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bewbies posted:the only reason to ever use WP is for obscuration or if you REALLY need to light something on fire for some reason and you don't have a fuel air or thermobaric weapon Speaking of, what makes a fuel-air explosive a good incendiary weapon as opposed to just straight high explosive? Is it just because the explosion has a large area and the fuel will spread through enclosed spaces before ignition? EDIT: Thinking about it, yeah, spreading a fuel aerosol through a space then lighting it would probably be really loving good at lighting things on fire. A Renaissance Nerd fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 17:35
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MikeCrotch posted:What modern day invention or weapon are you really, really glad your guys didn't have access to? I'm guessing Willie Pete is up there, but I imagine if they had cars it would be a Blues Brother esque drunken pileup the size of Saxony
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Aug 16, 2016 17:42
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V. Illych L. posted:couldn't it also work as a terror weapon Yes, and it has been. Israel has been known recently to dump WP on Palestinian civilians.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:44
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The principle of an ordinary explosive is that there's an oxidiser and a fuel mixed together, that react chemically to produce a lot of energy. Think about chemistry class, and those balloons they pop with hydrogen and oxygen mixed in together. In gunpowder the equivalent is charcoal/sulfur, and the oxidiser potassium nitrate (saltpeter). In a fuel air explosive, though, you *only* supply the fuel, dispersing it through the air, and making use of ambient oxygen as the oxidiser. The result? You get a much bigger bang for your buck, because you save about half the mass of the bomb. EDIT: ^^^ WP is nasty stuff, but I think my understanding of the events where it's allegedly used is that they represent on-the-field 'improvisations'. I don't see them being stocked as doctrinally 'here, use this in case you want to shoot a hospital'. Which is sort of how it's presented in, ahem, the aforementioned Spec Ops game. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 17:46
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MikeCrotch posted:What modern day invention or weapon are you really, really glad your guys didn't have access to? I'm guessing Willie Pete is up there, but I imagine if they had cars it would be a Blues Brother esque drunken pileup the size of Saxony Medieval Italy is probably better off not having had WP or easily man portable explosives.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:51
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Note that they're mostly used as gently caress off huge explosives not any kind of incendiary. They're what you drop on the jungle to blow a hundred meters flat for an LZ, not to set it on fire. Iirc the crazy over pressure also makes them useful for collapsing caves and tunnels and such b
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Aug 16, 2016 17:52
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V. Illych L. posted:couldn't it also work as a terror weapon I feel like blowing people apart is pretty terrifying already. If you really need to set things on fire there are more effective methods, as bewbies already mentioned. The only real reason to use WP as a terror weapon is for plausible deniability. A Renaissance Nerd posted:Speaking of, what makes a fuel-air explosive a good incendiary weapon as opposed to just straight high explosive? Is it just because the explosion has a large area and the fuel will spread through enclosed spaces before ignition? High explosives are not great incendiaries, and the shockwave they produce can actually blow fires out.
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Aug 16, 2016 17:54
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interestingly enough, philip II had access to something almost like just nuking the rebellious parts of the Netherlands--someone brought up the idea of just cutting the dykes and flooding the entire thing. he rejected it because it would have killed too many people and ruined farming for a long time. which makes him a better person than nixon, who wanted to do the same drat thing in vietnam edit: i guess every spanish monarch or governor of the netherlands would have been able to do that, they just chose not to HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 18:04
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Where was Nixon on the ol' Civilization scoreboard? How much higher was he than Dan Quayle?
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Aug 16, 2016 18:10
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actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him metternich, kemper boyd, any thoughts?
