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100 Years Ago Checking back in with the Brusilov offensive, which could really use some support, guys. The French parliament holds a secret session with multiple fist-fights in the chamber, as one Sergeant Andre Maginot (yes, that Maginot) leads calls for General Joffre to be sacked. The man himself is with General Haig, once again fiddling with the start date for the Somme (currently June 29); the Belgian Empire finishes conquering Urundi; Henri Desagneaux gets bombed by aeroplanes; Lt-Col Fraser-Tytler has a grandstand view of the final preparations near Maricourt; and Maximilian Mugge is feeling a bit poo poo. Jaguars! posted:So the Watling st trench would probably be the major reserve or frontline trench that would be considered to run the length of the western front. That's not really how it works, nobody thinks in these terms over long distances. Rivers get in the way; so do mine craters, and heavy shells, and local counter-attacks. If you tried to walk underground from Switzerland to Nieuport, along the way you'll hit a lot of bits where the trenches don't quite link into each other as neatly as small-view aerial photographs suggest they might. It's a rare name that persists more than a mile or two. I do think I've solved the mystery, by the way. And replaced it with another mystery! Bernard Adams and Malcolm White are talking about two different places, but they do have one interesting similarity. Here's the Bois Francais on 15 June 1916, a week after Adams was wounded. Exactly where he was he doesn't say, but from the route he walked back, my guess is in No Man's Land, somewhere around the bottom of the words "Bois Francais" (top right corner, squares F.9 and F.10). Here we can clearly see Maple Redoubt, where he spent so much time; and then in the triangle of Park Lane, Watling Street, and Quarry Street is where Lance-Corporal Allan's Lewis-gun post had a shell fall on them; you may also remember Adams talking about a trench mortar post in "the Quarry", and the two mine craters near sentry post F.10.5 (you can see where the Germans have now sapped forward from their own fire trench to support the men occupying them) are most likely to be the ones Adams saw being blown a few months ago. Anyway, so there's Adams's Watling Street; a tiny pissy little thing connecting one communications trench to another. Now, here's Malcolm White's Watling Street, over two maps. This is a road, but it's a short, narrow little third-class dirt track about a mile and a half long, heading off the south of this map in square K.34 and appearing on the north of this one in Q.4.b; it crosses No Man's Land and then disappears into Beaumont Hamel. I wonder if this was perhaps a standing joke to give the name to unimportant short connecting roads or trenches that didn't really go anywhere? It's a nice thought, at least.
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Jun 17, 2016 16:27
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JaucheCharly posted:Don't know about you, but people seemed to be pretty happy with single handed stabbing and smashing. Mace to the face is a tried and true concept. There's more to that than arm movement though, you're using your whole body to whack someone.
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Jun 17, 2016 19:25
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Pershing posted:Here's one: did the survival of Spanish fascism lead to further development in fascistic political theory? I think this question is pretty complex, and needs to be answered in several parts. The first question is: was Francoist Spain genuinely fascist? As I understand the literature today, this is a highly contested claim. In my earlier posts I talked a little about how fascism is highly non-ideological and diverse as a phenomenon, thus making questions like this very open. Robert Paxton, for example, who studies Vichy France, argues that Spain was a country where fascism ‘flourished but failed’: he argues that the military dictatorship of Franco essentially ‘pre-empted’ fascism, while Salazar in Portugal broke it up after taking some of its ideas. The argument here is essentially that for fascism to be genuine it has to arise out of a set of groups parallel to the state that are invited to exercise power by conservative elites when social issues prove indissoluble to the traditional state apparatus (police, army, justice system, parliamentary democracy, etc.). Franco, on the other hand, just was a member of that social elite, victorious with the assistance of fascist groups. There’s a second question, which is how did Francoist Spain change over time? The answer to this question is quite well-trodden, and is all about the so-called ‘Spanish miracle’ experience from the fifties onwards. Franco does attempt something like Italian fascist economics, utilising the ‘corporatist’ system: the involvement of different groups in the economic and social management of the country as groups, or corporate bodies. The manufacturers of a good therefore would be deeply involved in setting production targets and prices for their products; a more capitalist syndicalism. It didn’t really work, and famously Opus Dei were deeply involved in laying down the framework for quite successful economic liberalisation through to the seventies that really has little or nothing to do with fascism. The third question is how is this all represented in any official doctrine? That question is a little out of my paygrade for Spain. I’m not aware that the internal tracts of FET y de las JONS are available in English except in extracts. As I understand it, rising through the party used to involve the writing of involved ideological treatises, so they may be available; the party, however (perhaps unsurprisingly because it’s a merger of the Carlists and the Falange) was quite ideologically heterogenous for a purportedly fascist party - albeit, as we’ve said, that Fascists aren’t all that ideological. So my answer to you is tentatively no, but I know considerably more about the intellectual roots of the German and Italian examples.
