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Another major failure for the Empire was the lack of a comprehensive COIN strategy for dealing with the population on vital locations like Endor. Winning the hearts and feeble minds of Ewoks should have been an easy task for a Sith lord, with public diplomacy the Empire could have not only pacified the locals but also ensured that Ewoks would have informed the local garrison about rebel agent sightings.
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Dec 25, 2016 18:00
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How "realistic" holistically speaking, in terms of doctrine, arms procurement, occasional gently caress ups, arms race, etc are the Honor books? Star Trek and Star Wars both seem to have this issue of not really being holistic in their approach to the above. Star Trek until Enterprise and Star Trek Online seem to entirely lack ground forces. Star Wars is more of the opposite, I feel like technology and armament procurement has more or less entirely stagnated and lacking in grand strategy while the ground stuff seems to at least pass the sniff test. In that one Honor Harrington book I've read you had Haven building a new advanced fleet so they could keep Manticore off their backs and the Chinese-Prussians had new propulsion engines and the Solarian league just didn't give a gently caress because of how huge it was; I liked the idea it was kind of like Ming China in terms of sheer size with all of the various kingdoms and pseudo republics were like all tiny ants in comparison but like China the League was like too huge to ever do anything unless they lost a baseball game or something. But I got the impression that Haven is kind of how the author views robust nordic welfare states so I'm not particularly inclined to continue unless I'm imagining things.
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Dec 25, 2016 18:04
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bewbies posted:Do you have any useful tips for doing this? There appears to be approximately one jillion such items on ebay and I am in way over my head here :/ Best bet is to lurk the watchuseek Russian watch subforum for a while. There are many obsessive spergs there and some good guides. Just lurk for a while and you'll pick it up quickly. Alternatively do what I did and learn the hard way! Merry holidays milhist goons
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Dec 25, 2016 18:10
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Argas posted:The old lore is that the Mon Calamari ships were civilian vessels converted into warships, with the largest ones being pleasure liners. They'd generally be worse at focusing firepower than Imperial star destroyers and were not as well armed, but had redundant shield generators. No idea how much of this has been kept with the new canon. Well apparently now Mon Calamari ships aren't just converted civilian ships, they're converted cities. So basically they did a 'so long and thanks for all the fish' in their city-ships when the Empire came to crack down on them, before converting them into full-blown battleships.
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Dec 25, 2016 18:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:How "realistic" holistically speaking, in terms of doctrine, arms procurement, occasional gently caress ups, arms race, etc are the Honor books? Alright for the early books but going completely mad when the author stopped letting editors work on the book. Manticore starts effortlessly producing major technological breakthroughs in response to ever larger and more ineptly led fleets of super-dreadnoughts.
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Dec 25, 2016 18:41
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I've read maybe two or three Honor books. One had a two ship battle that was a boring, overlylong slugfest, the other was... gently caress, some system that's trying to break away pitting it's oversized frigattes against a fleet with more advanced missile engines or something. A lot of talk about HUNDREDS OF MISSILES BEING LAUNCHED, lasers piercing ships and ships disintegrating while flying at relativistic speeds. Super boring, and victory ever only felt like "victory"
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Dec 25, 2016 18:57
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Crazycryodude posted:Y-wings putting a few torpedoes into the single, non-redundant shield generator sitting out in the open. There's three of them, that's plenty redundant. And then the weak point that disables the ship is the bridge with all the command staff. Do real-world warships have a plan for if the bridge and command staff are taken out in a battle?
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Dec 25, 2016 19:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's three of them, that's plenty redundant. And then the weak point that disables the ship is the bridge with all the command staff. Real-world ships have a Combat Information Center in the center of the ship that handles the fighting. If something gets to the chewy center then the ship is probably hosed regardless.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:18
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wdarkk posted:Real-world ships have a Combat Information Center in the center of the ship that handles the fighting. If something gets to the chewy center then the ship is probably hosed regardless. Lol, keeping this in mind, I was just going to reply with "Sink."
