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ToxicSlurpee posted:They're also fantastic for burning down plants or heavy foliage which led to use in Vietnam. Now that use is used for civvy purposes for stuff like controlled burns and what have you. For a while the Nazis experimented with ClF3 fueled flamethrowers since that poo poo will literally make concrete burn. Not magnesium's "burns hot enough to make concrete melt" but instead "chemically reacts with concrete to make it combust." Sounds like the perfect "Bunker-B-Gone" right? Obviously the problem with something so reactant it burns normally stable materials like concrete is that it also reacts with everything less stable. Like your flamethrower tank/equipment. The chemical tanks you store/manufacture the poo poo in. The dude carrying the equipment. The Nazis tried and tried and tried before eventually declaring "Substance N" as they called it was simply too dangerous for anyone to use. Also, as mentioned dressing specialist weapons up to keep the enemy from shooting them first is something that happened a lot in WWII. Another example is the Sherman Firefly. American Shermans shipped to Britain to have a huge whopping Imperial 17 pdr (yes, that's pdr as in "pounder", the Brits like to name their tank guns after weight of shot fired like they were land-ships) strapped onto it. The 17 pdr was a gun that Germans hated because it was big enough to reliably penetrate Tiger armor at several time the range that a normal Sherman's gun would penetrate. For obvious reasons any Sherman that sported a barrel nearly as long as the tank's chassis (seriously the 17 pdr is a huge gun) became a priority target for any German tank crew. Which is why 17pdr crews started to attach fake muzzle breaks partways down the gun barrel and panting anything after that a different color to hope that any enemy tank that saw them would think they were looking at yet another Sherman not a Sherman with a doom gun on it. C.M. Kruger posted: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. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that the American doctrine in WWII relied on hilarious and brutal amounts of artillery and close air support. If there was anything in the way we bombed the ever living gently caress out of it. Shermans saw a Tiger? 9/10 times they'd launch a smoke shell to blind the heavier tank and retreat as they called in artillery/air support. Guns dug in on the road like a bunch of ticks? Well we have this 3 minute delivery timer on artillery shells... Moving into a contested village? Bomb it to rubble. Something twitched while our soldiers were moving in? Bomb it again just to be sure. Alkydere has a new favorite as of 06:20 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 06:12
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I do recall Americans in WW2 (and possibly WW1) gained a reputation for being extremely trigger-happy with heavy weapons, which may have been a result of less hierarchical hoops to jump through to call in artillery strikes compared to European armies.
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Jan 31, 2018 08:02
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Inescapable Duck posted:I do recall Americans in WW2 (and possibly WW1) gained a reputation for being extremely trigger-happy with heavy weapons, which may have been a result of less hierarchical hoops to jump through to call in artillery strikes compared to European armies. One of America's biggest advantages in the war was that we just manufactured the ever loving gently caress out of absolutely everything and drowned Germany in it. You see this in the tanks; where Germany kept trying to make the most awesome tank they possibly could despite individual costs America mostly stuck to a few designs that were cheap to produce and spam. German tanks were generally better but there was just plain more Allied tanks. Logistics is the thing that wins wars more than anything. You really see this in America's propaganda posters at the time. A lot of it was targeted at people in the factory. The message was "Hey you! Yes you! With the tools! Whatever it is you're making keep making the gently caress out of that poo poo. As much as you can crank out. You're doing good for the war. Keep doing that." It was like hey bro you aren't fighting but don't feel bad about that because the guys fighting need stuff. Lots of stuff. Guns, bullets, tanks, food, ships, just like...crank that crap out.
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Jan 31, 2018 09:30
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of America's biggest advantages in the war was that we just manufactured the ever loving gently caress out of absolutely everything and drowned Germany in it. You see this in the tanks; where Germany kept trying to make the most awesome tank they possibly could despite individual costs America mostly stuck to a few designs that were cheap to produce and spam. German tanks were generally better but there was just plain more Allied tanks. Logistics is the thing that wins wars more than anything. I'd argue against German tanks being "generally better". The Sherman and Panzer IV line were generally equals in the reality of actual combat, and the Tiger and Panther had far too many design problems to make them effective. Thick armor and a good gun don't matter much when you don't have many of your awesome tanks and they keep breaking down and not having replacement parts available, or you need to transport your fancy Panther by rail everywhere because its transmission will break after a few hundred kilometers at best.
