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spectralent posted:Also tanks all have HP in those kinds of games so getting penetrated by a 152mm bunker-buster shell just mildly annoys your crew. Ricochet!  Bounced off!  Well, pack it up lads, our guns just aren't doing any damage 
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Sep 23, 2016 05:14
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A while back y'all were discussing tank crew assignments. Way too late to that party but figured this might be mildly interesting anyway:  Test scores required at muster for being considered as a conscripted strv 103/S-tank crew member. Points are on a Stanine scale, so 5 is the mean score and each step on the scale is 0.5 standard deviations. The "psychical" test is intended to estimate the ability to act under stress. People taller than 175 cm (5' 9") need not apply.
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Sep 23, 2016 07:27
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I could probably drive an S-tank! It's great, because I'm a lovely driver, while tanks are somewhat more forgiving when obstacles like people, small trees and curbs arise.
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Sep 23, 2016 07:53
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Surprised the auditory requirement is so lax as I'd imagine being able to hear orders in a loud metal box would be important.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:29
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From Wikipedia on the Treaty of Versailles:quote:The British military historian Correlli Barnett claimed that the Treaty of Versailles was "extremely lenient in comparison with the peace terms that Germany herself, when she was expecting to win the war, had had in mind to impose on the Allies". What were these?
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Sep 23, 2016 08:32
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Pontius Pilate posted:Surprised the auditory requirement is so lax as I'd imagine being able to hear orders in a loud metal box would be important. IIRC S-tanks have headsets.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:52
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Tias posted:IIRC S-tanks have headsets. Complete helmet with integrated headphones and throat microphone, yes. You normally talk over the intercom. This is the same for most tanks since WW2, by the way. They just get too loud for unaided communication.
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Sep 23, 2016 09:10
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Baron Porkface posted:From Wikipedia on the Treaty of Versailles: Just look at Brest-Litovsk.
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Sep 23, 2016 09:28
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Brest-Litovsk is a bit too simple a comparison. There's a melange of German war aims, peace proposals, individual politicians, reactions to circumstances in the war, etc etc that make it difficult to substantiate the "Germany would have been worse!" argument. The situation with France or Britain capitulating would have been rather different to that of the Soviets, where Germany was well aware they were not only broken but very possibly just a temporary government. It wasn't a long term peace with a neighbour but a smash and grab because who knows who will be in charge in Moscow in six months time. I'm at work but I'd love to go into this a bit more later.
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Sep 23, 2016 09:58
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lenoon posted:Brest-Litovsk is a bit too simple a comparison. There's a melange of German war aims, peace proposals, individual politicians, reactions to circumstances in the war, etc etc that make it difficult to substantiate the "Germany would have been worse!" argument. The situation with France or Britain capitulating would have been rather different to that of the Soviets, where Germany was well aware they were not only broken but very possibly just a temporary government. It wasn't a long term peace with a neighbour but a smash and grab because who knows who will be in charge in Moscow in six months time. I'm at work but I'd love to go into this a bit more later. Well, also, just look at 1870. France paid an absolute poo poo-ton of money to Germany and of course lost Alsace-Lorraine. It would depend exactly how badly the Entente was defeated but it wouldn't have been pretty.
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Sep 23, 2016 10:04
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Fangz posted:In real life it's not generally considered okay to throw away thousands of lives in an operation that has no real hope of success, and which might not be needed anyway. The logic of 'hey you have those ships just sitting around, might as well throw them into the fire' doesn't really work. Operation Ten-Go 
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Sep 23, 2016 10:07
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that's a weird way to spell Elsaß and the Province of Lotharingia
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Sep 23, 2016 10:07
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EvanSchenck posted:This will be expensive, as you say, but the fact that Britain generally is a very wealthy country does not mean that all Britons are wealthy. In fact, much of the population is poor enough, and spends a large enough proportion of their income on subsistence, that an abrupt major increase in food prices represents a serious problem for social stability. This would most likely require massive government intervention in the form of price controls, subsidies, and rationing. Over a longer time frame Britain may begin to run into calorie shortages, and shortcuts like demanding excessive exports from India become an issue for overall imperial stability. I think we're loudly agreeing here to some extent? Yes, I agree the government would have to subsidise things, and this would be expensive, and India probably gets to have another famine. Bear in mind, though, over your longer time frame the government isn't going to just sit still and accept the status quo; if there literally isn't enough grain available on the markets world wide (which, frankly, I just don't buy, but even so) it's not going to just sit there, it's going to work to increase grain production in the areas under its control (India primarily, probably, depending on the time period, but it's not like the British Empire is exactly small you know), and that is going to work. I mean, in the modern world the UK has 70 million people and India feeds a billion, do you really think a UK-controlled India can't keep 1/15th of India's population fed if the government puts its mind to it? For a real world example of how this goes down, look at how well King Cotton and the US blockade worked out for the Confederacy in harming British industry. Global trade adapts.