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Aug 16, 2016 18:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:Note that they're mostly used as gently caress off huge explosives not any kind of incendiary. They're what you drop on the jungle to blow a hundred meters flat for an LZ, not to set it on fire. Nah, the BLU-82 wasn't an FAE, it was a conventional big-rear end hunk of ammonium nitrate with some aluminum and polystyrene added. Two factors of merit for an explosive are brisance and heave. Brisance is peak detonation pressure and is related to detonation velocity, you can roughly think of this as the ability of the explosion to shatter things into pieces, or alternately as the energy carried by the shockwave. Heave is total impulse, you can think of this as how far it throws the pieces, the energy behind the shockwave, how much the bubble behind it expands. Something like ANFO is low-brisance, high-heave; you don't need to break the rock you're mining into sand but you do need to move a hillside into a pile of rubble. That's why it's good for clearing landing zones: You don't need some huge overpressure to kill trees but you would like them nicely moved out of the way. A GP bomb wants a higher-brisance explosive than that, because you want to break a heavy steel bombcase into a bunch of lethal fragments, but you also want enough impulse to throw those fragments a good distance. So you wouldn't want to use an arbitrarily high-brisance explosive because then you'd turn your steel bombcase into dust and lower its lethal radius (which is not an inherently bad idea, there are warheads that basically do that but they do it by using a carbon fiber bombcase and mixing the explosive fill with an inert metal powder, that's a different thing). FAE bombs are low-brisance relative to conventional munitions; the detonation takes longer to proceed because you're burning a large volume of fuel so the detonation pressure rises slowly. But the impulse they can generate is very high relative to munition weight, and so long as your peak detonation pressure is high enough to break what you're aiming at then maximizing impulse is probably a better goal than trying to get a higher detonation pressure. But then again their energy is limited by the amount of O2 present in the cloud volume. But yes, they're not used for setting things on fire. Partly because they tend to consume all the O2 in the vicinity. Incendiary munitions use an explosive to scatter a bunch of stuff that will keep burning, like zirconium or aluminum or phosphorus if you're old-school Phanatic fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 18:13
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Taerkar posted:Where was Nixon on the ol' Civilization scoreboard? How much higher was he than Dan Quayle? I've got him plugged in somewhere near Richard III.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:17
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HEY GAL posted:these dudes would love the gently caress out of anything shoulder-mounted and explosive, and knowing them, they'd would be more likely to fire them off indoors rather than at any enemies who were hanging around I wonder what TV programs these kinds of guys would have made/liked? The law/court themed ones would certainly be worth watching for sure.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:40
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What's this?! I come back to SA after an absence of only several years to find that there's not just one, but TWO follow up threads to the original from 2010 - I'm so happy to see this thriving! I have no hope of catching up on everything that's happened since I was here last, so I'll just pick up at the start of this iteration and try to keep up. I just want to say that it does me good to see so many people involved in the discussion!
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Aug 16, 2016 18:45
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SeanBeansShako posted:I wonder what TV programs these kinds of guys would have made/liked? edit: "will anyone successfully spell or pronounce Oberst Yssavolitsky's last name, including himself?"
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Aug 16, 2016 18:46
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SeanBeansShako posted:I wonder what TV programs these kinds of guys would have made/liked? Imagine Henry VIII visiting the Jerry Springer show.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:48
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I'd legit watch both.Admiral Snackbar posted:What's this?! SEE YOU IN A YEAR!
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Aug 16, 2016 18:48
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HEY GAL posted:actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:52
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Grand Prize Winner posted:English name question: I know there used to be a lot of towns with streets like Gropecunte Alley and so forth, but did any people end up with names related to their not-socially-acceptable trades? Like, is there today one James Whoremonger living a quiet life in Hamfast or something? Around where I grew up (Herefordshire) one of the local surnames is Wanklyn, I like to think that could be a trade-related surname.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:58
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Kemper Boyd posted:Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie. The nation state only began to emerge in the 20th century. Also can you explain that blanket statement as there were quite the collection of bastards just before Napoleon, let alone all the history that proceeded them.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:11
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Hunt11 posted:The nation state only began to emerge in the 20th century. Also can you explain that blanket statement as there were quite the collection of bastards just before Napoleon, let alone all the history that proceeded them. It's definitely not the case that the nation state is a 20th century invention but I think the point here is virulent modern nationalism really gets its first big outing in the Napoleonic period.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:16
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Kemper Boyd posted:Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie. or, you know, the traditional breakfast vermouth HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 19:17
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Owlkill posted:Around where I grew up (Herefordshire) one of the local surnames is Wanklyn, I like to think that could be a trade-related surname. For people who are good with their hands, you mean?
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Aug 16, 2016 19:20
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And to hammer home this point about states, if Victorian England doesn't have a state just what does it have?