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Jan 31, 2018 15:57
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If one of you tank guys turns out to be Lindybeige... ... actually, I won't be surprised in the least. He's a goon if I ever saw one.
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Jan 31, 2018 16:40
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of America's biggest advantages in the war was that we just manufactured the ever loving gently caress out of absolutely everything and drowned Germany in it. You see this in the tanks; where Germany kept trying to make the most awesome tank they possibly could despite individual costs America mostly stuck to a few designs that were cheap to produce and spam. German tanks were generally better but there was just plain more Allied tanks. Logistics is the thing that wins wars more than anything. It's not explicitly a World War II parable or anything... but, well.
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Jan 31, 2018 16:44
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Inescapable Duck posted:I do recall Americans in WW2 (and possibly WW1) gained a reputation for being extremely trigger-happy with heavy weapons, which may have been a result of less hierarchical hoops to jump through to call in artillery strikes compared to European armies. I recall a quote I read somewhere, roughly along these lines: quote:To determine the nationality of an enemy force at distance, fire a few shots in their direction and then seek cover. If the enemy responds with a fusillade of machine-gun fire, they are German. If they respond with precise, regimented rifle fire, they are British. If there is no obvious response and three minutes later you are killed by artillery shells, they were Americans.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:00
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I mean hell, that's the way you win most wars against AI in Civilization; they've spent tons of cheating turns churning out meh military units, you've built up your economy and cities so you can buy an army on short notice and wreck their poo poo.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:13
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DACK FAYDEN posted:There's an Arthur C. Clarke story about this, told from the perspective of the head of state of the losing side of a space war that lost because they kept funding crazy new R&D and they just got conventionally outnumbered. Is that the one where they figure out 2+2=4 every time, and put pilots into cruise missiles?
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Jan 31, 2018 18:13
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Nth Doctor posted:Is that the one where they figure out 2+2=4 every time, and put pilots into cruise missiles? Didn't the Nazis plan to do more or less that with suicide planes designed to be flown by Hitler Youth?
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Jan 31, 2018 18:26
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DACK FAYDEN posted:There's an Arthur C. Clarke story about this, told from the perspective of the head of state of the losing side of a space war that lost because they kept funding crazy new R&D and they just got conventionally outnumbered. The original Mobile Suit Gundam does this too, the Principality of Zeon keeps coming up with all sorts of new robot designs(that are often extremely specialized), while the Federation wins the war partially because they focus development on only a couple proven designs that they can then throw at the enemy by the dozens at a time
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Jan 31, 2018 18:30
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The real Wunderwaffe was the T-34, designed to be stamped out of metal sheets and abandoned in a ditch when it broke down after 300 kilometers. Who would’ve thought that? Not Hitler, obviously.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:42
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Nth Doctor posted:Is that the one where they figure out 2+2=4 every time, and put pilots into cruise missiles? No, that's a different one where everyone's so reliant on computers and hand calculators that they don't know how to do math any more, but someone digs up an ancient math textbook and figures out how to do basic arithmetic again, they start training people, and hooray now we can have manned missiles instead of putting these expensive computers into them. The Clarke story is IIRC told as a series of reports taking the form of "as soon as we finish Secret Project X, we will trounce the puny forces arrayed against us. Okay, there's a few more of their ships than we expected, and we're having some minor issues with the project, but it'll be done Real Soon Now and then for ship of ours they destroy, a hundred of theirs shall fall!" and eventually they're saying "okay look we're down to a single backwater planet. The war may not necessarily have proceeded in our favor."
