|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Returning from Gettysburg I have an even lower opinion of Lee than I had even thought possible. How the gently caress are 12k dudes supposed to take the fortified center of the union line when it takes half an hour of walking through the most perfect shooting gallery ever just to reach it. Maybe they thought themselves impervious to American bullets.
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 11:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 21:40 |
|
|
If more armor was the answer to missiles, you'd see more armor used on ships instead of going all sorts "stealth"
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 12:04
|
|
|
Also you don't have to sink a battleship to cripple it.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 12:55
|
|
|
Tomn posted:This is a bit silly, but I went around looking for videos of exactly this and ended up noticing a dumb YouTube argument that raised what I thought was an interesting question - how well can an Iowa-class stand up to modern anti-ship missiles? Our heroic YouTuber was arguing that modern anti-ship missiles are designed to kill the relatively thin armor of things like aircraft carriers and that an Iowa could hold up much better due to its thick plating. I imagine it's a lot easier that he suspects to mission-kill an Iowa even if you can't kill it, but is there a kernel of truth to his argument? I swear to god actual real life navy guys still have this argument and boy is it popular on the internet. First, everything I'm about to say doesn't apply to the Kh-22 - it is an outlier in every respect. That said, there isn't an ASM currently fielded (other than the Kh-22) that has a prayer of penetrating the belt or turret armor of a WWII battleship, to include top down attacks on the deck or turret roofs. Those ships were designed to withstand impacts of shells 3-4 times the size of modern missile warheads, and this is a thing that they actually could do in practice. This essentially means that it'd be VERY difficult, if not impossible, to sink a battleship with missile fire. The turrets, citadel, and middle hull would be practically impossible to penetrate, and that is pretty much a necessity if you're going to actually sink one of these things in a relatively timely manner. This is the reality that battleship enthusiasts use to support their argument that "your pussy little arleigh burke couldn't sink the ship of a real man", and they're correct - it couldn't. What it could do, though, is hit the superstructure of the battleship, repeatedly, and accurately, with a whole lot of high explosive and jet fuel, which would very quickly turn the entire upper part of the ship into a giant raging inferno, which would effectively destroy the battleship's ability to target its guns, to navigate, to coordinate damage control, etc etc. Even if you take a 1980s Iowa, with its CWIS upgrades, it is still a huge target, with not nearly enough defensive firepower to resist a modern structured missile attack. Aside: one of the more interesting iterations of this discussion I participated in, after the various naval proponents gave their say, an army guy said "you know what I'd do is send a flight of Apaches out there and hit it with about 150 hellfires, that'd do the trick". And, it probably would.... modern anti tank missiles would have no problem penetrating the armor of a WWII battleship, which is kind of weird if you think about it...tanks have much, much thicker armor than those ships did.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:10
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:The SU-76 is close to the StuG, but the SU-85 and SU-100 are not. The StuG started out as an infantry support vehicle, and through equipping a better gun it became suitable for fighting tanks, while still remaining an infantry support vehicle. The SU-85 and SU-100, on the other hand, were tank destroyers created for the purpose of destroying tanks and were sometime begrudgingly forced to support infantry. The German equivalent of the SU-85 would be would be the Jagdpanzer IV, not the StuG. Kinda coming off you here, how were towed and infantry guns and such used overall? I'm aware America disliked them heavily, but also that they were instrumental in several other theatres like Africa and the Eastern Front.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:13
|
|
|
bewbies posted:I swear to god actual real life navy guys still have this argument and boy is it popular on the internet. My impression is also that an Iowa-class would be "wicked" hosed against a semi modern attack submarine, so you don't really have to kill the battlewagon, you just have to kill enough of its escorts so that your 688 or Victor can put a couple of torpedos in. Is that the case?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:26
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:My impression is also that an Iowa-class would be "wicked" hosed against a semi modern attack submarine, so you don't really have to kill the battlewagon, you just have to kill enough of its escorts so that your 688 or Victor can put a couple of torpedos in. Is that the case? Basically yeah....heavyweight torpedoes are the best way to sink an armored ship now just like they were in WWII. That being said the Iowa in particular had some incredible torpedo protection; it probably would have done fairly well even against a modern torpedo. "Well" in this case is relative of course...meaning, it might've taken several under-keel detonations to sink it instead of just one or two.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:38