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Dec 25, 2016 19:20
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relevant to unexploded bomb chat a bit ago: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38430671 50,000 people from Augsburg have been evacuated so that a bomb can be disposed of. e: huh, looking through the related stories, 5 years ago there was another diffusal that forced the evacuation of 45,000 people. Does that really happen this regularly? Koramei fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 19:20
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Yeah all the time. I remember a couple during my year in Berlin. UXO teams are pretty common for construction sites.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:26
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Koramei posted:relevant to unexploded bomb chat a bit ago: Considering how many bombs were dropped over Europe, yes, I'd say so.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:27
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Talk about German efficiency, evacuate everyone when they're enjoying a public holiday, after all the bomb has been lying dormant for seven decades so it can't wait a couple of days! Der Krieg gegen Weihnachten!!!
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Dec 25, 2016 19:53
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Nenonen posted:Talk about German efficiency, evacuate everyone when they're enjoying a public holiday, after all the bomb has been lying dormant for seven decades so it can't wait a couple of days! Der Krieg gegen Weihnachten!!! Considering the number of old ordnance induced Darwin Awards, they made the right call.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:59
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Yeah, waiting an extra day or two to dispose of the bomb means it's inevitably going to go off right in the middle of a populated area on the extra day because 2016 has it out for us.
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Dec 25, 2016 20:01
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my dad posted:Considering the number of old ordnance induced Darwin Awards, they made the right call. Well I mean surround the spot with troopers in case someone decides to start digging it up and if neighbours ask what's up tell them that it's just an anti-terrorist rehearsal, nothing out of ordinary here, nein mein Herr! But obviously real life authorities hardly have a choice in cases like this. It just strikes me as extremely German to spoil everyone's holiday but that's just my casual racism showing, honestly it would have been the same anywhere. I would like to read more about how they are recognized and disabled. Unexploded bombs are found all the time but Grand Slams are something else! Aren't they buried really deep in the ground, how do you even reach them so that you can disable the fuzes without risking an explosion?
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Dec 25, 2016 20:26
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Image it really well then carefully drill a small hole through the soil and into the fuse? I assume Grand Slams didn't have the anti-tamper mechanisms that some smaller bombs did.
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Dec 25, 2016 20:46
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Nenonen posted:I would like to read more about how they are recognized and disabled. Unexploded bombs are found all the time but Grand Slams are something else! 1.8 tonnes corresponds to 4000 lbs. This one is only a third of a Grand Slam: "Wikipedia posted:The bombs then called Blockbusters were the RAF's HC (High Capacity) bombs. These bombs had especially thin casings that allowed them to contain approximately three-quarters of their weight in explosive, with a 4,000-pound bomb containing over 3,000 pounds (1,400 kg) of Amatol. Most General-purpose bombs (termed Medium Capacity—or MC—by the RAF) contained 50% explosive by weight, the rest being made up of the fragmentation bomb casing. Blockbusters got larger as the war progressed, from the original 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg) version, up to 12,000 pounds (5,400 kg).
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Dec 25, 2016 21:11
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Speaking of bombs why where the rounded tips so common? Why not just take a big-ol oil drum and fill it to the brim with explosives and put a couple of detonators on it? It seems like a more efficient volume shape.
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Dec 25, 2016 22:47
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Flies slightly straighter I assume. Same reason they have fins.
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Dec 25, 2016 22:50
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Boiled Water posted:Speaking of bombs why where the rounded tips so common? Why not just take a big-ol oil drum and fill it to the brim with explosives and put a couple of detonators on it? It seems like a more efficient volume shape. Drag. If you carry a flat-nosed bomb externally it will play hell with your flight performance. That's why modern bombs are longer and thinner than WWII bombs - modern aircraft are so much faster that they'd be crippled by carrying WWII ordnance.
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Dec 25, 2016 23:00
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Gnoman posted:Drag. If you carry a flat-nosed bomb externally it will play hell with your flight performance. That's why modern bombs are longer and thinner than WWII bombs - modern aircraft are so much faster that they'd be crippled by carrying WWII ordnance. This is the same reason almost every modern combat aircraft is really pointy-looking and every airliner is basically a giant rounded-off tube. If you want to go fast and have good fuel performance, you have to use that basic shape.
