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chitoryu12 posted: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. You'd be surprised how often political concerns trump the ostensible point of a particular exercise.
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Feb 1, 2018 02:06
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MisterBibs posted:Kinda the opposite of historical facts, but I was trying to research how folks in Europe started drinking (and being able to tolerate) milk and other dairy products, when humans conventionally only process milki as babies, and it turns out we only have theories as to how it wound up happening so fast, in evolutionary terms. What about the non-European cultures that drink milk (and use dairy products)? Why would the European peoples have evolved that separately instead of inheriting it?
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Feb 1, 2018 02:51
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xcheopis posted:What about the non-European cultures that drink milk (and use dairy products)? Why would the European peoples have evolved that separately instead of inheriting it? I'd guess the most likely answer for "why does this culture tolerate lactose well" is "they're descended from the original population(s) that evolved lactose tolerance." Whether more than one population evolved it separately vs. it evolving once and then spreading with migrating populations is a hard question to answer. Per this NPR article, "Today, however, 35 percent of the global population — mostly people with European ancestry — can digest lactose in adulthood without a hitch." chitoryu12 posted: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. As Jabor notes, while the ostensible point is to test your training/equipment/military theory, a lot of prestige (=promotions), production contracts (=money), and other tangible rewards can be riding on the results of these exercises, which creates an incentive to pervert the exercise to achieve a desired result. For example, if you favor the F-35, you might try to design tests that it is well-suited to performing, regardless of how well reality matches the tests (and contrarily, if you don't like the F-35, you'd try to design tests that it's bad at). This tends to be hidden under the guise of making assumptions about the capabilities of your enemies -- for example, the presence or absence of SAMs makes a big difference in how viable the A-10 is in a close-air-support role, but the F-35 doesn't care so much, assuming its stealth and speed are adequate. So if you design a test that assumes the presence of SAMs (which may or may not be appropriate, depending on which real-world military you're simulating), you're giving the F-35 an edge over the A-10. Are the tests always biased by corruption or politics? I sure hope not. But discounting the possibility that they're biased is foolish.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:29
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World War 2 Online was doing research on German fighters. and found a real document on how a German fighter could pretty much out-perform anything the Allies ever built. Turns out they rigged the test (I think by claiming the speed in level flight was amazing, only by diving from a great hight first) to impress Goering. If you didn't get that deep into the research you'd think the German plane was amazingly better than it actually was.
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Feb 1, 2018 04:15
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chitoryu12 posted: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. Some of those things are just fundamental problems with tanks in general; heavy vehicles operating in a war have All the Problems. In Germany in particular like was mentioned their clever and spectacular tank designs had to make do with what was available sometimes. This was a fundamental design difference between Allied and Nazi tanks, really; the Nazis were chasing the perfect tank no matter how complex and expensive it was. Similarly it shows the overall differences between the Allies and Germany; the German idea was to rely heavily on German engineering being the best poo poo ever because Germans are the best poo poo ever. Nazi Germany was a pretty rigid hierarchy and only Cool and Good People got to do certain jobs. America and Russia on the other hand made simpler tank designs that were mass produced. Any random dingus with two hands and a pulse they could grab off of the street could do something in the factory even if it was just tightening rivets. The designs were also far simpler which not only made them easier to repair but easier to slap a new tank together out of parts you scrapped from a pair of broken down tanks. Germany had more tank designs with parts that probably weren't interchangeable. As was said Russia just kind of slapped together whatever worked and hurled it Germany. On the other end America found a design that worked and had factories vomiting out as many as possible. That standardization made it far easier to crank out absolute poo poo loads of them. It doesn't matter how much better the German tanks were if they were constantly outnumbered. Granted the Allies also figured out all sorts of neat ways to wreck the poo poo out of a Panther without even using a proper tank. Germany came up with some downright insane things over the course of the war. Some of them were in fact very good ideas that would have done amazing things if it was possible at all to mass produce them. Or if they did more mass production of interchangeable things in general. They were chasing that perfect ace in the hole that would win the war while failing to realize the Allies had already figured that out. The other weird thing was that when the Allies realized how stupid really heavy tanks were and went for piles and piles of not heavy ones (the American doctrine was primarily a mix of vehicles; medium weight Sherman tanks were the main tank but there were various other things around too) the Germans decided to go continually heavier. This ended in the biggest tank ever built; the Maus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus Weight: 207 tons. Maximum speed: 12 mph. Size: impossible to miss loving huge. Usefulness: not very; it was too heavy to cross any bridge that existed anywhere. Only two were ever produced and only one of them was actually finished. They never saw combat and let's be honest it's probably good that they didn't. Something that big and slow would be absurdly easy to explode into oblivion especially if you had access to the vast supply of mass produced everything the Allies had. The Germans also designed but never built this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte 1,100 tons of tank. Too heavy to use roads. Impossible to transport by rail because it was just so god damned big. It was never actually built. It was big enough that it would have used the kinds of guns they normally put on battleships at the time. If it existed it would have been even less useful than the Maus. Apparently it started because Hitler wanted the biggest god damned tank ever made and practicality be damned. Eventually somebody else cancelled it because tanks that big are a stupid idea.
