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Vietnam was mostly napalm and agent orange (burn & defoliant respectively). There were a buncha flamethrowers too, but they were in the minority compared to the bombing campaigns.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:09
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Nope. Joke or not you were totally 100% correct. That was literally the purpose of making the flamethrower not look like one. That guy got shot first. Cf. my father, SF radioman. The antenna on his back was basically a big "Shoot me second! (after the officer)" flag. Because if you don't take him out, he calls in an Arc Light and makes your camp look like the surface of the moon.
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Jan 27, 2018 07:48
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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With the Arc Light strikes, was there a bunch of B-52's just floating around at ready notice or did you have to wait for them to scramble?
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Jan 27, 2018 07:54
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Delivery McGee posted:Cf. my father, SF radioman. The antenna on his back was basically a big "Shoot me second! (after the officer)" flag. Because if you don't take him out, he calls in an Arc Light and makes your camp look like the surface of the moon. what is an arc light
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Jan 27, 2018 07:57
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A spanner. Pass me it!
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Jan 27, 2018 08:01
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chernobyl kinsman posted:what is an arc light https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arc_Light
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Jan 27, 2018 08:02
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I thought it was cheaper to just artillery the poo poo out of everything, cause it sure seemed they did that a lot.
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Jan 27, 2018 08:05
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slothrop posted:With the Arc Light strikes, was there a bunch of B-52's just floating around at ready notice or did you have to wait for them to scramble? As far as I can tell, they were Alert-5 on Guam, so it'd take awhile. But when they got there ... well, perhaps I should use Dad's words: "We were in a firefight, and then the world exploded, and a quarter-mile wide by mile-long stretch of jungle was just ... gone." They were so high up you never saw/heard them coming. Also, fun fact, those same aircraft that my pa was calling in 50 years ago are still in service, and expected to last 'til the 2040s. It's not your father's Air Force, but it may be your grandfather's airplane.
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Jan 27, 2018 08:06
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Back of the envelope says that's a 4 hour one way trip at cruising speed. That still seems a long time to wait if you're in the poo poo so bad you need to disappear some jungle.
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Jan 27, 2018 09:09
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Krankenstyle posted:Vietnam was mostly napalm and agent orange (burn & defoliant respectively). They did have some on boats, which apparently saw a reasonable amount of use. Supposedly these had a range of up to 300 metres.  
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Jan 27, 2018 09:20
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Krankenstyle posted:I thought it was cheaper to just artillery the poo poo out of everything, cause it sure seemed they did that a lot. Artillery is only cheap if it's already on site.
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Jan 27, 2018 09:28
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Perestroika posted:They did have some on boats, which apparently saw a reasonable amount of use. Supposedly these had a range of up to 300 metres. gah i cant help but wonder what the pressure was in those monsters if they could throw that long
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Jan 27, 2018 09:29
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I'd say you're looking at a literal fire hose loaded with combustibles and a pilot light attached there.
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Jan 27, 2018 10:30
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Sure but as anyone who's played with matches & gasoline knows, that just dribbles. You need pressure to shoot it somewhere.
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Jan 27, 2018 11:01
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Krankenstyle posted:Sure but as anyone who's played with matches & gasoline knows, that just dribbles. You need pressure to shoot it somewhere. You can make your own with a propane tank and a nozzle. For use on weeds, see, and most definitely not on the neighbors who let their gotdamned pitbull chew through the fence to get at you while you were out in the yard burning weeds. Make sure you store the nozzle away from the propane canister you have for the barbecue, so if anyone gets curious they definitely won't find it behind the Christmas tree in the shed. Not that I would know.
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Jan 27, 2018 11:11
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I was wondering how much pressure was needed for the goddamn vieatnam boats to shoot 300 meters of flames... Not to build it myself, not to do anything, just "wow, that must have needed a lot of pressure".
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Jan 27, 2018 11:17
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I imagine the exact specs of those are still very classified.
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Jan 27, 2018 11:28
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Krankenstyle posted:Sure but as anyone who's played with matches & gasoline knows, that just dribbles. You need pressure to shoot it somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkrQia1GlNY
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Jan 27, 2018 11:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpeWHtlIsB4&t=148s
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Jan 27, 2018 14:00
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awesome, thanks  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdH1hSWGFGU
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Jan 27, 2018 14:04
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Krankenstyle posted:I was literally kidding though lol --- Why else would they camouflage it? You have to remember, a trained farm horse was a fantastically expensive and important thing to a farmer's ability to actually farm. It's the tractor, generator, and family car all in one. A horse multiplies a farmer's ability to make and distribute food. So without those horses, people literally starve. It was probably cheaper to replace the horses then to loose the tax income, local food supply, productivity, and good will.