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Dec 25, 2016 23:19
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The Lone Badger posted:Image it really well then carefully drill a small hole through the soil and into the fuse? I don't know what the situation is like where the current bomb scare is happening, but Berlin is kind of uniquely hosed due to geology as far as being a UXO magnet goes. The short version is that it's a giant loving swamp. The city is sitting on top of something like 20 meters of soft soil and under that is a layer of hard clay. This is one of the big reasons why the subways aren't buried as deeply as in other cities and why you see some parts of the city with above ground water pipes. Anyways, as I understand it the bombs wouldn't reliably detonate against the crappy top layer if they didn't hit a building or something hard (or if the fuse just didn't work) and would then ricochet off the hard clay layer, ending up sitting nose up in the mud ~20-10 meters below the surface. This is important because a lot of American and British bombs had some kind of chemical fuse to set them off later if they didn't go off on contact. Acetone dissolving some kind of early plastic disc from what I recall. The problem is that when they sat nose up the chemical didn't get to where it needed to get, so they never went off. The fuses, however, were twichy as gently caress after 60 years of sitting in the mud, so disarming them was a bit of an invigorating experience. I'm basing this off half remembered stuff from a german documentary I saw, so the details might be sketchy, but the general thrust of the geology and the fuse design leading to bombs sitting nose up in greater quantities than in other areas of Germany is the salient part.
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Dec 26, 2016 00:57
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I received an illegal order once when I was in Iraq, the captain that gave it to me got all pissy when I told him no and threatened to court martial me until the colonel commanding our base told him to shut the gently caress up and stop being an idiot
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Dec 26, 2016 01:46
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Is it funny illegal or traumatic illegal? I'm mega curious but obviously you might not want to talk about it here.
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Dec 26, 2016 03:09
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Gnoman posted:Drag. If you carry a flat-nosed bomb externally it will play hell with your flight performance. That's why modern bombs are longer and thinner than WWII bombs - modern aircraft are so much faster that they'd be crippled by carrying WWII ordnance. Also less-aerodynamic shapes can have exciting behavior when they're released at transonic/supersonic speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTnmZ_HPAs
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Dec 26, 2016 03:21
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Arquinsiel posted:Is it funny illegal or traumatic illegal? I'm mega curious but obviously you might not want to talk about it here. Funny illegal? I dunno, those two things were often the same overseas. Basically, I ran sources when I was overseas, and this captain wanted me to tell him who my sources were. Edit: he called me over to the TOC one day and told me he wanted me to give him all the info I had on my sources so he could put it in a report to division. I was like "I'm sorry, sir, I can't do that, I'm only allowed to disseminate that information to my direct supervisors." He got all pouty, and said ok, and then apparently went to the post commander to complain; he also told him the commander that I was disrespectful, lol. Luckily, our post commander thought this captain was a compete idiot, and really liked our team, so when he spoke to my tan leader and he told the commander "yeah, Specialist Thalantos is correct." So the commander went back to this captain and.....said something to him. I don't know what, but the captain apologized to me the next day. :  :
Dwanyelle fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Dec 26, 2016 |
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Dec 26, 2016 04:32
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Oh, good, the funny kind of illegal. I was worried it was along the lines of "take this fucker out back and shoot him" or "go torch that village" illegal.
Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Dec 26, 2016 |
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Dec 26, 2016 05:08
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Oh no, that didn't happen on my post, but, uh..... Well, I guess the good thing is, no one actually got killed?
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Dec 26, 2016 05:10
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Raenir Salazar posted:How "realistic" holistically speaking, in terms of doctrine, arms procurement, occasional gently caress ups, arms race, etc are the Honor books? The most realistic milSF about procurement is and always will be the short story "Superiority" by Arthur C Clarke, which is available on the first page of Google hits. The Honorverse is kind of messy, since Weber switches through at least metaphors for how the ships work. A lot of the stuff starts with an Age of Sail metaphor, with a mostly stagnant tech-base the improves incrementally over centuries. This rapidly switches to a Dreadnought race, with bigger missile broadsides and ECM standing in for general improvement in firepower and ranging. And then it gets weird with the birth of carrier aviation and missile pod dreadnoughts. Overall, from what I remember of the series (which is shamefully too much), prototype stuff and new ideas always just work, while in the real world, implementing a whole new weapons system ranges from a signal success, say the use of laser-guided bombs to knock out Dong Ha bridge, to a moderate waste of resources that goes nowhere (batbombs) to Nazi-Procurement.txt.