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Feb 1, 2018 04:17
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chitoryu12 posted:I'd argue against German tanks being "generally better". The Sherman and Panzer IV line were generally equals in the reality of actual combat Remember when the Germans realized a short barreled gun was stupid as gently caress against another tank? *posts headlong into an enfilade position like Whitman did"
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Feb 1, 2018 04:21
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PMush Perfect posted:Please link whichever thread you do decide to talk about it in. Eh, I don't have enough to start a proper thread. I was mostly just trying to avoid this thread having yet another WWII phase (any history thread has that risk). But since it seems to be happening anyways, if there's any subjects you'd like to know about WWII tanks, their designs and *why* they were designed like that...ask away and I'll try to answer to the best of my ability. Instant Sunrise posted: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, um, the Mk. 14 was such a huge clusterfuck that I, a land-lubbing tanker, know about this one. They were equipped with a "magnetic exploder" that basically sensed the steel hull above it and exploded. A torpedo that goes boom a few feet below a keel of a ship is even more devastating than one that simply impacts and blows up below the water line, not that either is good. It's the difference between "big hole under the water line" and "breaks the ship's back". The navy was ga-ga for these devices, built them...and then as you said didn't actually test them outside of lab conditions. Japan then attacks and the aging, obsolete, half-starved Asiatic fleet (remember: Depression) does it's best to fight a retreat (which was a GLORIOUS clusterfuck of politics as Japan drove out Dutch, French, English, Austrialian and American forces out, none of which could agree on the time of day let alone how to organize for battle). And all the time the Americans are using these torpedos and nothing is happening. If you set your torpedo to swim under the enemy boat the magnetic exploder never goes off, if you set them to run high for a direct impact it turns out that the backup contact detonator wasn't reinforced to withstand a direct impact so it just bounced off or stuck in the hull of the ship. ToxicSlurpee posted:Some of those things are just fundamental problems with tanks in general; heavy vehicles operating in a war have All the Problems. In Germany in particular like was mentioned their clever and spectacular tank designs had to make do with what was available sometimes. This was a fundamental design difference between Allied and Nazi tanks, really; the Nazis were chasing the perfect tank no matter how complex and expensive it was. Similarly it shows the overall differences between the Allies and Germany; the German idea was to rely heavily on German engineering being the best poo poo ever because Germans are the best poo poo ever. Nazi Germany was a pretty rigid hierarchy and only Cool and Good People got to do certain jobs. I forgot who said it, but basically every third Panther or Tiger that rolled off of the assembly line had enough differences that anyone else would have considered a new variation of tank with its own designation. The Germans built some really good poo poo, then instead of standardizing it they threw it on the floor and built the NEXT shiny thing. All while their industrial base is being bombed to bedrock. ToxicSlurpee posted:Germany came up with some downright insane things over the course of the war. Some of them were in fact very good ideas that would have done amazing things if it was possible at all to mass produce them. Or if they did more mass production of interchangeable things in general. They were chasing that perfect ace in the hole that would win the war while failing to realize the Allies had already figured that out. Seriously, the Germans were the first to figure out night vision. They had Panthers that had infrared cameras and floodlights so they could hide in the forest, and the Allies would never notice that they were being lit up. The Nazis built some cool, absolutely amazing stuff and were never satisfied to just build 1,000 or even 100 of the suckers as they'd immediately move onto the next thing. ToxicSlurpee posted:The other weird thing was that when the Allies realized how stupid really heavy tanks were and went for piles and piles of not heavy ones (the American doctrine was primarily a mix of vehicles; medium weight Sherman tanks were the main tank but there were various other things around too) the Germans decided to go continually heavier. This ended in the biggest tank ever built; the Maus. I'm...not even going to get into the Ratte besides it being some hilariously stupid pipe-dream but I feel like I should say something to emphasize how BIG the Maus was: It's engine was literally stripped off of a U-Boat. They put an engine designed to move a loving submarine and put it in a tank. Reports said the thing wasn't just Impossible To Miss large, the engine was Impossible To Miss LOUD too. Decrepus posted:Remember when the Germans realized a short barreled gun was stupid as gently caress against another tank? The short-barreled 75mm wasn't actually a bad gun design. It was designed to primarily lob HEAT ammo. Remember, the Germans were teh first to experiment with a lot of poo poo then drop it when it was a bad idea or the next shininess came along. The advantage of HEAT is you don't need to lob it at a million miles an hour to penetrate armor: the entire penetration force is contained within the explosive. The downsides: it's expensive and fiddly as gently caress, and the fuses at the time required a very slow shell (lots of arc) or else they wouldn't go off reliably. So the Germans said "gently caress it" and started building long-barrelled 75mm guns that could still fire their HEAT shells while also firing AP/APHE shots. Alkydere has a new favorite as of 05:16 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 05:02
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ToxicSlurpee posted:This ended in the biggest tank ever built; the Maus. I would like to point out that while the Maus could have used roads, it could not have used bridges. The plan for encountering a river was to drive across underwater. How were they going to run the internal combustion engine underwater? They weren’t. The Maus had a electric transmission. It was to be powered via an electrical umbilical cord to a buddy tank that remained on the shore, waiting for its turn to cross.
