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lol @ SS legal troops, journalists and geologists. "As you can see, these are inferior, Slavo-Asiatic sediments..."
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Nov 30, 2016 09:34
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JcDent posted:lol @ SS legal troops, journalists and geologists. That's why the T-34 was so amazing, it used U(be)ral(les) metals!
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Nov 30, 2016 10:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:Dude who is going to berlin: Thanks! Forgot about that one, was on my to do list last time I visited Berlin but ended up not seeing it. Only so much you have time for especially as I was there with two friends and had to compromise. Not really relevant for this thread but I'm definitively going to the natural history museum as that is extremely my poo poo (biology student). Saw the outside of the building (closed at the time) in the early 2000's and it still had bullet holes.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:44
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Falukorv posted:Saw the outside of the building (closed at the time) in the early 2000's and it still had bullet holes.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:52
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Does Europe have an unexploded ordinance problem? I was reading how there are tracts of land in France that are just fenced off because of unexploded Ww1 ordinance or does the topography of France have a unique structure which allowed for more ordinance to have not detonate?
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Nov 30, 2016 15:43
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KildarX posted:Does Europe have an unexploded ordinance problem? Yes. quote:I was reading how there are tracts of land in France that are just fenced off because of unexploded Ww1 ordinance or does the topography of France have a unique structure which allowed for more ordinance to have not detonate? There was a hell of a lot more artillery hitting the ground in France than there was in the UK or Spain.
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Nov 30, 2016 15:49
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To an extent, yeah. In western Europe it's not quite "step on a landmine while walking to the grocery store" level, but especially along the old Western Front in France/Belgium it's pretty bad. WWI was, well, I don't need to explain to the MilHist thread - have the world's largest industrial powers spend 4 years firing millions of tons of artillery shells almost non-stop into the same small strip of land and you'll have enough unexploded ordinance to last centuries. I don't think it's anything to do with the geography, just a number game. I know less about Eastern Europe, but I'd imagine some of the more wartorn places (parts of the Balkans, nowadays eastern Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) have a measurable problem - Bosnia and Herzegovina definitely has a major landmine problem still persisting today.
Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 16:02
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KildarX posted:Does Europe have an unexploded ordinance problem? I was reading how there are tracts of land in France that are just fenced off because of unexploded Ww1 ordinance or does the topography of France have a unique structure which allowed for more ordinance to have not detonate? It is called the Iron Harvest and it is pretty dangerous to annoying if you work in the farming industry in Northern France/Belgium. Those explosives are still active and quite dangerous. Every now and then over here construction work in some of the cities dredges up a WW2 German bomb that buried itself deep in the ground. Awww, guess I'll add german soldiers with pink on their uniforms to the list of things nazis ruined with military tradition. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 16:07
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HEY GAL posted:large sections of Berlin still do They're actually getting around to fixing a lot of those which really kind of bums me out. I know the area around the Museum Island used to be great for looking at damage from the fighting, and the last time I was there they were making a big push on getting that fixed. Berlin's actually uniquely bad for UXO because of its geology. As I understand it it has a layer of soft soil sitting on top of a layer of hard clay. A lot of bombs fell in the soil, didn't detonate, then kind of ricocheted off the clay so they ended up nose up. The latter bit is important, as it hosed up the time delay fuzzes that were supposed to blow them if the contact igniter didn't do the job.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:08
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Falukorv posted:Hi thread. I went to Berlin this September. It was as good as Rome but it aint got poo poo on Amsterdam, Munich or Florence. YMMV. Anyway, the big History Museum on the island is a little on the weak side but it does have the Nefritti bust and the ridiculous golden crown thing. Also on the island is a church, and in the basement of said church is a bunch of dead royal Prussians. That was pretty neat and the art museum on the island is quite good too. Anyway, theres a Citadel. Last invested in WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandau_Citadel Also, bunkers: http://berliner-unterwelten.de/home.1.1.html
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Nov 30, 2016 16:08
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KildarX posted:Does Europe have an unexploded ordinance problem? I was reading how there are tracts of land in France that are just fenced off because of unexploded Ww1 ordinance or does the topography of France have a unique structure which allowed for more ordinance to have not detonate? The artillery situation in Flandres was pretty extreme but finding a dud bomb during construction is still a common occurrence in German cities today. It's probably pretty similar in Volgograd as well. It's not limited to Europe, I seem to recall that there are still major minefields basically intact around El Alamein. I can't even imagine how bad it has to be in Vietnam. It should be basically proportional to the concentration of ordnance dropped and probably something like soil characteristics, there was something about shells with working detonators just blorpfing into the mud without going off in Flandres.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:13
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KildarX posted:Does Europe have an unexploded ordinance problem? Oh yeah. It's not even just WW1 stuff either- it's not uncommon for construction/excavation teams in Germany to find UXO underneath streets and buildings in major cities that were targeted during the Allied bombing campaign. I think the most recent find was in Cologne about a year/2 years ago. KildarX posted:I was reading how there are tracts of land in France that are just fenced off because of unexploded Ww1 ordinance or does the topography of France have a unique structure which allowed for more ordinance to have not detonate? Trin can speak on this better than I can, but a major part of why the Iron Harvest is a thing is because the British war industry- in an effort to keep up with the intense demand for artillery shells after the pre-war stockpiles proved to be grossly inadequate- started to cut back on QA checks during shell manufacturing. In addition, they also lowered the bar for what could qualify as proper training and skillsets for factory workers, primarily to deal with the labor situation that arose following the introduction of their conscription system. The result was that a large number of their artillery shells were duds whose fuses and detonators never activated correctly. Compounding that, the Central Powers had a habit of preparing for major offensives with artillery bombardments that went on for hours as the least, and multiple days on average. This kind of thing, coupled with the kind of constant rain that made the trenches as wet as you hear of them being, turned the ground of the targeted area into a pulpy mess of loose dirt, mud, and foliage that, in addition to being very difficult to navigate or traverse, tended to be too soft to set off a working shell's contact detonator. So you wind up with a very large number of shells that simply went "plop" and sank underground, because even if only 5% of the total artillery volume lobbed never went off, 5% of that much goddamn ordnance is still a metric fuckton to be left sitting around.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:31
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How did days long bombardments work? You just cycle through crews on a artillery piece day and night and just fire as much ordinance into an area as fast as you can for a few days or do you have a set number of pieces firing x amount of ordinance every hour for y amount of hours?
