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Asehujiko posted:I met somebody who claims that bows & arrows are just as effective as guns, if not more so, and the only reason we have the latter is because the government changes how we fight wars every so often to drive arms sales and also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. Is there any brand of conspiracy mongers that actually say this poo poo or is this all his own drug fuelled insanity? If you have to ask, the answer is yes. There are people who think Stargate the movie/TV series is a coverup for Stargate the actual intergalactic military programme. Bows&arrows can be highly effective, though only in an extremely limited number of scenario such as shooting through reinforced aircraft cockpit doors or bulletproof vests.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:08
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Asehujiko posted:I met somebody who claims that bows & arrows are just as effective as guns, if not more so, and the only reason we have the latter is because the government changes how we fight wars every so often to drive arms sales and also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. Is there any brand of conspiracy mongers that actually say this poo poo or is this all his own drug fuelled insanity? I think the bow and arrows thing might just be because he watched that show Arrow a lot.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:13
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At least it used to be true that bow and arrow was better than guns, for a few centuries. That's more than you can say for most conspiracy theories!
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Jan 18, 2016 01:17
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boom boom boom posted:I think the bow and arrows thing might just be because he watched that show Arrow a lot. this is a dusturbingly likely possibility
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Jan 18, 2016 01:17
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blowfish posted:this is a dusturbingly likely possibility Obviously the government mistranslated the hieroglyphics to hide the presence of Thanagarian hawk warriors on ancient earth.
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Jan 18, 2016 04:36
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boom boom boom posted:This really sounds like you're describing a Judge Dredd story arc. That's what I said in the Dildo Rancher Standoff thread, it's all the talk about SovCits. Asehujiko posted:...also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. I love poo poo like this because it is just so obviously stupid at even the most facile level. The Rosetta Stone isn't some Ovaltine Decoder Ring, it's just a proclamation which happened to be written in three different languages, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek and Demotic script. No-one knew how to read hieroglyphs, but scholars did know how to read Greek and Demotic. When they examined the stone and saw that the languages they could read said the same things, they realised that the hieroglyphs must also say the same thing and everything went from there. So it follows that if the Egyptian hieroglyphs are mistranslated, then so must be everything ever written in Demotic script and ancient Greek.
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Jan 18, 2016 06:31
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fishmech posted:At least it used to be true that bow and arrow was better than guns, for a few centuries. That's more than you can say for most conspiracy theories! That depends on what you mean by "better." Some bow-using troops were displaced by the gun real quickly. Others, such as English yeomen with longbows, were far more effective than guns for centuries as you say. One of the biggest differences, however, was that it look a lifetime of training to create a yeoman. They started training as literal children and if you weren't spending at least a decade learning how to use one and letting your body adapt to it you weren't going to be a yeoman. The advantage of a gun is that you can teach somebody who has never seen one before how to use it in like a week. That was the big advantage of guns; learning to use a bow properly takes way more time. Early guns sucked of course but once again they had that major advantage of training time. Teach a guy how to load it and say "point it at the bad guys, pull the trigger" and now you have a soldier. You couldn't do that with most other troop types at the time. Conversely it's hilarious that a bunch of undisciplined, untrained rednecks think they're going to stand up to a professional army. These days it isn't nearly as simple as "teach to use gun -> person is useful soldier." Modern warfare is far more irregular.
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Jan 18, 2016 07:12
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That depends on what you mean by "better." Some bow-using troops were displaced by the gun real quickly. Others, such as English yeomen with longbows, were far more effective than guns for centuries as you say. One of the biggest differences, however, was that it look a lifetime of training to create a yeoman. They started training as literal children and if you weren't spending at least a decade learning how to use one and letting your body adapt to it you weren't going to be a yeoman. The advantage of a gun is that you can teach somebody who has never seen one before how to use it in like a week. Plus a yeoman is going to need to have a fairly decent diet so he can bulk up to pull a bow with a 100lb+ draw weight, and is going to need regular practice to maintain those muscles. A musketman on the other hand might need to drill regularly for formation fighting, but the actual skill of firing a gun is so simple that reservists can be quickly retrained and brought into service. The crossbow had a pretty similar effect. European rulers were falling over themselves to ban them in the high middle ages over fears that some uncultured peasant could knock a honorable and chivalrous knight off his horse with little training, and fears of lone crossbowmen in scroll depositories. (Similarly they also panicked over wheel-lock pistols being used by peasant assassins.)
