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What are some of the worst military weapons ever made, in terms of uselessness/being overdesigned/cost/killing their users? e: Cold War and earlier only 
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Sep 1, 2017 15:39
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Mans ego.
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Sep 1, 2017 15:45
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1. Theres that Canadian shield shovel thing from ww1 that couldn't shovel, couldn't shield, and was a bitch to carry around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_Shield_Shovel 2. Theres the idea of soviet anti-tank dogs in WW2. 3. The British chicken powered nuclear mine. 4. Theres that Russian battleship that was a a circle instead of a regular hull design. Probably more, but those are the prominent ones that come to mind that were completely loving useless. Theres plenty of lovely guns, but at least they 'worked' in ideal conditions. The above were loving useless even in perfect conditions.
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Sep 1, 2017 15:46
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Me-163 Komet Me-210
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Sep 1, 2017 15:58
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ugh its Troika posted:What are some of the worst military weapons ever made, in terms of uselessness/being overdesigned/cost/killing their users? Vought F7U Cutlass
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Sep 1, 2017 16:03
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I find it interesting that the military vote went 3-1 in favour of Lincoln over McClellan. He might have been popular with the troops, but they evidently didn't like the idea of him being in charge.
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Sep 1, 2017 16:20
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The attempt by an enterprising individual to turn the Enfield into a semi automatic rifle by bolting a load of gubbins to the side of the gun which automate the bolt cycling process, would qualify if not for the infuriating fact that it does actually work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U682yOpNafg Still wasn't taken up because it wasn't judged necessary and I don't think it would have been taken very seriously. And also it requires a bunch of extra steel bits to be stuck on it in order to prevent it from taking your fingers off or putting your eye out while firing, turns out putting all the guts on the outside of the gun isn't the best idea! OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Sep 1, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2017 16:26
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Man, why isn't this in Battlefield 1.
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Sep 1, 2017 16:30
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ugh its Troika posted:What are some of the worst military weapons ever made, in terms of uselessness/being overdesigned/cost/killing their users? shield with a gun in it that dude who wanted all pikemen to also be archers the pike dragoon idea
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Sep 1, 2017 17:01
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ugh its Troika posted:What are some of the worst military weapons ever made, in terms of uselessness/being overdesigned/cost/killing their users? (mostly airplanes) - He 177 might have literally killed more of their own crews than enemy personnel - V-2s are documented to have killed more people in their construction than in their deployment - Quebec class submarines use a air-independant propulsion system: using big oxygen tanks to feed the diesel engine's combustion, then condensing the waste products out of the air, and they were dangerous as gently caress - Germany being sold on F-104 Starfighters for ground attack proved very unfortunate for the Luftwaffe - Tu-22 blinders were tricky to fly and had laughably bad ergonomics, killed a lot of their crews - B-58s were not much better, 1/3rd of the airframes were lost due to accidents? - The MiG-23 while being a good guided rocket was tricky as poo poo to fly - an American test pilot described it as the plane constantly watching and waiting for a good time to kill its pilot
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Sep 1, 2017 17:12
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo This is also the top search result if you google "us torpedo scandal."
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Sep 1, 2017 17:13
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Alchenar posted:I find it interesting that the military vote went 3-1 in favour of Lincoln over McClellan. He might have been popular with the troops, but they evidently didn't like the idea of him being in charge. At that point, they probably didn't like the idea of not winning the war. It may technically be a sunk cost fallacy, but if you've been through the ACW poo poo-show, and it's becoming clear that your side is actually going to win, you probably want the guy that will see that through instead of the guy running on the idea of not doing that. "I didn't march through the wilderness to quit before we win" kind of thing.
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Sep 1, 2017 17:20
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HEY GAIL posted:shield with a gun in it The German Maxim was quite good though?
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Sep 1, 2017 17:23
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Hunley sank a decent-sized ship but sank itself three times and took 250% crew casualties in the process, whether or not this counts as a success I'll leave up to the reader to decide. If you don't insist on viewing it as a submarine you could argue that it was one of the more successful suicide torpedoes in that it sank something besides itself
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Sep 1, 2017 17:45
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Saint Celestine posted:4. Theres that Russian battleship that was a a circle instead of a regular hull design.
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Sep 1, 2017 17:46
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aphid_licker posted:Hunley sank a decent-sized ship but sank itself three times and took 250% crew casualties in the process, whether or not this counts as a success I'll leave up to the reader to decide. if we'd had two of them we could have submarine jousted
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Sep 1, 2017 17:50
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I feel like the Hunley should always be put next to the Monitor as a comparison between the experimental superweapons between the sides.Fangz posted:Man, why isn't this in Battlefield 1. Videogames sadly haven't figured out yet to fully model the experience of a lovely gun.
