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Elyv posted:You're describing a novel about paperwork, I suspect most people would find that boring as hell. The Atrocity Archives was awesome.
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May 16, 2016 21:12
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Davin Valkri posted:Aren't you describing an epistolary novel that uses after-action reports, KIA lists, medal citations, and post-battle histories? yes i kinda liked frankenstein and dracula Fangz posted:The Atrocity Archives was awesome. 
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May 16, 2016 21:12
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Elyv posted:You're describing a novel about paperwork, I suspect most people would find that boring as hell. Throw in a couple of action sequences in the form of commendations for conspicuous bravery. In unrelated news, I have just found out that conspicuous and suspicious do not, in fact, mean the same thing. It never made sense to me before why someone would call someone's bravery suspicious, anyway. Like, what did they even suspect?
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May 16, 2016 21:15
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Davin Valkri posted:Aren't you describing an epistolary novel that uses after-action reports, KIA lists, medal citations, and post-battle histories? Yes. And that sounds neat! Looks like I've got more things to read.
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May 16, 2016 21:15
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cheerfullydrab posted:I just thought of the best idea for a military science fiction book. In the aftermath of a space battle, a heavily-damaged gigantic space warship drifts slowly back to its homebase, everyone on board endlessly fills out paperwork related to the battle that just happened. Eric Frank Russell made a good start on that with "Alamagoosa". Eric Frank Russell posted:
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May 16, 2016 21:37
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Davin Valkri posted:Aren't you describing an epistolary novel that uses after-action reports, KIA lists, medal citations, and post-battle histories? This sounds great! As a huge fan of Jorge Luis Borges and the like, I love false primary and secondary sources in my fiction. Question: what is the training for a ww1 artilleryman? How long would it take to go from fresh recruit to capable soldier? How does artillery doctrine and training vary between the major belligerents?
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May 16, 2016 21:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:That was actually probably a humanitarian concession. A lot of families back then relied on the labor of adult children to make ends meet especially rural families. Letting them pick one would let them make the right choice for the finances and general family well being. Gotta suck to know you were explicitly the son your mother would prefer to die if she had to pick though.
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May 16, 2016 23:03
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ulmont posted:Gotta suck to know you were explicitly the son your mother would prefer to die if she had to pick though. Sending your least brightest or capable sons to do soldiering or officering is a noble long standing tradition. Amusingly, the Duke Of Wellington before his rise was seen as the least capable member of his influential family.
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May 16, 2016 23:28
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If we're going to talk about epistolary novels, how about this idea? An epistolary novel about a future science fiction battle, shown through hundreds of iterations of the same futuristic bland one page post-battle report form that all extremely low-ranking grunts must fill out after any action. "During the battle I felt: (circle one) A: A little shaky B: Reasonably afraid C: Rather quite scared D: Genuinely terrified E: Paralyzing fear" Grognard reader: "Ooh, look, the guy on page 162 circled 'paralyzing fear' in a very ragged fashion! He must have had a rough time of it!"
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May 17, 2016 00:12
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"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" You people do realize you're describing archival research, right?
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May 17, 2016 00:34
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Davin Valkri posted:Aren't you describing an epistolary novel that uses after-action reports, KIA lists, medal citations, and post-battle histories? I goddamn love epistolary novels, then again I take accounting coursework of my own volition.  Cyrano: edited archival research, which is why this thread is goddamn amazing.
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May 17, 2016 00:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" That's why all my hypotheticals are science fiction. Gotta get that gloss on it.
