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Rockopolis posted:Here's a weird question - what is the reason that militaries pick tanks over assault guns? Like, it's trading between a rotating turret and a bigger gun and more armor, right? Why is the turret the superior choice? I think this assumes too much intent between the two. With the Germans, tanks and assault guns were intended to be two different things for two different purposes. I mean, we're familiar with tanks as the mobile exploitation platform, but then assault guns were supposed to take the place of "infantry guns" as direct-fire weapons that would be used to destroy fortifications, only these things were mounted on tracks so that they could keep up with the advance. Even when they started making the Marder-type assault guns, it was more of a means of using excess tank chassis and mating them to captured AT guns than a conscious choice between "do I make an assault gun or do I make a tank".
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Jun 9, 2017 10:30
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limp_cheese posted:
 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...llaging&f=false HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 11:07
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limp_cheese posted:Does anybody know how the wounded were cared for or treated at various points in history? Not just hospital poo poo, but how they were taken care of after the fact when they went home. From my understanding simple wounds were fatal because of poor hygiene, lovely tools, and limited medical knowledge. Afterwards the wounded were made to fend for themselves without much of a stipend , if any. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Army-Flanders-Spanish-Road-1567-1659/dp/052183600X https://global.oup.com/academic/product/italy-1636-9780198738244?cc=gb&lang=en& The Spanish armies are very well run from a medical standpoint. There are military hospitals, which are free for soldiers of Spanish ethnicity, and partially funded by the government. These hospitals are well staffed and well equipped--if you've got to get hurt in the early modern period, and you're not in the Muslim world, a Spanish military hospital is probably the best place for you. I don't know a whole lot about 16th and early 17th century soldiers' experiences after they leave the hospital, if they're suffering chronic effects. I do know that the mid 17th century French crown founded hospitals for old or permanently disabled soldiers. Probably not enough, but the impulse was there. These people are not heartless--they just don't know as much about medicine as we do, and in many cases they don't have enough resources. And given the way surgery progressed, with centuries of slow advancement until the late 19th century, my hot take is that a well-trained, experienced 16th or 17th century military surgeon is probably among the best you can get until the beginning of antiseptic surgery. Possibly the best--in contrast to the mid 19th century, the great surgeon Ambrose Pare believed that an abdominal wound is not an automatic death sentence. He recounts saving several people whose intestines he sewed up, and regarded it as a delicate thing but certainly not unusual. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 11:28
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mlmp08 posted:That is probably entirely dependent on how dickish your chain of command wants to be and what the general climate is. If you're at war with Russia and a tank gets nuked by a round, you're probably not going to ensure the radios are destroyed. If you get ambushed by 3 hit-and-run Taliban and use that to say you lost all your kit, probably a bad idea. To expand; there are potentially serious consequences to letting even minor equipment escape in the kind of counter-insurgency operations we've done for the last 10 years. Lose a pair of NVG? Now the local Taliban commander has night vision capability he didn't have before. Lose a single frag grenade? What do you think happens to local/international consent for operations when it gets chucked into a crowd of civilians and the investigation says it was a US weapon?
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Jun 9, 2017 13:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:Even when they started making the Marder-type assault guns, it was more of a means of using excess tank chassis and mating them to captured AT guns than a conscious choice between "do I make an assault gun or do I make a tank". I guess frontal assaults are simplest to understand. Apply force to the enemy until someone loses.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:03
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That depends on what you understand by a bottleneck. In the forties, thoroughly militarized societies could easily devote factories to all aspects of tank production, and today you just buy tanks from the countries that do.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:08
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HEY GAIL posted:
That or you go all the way back to the Romans for the best wound care prior to antiseptics.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:20
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spectralent posted:Is this like "If you were around when there was some fighting but not in much risk and dropped a radio somewhere like a dumbass you have to get it after" or is it like "if you are presently running away from artillery trying to erase your grid reference and you get something knocked out of your hands the procedure-correct thing to do is get it back first"? Because if it's the second, christ. Leadership is generally reasonable if you have a good reason to abandon a piece of kit (ie, getting shot at). The thing to remember is combat is 99.5% walking/driving around, so the vast majority of the time, if a guy loses a piece of kit, he didn't lose it because his life was in immediate serious danger but rather because he sat down to get a drink of water and left it on the curb or on a rock or something.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:23
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Rockopolis posted:See, thats the other thing that gets me, isn't the turret a production bottleneck? Well, yeah, but you build it anyway, because you do need that tank for a purpose that an assault gun/tank destroyer can't do (or you won't want them to do, per your doctrine)
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Jun 9, 2017 14:29
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This picture makes me unreasonably giggly.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:31
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Rockopolis posted:See, thats the other thing that gets me, isn't the turret a production bottleneck? Depends on your situation. The biggest bottleneck is shutting down the whole plant for an indeterminate number of months or years while you re-tool to build a new model. Do you just shut down the completely obsolete Pz38 line or do you find a way to shoe horn an acceptable gun on the chassis, slap some good enough armor over it, and start making Hetzers that your troops can find a use for? edit: also the last time SPGs were a big thing it was the 40s-50s. Design and manufacturing has come a LONG way since then. Raw numbers of AFVs aren't as important any more as the capability of each one. maybe if we ended up in a WW3 situation where we were trying to make vehicles in the local economies of Pennsylvania and Virginia for the warlords fighting over the irradiated rubble they would have a place again, but at that point so does a Honda Civic with the roof cut away and an M2 mounted on playground equipment. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 14:35
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OwlFancier posted:This picture makes me unreasonably giggly. Somebody please post those pics with Romans in a Chinook and those musketeers hanging off a Huey(?)
