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Deptfordx posted:I've actually read one of his. The Big One. Where as described previously WW2 goes on to 1947 and the US launches a mass B36 nuclear strike on Germany. Yeah. It's actually kind of amazing. I wasn't kidding when I said it was dad fiction from Team B. There's also the stories he wrote trying to suck up to anti-religion types on a sci-fi crossover debates board that's basically humanity kicking the poo poo out of hell. Those are the epicenter of b-movie dad fiction though and I kind of love them.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:34
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xthetenth posted:Yeah. It's actually kind of amazing. I wasn't kidding when I said it was dad fiction from Team B. 
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Jul 16, 2016 15:42
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Nebakenezzer posted:Dear Mr. Bewbies, There's an interesting consideration here: the UK had what was prohibitively the best slow fat flying boat coastal patrol thing in the world in 1939; it had an impressive combat radius that was eventually expanded to be similar to the B-24s and was a very effective U-boat hunter, but they had very few of them and they were not a production priority. In fact, Short was told to use the Sunderland as the basis for a heavy bomber, which produced the generally underwhelming Sterling, and a LOT of that production capacity got shifted over to the bomber (I don't know exactly how much; I do know Short used like 10 different factories though). Point being, that's a pretty great example of the misalignment of priorities...you've got a fantastic airframe with a lot of room for development that can seriously, immediately contribute to your survival, but instead you tell the builder to make lovely bombers to dump HE randomly into German cities. The other British heavies were not particularly well suited to the long range patrol role; they were really optimized for hauling huge quantities of bombs to Germany, not for flying 18 hour sorties over the north Atlantic at low speed and low altitude with a minimal payload. I'm sure they could have been modified as such had it been a point of emphasis though. Grand Prize Winner posted:How did engineers make a plane long range back then? Larger tanks? More efficient engines? To increase range you have three basic options, just like with a car: better fuel efficiency (aerodynamics or engine), more fuel, or less weight. Better aerodynamics is always preferred because there isn't really a penalty for doing so; more fuel requires more plane which means bigger, more expensive, heavier, etc, less weight means less payload/armor/etc. Designers did all three to varying degrees...the Japanese got the ridiculous range of the G4M by removing pretty much everything that wasn't bombs, engines, or fuel (and thus made a very vulnerable plane); the P-51 got its range largely by being very efficient aerodynamically; the B-29 was similarly an aerodynamic marvel for its time plus it held 2-3 times more fuel that any other heavy bomber, thus it was really really big, and thus was really really expensive. The B-36 overcame all opposition by sheer enthusiasm. bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 15:43
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Arquinsiel posted:Wait... how does that make the point he's trying to make? It's a "my sci-fi universe can beat up your sci-fi universe" site, and my (actual, real) sci-fi universe with modern science and rationalism and technology can beat up your not actually sci fictional universe is right in that vein. The armies of hell confidently get together, form up their massive numbers, and get utterly demolished by a combination of every modern military on earth up to and including gently caress it we're sending in armor, having them button up and dropping sarin on their heads. It's definitely something. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 17:05
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bewbies posted:The B-36 overcame all opposition by sheer enthusiasm. I found this far too amusing and accurate.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:13
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xthetenth posted:It's a "my sci-fi universe can beat up your sci-fi universe" site, and my (actual, real) sci-fi universe with modern science and rationalism and technology can beat up your not actually sci fictional universe is right in that vein. You cant leave it at that and not link it  http://www.tboverse.us/HPCAFORUM/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=29(It was originally written on bbs.stardestroyer.net, but stuart and them got in a slapfight, so now he keeps it on his own forum)
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Jul 16, 2016 17:24
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Loel posted:You cant leave it at that and not link it This was quite a few years ago but if memory serves, the reason Stuart Slade got into a slapfight with sd.net was that he wrote a scene in one of his many other stories where a large group of South African mercenaries ran over and killed a small annoying Kenyan child. The whole village where this happened was ok with this after being paid a pittance in compensation and offered the mercenaries fried chicken which was then somehow exported and became a big corporate franchise. Stuart then inserted a comment that in other timelines the dead child would go on to be the father of one Barrack Hussein Obama.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:47