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Dec 26, 2016 05:19
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Some bits of the Honorverse fall pretty bad into the 'These political groups are terrible' lines, mostly along the common lines of many sci-fi writers.
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Dec 26, 2016 05:42
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My wife and I went to Siem Reap, Cambodia for our honeymoon, and while we were there we visited the local war museum, which has a collection of mostly Soviet-era equipment from the civil war. I put up the pictures on Imgur albums, if anyone would like to see: https://imgur.com/a/G4bu5 http://imgur.com/a/V2EAw The tour guide's story was that he left his village one morning at 7 AM to scavenge for food, then when he came back by 10 AM, everyone there had been rounded up and carted off to the killing fields, never to be seen again. He fled to the countryside and ended up joining anti-Khmer Rouge insurgents. The harrowing part of his story was when he'd hold up a deactivated land mine, have us feel the indentations that were supposed to turn into shrapnel fragments on detonation, then have us touch his kneecap, where there's the exact same piece of shrapnel buried under his skin. And then he'd do it again, but this time with ball bearings underneath the base of his palm. And there was also the inside of a blown-out tank, where he swears the bones of his Colonel friend are still in, moldering under the elements after he was killed inside the tank when it drove over a land mine in the 90s.
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Dec 26, 2016 05:55
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Thalantos posted:Funny illegal? I dunno, those two things were often the same overseas.
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Dec 26, 2016 14:27
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Got Hornfischer's new book, The Fleet At Flood Tide for Christmas, and finished it this morning. It's an interesting book, but I think it's a step down from his previous works - I think Hornfischer isn't the best at talking about large-scale campaigns in the course of one book, and this one tried to cover the Marianas campaign, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the bombing campaign against the Home Islands, and the atomic bomb, plus the fleet and air battles along the way and looking at the cost to civilians and how the Pacific war turned into one of total war culminating in the atomic bombs. Still interesting, still a reasonably good book, but I think Hornfischer was better concentrating on one specific battle rather than expanding his focus to full campaigns.
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Dec 26, 2016 15:45
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Arquinsiel posted:Thanks for sharing. I'm really glad it was more of a white-collar warcrime you got to refuse. mods please change my name to White-Collar War Criminal, tia.
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Dec 26, 2016 15:53
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Arquinsiel posted:white-collar warcrime Next thread title right here.
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Dec 26, 2016 18:25
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Arquinsiel posted:Thanks for sharing. I'm really glad it was more of a white-collar warcrime you got to refuse. Heh, me too, I suppose. I once had an Iraqi army platoon sergeant ask me for permission to torture a prisoner they had. Obviously I said no. That's the one and only time I've gotten to give a traditional military chewing out to a senior NCO....
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Dec 26, 2016 20:41
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Warship nerds, here's something a little strange... When the United States entered into World War One, a senator from south Carolina [who was such a piece of poo poo I think I could legitimately describe him as an American style Nazi] was just a total rear end in a top hat about battleships for some reason. To get him to shut up already, the US Navy promised to build the greatest, most huuugest battleship it possibly could. It was designed but not built, being disallowed by the 1922 Washington Naval treaty. Anyway, a modeller took Tamiya's 1/350 scale Missouri and modified it to show people what a 1937 "Maximum Battleship" would look like. http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/bb/bb-73/350-br/br-index.html
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Dec 27, 2016 00:33
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bewbies posted:I finally finished this thing for new kid: "Mikoyan Gurevich, Hellcat Spitfire, Dewoitine Warhawk, Lavotchkin Petlyakov, These are a few of my favorite things.."
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Dec 27, 2016 00:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:Warship nerds, here's something a little strange... How does this differ from the proposed Montana class?
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Dec 27, 2016 00:47
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