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HEY GAL posted:parody thread dude got banned for threatening the lawyer goonnette and saying that he wished her children got raped Ah, the classy "I hope x gets raped" defense, always works like a charm. ...would still appreciate a write up on Centurion and how not having major weaknesses made it a good/great tank. I already asked about it, I think, but how did weapons other than pikes and matchlocks work in the times of pike and shot? I should probably go to medieval thread, and ask what was the major european infantry weapon in the middle ages and how long axes/longswords fared against it.
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Nov 7, 2015 20:39
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Two things leap to mind when it comes to suggestions: 1) Maps to go with the massive army maneuvers. 2) A small tag added on behind the names of the various commanders and armies, that identifies them as being part of a certain faction or unaligned rebels/pirates/brigands/freelance taxcollectors.
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Nov 7, 2015 20:43
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Slo-Tek posted:Hey All, This thread has gotten to the point where I can't tell the lovely on purpose posts from the lovely because stupid posts.
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Nov 7, 2015 21:02
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HEY GAL posted:can i ask what this was about? this thread is usually pretty chill Keldoclock. JcDent posted:Ah, the classy "I hope x gets raped" defense, always works like a charm. Was the centurion the one that pioneered a laying-down driver's seating position? I'm certain I read this somewhere but I'm probably just senile.
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Nov 7, 2015 21:08
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Extra History releases it's Lies episode for the story of Admiral Yi. The greatest Admiral in military history who knew no equal. while also releases Admiral Yi: Drums of War OST from that episode, and if you've liked The Legend of Korra you might recognize the style! I love Extra Credits's take on history as I almost never fail to break out in tears at the end, especially here when they mentioned Yi's tragic death by a stray Japanese bullet.  The music and art direction never fails to capture my engagement.
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Nov 7, 2015 21:42
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Slo-Tek posted:Hey All, This thread has gotten to the point where I can't tell the lovely on purpose posts from the lovely because stupid posts. probate keldoclock and everyone who posted about anime, namaste
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Nov 7, 2015 21:59
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Hogge Wild posted:probate keldoclock and everyone who posted about anime, namaste Seconding this.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:03
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100 Years Ago On the Isonzo, the Italian rank and file are so happy and upbeat about life you'd think that Arnold Rimmer had just been appointed their Morale Officer. An unfortunate trooper near Loos runs into an old friend, the King of Greece continues trying to keep Venizelos out of power by hook and crook in equal measure, and although nothing of importance occurs, Lieutenant Bernard Adams provides a highly interesting narrative about how exactly one takes over a position from another battalion when one arrives in the line.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:05
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chitoryu12 posted:So, the MacAdam Shield Shovel! Here's what Soviets used during the Winter War:   They didn't work at all, soldiers using them were just shot from a different angle. They were probably invented by some armchair polemarchos.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:18
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Hogge Wild posted:Here's what Soviets used during the Winter War: I recall reading that a lot of guys using these got shot in the buttocks.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:25
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JaucheCharly posted:About the price of composite bows, turkish records from 1705 and chinese from 1802 show that they cost about a skilled worker's monthly wage, which accidentally is quite close to the modern price of these things. The workday prices I talked about were for untrained workers, so a composite bow would have been about 20 times more expensive than a longbow and 5 times more expensive than a musket. Did the Turks and Chinese use assembly lines? And how expensive were the bowstrings? Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 22:30
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P-Mack posted:I recall reading that a lot of guys using these got shot in the buttocks. Probably better than getting shot in the face, but I'd imagine that the shield compromises the soldier's camo. Being hidden is still the best way to not get shot.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:32
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P-Mack posted:I recall reading that a lot of guys using these got shot in the buttocks. Yes. Corbeau posted:Probably better than getting shot in the face, but I'd imagine that the shield compromises the soldier's camo. Being hidden is still the best way to not get shot. Soviets didn't use camo, and most didn't even have snowsuits.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:35
