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Star Wars is about everything 1920's to 1970's pop culture Lucas absorbed during his hilariously strained writing seissions of the drafts for A New Hope. Also, the Enfield rifled musket is pretty good. Not sure how the Confederates could gently caress up using it but I imagine they found a way.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:01
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SeanBeansShako posted:Star Wars is about everything 1920's to 1970's pop culture Lucas absorbed during his hilariously strained writing seissions of the drafts for A New Hope. Sure, but they didn't have enough of them. Manufacturing your own guns from a native industrial base and having to import them from Europe through a blockade are two different things.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:lol do you have a list? Is he talking about Huck Finn or Mein Kampf? http://www.jrbooksonline.com/pdf_books_top_list.htm I like the last site update: quote:26 Mar 2017: Added link to Alex Linder's excellent reading of Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, to the Raspail entry farther down this page. Of great topical interest today due to the recent mud-flood into the U.S. and Europe.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:04
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So what was the reason for all these hodge podge state militia all being armed with pretty much many different types of musket? did they simply just get caught on the hop when the Confederates became a thing and were armed with obsolete gear and it was a case of 'buy anything vaguely modern'?
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Apr 16, 2017 17:06
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BattleMoose posted:
Oh man, the author of that source was a literal no-poo poo "water fluoridation is a commie plot!" guy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Racey_Jordan
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Apr 16, 2017 17:11
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SeanBeansShako posted:So what was the reason for all these hodge podge state militia all being armed with pretty much many different types of musket? did they simply just get caught on the hop when the Confederates became a thing and were armed with obsolete gear and it was a case of 'buy anything vaguely modern'? Any sort of standardization or uniform equipment was seen as federalist tyranny, and the South was completely unprepared for war with the North.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:16
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SeanBeansShako posted:So what was the reason for all these hodge podge state militia all being armed with pretty much many different types of musket? did they simply just get caught on the hop when the Confederates became a thing and were armed with obsolete gear and it was a case of 'buy anything vaguely modern'? Because the Confederacy was just a bunch of states that decided "gently caress you for telling us we can't have slaves" and decided to make their own nation, the Confederate States Army was formed from soldiers who remained loyal to their states, volunteers and local militias bringing their own guns to the battle, and eventually conscripts. This obviously put them at a bit of a disadvantage, since the South didn't have close to the industrial base that the Union did. Both sides started with less than a million weapons stockpiled, but the Union was able to ramp up and start producing. When the Confederates started recruiting new soldiers and having to replace equipment lost in battle, they couldn't just churn out another 200,000 Springfield muskets. They worked to establish factories where there were none and did some illegal copying of Northern designs like the Springfield, but most of their weapons were purchased from foreign sources. The volunteers who started the war also brought their weapons from home to make up for the lack of standardized arms. Early Confederate soldiers marched into battle with Kentucky rifles, old flintlock muskets dating back to the American Revolution, and even shotguns. Some flintlocks got converted to caplocks and some were rifled, but all the way to the end of the war at least a few CSA soldiers were lining up with smoothbore muskets. And as Cythereal said, the CSA was founded on a position of the states having lots of rights to decide their own course. This meant that even uniforms couldn't be standardized, let alone rifle ammo and railway gauges.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:24
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Cythereal posted:Any sort of standardization or uniform equipment was seen as federalist tyranny, and the South was completely unprepared for war with the North. This really wasn't substantially different in the north, especially early on in the war. States essentially furnished their own volunteers and equipment and leadership and etc with practically no federal oversight. and of course, neither side was in either way prepared to wage a full-scale industrial war until years after the fighting had started. The big difference between the two sides politically was that Lincoln was able to use the war as a very effective argument in favor of more federal power, which of course has had huge impacts in American politics right up until the present day . Jefferson Davis tried the entire war to get more centralized power but never succeeded for obvious reasons.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:28
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Also, volunteers and militia were not the same thing during the Civil War the most part. Militias were strictly local and almost totally ad hoc, volunteers in contrast were formed into regiments and then join the respective armies of both sides.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:30
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There's reports of some of the milita units going into the very first battles with pikes (mixed in among the hodgepodge of home-owned muskets and shotguns).