|
|
|
A GP guided bomb should do the trick.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:46
|
|
|
bewbies posted:
This is legit interesting. Is there a factor that means ships can't make use of composites like chobham or BDD or things like ERA around the armour belts?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:46
|
|
|
On that note, were there any notable developments in torpedo bombers after WW2, or were they considered to be mostly obsolete/unnecessary after the development of anti-ship missiles? I don't remember hearing too much about air-dropped torpedoes nowadays. Also, if battleship armor IS thick enough to survive modern anti-ship missiles, is it theoretically possible to create something as armored as a battleship, but without the vulnerable superstructure? I imagine that even if possible, it'd be something of an expensive boondoggle that'd still be vulnerable to submarine torpedoes as you mention, but can it be done?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:48
|
|
|
A submarine?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 13:58
|
|
|
Air launched torpedoes are still super duper important, probably moreso than the heavyweights...they're the main way you attack submerged submarines. They're pretty tiny though and they wouldn't be of much use during our fantasy scenario. There isn't any technical reason why we couldn't build a "modern" battleship and cover the entire thing in DU and Chobham and kevlar and slat armor. The issue is one of practicality - passive defense, like armor, is generally a one-and-done thing...once you've built your battleship, the armor you put on it is the armor it will have forever and ever amen. This is what essentially kills the idea - the reason we don't have any super heavy anti ship missiles is because they aren't necessary to sink pussy-rear end modern ships, but if you need to sink a super armored hulk of a battleship, it is relatively easy to create a new heavy munition to do so. Easier than building a new ship, in any case. So, if the US spends a decade building a couple of modern battleships, opponents can simply scale up their anti ship missiles, and long before the USS Missouri II sets sail, Russia and China will field ASCMs the size of a B-17 with 2,000kg warheads and mach 5 terminal speed and you've just spent $20 billion to build a target hulk. There's also the "all the eggs in one basket" problem: it is always preferable to spread out capabilities amongst many platforms instead of concentrating them on one, and then there's the observability issue, and so on..... That being said it'd be worth it just because battleship geeks would walk around with giant raging boners for several years and they'd get very uncomfortable.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:01
|
|
|
Tomn posted:On that note, were there any notable developments in torpedo bombers after WW2, or were they considered to be mostly obsolete/unnecessary after the development of anti-ship missiles? I don't remember hearing too much about air-dropped torpedoes nowadays. You might be able to make an armored ship that can fight but it would cost a comparatively breathtaking amount. Modern ships are volume critical rather than weight critical, and that's going to make a ship with missile magazines and a CIC under armor pricey as could be. bewbies posted:Basically yeah....heavyweight torpedoes are the best way to sink an armored ship now just like they were in WWII. That being said the Iowa in particular had some incredible torpedo protection; it probably would have done fairly well even against a modern torpedo. "Well" in this case is relative of course...meaning, it might've taken several under-keel detonations to sink it instead of just one or two. How much does a side TDS even help against under-keel detonations?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:02
|
|
|
bewbies posted:the reason we don't have any super heavy anti ship missiles Other than the aforementioned possibly-nuclear-tipped Kh-22 or I guess the Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missile, of course. Carriers are already big and hard to sink, America's potential opponents are already tooled up appropriately, and if we're talking World War 3, well, there's no armour that's going to stand up to a direct hit from a nuke.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:13
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:How much does a side TDS even help against under-keel detonations? Iowas at least, and I think most of their design contemporaries, were designed to at least resist under keel detonations. Their main concern at the time they were designed was mines, not torpedoes, but the idea was similar. "Resist" in this case means something like "take it like a champ and then immediately head to drydock for 6 months of repairs", but they did, probably, have the protection to survive a couple of modern torpedo strikes without having the keel broken.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:16