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May 17, 2016 00:39
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I goddamn love epistolary novels, then again I take accounting coursework of my own volition. You'd be surprised how often you come across stuff like that in un-edited archival material . Of course it's not all of it, but I can recall a number of times when some scandal or event would happen and I'd be following it through a folder. The best, most obvious example was a folder attached to a guy's personnel files that had a title something like "inquiries into inappropriate relations of School Administrator Schmidt with teacher trainees." Over about 50 documents it started with a average if ugly sexual harassment scandal and snowballed into half the future bigwigs of the W. German government trying to get him off the hook because he was important in local electoral politics. In the end they succeed. Dude got the catholic priest treatment, transferred to the next district over. Which I guess is fitting as these were all CDU politicians. edit: another great one involved a guy who was super incompetent at his job in the soviet sector getting pissed at everyone in the school he ran and denouncing pretty much everyone there as revanchist nazis plotting active resistance and forming a "werewolf" cell. Needless to say those kidns of allegations could be problematic, especially in the Soviet Zone. A dude who knew what the gently caress was up intervened and got him fired. The best part is that as a parting shot the dude stole all the fruit from the orchard the school kids planted. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:43 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 00:40
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100 Years Ago 9 May: The Battle of Kondoa should, like so many before it in Africa, have been a formality. This is usually the lead-in to some horrible tale of woe and incompetence; but now they've had some half-time oranges, switched ends, and let Colonel von Lettow Vorbeck put his men where his reputation is. Back in Germany, rather a lot of their dreadnoughts have been fitted with faulty condensers, so they must push back Der Tag another week or so. Colonel Hankey brings a note from Mater to avoid getting sent to Russia; General Petain has more Opinions, these ones painfully ironic; Louis Barthas is mildly ill, but when Edward Mousley is so much worse off it's getting harder to be sympathetic; and Maximilian Mugge is very grateful to see in the paper some fine comments from an enlightened judge on the subject of naturalisation. 10 May: It's happened again, it's happened again: oh African theatre, it's happened again. Yes, this time it's von Lettow-Vorbeck's chance to drop a bollock of truly hideous proportions. Enver Pasha sticks his nose into the Caucasus and pushes an army commander into promising things he shouldn't have; Dr Oskar Teichman of the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Worcester Yeomanry is Yet Another New Correspondent; and, ugggghhh. Remember how General Hunter-Weston had become a born-again bite-and-hold convert? General Haig is most disappointed with him. General Haig is leaning hard on him to be more offensive when he commands his corps on the Somme. Isn't that fantastic. (To finish a dreadful day full of awful news: Louis Barthas is being fed lies by his bosses; Malcolm White has apparently hosed up again; and Maximilian Mugge's references move from "hopelessly squirrelly" up to "mildly recognisable" as he invokes Swift and Gulliver's Travels.) 11 May: General Joffre politely but firmly requests that General "Cassandra" Petain should shut up and do as he's told; Louis Barthas goes off up the line to Hill 304 with his guts all twisted; Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck's blunder has left him knocked for six; E.S. Thompson gets his orders to march up to Kondoa from Arusha; the British government sets up another useless aviation-based talking shop; new correspondent Rev. Oswin Creighton joins a corporals' cork club; and idiot son of a Montreal millionaire Clifford Wells goes to Oxford on leave and gives me an excellent opportunity to mention that General Haig used to trash restaurants with the Bullingdon Club in his younger days.
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May 17, 2016 01:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" Which is basically what the visual novels Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus are all about!
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May 17, 2016 01:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" I was thinking the same, but the result of archival research should not be a complete fabrication.
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May 17, 2016 01:49
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ArchangeI posted:I was thinking the same, but the result of archival research should not be a complete fabrication. Love your weasel word
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May 17, 2016 03:54
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Elyv posted:You're describing a novel about paperwork, I suspect most people would find that boring as hell. edit: hi Cyrano. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 09:41 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 09:37
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Cyrano4747 posted:You'd be surprised how often you come across stuff like that in un-edited archival material . Of course it's not all of it, but I can recall a number of times when some scandal or event would happen and I'd be following it through a folder. edit: the recipient of that letter eventually stabbed his wife twelve times. tl;dr: nothing was fine HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 09:49 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 09:44
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HEY GAL posted:tl;dr: nothing was fine 17th century Europe in a nutshell right there.
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May 17, 2016 09:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" I can't do archival research on cool space battles yet.
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May 17, 2016 10:15
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Waci posted:I can't do archival research on cool space battles yet. You could trawl through old forum posts about EVE Online, which never fails to be full of hilarious dramabombs
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May 17, 2016 11:29
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Trin Tragula posted:You could trawl through old forum posts about EVE Online, which never fails to be full of hilarious dramabombs Or, y'know, new forum posts. I found SA via Eve in 2007 and at the moment things are still pretty  since we lost all our stuff.