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Jun 9, 2017 14:35
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Fallout: New Vegas movie looking good.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:58
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Molentik posted:Somebody please post those pics with Romans in a Chinook and those musketeers hanging off a Huey(?) 
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 15:02
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On the subject of battlefield medicine, were amputations as rife in 19th century warfare as pop culture makes it seem? Every ACW movie has the obligatory bite-the-stick scene, the pile of limbs in the background. Was it the same in the US as is was in Europe? We don't see a lot of Crimean War movies, maybe they cut off legs all the time too, I don't know. I remember reading somewhere that it was the minie ball that led to so many amputations; that it was so powerful if it hit you in a limb it would basically gently caress it up so bad the only option was to lose it.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:07
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zoux posted:On the subject of battlefield medicine, were amputations as rife in 19th century warfare as pop culture makes it seem? Every ACW movie has the obligatory bite-the-stick scene, the pile of limbs in the background. Was it the same in the US as is was in Europe? We don't see a lot of Crimean War movies, maybe they cut off legs all the time too, I don't know. I remember reading somewhere that it was the minie ball that led to so many amputations; that it was so powerful if it hit you in a limb it would basically gently caress it up so bad the only option was to lose it. Big, heavy pieces of lead tended to smash bone pretty bad. There wouldn't have been a whole lot left to heal. A figure I saw had over 30,000 amputations among the Union.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:17
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zoux posted:On the subject of battlefield medicine, were amputations as rife in 19th century warfare as pop culture makes it seem? Every ACW movie has the obligatory bite-the-stick scene, the pile of limbs in the background. Was it the same in the US as is was in Europe? We don't see a lot of Crimean War movies, maybe they cut off legs all the time too, I don't know. I remember reading somewhere that it was the minie ball that led to so many amputations; that it was so powerful if it hit you in a limb it would basically gently caress it up so bad the only option was to lose it. Yes.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:30
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chitoryu12 posted:Big, heavy pieces of lead tended to smash bone pretty bad. There wouldn't have been a whole lot left to heal. Also saving a limb pre-antibiotic days is tricky as hell, because all those smashed up bits of flesh don't get good circulation anymore and without bloodflow infection sets in and then you at least lose the limb anyway. Even *with* antibiotics the local circulatory damage means it's hard to deliver those antibiotics to the wound site, so you need to be *really* good at debridement. In Vietnam, okay, maybe you try to save the limb because you know if you didn't debride all the damaged tissue you can take the limb off at a later date and antibiotics will probably safe the rest of the patient, but back then if you screw that first bit up to save the limb you've probably just killed the patient. So risk analysis weighs far heavier towards "Just amputate the thing." Edit: Should also mention that effective surgical debridement of a wound is much harder without complete anaesthesia is much harder than with, because the patient's moving around. Which is another point in favor of just throwing it on the pile. Yeah, most civil war surgery was done under anaesthetic, but usually it was just enough to render the patient insensate, not completely unconscious and immobile, because we didn't figure out how to do that without standing a good chance of killing people until later. So he's still moving around, and if you've got nurses holding him down so you can cut, they're moving around and getting in your light which might not be that great in the first place and it's just going to be pretty unlikely that you're going to get all the dead tissue out. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 15:35
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Up to and including Vietnam, yeah, a lot of amputations. It wouldn't suprise me if the rate is consistently rising, as we get better at saving lives from the initial injury.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:44
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zoux posted:On the subject of battlefield medicine, were amputations as rife in 19th century warfare as pop culture makes it seem? Every ACW movie has the obligatory bite-the-stick scene, the pile of limbs in the background. Was it the same in the US as is was in Europe? We don't see a lot of Crimean War movies, maybe they cut off legs all the time too, I don't know. I remember reading somewhere that it was the minie ball that led to so many amputations; that it was so powerful if it hit you in a limb it would basically gently caress it up so bad the only option was to lose it. It wasn't so much the weapon - a modern rifle round will shatter a bone in much the same way (I blame Shelby Foote for exacerbating this very persistent myth). The issue was getting the wound clean. The bullet would usually carry in digusting bits of dirty clothing with it, and the soldier would probably get dirt in the wound while lying there/being evacuated/etc, so without modern antiseptics and antibiotics infection/gangrene was pretty much inevitable, and along with that the death of the patient. If instead you just cut off the affected limb you didn't have to worry about infection nearly as much as you knew you had a relatively clean wound at the amputation site. ...efb
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Jun 9, 2017 15:46
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Is Shelby Foote good or not?