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Jan 18, 2016 08:11
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The comments... 
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Jan 18, 2016 08:37
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C.M. Kruger posted:Plus a yeoman is going to need to have a fairly decent diet so he can bulk up to pull a bow with a 100lb+ draw weight, and is going to need regular practice to maintain those muscles. A musketman on the other hand might need to drill regularly for formation fighting, but the actual skill of firing a gun is so simple that reservists can be quickly retrained and brought into service. That isn't entirely accurate on crossbows, actually. One of the reasons that crossbows weren't used in some places was because their rate of fire was utter poo poo compared to regular bows. Crossbows are actually ancient. Greeks knew about them and they date back to like the 8th century B.C. in China. Earlier, maybe. In any event crossbow troops showed up a lot for similar reasons to guns. They were balls easy to use and it was easy to train people to use them. They also took longer to make than bows and didn't have the same usefulness in hunting. Really if some peasant could gently caress up a knight on a horse you bet your rear end that tactic is going to be used against the neighbors. That's also an inaccurate view of fighting; most of it was done by peasants on foot. Knights on horseback were an exception rather than a rule and the peasantry had all sorts of ways to deal with them. This is also why peasants with spears were such a mainstay for basically ever. You couldn't easily charge cavalry into a bunch of dudes with spears standing in a line. Interestingly Italy was one place where the crossbow caught on. City militias were expected to know how to use crossbows. It wasn't easy to find a place to practice actual archery in the city so they made do with teaching dudes how to use crossbows in a pinch. Crossbows came and went depending on the circumstances but mostly if the peasants already knew how to use bows and did so to hunt why bother teaching them another kind of bow that was shittier? Crossbows were more accurate but accuracy was never really the point of archers in medieval combat. You wanted to get as many arrows in the sky as possible so you wanted archers that could loose volleys quickly. Crossbows couldn't do that. At the time there were always weird goings on relating to who could own weapons, where, how, and why. Nobility relied on peasants for their levies and peasants were generally expected to be armed for just that reason. Anybody who went to war was expected to supply their own gear. Duke McRichfuck isn't going to buy swords for his peasants; they had to make do with what they had. Having better gear meant coming home alive so peasants had a pretty good motivation to get the best stuff they could get their hands on.
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Jan 18, 2016 09:25
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Really the biggest advantage of guns was how easy is was to mass them. If you dedicate a massive portion of your countries industry solo to training, equipping and supplying archers, like England during the hundred years war you can outfit a few thousand longbow men. Fast forward a hindered years or so and countries are fielding 10s of thousands of musketeers. Because the pool of available musketeers is basically anyone with a pulse and 4 functioning limbs, there was a runaway snowball effect as more guns were brought in to counter heavy medieval armor, which lead to guns and gun powder becoming cheaper through experience and economics of scale, which lead to more guns being used, which lead to cheaper guns...
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Jan 18, 2016 14:18
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Vorpal Cat posted:Really the biggest advantage of guns was how easy is was to mass them. If you dedicate a massive portion of your countries industry solo to training, equipping and supplying archers, like England during the hundred years war you can outfit a few thousand longbow men. Fast forward a hindered years or so and countries are fielding 10s of thousands of musketeers. Because the pool of available musketeers is basically anyone with a pulse and 4 functioning limbs, there was a runaway snowball effect as more guns were brought in to counter heavy medieval armor, which lead to guns and gun powder becoming cheaper through experience and economics of scale, which lead to more guns being used, which lead to cheaper guns... For the record, guns didn't have much to do with the decline of medieval armor. By the time that firearms that could actually maybe penetrate plate were invented, body armor beyond a breastplate was all but dead. The decline of armor had more to do with cost than anything else. Plate armor takes forever to make, and it has to be custom made.