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Jun 17, 2016 19:31
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I'm aware of the "Soviet tanks are so bad you have to change gear with a hammer" thing. Where did this start, and has it ever been true of any military vehicle?
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Jun 17, 2016 19:47
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spectralent posted:I'm aware of the "Soviet tanks are so bad you have to change gear with a hammer" thing. Where did this start, and has it ever been true of any military vehicle? The way I always heard it, the stereotype is that Soviet gear was always ugly and had awful ergonomics and may not have been as precise or advanced as Western equivalents, but was cheap and incredibly reliable. It probably started after World War II, as the Germans actually greatly respected Soviet equipment (the Panther was a direct result of their attempts to create a medium tank that could compete with the T-34 and plenty of captured Soviet weapons like SMGs were used) and the United States wanted to stereotype their enemy. Of course, that's not exactly the whole story. The Soviets were the first to put a satellite and a man in space, and their tanks were the first to get composite armor (while the West was still making the paper-thin Leopard 1 and the Swedish were making the bizarre S-Tank because they thought they couldn't make a well-balanced traditional tank design that could stand up to advances in HEAT rounds and missiles). It is true that the Soviets valued durability in the harsh conditions they were meant for, and they wanted inexpensive gear that could allow for a huge army with a ton of vehicles and weapons. And this did result in a cost of some ergonomics, like the Kalashnikov basically being a left-handed gun and the tanks being extremely cramped to keep them small while still fitting an autoloader. But generally Soviet gear was competitive with anything from the same generation, because warfare comes down to more than stiff gear levers.
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Jun 17, 2016 20:08
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spectralent posted:I'm aware of the "Soviet tanks are so bad you have to change gear with a hammer" thing. Where did this start, and has it ever been true of any military vehicle? I haven't driven any tanks, but I have driven Soviet trucks, and I find it plausible that some vehicles really needed a hammer or other tools to change gears.
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Jun 17, 2016 20:27
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One thing I've heard from people who worked on tanks in the FDF, namely the Finnish-modified T-72 and the Leo 2, was that the T-72 was easy to field maintain but extensive maintenance (like swapping out engines) is utterly rear end.
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Jun 17, 2016 20:50
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Hazzard posted:There's more to that than arm movement though, you're using your whole body to whack someone. We all know that. Just to get the timeline of what has been said here Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:The force you can exert with one arm over and over isn't nearly enough to power a serious weapon. Fangz posted:Uh, several thousand years of history begs to differ. Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Protip: a bow is drawn with the upper back. Go to the gym sometime and see how much you can row and how much you can pull with just the arm. Even better would be to replicate the semicircle of the Chinese thing's pull, but I've never seen a device like that. JaucheCharly posted:Don't know about you, but people seemed to be pretty happy with single handed stabbing and smashing. Mace to the face is a tried and true concept. Stabbing someone takes next to no effort, cutting neither. Post about "The force you can exert with one arm over and over isn't nearly enough to power a serious weapon" in the medieval or the fencing thread, and you'll hear some interesting replies. That might apply for a crossbow, because they're abysmal at transferring the stored energy into the projectile. Bad return speed, short powerstroke. Throwing knives? Why no mention of throwing axes or javelins, heck, even stones? On the bright side, if you have the capital for the spanning devices, crossbows can be operated by the village idiot and do some real damage with little training. Archery, on the other hand, takes a long time to get accustomed to.