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Sep 23, 2016 10:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:Ricochet! This is one of the things that annoys the hell out of me about Flames of War. IS-2s and ISU-152s can't frontally penetrate King Tigers/Ferdinands, riiiiiight.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:13
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lenoon posted:Brest-Litovsk is a bit too simple a comparison. There's a melange of German war aims, peace proposals, individual politicians, reactions to circumstances in the war, etc etc that make it difficult to substantiate the "Germany would have been worse!" argument. The situation with France or Britain capitulating would have been rather different to that of the Soviets, where Germany was well aware they were not only broken but very possibly just a temporary government. It wasn't a long term peace with a neighbour but a smash and grab because who knows who will be in charge in Moscow in six months time. I'm at work but I'd love to go into this a bit more later. I think the "Germany would have been worse!" argument is total bullshit cooked up to justify being terrible. These are the same people that kept up the blockade of Germany until the treaty was signed, which was extremely cruel.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:13
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HEY GAL posted:that's a weird way to spell Elsaß and the Province of Lotharingia what is this Alemanni nonsense I love it how split we Europeans are on how to call Germany, and a few other countries... but Germany probably takes the cake 
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Sep 23, 2016 11:29
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Go Lithuania! I have no f-in clue why we call Germany like we do.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:45
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Jack2142 posted:I mean I know it's a bad idea, however the throwing away lives in operations with slim chances of success seems pretty par for the course in WWI. I am not trying to say this would have been a good idea, it just seems like with how heavily the Germans were gambling in 1918 I just was wondering if there was any consideration of rolling the dice at sea like they were elsewhere. The story of the German High Seas Fleet is a sad one. It started the war with everyone in high spirits and filled with can-do attitude, but thanks to the Kaiser not wanting to risk his ships the fleet had to operate under idiotic constraints. German admirals had to fight like mad to make battles like Jutland possible and every little scratch on their ships made the Kaiser flip out in anxiousness. So even though the High Seas Fleet made a good showing, thanks to being ordered back to port over and over again the morale of the fleet slowly eroded. After Jutland it got progressively worse. I would say the last chance to have a good old battle for the High Seas Fleet was in 1917, after that the corrosion was to deep: The Kaiser had made his fleet finally useless. The High Seas Fleet of 1918 was completely unable to conduct a major operation with any chance of success. By October 1918 things had gotten disfunctional to rather silly levels. The suicide order could only be made because the higher echelons of the fleet at that point were totally out of touch with what their crews were thinking. If they had known how rotten the fleet was, they would have scuttled the fleet immediately and send everyone home.
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Sep 23, 2016 11:51
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Jack2142 posted:I mean I know it's a bad idea, however the throwing away lives in operations with slim chances of success seems pretty par for the course in WWI. I am not trying to say this would have been a good idea, it just seems like with how heavily the Germans were gambling in 1918 I just was wondering if there was any consideration of rolling the dice at sea like they were elsewhere.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:08
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War between the US and the UK pre 1914 is pretty much an exercise in slamming your dick in a drawer in the hope that the other guy's dick gets slammed worse.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:17
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Say, I've read it a few times now that Chamberlain gets an unfairly bad reputation. The reasoning there being Britain was simply not capable of pursuing a successful war against Germany that at the time, so appeasement was the more realistic option left, giving Britain the time to arm up and strengthen their military. Now I'm wondering, to what degree did that actually work out in practice? What were the relative military capabilities between Britain and Germany like during, say, early 1938, as compared to the start of the war? Perestroika fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 12:19
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Perestroika posted:Say, I've read it a few times now that Chamberlain gets an unfairly bad reputation. The reasoning there being Britain was simply not capable of pursuing a successful war against Germany that at the time, so holding appeasement was the more realistic option left, giving Britain the time to arm up and strengthen their military. That's interesting, I've heard Chamberlain was against war because he didn't want to start something like WWI again, which would be the opposite of arguing "Britain was just not ready for war yet". Can someone say what Chamberlain was really thinking?