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Feb 1, 2018 05:20
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A little late on the flamethrower chat but relevant for armoured vehicle chat: one thing I remember reading from accounts of the Canadian Army during the Battle of the Scheldt was that a favourite tactic to support river crossings was to roll up with Wasp IIc flamethrower-equipped Bren carriers and fire over the river onto the Germans. Mark Zuehlke wrote a book about the Canadian Army crossing the Rhine, and mentions that the Wasp's flamethrower stream was projected "to a maximum range of about 150 yards. This 'golden rain' of burning fuel broke into millions of ignited blobs of gasoline that showered widely and set alight any vegetation or wood it struck. A few tiny blobs of burning fuel attached to a man could be quickly smothered, but larger adhesions were impossible to quell, 'and in this case the fats in the human body were literally burned up', one Wasp specialist recorded." I remember reading that and thinking it sounded pretty danged horrific. Anyway, here's a bad photo of Canadian Wasp IIcs firing across the Leopold Canal during the Battle of the Scheldt.  By the end of the war, the Canadians had a ton of the things and were using them for pretty much everything by the time they crossed the Rhine, in addition to their ridiculous concentrations of artillery (i.e. the 4 million shells the 13th Canadian Field Regiment artillerymen rained on Hoch Elten).
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Feb 1, 2018 05:39
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Alkydere posted:Seriously, the Germans were the first to figure out night vision. They had Panthers that had infrared cameras and floodlights so they could hide in the forest, and the Allies would never notice that they were being lit up. The Nazis built some cool, absolutely amazing stuff and were never satisfied to just build 1,000 or even 100 of the suckers as they'd immediately move onto the next thing. The Germans started outfitting tanks with night vision in '43, which actually is later than the American night vision field trials which were done in '42. Both found that it didn't work in real life conditions as well as they'd hoped and dropped it. A neat idea but the tech wasn't quite advanced enough to make it widely viable until after the war.
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Feb 1, 2018 05:39
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'd guess the most likely answer for "why does this culture tolerate lactose well" is "they're descended from the original population(s) that evolved lactose tolerance." Whether more than one population evolved it separately vs. it evolving once and then spreading with migrating populations is a hard question to answer.
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Feb 1, 2018 06:22
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With all the Maus and nightvision chat, you guys have read My Tank Is FIGHT! right?
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Feb 1, 2018 15:15
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Don't you WW2-nerds have a thread to talk about tanks in?
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Feb 1, 2018 15:42
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Krankenstyle posted:Don't you WW2-nerds have a thread to talk about tanks in? And if you do, why are you holding out on us?
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Feb 1, 2018 16:13
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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. It was a space combat sim game IIRC
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Feb 1, 2018 16:44
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Hm, guess maybe it wasn't. Thought it was.
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Feb 1, 2018 16:48
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Most every funny story you hear about simulations and wargames probably involves rampant cheating, abuse of bugs, glitches and loopholes, rigging for the sake of showing off the fancy new toy, and likely all of the above.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:07
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Ugly In The Morning posted:And if you do, why are you holding out on us? There is a lot of ww2 tankchat in the general MilHist thread
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Feb 1, 2018 17:11
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Elyv posted:There is a lot of ww2 tankchat in the general MilHist thread Bookmarked and I'll try to keep my milstuff there. I tend to avoid MilHist threads because of a tendency for a certain sort of nutbar to show up. Yanno, the one that claims that German tanks, made out of superior Krupp steel, were superior vehicles in any and all ways.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:17
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Alkydere posted:Bookmarked and I'll try to keep my milstuff there. I tend to avoid MilHist threads because of a tendency for a certain sort of nutbar to show up. Yanno, the one that claims that German tanks, made out of superior Krupp steel, were superior vehicles in any and all ways. The milhist thread really, really hates Wehraboos. I'm not a big tank/WW2 person myself, I'm more interested in older stuff, but my understanding is that if anything, that thread pushes in the opposite direction.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:20
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Elyv posted:Wehraboos
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Feb 1, 2018 17:22
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Elyv posted:The milhist thread really, really hates Wehraboos. I'm not a big tank/WW2 person myself, I'm more interested in older stuff, but my understanding is that if anything, that thread pushes in the opposite direction. Ah, good. I guess I'm mostly used to War Thunder where I'm actually shooting at them...or worse, playing alongside them. PMush Perfect posted:That is a beautiful word and I need to remember it. If you've ever dealt with them, it's a depressingly accurate term
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Feb 1, 2018 18:10
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PMush Perfect posted:That is a beautiful word and I need to remember it. There's also the American Civil War equivalent: Leeaboos.
