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Ensign Expendable posted:Confirmed: Americans don't know anything about warfare, tanks, or life in general I did a double take when I found out that a non-zero number of American workers are injured every year due to microwaving water for tea and getting superheated steam in their face because America doesn't believe in kettles
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Sep 23, 2016 17:39
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HEY GAL posted:they are right next to/in front of us tho True, but damage results from a combination of how loud and how frequent the noise is. Your ears will recover more effectively from brief, widely spaced loud noises than if the noise happening a lot over a period of time. Your musketeers are by necessary always near their weapons when they are firing, but they move around so as a pikemen your proximity to the firing is more variable. If you're in the ranks of your square where the gunners are always nearby, you're doing about as bad as they are.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:41
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HEY GAL posted:they are right next to/in front of us tho You aren't literally holding the musket up to your face though, which is presumably worse. Also WWI siege artillerymen plugged their ears with cotton wool when firing, but that was more because if they didn't do that the pressure of the shell firing would have instantly burst their eardrums. In modern times the big issue is moving away from traditional hearing loss inducers like guns and artillery to people who work on planes. Turns out standard near running jets engines all day isn't good for your hearing, doubly so if you use Russian planes in which case hearing loss get extended to the aircrew as well (looking at you, TU-95).
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Sep 23, 2016 17:42
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bewbies posted:Gunners back in the day would just stuff paper in their ears, which I'd imagine worked pretty well all things considered. Amusing anachronism: in artillery training today (as back then) practically every order/command is yelled as loud as possible even though it isn't really necessary anymore. I feel like yelling in the gun drill is necessary because 1. You are wearing ear pro so you need to yell 2. You aren't so you need to yell 3. Just to be absolutely sure the whole crew hears the proper command and correct numbers.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:45
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MikeCrotch posted:I did a double take when I found out that a non-zero number of American workers are injured every year due to microwaving water for tea and getting superheated steam in their face because America doesn't believe in kettles That's because a normal office has a coffeemaker, not a kettle.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:49
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JcDent posted:Why not Tsushima? I think the preceding battle between Japanese torpedo boats disguised as English fishing trawlers and Russia's Second Pacific Squadron was even more lopsided... On the 'lopsided land battles' front, the battle of Narva in 1700 is one of those. Peter had like 30-40k men besieging a Swedish garrison of 2000, but then he had to attend other matters in Russia, certain that his generals couldn't gently caress this up. Charles was busy in Poland, after all. Except then Charles' relief force of 8000 veterans showed up and broke through green Russian lines. By the end of the day 9k Russians were killed and 20k taken captive after a bridge collapsed under the weigh of escaping Russians blocking the course for the rest of the force. Swedish losses? 667 dead, 1247 wounded. In fact there were so many prisoners that Charles had to let them go after disarming them. But hey, 20k free muskets! Nenonen fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 17:57
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The "battle" of the Medway was a pretty lopsided naval engagement too.
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Sep 23, 2016 18:54
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Fangz posted:I think it makes sense that any German settlement would be more harsh because of the way Versailles constituted a compromise between those that wanted Germany punished harshly (France, in particular) and those who wanted a fairly lenient deal (the US). A victorious Germany wouldn't have anyone like a Woodrow Wilson to tone things down. This is not true. It had the Reichstag, who did not want a punitive peace. Evans is clear on this.