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Jan 31, 2018 18:44
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of America's biggest advantages in the war was that we just manufactured the ever loving gently caress out of absolutely everything and drowned Germany in it. You see this in the tanks; where Germany kept trying to make the most awesome tank they possibly could despite individual costs America mostly stuck to a few designs that were cheap to produce and spam. German tanks were generally better but there was just plain more Allied tanks. Logistics is the thing that wins wars more than anything. Pretty much this. The Sherman, Panzer IV and Soviet T-34 were reasonable contemporaries. They excelled at different things but they were pretty close to 1:1 in and off the field. What really defined the nations what directions they went from there. How did the three big tank players diverge from the standard? Well we all know how the Germans went. They made Tigers and then Panthers. They made these big heavy bricks of armor and gun with all these technological doohickies. Due to the Allies bombing the ever living poo poo out of German factories they had to make due with stopgaps: the Tiger was forced to use a smaller transmission that just tore itself to pieces dealing with weight of the tank. The Panther, being made later, was even worse about this, doubly so since at that point of the war they couldn't spare the manpower on specialized maintenance crews for the Panthers that they had for the Tigers. They also had this fascination with giving the gunner the highest power scope to look through but no low power/wide angle one. So you'd basically have the gunner looking through this peep-hole trying to find a target in a busy, smoky, dusty battle while the Commander is shouting at him, which leads to a hilariously slow target acquisition time. The Soviets? They actually started with heavy tanks when the Germans invaded: the KV line. The KVs had really been built and fielded at precisely the right time and place: when the Germans invaded they had nothing bigger than a Pz. III, the Pz. IV was built in response to the T-34. The KV could just trundle through 95% of what the Germans through at it, was actually built to be nearly immune to artillery strikes, and was simply so heavily armored that it could literally crush German anti-armor positions under its treads with impunity. There's a very good case that Germany's heavy tank obsession came from having to deal with KV's. The thing is the Soviets realized the suckers were expensive maintenance hogs and that once the Germans started building heavier guns the KV's armor would turn it from behemoth to a slow and fat target. So they dropped it, stop making them and just focused on making more T-34s when not slapping guns and rockets onto literally anything that would carry them. Only at the end of the war when it became obvious that guns had increased to the point that the T-34s weren't cutting it anymore did the Soviets start producing the IS line, but those were really more of post-war tanks. The Americans? With their preponderance in artillery and airstikes to deal with the biggest headaches and more focus on creating mixed forces where a normal Sherman group would have a smattering of heavier gunned vehicles with it, they really saw no reason to build a "heavy" tank right up to about the same point the Soviets did so the development and then production of Pershings, the Sherman's planned replacement, lagged until nearly the end of the war so the Americans made-do with M4A3's which were basically up-armored Shermans.
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Jan 31, 2018 18:51
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Man, tanks are so cool. But when I try to look into it with any detail, it's all Greek to me.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:10
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PMush Perfect posted:Man, tanks are so cool. But when I try to look into it with any detail, it's all Greek to me. Play War Thunder for a bit. Within a week or two you'll start screaming about Russian Bias as you watch T-34 hulls bounce loving everything due to their sloping, or screaming frothing rage about American CAS as after about 5 minutes half the American team is now flying a fighter with enough bombs/rockets to terraform a small hill into a pond. In all seriousness I could go on a bit more about tank stuff (The Japanese were really bad at this "tank" thing) but I really don't want to turn this thread into Yet Another WWII thread more than necessary.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:27
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PMush Perfect posted:Man, tanks are so cool. But when I try to look into it with any detail, it's all Greek to me. Surely you mean Mesopotamian.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:40
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The Russian tank strategy reminds me of that 1980's naval wargame story -- not a computer game, I think it was a tabletop simulator kind of thing. Players would point-buy their fleets, then the fleets would fight in a tournament. One of the players decided to run some kind of evolutionary sim on their computer to come up with a highly-tuned fleet, and discovered that the most efficient strategy was to field an entire "fleet" of nothing but fast attack boats -- basically speedboats with moderately large guns mounted on them. They'd sink if they took any remotely significant amount of damage, but they were hard to hit and ridiculously cheap, so they were stunningly effective (in the rules of the wargame) against the destroyers and battleships and so on that normal players would field. The player won handily, then next year the wargame was tweaked to try to deny the strategy the player used. I forget exactly how, but it was something about assessing a penalty against fleets between battles if they had damaged ships, or ships without fuel, or something like that. Net result was that at the end of each battle, the player would simply sink the problematic ships himself. And they won again. Then the tournament organizers banned them from the tournament.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:42
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DACK FAYDEN posted:There's an Arthur C. Clarke story about this, told from the perspective of the head of state of the losing side of a space war that lost because they kept funding crazy new R&D and they just got conventionally outnumbered. It is called "Superiority" and you can read it right here, it is great.