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Sep 1, 2017 17:53
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OwlFancier posted:The attempt by an enterprising individual to turn the Enfield into a semi automatic rifle by bolting a load of gubbins to the side of the gun which automate the bolt cycling process, would qualify if not for the infuriating fact that it does actually work. This owns in every way
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Sep 1, 2017 18:01
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The leg bag issued to the 506 for their D-Day jump. Other units had bags of different designs that worked fine, theirs had a tendency to fly away under anything other than optimal conditions leaving much of the regiment unarmed. The brits say the US overloaded them and the transports were going too fast. I think that ~15 lbs and a few MPH is a pretty lovely reason to excuse bad design. It's a bag on a strap, use thicker material, heck maybe even two straps.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:17
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Acebuckeye13 posted:He was popular with his troops, his fellow commanders hated him, and Lincoln thought he was a pompus rear end in a top hat but was willing to put up with him until after Antitem. That is absolutely not true. There was an active anti-McClellan faction in the Army of the Potomac's leadership, mostly consisting of generals who didn't owe their positions to McClellan, but they were a minority, and were mostly removed during McClellan's tenure. After Antietam, Hooker and a very small circle around him were all that was left of this bunch, and Hooker didn't (yet) have the support to openly revolt. The pro-McClellan faction played a major role in undermining the army's successive commanders until Meade (who was a moderate McClellanite himself) was able to get the officer corps under control. Meade managed this in part because there had been a steady drain of McClellan partisans from the Army of the Potomac since Antietam, especially under Hooker. The army's officer corps remained McClellanite until the end of the war, but by 1864 was nonpartisan enough not to cause trouble*. The Union's professional officer corps leaned conservative, and were mostly Democrats. Many, if not most, hoped to fight a soft war that would bring the South back into the Union with a minimum of bloodshed and were unenthusiastic about the social changes that the end of slavery might bring. McClellan exemplified this stance on the war, and promoted it among the officers and men of his army. McClellan and his supporters were always able to explain away his battlefield disappointments by pointing at a lack of support from the Lincoln and Stanton, as well as phantom Confederate armies. McClellan's relationship with Lincoln was dysfunctional enough, and the administration worked at cross purposes with McClellan just enough, that the army's officers were willing to give McClellan the benefit of the doubt even into 1864. *The officer corps still tended to fight like a McClellanite army though, which caused no end of trouble.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:18
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Class Warcraft posted:I wanna hear more about this.  The Russian Monitor Novgorod. Lots has been written about it around the place as its relatively famous, but essentially the idea was to build a coastal defence ship with a very shallow draught for her displacement and use that to mount more armour and guns. It achieved this by removing a lot of the features boats had, like a keel as you can see below and an almost complete lack of freeboard as you can see in the drawing above. The concept being the flat bottom meant that it was very buoyant for its weight and stable so it could mount large guns and lots of armour and fire them effectively without sinking while being as cheap as possible. Given it wasn't meant to be taken away from the shore the idea was that it wouldn't need seakeeping ability etc. 
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Sep 1, 2017 18:22
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^ Beaten by a drat minute, cuuuuurrse yoooou Class Warcraft posted:I wanna hear more about this. It was a monitor, not a Battleship and it wasn't very good enough to make more than two.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:23
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Well gently caress I have to build one of those in from the depths now.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:26
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Can someone explain why Hooker became a euphemism for prostitute? I read Foote's books and he mentions it but doesn't really explain why.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:38
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The circular ships were a really weird experiment. Popov designed a royal yacht along the same lines.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:43
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HEY GAIL posted:shield with a gun in it Hear me out: giant pike shooting bows
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Sep 1, 2017 18:47
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Polyakov posted:
You didn't go into why it was such a piece of poo poo. 1. It was underpowered. 2. It couldn't keep up with the currents in the rivers it was supposed to operate 3. Firing a gun turned the ship. 4. Storms were terrible. 5. You couldn't steer the drat thing with rudders because of the hull shape so you had to use the engines. 6. The guns were exposed on a barbette and fired at a blistering rate of 1 shell every 10 minutes. 7. Did I mention firing the guns turned the ship itself? It was described as such by a witness - "On a trial cruise, they (Novgorod and Vitse-admiral Popov) went up the Dniepr very nicely for some distance, till they turned to retire. Then the current caught them, and they were carried out to sea, whirled helplessly round and round, every soul on board helplessly incapacitated by vertigo." Edit: At some point early in her career, Vitse-admiral Popov was fitted with a telescoping spar torpedo. (See! You can use a longer stick!) Saint Celestine fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Sep 1, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2017 19:02
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Saint Celestine posted:3. Firing a gun turned the ship. That just means you can do a special attack. Historical footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlAsSyDAWR8
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Sep 1, 2017 19:18
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One thing about war before the 20th century is without machines, there were lots fewer bad ideas about weapons of war, because if you did have one of those it was tried out and forgotton almost immediately Speaking of big: were war elephants a big thing? Did they stop being a big thing when gunpowder came about? Were there armored elephants? Cataphract Elephants? What about rhinos? They'd made some badass Cataphract cavalry
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Sep 1, 2017 19:36
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zoux posted:Hear me out: giant pike shooting bows  ?
