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HEY GAL posted:what do germans do when their complicated bullshit fails? have you asked any of your german counterparts this Honestly it usually doesn't, the Germans I've worked with have a really good work ethic and are very meticulous with their lab work. It would probably be less work for them if they simplified things, but it's not like every German scientist has a Rube Goldberg setup that explodes every other week. They just tend to overengineer things especially for field work where simplicity and robustness are very important. xthetenth posted:What do you do when you're tired and mess the order up? Well, here's the tradeoff. I can be standing at my instrument and switch the valves manually, maybe I gently caress up but I'm right there able to correct the situation. A lot of the automation setups are intended to operate without a user there, like I stick all my samples in and program my analysis and go to sleep for the night. The second scenario is terrifying to me, any number of things could easily go wrong and I lose half my samples or overpressure and blow a column or something.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:22
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Disinterested posted:It's pretty clear that virtually every time the German army is more circumspect and tries to slow the gently caress down to stop all this crippling attrition all it actually does it give the Soviets more time. Hell, destroying these huge pockets of Soviet troops and putting down millions of Soviet men is enough to buy the requisite time. And it goes both ways: what if Stalin was prepared to allow his generals to withdraw and prevent their encirclements? Returning to a previous conversation we had about the dude on a different forum who insisted that the Best Cultured And Intelligent People on the Planet and that as a result Hitler was just SO CLOSE to winning and our conclusion was "If the Germans could have won the war they wouldn't have been Nazi's"; at least the early shenanigans in the summer of 1941 are largely unavoidable in Stalin's Russia or lease it wouldn't be Stalin or Soviet Russia as we know it right? But the Kiev pocket though, surely that could've been entirely avoided by sending written orders at the get go to avoid wasting three days on confirming STAVKA's orders and maybe another 100,000-250,000 troops could have made it out to hold the Germans at bay during Case Blue? Ignoring Guderian's panzers lining up to attack in the north also seems like an easily avoidable thing, it's like the Soviets were like the Germans at Stalingrad and just really wanted to hold Kiev at all costs and ignored the flanks? I can't quite think of anything else though between 1941 and up until 1942 that comes to mind that would lend itself as an easily understood counterfactual as Kiev. I've heard that many of the more fruitless attacks in 41' may have helped to grind down the Germans and worsen their effectiveness for Typhoon from the attrition. e: SlothfulCobra posted:If Hitler was competent, he wouldn't be fighting Russia in the first place. At least not while he still had a war going on in the west. For the record you can notice the nose is missing in his profile view they have at different points of the video, and they do explain the story in Lies. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 21:24
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PittTheElder posted:How destructive is the firing of a 15 inch battleship gun anyway? Like is it dangerous to any crew who might be topside during a firing? Undoubtedly it would be deafeningly loud I guess. The big guns could be lethal if you got too close...managing their blast effects was a big consideration in design and....led to some significant issues for those that didn't manage it well (eg, the Nelsons). That being said I'm honestly not sure how the external gun crews dealt with the blasts, especially if the gun was firing at an angle that put it closer towards the superstructure. That would have sucked some rear end at the very least.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:25
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Pellisworth posted:overengineering "Overengineered" is a weasel term for "engineered badly". Either you made your tank to specifications or you didn't. For example, a 45 ton entry in a 30 ton tank project means you didn't, no matter how many exciting new features that no one asked for it has.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:27
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Ithle01 posted:This is one of those things where the problem with contemporary sources is that the author almost always brings their own prejudices into the writing. I find Machiavelli particularly grating because the man has a reputation for being exceptionally cynical, dishonest, and manipulative that has lasted until our day. Oh god, the end of the first Punic War. With the exception of a couple of generals ( Xanthippus, Hamilcar, maybe a couple of others), the entire war was prosecuted incompetently by the Carthaginians from start to finish, but the end of war might have been the very worst. So the First Punic War was 23 years long and at the end, the Carthaginians lost Sicily and had to pay a huge war indemnity. Hamilcar Barca, who at this point was the overall commander of the Carthaginian army in Sicily, made sure his army came back with him and iirc promised them that they'd get full pay. So they get back to North Africa and the Carthaginian Senate decides that, hey, we have this indemnity to Rome and we lost Sicily and we can't afford to pay the mercenaries. They send a general to tell them that, hey, we're not giving you all your money. The mercenaries are not happy about this. They kill the general and start to pillage towns in North Africa. The Carthaginians suddenly find money for more mercenaries and Hamilcar defeats the mercenary army. Also, during the war, Rome manufactured an excuse and seized Sardinia and Corsica. So by saving the money from paying mercenaries, they fought another 3 years of war in their home territory, had to hire new mercenaries, and lost more territory. Great job, guys!
