Grenrow posted:This isn't true at all. Where does this bullshit myth even come from? Crossbows existed for hundreds of years alongside dudes with arm and they didn't change jack poo poo about the social system. Who was talking about the social system?
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Jun 1, 2017 01:43
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The popular myth is that gunpowder weapons (and, to a lesser extent, crossbows) gave peasants the power to kill knights, and thus destroyed the Dung Age social system, paving the way for the Renaissance. Pure nonsense, of course, but it is obnoxiously enduring.
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Jun 1, 2017 01:53
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Disinterested posted:Who was talking about the social system? Like Gnoman said, that's always the second part of the myth. But in case you'd rather be a pedant: the existence of the crossbow did nothing to devalue the existence of armored men on horseback.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:04
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Tias posted:Dude, are you ever going to do a novel( or better yet, a CYOA) about trying to survive pikes, chronic alcoholism and eternal German lawsuits? If people are even half as much into this poo poo as we are itt you're made. It's kind of an untapped market imo because as far as I know there's basically like....nothing out there about this era in terms of fiction (or, alternatively, there's loads of failed stuff that never got popular because there's no demand for it, it's so hard to tell because I haven't really looked) The pitch is "game of thrones except all the characters are wearing clown suits," who doesn't want this?? Asscreed 2/brotherhood is the closest popular thing I can think of and it was a huge hit, there's got to be a pile of money waiting for the right creative type to pick it up.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:05
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The Lone Badger posted:In the meantime neither of us is feeding it because that would involve de facto taking responsibility for the front half. And, in the fullness of time, the back half.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:16
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Grenrow posted:Like Gnoman said, that's always the second part of the myth. But in case you'd rather be a pedant: the existence of the crossbow did nothing to devalue the existence of armored men on horseback. So then, a question: what caused the steady if uneven devaluation of heavy cavalry in warfare?
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Jun 1, 2017 02:16
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I think your premise is flawed.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think your premise is flawed. Don't just say so.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:30
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Disinterested posted:Don't just say so. What are you basing the "steady devaluation of heavy cavalry in warfare" on? Macdeonian heavy cavalry was highly valued. Byzantine cataphracts were highly valued. Gendarmes were highly valued. Demi-lancers were highly valued. Arme blanche cavalry and Kuirasiers were highly valued and represented a resurgence in traditional heavy cavalry. Cuirassiers were highly valued and represented a resurgence in use of heavy armored cavalry. You're the one who has to prove, in spite of all evidence, that there actually was some sort of devaluation of heavy cavalry in warfare. The thing that killed shock cavalry was probably the minie ball, at the earliest, or more certainly the breech-loading rifle. Heavy shock cavalry fell in to and out of vogue throughout western European history but it never was truly devalued.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:37
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ponzicar posted:I misread that as saber 'stache, and was disappointed that my initial vision of sword blocking mustaches don't exist. Nope, but the real items are hilarious enough out of context. The manliest lace covered manbags.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:44
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:GGS oversteps, like every other grand theory of history. Diamond has a good point in connecting animal domestication and the North-South continental axes with disease immunity, but he has very bad points whenever he talks about actual history. He takes primary sources at face value, and ends up rehashing arguments from a previous century of historiography. It's very shallow. I mean, presumably the academic critiques don't go out of their way to write aggrieved manifestos about how Jared personally murdered their dog.
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Jun 1, 2017 03:12
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Tias posted:Dude, are you ever going to do a novel( or better yet, a CYOA) about trying to survive pikes, chronic alcoholism and eternal German lawsuits? If people are even half as much into this poo poo as we are itt you're made. gently caress that, make it a screenplay and make it a boozer/stoner comedy. I want to see Seth Rogen injured by a stray, drunken gunshot
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Jun 1, 2017 03:21
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Disinterested posted:Don't just say so. Armies did eventually stop using armored cavalry and lancers. In the 1920s. They stopped using light cavalry - after WWII.The military role that knights played in the medieval era didn't go away until the twentieth century. Your entire question can be restated "How do you explain how this thing that never happened happened?"