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Zeond posted:This was quite a few years ago but if memory serves, the reason Stuart Slade got into a slapfight with sd.net was that he wrote a scene in one of his many other stories where a large group of South African mercenaries ran over and killed a small annoying Kenyan child. The whole village where this happened was ok with this after being paid a pittance in compensation and offered the mercenaries fried chicken which was then somehow exported and became a big corporate franchise. Stuart then inserted a comment that in other timelines the dead child would go on to be the father of one Barrack Hussein Obama. ... Hah. I was lurking on sdnet by that point, I didn't know that. But yeah, his threads got purged and he became unnameable, iirc.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:52
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Zeond posted:This was quite a few years ago but if memory serves, the reason Stuart Slade got into a slapfight with sd.net was that he wrote a scene in one of his many other stories where a large group of South African mercenaries ran over and killed a small annoying Kenyan child. The whole village where this happened was ok with this after being paid a pittance in compensation and offered the mercenaries fried chicken which was then somehow exported and became a big corporate franchise. Stuart then inserted a comment that in other timelines the dead child would go on to be the father of one Barrack Hussein Obama. 
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Jul 16, 2016 18:04
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Zeond posted:This was quite a few years ago but if memory serves, the reason Stuart Slade got into a slapfight with sd.net was that he wrote a scene in one of his many other stories where a large group of South African mercenaries ran over and killed a small annoying Kenyan child. The whole village where this happened was ok with this after being paid a pittance in compensation and offered the mercenaries fried chicken which was then somehow exported and became a big corporate franchise. Stuart then inserted a comment that in other timelines the dead child would go on to be the father of one Barrack Hussein Obama. Ghandi gets assassinated in The Big One, Michael Moore gets stuffed in a washing machine, and Barack gets aborted from time by a truck. I think there's more too!
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Jul 16, 2016 18:25
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He also threw a temper tantrum when someone put his posted-on-a-public-internet-forum piece of fiction inside a torrent and shared it and decided to not finish the Armageddon trilogy - the one where Hell invades Earth and mankind beats them back using science, engineering and a Robert Lee who's been salvaged from Hell, and then gets upset at God and declares war on Heaven.
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Jul 16, 2016 18:38
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Antti posted:He also threw a temper tantrum when someone put his posted-on-a-public-internet-forum piece of fiction inside a torrent and shared it and decided to not finish the Armageddon trilogy - the one where Hell invades Earth and mankind beats them back using science, engineering and a Robert Lee who's been salvaged from Hell, and then gets upset at God and declares war on Heaven. Nahh, Lee doesn't do a good job of dispersing and hiding his support stuff when trying to get brought up to speed which is apparently a disqualification for generalling in the modern US military .
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Jul 16, 2016 19:04
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Also, Julius Caesar ends up running Hell, with the support of the Baby Boomers.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:31
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I remember reading that series a few years ago: It ate up a summer and was entertaining, if nothing else.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:48
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Yeah, it actually was pretty entertaining, the same way early Tom Clancy is perfectly readable. But it's fun talking about it to people who don't know about it because it's insane on paper. It has the same draw Ghostbusters has, in a way: using technology to fight the supernatural. Like nuking Satan in the face. xthetenth posted:Nahh, Lee doesn't do a good job of dispersing and hiding his support stuff when trying to get brought up to speed which is apparently a disqualification for generalling in the modern US military Honestly, I'd forgotten that Lee wasn't that great as a general in the story.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:53
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And its fantastic military porn. But the uh ... other stuff. Yeah.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:59
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What was it, James Randi who figured out how to interact and open up portals to hell using insane people as telepaths?