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Jan 27, 2018 15:01
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Suspect Bucket posted:You have to remember, a trained farm horse was a fantastically expensive and important thing to a farmer's ability to actually farm. It's the tractor, generator, and family car all in one. A horse multiplies a farmer's ability to make and distribute food. So without those horses, people literally starve. It was probably cheaper to replace the horses then to loose the tax income, local food supply, productivity, and good will. Dunno how it was in Denmark, but at least here in southern Germany horses were something only the wealthier farmers had in their possession. My grandma was born on a tiny farmstead in 1932 and told me that most of farmers in her village only had oxen to pull ploughs and carriages, with "horse farmers" being a relatively small minority. This also never really changed, because draught animals would become obsolete soon anyway when agriculture became largely mechanised after WW2.
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Jan 27, 2018 15:16
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I can't speak to those two farmers or their wealth, but definitely the king didn't just hand out money for new horses on a whim. I'm thinking they argued that since the stag that killed the horses was the king's (all deer were), it was his responsibility, but idk. I'll get back on that sometime after next week when I've looked at the actual decree. One of my ancestors did steal a horse in 1845 and sold it to someone else. The case went all the way to the supreme court and he was sentenced a whopping 2x5 days jail lol
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Jan 27, 2018 17:02
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System Metternich posted:Dunno how it was in Denmark, but at least here in southern Germany horses were something only the wealthier farmers had in their possession. My grandma was born on a tiny farmstead in 1932 and told me that most of farmers in her village only had oxen to pull ploughs and carriages, with "horse farmers" being a relatively small minority. This also never really changed, because draught animals would become obsolete soon anyway when agriculture became largely mechanised after WW2. All the more important then that you replace the very valuable farm property owned by an influential farmsteader. Also, 'Gored to death by a stag' sounds incredibly suspicious to me. Anyhoo, it was definitely not a case of generosity. \/\/Prolly\/\/ Suspect Bucket has a new favorite as of 17:37 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 17:08
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King got drunk and killed a horse.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:17
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Lockback posted:King got drunk and killed a horse. 
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Jan 27, 2018 19:48
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Krankenstyle posted:I was wondering how much pressure was needed for the goddamn vieatnam boats to shoot 300 meters of flames... If you read Low Level Hell, which is amazing stories about recon helicopters in Vietnam, the author does mention the Zippo flamethrower AFVs were used as the final line in fire base defense, basically, if the VC/NVA had reached the inner perimeter, that perimeter was A WALL OF FIRE! There's a mention of him seeing the results of the Zippos work after an attack on a fire-base, it apparently wasn't pretty.
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Jan 27, 2018 20:07
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Krankenstyle posted:I thought it was cheaper to just artillery the poo poo out of everything, cause it sure seemed they did that a lot. Artillery has less range than a bomber and is more vulnerable. If you keep the planes in a place the VC can't get (i.e, Gaum) then they're generally pretty safe. If memory serves the Vietnamese could guerrilla the hell out of basically anything they wanted but didn't have good air support or much SAM stuff. Yes there was artillery but it had problems. Planes could just fly over the jungle with relative impunity and carpet bomb just like whatever.
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Jan 27, 2018 23:46
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Artillery has less range than a bomber and is more vulnerable. If you keep the planes in a place the VC can't get (i.e, Gaum) then they're generally pretty safe. If memory serves the Vietnamese could guerrilla the hell out of basically anything they wanted but didn't have good air support or much SAM stuff. Yes there was artillery but it had problems. Planes could just fly over the jungle with relative impunity and carpet bomb just like whatever. B52s were safer than the F105s and F4s, but NVA AA was absolutely lethal and led to the development of Wild Weasel techniques to suppress it.
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Jan 28, 2018 05:50
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On the other hand, artillery can be organic to a combat force, isn't affected by weather, can't be shot down by enemy aircraft/IADS, and has much faster response times. A good artillery battery can have it's guns firing within minutes, whereas it might take 10-30 minutes or more for air support to show up. In WWII for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ptn4a/over_time_the_idea_that_british_artillery_during/ quote:There was a question here a while back that discussed the axis opinion of allied troops. The overall consensus was that the Americans, while far from the most fearsome, were noted by German soldiers to have the best coordinated artillery tactics. Americans used the British system, but with a very significant innovation. They pre-computed the firing data for a HUGE number of variations of wind/temperature, barrel wear, elevation differentials, etc. Then for each possible variation, they created a separate calibrated tape measure. Along the tape was printed the gun laying information instead of distance marks. When a firing mission came in, the plotting officer would simply go to a filing cabinet containing the hundreds (thousands?) of these tapes and pull out the correct one for the current meteorological and situational factors. Then the tape would be laid out between the two grid points on the map (the battery's and the target's) and the firing data would be read from the printing on the tape. Apparently there were some other fudges that got thrown in to make the firing even more accurate. Net result was that there were about three minutes elapsed time from the initial fire support call until shells were making the enemy duck. And the firing was almost as accurate as the spotted German fires. Ergo, very responsive explosions exactly where they are wanted. Again, a drawback to the American system is that it requires very accurate and detailed maps (say showing individual farm buildings for instance) which must be plentifully supplied to troops at all levels. However, given the availability of such maps then American artillery could be hellacious. In fact the technique was so easy, that an otherwise ignorant enlisted man could be readily walked through the procedure over radio when all his officers had fallen. Another innovation of the Americans was their ability to obtain accurate fires extremely quickly from a LARGE number of firing batteries. Because of the simplicity and elegance of the tape system, almost any battery in range could fire on any target in any direction. All they had to do was get a request from another firing HQ or even just listen in on other battalion radio nets. No doubt more than one German officer assumed he'd have at least the first 15 or 20 minutes of his surprise attack free of defensive artillery fire. And when the artillery did start to come in, he'd expect to be warned by the initial spotting rounds. Instead he found he was under immediate fire placed directly on his men while many were still crossing the start line. I'm sure it appeared to more than one German that the Americans must have known when and where such attacks were coming. No wonder some Germans were impressed with American artillery.