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Kinda coming off you here, how were towed and infantry guns and such used overall? I'm aware America disliked them heavily, but also that they were instrumental in several other theatres like Africa and the Eastern Front. This is such a nebulous question that I'm not sure what to tell, equipment and usage varied vastly from army to army, period to period and region to region. Ideally, when defending, you had entrenched positions in depth, with mines and other manmade and natural obstacles channeling enemy advance into areas where you would concentrate your AT guns to fire from defilade positions on multiple directions at the weaker side(s). Should the attacker overrun the first line there would be more guns in the rear to prevent the tanks from breaking through and to allow for the first line to regroup. When an infantry division was on the offense the gun units would stay close to the advance elements to be ready to deploy against an enemy counter-attack. If the advancing division's flank wasn't protected by friendly forces the AT companies would move from position to position so as to cover the flank as the division marched on. It's not all true that the US 'heavily disliked' towed AT guns, though, but it's correct that there were disagreements about their value. About half of US Army's tank destroyer battalions were towed. spectralent posted:This is legit interesting. Is there a factor that means ships can't make use of composites like chobham or BDD or things like ERA around the armour belts? All of those things are expensive and weigh a lot and ships are much MUCH bigger than tanks, so it would be crazy expensive to build and to service (a ship covered with ERA blocks in particular would be particularly funny to scrub after a few weeks at sea!) and then your warship wouldn't be able to carry as much of other equipment, fuel etc. Shooting the missile down with guns or another missile seems like a more practical solution, especially as allowing your ship to be hit by a missile is likely to result in casualties and achieve a mission kill even if the ship doesn't sink. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 14:19 on May 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:17
|
|
|
bewbies posted:That being said it'd be worth it just because battleship geeks would walk around with giant raging boners for several years and they'd get very uncomfortable. Maybe this is the real cause of the IJN's poor decision-making process - too much blood in the wrong head thanks to the Yamato.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:17
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago There's a missing space in Mugge's account. "The menin the fighting unit have their meals apart from us in their huts."
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 14:58
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:There's a missing space in Mugge's account. Also if we're really picky ”Owd sodjer.” has the opening quotation mark the wrong way around 
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:12
|
|
|
Again, I think a big reason why armor on ships went kinda right out of the window is that crossroads was done in 1946, and the effect of shot Baker can pretty much be summarized as "welp." NBC survivability is still an important driver in weapons design (or it should be, at least).
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:26
|
|
|
Still feels weird to design armies to rule the post-nuclear wasteland that would be the aftermath of any such conflict.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:40
|
|
Fangz posted:Still feels weird to design armies to rule the post-nuclear wasteland that would be the aftermath of any such conflict. Got to have the last word, even after a nuclear hellstorm.
|
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:41
|
|
|
The problem with American towed guns was that the US Army didn't take them as seriously as they should have, and consequently was consistently stuck a generation behind contemporary British, German, and Soviet guns. Keep in mind, the army started the war with the hopelessly obsolete 37mm gun, adopted the British 6 pounder just as the Brits were moving on to the 17 pounder (And the Germans the PaK 40), and the 3 inch/76mm gun that was only issued to Tank Destroyer units was put into service just as the Germans were rolling out the vastly more powerful PaK 43. To make matters worse, the 3 inch gun was basically garbage-the gun itself dated back to the First World War, the carriage was repurposed from a 105mm howitzer, and as a result the platform was huge, unwieldy, and completely and utterly insufficient for dealing with German armor, as their track record during the Bulge showed.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:41
|
|
|
Tias posted:Me and girlfriend is on a Pentangle trip, and since we love High Germany: Are you sure? I always thought it was vague but likely to be the Seven Years' War, on account of the Hanoverian succession. This is Shirley Collins' version, btw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QJFwQcEOAw
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:43
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:a ship covered with ERA blocks in particular would be particularly funny to scrub after a few weeks at sea!