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Aug 19, 2016 21:29
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bewbies posted:The big guns could be lethal if you got too close...managing their blast effects was a big consideration in design and....led to some significant issues for those that didn't manage it well (eg, the Nelsons). I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that they had some restrictors in place to make sure you didn't blow everyone standing on the bridge into a blukhead.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:32
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Raenir Salazar posted:I can't quite think of anything else though between 1941 and up until 1942 that comes to mind that would lend itself as an easily understood counterfactual as Kiev. I've heard that many of the more fruitless attacks in 41' may have helped to grind down the Germans and worsen their effectiveness for Typhoon from the attrition. That latter part appears to be true of the forces deployed in defence of Moscow, the three fronts with approx 1.2 million soldiers and pretty similar materiel to the Germans. They do a bunch of costly thrusts that weakens their fronts but it also attrites all the furthest deployed panzer troops even more - and these are the only forces capable of striking decisive blows, and they can't be replaced faster than they're being lost. Of course, it just makes these Soviet armies softer for being destroyed, but again that's more of a feature of unwillingness to do tactical withdrawals in combination with German speed (for example, Guderian in the first 6 days of Typhoon makes it 250km to Orel, and the town is captured by a single company with 4 tanks that just drive over to the train station and wait three hours for backup. 140,000 people lived there). But Kiev is also a good example of Hitler overriding his commanders - who almost universally, apart from Kluge, were against diverting forces south to close the pocket - to beneficial effect. The problem is once the army hits genuine difficulties in late 1941 the flow of information back to Hitler and the OKW/H is just not getting through to people, and Hitler starts to distrust the reports as well. Plus, his strategic planning re: logistics etc. is all fanciful and too little too late. As for encirclements: it's mostly learning curve. It takes these huge casualties for Stalin to start learning, and also the right people like Konev (who Stalin threatens to shoot twice in October 1941) and Zhukov get in to the right jobs. But on the other hand these encirclements do do a big job - they take so long to destroy that it's a hugely damaging delay to the German advance. That's how Zhukov thinks about Viazma and Briansk and how Soviet historians,, seemingly, did afterwards. Also, more people get out than you think. A lot of the German commanders overstate how airtight they manage to keep these pockets Guderian is scraping together everything he can, for example, to close his pocket in Typhoon, but whole rifle divisions make it out and he lies and says they didn't. And, of course, as soon as the USSR counterattacks - Hitler does the same poo poo to his army, refusing to let it tactically withdraw.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:"Overengineered" is a weasel term for "engineered badly". Either you made your tank to specifications or you didn't. For example, a 45 ton entry in a 30 ton tank project means you didn't, no matter how many exciting new features that no one asked for it has. Fair enough, maybe I'll just settle on "unnecessarily complex for field use." My manually actuated setup had a lower throughput than if I had an automated setup where I could continuously analyze samples while doing other things (sleeping eating, other work). If at my home lab, I have controlled conditions and time for maintenance and making sure everything works perfectly, an automated setup would work just fine. Going into the field, an automated setup is more expensive and requires more supplies and replacement parts. It's also going to be a lot less reliable because you have much less space and control of things like temperature, humidity, motion (you're on a ship at sea!). If it's not reliable you lose the main advantage of being able to leave the setup run on its own and do something else with your time. So, in the field a manual setup is less efficient but simpler logistically and more reliable. An automated setup will be more efficient, but a lot more prone to catastrophic failure and logistically more expensive.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:37
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I think what we're saying here is Germany is the original tactilol nation.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:39
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Disinterested posted:
It does look very Austrian, just needs to have some sort of crested peak thing going for it.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:41
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Ensign Expendable posted:"Overengineered" is a weasel term for "engineered badly". Either you made your tank to specifications or you didn't. For example, a 45 ton entry in a 30 ton tank project means you didn't, no matter how many exciting new features that no one asked for it has. I think when people talk over engineering, we're talking things that made for a better tank in a featureless void, but weren't worth the production or maintenance trade offs. Like tight tolerances to make a high quality widget that will last 3 years when your tank will be dead within six months. Even a flat out better and cheaper in every way design can be "over engineering" if it wasn't worth disrupting the production line to implement.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:45
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Disinterested posted:Stahel uses a line from Glantz about the USSR and Germany being two prizefighters who punch eachother to blindness and exhaustion. I thought it was that bootleg wodka they stole from the Poles 
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Aug 19, 2016 21:48
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Disinterested posted:This is a good opportunity to ask a question Stahel doesn't answer: why, in the figures I listed above, would the IV's losses be 75% of total strength, while the III and II's losses were at 50%? Given most of the losses were reliability or supply related, were the IV's in 1941 that much more unreliable than the rest of the tank fleet? He says that they tended to ditch the heavier armour when they had to ditch vehicles for fuel and parts reasons as well, so I'm assuming that might have been a factor? The Pz IV was a couple of tons heavier than the III, depending on the mark of course. I don't think it was a massive difference, though, but that might explain it if they're preferentially cannibalising heavier vehicles?