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Jan 31, 2018 19:48
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Nth Doctor posted:Is that the one where they figure out 2+2=4 every time, and put pilots into cruise missiles? This one's called Superiority. Apparently it's just freely available on the Internet? e:f;b
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Jan 31, 2018 19:50
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Trabant posted:Surely you mean Mesopotamian. Mesopotankian. Gotta do everything myself.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:28
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Nth Doctor posted:Is that the one where they figure out 2+2=4 every time, and put pilots into cruise missiles? The Feeling of Power
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Jan 31, 2018 20:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The Russian tank strategy reminds me of that 1980's naval wargame story -- not a computer game, I think it was a tabletop simulator kind of thing. Players would point-buy their fleets, then the fleets would fight in a tournament. One of the players decided to run some kind of evolutionary sim on their computer to come up with a highly-tuned fleet, and discovered that the most efficient strategy was to field an entire "fleet" of nothing but fast attack boats -- basically speedboats with moderately large guns mounted on them. They'd sink if they took any remotely significant amount of damage, but they were hard to hit and ridiculously cheap, so they were stunningly effective (in the rules of the wargame) against the destroyers and battleships and so on that normal players would field. Basically that's how it worked. The Soviets realized "We have all the farmers we could ever want, why build big expensive vehicles to protect them and not just build all the guns to protect them? A dead tank can't shoot back." And while the Soviets did eventually have the superior tank doctrine, the Germans were organized enough that sending tanks was an expensive proposition, especially when you're having to keep torching and moving your factories to keep them from falling into German hands. Which is why you end up with poo poo like this:  (Yes it's a War Thunder screenshot, not the best source for historical information but a good source of reference pictures) That's a Zis 30 cannon strapped on top of an artillery tractor. The armor in there is barely enough to protect the driver and radio operator in the bottom from machine guns. It's not pretty but that thing is dirt cheap and that gun is big enough to kill Tigers. You can just start slapping those out and hide them in bushes and snow banks everywhere and suddenly the Germans are walking into a wall of guns. They even did cost analysis and figured out "our tanks last about this much time on the front" and built their tanks to last that long. A Sherman can keep going forever (there are some Sherman chassis in use as logging equipment to this day) as an American farmer's boy can keep it running on baling wire and bubblegum wrappers. A T-34 on the other hand was designed to work for X hours and when it had run for that many hours it was either a smoking wreck...or was shipped back via rail to be taken apart, repaired and upgraded. They were not designed for more than the simplest repairs (like tracks) to be done in the field. Alkydere has a new favorite as of 20:56 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 20:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The Russian tank strategy reminds me of that 1980's naval wargame story -- not a computer game, I think it was a tabletop simulator kind of thing. Players would point-buy their fleets, then the fleets would fight in a tournament. One of the players decided to run some kind of evolutionary sim on their computer to come up with a highly-tuned fleet, and discovered that the most efficient strategy was to field an entire "fleet" of nothing but fast attack boats -- basically speedboats with moderately large guns mounted on them. They'd sink if they took any remotely significant amount of damage, but they were hard to hit and ridiculously cheap, so they were stunningly effective (in the rules of the wargame) against the destroyers and battleships and so on that normal players would field. Could it be this wargame from back in 2002? Sounds very similar: quote:Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:55
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Wacky Delly posted:Mesopotankian. Gotta do everything myself. Are those the Hammurabi apologists who downplay his genocide of the Elamites?