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 15:48
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:What's that bulge on the gun about 1/3 of the way from the chamber supposed to do? Fume extractor. As the shell moves down the barrel, it has high-pressure gas behind it. When the shell passes the extractor, that high-pressure gas which is expanding to fill the barrel and move the shell along also expands into the volume of the extractor. When the shell leaves the barrel, the pressure drops in the barrel, and now the high-pressure gas in the extractor expands into the barrel and out the muzzle, pushing the crud you don't want to breathe along with it.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:01
|
|
|
Plan Z posted:My fault, then. From what l'd read, they never seemed interested in a dedicated tank destroyer analagous to the M10/M18 or Jagdpanzers. There were projects with anti-armor intent like the T-34-57, but it felt like they never really said "This is a tank destroyer. It is for destroying tanks." Appreciate the correction. The T-34-57 was actually explicitly referred to as "T-34 tank destroyer" in documents. "T-34-57" is a modern designation. As for turreted tank destroyers, there were some pre-war designs on the T-34 chassis, but none of them entered production.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:12
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Also if we're really picky ”Owd sodjer.” has the opening quotation mark the wrong way around
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:21
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Kinda coming off you here, how were towed and infantry guns and such used overall? I'm aware America disliked them heavily, but also that they were instrumental in several other theatres like Africa and the Eastern Front. In the Red Army, artillery was an organic element of the company (50 mm mortars), regiment (82 mm mortars, 76 mm howitzers), division (76 mm cannons, 122 mm mortars and howitzers), and corps (122 mm guns, 152 mm gun-howitzers). The really mean stuff like 152+ mm guns and 203+ mm howitzers was assigned to the Reserve of the Supreme Command. In 1942, due to the importance of anti-tank artillery, AT units were especially excluded from the general artillery population, their staff were paid more, and were marked by a special sleeve insignia. In addition to their increased pay, a bounty was paid to a gun crew for every tank knocked out. Despite their privileged status, the units were still assigned to a larger infantry (later, also tank) unit on a permanent or temporary basis. Despite the elite status of the anti-tank artillerymen, the emphasis was still on general purpose artillery. AT gunners were expected to be able to perform indirect fire missions in support of infantry.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:22
|
|
|
darthbob88 posted:And also here you note that Lukuga is a poor base for seaplanes because it's 2,500 miles above sea level. I suspect that's the wrong unit. Bwahaha. Hard to see how Belgium got rolled by the Germans when they had their own space programme!
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:23
|
|
|
darthbob88 posted:And also here you note that Lukuga is a poor base for seaplanes because it's 2,500 miles above sea level. I suspect that's the wrong unit. I mean technically speaking medium earth orbit would be a poor location for seaplanes 
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:24
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:He did kind of want to be a historian; before the war he wrote English biographies of Nietzsche, evidently without much success. Archive.org has a copy. I read the intro: lots of flourishes, lots of other people's opinions, very little settling down to the business of understanding.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:30
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Still feels weird to design armies to rule the post-nuclear wasteland that would be the aftermath of any such conflict. Not really. Even a worst case 1985 general exchange doesn't lead to a mass extinction event or kill enough of the population that we're back in the Middle Ages. Yeah poo poo is fundamentally different but it mak s sense for a government to want to ensure continuity and make the best out of that nightmare. Part of that is going to be an army that can function whether that means securing the nation or engaging in a post disaster resource grab abroad.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:34
|
|
|
bewbies posted:First, everything I'm about to say doesn't apply to the Kh-22 - it is an outlier in every respect. That said, there isn't an ASM currently fielded (other than the Kh-22) that has a prayer of penetrating the belt or turret armor of a WWII battleship, to include top down attacks on the deck or turret roofs. Those ships were designed to withstand impacts of shells 3-4 times the size of modern missile warheads, and this is a thing that they actually could do in practice. This essentially means that it'd be VERY difficult, if not impossible, to sink a battleship with missile fire. The turrets, citadel, and middle hull would be practically impossible to penetrate, and that is pretty much a necessity if you're going to actually sink one of these things in a relatively timely manner. An SS-N-19 is coming in at a significantly heavier weight and a much higher velocity than the 16/45 rounds the Iowa was armored against, even before you consider the 750 kilograms of HE it carries, which is about 20 times the payload of a 16" AP shell. That's not just going to defeat the