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Aug 19, 2016 21:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:Honestly fragments of the brass aren't really going to be a problem. I've tossed surplus WW2 / 1950s era rifle rounds with bad primers into fires tons of times and all they do is pop, fart out the bullet maybe six inches, and worst case the neck splits. You would need a REALLY heavy crimp on the bullet to hold it in long enough to develop enough pressure to rupture the brass. This is why a .50 cal round shouldn't be used as a hammer  http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2010/06/04/soldier-mutilates-hand-by-hitting-50-caliber-round/
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Aug 19, 2016 22:00
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HEY GAL posted:and look how cultured and educated he is Isn't the the count of Urbino who only had like half a face because he once caught a lance with his face?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:04
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Kemper Boyd posted:Isn't the the count of Urbino who only had like half a face because he once caught a lance with his face?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:05
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Disinterested posted:
Thanks for the pic (and SeanBeansShako's input as well). I've been taking more of an interest in late 18th century and early 19th European stuff recently. The amount of uniform variation between units in the same army is incredible. How much leeway did a colonel have in determining his own regiment's uniforms? Were there broad guidelines he had to stick with? I'm assuming that you would be restricted from issuing grenadier caps to regular line infantry, but what about stuff like those Mamluk-inspired uniforms that I think some of Napoleon's cavalry started to adopt? European Orientalist trends are really fascinating to me. You find these influences in the oddest of places sometimes.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:09
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Grenrow posted:Thanks for the pic (and SeanBeansShako's input as well). I've been taking more of an interest in late 18th century and early 19th European stuff recently. The amount of uniform variation between units in the same army is incredible. How much leeway did a colonel have in determining his own regiment's uniforms? Were there broad guidelines he had to stick with? I'm assuming that you would be restricted from issuing grenadier caps to regular line infantry, but what about stuff like those Mamluk-inspired uniforms that I think some of Napoleon's cavalry started to adopt? European Orientalist trends are really fascinating to me. You find these influences in the oddest of places sometimes. Well, during the 18th century it began more or less like a wild west of military fashion with some styles and headgear being reserved for elites or awarded to regiments for action on the field, however towards the end of the 18th century and early 19th century things were changing and the men in charge of the army as whole started bringing out regulations which saw to the end the more creative variation see from 1750 to 1804. When the state took charge, they looked into trying to make uniforms both cheaper to mass produce in the early factories, this led to one of my favourite Napoleonic Wars uniform experiments when Napoleon had a few regiments experiment with white dyed uniforms during the conflict. Turns out they got dirty easier and their own allies kept mistaking them for Austrian soldiers. Volunteer, Militia and raised units were allowed to get away with some of that stuff during the Napoleonic Wars. In campaign too some regulations were ignored for comfort or practicality. If you like the Mamluk stuff I strongly suggest you see what the French Revolutionary soldiers more or less patched up and pulled from the charity shop. Those guys really made some nice looking uniforms that are almost as good looking as their Napoleonic counter parts. After the Napoleonic Wars, at least in Britain during the decades of peace in Europe up until the 1840's early Victorian uniforms got dandy as hell. Then the Crimean War happened and suddenly everyone remembers why really tall head gear, insanely tight trousers and coats you can barely move your arms in is sort of a bad thing to wear on campaign.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:30
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I was getting some pictures of Soviet and Russian binoculars for a STALKER roleplay and came across this post from a binocular collector.quote:During World War 1, the US Navy borrowed binoculars from US citizens as part of their "Eyes for the Navy" program. Each borrowed binocular was engraved with a serial number and cataloged by the US Navy for return at the end of the war. This one became No 6467.    
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Aug 19, 2016 22:30
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What is it with Roosevelts and the navy, anyway?
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Aug 19, 2016 22:56
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http://m.imdb.com/title/tt4084744/ Anyone seen this movie? Any idea about it's accuracy?
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Aug 19, 2016 23:41
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Mines from 1918-1945. Cleanup  Cleanup is probably the most infamous thing about landmines, and the cleanup from WW1 naval mines was the single largest minesweeping effort ever carried out, the Northern barrage in particular was a huge quantity of mines, but there was also the vast amount of mines in Heligoland Bight and off the coast of the UK. There were 240’000 mines at least and 40’000 square miles of sea in which they could lie at the end of WW1 and to sweep these the International Mine Clearance Committee was formed comprised of 26 countries, the belligerents in WW1 on both sides, each country was assigned an area of sea to clear, the largest allotment going to RN who were responsible for the UK coast and the channel outside the French allotted zone along with the Mediterranean, the second largest to the USN who were given the Northern Barrage, third largest to the Kriegsmarine who were responsible for Heligoland Bight and the fourth to the French who were responsible for the Belgian and French coast. Minesweeping is an activity fraught with difficulty, as minefields decay they may drag their moorings and go outside their assigned fields or you have dangers of hang firing mines which can explode unpredictably and of countermining, while mines can sink or become inactive, during WW1 the belligerents had gotten very good at making ones that could survive long term so there was no such luck as was enjoyed by Farragut when he came to sweep the field at Mobile Bay. To illustrate one of the largest dangers, that of countermining, I’m going to recount a story from the sweeping of a dense anti-submarine minefield off the Isle of Skye, usually anti-submarine minefields were left till last because they were laid deep and ships would