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Jun 17, 2016 20:54
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JaucheCharly posted:Post about "The force you can exert with one arm over and over isn't nearly enough to power a serious weapon" in the medieval or the fencing thread, and you'll hear some interesting replies.
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Jun 17, 2016 21:01
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chitoryu12 posted:like the Kalashnikov basically being a left-handed gun Uhh, you sure about that? If I go lefty with it, it's
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Jun 17, 2016 21:21
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:Uhh, you sure about that? If I go lefty with it, it's It wasn't really made as a left-handed gun. But the charging handle and fire select lever are both on the right side of the gun, forcing the user to either remove their firing hand from the grip or awkwardly reach under or over the receiver to manipulate it. According to historical photos and footage of Soviet soldiers, they were meant to carry their magazine pouch on the right side of their body and use their right hand (firing hand for almost everyone) to load and charge the gun. One reenactor I saw had to rest the butt of his rifle on the ground while hiding behind cover to easily do this. Left-handed users ironically end up having a much easier time reaching the controls comfortably. If you want an excellent example of ergonomics, look at the AR-15. A right-handed user (the majority) can flick the fire selector with his thumb quietly and with very little motion and their trigger finger can reach the magazine release. For a lefty, they can press the mag release with their thumb while pulling the magazine out and bend their thumb with some difficulty to manipulate the selector. A ton of rifles since have copied the ergonomics, with big changes being stuff like left-side charging handles at the front or center of the receiver so you can easily grab it with your left hand while maintaining a shooting stance. A lot of the modern ergonomic improvements to the Kalashnikov platform are about making it feel more like an AR-15 or Heckler & Koch gun, with a thumb switch for the fire selector and a magazine release that can be pushed with the trigger finger instead of needing two hands. Of course, the point is that this really doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. The AK has plenty of faults, like its weird ergonomics and unpleasant recoil and it's not quite as accurate as a more expensive Western gun from the same era, but it's inexpensive and durable. You can arm thousands or millions of soldiers with them and they'll be perfectly accurate and powerful at realistic combat ranges; for all the fanboys like to argue, the accuracy differences between a Soviet-made AK and a $2000 AR-15 are going to be virtually impossible to notice at the actual ranges a typical rifleman is fighting in battle. Keep in mind that these qualities only apply to properly made AKs with some modicum of care and standards. Some shitheap thrown together for $50 of scrap metal and wood in a Somalian sweatshop is probably going to be utter crap to the point of being disposable. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 17, 2016 21:38
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Just holding a milled Kalashnikov with your right hand while reloading with your left is a right pain in the rear end, so I'm not entirely surprised ol' Mikhail designed it that way.
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Jun 17, 2016 21:53
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Desagneaux posted:The 19th Company hasn’t got one officer left. Who was in charge when this happened? Another officer from the same regiment? Whoever happens to be around and has a pair of epaulets? Every poilu for himself?
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Jun 17, 2016 21:53
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Hogge Wild posted:I haven't driven any tanks, but I have driven Soviet trucks, and I find it plausible that some vehicles really needed a hammer or other tools to change gears. I managed to change gears in a Soviet truck as a feeble 14 year old  There is one instance of documentally confirmed application of a mallet: in getting the PTRD bolt to unlock. The response from NIPSVO was two part: a) you guys are assholes, fix this bullshit and b) after 40 shots the handle fell off, fix this bullshit. This is why the more complex and heavier PTRS was favoured over the lighter, cheaper, but jammier PTRD. Soviet tank trials also measured the efforts required for controlling the tank. The most I've seen on a drivers lever was 35 kg of effort. The equivalent lever on the Sherman took 30 kg, on the Pz38(t) it was 50 kg.