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Jan 31, 2018 20:55
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Kassad posted:Could it be this wargame from back in 2002? Sounds very similar: That Wikipedia article used to mention that Red only pulled that off by having motorcycles carrying orders moving at the speed of light, the cruise missiles being bigger than the rowboats they were mounted on, and so on.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:59
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Wargaming rules leading to weird results is a tradition. I think that the US WWII-era tank destroyer program was built in part on wargame results that showed the tank destroyers did really well against a frontal assault by armor in a tight, concentrated formation that would rapidly overwhelm infantry positions. The problem is that, supposedly, the tanks couldn't actually engage the tank destroyers with their main guns, but could only kill them by overrunning their position. Since tank destroyers sacrificed armor and small caliber weapons in favor of huge anti-armor guns, well, declaring them invulnerable to tank guns is somewhat of an advantage.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:19
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Alkydere posted:In all seriousness I could go on a bit more about tank stuff (The Japanese were really bad at this "tank" thing) but I really don't want to turn this thread into Yet Another WWII thread more than necessary.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:27
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Kassad posted:Could it be this wargame from back in 2002? Sounds very similar: No, but it's a similar concept -- finding the edges in the rules that allow you to do things that wouldn't be feasible in a real war. It just so happens that the case I'm thinking of also involved one side doing monstrous things like sending out thousands of sailors in tiny speedboats with no armor, and then sinking your own boats (including the men on them) when they aren't able to fight any more. Come to think, I think part of the reason the speedboats worked was that the rules de facto restricted how many targets a ship could destroy in a turn, so it wasn't so much that the speedboats could dodge as that they just overwhelmed the enemy with a blob of units. Sure, whatever you hit dies, but you have to do that a thousand times or more before the end of the match; you're dealing damage 1HP at a time while they're dealing it much faster. I'm kind of sad I can't find the original writeup (which included more detail about why the winning strategy involved going all-speedboats); all my attempts to search just turn up actual board/tabletop/computer games.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:40
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:No, but it's a similar concept -- finding the edges in the rules that allow you to do things that wouldn't be feasible in a real war. It just so happens that the case I'm thinking of also involved one side doing monstrous things like sending out thousands of sailors in tiny speedboats with no armor, and then sinking your own boats (including the men on them) when they aren't able to fight any more. Come to think, I think part of the reason the speedboats worked was that the rules de facto restricted how many targets a ship could destroy in a turn, so it wasn't so much that the speedboats could dodge as that they just overwhelmed the enemy with a blob of units. Sure, whatever you hit dies, but you have to do that a thousand times or more before the end of the match; you're dealing damage 1HP at a time while they're dealing it much faster. drat, I remember that piece and it’s infuriating I can’t locate it. It might’ve been a longform article in NYT or The Atlantic, as far as I can recall.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:47
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I think your big problem would be finding people to crew those boats. Torpedo boats are one thing, what are basically manned torpedoes are another. Obviously the strategy has been executed and it is not impossible, but most of the examples I can think of are coming in situations where you have been fighting for a long time and are losing. Organizing people for the Suicide Commando Corps from a cold start seems difficult.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:09
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Speaking of wargames and boats, there was a fun thing that happened in either the US or UK navy around the turn of the 20th century. The torpedo was the new hotness in naval warfare, and people were trying to figure out how to best apply it. Small torpedo boats and submarines were one approach, but weren't really useful for actual pitched fleet battles due to their lack of range and/or speed. No matter how fast they made their theoretical ships, they would be easily blasted to hell before getting close enough to deploy their torpedoes. Generally the best you could hope for was deploying your torpedoes from a distance en masse, which was unlikely to hit anything but might disrupt the enemy's formation as they took evasive maneuvers (this would turn out to be important in the Battle of Jutland). But then, at some point, some mad genius asked: "So if we can't make our torpedo-ships fast enough to avoid enemy fire, why don't we make them big enough to just withstand it?". Basically, the idea was that they'd take a big, honking battleship, rip out all