pass over them, but this had been laid poorly so mines were at the wrong height and breaking their moorings, the flotilla of sweepers ran a shallow drag to clear the incorrectly laid mines then to start to deal with the deep mines, however a mine caught the sweep wire and detonated, this started a chain reaction of countermining explosions that caused the entire field to detonate over the course of 4 minutes of constant rippling explosions, luckily for the flotilla no mines were directly underneath them when they blew and so nobody was killed though all ships were severely damaged, but certainly I would not have liked to have been on one of those ships while those detonations were going on. The RN was also responsible for sweeping the Dardanelles, this was very difficult because there were no charts on the mines laid by either the Ottomans or the RN, though it is interesting to note that the Goeben and the Breslau, the German Battlecruiser and Light Cruiser (Renamed the Yavuz and the Midilli) who had played so much a part in Turkish entry into the war both struck British mines in the closing weeks of WW1, sinking the Breslau and crippling the Goeben. The problems with sweeping in the Dardanelles I touched on already, high current speed making the slow minesweepers even slower and badly affecting manoeuvrability. But here we see the RAF engaging in support for minesweeping, the waters were relatively clear so they would fly planes and airships and drop buoys over detected mines to warn the sweepers on the sea. Eventually 3’000 mines were removed from the Dardanelles with the loss of fifty lives and three sweepers, the biggest hazard they faced was dragging a mooring then the mine breaking loose from the sweep, it would then drift down with the current and hit either mines in a previous row or a sweeper coming up. The second and slightly surprising realisation was that the Germans had mined the Belgian rivers and canals, the way this was dealt with was a pair of canal towing horses were brought in who dragged a sweep between then, these mines had to be exploded safely as there was no way to safely let them sink to the bottom so once the horses were clear they were detonated with an explosive charge. The USN had the incredibly difficult task of clearing the Northern Barrage, this was the single most sophisticated minefield laid, with varying depths and terrible conditions, the Antenna mines used to catch submarines were detonated by contact with a hull, so the USN borrowed wooden fishing smacks from the locals of Scotland for their initial survey of the minefields, they nearly came to grief when their trawl wire which was metal started setting off the mines and were just about able to limp back into harbour without sinking, I find it astonishing that they recognised the danger of metal hulls, took steps to counter it but didn’t consider their metal sweep wire. However into 1919 they were properly supplied with wooden kites and non-conductive cables and so sweeping was able to continue in earnest. Eventually they swept 21’000 mines with the rest having sunk with the cost of nine lives and twenty three ships.  Traditional fishing Smack. It was at this time that the USN put into place a policy that would last until 1945, that the US would never lay a mine that it itself was not capable of sweeping, in the last days of WW2 they would break that rule and bring Japan to its knees completely in a very dramatic fashion. Interesting facts. For want of a better place to put it I’m going to include a few interesting facts here that got left out from earlier sections or didn’t fit elsewhere. At the start of the war, the RN had the capability to lay around 700 mines in a reasonable stretch of time, at the end of the war it had the capability to lay 60’000 mines. The minesweeping paravane being fitted to military ships is believed to have saved sixty eight warships including 7 battleships and 2 battlecruisers, in civilian service it is thought to have saved around 240’000 tons of merchant shipping. The total investment to the USN in mine warfare (mainly comprised in the Northern Barrage) was around $79 million and included the purchase of 110’000 mines, the value of shipping lost to enemy submarine activity which the barrage was designed to prevent was around $70 million a month. At the height of minelaying activity in the Northern Barrage the rate exceeded 1000 mines a day, a dedicated factory was built in St. Julian’s Creek VA in just under 4 months and it delivered mines at a rate of 6000 a week to Scotland. The only British dreadnought lost in the war was lost to a mine strike off the coast of Ireland in October 1914, it was the HMS Audacious a KGV class super-dreadnought which had been launched in 1912, at the time of its sinking the RN only had two more modern battleships than the HSF making any engagement that happened at that time more uncertain than at any other point in the war.  Sinking Audacious as photographed from passing US liner Olympic. Inter War developments. Mine warfare was hit like all other areas of military spending hard by cuts after the end of WW1, but as WW2 approached navies in general recognised the importance of mines and stepped up research as the start of war approached, mines became far more technically advanced, while the hertz horn remained the most popular detonation type many efforts were made to create mines that were “safer”, these included devices like electrolytic switches which rendered it much easier to set a mine to sink after a given length of time, there were also devices like vibrators developed which allowed acoustic mines, but acoustic mines remained an imperfect product until late in WW2, and the belligerent that employed them the most was the US. Royal Navy in the inter-war: Herbert Taylor and his inventions.  I am not overstating the achievements of Herbert Taylor when I say he was one of the single most important innovators for the RN that ever lived, he was a civilian inventor that was taken on board by the Admiral and worked for them from 1915 through to 1945, he somewhat presciently invented the hydrostatic pistol in 1914, before the point that the U-Boat was considered a truly major threat by mainstream thought. The hydrostatic pistol is the key component in the depth charge that allows it to trigger a detonator at a certain depth, he alongside Alban Gwynne created the key technology involved. However depth charges aside, Taylor also had a huge influence on mine warfare he lead the RN mine research team at HMS Vernon after the first world war and worked extensively in it during that tine, he created the first counter-paravane mine design, where a secondary electrical detonator was included, when the paravane hit the mooring line it triggered the mine which then exploded and destroyed the paravane, this was a precursor to his most important work that I mentioned in the title, the coiled rod or CR unit, though he did also develop several other improvements that I will also cover. The coil rod was a magnetic field detection device, when a ship passed overhead it induced a current in this rod which triggered the detonation, and it was the device which made the magnetic ground mine plausible, the magnetic ground mine was the most dangerous mine of the Second World War and was the first incarnation of the contactless ground mine, a type which due to its lack of mooring cable became significantly more difficult to sweep, most sweep methods so far have relied on entangling the mooring cable and as it sits on the sea bed it is both much harder to find and harder to sweep when you find it.  