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May 17, 2016 12:27
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Arquinsiel posted:It seems to be a British thing. All MGs are Spandaus We have a ballet about it and everything. Edit: re https://makersley.com/blunder-kondoa-10-may-1916/ Mr Mugge is Wrong about Things! It's not horizontal versus perpendicular in Gulliver's Travels, it's whether you break the egg at the little end versus the big end, as any tech nerd knows since this is where big-endian versus little-endian byte order's nomenclature originates. (This, in itself, satirising the sort of religious minutiae within the Church of England that in part led to the Civil War - Laudians vs Presbyterians, &c.) feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:55 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 12:30
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The blood, sweat, and tears shed in EVE online are going to be a big driver in the 211X MilHist thread. You know, the three picoseconds it's going to take the machine minds to process it, or through perpetual retellings within the go'onlord clan - who have come to rule the wind-swept wastes of the endless raddesert.
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May 17, 2016 13:22
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HEY GAL posted:he's describing the way i found out what happened to the Mansfeld Regiment, which was actually really cool Yep. It could actually be really fun to read through. Reading reports can be boring as hell when you're required to (primarily because most reports are just tedious) but if you're writing fiction you can just ignore the boring "we expended 243 rounds of plasma cells for a hit rate of 2.3%" while highlighting the action through citations for bravery and letters home.
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May 17, 2016 18:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Love your weasel word It's called a wide interpretation of the source, I'll have you know.
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May 17, 2016 19:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:"epistolary story in the form of government paperwork" There's a very good (or at least I liked it quite a bit) short story by Isaac Asimov that goes sort-of about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Alley If I recall right it was based on his stint in the army in WWII. EDIT: borken link. ltkerensky fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 20:56
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Was there some sort of significant shift in unit sizes between the ACW and WWI? You can't read about the ACW (which Wikipedia puts at ~3M soldiers) without tripping over generals, albeit some breveted. On the other hand, WWI involved vastly more soldiers but I seem to hear about relatively fewer generals. Was the scale of the war so much greater that the only way to describe it broadly is to focus the scope on whole army group actions and gloss over the lower-ranked generals' actions or were senior officers actually commanding more men than in the ACW?
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May 18, 2016 00:09
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hogmartin posted:Was there some sort of significant shift in unit sizes between the ACW and WWI? You can't read about the ACW (which Wikipedia puts at ~3M soldiers) without tripping over generals, albeit some breveted. On the other hand, WWI involved vastly more soldiers but I seem to hear about relatively fewer generals. Was the scale of the war so much greater that the only way to describe it broadly is to focus the scope on whole army group actions and gloss over the lower-ranked generals' actions or were senior officers actually commanding more men than in the ACW? Probably because the ACW involved lots of mobility over a huge geographical area and pitched battles in particular places. Thus, generalship mattered a lot in terms of tactics, maintaining supply lines, and efficiency of movement. WWI involved a largely static line of trenches with little room for individual flair from generals. Lots of coordinated movements with repeated battles over the same chunk of ground.
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May 18, 2016 00:13
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In a maneuver war the generals actually make some sort of difference.
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May 18, 2016 00:41
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In a maneuver war the generals actually make some sort of difference. They made a difference in ww1, too, but it's harder to discern because the armies were much, much more bureaucratic due to the increase in scale needed to run them.
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May 18, 2016 00:49
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Deteriorata posted:Probably because the ACW involved lots of mobility over a huge geographical area and pitched battles in particular places. Thus, generalship mattered a lot in terms of tactics, maintaining supply lines, and efficiency of movement. Panzeh posted:They made a difference in ww1, too, but it's harder to discern because the armies were much, much more bureaucratic due to the increase in scale needed to run them. Well, first off you have the whole of August-November 1914 where there was still a tonne of maneuever on the Western Front, and the character of the generals really did matter for the same reasons as you mentioned in the ACW, albeit with vastly bigger numbers of men involved. And then the same again in 1918 when the Spring Offensive rolls around and the trenches are blown wide upon, a situation which lasts until the Hundred Days Offensive and the end of the war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HkBTe8c9WI is a great lecture by Michael Neiberg on the Second Battle of the Marne, where the decision of who would be the French general for the battle was of paramount importance, since Foch (as Allied commander in chief) needed someone who could be relied on to press the atack on the Germans and act aggressively. The scale of the forces involved was something that was really new to WWI commanders and something that ended up affecting them differently. In particular the difficulty of managing the battle from the front lines and the sheer quantity of information that flooded into HQs from telegraph, telephone and courier was something that could crush generals if they allowed it to. Members of von Moltke's staff in 1914 commented on how he gradually drove himself insane by sitting in his HQ in Luxembourg and refusing to leave, feeling he could command better by getting information brought to him. This led to him spending all day in the map room, sending out orders and then worrying himself into a frenzy as he waiting for any kind of response on how the battle was going, eventually leading to his nervous breakdown after it was clear the Battle of the Marne was lost for the Germans. Contrast with the famously unflappable Joffre who hired a grand prix racing driver as his chaffeur so he could visit all of his army commands along the front line and talk face to face with his subordinate generals (and shitcan them when necessary). Whether this helped his calmness or was because of it, who knows, but its interesting to contrast the differing thoughts on the until-then unsolved problem of commanding an army of over a million soldiers.