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Aug 16, 2016 19:22
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Disinterested posted:And to hammer home this point about states, if Victorian England doesn't have a state just what does it have? Facial hair and lots of self hatred.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:35
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Disinterested posted:And to hammer home this point about states, if Victorian England doesn't have a state just what does it have? Do you mean the Victorian United Kingdom? 
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Aug 16, 2016 19:43
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Ia Ia Snackbar Fhtaghn!
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Aug 16, 2016 19:44
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feedmegin posted:Do you mean the Victorian United Kingdom? What's the difference.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:45
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Hunt11 posted:The nation state only began to emerge in the 20th century. Also can you explain that blanket statement as there were quite the collection of bastards just before Napoleon, let alone all the history that proceeded them. The 20th century is when the nation state finally erradicated all other forms of state organization (primarily when colonialism finally died its well deserved death), but the statement that it only began to emerge in the 20th century is utterly absurd and flies in the face of all available evidence. The 19th century was all about nationalism and people really, really, really wanting to form nation states. There were plenty of wars about it. Germany alone had three.
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Aug 16, 2016 19:50
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The most Nazi moment in this book so far is army group north had thousands of Jews in Riga producing huge quantities of desperately needed winter clothes for the German army and then they were all liquidated with the ghetto in November of 1941. Simultaneously the army quartermasters are still at this point telling the generals on the front to stop requesting winter equipment.
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Aug 16, 2016 20:28
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HEY GAL posted:i mean on a personal level. i would rather do shots with baner than whatever the gently caress nixon was on with nixon Same, definitively.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:16
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Mine warfare 1907-1918 Pretty much all of this will deal with the RN and the Kriegsmarine as the major naval participants in mining with guest appearances from the USN and the Ottoman Navy, there was a significant Russian mining effort in the Baltic Sea but unfortunately I don’t know a whole lot about it. Calculation of the threat of a minefield. The calculation of roughly how effective a minefield will be is a simple set of calculations though it differs for surface ships and submarines travelling submerged, this is why in an integrated submarine defence system it was usual to employ nets and mines to prevent a submarine penetrating a harbour.  The calculation I’m going to go through is for submarines but the same calculation works for surface ships if you just consider it as a 2D plane so you ignore the vertical components, the calculation assumes that a row of mines is made up of oblongs that contain one mine that covers a certain area. (Diameter of the Sub * (Area of Detonation of the mine / Total area assigned to that mine)) ^ Number of rows in the minefield. So essentially the size of the sub multiplied by the percentage of area covered by a mine, to take Northern Barrage as an example (I’ll cover what it was in more detail later but it was a large mine barrage laid from the Orkneys to Norway to stop U-Boats reaching the Atlantic). In this minefield the mines were laid 30 per mile with 14 rows at varying depth to catch submerged U-Boats, this meant each mine covered an area of 200 foot in breadth and 300 foot in depth, the mines used in this field were of a contact antenna type, where a long wire stretches out to a float and if a metal hull touches it a current is induced and it detonates the mine, so the threat height of the mine is the length of the wire which was 100ft, assuming a diameter of 25 feet of the submarine the calculation becomes: (25*(100/200*300))^14 = 0.55 or 55%, this means that the chance of a submarine passing safely through the Northern Barrage is 55%, but its probability of making it out and back is only 30%. (Ignoring dud rates). This serves to illustrate how high the casualties a well-placed minefield can have on a vessel trying to pass through it. Mines in the lead up to the First World War I think that the RN in general gets a bit more flak than it deserves for being resistant to change, some of it is earned but a lot of actions they took they took for good reasons at the time, but mine warfare was an area where they really did lag behind. The RN mine establishment at HMS Vernon was very good at their job but they had trouble getting funding or approval for their work, the argument went that because Britain was the dominant sea power it would be mad to do anything to restrict the passage of sea traffic as it could effectively dictate