The basic operation of a magnetic mine is that a ship made of metal has an inherent static magnetic field that it projects, as a magnetic field moves through a coil it induces a current, this motion is caused by the ship sailing over the top of the mine which detonates the mine, delay circuits had also been perfected which allowed the mine to wait until the ship was directly on top of it before detonating, creating a much more dangerous mine. It is especially worth noting that this type of mine was very effective against U-Boats, rather than the antenna arrangement of the Northern Barrage this covered a much wider area and was a far more deadly ASW weapon. While the principle of induction had been well understood for a very long time and was experimented with before it was not before improvement in battery technology allowed a constant electrical circuit to be run reliably, the Hertz horn had the advantage that it did not draw power until the point of detonation, which is part of its high reliability, but now more sophisticated mines could be created. I have touched on countermining before, one important development was the creation of an anti-countermining device, the device in question was an armature which linked the detonation circuit and the explosive charge, this was held in place by a permanent magnet, a shock to the unit would detach the armature from the magnet and break the circuit, rendering the mine inert. This meant that there would be no chain reactions through the field, if a mine detonated it may render its neighbours inert but it would not obliterate the entire field. It also rendered sweeping of mines far less reliable, especially given the difficulty of sweeping ground mines rendering them immune to countermining created far more uncertainty, no captain was going to risk sailing his ship through a minefield that only might be fully swept, mines are an exceptional effective terror weapon and a lot of their value is in the inhibition of enemy shipping as well as straight sinking. One very simple but important creation was Taylors creation of the MK 14 surface laid mine, this mine was able to be laid at a depth of up to 1000 fathoms, (around 1800 meters), for context in WW1 the maximum depth layable was typically around 45 fathoms or 80 meters, this enabled mining to take place at almost any point in the ocean.   He and his team at HMS Vernon also made improvements in mine safety, before this point a soluble plug was employed that flooded after a certain time, but that had proven to be unreliable, a reliable clock and fuse was created that after a certain time set off a small explosive charge that flooded the case. There were many other developments made by Taylor and his team that I will omit for the sake of length, they are largely developments of existing ideas such as sinkers and counter sweep designs, but as a result of his developments, the RN went into WW2 far better prepared than they did in WW1, they had one of the best magnetic mines in the world, a highly developed submarine and surface minelaying that enabled British minelaying in WW2 to sink 1 enemy ship for every 47 mines laid, as opposed to WW1 where that number was around 1 ship for every 880 mines laid.  Taylors timer and fuse for flooding a mine. US Development. U.S mine development didn’t really start in earnest until general rearmament started in 1940-41, however they made excellent progress in a very short stretch of time and as I will outline later conducted probably the single most devastating mining campaign against Japan. The USN started with a copy of the German Magnetic Aerial mine, and they were active in development of acoustic, pressure and magnetic mines that could be deployed by submarine or air. In WW2 we see the demise of surface based offensive minelaying in the USN, and the Pacific is a great case as to why, ships were too vulnerable, too slow and had to traverse great distances to get into position, with reliable development by all combatants of air dropped mines and the vast air fleets at the disposal of the Allied powers there was no real compelling reason to employ the fast raiders we saw in WW1 for offensive purposes. German development. The Germans learned the lessons of WW1 as well as the British did, they established a separate mine warfare command in 1920 who was tasked with developing technology and strategy for the employment of mines in any future war, and this establishment prepared them equally well for mine warfare in WW2 as did HMS Vernon for the RN. The Germans developed independently magnetic mines, and most importantly for them they developed a successful air deliverable magnetic mine, standard moored mines were less desirable for delivery by air, they were large, bulky, had poor aerodynamics and the sudden impact of the water would knock one of the many mechanical components necessary for them to work askew it was possible and indeed done but far less widely so than magnetic, acoustic or pressure mines. It is also the case that magnetic mines were necessary as the impact would likely shatter a Hertz horn and cause the mine to detonate, the Germans placed a great importance on this type of mine going into the Second World War, they assumed that Britain would be defenceless against it and that an intensive campaign of mining would reap much more dramatic results than in even WW1, they were partially right but the assumption that the British would not develop a countermeasure in time was short-sighted to say the least and they would be proven very badly wrong. Mine warfare in the European Theatre. German mining in 1939-1940. During the course of WW2, the Germans would sink around 1.4 million tons of civilian shipping with mines, the vast majority of this was sunk in the period of 1939-1940, due in part to their strategy but also due to the fact that they just did not have the resources to lay the big fields of WW1 only 10 warships were sunk by German mines, all of which were destroyers. (The largest warship on the allied side sunk by a mine was the HMS Neptune, which struck an Italian mine in the Med). The problem that the Germans would encounter is that their minelaying strategy was very inflexible, they relied almost exclusively on the air dropped magnetic mine, their surface raiders carried mines but as in WW1 they were very quickly swept from the seas by the RN without having done any appreciable damage. The fast surface ships of the KM did achieve some success dashing in and out of British coastal waters, but the advent of radar and the complete inferiority of the KM surface forces meant that it was risky business, the fields they laid were typically found very quickly and swept and they never really received the priority in material, money or men to make a meaningful