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Jan 28, 2018 07:13
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Queen of battle.
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Jan 28, 2018 07:31
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In a bit of new-meets-old, the Voynich manuscript decoding efforts finally made a bit of progress:quote:Importantly, the researchers aren’t saying they’ve deciphered the entire Voynich manuscript. Rather, they’ve identified the language of origin (Hebrew), and a coding scheme in which letters have been arranged in a particular order (alphagram). Kondrak says the full meaning of the text won’t be known until historians of ancient Hebrew have a chance to study the deciphered text.
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Jan 29, 2018 23:26
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Bah, alphagrams is some numerology type nonsense. I like the theory that it’s an invented alphabet for a Nahuatl dialect better. They got pretty far identifying the plants from the herbal section: https://hort.purdue.edu/voynich/ Weird coincidence that I just bought the facsimile though! E: quote:For the final step, the researchers deciperhered the opening phrase of the manuscript, and presented it to colleague Moshe Koppel, a computer scientist and native Hebrew speaker. Koppel said it didn’t form a coherent sentence in Hebrew. Jesus Christ lol Carthag Tuek has a new favorite as of 00:14 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 00:09
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Algorithms are either going to save the world or doom it, it's just a matter of which happens first.
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Jan 30, 2018 01:19
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PMush Perfect posted:Algorithms are either going to save the world or doom it, it's just a matter of which happens first. You're implying that a saved world cannot then be doomed. Entropy's gonna get us all in the end, it's just a question of how soon that end is and how much we help it along.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:10
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PMush Perfect posted:Algorithms are either going to save the world or doom it, it's just a matter of which happens first. Pretty much everything that exists is doomed anyway. It isn't a matter of if something gets destroyed so much as when.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:24
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PMush Perfect posted:Algorithms are either going to save the world or doom it, it's just a matter of which happens first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54UbGamQPI8
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Jan 30, 2018 05:17
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Pretty much everything that exists is doomed anyway. It isn't a matter of if something gets destroyed so much as when. Thanks, Tyson.
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Jan 30, 2018 12:57
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Re: the gored horses earlier, I just spent over a drat hour teasing out the handwriting of an absolute madman. This document is a "tingsvidne" (basically a legally binding transcript from a thing session). It says that Jens Hansen of Horserød appeared before the local court and complained that one of his best "wagon mares", five years of age, had been gored by a deer. Thereafter, he had been unable to do Corvée (mandatory work for the king/lord), and his own farming had been set back. Last winter, he had been attacked by a "contagious disease" and been shot to death by the local administration (lol that's p much what it says, but I assume it means his animals), and so the loss of the mare compelled him to seek help lest he lose his farm. Thus he would like to call witnesses. Three named men then approached and one by one swore with raised hands that they had seen that his mare was dead, and it was stung in the left side so its guts had spilled out, that no other than a deer could have done it, and that the mare was valued at 16 sletdaler. Local administrator Lorentz Juel "had nothing to say", but it is he who sent the documents further up the system with a recommendation, suggesting 10 rigsdaler (15 sldl) to each farmer so they could buy new horses. The other farmer didn't have a tingsvidne, but instead a boring letter with an endorsement by the local bailiff and two witnesses. His horse was valued at 12 rigsdaler. In the central admin, some other guy has written in the margin that second farmer should only get 8 rdl (12 sldl) – maybe the lack of a tearjerker? Then a third administrator approved it in the name of the king. So yeah they seem to be smallish farmers who really needed those horses, and the admin figured it was better to help them get new horses than the whole system collapsing. Transcription: quote:Kongl=Mayts Birchedommere till det Chronnibori-
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Jan 30, 2018 22:30
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Pretty much everything that exists is doomed anyway. It isn't a matter of if something gets destroyed so much as when. I mean on the long scale eventually the earth will be destroyed.
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Jan 30, 2018 23:06
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