike in it and it still ended up less popular in hand-to-hand combat than the issue BEF entrenching tool. Well, you had to actually carry it onto the field. When your shovel weighs 5 pounds and has a loving hole in the part that's supposed to not have a hole in it, you start finding new shovels.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:00
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wdarkk posted:Link please. This is the Mikazuki Munechika  One of the "Five famous swords in Japan", it is named after the crescent moon pattern in the blade. This is also Mikazuki Munechika  Sword boyfriends this a-way: http://touken-ranbu.wikia.com/wiki/Touken_Ranbu_Wiki
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Nov 7, 2015 03:01
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chitoryu12 posted:And there's also training cost to be considered. Longbow men had to basically be trained from childhood to develop the strength and accuracy to pierce armor, and it only got worse as armor improved. Even as precarious a weapon as a matchlock arquebus takes orders of magnitude less time and effort to train, so you can raise a lot of totally untrained peasants of average period fitness to be useful conscripts with ranged weapons. Everyone keeps saying this but it's not really true- peasant levies and conscripts were not actually that common in at least continental warfare, it was dominated more by professionals, and they used firearms over bows. Most musketeers in this period were professional soldiers who had plenty of time to drill and train.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:03
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Hypha posted:This is the Mikazuki Munechika "Cool", thanks.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:08
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