impact. They seemed to disregard the effectiveness of minelaying U-Boats, they only developed one type, the XB, and only completed 8 of them, 6 of which were sunk, they performed quite poorly and the strategy of minelaying didn’t enjoy Donitz favour, he was a devotee of the torpedo through and through. This essentially left only one option, which was the magnetic ground mine delivered by the Luftwaffe, this enjoyed fantastic success for a short period of time, they dropped them aggressively in harbour mouths and in the early years of the war inflicted significant losses, this tailed off sharply after 1940 with the establishment of air superiority over the British Isles, however most important was the fact that the British had done what the Germans thought they would never do, they learned how to sweep the magnetic mine. Sweeping and evasion of the Magnetic Mine. HMS Vernon as mentioned had been working hard on magnetic mines before WW2, they were familiar with their operation and given the fortuitous capture of an intact German mine that was misdropped onto a mud-flat in 1939 meant that the RN knew what the Germans were up too and already had an idea as to how to counter it. This was the start of degaussing as a defensive measure, the basic principle of which is that by running an electromagnetic field over the metal hull of a boat you induce a new magnetic alignment in the constituent atoms of the hull with the ultimate aim of creating a neutral magnetic field, (crudely speaking, if half the fields are aligned pointing up and half pointing down then the ship has a neutral magnetic field, while the orientation can in reality be anything in a 360 degree sphere the principle is the same). This was usually achieved by dragging a large cable carrying around 2KA of current across the hull, this would induce a neutral field for a period of a few months, during which the ship was functionally immune to magnetic mines. The USN would deploy several ships equipped with this equipment while the RN did it in shipyard, but with this practice in place losses to german mines dropped incredibly quickly, and the swift implementation of this is probably a large part of the reason we saw almost zero military ship losses in WW2. It is also interesting to note that degaussing continued for years after WW2 because of the residual danger of sea mines.  The degaussing band is clearly visible along the side of the HMS Queen Mary. However they didn’t just ignore them, the RN developed a magnetic sweep system, they would have a tugboat pull a long buoyant stretch of wire with a current running through it which induced a large magnetic field which would trip the detonators, it was functionally very similar to the standard sweeping of mines with mooring cables but the sweep line floated on the surface rather than under it. The Germans took this approach as well, using large coils mounted on flying boats, by inducing a large magnetic field they hoped to trip the detonators, in general they were quite successful and one of the few times in history that naval mines have been swept from the air.  The Japanese and Germans would never develop a fully satisfactory minesweeping technology for the mixture of magnetic acoustic and pressure mines, they typically took at least 2 months to find a method of sweeping a modified or new mine type which badly hurt them. It is interesting to note that the USN delayed deploying its more advanced magnetic mines because it was US policy not to drop a mine they could not sweep, the USN developed a very good series of mines that moved beyond the simple up/down axis that the early German mines used, but measured lateral magnetic shift as well, making degaussing less effective as a counter. German mining of Cape Juminda and the evacuation of Tallinn.  Mine area off the Cape circled. In 1941 with the Germans storming through the Baltic Republics the Red Army found itself outflanked in the port of Tallinn and was forced to evacuate by sea, the Russians knew the Germans had been mining their escape route and Russian fleet minesweepers did their best to try and clear an evacuation route, but bad weather and constant attacks from Ju88 bombers, the Finnish 2nd MTB flotilla, the German 3rd E-Boat flotilla and 6 inch coastal artillery set up on the cape of Juminda meant that they were unable to clear the area, so the Russians had to send their evacuation ships straight through the centre of a minefield, casualty reports from the eastern front being what they are it is unlikely that we know the true extent of the human cost. However from the fleet that left Talinn 25 out of 29 transports were sunk by mines or shelling, the Soviet Baltic fleet lost five destroyers, two submarines and four smaller boats, estimates of the dead range between 4’000 and 13’000, sources are not consistent over whether they include evacuation from the beaches of Tallinn and it’s unlikely that losses will be ever definitely established, but they were certainly very heavy indeed, the event itself was suppressed by the Russians for decades after the fact. This is the most famous of the German mining efforts but they did extensively employ mines in the black sea and deeper towards Leningrad, but largely speaking they did not employ mines to attempt to intercept arctic convoys, I believe this is because they did not have enough deep water mines to cover that area of the ocean, the British had significant stocks of their 1000 fathom mines but the Germans did not, which was a misstep on their part, those convoys were ideal targets for mining, relatively predictable routes, far from friendly support meaning that sweeping would be hazardous under the auspices of the Luftwaffe could have done significant damage to the Arctic convoys. In the European theatre the Germans suffered from a lack of flexibility and didn’t focus on mine warfare the same way they had in WW1, which I think cost them significantly in the Battle of the Atlantic. Damage inflicted. During the war, British mining took an incredibly heavy toll on German shipping, 17’500 mines were laid by surface ships, which destroyed 124 German ships, damaged 50 which were returned to service. 