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Jul 16, 2016 20:03
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nothing to seehere posted:What was it, James Randi who figured out how to interact and open up portals to hell using insane people as telepaths? Yup. And all telepaths were drafted and made officers, no matter how crazy they were. There was that one guy who wanted a million dollars and a car, but they drafted him as a PFC instead. edit: Oh, that's right. Schizophrenics actually were hearing/seeing demons, and tinfoil kept them out.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:04
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Another piece of crazy poo poo I just remembered: Most of the Goldman Sachs board dies in the inital demon invasion by accident, goes to hell... and then gets liberated by the human forces and starts suing the rest of the board for control of the company from Hell.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:09
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nothing to seehere posted:Another piece of crazy poo poo I just remembered: Most of the Goldman Sachs board dies in the inital demon invasion by accident, goes to hell... and then gets liberated by the human forces and starts suing the rest of the board for control of the company from Hell. Yeah, property law gets really interesting when your soul still exists
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Jul 16, 2016 20:10
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nothing to seehere posted:Another piece of crazy poo poo I just remembered: Most of the Goldman Sachs board dies in the inital demon invasion by accident, goes to hell... and then gets liberated by the human forces and starts suing the rest of the board for control of the company from Hell. I don't remember that part. I do remember some bit about a restored naval reserve boat that I don't think went anywhere that seemed kind of weird.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:10
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Zeond posted:This was quite a few years ago but if memory serves, the reason Stuart Slade got into a slapfight with sd.net was that he wrote a scene in one of his many other stories where a large group of South African mercenaries ran over and killed a small annoying Kenyan child. The whole village where this happened was ok with this after being paid a pittance in compensation and offered the mercenaries fried chicken which was then somehow exported and became a big corporate franchise. Stuart then inserted a comment that in other timelines the dead child would go on to be the father of one Barrack Hussein Obama. That is such a petty revenge it's hilarious. "Take this you drat Commie-Nazi Kenyan usurper." *Saves word document with smile of triumph*
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Jul 16, 2016 20:20
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bewbies posted:There's an interesting consideration here: the UK had what was prohibitively the best slow fat flying boat coastal patrol thing in the world in 1939; it had an impressive combat radius that was eventually expanded to be similar to the B-24s and was a very effective U-boat hunter, but they had very few of them and they were not a production priority. In fact, Short was told to use the Sunderland as the basis for a heavy bomber, which produced the generally underwhelming Sterling, and a LOT of that production capacity got shifted over to the bomber (I don't know exactly how much; I do know Short used like 10 different factories though). Point being, that's a pretty great example of the misalignment of priorities...you've got a fantastic airframe with a lot of room for development that can seriously, immediately contribute to your survival, but instead you tell the builder to make lovely bombers to dump HE randomly into German cities. It's a good point, and one I have to emphasize, because it has a poo poo-load of parallels to the German experience. In 1940 production remained limited for the Sunderland, so much so that production wasn't even meeting its replacement values for existing squadrons, let alone creating new ones. There are several reasons for this; one is the Sterling, as you mentioned. Another is that production for the Sterling was based out of Rochester, UK, which is SE of London. During the blitz, the factory that the Sterling was going to be made in was destroyed. I haven't read that Sterling production actually took over expansion space that was going to the Sunderland, but it seems a possibility. So you have production alterations made by enemy bomber in addition to the RAF emphasizing the poo poo out of the Sterling. On top of that, you have the RAF expecting that the Sunderland was about to get a better (IE cheaper) supplement, in the form of the two engine Saunders-Roe (Saro) Lerwick, which when it took to the sky revealed itself to be an appalling airplane. Patrol planes should be stable, and the Lerwick really, really was not, either on the water or in the sky. Despite the really low production, half were lost to accidents inside of a year. I'm not sure when the Mk. III Sunderland( which is the type that saw production in the hundreds, as opposed to the previous two marks, which never saw production in the triple digits) went into production but it was really late considering that it first flew in 1937 and 1939 had demonstrated an urgent need for fat slow coastal patrol flying boats. Late 1941? Early 1942? bewbies posted:The B-36 overcame all opposition by sheer enthusiasm. lol Convair's desire for a fat defense contract knew no bounds
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Jul 16, 2016 20:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:On the Eastern Front in WWII would it be common for their to be clouds "below" or at the altitude that Soviet and Luiftwaffe pilots flew at? As far as I understand it, clouds were usually above them. The eastern front was categorized as being about low-altitude combat, with ground-attack aircraft being very popular in that theater. I've never seen any metrics though, and it'd be cool to see.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:54