armor, it's going to grossly overmatch it. Exocets and Harpoons, yeah, you could bounce those off the belt all day, but the big heavyweight and supersonic Russian ASMs, it's not even going to be a contest. Also the Iowas were built before we really understood shock damage and how to design ship systems to withstand it, who knows if the shafts are going to stay straight when something like that hits the hull. quote:Even if you take a 1980s Iowa, with its CWIS upgrades, it is still a huge target, with not nearly enough defensive firepower to resist a modern structured missile attack. CIWS is virtually useless against even single supersonic ASMs. Or at least the 1980s ones were. The fire control was closed loop: fire, adjust, fire, the chance of a first-burst hit was small and a supersonic ASM is past the engagement envelope and into your ship before it gets the second burst off. Even if it does get a hit, unless it detonates the warhead you've got tons of broken flaming missile body and rocket fuel heading towards your ship and it's still probably going to hurt. A bunch of Burkes don't even have it installed, but I think they started putting it on the newer ones to deal with small boats.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 16:53
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Still feels weird to design armies to rule the post-nuclear wasteland that would be the aftermath of any such conflict. It makes some degree of sense to me for guaranteeing that someone who managed to get off a first strike doesn't "win", if we're considering MAD. If you can first-strike and destroy a significant amount of nuclear capacity, but there's still going to be a conventional army dispersed all over the line to make actually claiming your wasteland awkward, that's another reason to avoid pushing the button. If you push the button and, if your gamble was correct, you then just get to walk over the border and claim the empire, that looks much more attractive. Acebuckeye13 posted:The problem with American towed guns was that the US Army didn't take them as seriously as they should have, and consequently was consistently stuck a generation behind contemporary British, German, and Soviet guns. Keep in mind, the army started the war with the hopelessly obsolete 37mm gun, adopted the British 6 pounder just as the Brits were moving on to the 17 pounder (And the Germans the PaK 40), and the 3 inch/76mm gun that was only issued to Tank Destroyer units was put into service just as the Germans were rolling out the vastly more powerful PaK 43. To make matters worse, the 3 inch gun was basically garbage-the gun itself dated back to the First World War, the carriage was repurposed from a 105mm howitzer, and as a result the platform was huge, unwieldy, and completely and utterly insufficient for dealing with German armor, as their track record during the Bulge showed. Aaah; so American towed gun performance was uniquely bad, rather than anyone else being uniquely good with them?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 17:07
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Aaah; so American towed gun performance was uniquely bad, rather than anyone else being uniquely good with them? I mean, unless you count the Flak 36 being pointed at tanks early on I guess?
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 17:29
|
|
|
Burgan Yssawolitzky, Obrist Lieutenant of a regiment of arquebusiers. Succeeded to command of the regiment when its Oberst was killed by a cannon shot from the trenches at Prague, Nov. 1634.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:Source? I'm genuinely curious about this. Eagle in Flames: The Fall of the Luftwaffe, E. R. Hooton is still the best work I have found for tabulated data on the Luftwaffe you do have to cross reference with your choice of USN or IJN performance, mostly it's not even close (even before you adjust for more numerous/effective CAP and AAA). For the RN you can really only use the Bismarck chase and Cape Matapan as an equivalent 'you must hit this ship underway' as a reference, but as the RN still win so why not but the Luftwaffe in forth place (Matapan Swordfish at night are 1/8 against warships and suffer slight loss, PQ18 He 111s are 1/11 in daylight against merchant ships and are rendered combat ineffective).
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 19:58
|
|
|
Am I missing something? It sure looks like you're cherry picking like crazy to nobody's benefit. According to Wiki, overall, PQ18 lost 13 ships, 8 of which were sunk in an attack by KG26 using He-111s with torpedoes. In a later contested attack, only one ship was sunk by torpedo. At minimum you are comparing a heavily contested attack on a convoy with fighter air cover with an attack on warships without air cover. They aren't remotely similar situations.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 20:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 21:40 |
|
|
spectralent posted:This is legit interesting. Is there a factor that means ships can't make use of composites like chobham or BDD or things like ERA around the armour belts? Traditional naval artillery was low angle and flat trajectory (to ensure high velocity) so could be calculated to hit an armored belt. Missiles are free from such constraints and much less predictable so an idea like 'all or nothing' becomes almost worthless. Modern ASMs are all capable of performing programmed terminal maneuvers to maximize damage. Tanks and AFVs are always designed with an 'Armour towards threat' mentality that won't work at sea.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2016 20:48
|
|