that via the power of its surface fleet. In 1903 the RN decided to stop mining altogether, this decision lasted about two years before the impact of mines in the Russo-Japanese war made it obvious that mines were here to stay. The RN broadly had four choices of detonating system to choose from, a mechanical detonator similar to the Singer mine, a pendulum based mine which when hit the pendulum moves relative to the mine casing and triggers the detonation, a mercury based mine where a mercury bead inside a tube that moves with the mine and if it moves sufficiently completes a circuit which detonates the mine and finally the Hertz horn type electrochemical detonator. They rejected pendulum and mercury on the basis that in the rough seas that they would be laid that they would be subject to accidental detonation, which is reasonable. They rejected the Hertz horn officially because they wanted to avoid electrical systems at sea if at all possible and were afraid that the detonation of another mine in the field would cause the glass to crack and setting off the mine in a chain reaction called sympathetic detonation, what I suspect was the actual reason is that a Hertz horn detonated mine was two to five times the price of a mechanical detonator. Going into the first world war the British developed what they called the Naval Spherical Mine, it was a mechanical mine where contact with the firing arm released the spring loaded striker which detonated the explosive charge. In practice however this was an unreliable system that often failed to detonate when struck and really hurt British mining efforts for a long time until they refined their design, the other main design was the Elia mine, which was originally a hertz horn design purchased from Italy but was modified to a mechanical type to Royal Navy specification and suffered the same problems as the Spherical mine. The Russians would help out by shipping a boat full of the Carbonit design early in the war, Carbonit had sold their weapons commercially before the outbreak of war so despite being based in Germany their designs got around a fair bit, being employed by Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Russia and Britain.  This is contrasted with the Kriegsmarine who saw the Russo Japanese war and immediately took the lesson to heart and stockpiled a supply of effective modern Hertz horn operated mines before the outbreak of WW1, the North Sea and the British Cost are particularly suitable for mining and they rightly saw that Britain was uniquely vulnerable to attacks on its trade and fleet, the Germans would begin their first mine sortie the first night of the war using their very competently designed Carbonit mine.  Mines in the North Sea.  USN and RN minefields in hatched colors, german minefields in black. 1914 German efforts. I mentioned that the Germans put to sea early, they sent out a converted mail steamer on the 2nd August 1914, (2 days before Britain declared war) which they had repainted to look like a Great Eastern Railways steamer, it carried 180 Carbonit mines, they were spotted on the 4th by a fisherman throwing things over the side inside a major shipping lane off the coast of Southwold and were intercepted by the light cruiser Amphion and sunk, the Captain of the Amphion placed the rescued Germans in the prow so that in his words “If we go on one of your mines you go first”, and it attempted to make its way back to Harwich. During this trip the Amphion nearly opened fire on another ship painted in the Great Eastern Railways colours who was flying a German ensign but they got the message just in time that it was transporting the German Ambassador back home. Unfortunately for the Amphion it struck a pair of mines laid by the German ship it had sunk and sunk quickly with the loss of 130 Sailors and 27 German prisoners. The Germans made concerted efforts to mine the north sea using fast minelayers and caused significant damage to civilian shipping and the royal navy, the most prolific minelayer being the light cruiser Kolberg that accompanied Germanies battlecruiser raids on the East Anglian coast, it was at this point that the Royal Naval Minesweeper Reserve started to be heavily employed, I will cover them later on in a dedicated section about minesweeping but they were civilian seamen, usually but not always fishermen who were trained by the Royal Navy for times of war and were a very ballsy and competent group of men. The RN decided that it was pointless to sweep the German minefields in their entirety, and instead adopted a system of shipping lanes, where they would sweep regularly to keep it clear and leave the other mines in place marked by buoys, it was a good decision at the time because once a minefield is laid it can serve as a British defensive minefield as much as a German offensive one and to sweep mines other than ones that you absolutely have too invites unnecessary casualties.  