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Oh lord OK I was reading that wikipedia link on the Short Sunderland, and it seems the sperglords over there are in a twist as to what constitutes a Mk.IIIA Sunderland. It's really simple: Mk.III: a million antennas for the Mk. 2 radar; Mk. IIIA; domes under the wingtips for the Mk.3 centimetric radar. That's it. You can correct them if you like, I can't be bothered, I might just send them this image instead: 
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Jul 16, 2016 20:57
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How did engineers make a plane long range back then? Larger tanks? More efficient engines? Bigger fuel tanks in the plane (wings, fuselage) or making drop tanks. Bombers would sometimes have a modification to add a large fuel tank in the bomb bay to give them extra distance at the cost of most offensive armament. Otherwise, remove some defensive guns/crewmen. For fighters, you're either cutting down on guns in the wings to fill the space with fuel tanks or simply giving them drop tanks.
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Jul 16, 2016 21:09
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xthetenth posted:Ghandi gets assassinated in The Big One, Michael Moore gets stuffed in a washing machine, and Barack gets aborted from time by a truck. I think there's more too! I don't know whether this is actually "a thing" or not, but that breed of alt-milhistory writers really don't like Gandhi for some reason. I remember Turtledove wrote a story about the Nazis conquering the Raj which was basically a long-form "nonviolence only worked because good white people allowed it to, foolish half-naked fakir." e: I remember picking up a book called What If? when I was in high school which was a collection of alt-history essays, and finding it weird that every single one of them was exclusively about military history. Then I found cool authors like Kim Stanley Robinson who flattered my biases better! Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 22:34
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Found in a article about the Blackburn Baffin: [ahem] "The Baffin was designed by Major F A Bumpus..."
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Jul 16, 2016 22:34
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Probably-dumb-question: Modern armour techniques are all kind of anti-tech innovations, right? Chobham, BDD, and stuff like that is all designed to disrupt HEAT jets, fragment long-rod penetrations, abrade sabot, and all other kinds of stuff. This is, at least, my understanding. I've been told they're not really built to defeat shells, in the WW2 sense, but that the armour is thick enough that shells are also pretty useless. So, assuming I'm not wrong about the above, how'd modern armour deal with things like the british six-inch howitzer or the soviet 152mm and 203mm guns that were firing anti-concrete weapons? Would the sheer kinetic energy be enough to make a big enough hole? Also, kind of relatedly, how does armour deal with really big explosions? I realise 152mm/203mm HE isn't really a calibre most tanks are toting around, but presumably this one's more than just speculation since I'd assume tanks still get bombed now with things that are just putting out loads of kinetic force.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:19
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From Prince Philip's Wikipedia article: The accession of Elizabeth to the throne brought up the question of the name of the royal house. The Duke's uncle, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, advocated the name House of Mountbatten, as Elizabeth would typically have taken Philip's last name on marriage; however, when Queen Mary, Elizabeth's paternal grandmother, heard of this suggestion, she informed the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who himself later advised the Queen to issue a royal proclamation declaring that the royal house was to remain known as the House of Windsor. Churchill's strong personal antipathy to Lord Mountbatten, whom he considered a dangerous and subversive rival who had lost India, may have contributed to this. The Duke privately complained, "I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children." Oh that Churchill! No one can hold a grudge like him.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:26
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You'd think they'd get on famously, what with both being associated with huge gently caress up operations that got a lot of British and Commonwealth soldiers killed.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:30
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lol just watched that clip this is my fave tujurikkuja https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-QIeng2lOo it has absolutely nothing to do with milhist
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Jul 17, 2016 00:39
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SeanBeansShako posted:You'd think they'd get on famously, what with both being associated with huge gently caress up operations that got a lot of British and Commonwealth soldiers killed. haha Well it's just like HEY GAL said, that your enemies are just the guys you shoot at, but it's the guys who are on your side that you can really hate. When I can be arsed, I'll post about the dramatis personae at the Battle of Suomussalmi. The two main officers pretended that the other one didn't exist.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:50
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As much as I hate alt-history in general, I find it amusing that y'all are complaining about alt-history authors writing about Gandhi being assassinated because, y'know, that's what happened in real history.