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May 18, 2016 09:32
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Hey lenoon if you haven't read The War Diary of a Square Peg yet you really need to do that because I've just realised that Maximilian Mugge and George Baker were at Shoreham in the NCC at the same time. (Mugge hates the Humpty-Dumpties as well.) Don't suppose Soul of a Skunk mentions what he was doing on the 21st of May 1916?Deteriorata posted:WWI involved a largely static line of trenches with little room for individual flair from generals. Don't worry, Hunter-Bunter's going to have a jolly good try at individual flair in a month and a half. I'm sure it's all going to be sausages in Berlin by tea-time! Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 11:30 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 11:27
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Trin Tragula posted:Don't worry, Hunter-Bunter's going to have a jolly good try at individual flair in a month and a half. I'm sure it's all going to be sausages in Berlin by tea-time! Wasn't Hunter-Bunter the guy who made a strenuous effort to gently caress up the Boer War too?
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May 18, 2016 11:59
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That would be Redvers Buller, which does roll off the tongue the same kind of way. (Hunter-Weston was only just out of short trousers when he went to the Boer War, which suited him much better than Gallipoli.) 100 Years Ago 12 May: It's all going on in Africa! At Kondoa, the South Africans are now planning to attack, which could well end as badly as almost every other attack in this theatre. Noted loony Commander Spicer-Simson of Lake Tanganyika has just returned there after a visit to Leopoldville, and he's lost none of his taste for shipping large boats thousands of miles across Africa. And E.S. Thompson sets out on the march to Kondoa from Arusha. Elsewhere: Louis Barthas has a look at Hill 304 and is shockingly unimpressed; Admiral Beatty's battlecruisers have been having trouble hitting the broad side of a barn, so he'll be sending them turn and turn about to the firing ranges at Scapa Flow, in exchange for cover from a dreadnought squadron, but not everyone is happy with this; Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler of the artillery returns to the Somme to (hopefully) have more drunken escapades with the French; and Maximilian Mugge's colonel cuts through the bullshit of the Travelling Medical Board. 13 May: The Lafayette Escadrille makes its first official flight for France; James McConnell manages to get lost in a cloud. The Battle of Kondoa thankfully peters out without further attacks; senior naval officers are getting unwell all over the shop; Louis Barthas settles into Hill 304, with the blood and the guts and the flies; E.S. Thompson gets stuck into a march that currently has a 50% casualty rate; Clifford Wells is beginning to worry that if he misses the Big Push he might miss the whole rest of the war; and JRR Tolkien qualifies as an instructor of army signallers. 14 May: The Chinese and French governments reach an agreement for China to supply civilian labourers to France; the conditions at Kondoa as it lapses into watchful inaction are of course horrific; E.S. Thompson is sleeping like a log as his marches get longer; Louis Barthas tries very hard not to die while his officers disappear down holes; Malcolm White enjoys the Battalion sports day and concert party; and Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler is now shuffling his guns over a bit, an excellent chance to reiterate that there are no chances to learn lessons from fighting if you never do any fighting.
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May 18, 2016 13:56
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On the T-54 and -62 there's a ridge across the hull near the middle of the glacis: I think I've heard it's called a "splash board", but what's it actually for? Is it just to catch mud? If it is, why? I don't think I've seen many other tanks with it. spectralent fucked around with this message at 17:06 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 17:03
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C.H.U.D.D (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 18, 2016 17:15
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spectralent posted:On the T-54 and -62 there's a ridge across the hull near the middle of the glacis: Yep that's a splash board. As to why not many tanks have it, it's not always considered needed. Do keep in mind that the Russians were very concerned with water obstacle crossings. A splash board is a small, simple thing that can help your tanks in crossing streams and small rivers so why not?
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May 18, 2016 17:51
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Aaah, makes sense. Why don't later T-series tanks have it, then, and why not things like the ISes?
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May 18, 2016 18:30
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