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JcDent posted:...would still appreciate a write up on Centurion and how not having major weaknesses made it a good/great tank. I was phoneposting when I wrote that, so I guess I should elaborate a bit. See, a lot of people think that having the biggest gun or the thickest armor is what makes a tank good. That's only true on the internet though, in the real world it doesn't win wars nor does it win tank duels. What wins wars is mostly having a tank in the right place at the right time when the other guy doesn't, and what wins tank duels - between tanks where one doesn't completely outclass the other - is getting the first hit in. The Swedish cold war-era tank gunnery manual stated in big bold letters that in duels, if you fired first and got the first hit that would result in a victory four times out of five - probably a lesson from WW2 and most likely still true today. Once you've gotten the basics of your tank right (moves okay in terrain, has a gun that isn't completely inadequate against the other guy's armor, has armor that affords some protection, especially against less qualified threats like various infantry weapons and autocannons mounted on light AFV's etc), the most important things to have are good reliability, good strategic mobility (can get to the fight without taking too long or running out of fuel), good observation equipment and low price. The Centurion had (in its day) most of these, except maybe the strategic mobility part - early marks had a relatively short operational range and it had a rather low road speed. While it was technically slightly inferior to its contemporary the T-55 in many ways, it did what a tank was supposed to do and as such it was a good tank. By the mid-60's though it was getting rather long in the tooth compared to the new Soviet hotness (T-64 and T-72) but many countries kept it in service well into the 80's or even the 90's. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 22:36
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JcDent posted:...would still appreciate a write up on Centurion and how not having major weaknesses made it a good/great tank. Centurion most definitely had some pretty serious weaknesses, but they happened to be in areas not terribly important to the doctrine of it's users. At it's core Centurion is a WWII tank, it was basically intended as a Comet that could carry a 17pdr gun, as fitted to Sherman Fireflies. It started out life as something of a British Panther, both having high velocity 75mm guns and very similar armor, engine power and overall size. While it was quickly uparmored after the war, it still ended up with less protection than a T-55 while weighting 15t more, thanks to it's large size. Due to the weight, the engine ended up using tremendous quantities of fuel moving the tank cross-country, and the early models had less than 100km of off-road range. The latter versions helped a bit by cramming more fuel tanks in, but that particular issue was only solved by changing out the Meteor engine by something else, something the British never did. Now you're probably wondering why this thing is famous. The Centurion was redeemed by the fact that shortly after the war, the 17pdr gun was replaced by the brand spanking new 20pdr, a 84mm high velocity cannon with very good performance along with a very modern fire control system. That gun was in fact so good that when the British switched entirely to APDS ammo and needed a gun with a larger bore, they just replaced the barrel by a 105mm diameter one, creating the 105mm L7. Said gun was good enough to seriously overmatch the T-55, and fight on even ground with the T-62, causing a bit of a panic for the Soviet as NATO proceeded to adopt it wholesale. Every NATO MBT between 1965 and 1985 ended up carrying it or a close derivative, from the M60 and the regunned M48A5s to Leopard 1, AMX30, the Strv103 and even the first version of the M1 Abrams. This caused all of NATO to spend time and money developing new and better ammo for the gun, and that kept it competitive with basically anything up to the mid '80s. As a result Centurion ended up basically everywhere, since as the British dumped them in the mid '60s in favor of Chieftain a lot of minor countries bought them up for pennies and ended up with tanks that were not very mobile or armored but had the same firepower as the very latest and greatest. They had a good gun, good fire control and space for upgrades like laser rangefinders, so they never really got obsolete, with matchups up to early T-72 being fairly even in that whoever got hit lost pretty hard, and Centurions were accurate tanks thanks to good ergonomics and a fire-control system that only really got overtaken in the late '70s. As a result of this, it was used a lot by small countries in mostly defensive situations that minimized it's weaknesses and enabled it to leverage the strengths of the gun. Kafouille fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 23:19
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The centurion was also proven in Korea where no other tank could climb the mountains. As I am phone posting I should do an effort post in the form of British vehicles and their development as some of the stories are outright crazy given the laughable nature of western procurement policies.Wikipedia posted:Nuclear testsEdit spiky butthole fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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Nov 7, 2015 23:28
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Slo-Tek posted:Hey All, This thread has gotten to the point where I can't tell the lovely on purpose posts from the lovely because stupid posts. Just ban Keldoclock.
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Nov 7, 2015 23:29
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JcDent posted:
The ONLY thing anyone needs to read about the Centurion is the amazing Korean War AAR/evaluation written by Lt. J Brown of the RNZAC. It is hilarious and very detailed, a great read. http://antipodeanarmour.blogspot.hk/p/centurion-tanks-in-korea-report-by-lt-j.html
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Nov 7, 2015 23:45
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Hogge Wild posted:Soviets didn't use camo, and most didn't even have snowsuits. Sounds like they got shot a lot then. 