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Sep 23, 2016 18:58
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HEY GAL posted:they are right next to/in front of us tho In ~my era~ with the Napoleonic British Army when the two lines were preparing to fire the guys in the rear line would more less be firing just above the shoulders of the guy in the front line. Double the fun when you think more about it you got the extra risk of getting a piece of broken flint in the eye or burning wadding! SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 19:02
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Pontius Pilate posted:The "battle" of the Medway was a pretty lopsided naval engagement too. Pretty hard to top Red Cliff or Lake Poyang for catastrophic fiery disasters. Dunno if freshwater counts though.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:07
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SeanBeansShako posted:Double the fun when you think more about it you got the extra risk of getting a piece of broken flint in the eye or burning wadding! and your guys don't have helmets, we're trained to bend our heads when they fire because the brims of our helmets will protect your eyes from bits of flying powder
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Sep 23, 2016 19:09
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HEY GAL posted:unburnt powder that is still on fire, bits of wadding They had peaks on their shako, but I imagine they are pretty lovely at doing anything but keeping the sun just out your eyes. Hopefully some old NCO gave some of the soldiers that era some advice about avoiding some of that crap. I just know some poor fucker out there broke his teeth/swallowed and choked to death on one of the balls.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:11
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you can't break your teeth on lead homes, it's so soft you can chew your musket ball smaller if you've got ammo that is too big for your gun for whatever reason
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Sep 23, 2016 19:13
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HEY GAL posted:you can't break your teeth on lead homes, it's so soft you can chew your musket ball smaller if you've got ammo that is too big for your gun for whatever reason Welp my secret is out, I have never fired a musket. Nor basic knowledge when it comes to lead. Neat. On the plus side, now I have metal image of French soldiers trying desperately to chew down British musket balls in a siege. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 19:14
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HEY GAL posted:you can't break your teeth on lead homes, it's so soft you can chew your musket ball smaller if you've got ammo that is too big for your gun for whatever reason This strikes me as an unhealthy choice.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:16
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
PittTheElder posted:This strikes me as an unhealthy choice. Well, the soldiers of her era do have a nasty tendency to not live that long due to their lifestyle.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:Modern-as-in-today people might have had poo poo, but before relatively recently no one gave a gently caress. drat near every WW2 vet I've known who saw combat had serious hearing issues. My marine grandfather fought in the PTO. Any time he doesn't want to be bothered or participate in a conversation, he just turns his hearing aids off.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:20
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PittTheElder posted:This strikes me as an unhealthy choice.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:22
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Disinterested posted:This is not true. It had the Reichstag, who did not want a punitive peace. Evans is clear on this. They might not have wanted one, but since we're talking Gay Black Hitler here they might very well have succumbed to victor's euphoria in the aftermath of a German win. Or possibly, since this is a hypothetical pulled directly from my rear end.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:17
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:They might not have wanted one, but since we're talking Gay Black Hitler here they might very well have succumbed to victor's euphoria in the aftermath of a German win. Or possibly, since this is a hypothetical pulled directly from my rear end. Up until the end of the war and the Kaiser's abdication, wasn't most of the decision-making in the German Empire controlled by the Kaiser/Chancellor (and later Ludendorff), so I guess assuming a victorious central powers, and no revolutions/abdications, how much influence would the Reichstag actually have in drafting a peace treaty comparative to the executive and the foreign ministry? edit: This is veering way off the hypothetical deep end, since I was under the impression that up until the 1918 revolutions that the Reichstag really didn't have much influence at all to do with actual policy, and have no idea if that would have carried over in a transition from wartime governance to a peacetime one.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:56
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SeanBeansShako posted:On the plus side, now I have metal image of French soldiers trying desperately to chew down British musket balls in a siege. It's cool, metallic lead has low bioavailability. They'll be fine.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:02
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Libluini posted: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.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:07
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A German victory in WWI would be exactly like the Kaiserreich mod. EXACTLY
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Sep 23, 2016 21:17
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if it brings back the HRE i am for it
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Sep 23, 2016 21:20
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:See also all that Marxist poo poo about historical inevitability. In philosophy teleology is a reason by itself to totally reject an argument
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Sep 23, 2016 21:20
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Blog post coming soonJack2142 posted: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. There was an attempt to do something in late April (just after the backs-to-the-wall panic about the Channel Ports), which ended in exactly the same way that all the other German attempts to do something did*. By 1918 all merchantmen travel in convoys; Admiral Scheer starts sending out cruisers to gently caress with them; the Grand Fleet detaches a battleship squadron to deal with this irritant; now the Germans have another chance to do what they've been trying to do all along, get hold of some small capital-ship element of the Grand Fleet on its own, kill it, and then run away very fast before they get caught. Scheer's also had his submarines out on observation duty, trying to figure out when the convoys come and go and where it is they come to and go from, with the idea that he'll intercept a convoy and so draw the battleship squadron out so it can be dealt with. Trouble is, yet again the submarines screw up their one job and send home duff information. (The British official historian makes some bitchy comments wondering why he didn't have a civilian spy in Norway help them out.) Scheer sorties the High Seas Fleet on the 22nd, gets to the shipping lanes on the 23rd, spends a lot of time sitting nervously in the middle of the sea waiting for a convoy that never arrives, there's a lot of undignified waddling around in fog from all parties, eventually the HSF gets out of there on the 25th, successfully avoiding both the convoys and the late-arriving Grand Fleet. Then one of their dreadnoughts gets torpedoed on the way back. Just another day at the office. *excepting Jutland, which only went off because one little Danish tramp steamer wandered into exactly the right bit of sea to be noticed and inspected by supporting vessels from the two battlecruiser fleets at the same time, one of which had already been ordered to turn away before spotting the ship, but the flag signal to turn north hadn't yet percolated down to them when they sighted the merchant. Turns out it's really hard to arrange a fleet battle when both sides are determined to do it on their terms. quote: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. Oh yeah, and almost nobody in the comfortable chairs did a thing when they thought it had a low chance of success, and the reasons why they thought they in fact had a high chance of success are often quite interesting. Check me out if you like this sort of thing! It's a real gas, or at least it is after April 1915.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:20