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Jun 17, 2016 22:13
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chitoryu12 posted:The way I always heard it, the stereotype is that Soviet gear was always ugly and had awful ergonomics and may not have been as precise or advanced as Western equivalents, but was cheap and incredibly reliable. It probably started after World War II, as the Germans actually greatly respected Soviet equipment (the Panther was a direct result of their attempts to create a medium tank that could compete with the T-34 and plenty of captured Soviet weapons like SMGs were used) and the United States wanted to stereotype their enemy. In the cold war thread, this discussion of underlying design philosophies of east vs. west has been kicked around quite a bit. The short, short version is that both sides build their technology to try and match their material/personnel conditions. The Soviets often had larger armies that were built around not well educated constricpts, and that influenced a lot of their vehicle design. Aircraft in particular. Western nations had a pool of NCOs and educated technicians to do regular maintenance. So western aircraft are (usually) build around the assumption that maintenance is going to be regular, aircraft will be flying off of airfields of a certain standard (good paving, regular sweeps for foreign object detection, etc.) Major maintenance, like rebuilding jet turbines, is a rare thing, every 100,000 flight hours or so. Meanwhile, the Soviets didn't have the deep bench of technical talent (or at any rate, didn't want to pay for it.) So they acted like Walmart would, if Walmart had an air force: Soviet warplanes were designed to work for several hundred flight hours with little to no maintenance off of airbases a bit down at the heels; then the engine is removed and shipped of to a dedicated maintenance facility. You can find awful ergonomic kludges if you look hard enough on the Soviet side. My personal favorite is the all-around terrible Tu-22 "Blinder.' It was very, very difficult to see out of the cockpit, and due to technology constraints the ergonomics were just goofy bad; the pilots couldn't reach all the flight controls when strapped in and had to resort to tying strings onto various important switches. Did I mention this aircraft was infamously difficult to fly and had a particularly challenging/fast landing method? Images for you poor sods who study Dreadnoughts an' Pikemen an' poo poo   Oh, and the three crewmen had ejection seats that fired downward, once again for awkward technical reasons, which pretty much gurenteed a problem at low altitude would kill the crew. Meanwhile, the American equivalent had escape capsules [  MILHIST THREAD TRIGGER WARNING: BEARS] tested by bears. While I imagine the cockpit ergonomics were better sorted, the B-58 Hustler was nearly as much a pilot killer as the Tu-22. The demands for making an aircraft that could fly for hours at mach 2 was basically too much for 1950s technology. This was made somewhat worse when by the time they were ready for deployment at the end of the 1950s, nuking stuff by flying really high and fast was seen as obsolete. So the hard to handle B-58s changed to penetration by flying at low altitudes - where they weren't all that fast.  
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Jun 17, 2016 22:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:Images for you poor sods who study Dreadnoughts an' Pikemen an' poo poo 
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Jun 17, 2016 22:36
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The basic Kalashnikov design isn't great if you want to put a scope on the top, because the top of the Kalashnikov is a loose cover and not stable, so you had to have a cumbersome mounting bracket that fixes the optic to the lower. Here's a Galil, same thing.  Obviously the Kalashnikov was never designed with this in mind but it's a real disadvantage today when everyone has a scope.
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Jun 17, 2016 23:01
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I also could have said "here are images for those who are not sad aviation spergs who can recall easily what a whole shitload of obscure aircraft look like"
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Jun 17, 2016 23:05
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Empress Theonora posted:Who was in charge when this happened? Another officer from the same regiment? Whoever happens to be around and has a pair of epaulets? Every poilu for himself? The senior NCO. Usually replaced after a while by some hapless Lieutenant fresh out of officer school who may or may not have to shave yet.