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Apr 16, 2017 17:31
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Jesus how was the south a threat at all
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Apr 16, 2017 17:46
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Why was Austro-Hungarian army so ineffective during WW1 that Germany had to repeatedly save its dual royal rear end against Russians, Italians and even Serbs?
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Apr 16, 2017 17:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Define "winning" Your post is vaguely like a TLDR of The War Nerd talking about the IRA vs Al Qaeda Does an interesting job of comparing the IRA's success to Al Qaeda's "success", difference is he's doing it from the pov of the terror groups as opposed to the pov of counterinsurgency as per the question you were answering. Cyrano4747 posted:For most rebel groups that's not dying and being enough of a nuisance that they want to talk to you. Gary Brecher posted:You could do it like those Fight Club rules: The Sausages fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 17:48
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Phi230 posted:Jesus how was the south a threat at all Because the North wasn't really prepared for war, either, and the political situation in the North was dicey. The South never had a chance in hell of somehow conquering the North, but a stalemate leading to a temporary peace isn't too hard to imagine. I say temporary, because the CSA as an independent nation would have been the pariah of the world and in the economic shitter while the North would have been in a much better position. The CSA was also ridiculously unstable internally and it's not hard to imagine the CSA itself splintering in this Gay Black Hitler scenario. All the CSA states agreed on was slavery. As it was, the CSA was riven by internal dissent, desertion, and in places outright rebellion - Florida was particularly noted as a hotbed of anti-Confederate activity and desertion.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:49
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Alchenar posted:There's reports of some of the milita units going into the very first battles with pikes (mixed in among the hodgepodge of home-owned muskets and shotguns). One out of two gets a pike, the one without a pike follows. When the one with the pike gets killed, the one who follows picks up the pike and pikes.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:53
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OwlFancier posted:If they were using long swords or similar, try and wrestle the other guy down, smack him with your sword hilt, then grab the pointy end of your own sword with your offhand and try to position it at the arm or neck joint and then jam it in there as hard as you can. So while you've got the gist of it, there's a few details that are not quite right. So: If you've wrestled a guy to the ground you don't need to smack him with the hilt of your sword, because you've basically got control of him at this point and can stab him up. Your options are not limited to the arm and neck joints (and some helmets like the great bascinet don't have a neck joint, while gothic armour tends to keep it well-covered). You can rip off someone's helmet, lift up the visor, or stab the groin and hit the femoral artery. Blows with the blade of the sword were still used, and could still do quite a lot of damage when hitting the head or a joint or, say, after ripping off a piece of your opponents armor. That we see a not insignificant number of cutting-oriented swords in the 15th/16th centuries suggests to me that they were still useful. Some of these late cutting swords were single handed and oriented toward use from horseback, but more thrust-oriented swords and wrestling techniques would be useful here too. You could even tuck your sword under your armpit and brace the crossguard against your shoulder like a lance. quote:Armoured knights would generally not fight each other with swords so much, rather they'd use hammers or picks to punch through the armour, or in the hopes of just braining each other hard enough to do some damage, or they'd use something like a rondel dagger, which is basically a metal stake that you smack the pommel of to jam it through armour. I don't really agree with the first part of the sentence. Though maces and warhammers do become significantly more common in the 15th century they still do not appear in art or in written sources as much as swords. Moreover, the main anti-armor weapon of the mounted knight was, throughout the period, the lance (or various pole weapons on foot, from spears to pollaxes depending on circumstance).  There's some correct stuff in here but John Clements is a dipshit. He implies that it's easy to thrust through mail and says using the only way a swung sword could hurt a man in armor was with a mortschlag. gently caress off.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:54
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Phi230 posted:Jesus how was the south a threat at all This thread in general tend to make very poor assessments of the Confederacy, I assume as a reaction to the lost causers out there on the Internet, in much the same way it does with World War II Germany. without going into an obnoxious amount of detail, there really wasn't a whole lot of difference in general competence between the respective sides. That said, the south wasn't going to marching to Washington and demand anyone surrender, despite lees complete faith otherwise. What they could have done, and what they came alarmingly close to actually doing, was wearing out the Northern will to continue to fight. Lincolns management of his political capital and his understanding the political reality he faced was the deciding factor as much as anything.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:59