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SeanBeansShako posted:Welp my secret is out, I have never fired a musket. Mate we should both do some musket firing, where you based? I'm trying to get in with the sealed knot guys but they are not appreciative of my digger philosophies
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Sep 23, 2016 21:24
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I'm kicking it in the middle of nowhere in south east Cornwall, but at the moment I have my hands full with a military milner project for the musuem. I'm researching hats.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:36
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Devlan Mud posted:Up until the end of the war and the Kaiser's abdication, wasn't most of the decision-making in the German Empire controlled by the Kaiser/Chancellor (and later Ludendorff), so I guess assuming a victorious central powers, and no revolutions/abdications, how much influence would the Reichstag actually have in drafting a peace treaty comparative to the executive and the foreign ministry? Not really. During the war the empire was being run by the generals from fairly early on with the full expectation it was going to be the reichstag running the show afterwards, and the Kaiser before the war still had to rule fairly consensually with his parliament.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:42
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anakha posted:Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: Possibly some of Yi Sung Sin (can't loving spell his name)'s antics against the Japanese during their attempted invasion of Korea? Think proto-ironclads versus Japan's legendarily terrrible "floating wooden brick castle" school of naval design. The issue there is source reliability given how long ago it was.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:43
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Here's Richard Evans:quote:"the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified." He's right about the elites, but misses the point that they weren't able to carry the majority of the German people with them; the largest political party, the Social Democrats, was opposed to annexations and had long been critical of the militarism of the elites. By the middle of the war, the Social Democrats had forged the alliance with other democratic parties that was to come to power at the war's end. German atrocities in the first phase of the war, in France, and the last phase, in the east, were real enough, but you can't generalise from these to say this is how the Germans would have treated the whole of the rest of Europe had they won. Imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany; the Kaiser was not Hitler.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:45
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OwlFancier posted:Yi Sung Sin (can't loving spell his name) there's about five different ways people romanize Korean so I don't blame you; the "correct" way would be Yi Sun-sin, pronounced sorta like Ee Soon-shin. just in case that's ever relevant for the future
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Sep 23, 2016 21:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:In philosophy teleology is a reason by itself to totally reject an argument At this point isn't philosophy just pedants bullshitting unfalsifiable arguments in the face of unanswerable questions?
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Sep 23, 2016 21:54
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Koramei posted:there's about five different ways people romanize Korean so I don't blame you; the "correct" way would be Yi Sun-sin, pronounced sorta like Ee Soon-shin. It's not helped by the fact that I just do not for the life of me have the ear or tongue for non-germanic languages. I can't even pronounce French, whereas German I used to be able to hack and gargle my way through all day. I really want to learn Saxon or Old English or something like that, I'm sure they'd be super fun to pronounce
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Sep 23, 2016 21:55
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PittTheElder posted:At this point isn't philosophy just pedants bullshitting unfalsifiable arguments in the face of unanswerable questions? If anything it's closer to being a very odd outlying subset to mathematics.
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Sep 23, 2016 22:04
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These things come in waves, just as military history fads do. Philosophy will become more and less accessible as time goes on. Panthers will be comparatively better and comparatively worse. It happens.
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Sep 23, 2016 22:22
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lenoon posted:These things come in waves, just as military history fads do. Philosophy will become more and less accessible as time goes on. Panthers will be comparatively better and comparatively worse. It happens. Poo-tee-weet?
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Sep 23, 2016 22:30
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Grenrow posted:Teleology, in history, is the idea that history has some definite "purpose" or end-state that we're advancing to. A common example is Whig history, which is the idea that Anglo-style liberal democracy is the best thing ever and all of history is just a progression to that point. Generally dismissed and frowned upon nowadays in the academy, but it's still common to see people talk about history like it's just a big game of civilization. You see this sometimes when people ask why Africa hasn't "advanced" or dumb poo poo like that. This reminds me of common opposition to evolution, like the classic "If we evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?" Well, evolution doesn't work that way.
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Sep 23, 2016 22:34
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When Tirpitz was expounding on his riskflotte doctrine, did anyone ever tell him that sailors were unlikely to do their best work for a plan that assumes the other guys will win the big fight?
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Sep 23, 2016 23:06
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Zorak of Michigan posted:When Tirpitz was expounding on his riskflotte doctrine, did anyone ever tell him that sailors were unlikely to do their best work for a plan that assumes the other guys will win the big fight? I think it's fair to say that there turned out to be quite a lot wrong with Tirpitz's assumptions
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Sep 23, 2016 23:38
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