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Jan 18, 2016 14:33
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Vorpal Cat posted:Really the biggest advantage of guns was how easy is was to mass them. If you dedicate a massive portion of your countries industry solo to training, equipping and supplying archers, like England during the hundred years war you can outfit a few thousand longbow men. Fast forward a hindered years or so and countries are fielding 10s of thousands of musketeers. Because the pool of available musketeers is basically anyone with a pulse and 4 functioning limbs, there was a runaway snowball effect as more guns were brought in to counter heavy medieval armor, which lead to guns and gun powder becoming cheaper through experience and economics of scale, which lead to more guns being used, which lead to cheaper guns... The thing is it took a long time to get to the point that you could mass gun users, because guns spent a lot of time being real expensive and unreliable. So even though there's hand carried guns as early as around 1350 in Europe, you still gotta wait quite some time before it's developed into a practical and cheap enough weapon to issue en masse.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:16
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Asehujiko posted:I met somebody who claims that bows & arrows are just as effective as guns, if not more so, and the only reason we have the latter is because the government changes how we fight wars every so often to drive arms sales and also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. Is there any brand of conspiracy mongers that actually say this poo poo or is this all his own drug fuelled insanity?
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Jan 18, 2016 16:21
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The thing is, his argument wasn't that there was a time where early guns were garbage, it was that when the government is abolished and the world divided into 7 billion parcels of land where everybody can grow their own crops and not have a bankster shill in the Hague tell them him "cannabis" isn't a valid option like now, he'll defend his home with a bow instead of an ak-47 or something because the bow is the peak of human weaponcrafting and the last 400 years have been the combined governments of the world conspiring to repeatedly replace it with sidegrades everywhere just to collect money from arms sales. Me trying to ask him how he'd deal with a tank or plane is what prompted the sudden switch of subject to the Rosetta stone.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:42
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To be fair an AK is equivalent to a bow and arrow against a tank or a plane.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:50
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The Larch posted:For the record, guns didn't have much to do with the decline of medieval armor. By the time that firearms that could actually maybe penetrate plate were invented, body armor beyond a breastplate was all but dead. The decline of armor had more to do with cost than anything else. Plate armor takes forever to make, and it has to be custom made. Guns do have to do with the decline of early modern harnesses just by pushing them to become more and more heavy and expensive. Even then, it's a lot less hard and fast, there's some mentions of harnesses where the cuirass is proof to even full on muskets, while the helmet is only really proof against pistols. There's also the massive category and proliferation of munition armor, which was churned out en masse by proto factories, and didn't have niceties such as steel, let alone proper heat treatment (popular starting around 1500) or fitting, but were used in huge numbers by infantry. It's really important to remember that the early modern period wasn't the medieval and there's reasons for what it's called, it's a real transition period and some things like state arsenals (the Venitian one is a highlight) are pretty impressive proto factories. Armor is heavy though, and the more things can punch through it the less worthwhile it is, and both cheap but less protective and expensive and more protective armors fell behind on being worth the cost, although cuirassiers with actual armor could be really nasty in the right situation for a long while.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:51
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Asehujiko posted:The thing is, his argument wasn't that there was a time where early guns were garbage, it was that when the government is abolished and the world divided into 7 billion parcels of land where everybody can grow their own crops and not have a bankster shill in the Hague tell them him "cannabis" isn't a valid option like now, he'll defend his home with a bow instead of an ak-47 or something because the bow is the peak of human weaponcrafting and the last 400 years have been the combined governments of the world conspiring to repeatedly replace it with sidegrades everywhere just to collect money from arms sales. Me trying to ask him how he'd deal with a tank or plane is what prompted the sudden switch of subject to the Rosetta stone. Yeah I just brought up that guns at least used to be trash, because at least that part used to be true. You can't say that for a lot of other conspiracy theories.
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Jan 18, 2016 16:53
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MasterSlowPoke posted:To be fair an AK is equivalent to a bow and arrow against a tank or a plane. The AK is the equivalent of a wet, frayed towel against a tank or a plane.