It was towards the end of 1914 that three of the great pieces of luck that the British had took place, a minelaying set of four German destroyers was intercepted and sunk off the East Anglian coast, and soon after a fishing trawler was operating in that area and found a bag in its nets, the skipper took it ashore and gave it to the RN who recognised it as the code books for German diplomatic and Inter service communication, the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground off Estonia and was captured intact by a pair of Russian cruisers who retrieved the German naval codes for fleet communications and finally the merchant codes were captured from a German liner off Australia, these three finds allowed the RN to anticipate German minelaying and direct sweepers to keep the safe channels open for merchant shipping, these channels were maintained very well throughout the war. Until late 1914 the Admiralty attempted to keep to the Hague convention, they laid defensive minefields around their own ports and made the first attempt to mine the Dover strait to stop interference with cross channel traffic, but in November on the grounds that the Germans had been laying unrestricted minefields they announced that the whole of the North Sea was subject to British mining, the Admiralty advised ships to approach via the Dover strait and kept this policy throughout the war. The RN, lacking fast minelayers requisitioned several fast merchant ships to conduct mine raids into the Heligoland Bight, however at this early stage there were too few ships which were too slow to do this safely and their efforts were largely for nought due to the already covered poor design of the Naval Spherical Mine and the inadequacies of the ships used. 1915 The Flower class sloop was ordered in 1914 when it became obvious that the RN had very poor fleet minesweeping capability, they were designed with triple spacing at the bow and to be as simple as possible with single screw propulsion and coal burning engines, they had a speed of 17 knots and a build time of around 20 weeks, their hull design gave them excellent survivability to mine strikes and served very well in their job as minesweeper, they would later be adapted to serve as ASW ships. It was also during 1915 that the RN created the Racecourse type of minesweeper which is interesting to note because it is a paddle steamer. In 1914 the Admiralty requisitioned a number of paddle steamers used to carry tourists around the British coast and crewed them with the Royal Naval Minesweeping Reserve, In the open sea the RNMR used fishing trawlers but given their deep draught they were not suitable for operations close to the coast so the paddle steamers were pressed into service, these boats were excellent at their job with shallow draught and good manueverability and were so successful that the RN ordered the Racecourse type built, the ships were so well built that they survived mine strikes much better than many RN service vessels, being able to be towed into port and repaired.  Peacetime steamer "Mavis"  Wartime Racecourse Steamer "Banbury" 1915 is very notable however for the winding down of the German surface minelayers and the emergence of the U-Boat minelayer. The first sign of this new danger was in July of 1915, a British coastal vessel the Cottingham was off Yarmouth when it sighted a submarine and then proceeded to run it down and sink it by ramming, the next day the Admiralty salvaged it and discovered it was a new type of U-boat, the UC.I, a cheap slow and small submarine only being around 160 tons and 110 feet long they could go around 6 knots surfaced, but they carried 12 mines in six vertical tubes, they were conceived in 1914 and were very quickly replaced by the UC.II as pictured below. The UC.II was probably the most successful naval weapon of the war, they were a 500 ton submarine that carried 18 mines and were credited with 1800 allied and neutral ship sinking’s throughout the war.  Upper image is the UC.II, lower the UC.III  The mine they carried is interesting, they dropped out the bottom of the sub and then a soluble plug dissolved to release the mine to float up to its set depth, in practice this was an imperfect arrangement as there are some cases of submarines lost by their own mines deploying underneath them, the Germans were to eventually solve this with the UE.II class submarine who deployed out the back and were designed to be oceangoing with a torpedo armament in addition to the mines but that did not come into service until the end of 1917, it is also interesting that the UE3 caused the only USN battleship casualty of the war, the USS Minnesota, a pre-dreadnought struck a mine off the eastern seaboard in 1918, she didn’t sink but was out of service for the rest of the war. 1915 also marked the time that the RN got serious about designing a good mine, they captured one of the new German models which got stuck in the sands off the coast which was disarmed and recovered, its features were incorporated into a new line of RN mines, the H.II class pictured below. They also started employing their new E class submarine as a minelayer and laid design of a new class of fast minelayers to serve as Destroyer Leaders, the Abidiel class. 