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Found a way for HEY GAL to get involved in discussions on the sound of a grenade launcher going off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YIIUtUKm3g
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Apr 16, 2017 18:03
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The Sausages posted:Your post is vaguely like a TLDR of The War Nerd talking about the IRA vs Al Qaeda Does an interesting job of comparing the IRA's success to Al Qaeda's "success", difference is he's doing it from the pov of the terror groups as opposed to the pov of counterinsurgency as per the question you were answering.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:17
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Nenonen posted:Why was Austro-Hungarian army so ineffective during WW1 that Germany had to repeatedly save its dual royal rear end against Russians, Italians and even Serbs? Problems include: Incredibly multinational army often with units with no fully common language Incredibly multinational nation with minimal buy-in from large swathes of the country Franz Joseph dying A large part of the country is still totally de-industrialised Trying to achieve victory by decisive attacks early in the war that crumble in to disorganised massacres Bad generals &c.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:27
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Arquinsiel posted:I think, perhaps, that the Irish sea might be more of a barrier to trains than the gauge difference. What are you saying? Ireland has a land border with the EU not for long though
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Apr 16, 2017 18:29
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You think its funny how officers literally can't talk to subordinates because of language barriers
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Apr 16, 2017 18:29
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Disinterested posted:Problems include: It went much further than "just" national antipathies. The entire Austro-Hungarian confederacy had been moribund thanks to institutional gridlock, and I will quote my post from an earlier thread quoting a paper on the topic to showcase just how hosed Austrian military was on the eve of WWI, and how impossible it would have been for it to enter the war with either competent personnel, or sufficient material equipment: quote:I'll translate a couple of paragraphs on how the Army was run and financed during the Franz Joseph era, specifically during the Austria-Hungary period. Tl;dr - the AH military had been deliberately and by design sabotaged by political cliques of the EMpire.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:41
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steinrokkan posted:Tl;dr - the AH military had been deliberately and by design sabotaged by political cliques of the EMpire. And this kind of thing is why Franz Ferdinand was assassinated - he was a dedicated reformer who wanted to un-gently caress Austria-Hungary and had the resources and means to do it when he ascended the throne, or at least to make a drat good try of it. This made him a threat to people who didn't want to see Austria-Hungary un-hosed (i.e. pretty much everyone but Germany).
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Apr 16, 2017 18:45
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The archduke was assassinated because serbia stronk, you fool
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Apr 16, 2017 18:52
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Cythereal posted:And this kind of thing is why Franz Ferdinand was assassinated - he was a dedicated reformer who wanted to un-gently caress Austria-Hungary and had the resources and means to do it when he ascended the throne, or at least to make a drat good try of it. This made him a threat to people who didn't want to see Austria-Hungary un-hosed (i.e. pretty much everyone but Germany). I don't really think the country's problems were soluble.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:56
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Disinterested posted:I don't really think the country's problems were soluble. Probably, but Franz Ferdinand intended to try and Serbia's leadership regarded him as more dangerous than A-H's warhawks because of it. Ferdinand wanted a softer hand in the Balkans and with A-H's minorities, and was apparently thinking about working towards some sort of "United States of Greater Austria" sort of deal. He was targeted and assassinated because these plans made him much more dangerous to Serbia than any warmonger could have been.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:59
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Safety Biscuits posted:What are you saying? Ireland has a land border with the EU not for long though 
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Apr 16, 2017 19:01
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Cythereal posted:Probably, but Franz Ferdinand intended to try and Serbia's leadership regarded him as more dangerous than A-H's warhawks because of it. Ferdinand wanted a softer hand in the Balkans and with A-H's minorities, and was apparently thinking about working towards some sort of "United States of Greater Austria" sort of deal. He was targeted and assassinated because these plans made him much more dangerous to Serbia than any warmonger could have been. You know who also hated those ideas? Hungarians.