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Nov 30, 2016 16:38
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Argus Zant posted:Oh yeah. It's not even just WW1 stuff either- it's not uncommon for construction/excavation teams in Germany to find UXO underneath streets and buildings in major cities that were targeted during the Allied bombing campaign. I think the most recent find was in Cologne about a year/2 years ago. I can only find the source in German but apparently 5500 dud bombs are discovered in Germany every year. The mid-sized city I live in has been finding them at a rate of about one a year lately.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:43
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MikeCrotch posted:I desperately need someone to find that WWII hex and counter game where the SS pieces were all hot pink. I need those wehraboo reactions. I think I've seen this tossed around the wargame thread for years and no one has ever remembered it. I don't think I actually want to google 'hot pink SS' tho
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Nov 30, 2016 16:44
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StashAugustine posted:I think I've seen this tossed around the wargame thread for years and no one has ever remembered it. I don't think I actually want to google 'hot pink SS' tho I want to believe!
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Nov 30, 2016 16:53
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How thin is the soil level in Berlin that a bomb can penetrate it and bounce back? About ten years ago some idiot in my hometown (Kaunas, Lithuania) uncovered an aero bomb in his yard. He (and kids) jumped on it, beat the aerons with a showel (to get scrap to sell) and even wanted a compensation after the military defused it. My favorite part about this is that there were piles of scrap metal and diesel stores close to the place of incident, which could have made for a helluva explosion if it had went off.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:03
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JcDent posted:How thin is the soil level in Berlin that a bomb can penetrate it and bounce back? I read that as "Kansas" for a moment and though "yep, that sounds right."
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Nov 30, 2016 17:20
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I can picture that bullshit happening in the countryside in the UK too. I blame the isolation.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:27
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JcDent posted:How thin is the soil level in Berlin that a bomb can penetrate it and bounce back? Heh, one month ago the police station in Finland's second biggest city was evacuated after a guy brought a rusty hand grenade that he'd found somewhere. And it was live with a very rusty pin and this guy drives 50 km to hand it over and is now facing criminal charges over it. Russian WW2 bombs are still found regularly from lakes, sometimes from attics which is pretty scary to think of if you live in an old house - that you might be sleeping under a live,damaged and unstable bomb that no one has noticed in 70 years but which could go off any moment.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:53
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There's a sunken ship in the Thames estuary with 1400 tonnes of explosives still on it
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Nov 30, 2016 17:54
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Nenonen posted:Heh, one month ago the police station in Finland's second biggest city was evacuated after a guy brought a rusty hand grenade that he'd found somewhere. And it was live with a very rusty pin and this guy drives 50 km to hand it over and is now facing criminal charges over it. It's not even the first time. At least once a year some yahoo finds an old bomb or a grenade and decides the best course of action is to bring it to the police station, you know, the place in the middle of town, where a lot of people are either working or visiting as customers. I checked and the previous time was in Jyväskylä in March 2015.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:00
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JcDent posted:How thin is the soil level in Berlin that a bomb can penetrate it and bounce back? Berlin is built on a swamp; that's why it's got brightly coloured pipes going everywhere to handle shifts in groundwater due to stuff like construction.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:28
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There's still enough of them in London that it's not particularly newsworthy when they're found. On my recent trip to Belgium the wife and I were cycling bits of the Ypres salient (grog ways to ensure your wife has a great holiday: carry a huge printout of the Ypres trench lines and keep saying oh just over the next road is another cemetery!) and the iron harvest is still in full swing, lots of smaller shells posted into the holes in telegraph poles. Pretty impressive to say it's been 100 years, but then again ploughing really fucks up the soil.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:It is called the Iron Harvest and it is pretty dangerous to annoying if you work in the farming industry in Northern France/Belgium. Those explosives are still active and quite dangerous. When you think about it, theres not a lot the Nazis didn't ruin. Bagpipes, I guess? Hard to tell if those are already considered ruined or not 
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Nov 30, 2016 19:01
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Falukorv posted:Thanks! Not a bio student, but that is definitely worth getting excited for imo. Even the non-enthusiast can well appreciate the Giraffatitan (ex-Brachiosaurus) brancai mount, I'd think. Hope you have a great trip.