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Sep 23, 2016 12:21
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JcDent posted:Go Lithuania! I have no f-in clue why we call Germany like we do. It's of unclear origin: quote:In Latvian and Lithuanian the names Vācija and Vokietija contain the root vāca or vākiā. Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga associated this with a reference to a Swedish tribe named Vagoths in a 6th-century chronicle (cf. finn. Vuojola and eston. Oju-/Ojamaa, 'Gotland', both derived from the Baltic word; the ethnonym *vakja, used by the Votes (vadja) and the Sami, in older sources (vuowjos), may also be related). So the word for German possibly comes from a name originally given by West Baltic tribes to the Vikings.[19] Latvian linguist Konstantīns Karulis proposes that the word may be based on the Indo-European word *wek ("speak"), from which derive Old Prussian wackis ("war cry") or Latvian vēkšķis. Such names could have been used to describe neighbouring people whose language was incomprehensible to Baltic peoples.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:30
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feedmegin posted:if there literally isn't enough grain available on the markets world wide (which, frankly, I just don't buy, but even so) Why not? Do you have data? In 1913, estimated total worldwide wheat production is 4 billion bushels. That's all the wheat in the entire world, including wheat that will be consumed locally and never exported, because the people in the country where it was grown need to eat as well. Production in the USA and Canada is 1 billion bushels, and because of the technical advantage and fertility of those countries, they can export a disproportionately large amount of that. Russia also produces 1 billion bushels, but inefficient transportation infrastructure and a higher population (which is more reliant on wheat alone for subsistence) mean less is available abroad. Your position is that withdrawing countries that produce 25% of the world's wheat from the global market won't have a major effect on the availability of bread to British consumers. Imagine for a second what would happen if global oil production abruptly fell by 25%. quote:it's not going to just sit there, it's going to work to increase grain production in the areas under its control (India primarily, probably, depending on the time period, but it's not like the British Empire is exactly small you know), and that is going to work. I mean, in the modern world the UK has 70 million people and India feeds a billion, do you really think a UK-controlled India can't keep 1/15th of India's population fed if the government puts its mind to it? Have you considered perhaps that agriculture in 1860-1914 is not the same as agriculture in 2015, particularly in India? edit: To put a finer point on this, India's population grew rapidly during the early 20th century without corresponding expansion in transportation infrastructure or agricultural mechanization. By the mid-20th century production was below local needs and India was a major importer of food. Beginning in the 1970s, the Green Revolution began a period of rapid continuous growth in production, and India is currently a net exporter once again. In 1914 India is not yet in the position of having no available surplus for export, which won't happen for some years, but it probably has less excess capacity than, say, the entirety of North America. quote:For a real world example of how this goes down, look at how well King Cotton and the US blockade worked out for the Confederacy in harming British industry. Global trade adapts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Cotton_Famine Substitute "bread" for "cotton" in this scenario. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 12:31
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How different was the morale of German submariners in the final year, compared to the HSF? They were taking heavy losses and Allied convoys were harder to get at, but also got to see action even taking the fight to the American coast, and on top of that they were celebrated as heroes if they just managed to make it back to home port.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:34
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EvanSchenck posted:Your position is that withdrawing countries that produce 25% of the world's wheat from the global market won't have a major effect on the availability of bread to British consumers. Imagine for a second what would happen if global oil production abruptly fell by 25%. Um. If a US wheat embargo has that much of an effect on the entire industrialised world in anything but the shortest of terms (either directly or because Britain is spending a tonne of money to buy it all from other sources), then what happens instead is that the entirety of Europe forms an alliance and pushes America's poo poo in (while also improving its agricultural practices by state mandate so that can't happen again). Edit: also my position is not that it 'won't make a difference' - it will. The difference is that, outside of the short term, Britain and other countries would react by putting more areas under cultivation, improving agricultural techniques and transportation, and producing wheat in areas where in real life they produced other commodities. It's not like that 25% of wheat disappears and everyone goes on like nothing happened. Just as with the cotton famine you mentioned, there is short term pain and then the global economy adjusts (which sucked for all the new cotton producers when the Civil War ended, but hey ho). The end result of this is not 'everyone in Britain starves to death' over any timescale, or anything close to it. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 12:45