1916 A large part of the fencing between the German High Seas Fleet and the Home Fleet were attempts to draw each other onto minefields mainly by using battlecruiser forces, but Jellicoe and Scheer both exercised more sense than Makaroff and stayed clear of each others traps, the Home fleet was accompanied by Paravane equipped fast minesweepers which I will cover in the minesweeping section which served excellently in keeping it safe. It was during this fencing however that two major casualties happened, first was the German battlecruiser Seydlitz, one of the HSF’s most modern struck a Spherical mine and was put out of action for four months, the excellent subdivision and design of the German ships stopped her sinking entirely. The other was the sinking of the cruiser Hampshire who was carrying Lord Kitchener at this time, this was just after Jutland and so the germans had laid several offensive minefields which the RN had not yet found and swept so despite urging from Jellicoe Kitchener insisted on travelling to Russia on a diplomatic mission, the Hampshire strayed out of the normal lanes and her escorting destroyers were unable to keep up in the heavy seas so were sent home and struck a U-Boat laid mine sinking with all hands. Jutland itself was an interesting use of tactical minelaying, the RN had embraced the fast minelayer and had built a new class of destroyers capable of 34 Knots armed with a quartet of 4 inch guns it was fast and capable of outfighting anything that could catch it. One of these vessels, the Abdiel, circumvented the battle and laid mines across the HSF’s retreat route next to Denmark, it laid 90 mines and retreated unseen, and during the retreat the Ostfriesland, a German dreadnought hit one of these mines and suffered 40 by 12 foot gash in her side, she managed to limp home and was laid up for 2 months for repair, it is very unusual that mines laid during a battle have any effect, there was a lot of fear of it but it just didn’t come to pass. In 1916 we see the start of a concentrated effort to use mines to combat the U-Boat threat, there was an integration of nets and electrically detonated mines in an extensive barrage along the Belgian coast between Ostend and the mouth of the river Scheldt, if a submarine contacted the nets it would trigger the firing of a nearby mine in an effort to increase the threat of the minefield. There was also a backup set of contact mines of varying depth.  1917-18 1917 marks the peak of the effort of the KM to win the war of the Atlantic, they especially tried to catch US troops crossing the Atlantic but were largely unsuccessful, but they repeatedly re-laid minefields in shipping lanes and caused many casualties. 1917 marked the turning point of the war in the north sea, the RN had become very practiced at sweeps by this point, starting to employ high speed motor boats whose draught was too shallow to hit a mine, this combined with the more effective ability to hunt U-Boats meant that the Germans started to suffer unsustainable attritition in U-Boats and crews. This year does also contain one of my favourite stories of mine warfare of the war, sweepers operating off the south of Ireland noticed that their area kept having the same field replenished, so the leader of this flotilla ordered his men to look busy but not to actually sweep any mines, UC.44 observed them and believed that the field had been swept, and returned to lay a new field, unfortunately for that boat he struck one of his own mines, most of his crew escaped and was rescued by the minesweeping flotilla, the Captain of UC.44 was reported to be complaining vociferously about the inefficiency of British minesweeping as he was rescued. 1917 also sees the start of the truly mad undertaking, the HSF was confined to port but the U-Boat threat was growing, and so the creation of two barrages was planned, the Dover barrage and the North Sea barrage. The Dover barrage was not completed by the end of the war but was a plan to create a integrated defence comprised of mines of both shore triggered and contact types, hydrophones, 4 inch guns, nets and patrolling blimps with spotlights  The North Sea barrage was created in order to stop U-Boats breaching the North Atlantic, it was selected over smaller barrages closer to Heligoland and the mouth of the Baltic largely because it was far enough away that it could not be swept and that it did not restrict Grand Fleet operations, it was planned for 70’000 mines covering 240 miles of sea from the Orkneys across to Norway, the USN would play a very large part in laying this, the type of mine used was mentioned in the Minefield Threat section but the diagram below gives a better idea of how it functioned, the type was called the antenna mine with the mode of operation being a metal hull touching the antenna at the top and causing a detonation, it is specifically an anti-submarine mine with the antenna increasing the threat area and allowing it to catch submerged vessels much more easily.  Despite the scale of the undertaking it is thought that only six U-Boats were destroyed in the barrage, the water was too deep and it was impossible to patrol meaning U-Boats could pass easily on the surface, the cost of the barrage was around £30 million but as pointed out by the Secretary of the Navy Joseph Daniels, the war was costing that quantity per day, if it shortened it by even a day it was worth it. Ultimately I don’t believe that it did, or that the mines and money would have been better employed elsewhere but it was a staggering undertaking. 1918 was also the year that mining operations in the Heligoland Bight came to a head, with the new classes of high speed mine layers and two particularly nasty new types of mines: The oscillator mine which used a hydrostat and adjustable ballast to change its depth in a cycle to make it harder to sweep, and the delayed release mine, where it would sit on the bottom and parts of the field would come up at different times presenting a much more persistent danger, there was also the first incarnation of a mine that would play a huge part in WW2, the magnetic mine, I won’t cover this here because it is more suitable to cover in the context of WW2, but this was its first appearance.  