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Jun 17, 2016 23:18
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I am reading these complaints about AK ergonomics and can't help but think "why does this matter?" Any poster here should know that infantry small arms matter for SFA in the greater scheme of things past a certain point in relative quality. It's a shooty-bang stick that can carry 30 rounds at a time and will withstand a lot of punishment. It isn't going to kill much. That's what the squad PKM/BMP, platoon AGS/HMG, company mortars, brigade artillery and etc are there for.
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Jun 17, 2016 23:47
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Nebakenezzer posted:I also could have said "here are images for those who are not sad aviation spergs who can recall easily what a whole shitload of obscure aircraft look like" Anyone who doesn't give you a knowing nod when you start talking about the aesthetics of the B-58 isn't worth knowing IMO
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Jun 17, 2016 23:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:Meanwhile, the American equivalent had escape capsules [ 
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Jun 18, 2016 00:01
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We need more planes named after adult magazines.
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Jun 18, 2016 00:05
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Kerbal space program facial expressions right here.
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Jun 18, 2016 00:11
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Pretty much a Gemini spacecraft right there.
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Jun 18, 2016 00:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Nebakenezzer posted:In the cold war thread, this discussion of underlying design philosophies of east vs. west has been kicked around quite a bit. The short, short version is that both sides build their technology to try and match their material/personnel conditions. The Soviets often had larger armies that were built around not well educated constricpts, and that influenced a lot of their vehicle design. Aircraft in particular. Western nations had a pool of NCOs and educated technicians to do regular maintenance. So western aircraft are (usually) build around the assumption that maintenance is going to be regular, aircraft will be flying off of airfields of a certain standard (good paving, regular sweeps for foreign object detection, etc.) Major maintenance, like rebuilding jet turbines, is a rare thing, every 100,000 flight hours or so. Meanwhile, the Soviets didn't have the deep bench of technical talent (or at any rate, didn't want to pay for it.) So they acted like Walmart would, if Walmart had an air force: Soviet warplanes were designed to work for several hundred flight hours with little to no maintenance off of airbases a bit down at the heels; then the engine is removed and shipped of to a dedicated maintenance facility. Oh they have one of those at the SAC museum. e: 
FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 04:53
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On the topic of Chinese repeating crossbows, according to this guy they coated the bolts with poison. http://www.atarn.org/chinese/yn_xbow/zhugehtm.htm quote:The Ming Dynasty text says, "The Zhuge Nu is a handy little weapon that even the Confucian scholar (i.e. a weakling) or palace women can use in self-defence. It fires weakly so you have to tip the darts with poison. Once the darts are tipped with 'tiger-killing poison', you can fire it at a horse or a man and as long as you draw blood, your adversary will die immediately. The draw-back to the weapon is its very limited range."
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Jun 18, 2016 06:00
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Peter Dekker had one on sale a while ago http://mandarinmansion.com/chinese-repeating-crossbow
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Jun 18, 2016 07:15
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C.M. Kruger posted:On the topic of Chinese repeating crossbows, according to this guy they coated the bolts with poison. If I'm not entirely wrong, explanations like "coating bolts in poison" tend to be rather suspect because making something like that work is pretty dang hard.
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Jun 18, 2016 07:23
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There's many indigenous cultures that poison their projectiles for hunting purposes and for war. What leads you to think that this is somehow unworkable?
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Jun 18, 2016 08:39
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Kemper Boyd posted:If I'm not entirely wrong, explanations like "coating bolts in poison" tend to be rather suspect because making something like that work is pretty dang hard. maybe they just covered them in poo poo?
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Jun 18, 2016 08:40
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JaucheCharly posted:Stabbing someone takes next to no effort, cutting neither. Post about "The force you can exert with one arm over and over isn't nearly enough to power a serious weapon" in the medieval or the fencing thread, and you'll hear some interesting replies. JaucheCharly posted:Throwing knives? Why no mention of throwing axes or javelins, heck, even stones?