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Jun 9, 2017 15:49
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Amputations in the Civil War still had a fatality rate of something like 36%, so "relatively" is the operative word.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:52
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I think he was absolutely wonderful both as a writer and as a commentator, however, he said two things in The Civil War (the thing about the minie balls, and "the south never had a chance to win that war") that I respectfully disagree with.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:53
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bewbies posted:I think he was absolutely wonderful both as a writer and as a commentator, however, he said two things in The Civil War (the thing about the minie balls, and "the south never had a chance to win that war") that I respectfully disagree with. I'm curious - the south Could have won by becoming so damaging to the Union the Union would just be "aw gently caress it?"
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Jun 9, 2017 16:37
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'm curious - the south Could have won by becoming so damaging to the Union the Union would just be "aw gently caress it?" Very short explanation: If the North had not won a series of victories, especially Atlanta, right before the 1864 election, the Democrats would have won the presidency on a peace platform and probably sought some sort of accommodation with the CSA.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'm curious - the south Could have won by becoming so damaging to the Union the Union would just be "aw gently caress it?" It depends what you mean by "damage" - they weren't going to ever be able to invade and wreck the north in the way we saw during the world wars...nor would they have wanted to. They had kind of a fine line to walk in that regard. The war's center of gravity was the political will in the north, and had the CSA seriously threatened the security or prosperity of the north, that will would have gotten a huge boost, and thus would have been counterproductive (this is why the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns were so ill-conceived). However, had they focused all of their efforts on draining that political will and driving major changes in the northern government, getting "aw gently caress it" was absolutely a possibility.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:57
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Okay, so the Hetzer was trying to use an obsolete production line with as little downtime as possible. Those stories are fun, I appreciate the cleverness. The pictures are unreasonably hilarious. For amputations, was it always knife and saw like in the movies, or did anyone ever come up with like a guillotine or one of those big paper cutters?
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Jun 9, 2017 16:57
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The other counterfactual: How fast could the Union have won the war if they'd have had more aggressive leadership?
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Jun 9, 2017 17:00
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Rockopolis posted:For amputations, was it always knife and saw like in the movies, or did anyone ever come up with like a guillotine or one of those big paper cutters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine_amputation edit: chainsaws were a thing for sawing through bones long before they were a thing for sawing through wood
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Jun 9, 2017 17:04
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HEY GAIL posted:the knife and saw is for limbs--i have seen a large curved chisel for amputating fingers, which functions like a guillotine, you whack it with a hammer. But fingers are small. The thing is that you not only have to make a clean, deft cut, you need to preserve a flap of skin and flesh to fold over the wound like a big dripping meat burrito--just smashing through the whole thing with a guillotine would be counterproductive. A so-called "guillotine amputation" is a technical term but once you have to do one, poo poo's hosed already. This is cargo cult masculinity bullshit but when I saw it it was the first time I realized that amputation wasn't just sawing off a limb. 
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Jun 9, 2017 17:08
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Cool, that makes sense. Thanks. I'd always thought they just cauterized the stump. Any stories about drunken medical students getting into chainsaw fights?
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Jun 9, 2017 17:09
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No. Have a video looking into this kind of battlefield surgery during the Napoleonic Wars.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:19
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SeanBeansShako posted:No.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:36
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zoux posted:This is cargo cult masculinity bullshit but when I saw it it was the first time I realized that amputation wasn't just sawing off a limb. It should also be noted that the guys who were good at this got FAST. We're talking in the 30-45 second range for getting a leg off. This was crucial because blood loss was going to be a major problem even with a tourniquet.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:It should also be noted that the guys who were good at this got FAST. We're talking in the 30-45 second range for getting a leg off. This was crucial because blood loss was going to be a major problem even with a tourniquet. Too fast sometimes
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Jun 9, 2017 17:54
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http://www.civilwarmedicalbooks.com/civil_war_amputation.html
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Jun 9, 2017 18:10
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Ghostposting from the old thread still, god drat you guys  .There was a discussion about how the wars during the 17th and 18th century were financed. Englund makes the point that one of the reasons it dragged on for so long was that when you signed the peace treaty everything needs to be settled. Salary to soldiers, reparations, deals etc. If the position you're in is not strong enough, or you simply don't have the money, it makes more financial sense to just go on instead of sorting it. So  off to Poland it is.
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Jun 9, 2017 18:44
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How are the casualties distributed over the duration of the ACW? Is there still a campaigning season? How big are the peaks from the major battles vs. what I assume is the background noise from a million skirmishes? Are there disease seasons, winter maybe? So would it be a noisy baseline level of skirmishes and raids, occasional sharp peaks in the campaigning seasons from the major battles, sort of a gradual swell in the winter from epidemics? Something like that?
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Jun 9, 2017 18:45
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zoux posted:Is Shelby Foote good or not? I believe a Shell by your Foote will lead to amputation. So not very good.
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Jun 9, 2017 19:13
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If it is roundshot still rolling across the ground, the force does most of the amputation work if you think you are smart trying to kick it like a ball.
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Jun 9, 2017 19:16
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