British mining operations in the Bight destroyed 28 destroyers, at least 4 U-Boats and 70 other craft along with damaging several battleships and cruisers. During the course of WW2 the Germans laid 43’000 mines, the British laid 128’000 and the USN 57’000 (mostly in the Northern barrage).The Germans lost 150 warships to mines, including at least 40 U-Boats (U-Boat casualty figures are very hard to determine cause for obvious reasons), the German minelayers sunk 46 British warships but also 439 auxiliaries and minesweepers, both sides lost more warships to mine warfare than the combination of gunfire and torpedo attack. Gallipoli. I’m sure you are mostly familiar with the plan that lead up to the Gallipoli campaign, but just to briefly summarise it, originally the plan was a naval one, it was to force the dardanelles straight using battleships and threaten Constantinople with the large guns of the combined allied fleets, and at the same time sink the Goeben and the Breslau who had been absorbed into the Turkish navy. However, the Dardenelles straight is probably one of the most suitable places to defend with mines in the world, less than a mile wide at its narrowest point it was extensively covered by forts and any minefield laid was able to be well covered by fire to stop any sweeping efforts, and without sweeping it would be suicide to send the big dreadnoughts into the strait, on top of that the tide is up to 4 knots in places making it very challenging to make headway in the typically slow minesweeping trawlers and paddlers available to the RN.  The Ottoman forces had three types of mines, drift mines which were small rafts under which a mine was slung, these were about as effective as any other drift mine in history, not at all, they had lots of Carbonit mines imported from Germany and a free-floating mine called a Leon type, this was a powered mine that kept station via a hydrostat and an electric propeller, they were almost impossible to sweep as they had no mooring cable, we don’t know how the Leon would have performed as the allied fleets never penetrated far enough for the Ottomans to consider using them. The Allies knew about the mines and made efforts to clear them, working mainly at night they attempted their first sweep with the RNMR crews, they were very quickly bombarded by the forts and turned back, they tried many combinations including battleship support but the conditions were almost unworkable, with their drag nets deployed the trawlers could make little headway against the strong current, this was the source of a lot of resentment between the RN crews and the RNMR crews with the RN muttering about lack of moral fiber on the part of the volunteer civilian crews with no training under fire. The night tactics were proven not to work and Admiral Carden the commander was under immense pressure from Churchill to make progress, he however fell extremely ill and was replaced by his subordinate, Admiral de Roebeck who decided to sweep the minefield at day while employing his whole force of 18 battleships to silence the shore guns, they had pretty much charted the minefields and were confident of success. However the night before a small ship under an Ottoman Colonel Geehl had steamed down the night before and laid a field of 20 Carbonit mines, this field accounted for 2 battleship sinkings and a third crippled, the Bouvet, Irresistible and the Ocean respectively, a fourth, Inflexible, was crippled by gunfire. At this stage Admiral Roebeck lost his nerve and stopped the operation despite the assurances of his subordinate Commander Keyes that only the mines stood between them an Constantinople he called off the operation and it was essentially abandoned in favour of the doomed land campaign. Minesweeping Technology. Minesweeping developed at a rapid pace in the RN during the First World War, I have covered some of the purpose built minesweepers but this section will cover the various minesweeping technologies and techniques of WW1. Countermining. Countermining was one of the two main techniques employed by the RN in the lead up to WW1, it employs the principle of sympathetic detonation where the shockwaves of an explosion will trigger mines and create a chain reaction that blows the minefield up, sympathetic detonation is the main reason that minefields were spaced at around 200 feet to stop one mine explosion from detonating the entire field. The principle was that a fast launch laid a line of charges on a timer then hightailed It out of there, the charges would go off and destroy the minefield, as you may imagine this was dangerous and unpopular work and there was probably a considerable sigh of relief when it was abandoned in 1914. Sweep A sweep works by a heavy cable being towed between weighted kites behind two boats, the cable would become entangled in the mooring cable and either be cut by serrations or be successfully dragged into shallower water where it can be disarmed, usually by shooting it with a Vickers gun to hole the case and sink it. This is the reason that trawlers were often used because along with their crews they were equipped and trained to handle big heavy cables and had the heavy duty davets necessary to hold them, it was also the case that the crews of fishing trawlers were intimately familiar with their stretch of water and the conditions of the north sea.  