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Nov 30, 2016 19:22
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sullat posted:The retreat from the Yalu was pretty chaotic. Certainly elements of the army could be described as 'routed', but IIRC, the Marines did a credible job of holding the line to allow for a more orderly retreat. Still, casualties were pretty bad and there was a ton of lost equipment. This is all half-remembered from The Coldest Winter, but I seem to remember Halberstam essentially saying that the Army units got undisciplined and reckless in pursuing fleeing opponents and were caught completely off-guard by the Chinese counterattack. He characterized the Marine units as a bit more cautious, and he focused on the high numbers of automatic weapons as the reason why relatively small groups of Marines were able to successfully hold off much larger Chinese forces.
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Nov 30, 2016 19:38
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Antti posted:It's not even the first time. At least once a year some yahoo finds an old bomb or a grenade and decides the best course of action is to bring it to the police station, you know, the place in the middle of town, where a lot of people are either working or visiting as customers. It worked out in Hot Fuzz.
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Nov 30, 2016 19:49
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Jobbo_Fett posted:When you think about it, theres not a lot the Nazis didn't ruin. Yeah, they would have managed to ruin bagpipes. At some point, some bright boy would have created an armored vehicle for them, probably converting captured Bren Carriers or Goliaths/Kettenkrads or something. And everyone knows that bagpipes are traditionally an infantry weapon...
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Nov 30, 2016 19:58
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aphid_licker posted:I can only find the source in German but apparently 5500 dud bombs are discovered in Germany every year. The mid-sized city I live in has been finding them at a rate of about one a year lately. Yeah the year I spent in Berlin I remember seeing at least two in the news for the city area alone. Also to give an idea of how poo poo berlins soil is the subways are right near the surface. I saw repairs on a station once and the roofs are about a foot under the streets in a lot of places.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:07
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you could try living in dresden instead, where the elbe floods every fifteen minutes and the water table is about...shin level
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 20:25
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HEY GAL posted:you could try living in dresden instead, where the elbe floods every fifteen minutes Nonsense, it floods only in the winter when the ice creates a blockage, in the spring when the ice melts and in the fall when the heavy rains come. Well, and sometimes in the summer too. Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah the year I spent in Berlin I remember seeing at least two in the news for the city area alone. Well, Berlin is pretty big and was heavily bombed. But yeah, its not exactly considered national news when it happens unless its in a really awkward position and a lot of people have to be evacuated. And even then only on a slow news day. Really the best example is that you have to get your construction lot checked for UXO before you can build a house in Germany, it's a legal requirement.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:42
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KildarX posted:How did days long bombardments work? You just cycle through crews on a artillery piece day and night and just fire as much ordinance into an area as fast as you can for a few days or do you have a set number of pieces firing x amount of ordinance every hour for y amount of hours? There are specific targets for each unit, maybe even down to the individual piece, is hitting at specific times. So the gun you crew may spend several minutes shooting one target, then pause for some time, before shifting to another target. Stretch this over days and, yea you may need to rotate fresh people in from time to time but it's not going to be every single gun firing non stop for days. This is occurring over miles of front with hundreds of cannon and involves a large planning process, to include identifying every target, preparing all the necessary logistics, etc, in order to prepare the most effective schedule of fires
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Nov 30, 2016 20:46
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ArchangeI posted:Nonsense, it floods only in the winter when the ice creates a blockage, in the spring when the ice melts and in the fall when the heavy rains come.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:51
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HEY GAL posted:remember 2013, when the moldau/elbe flooded from prague to dresden? a seal from the prague zoo ended up in dresden somehow and then died. Is that because of the ordeal of being swept by floods from the Czech Republic to Germany or does Dresden just really hate seals or something
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Nov 30, 2016 21:06
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It's perfectly fine with the first six.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:07
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JcDent posted:How thin is the soil level in Berlin that a bomb can penetrate it and bounce back? God bless Lithuania! You're not Crotia, but close!
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Nov 30, 2016 21:20
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MikeCrotch posted:Is that because of the ordeal of being swept by floods from the Czech Republic to Germany or does Dresden just really hate seals or something Given that it is Dresden it was probably the fact that the seal was a foreigner.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah the year I spent in Berlin I remember seeing at least two in the news for the city area alone. There's also the forest in Germany that's closed to the public outside specific paths because the Nazis laid a bunch of glass land mines in the area and they were designed to be invisible to metal detectors and either nobody wants to risk sniffing them out with metal detectors or the explosive compound's details were lost in the war and nobody knows what to look for. E: it's Eifel National Forest, but it looks like it isn't necessarily closed, just filled with warning signs along paths telling people to stay the hell on the path lest they step on a mine. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 22:17
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FAUXTON posted:glass land mines Nice to see yet another way the Nazis are loving over Germany even to this day.
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Nov 30, 2016 22:24
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