3’000 mines were laid by submarine destroying 59 vessels and damaging 8, but most critically 55’000 mines were laid by air, destroying 864 vessels, and damaging 483. German mining would sink around 500 British merchant ships during the course of WW2, sadly I cannot find a more detailed source than that, sadly the numbers for U-Boats lost to mines are also unreliable, largely because it is very difficult to determine exactly how a U-Boat sank, estimates vary from mid-thirties up to nearly a hundred. The Pacific War. The mine warfare campaign against Japan is very interesting, in that it showed in the short few months it was intensely prosecuted that it was likely the most potent weapon that the US could have employed, but it was not employed due to various logistical and political concerns until after the war was a certainty. Early efforts. The first minefields were laid in the Hainan straight and around the approaches to Bangkok, 420 mines were laid in 21 fields, over the course of the war these fields would sink 27 ships and damage 27 more, one strike for every eight mines laid, the Japanese made no proper effort to sweep these field, submarines operating from Australia would continue to lay minefields throughout the Pacific, and when long range American submarines started to operate from other bases they would usually bring a small number of mines with them to lay at the end of their patrol. Aerial mining of japan and Operation Starvation. By 1944 the American war machine had spun up to such an extent that thousands of mines were available to be airdropped, Nimitz and Arnold planned a large series of extensive mining raids to choke off Japanese trade. This was the first large scale deployment of the 3 newest types of mines in the US arsenal, Magnetic, Acoustic and Pressure mines. This was pushed through in a large part because it was still the time that the USAAF was jockeying for status, much like the bombing raids and the B-29 they needed to show they were making a credible contribution to the defeat of Japan, the USAAF were committed to strategic bombardment and it took a significant amount of arm-twisting from the USN to convince them to divert resources for the blockade via mining route, but it delayed the campaign from when the navy wanted it to start in late 1944 to early 1945. Mining began on March 27th 1945, four days before the assault on Okinawa, the USAAF dropped 5500 magnetic, 3500 acoustic and 3000 pressure mines in the shipping lanes in Japan, taking 1500 sorties involving around 100 planes, around 6% of total. This campaign had an incredible effect on Japanese shipping as shown below, the width of the arrows represents relative throughput.  As shown, the eastern coast ports were pretty much entirely shut down and every single port on the western coast was subject to massive reductions in traffic, it is especially worth noting that the traffic into the Inland sea and as a result the Kobe docks was cut to almost nil, the Inland sea was a major artery of Japanese logistics, but because of its narrow approaches an ideal target for mine blockade.  Japan in early 1945 was bringing in 90% of her iron ore, 25% of her coal, 80% of her oil and 20% of her food from abroad, 75% of all freight traffic was seaborn due to the underdeveloped nature of the Japanese rail system, in 1945 the Japanese had around 1.8 million tons of shipping left, the mining campaign destroyed or seriously damaged 431 ships totalling around 1 million tons, The effect on War industry was even more dramatic than that, in the tables below you can see that far more shipping as a proportion had to be allocated to moving food as compared to the necessary materials to make weapons after the start of the mine campaign, this was to stop people starving, the average Japanese intake was around 1600 calories per day at this stage, had the mining campaign continued it was very likely that food would not have been able to be moved inside Japan and a mass famine would have been certain to occur while food rotted in the fields of Japan, unable to be collected or shifted to people who needed to be fed because there was simply no means of doing so left.  The mining campaign against Japan was the most cost effective campaign of the war for the USA. Had it been planned and executed earlier in accordance with the USN plans it is extremely likely that Japanese defence on Okinawa would have been badly impaired with the Japanese completely unable to reinforce their garrison there with food, bullets and reinforcements. Next Time – Korea, Vietnam, Persian gulf and Gadaffi. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 00:00
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Yvonmukluk posted:What is it with Roosevelts and the navy, anyway? Good reason to not trust it very much http://taskandpurpose.com/wwii-naval-ship-unlucky-almost-killed-fdr/. I think that's my favorite ship story ever, the USS William D. Porter is my kinda ship. Awful.
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Aug 20, 2016 00:02
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HEY GAL posted:ok, this entire time i thought they used black powder as well. and the wikipedia entry says there were portions of black powder on some of the charges, but not what they were for. what were they for? Probably the igniter charge. A percussion cap/primer is enough to light off a musket or rifle, but the six bags of boom behind a 16" shell need a bit more than that to light 'em off. I don't know about naval guns specifically, but one of the late-war/Cold War vehicles Nick Moran did a video on (with separate ammunition, so most likely a self-propelled howitzer rather than a tank) used "primers" that were basically a .30-06 blank cartridge; IIRC naval guns used something similar, but on a larger scale (maybe a percussion cap the size of your fist and a pound or two of black powder at the bottom of each 120-pound bag of smokeless powder?) PittTheElder posted:How destructive is the firing of a 15 inch battleship gun anyway? Like is it dangerous to any crew who might be topside during a firing? Undoubtedly it would be deafeningly loud I guess.  50m radius around the breech outside the armour might kill you just from overpressure, earpro is mandatory within half a klick, and God help you if you're within 90 degrees and 200m of the muzzle. Obviously the AA crewmen in the open gun tubs survived the main battery firing, but it couldn't have been pleasant. Though otoh, firing the big guns and fighting off aircraft were, at least in theory, one or the other, so maybe they fully buttoned up when firing the big guns. Here's Wisconsin's last salvos, you can see people moving around on the bridge wings and the camera crew way up on the bow, that's probably a good idea of minimum safe distance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ATYPrZnSQ
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Aug 20, 2016 00:11
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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SimonCat posted:This is why a .50 cal round shouldn't be used as a hammer Yes, the dude banged on the primer. Don't do that. edit: if I had to hazard a guess why it did that when most times an out of chamber round isn't nearly so dramatic: 1) a lot of .50 BMG has a really heavy crimp. 2) fist enclosing the round 3) shaking up ammo too much can degrade the powder and cause it to burn faster. If this was a round he was hammering with like that frequently it couldn't have been unsafe even in a weapon. Don't shake your rounds all the time kids. edit: THAT said, .50BMG is a loving beast of a round as far as the powder charge. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 00:20
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Delivery McGee posted:
The Japanese tried to use the main guns for AA, it didn't work very well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Shiki_(anti-aircraft_shell) P-Mack fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 00:30
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For quite a while, navies avoided superfiring turrets because they were worried about blast damage (especially to sighting hoods for local control).