The trawlers employed began to be armed with 6 pounder guns and would often tenaciously charge and ram U-Boats that they saw near the surface, this being the cause of one of the first sinkings of the U-Boat, a trawler saw a U-Boat trying to enter Scapa flow and rammed it damaging the hydroplanes and rendering the boat unpilotable, a gunboat came alongside and got off most of her crew before the submarine sank, the trawler in question being given a reward of £500. The most impressive instance for me was when an unknown U.139 class, one of the giant cruiser type submarines built by the Germans armed with a pair of 6 inch deck guns surfaced near a sweeping team with the intent of sinking them, the trawlers formed up and blazed away at the surfaced U-Boat, losing one of their number to a 6 inch shell, but a lucky shot from one of the trawlers disabled the forward gun and damaged her hull causing her to dive quickly and run.  U.139 shown bottom with standard U-Boat for scale. Paravane. The paravane was two long metal bars whick were controlled by a hydraulic plane system that protruded either side of the bow of a ship, they ended in a sharp cutting jaw and the idea was that a mooring cable would slide down the bar and into the cutting jaw where it would be severed and could then float to the surface to be sunk safely. These were the critical component of fleet minesweepers that allowed the battlefleet to move at a useful speed and be reasonably sure of not striking a mine, eventually all merchant ships were issued with paravanes in 1917 which meant that in 1918 only 27 ships were lost in British waters to mine strikes.  High Speed Sweep This is an interesting development of the paravane idea, a fast ship would tow a pair of paravanes connected by a sweep wire, the paravanes would keep the wire at a set depth with a float pulling the assembly out to the side of the ship and meant that the ship could effectively sideswipe a minefield in layers, working its way safely down in slices until the fioeld had been cleared, this had the advantage over paravanes of not requiring extensive refitting and could operate at high speed for fleet minesweeping duties.  Oropesa Sweep This was the final and most effective type developed, it was essentially a towed paravane array, the lead ship in a flotilla would enter the minefield and sweep a wide path using the paravane principle described earlier, then a pair of ships would follow, either using the same technique of the HSS technique, keeping their hulls inside the area swept by the first Oropesa sweep which is known to be clear, they would expand the swept path while in relative safety,  This is a huge topic area and as I wrote it up I realised I’d have to leave some of it out for the sake of my fingers, if you want to know more about something I touched on I will be more than happy to expand but I hope I have managed to catch all the major areas of mines in WW1. Next time: The cleanup, inter war developments and WW2. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 21:22
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HEY GAL posted:actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him I don't know enough about Nixon to say how he ranks in the "would I hang out with him y/n" department I bet Frederick II would be insufferable though. With him it's probably all "Yeah, I need to invade this country for reasons", randomly starting to play on his flute, making bad jokes about non-Prussians and non-enlightened Lutherans, being smug about being  friends with Voltaire and starting to cry because he thought of his fatherI'm not a fan, in case you didn't notice  but on the other hand: Kemper Boyd posted:Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:52
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System Metternich posted:I don't know enough about Nixon to say how he ranks in the "would I hang out with him y/n" department Don't forget if he was around today he'd probably be an annoying evangelizing atheist.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:56
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System Metternich posted:being smug about being
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Aug 16, 2016 21:59
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I have to admit I'm half a fan of his just because of how he stressed competency in the civil service over connections. Well, for the time.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:I have to admit I'm half a fan of his just because of how he stressed competency in the civil service over connections. Well, for the time.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:02
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of course the real rock stars of civil service reform are von Stein and von Hardenberg  Humboldt if you're a geek into educational history.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:02
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I maintain that him not loving a woman was a terrible mistake in retrospect though.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:of course the real rock stars of civil service reform are von Stein and von Hardenberg
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Aug 16, 2016 22:03
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