the guns, and use to massive weight savings to make them faster and their armour even thicker. And, of course, the mother of all torpedo batteries hidden beneath the water. They'd just charge right in on the enemy line of battle, resist incoming gunfire with their thicker armour, and deploy torpedoes from a range so close that the enemy wouldn't be able to evade them. Basically exactly the kind of thing a random bored teenager might come up with if you put him in charge of designing warships. Naturally, nobody is just going to sacrifice one of their ludicrously expensive battleships on a hunch like this, so instead the whole thing was wargamed out, in great detail. And to the surprise of just about everybody involved, it actually worked out really well. While a single one of these torpedo-battleships would be a risky proposition that got sunk before getting into range, two or more of them would be a critical mass that could do the trick. You might lose one of them during the approach, but the other would almost always get in close enough to just utterly savage the entire enemy fleet with a super-dense spread of short-range torpedoes. And so, for a while, people were actually seriously considering building these things and tried to foresee how this might change naval strategy and tactics for years to come. But just then a couple of technological breakthroughs were made. The effective range of naval cannons increased drastically, and better engines allowed traditional battleships to move quite a bit faster than before despite the weight of their guns. That proved to be a tipping point, as now a theoretical torpedo-battleship would have to cross a much longer distance under fire at less of a relative speed advantage, usually seeing it critically damaged long before getting into effective torpedo range. But still, for a brief period of time naval warfare almost turned into  , except underwater. 
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Jan 31, 2018 22:16
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:drat, I remember that piece and it’s infuriating I can’t locate it. It might’ve been a longform article in NYT or The Atlantic, as far as I can recall. A friend of mine found it! It's part of a longer New Yorker piece. And it turns out I got a lot of the details wrong, but oh well! Nessus posted:I think your big problem would be finding people to crew those boats. Torpedo boats are one thing, what are basically manned torpedoes are another. Sure, the strategy in the wargame was ludicrous. It worked because nobody reasonable would have considered it, and thus they were not prepared for it.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:A friend of mine found it! It's part of a longer New Yorker piece. And it turns out I got a lot of the details wrong, but oh well! They weren't prepared for it because it was essentially impossible. The rogue commander didn't use any kind of tactic that would have been possible under the laws of physics, like instantaneous motorcycle couriers that "couldn't be intercepted" or having massive amounts of boats carrying missiles that were literally not possible for them to carry in real life. The whole purpose of the war game was to test the military's capability to a realistic threat of a particular kind. Van Riper wanted to feel smug about winning, so he instead hijacked the exercise to make it all about him being clever.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:A friend of mine found it! It's part of a longer New Yorker piece. And it turns out I got a lot of the details wrong, but oh well! Please tell your friend I said thanks!
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Jan 31, 2018 23:59
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chitoryu12 posted:They weren't prepared for it because it was essentially impossible. The rogue commander didn't use any kind of tactic that would have been possible under the laws of physics, like instantaneous motorcycle couriers that "couldn't be intercepted" or having massive amounts of boats carrying missiles that were literally not possible for them to carry in real life. I was talking about the "field a hundred tiny ships that are perfectly legal by the game rules but completely implausible by normal-human logic" wargame, not the US military training exercise that went awry. In the latter case you would expect that physics would continue to hold -- there are implicit rules that the players need to abide by, in addition to the explicit ones that the exercise spells out. In the former, though, it literally is a game (i.e. with no serious goal or real-life consequence) and anything within the rules is fair play; learning how to turn the rules to your advantage is perfectly fine and, normally, encouraged. It's on the game designers to come up with rules that can't easily be subverted (i.e. to have a game without a "dominant meta"). I do dimly recall that that training exercise had some skeevy stuff happening on the other side as well. Like, every remotely high-tech line of communication that Riper had was declared invalid by fiat, or something along those lines. In other words, if you've set up a "training exercise" that is really meant to be "watch as Our Side effortlessly trounces our opponents", be careful that whoever you've set up as the fall guy doesn't decide to cheat. In fact I'd daresay this kind of thing (cheating in various ways) is common in training exercises, considering how high their political stakes can be. Not just in that people don't play by the rules, but the rules themselves are biased. Here's a neat article about Air Force tests which points out that you can design the test to draw whatever conclusions you like, just by changing the parameters the plane has to operate under. It's similar for wargames: by changing the rules you can pre-determine the result.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:03