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Apr 16, 2017 19:02
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Arquinsiel posted:The Northern Irish tracks are the same gauge v  v I'm not going to let a little ignorance get in the way of a cheap joke.
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Apr 16, 2017 19:04
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Disinterested posted:You know who also hated those ideas? Hungarians. And your point? Ferdinand was well aware of that, and had moved extensively to curtail and block the Hungarian elite. Yes, A-H's problems were probably unsolvable, but Franz Ferdinand intended to try and had the resources and means to make a drat good go of it. This made him a threat to anyone who didn't want to see A-H's problems solved and lead to his assassination by Serbia.
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Apr 16, 2017 19:08
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Disinterested posted:Problems include: And yet somehow they were losing to Russians who also had a multinational army, poor morale, corrupt and incompetent government, poor industrialization, bad generals (albeit some good ones), and had had a huge rebellion just 10 years back. But I assume that an overall larger industrial base and army helped to overwhelm the Austrians and also the generals fighting the Austrians seem to have been more competent than the ones at the Masurian lakes, at least, and no worse or better than their Austrian opponents?
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Apr 16, 2017 19:10
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Phanatic posted:Note that this is still an issue in the EU. Spain uses a different gauge than most of the rest of Europe, and then you've got the Russian gauge that's used in the Baltics and Finland. Ireland uses a different gauge than everyone else. Also, I believe the Erie Railroad in New York was built to a different gauge from all the other railroads in the Northeast for some reason which I can no longer recall. They fixed it fairly early on, but with railroad construction in the United States being a semi-private affair stuff like that could sometimes happen.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:11
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Arquinsiel posted:That article actually totally ignores Omagh, which is what actually made the Good Friday Agreement stick. Other than that, he's right. "Nerf war" won, and the Omagh bombing, while debatably intended to be a nerf bomb, resulted in both sides seeing what would happen if the gloves came off. He's also massively over-charitable to the IRA, who did regularly engage in reprisal killings. Mostly targeted at military personnel, but still... they killed people. Lots of people. The article is really bad, and gets lots of things wrong. To avoid writing an effort post, the alternative narrative on the IRA is that they were utterly militarily defeated, compromised by the security services, and their political leadership had the police closing in on them. The Good Friday Agreement was not a victory for the IRA, they had to concede the legitimacy of NI's place in the UK while all the UK gave up in return was the principle of the right to self-determination (which you'll note has been UK policy on literally every part of it's territory).
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Apr 16, 2017 20:14
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Nenonen posted:And yet somehow they were losing to Russians who also had a multinational army, poor morale, corrupt and incompetent government, poor industrialization, bad generals (albeit some good ones), and had had a huge rebellion just 10 years back. But I assume that an overall larger industrial base and army helped to overwhelm the Austrians and also the generals fighting the Austrians seem to have been more competent than the ones at the Masurian lakes, at least, and no worse or better than their Austrian opponents? The problems of the 1905 revolutions really only reared back up in 1917. It really took an inordinate amount of incompetence for majority of Russians to turn against the Tsar, but Nicholas II was just that kind of guy. Imperial Russia was ~50% Russian, ~20% Belarussian and Ukrainian, while Austro-Hungary was 25% Austrian, 20% Hungarian, 13% Czech, and so on. They aren't comparable. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 20:17
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Arquinsiel posted:That article actually totally ignores Omagh, which is what actually made the Good Friday Agreement stick. Other than that, he's right. "Nerf war" won, and the Omagh bombing, while debatably intended to be a nerf bomb, resulted in both sides seeing what would happen if the gloves came off. He's also massively over-charitable to the IRA, who did regularly engage in reprisal killings. Mostly targeted at military personnel, but still... they killed people. Lots of people. War Nerd is always a bit sloppy on specifics. Still I think it does a good job of making the point that an insurgency isn't really purely or even primarily a military action, they are political movements with political goals, and force or violence is just one means to that end. EggsAisle posted:Are there cases where it has worked? This has me really curious now. It's difficult to think of cases like this because the fact that a consequential insurgency has occurred means the hearts and minds of the subject people have already been lost by a government. However its not just the government that has to win hearts and minds, rather