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Sep 1, 2017 20:04
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He said a PIKE shooting bows not a bow shooting pikes.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:16
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If you are going to start hunting dragons that type of bow makes a lot of sense.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:23
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Saint Celestine posted:"On a trial cruise, they (Novgorod and Vitse-admiral Popov) went up the Dniepr very nicely for some distance, till they turned to retire. Then the current caught them, and they were carried out to sea, whirled helplessly round and round, every soul on board helplessly incapacitated by vertigo." This never happened.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:30
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:This never happened. How do you know? Were you there?
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Sep 1, 2017 20:38
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain why Hooker became a euphemism for prostitute? I read Foote's books and he mentions it but doesn't really explain why. His staff officers hung around D.C. a lot and we're a bit notorious for frequenting the brothels. Think swanky Victorian brothels not s cheap whore house. The joke was that the ladies might as well be on the staff and were called "Hookers girls". This got shortened and stuck around.
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Sep 1, 2017 21:18
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Saint Celestine posted:How do you know? Were you there? I mean I'm also wondering how a sailor gets helplessly incapacitated by a drifting barge. Unless someone left one side of the engines on. Nebakenezzer posted:Were there armored elephants? Cataphract Elephants? The Royal Armouries in Leeds would probably venture a yes on that count. https://collections.royalarmouries.org/object/rac-object-1761.html It was sadly in for renovation when I went.  I want to be the person at the armoury who had to go through the phonebook looking for life size elephant model suppliers, ring them up, and say "Hey we need an elephant, no, I've already got a set of clothes for it, I need you to size me an elephant for my armour please." Also: quote:Provenance Hello yes and welcome to Wales please mind the GIANT WAR ELEPHANT in the front room that's my wife's haha she is a card. Also "gently caress dad's dead hey HMRC how about this sweet elephant rather than taxing us ta very much." OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Sep 1, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2017 21:27
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Saint Celestine posted:How do you know? Were you there? There's a bunch of bullshit written about those ships, and that's one of the most widely-reported bullshit things about them. Naval historian Stephen McLaughlin wrote a comprehensive debunking of their reputation as LOL RUSSIA MAKE DUMB CIRCLE SHIPS BECAUSE RUSSIANS DUMB in Warship 2015.
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Sep 1, 2017 21:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:His staff officers hung around D.C. a lot and we're a bit notorious for frequenting the brothels. Think swanky Victorian brothels not s cheap whore house. Thanks! It's interesting socially how something like that sticks, as I'm guessing he's not the only guy who's staff had that issue.
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Sep 1, 2017 21:38
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zoux posted:Hear me out: giant pike shooting bows https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun
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Sep 1, 2017 21:43
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McClellan definitely wasn't disliked by the majority of his subordinates, to include senior officers. In fact, that was one of the major reasons why the Democrats nominated him in 1864...he still held a good bit of sway with the army. The people who DID dislike him, a lot, were 1) Republican politicians, and 2) newspapermen sympathetic to the republicans, who were very loud, and very prominent. He didn't help matters by being a huge dick, more or less openly, to Lincoln, which in turn gave other Republicans more reason to dislike him. I've always thought that Ken Burns' series, wonderful as it was, kind of went a little hard on McClellan, and that has gone a long way to influencing our current narrative about him. There were like 2 whole episodes devoted in large part to describing how much he sucked. He was bad, don't get me wrong, but there were so many generals that were so much worse in that war. dublish posted:McClellanite I like this term and am announcing my plans to steal it. bewbies fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Sep 1, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2017 21:52
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