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Aug 20, 2016 00:30
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SeanBeansShako posted:It does look very Austrian, just needs to have some sort of crested peak thing going for it. What he needs is two of them helmet plumes stuck on his back. Eat poo poo Poland. Our guys are 50% cooler.
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Aug 20, 2016 00:31
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OwlFancier posted:What he needs is two of them helmet plumes stuck on his back. Eat poo poo Poland. Our guys are 50% cooler. Don't fight your nations both do pretty cool uniforms
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Aug 20, 2016 00:47
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:For quite a while, navies avoided superfiring turrets because they were worried about blast damage (especially to sighting hoods for local control). Not the US, because they already knew it'd work because of the worst drat idea ever, the double decker turret.
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Aug 20, 2016 00:49
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xthetenth posted:Not the US, because they already knew it'd work because of the worst drat idea ever, the double decker turret. The double decker was amazing, it was like what a child would draw, or what xzibit would make.
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Aug 20, 2016 01:24
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Today's The Chieftan video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCJqdZL2b0 "I had this terrible habit of investigating bombs with my soldiers. I guess it kept me company, but in hindsight probably not the most sensible thing ever." And yeah, that "sounds vaguely American but every fifth word is pronounced really weird" is the standard Northern Irish accent, I think the first time I noticed it was the girl that played Octavia in the HBO "Rome" series. Wargaming's EU channel has an Englishman (former British Army tankie, so he also knows his poo poo) by the name of Richard "Challenger" Cutland doing the same sort of thing, but Cutland's not as interesting as Moran. Compare them covering the same incredibly lovely vehicle: "Challenger": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZFPB0spgOw "Chieftain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxF6penza6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4JVBp2JOgE Cutland's just reading a script, Moran is fuckin' miserable and commenting on the ergonomics the entire time he's inside it, and not just because he's 6 feet and change tall in a vehicle designed for underfed Nazi coscripts. Though "I'm sitting in the loader's seat with my feet on the gunner's footrests" is pretty hilarious. Re: Nick wearing the Stetson: it keeps the sun off and he earned it, I don't have a problem with it. If he was really an rear end in a top hat former cavalryman he'd be wearing his spurs on his tennis shoes.
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Aug 20, 2016 01:52
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The double decker was amazing, it was like what a child would draw, or what xzibit would make. I love the justification for it. The 8 inch turret would gain considerably in protection because it'd share the 12 inch turret's barbette! A ship is a pretty small target, so it doesn't really matter that they're stuck firing at the same target, and in close the turret can turn for the 8 inch salvoes between 12 inch shots. Heck, we can even turn the turret 180 between 12 inch shots! ("a heavy fire could be maintained against a weak enemy to port while the [heavy] guns were being prepared for delivering their blows against a stronger enemy to starboard") It'll reduce blast interference within the heavy gun battery (apparently a major problem abroad)! Actually that interference is worth noting. "For example, in the French Brennus 'a system of bugle calls has been adopted by which one or more guns' crews must desert their guns and seek cover from the blast of some heavy gun that is about to be fired'".
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Aug 20, 2016 02:59
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:No. They were the major fighting force in 15th century Italy, yes, but they had no major effect beyond that region. In the 16th century meanwhile, they were certainly effective in their own right and often valuable, but they did not make up the core of the armies that the French, Germans, and Spanish brought to the Italian Wars. I apologise for my broad generalisation. I was blinded by the magnificence that is Italian fashion of the period.  The Condotierri ruled.... my heart.
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Aug 20, 2016 02:59
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I actually struggle to think of a time where it was more fancy to be a soldier than in late-15th/early-16th century italy. 
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Aug 20, 2016 03:01
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Endman posted:I apologise for my broad generalisation. I was blinded by the magnificence that is Italian fashion of the period. That's Swiss/German fashion, which the Italians probably purloined eventually.
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Aug 20, 2016 03:20
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:That's Swiss/German fashion, which the Italians probably purloined eventually. You've shattered my entire worldview.
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Aug 20, 2016 03:25
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Naval gun blast/over pressure chat: Have I got a link for you. http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA210220 A 1989 paper on the physics of blast waves from a 16" gun. Still hunting for a video of a 16" HE shell detonation, though, if anyone knows of one.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:27
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Endman posted:You've shattered my entire worldview. I'm sorry. Here's a reislaufer to make up for it
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Aug 20, 2016 04:32
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Man it's been awesome reading this thread and the previous one! Really appreciate people have put into some absolutely fantastic posts here! Thanks for the links to Inside the Chieftain's Hatch as well, since those videos have been very interesting. I was reading the articles Nicholas Moran has written , and in the forum link for one of the articles about his experience with troops from other countries a surprisingly polite discussion came up about the American/Canadian/British different perspectives on the War of 1812. I've been interested in that kind of comparative history, and after seeing a much less polite argument on a different site with a Russian poster telling folks how WWII actually went I tried to find resources that compared different views of war or other international events, but surprisingly most everything I could find was about Japanese war crime denials and textbook controversies. Does anyone know of any good resources for comparing how wars are viewed/taught by different countries? I've been reading Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History which does some of that for wars the US was involved in, but it would be great to have more than just that.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:33
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