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Jun 1, 2017 03:23
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thatbastardken posted:people who are good at spies Bit late, but the USA if you count signals intelligence and codebreaking. Humint may be historically lacking for Americans, but code-breaking, signals interception, tapping cables on the ocean floor, and all sorts of fun things along those lines have been a notable strength of the US for a long, long time.
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Jun 1, 2017 03:24
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I'm going to glue little upturned wings onto my Wiesel and drive it around with the hatch open and you can't stop me.
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Jun 1, 2017 03:28
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I'm uncertain whether this really fits a military history thread but: In the late 70's I was doing high school history and I chose an assignment on Sino-Soviet relations and wrote to their respective embassies here in Australia. Well, I didn't expect the replies: a booklet from the Chinese and a practical torrent of booklets and pamphlets from the Russians. They're long gone now but I remember one Russian booklet titled "What are they thinking of in Peking?!". Has anyone seen this kind of propaganda online? I haven't thought about it for years but it was fairly crazy stuff to read.
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Jun 1, 2017 05:10
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Grand Prize Winner posted:gently caress that, make it a screenplay and make it a boozer/stoner comedy. I want to see Seth Rogen injured by a stray, drunken gunshot dude, where's my zweihänder
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Jun 1, 2017 05:12
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ewe2 posted:I'm uncertain whether this really fits a military history thread but: Well, what were they thinking, and did you get top grades for citing it as a source?
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Jun 1, 2017 05:42
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MilHist goons, I'm planning a trip through Europe for September and November, working my way from West to East. I'd like some advice on what to see!  Going to be doing the Airborne March in Arnhem September 2nd and going to Tiger Day at Bovington on the 16th, so I've got some time between those dates to visit the Low Countries and the UK. Since I'm in the area, I'd like to visit some of the battlefields and other historical sites in the area. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what to see and what (if any) tours to go on. My current itinerary is to fly into Amsterdam, spend a few days there, do the Arnhem March, spend another 1-2 days in Arnhem and Njimegen. Then my schedule is more open. Here's what I've been mulling. I've already been to the Somme and Waterloo, so I'd like to see some other things in the area.
Is there anything on here that's a must-see or not worth it? Any guides or tours you recommend? After that, I'm going to take a cross-channel ferry. Might spend a day in Dover, then on to London for a few days to do some research work at the National Archives and see IWM (have already done the Tower, HMS Belfast and the RAF Museum). Will take day trips out to IWM Duxford, the Tank Museum at Bovington, and maybe the FAA Museum. Anything else I should add? From there, I'm going to hop over to south-east Germany and seeing some combination of Munich, Nuremberg, Leipzig, and Dresden for around 5-10 days. Still looking into what I should see. How much time should I spend here and what's worth seeing? Then fly to Russia to see St. Petersburg and Moscow. Going to be seeing the usual mix of palaces, museums, etc. Curious to know if there are any must-sees to visit or tourist traps to avoid. The AIRPOWER thread-favorites Monino Air Museum and the Kubinka Tank Museum might/might not be closed at the moment and I'm having a hell of a time figuring out if they can even be visited at this point. There's apparently a "Patriot's Park" where some of the tanks and planes have been taken, but I can't get much info on it. If anyone has more info about what's going, I'd be glad to hear it! 