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Jul 17, 2016 01:16
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xthetenth posted:It's a "my sci-fi universe can beat up your sci-fi universe" site, and my (actual, real) sci-fi universe with modern science and rationalism and technology can beat up your not actually sci fictional universe is right in that vein. It actually makes sense in-universe. The idea is that Hell and Heaven only checked up on Earth once every few centuries, since human technology stayed basically stuck at "Stab the other guy with something sharp" for millennia. This meant that when Armageddon actually came, they were totally unprepared for the Industrial Revolution causing humanity to go from muskets to nuke-carrying supersonic jet planes and .50 caliber machine guns over the course of 200 years and were just prepared to conquer medieval-era armies instead of a modern military. The whole concept is really cool and full of neat little moments, but is held back by Stuart's right-wing jingoistic insanity.
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Jul 17, 2016 01:41
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chitoryu12 posted:It actually makes sense in-universe. The idea is that Hell and Heaven only checked up on Earth once every few centuries, since human technology stayed basically stuck at "Stab the other guy with something sharp" for millennia. This meant that when Armageddon actually came, they were totally unprepared for the Industrial Revolution causing humanity to go from muskets to nuke-carrying supersonic jet planes and .50 caliber machine guns over the course of 200 years and were just prepared to conquer medieval-era armies instead of a modern military. Yeah, pretty much. It's a really cool idea, and even despite his bugfuck nutsness it manages to be top tier dad fiction. I'd love for a competent writer to do it where hell makes their play right around WWII time and it's not a foregone conclusion dragged out over three books.
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Jul 17, 2016 01:46
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How is the fight even in question when we all know the old joke about the USMC?
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Jul 17, 2016 02:13
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xthetenth posted:Yeah, pretty much. It's a really cool idea, and even despite his bugfuck nutsness it manages to be top tier dad fiction. This is literally Turtledove's Worldwar series except it has aliens instead of Satan. It's probably the least terrible of his series for what that's worth (not much)
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Jul 17, 2016 02:20
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chitoryu12 posted:It actually makes sense in-universe. The idea is that Hell and Heaven only checked up on Earth once every few centuries, since human technology stayed basically stuck at "Stab the other guy with something sharp" for millennia. This meant that when Armageddon actually came, they were totally unprepared for the Industrial Revolution causing humanity to go from muskets to nuke-carrying supersonic jet planes and .50 caliber machine guns over the course of 200 years and were just prepared to conquer medieval-era armies instead of a modern military. ...And it's ripped wholesale from Turtledove's World War series, which itself was nothing more than a thinly veiled way to get an analogue of the modern US military to invade 1942 Earth.
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Jul 17, 2016 02:33
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Kellsterik posted:e: I remember picking up a book called What If? when I was in high school which was a collection of alt-history essays, and finding it weird that every single one of them was exclusively about military history. Hrm. My favorite one in that collection was the one about what if the Germans don't put Lenin on the train back to Russia.
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