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quote:Your position is that withdrawing countries that produce 25% of the world's wheat from the global market won't have a major effect on the availability of bread to British consumers. Imagine for a second what would happen if global oil production abruptly fell by 25%. It would cause mass starvation, but quite probably not in a wealthy and powerful yet small population-wise country like Britain. British demand is only a small part of global demand, and US being cut off from the global market means that pain is shared out over the world. It's not really like the cotton famine because in that case Britain was one of the world's biggest users of cotton. Wheat is fairly easily replaceable in the diet, anyway. British food imports fell from 19 million tons in 1940 to 11 million tons in 1944 (and this was down from 55 million tons in peacetime!) without risking real starvation. A reduction in the global production of wheat would be much milder than that. Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 12:53
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cheerfullydrab posted:I think the "Germany would have been worse!" argument is total bullshit cooked up to justify being terrible. Check out the first few chapters of Richard J. Evans' The Coming Of The Third Reich and you'll find this really, really is not true at all.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:57
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I don't know much about wheat imports, but wouldn't blockading Britain from food imports over the Atlantic be of only limited effect unless we're talking about the US allying with France, Germany or Russia in this hypothetical war? Interdicting imports from Canada sounds all very well and good but when you could literally have people swimming across the channel with a bag full of baguettes it seems to be a marginal victory. Presumably during war plan (red?) British diplomacy has brought in at least one other major European power? The victory would come from making pursuing the war costly and pointless, not starving Britain out.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:59
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Fangz posted:It would cause mass starvation, but quite probably not in a wealthy and powerful yet small population-wise country like Britain. British demand is only a small part of global demand, and US being cut off from the global market means that pain is shared out over the world. It's not really like the cotton famine because in that case Britain was one of the world's biggest users of cotton. See my earlier posts about food production but Britain also had a lot of slack capacity that it was choosing not to employ because it wasnt economic to do so.
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Sep 23, 2016 12:59
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lenoon posted:I don't know much about wheat imports, but wouldn't blockading Britain from food imports over the Atlantic be of only limited effect unless we're talking about the US allying with France, Germany or Russia in this hypothetical war? Interdicting imports from Canada sounds all very well and good but when you could literally have people swimming across the channel with a bag full of baguettes it seems to be a marginal victory. Presumably during war plan (red?) British diplomacy has brought in at least one other major European power? The victory would come from making pursuing the war costly and pointless, not starving Britain out. The original Gay Black Hitler that started this discussion involved the U.S. joining the Central Powers during WW1. Polyakov posted:See my earlier posts about food production but Britain also had a lot of slack capacity that it was choosing not to employ because it wasnt economic to do so. They had a lot of slack industrial capacity, not slack agricultural capacity.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:00
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Oh, I was assuming a simple British Empire vs USA conflict. If it was just WWI except the US was on the other side the allies would be screwed.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:03
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Edit: I don't think there could be a late 19th century "just Britain" war on that scale. All that splendid isolation stuff is bollocks, we were in European and world politics up to our filthy colonialist elbows. Pretty cool image of late-Victorian colonial troops tulwar fighting Roosevelt on the White House lawn, though. ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Check out the first few chapters of Richard J. Evans' The Coming Of The Third Reich and you'll find this really, really is not true at all. But iirc (been a while since I read them) the beginning of the trilogy is a case of narrative history picking up very meagre threads of German history and strong arming them into a Prelude to Naziism which I recall finding a bit, well, trite. I could be remembering wrong, but evans's position on pre-1933 is pretty teleological. Idk, could you sum up the thrust of his argument? As I said it's probably been six years or so, whenever the third one came out, so I might be remembering wrong. lenoon fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 13:04