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Jun 18, 2016 08:51
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A sling will gently caress up the day for a lot of bronze/early iron age infantry.
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Jun 18, 2016 08:58
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JaucheCharly posted:There's many indigenous cultures that poison their projectiles for hunting purposes and for war. What leads you to think that this is somehow unworkable? Availability of poisons that are actually appropriate for the use. There's just not that many poisons that are actually effective to deliver by something like a crossbow bolt, and getting a sufficient quantity of it to stick on a bolt isn't that simple. And poisons that act fast enough to make an actual different, they're not that common either.
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Jun 18, 2016 09:21
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Kemper Boyd posted:Availability of poisons that are actually appropriate for the use. There's just not that many poisons that are actually effective to deliver by something like a crossbow bolt, and getting a sufficient quantity of it to stick on a bolt isn't that simple. And poisons that act fast enough to make an actual different, they're not that common either. That's the poison that was used according to the article above https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum
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Jun 18, 2016 09:32
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JaucheCharly posted:That's the poison that was used according to the article above I think that the use case for indigenous people, where the amount of users for a given poison is more feasible than doing it on a proto-industrial scale. The references to poison use also seem to come from rather old literature but I can't really judge if it's reliable or not since I don't know jack poo poo about Chinese history.
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Jun 18, 2016 09:55
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Alot of literature about projectile weapons is really old and sometimes unreliable, but as a rule of thumb, if the weapon was of weak drawweight and meant to be shot at people or game, the bolts, darts or arrows are always poisoned. Selby is one of the better authors that did alot of research on chinese archery
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Jun 18, 2016 10:44
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 Sebastian Vrancx, Landscape with Horsemen at Rest Considering the way early modern armies traveled and lived, most of the early modern soldier's war experience would have looked like a less idealized version of this, a little group travelling trouppenweise ("as a troop") through the world. I love pictures that are just soldiers hanging out. Edit: Taking this opportunity to mention, once again, my favorite Vrancx painting:  Look at that pikeman! His jacket is probably too small for him (you can't see it under his armor) if he's even got one, it definitely doesn't match his pants, since it's not laced into them and his huge early-modern shirt is hanging out, but by god there's a dagger in his belt. This guy has his priorities straight. Edit 2: Also check out the contrast between everyone's waists and their pants (like the pikeman in the center foreground in Landscape with Horsemen at Rest) to see how goddamn huge early modern pants are HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 10:52
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JaucheCharly posted:Alot of literature about projectile weapons is really old and sometimes unreliable, but as a rule of thumb, if the weapon was of weak drawweight and meant to be shot at people or game, the bolts, darts or arrows are always poisoned. I did a google search, other people have tried to corroborate the use of aconite-tipped projectiles from the medieval era. But in general, this thing doesn't look like something you'd use on the front lines of a battlefield, no matter what videogame CKNs do. Also, without some actual tests of the efficacy of aconite bolts, I'm really not sure how effective they'd be. Biologically, aconitine holds open sodium ion channels in muscles and neurons. According to what I remember of undergrad physiology, that should result in muscle spasms, then weakness, and maybe eventual death from respiratory depression. We'd need to recreate the poison, but good luck getting animal ethics approval at a university for a history experiment. Because all my research into aconite poisoning doesn't describe rapid incapacitation: for all we know, someone shot with the stuff can still dash forward and beat your face into the ground. And while the translated text states "Once the darts are tipped with 'tiger-killing poison', you can fire it at a horse or a man and as long as you draw blood, your adversary will die immediately", I'm not sure how much actual testing was done by the scholar who wrote that text. Links: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jphs1951/66/4/66_4_421/_pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19514874
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Jun 18, 2016 13:02
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Fangz posted:Uh, several thousand years of history begs to differ. 
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Jun 18, 2016 13:02
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