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Jan 18, 2016 17:29
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The AK is the equivalent of a wet, frayed towel against a tank or a plane. Nuh-uh! Rambo took out a helicopter with a rock, so I, real-live person with delusions of adequacy can get jets with my AK. If I had one.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:13
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An AK isn't going to gently caress up a Hind or something but it can definitely cause problems.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:07
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blowfish posted:If you have to ask, the answer is yes. There are people who think Stargate the movie/TV series is a coverup for Stargate the actual intergalactic military programme. And for the best meta example of this, there was literally an episode about a show that looked *like* the stargate program with O'Neil as the Air Force representative and it was a goofy as poo poo parody of the show's own silly decisions. The reason it was allowed was. . .as a coverup for the Stargate program. So people who think the show is a coverup watched the show that has them using a silly ridiculous parody show as a coverup and lack so much self awareness that they can't see how much the makers are mocking them. 
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Jan 18, 2016 19:35
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The AK is the equivalent of a wet, frayed towel against a tank or a plane. The standard strategy for infantry to fight tanks in urban situations involves knocking holes in interior walls of apartment buildings or row houses, running around through the resulting rabbit warren and popping out unpredictably (like murderous whackamoles) to fire rifles or machine guns at the tank's hatches. The idea is to force the crew to button up, limiting their situational awareness, while also forcing them to divide their attention many different directions. This provides cover for a dude to blast the tank in the butt or track with a carefully aimed rocket or missile, or to run up with a satchel charge. So basically in the scenario described the dude is hosed due to being alone at least as much as he's hosed by just having a bow. This is something I don't think I've ever seen a prepper address. They all seem to expect to survive just fine as a lone, isolated homestead.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:58
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If Civ4 taught me anything it's that longbowmen defending a city can take down longbow helicopters more often than not. 
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Jan 18, 2016 20:02
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SedanChair posted:An AK isn't going to gently caress up a Hind or something but it can definitely cause problems. Most aircraft can get some kind of hosed up from rifle fire. We're not exactly in World War II any more, but most aircraft are surprisingly thin-skinned and have fragile parts (like engine turbines) exposed and easy to damage on the outside. Even just having a damaged turbine blade fragment and ping through the rest of the engine at high speed can completely kill the plane and send it to the ground.
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Jan 18, 2016 20:54
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chitoryu12 posted:Most aircraft can get some kind of hosed up from rifle fire. We're not exactly in World War II any more, but most aircraft are surprisingly thin-skinned and have fragile parts (like engine turbines) exposed and easy to damage on the outside. Even just having a damaged turbine blade fragment and ping through the rest of the engine at high speed can completely kill the plane and send it to the ground. And the chances of Johnny Militia doing that with his single AK while the planes fly 3 miles overhead ain't exactly high.
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Jan 18, 2016 21:05
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fishmech posted:And the chances of Johnny Militia doing that with his single AK while the planes fly 3 miles overhead ain't exactly high. Yeah, I'm just saying that it's not exactly a "wet towel" comparison. Aircraft are actually extremely vulnerable to damage and have to rely on their speed and distance from attackers to avoid being hit. Helicopters are especially vulnerable since they tend to fly so low and slow by comparison, and Vietnam saw a ton of damage and injuries/deaths from small arms fire to Hueys.
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Jan 18, 2016 21:09
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Plate armor was heavy, but the weight was evenly distributed over the whole body. Even then it wasn't as heavy as a field pack of a current US Soldier. Anyways, the whole mistranslation of Egyptian reminds me of Stitchens whole gimmick. Before people were able to translate Sumarian, Stitchen claimed he could so he started to spout out about how Sumerian tablets talked about aliens from the stars and about a twin planet to earth where they came from. They came here for gold but found earth women super hot so they got down to banging. Most of the Ancient Aliens crap comes from him, but Von Danniken expanded it to Mesoamerica and other cultures. Thing is now we can translate Sumerian so we know what all those tablets say, and we know Stitchen was full of poo poo, but people still think he was telling the truth.
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Jan 19, 2016 02:56
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Evil Fluffy posted:If Civ4 taught me anything it's that longbowmen defending a city can take down longbow helicopters more often than not. A tank can only attack so many times a turn so if you just make sure you have 90 turns of spearmen they can't conquer your cities.