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Nov 8, 2015 02:02
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Corbeau posted:Sounds like they got shot a lot then. A good summary of the Soviet experience during the Winter War.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:15
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P-Mack posted:Sorry for the long gap between updates, I'll try harder to stay on top of things. I feel ashamed to admit this, but I have problems remembering names in all this. While I can follow who everybody is quite well, I have some problems keeping the names straight. The maps showing force movements are a good idea. My Chinese geography is very weak.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:19
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I'd like tone marks and more characters, since that helps distinguish names, but maybe that's just me. Also in the final version you probably want to give a rough and dirty guide to pinyin so people can actually say the names. Really good stuff by the way! I think we get used to all these awesome effort posts and don't say it enough, but all you guys seriously own! Please keep up the good work!
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Nov 8, 2015 02:44
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SerthVarnee posted:Two things leap to mind when it comes to suggestions: Nebakenezzer posted:I feel ashamed to admit this, but I have problems remembering names in all this. While I can follow who everybody is quite well, I have some problems keeping the names straight. I'll add more maps, but I always get super nervous about screwing something up and having a completely wack map like Wikipedia does. Franz Michael's Taiping book has some super detailed maps of army movements, but he just drew straight lines between cities rather than trying to guess at what route the armies actually took. I got a little salty when he showed Li Xiucheng marching right through the middle of where Chaohu Lake should have been. I don't want to do a graphical tag identifying commanders cause that's would make me feel like I'm in a video game, but maybe I could do a parenthetical note each time someone shows up for the first time in a given chapter. Xiahou Dun posted:I'd like tone marks and more characters, since that helps distinguish names, but maybe that's just me. Also in the final version you probably want to give a rough and dirty guide to pinyin so people can actually say the names. I wish ever so much that using the pinyin tone marks was a thing in English transliteration. There's got to be some MLA rule against it since no one ever does it, right? (As a side note, this project has pretty much forced me to make peace with Wade-Giles.) I probably should toss in the characters more frequently, since that's super useful if someone wants to Unrelated Chinese language thing, a couple of the older books I've read are in 8.5"X11" format, typewritten, with blank spaces where someone wrote in the characters by hand. They then just mimeographed or whatever its called the typewritten pages, since the university press couldn't do characters. Just made me think a little about what an enormous pain in the rear end trans-Pacific scholarship must have been 60 years ago.
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Nov 8, 2015 03:17
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O you have no god drat idea how bad doing academic work in Chinese is and how much worse it was. For my work my go to reference text is this awful dictionary the size of my torso in Wade-Giles* that's been out of print since the Japanese invaded, but it's one of the few decent Classical dictionaries. And while we've progressed beyond blank-space-and-write-in-the-character, there are recurring chunks of my dissertation that might look typed but are actually teeny tiny .jpegs of my handwriting made to fit in the text because that character isn't unicode. But if you want the tones for the names you can give me the characters and I'll tell you them. *boooo hiss
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Nov 8, 2015 03:59
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So I will be doing a series of effort posts on the T-54 and it's descendants, first post deals with the first two prototypes:quote:In 1944 the Red Army began looking for a replacement for the battle proven T-34. Their initial action was to simply up-gun the T-34 again, this time with the 100mm D-10T from the SU-100. However deficiencies in the transmission prevented this plan from coming to fruition. As a result the Red Army turned to the T-44. Relying on experience gained from the T-44's own up-gun project they created what was called the T-44B. Given the major changes compared to the current T-44 they later changed the name to the T-54. Designed by A.A. Morozov between October 1944 and December 1944 it had reached sufficient development by November 1st 1944 that People's Commissar of Tank Industry of the USSR V.A. Malyshev ordered Factory №183 to produce a prototype. The factory built the original prototype by January 30th 1945 where until mid-February it underwent testing. On February 22nd it was sent to a NIBT training ground to undergo government testing. Despite identifying several flaws such as a lack hydraulic shock absorbers for the road wheels the T-54 was deemed superior to all existing domestic designs and recommended for eventual adoption.
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Nov 8, 2015 04:35
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Slavvy posted:Was the centurion the one that pioneered a laying-down driver's seating position? I'm certain I read this somewhere but I'm probably just senile. That was the Chieftain, its successor.