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Jun 1, 2017 06:39
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IMO Jared Diamond is offering not that great of answers to very good questions. "A Short History Of Everybody For The Last 13,000 Years" is an insulting subtitle and oversteps hugely. But he's asking the questions, at least, right? Asking you to consider Western dominance, or you might say white supremacy, as a historical and political movement.Splode posted:Europe dominated recently, but now it's the US. The time for global superpowers even being possible is very short, and in that small time Europe is already no longer king. Sorry to pick on you but here's how it looks if you don't even ask. Europe was on top but America beat it. Never mind where "America" came from or what exactly it is. That's like saying Microsoft is richer than Bill Gates, you know? "Europe," "the West," that's the culturally chauvinistic white guys in sailing ships who invested in world conquest 500 years ago and won big. On one scale, Europe collapses and America rises; on a bigger one, Europe and America do pretty loving great at the expense of everyone else. This is on a global scale; almost everywhere humans live, it has left a scar of violence and a transformed society & economy. It's not on a scale with Rome or the Ming, it's on a scale with agriculture. The industrial revolution happened inside it. So people know about this from experience, and they deserve a better explanation than the traditional one: "our race / culture is better than yours, so it wins." And the endgame is unclear in a very scary way. The system is built around the liquidity of bets on its own growth. We've been spending future money since before Ferdinand and Isabella signed the loan. It's hard to think critically about this because even our ways of thinking have grown up inside of it. Even in our wildest fantasies we can't imagine a future without either strip mines on Mars or like, gangs of cannibals. Does Diamond have any answers though? GG&S is basically, "Everything happened because of everything that happened right before it." He may as well have called it Cattle, Longitude, & Barley; everything worth talking about is deterministic, all the way back to the tectonic plates. Is that an argument or some kind of zen koan about historiography? "This method of inquiry produces results typical of itself." That's one way to make your thesis airtight i guess. Collapse and The World Until Yesterday constitute a plea not to do the stuff that they predict we will do, and use specific versions of the past as microcosms of the future, which both seem intellectually sloppy to me. If ideology counts, if values matter, if it's "entirely in our power" to change course, why wasn't the same true for Columbus? ("because we're both living off the mortgages our bosses took out on not changing course," i'd argue, but that's kind of a more depressing version of the same tautology, so I hope it's wrong) Anyway. Big questions!!!
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Jun 1, 2017 06:43
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean, presumably the academic critiques don't go out of their way to write aggrieved manifestos about how Jared personally murdered their dog. Yeah, but there's no addressing that poo poo anyways. Cool smart people explain why they dislike GGS, then the intellectual cosplayers try to piggyback poorly. Or maybe people are enthusiasts who feel strongly without really having the grasp on writing to express it properly. The same phenom happens for literally everything nerdy idk why.
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Jun 1, 2017 06:58
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Bacarruda posted:
Its a little further west but Sainte Mere Eglise has a pretty good air museum regarding the normandy invasion. Also point de huc still has some of the bunkers there and worth seeing. There really isn't much too much to actually see at the beaches except well, the beaches. Also another museum at the American main cemetery thing that was also pretty good. I spent a night in Bayeux and did a day trip with an organised tour, it was a long day but hit all the sites I wanted to (and some I didn't but there it is). Added bonus of spending time in Bayeux is the Bayeux tapestry and Bayeux cathedral. There is also a statue of Dick Winters there now. Dick never gave permission to erect a statue of himself so they had to wait for him to die first. Then apparently you can erect statues of dead people without permission.
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Jun 1, 2017 07:06
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BattleMoose posted:Then apparently you can erect statues of dead people without permission. I guess they asked, and since he didn't say no they assumed it was OK.
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Jun 1, 2017 07:11
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BattleMoose posted:Its a little further west but Sainte Mere Eglise has a pretty good air museum regarding the normandy invasion. Also point de huc still has some of the bunkers there and worth seeing. There really isn't much too much to actually see at the beaches except well, the beaches. Also another museum at the American main cemetery thing that was also pretty good. I spent a night in Bayeux and did a day trip with an organised tour, it was a long day but hit all the sites I wanted to (and some I didn't but there it is). Added bonus of spending time in Bayeux is the Bayeux tapestry and Bayeux cathedral. I've seen Bayeux, Caen, and the Normandy beaches and segments of the airborne battlefields, already. Was definitely worth seeing! Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 08:05
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Ainsley McTree posted:It's kind of an untapped market imo because as far as I know there's basically like....nothing out there about this era in terms of fiction (or, alternatively, there's loads of failed stuff that never got popular because there's no demand for it, it's so hard to tell because I haven't really looked) There's The Simplicissimus for fiction about that time. Problem is, it's also fiction from that time. 