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Jan 19, 2016 06:10
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fishmech posted:The thing is it took a long time to get to the point that you could mass gun users, because guns spent a lot of time being real expensive and unreliable. So even though there's hand carried guns as early as around 1350 in Europe, you still gotta wait quite some time before it's developed into a practical and cheap enough weapon to issue en masse. That's why I said a hundred years or so after the hundred years war, by 1550-1600 guns were cheep, french style mass knights were all but gone, and pike and shot was the order of the day.
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Jan 19, 2016 07:38
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chitoryu12 posted:Yeah, I'm just saying that it's not exactly a "wet towel" comparison. Aircraft are actually extremely vulnerable to damage and have to rely on their speed and distance from attackers to avoid being hit. Helicopters are especially vulnerable since they tend to fly so low and slow by comparison, and Vietnam saw a ton of damage and injuries/deaths from small arms fire to Hueys. I've asked this thread before, but never got an answer: We know the NVA specifically trained its soldiers to lay AK-47 fire in front of where helicopters advanced as a personal AA measure. Did this actually work, or were most helicopters brought low with machine guns or the situations where a billion AK-wielding guys could surround them? E: Doh, thought I was in the milhist thread  If anyone knows I'd be happy to hear about it, though.
Tias fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 13:16
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A reminder that in 1968 some CIA guys shot down a plane from a helicopter using an AK-47
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Jan 19, 2016 13:24
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Tias posted:I've asked this thread before, but never got an answer: Helicopters are not all made equally. Transport helicopters like Hueys and Chinooks, have less armour so that they can carry more. UH-1s didn't come with armour from the factory but some were retrofitted with armoured pilot seats. The glass canopy though wasn't armoured and neither was the skin. Attack helicopters on the other hand such as Apaches, Hinds, etc are designed to be survivable in the face of return fire. They have armoured glass canopies, armoured crew compartments and plating over critical components such as electrical and fuel systems. Even the rotor blades are able to take direct hits from anything smaller than cannon fire. Boeing says the Apache is designed so that every part of the helicopter can survive hits from .50 calibre rounds. There's footage of (IIRC) a Blackhawk getting hit by an anti-tank missile, and it just punches in one side and out the other without exploding because the fuselage is too soft to trigger the detonator. Helen Highwater fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 16:28
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On the other hand a bunch of Iraqis with AK's hosed up a entire AH-64 regiment in 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_attack_on_Karbala
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Jan 19, 2016 20:11
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SedanChair posted:An AK isn't going to gently caress up a Hind or something but it can definitely cause problems. A Hind D?
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Jan 19, 2016 20:39
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C.M. Kruger posted:On the other hand a bunch of Iraqis with AK's hosed up a entire AH-64 regiment in 2003. Repelled it, anyway. Which is pretty impressive.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:55
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E-Tank posted:And for the best meta example of this, there was literally an episode about a show that looked *like* the stargate program with O'Neil as the Air Force representative and it was a goofy as poo poo parody of the show's own silly decisions. The reason it was allowed was. . .as a coverup for the Stargate program. Oh yes, that was a funny episode. Then they picked up the show-in-the-show again to mock fanfiction writers  MikeCrotch posted:A reminder that in 1968 some CIA guys shot down a plane from a helicopter using an AK-47 There was also a case where a bomb got dropped on a helicopter during liftoff and hit it in the air.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:55
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blowfish posted:If you have to ask, the answer is yes. There are people who think Wormhole X-Treme! the movie/TV series is a coverup for Stargate the actual intergalactic military programme.
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Jan 19, 2016 22:04
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C.M. Kruger posted:On the other hand a bunch of Iraqis with AK's hosed up a entire AH-64 regiment in 2003. They shot up 30 AH-64s with "cannon fire, RPGs, and small-arms all combining from multiple camouflaged fireteams" and brought down 1. The other 29 made it home despite having an average of 15-20 holes in each of them. There are very few combat aircraft where the pilots aren't the most expensive component.
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Jan 20, 2016 00:40
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It's a double bluff - Stargate is totally real you guys. If only - it's the best conspiracy of all - the US government is actively colonizing other planets, developing new energy technologies, and kicking alien rear end in the name of secular liberty - everything is going to plan
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Jan 20, 2016 01:28
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