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An embargo wouldn't necessarily have to affect neutral nations even if that opens some doors to smuggling. Like consider the Netherlands during WW1 and how Germany used it as a backdoor to get some much needed supplies. If UK tried to stop neutral nation's merchant ships from entering and leaving US ports it would likely hurt UK more than letting them pass would; first because having a famine in Europe would not help in keeping UK supplied, quite the opposite, and because it could result in the formation of an anti-British coalition. Grain from Australia and India is not going to help Britain if the ships get raided in the Med.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:06
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Nenonen posted:An embargo wouldn't necessarily have to affect neutral nations even if that opens some doors to smuggling. Like consider the Netherlands during WW1 and how Germany used it as a backdoor to get some much needed supplies. If UK tried to stop neutral nation's merchant ships from entering and leaving US ports it would likely hurt UK more than letting them pass would; first because having a famine in Europe would not help in keeping UK supplied, quite the opposite, and because it could result in the formation of an anti-British coalition. Grain from Australia and India is not going to help Britain if the ships get raided in the Med. If the US exports grain to neutral countries, what's to stop those neutral countries selling the grain to the UK at a markup, either openly or secretly? The UK wants grain to get from the US to Europe, it's not going to try and stop it.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:10
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Check out the first few chapters of Richard J. Evans' The Coming Of The Third Reich and you'll find this really, really is not true at all. Yes, the German is naturally predisposed to cruelty and evil. It's almost as if they have a special way of going about things.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:19
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feedmegin posted:If the US exports grain to neutral countries, what's to stop those neutral countries selling the grain to the UK at a markup, either openly or secretly? The UK wants grain to get from the US to Europe, it's not going to try and stop it. It all depends on how the pros and cons compare. How bad would a total economic isolation and the resulting grain mountains be for US economy? Could they negoatiate clauses with neutral trade partners that they promise not to sell food to the Brits? No such trust-based embargo would be complete and smuggling always happens, but it might work to the States' benefit anyway.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:23
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lenoon posted:But iirc (been a while since I read them) the beginning of the trilogy is a case of narrative history picking up very meagre threads of German history and strong arming them into a Prelude to Naziism which I recall finding a bit, well, trite. I could be remembering wrong, but evans's position on pre-1933 is pretty teleological. Idk, could you sum up the thrust of his argument? As I said it's probably been six years or so, whenever the third one came out, so I might be remembering wrong. Teleological is one of those words that I find gets overused a lot by historians trying to prove that older works they disagree with Are Actually Bad. Then again maybe it's because it's so often used to discredit Arthur Marder by people who, during the course of my doctoral research, kept being proved broadly wrong and Marder broadly right. But that's not relevant in this case because Evans was discussing a very specific set of German proposals for Versailles-like demands from France and Belgium drawn up in the fall of 1914, when it looked like the war could very well turn into Franco-Prussian War 2. I don't have the reference in front of me because I don't know exactly where in my house my copy of Coming of the Third Reich is.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:31
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:
They also had a lot of slack agricultural capacity, the British agricultural sector was only marginally less efficient than the US one, at around 3% per empoloyee, reflecting an equally high level of automation, when they needed to secure their food output in WW1 due to a poor US harvest they increased production by 50-60% in grain and potato harvesting over the course of 1 year, if Britiain wanted to get very serious about agricultural production it had the spare farmland and the ability to mechanize it to produce efficiently very quickly.
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Sep 23, 2016 13:32
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Teleological is one of those words that I find gets overused a lot by historians trying to prove that older works they disagree with Are Actually Bad. Then again maybe it's because it's so often used to discredit Arthur Marder by people who, during the course of my doctoral research, kept being proved broadly wrong and Marder broadly right. Would you prefer "Telegugical", a made-up word I just invented for historical arguments made only in the Telegu language?
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Sep 23, 2016 13:55
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