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Nov 8, 2015 06:29
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Looking for pictures of 17th century glasses, found this guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Quevedo Sometimes you get a sort of...stereotypical face of their time in these portraits, sometimes they look like people of the present day in old clothing. Like, this dude could be a professor any one of us has had HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Nov 8, 2015 |
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Nov 8, 2015 07:43
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Dorkus, Ph.D
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Nov 8, 2015 07:52
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he is a famous politician and poet!
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Nov 8, 2015 07:54
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Hey P-Mack i thought of another thing, which....err...might just be a rephrasing of what Nebakenezzer said very few posts back. I'd really like some sort of "wait who is this guy again?" brief description, that i could access in link form, whenever a person gets reintroduced after a lot of talking about other people or places. I remember having the same issue when i read The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Lots and lots of people introduced with good bit of background, but whenever the narrator shifts from one guy to another, it all became a blur of names and ships untill i flipped back a few pages going "oh right that guy!" It kinda interrupted the flow a bit. This of course is easier to solve in a digital version, since links seldom do much when pressed on paper. Other than that keep posting and do let me know when i can start throwing money at you to get the complete digital/book version.
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Nov 8, 2015 09:27
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My eyes just glass over Chinese names, tbh. Thanks for the Cent stuff! Amazing long life for a WWII tank (especially if you count the Olyphant), but I guess the Chaffee had similar success too, no?
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Nov 8, 2015 09:58
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Geography wise, maps would definitely be usful: I've ignored most of the "and they marched to X" stuff because I have no idea where things are relative to each other.
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Nov 8, 2015 10:50
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JcDent posted:My eyes just glass over Chinese names, tbh. What I've read of Romance of Three Kingdoms is the same. The characters I do remember are mostly the ones I've played as in Dynasty Warriors. The fact my translation didn't have anything saying their family name comes first confused me a bit as well.
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Nov 8, 2015 12:03
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Did someone say muskets? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bys_xINB0Hc
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Nov 8, 2015 12:45
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JaucheCharly posted:That is right, but arrows are reusable. You can pick them up or repair them. Some might break, or have their fletching ruffled, but it's not as if they're gone when you shoot them. Longbowmen would be issued 2 sheaves of arrows for a campaign. That's 48 arrows. On the other hand, as mentioned in the thread a couple of times, musketeers could manufacture their own ammo in the field. Sometimes they looted lead from windows to do just that.
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Nov 8, 2015 13:40
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Kemper Boyd posted:On the other hand, as mentioned in the thread a couple of times, musketeers could manufacture their own ammo in the field. Sometimes they looted lead from windows to do just that. They can't manufacture gunpowder though. (Actually now I'm wondering if some enterprising young private has tried devising their own formula...) Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Nov 8, 2015 |
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Nov 8, 2015 13:44
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I actually tried to learn pinyin specifically to try and follow along with pmacks posts. It was fun and interesting, but I still think I'm butchering the names and yeah, there are just too many people doing too many things to keep track of it. I only really remember Shi Dikai for some reason.
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Nov 8, 2015 13:56
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Fangz posted:They can't manufacture gunpowder though. Doubtful. Gunpowder itself is pretty basic and not too hard to cook up on your own, but saltpeter is a bottleneck for it. Early modern nations considered it a strategic resource and went to great lengths to make sure the had a ton of it stockpiled.
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Nov 8, 2015 16:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:Doubtful. Gunpowder itself is pretty basic and not too hard to cook up on your own, but saltpeter is a bottleneck for it. Early modern nations considered it a strategic resource and went to great lengths to make sure the had a ton of it stockpiled. Well, some crazy person probably tried... some guy in the apartment complex down the street tried to make cold fusion or something in the storage room. Haz mat had to come in with suits to clear out all the mercury. Heck, some kid in Michigan tried to make a nuclear reactor in his back yard; he ended up spreading radiation all over the place after scraping off radioactive materials from watches and lantern mantles.
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Nov 8, 2015 17:23
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WoodrowSkillson posted:
this is all loving wrong. Iron & steel swords can flex just fine. Hell, the thinness & cross sections of swords of (very roughly) 600-1300 means that the mere act of holding the sword out with the flat facing the ground causes the blade to visibly curve a bit, not to mention the act of cutting which causes significant flex unless your edge alignment is perfect and entirely on the centre of percussion. As for homogenous steel swords never suffering plastic deformation (as opposed to elastic, which I call "flexing" above), this is again wrong. While the elastic limit of tempered steels is significantly improved over untempered steel (or wrought iron, which cannot be hardened and tempered) it still has an elastic limit beyond which it will bend before fracturing.
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