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http://www.aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own Here's the rpg story
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Feb 1, 2018 00:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I was talking about the "field a hundred tiny ships that are perfectly legal by the game rules but completely implausible by normal-human logic" wargame, not the US military training exercise that went awry. In the latter case you would expect that physics would continue to hold -- there are implicit rules that the players need to abide by, in addition to the explicit ones that the exercise spells out. In the former, though, it literally is a game (i.e. with no serious goal or real-life consequence) and anything within the rules is fair play; learning how to turn the rules to your advantage is perfectly fine and, normally, encouraged. It's on the game designers to come up with rules that can't easily be subverted (i.e. to have a game without a "dominant meta"). In the years leading up to World War 2, the US Navy had designed the Mark 14 torpedo, which was supposed to be the hot new standard for naval munitions. The problem was that the design and testing happened in the middle of the Great Depression, so the Navy was extremely reluctant to do any testing that might damage or destroy the torpedoes, and the Navy DEFINITELY didn't want to do any testing that would you know, actually damage ships. Yeah. World War 2 rolls around and this poo poo does not work. At all. They'd either blow up way too early, go right underneath the target ship, hit the side of the ship with a very noticeable lack of exploding, or fire in a big old circle and come back around to hit the ship that fired it. The Bureau of Ordinance's response to this? "You're shooting it wrong." They denied there was a problem and it took years to be the Bureau of Ordinance to even admit there was a problem and to fix it.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:47
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Please tell me about this missile spam battle
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Feb 1, 2018 01:40
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I was talking about the "field a hundred tiny ships that are perfectly legal by the game rules but completely implausible by normal-human logic" wargame, not the US military training exercise that went awry. In the latter case you would expect that physics would continue to hold -- there are implicit rules that the players need to abide by, in addition to the explicit ones that the exercise spells out. In the former, though, it literally is a game (i.e. with no serious goal or real-life consequence) and anything within the rules is fair play; learning how to turn the rules to your advantage is perfectly fine and, normally, encouraged. It's on the game designers to come up with rules that can't easily be subverted (i.e. to have a game without a "dominant meta"). You're severely misunderstanding the point of war games. The point isn't to "win". It's not a competition between two teams to see who can achieve victory, or a way of showcasing how badass everything is. War games are built around specific purposes that are being tested. In the case of Millennium Challenge 2002, it was to test the new age of computer networks in warfare against a target with generally known capabilities (it's widely believed that Red was simulating the Iranian military at the time). Even aside from Van Riper engaging in blatant cheating by utilizing capabilities he wasn't supposed to have and knowledge he wasn't supposed to take advantage of (such as knowing the particular flaws of the V-22 Osprey and exactly how the Blue team would utilize them, even though the Osprey wasn't in active service and only an American general like him would have the information), he completely threw out everything the exercise was meant to test in an effort to "win". He then took advantage of the situation to yap at the media about how the military "cheated" because he was just too good to beat and they're all a bunch of losers. People also take umbrage at the Navy refloating the armada and resetting the game repeatedly, which entirely misunderstands how these games should go. You still take lessons from legitimate mistakes that cause Blue to lose ("legitimate" meaning "not an armada of pleasure yachts with cruise missiles that would sink them under their weight in real life"), but you're not in a competition to see who wins. If you just shut down everything and hand a victory to the Red team, you've wasted millions of dollars and everyone's time on planning the exercise. Every single war game involves resetting and continuing after the Blue team fails because it would be completely pointless to end it all after the first setback. I need to find the source again (Cyrano posted it a while back), but I believe Van Riper even engaged in a sort of terrain glitch with the computer simulator to allow his vessels to remain totally undetected until their ambush.
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Feb 1, 2018 01:55
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