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Jun 1, 2017 08:14
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Ensign Expendable posted:Well, what were they thinking, and did you get top grades for citing it as a source? They weren't thinking about Russia at all and yes. My history teacher congratulated me on inadvertently starting my own ASIO file (hi guys!). Back in the cold war 70's Russia seemed sad that China wasn't joining a worldwide brotherhood of Communism (or at least that's the impression they were keen on presenting) and arguing over borders. As I surmised at the time, Chinese communism was an improvement on previous autocratic models and they were particularly disinterested in the overtures from any direction, let alone Russia's.
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Jun 1, 2017 08:56
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Bacarruda posted:Euro trip I have some suggestions for you when you are in the Netherlands; - Dont go to the new National Military Museum in Soesterbeek, it's very fancy design wise but the collection isn't that great. - If you are in Arnhem visit Hartenstein ( the Airborne museum) which is pretty great. There is also the 'Bronbeek' museum which specialises in our colonial militairy history. It's not that well known, but I think it is a very nice museum. - Whatever you do, don't miss out on the Overloon museum. Overloon was the locatation of the bloodiest tank battle on Dutch soil and they have a huuuuge museum there. They have a shitload of tanks like a Panther, Shermans, T-34, Hetzer etc along with a huge collection of US trucks, weapons etc.
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Jun 1, 2017 10:10
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Cythereal posted:Bit late, but the USA if you count signals intelligence and codebreaking. Humint may be historically lacking for Americans, but code-breaking, signals interception, tapping cables on the ocean floor, and all sorts of fun things along those lines have been a notable strength of the US for a long, long time. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing though 
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Jun 1, 2017 10:45
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Ainsley McTree posted:It's kind of an untapped market imo because as far as I know there's basically like....nothing out there about this era in terms of fiction (or, alternatively, there's loads of failed stuff that never got popular because there's no demand for it, it's so hard to tell because I haven't really looked) There's the 1632 series  (Hope you like books about why Americans rule, Europeans drool, and all anyone in the 17th century ever needed was good old American knowhow and the US constitution)
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Jun 1, 2017 11:34
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Molentik posted:I have some suggestions for you when you are in the Netherlands; Thanks for the suggestions! It's very helpful!
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Jun 1, 2017 13:35
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Gnoman posted:Armies did eventually stop using armored cavalry and lancers. In the 1920s. They stopped using light cavalry - after WWII.The military role that knights played in the medieval era didn't go away until the twentieth century. Your entire question can be restated "How do you explain how this thing that never happened happened?" There is a difference between armored cavalry and knights. While knights would often take on the battlefield the role of cavalry, the term knight defines a warrior social class in the medieval era that did fade away. The increased production of crossbows and guns did not eliminate cavalry, but it did eliminate excessive armor as if it is not going to protect you anyway, then why bother wearing it? This changed the cost associated with fielding cavalry and suddenly you did not need a class of warriors who devoted almost all the resources they had to serving a purpose in battle. This combined with an increased centralizing of states and knights just stopped being as needed so they got absorbed into the general nobility.
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Jun 1, 2017 13:57
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Hunt11 posted:There is a difference between armored cavalry and knights. While knights would often take on the battlefield the role of cavalry, the term knight defines a warrior social class in the medieval era that did fade away. The increased production of crossbows and guns did not eliminate cavalry, but it did eliminate excessive armor as if it is not going to protect you anyway, then why bother wearing it? This changed the cost associated with fielding cavalry and suddenly you did not need a class of warriors who devoted almost all the resources they had to serving a purpose in battle. This combined with an increased centralizing of states and knights just stopped being as needed so they got absorbed into the general nobility. To the extent they did, anyway. It's still a way to mark out people as higher class, I live in Denmark and can't throw a can without hitting a Knight of Dannebrog or Knight of the Elephant and what have you. Tias fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 14:02
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Can confirm that Overloon is very good.