they and the insurgents are competing for the support and backing of the people. The far-left terrorist groups of Western Europe which mobilized in the seventies, like the Red Army Faction in West Germany or the Red Brigades of Italy, never really developed a popular base of support. Without a broad base of support these organizations could never truly threaten the state and as dedicated cadres died or were imprisoned they were rarely replaced and the groups withered. In Peru the revolutionary Maoist organization the Shining Path became popular among Indians, who had long resented and been neglected by the Federal government. In the 1980s and 1990s they expanded across much of rural Peru, controlling territory and threatening the government. However The Shining Path soon turned towards brutal and unpopular methods, indiscriminately slaughtering the inhabitants of villages known for collaboration and barring farmers from taking goods to market in a misguided effort to besiege Lima and strangle the capitalist system. While peasants still mistrusted the government, many also began to fear the Shining Path, and the state took advantage by organizing local self-defense militias that kept the Shining Path out. Losing popular support and facing a more competent military campaign, the Shining Path have been declining in strength since the 1990s.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:29
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bewbies posted:This thread in general tend to make very poor assessments of the Confederacy, I assume as a reaction to the lost causers out there on the Internet, in much the same way it does with World War II Germany. without going into an obnoxious amount of detail, there really wasn't a whole lot of difference in general competence between the respective sides. One particular thing I've found interesting is that Lincoln really wasn't that popular when he came into office, but he managed things well and built political coalitions to support the war, because he turned out to be an extremely competent president. Jeff Davis, on the other hand, was a popular figure but an absolutely lovely president, who couldn't whip the various states in line, refused to fire bad generals like Bragg and generally lost his support due to his mismanagement of the war..
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Apr 16, 2017 20:46
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Alchenar posted:The article is really bad, and gets lots of things wrong. Remember that class issue? Well things have gotten less obviously split along Religious/Political lines, with there now being far less wealthy Unionists. This has ended up meaning that when Martin McGuinness, known terrorist, collapsed the government a while back by retiring due to medical issues the former terrorist was seen as "a man of principle" by people across the spectrum, most notably with even UUP members speaking fondly of him. Conversely, Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, is now known to be a racist white collar criminal. As for "utterly militarily defeated"... lolwut? The people still exist. They still have access to weapons. Splinter factions of the IRA became a significant problem in the Republic through the late 90's and into the early 20-teens as they turned to crime to finance their campaigns. The Orange Order still plays game of fleggs in the runup to every Patrick's Day and every 12th of July. And, most importantly, none of the underlying problems have gone away. The DUP has still managed to stonewall legislation coming from Westminster so that abortion and same sex marriage are not available up north. They campaigned for Brexit, but only in London, while the rest of the parties are aware that the entire Good Friday Agreement is underpinned by EU assistance in various forms. If you don't think that the IRA holdouts and the acronym soup of Loyalist paramilitary organisations cancrank things back up to the level they were at the height of the troubles within a few years when Brexit fucks things for one side or another then I dunno what to tell you other than I envy your optimism. TL;DR: Northern Ireland felt like an ignored part of the Union, made noise, got attention, calmed down. Brexit made them feel ignored again 
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Apr 16, 2017 21:01
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Das Boot is another good war movie. Watch it in the original German with subtitles, or watch the English version, it's one of the few good dubs -- all the actors also spoke English, so they did their own lines in the English redub.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:48
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Kemper Boyd posted:One particular thing I've found interesting is that Lincoln really wasn't that popular when he came into office, but he managed things well and built political coalitions to support the war, because he turned out to be an extremely competent president. I often wonder how good of a president Lincoln would've been if the war hadn't happened. It seems like the duties of a president in peacetime might be significantly different than those during a war. It's also possible that the south may have been able to do more damage to the Republican cause by sticking around and deadlocking legislation and sabotaging Lincoln at every turn, but I suppose they knew that they'd only be buying time in the long game at that point.
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Apr 16, 2017 22:20
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