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Jun 1, 2017 14:09
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:What are you basing the "steady devaluation of heavy cavalry in warfare" on? Macdeonian heavy cavalry was highly valued. Byzantine cataphracts were highly valued. Gendarmes were highly valued. Demi-lancers were highly valued. Arme blanche cavalry and Kuirasiers were highly valued and represented a resurgence in traditional heavy cavalry. Cuirassiers were highly valued and represented a resurgence in use of heavy armored cavalry. and in the last third of the thirty years war the proportion of cav goes up, since they are the branch of service most suited to mobile, lightly supplied war of maneuver over huge distances
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Jun 1, 2017 14:20
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Tias posted:Dude, are you ever going to do a novel( or better yet, a CYOA) about trying to survive pikes, chronic alcoholism and eternal German lawsuits? If people are even half as much into this poo poo as we are itt you're made. She did make a CYOA. RIP Lisandro Bartolome de Avila, you Spain-ed the poo poo out of Germany, you ganked the good  "
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Jun 1, 2017 14:21
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HEY GAIL posted:in the early 17th century gunpowder made heavy cav more important, because now those dudes have pistols Draaaagoooooooooooooooooooooons!
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Jun 1, 2017 14:27
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HEY GAIL posted:in the early 17th century gunpowder made heavy cav more important, because now those dudes have pistols My understanding is that the proportion of Cavalry:Infantry kept rising in the 17th Century until it was effectively 1:1, and only with the introduction of the plug bayonet in the 1670's onwards did the ratio swing back until you hit the Napoleonic era and "Well drilled and led infantry are effectively immune to cavalry" has become established wisdom.
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Jun 1, 2017 14:33
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Hunt11 posted:There is a difference between armored cavalry and knights. While knights would often take on the battlefield the role of cavalry, the term knight defines a warrior social class in the medieval era that did fade away. The increased production of crossbows and guns did not eliminate cavalry, but it did eliminate excessive armor as if it is not going to protect you anyway, then why bother wearing it? This changed the cost associated with fielding cavalry and suddenly you did not need a class of warriors who devoted almost all the resources they had to serving a purpose in battle. This combined with an increased centralizing of states and knights just stopped being as needed so they got absorbed into the general nobility. The social class that medieval knights constituted stayed hugely important for centuries after gunpowder became dominant. I mean, gently caress, in France you have significant tensions with Louis XIV trying to ennoble bureaucrats so he can get some truly competent experts running his emipre and you don't really deep six that old system until the Revolution. Even then it's really the industrial revolution that creates a new basis for wealth and power that really obsoletes the landed aristocracy. And EVEN THEN it clings on like a motherfucker in some areas. Your average Junker general staff douchebag in 1910 is very much a product of the same institutions that fed petty nobles into the politics of the HRE. Oh, and that guy's temper tantrum about losing control of society is part of what is going to make him back a certain Austrian political upstart (who he thinks he can control) to get his hands back on society's reins.
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Jun 1, 2017 14:40
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Bacarruda posted:
The Kubinka tank museum is a part of Patriot Park. Some tanks are being moved out to more viewer friendly areas (as in not dusty garages packed side to side) where you can actually walk all around and look at them from all sides.
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Jun 1, 2017 14:42
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Bacarruda posted:Thanks for the suggestions! It's very helpful! If you have the time in Northern France I'd strongly suggest checking out the V3 tunnels at Mimoyeques, the V2 launch site and blockhouse at Eperleques and La Coupole near St Omer (the latter is more a generic aerospace museum but the building itself is fascinating).
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