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Feb 1, 2018 18:31
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During the Napoleonic Wars a french ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey wearing a french uniform. Having never seen a monkey before the hartlepudlians thought it was a french spy and gave it a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging. People from Hartlepool are still known as "monkey hangers".
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Feb 1, 2018 20:35
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Suspect Bucket posted:With all the Maus and nightvision chat, you guys have read My Tank Is FIGHT! right? I got my copy several years before I even started coming here
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Feb 1, 2018 20:59
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Alhazred posted:During the Napoleonic Wars a french ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey wearing a french uniform. Having never seen a monkey before the hartlepudlians thought it was a french spy and gave it a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging. People from Hartlepool are still known as "monkey hangers". I seem to recall hearing that this story is a myth.
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Feb 1, 2018 22:39
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PYF Historical Fun Fact: It's probably a myth.
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Feb 1, 2018 23:13
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Alkydere posted:Seriously, the Germans were the first to figure out night vision. They had Panthers that had infrared cameras and floodlights so they could hide in the forest, and the Allies would never notice that they were being lit up. The Nazis built some cool, absolutely amazing stuff and were never satisfied to just build 1,000 or even 100 of the suckers as they'd immediately move onto the next thing. That's assuming the Panthers could even locate their target effectively. One major downside to the Panther design was that the gunner only had a highly magnified main sight with a fixed zoom to view the outside world, without any low power alternative like the Americans and Soviets had. Because he could only view a tiny portion of the battlefield, it was a chore for Panther gunners to coordinate with their commander to lay the gun on a target (about 20 to 30 seconds in tests). This ended up making the Panther best suited for ambushes aimed at pre-planned points. Other issues with the Panther: * On many production vehicles, the turret rotation speed was linked directly to the engine speed. If the driver doesn't have the engine in high gear, enjoy taking an eternity to turn your gun around. * The Panther was intended as a medium tank, but the design ballooned until it was truly a heavy tank with a medium classification still slapped on. The final drive design wasn't updated to accommodate for the increased weight, so it tended to break after only 150 kilometers (about 93 miles). The Panther had to be babied constantly and transported by rail even for 15 mile trips because one of its most vital transmission components would break down after a short time. * The turret traverse is so weak that the gun will start to rotate under gravity with an incline of 20 degrees or more. Combine that with the gunner only having a high power fixed sight, and good luck aiming and firing on the move. * The Panther had similar problems as other German tanks with brittle steel and welds, making the armor prone to cracking under shell impact even under the less powerful 75mm Sherman shells. We know so much because the French attempted to press captured Panthers into service after the war, where they lasted 4 years before being discarded. They heavily scrutinized the vehicles and criticized the many problems that made them difficult to utilize. When they had to send forces to French Indo-China, they ignored the Panthers in favor of American M36 Jacksons because they would have had no way of providing the Panthers with the support they needed to keep them from breaking down.
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Feb 2, 2018 01:10
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Everything I hear about Nazi weapons seems to indicate they were made specifically to give boners to slavering war-nerds with no sense of practicality, tactics or logistics, which to be fair is probably entirely accurate.
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Feb 2, 2018 09:11
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Alhazred posted:During the Napoleonic Wars a french ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey wearing a french uniform. Having never seen a monkey before the hartlepudlians thought it was a french spy and gave it a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging. People from Hartlepool are still known as "monkey hangers". True or not still better than being known as a 'Hartlepudlian' jfc
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Feb 2, 2018 10:41
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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! Oh man I was just thinking about this the other day. It's a really good article and the wargame bit is only a small part.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:06
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Inescapable Duck posted:Everything I hear about Nazi weapons seems to indicate they were made specifically to give boners to slavering war-nerds with no sense of practicality, tactics or logistics, which to be fair is probably entirely accurate. Pretty much the only thing they innovated on was #branding and evil.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:45
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Inescapable Duck posted:Everything I hear about Nazi weapons seems to indicate they were made specifically to give boners to slavering war-nerds with no sense of practicality, tactics or logistics, which to be fair is probably entirely accurate. Pretty much, yeah. I mean, every side had a whole bunch of completely insane designs pop up, but usually the allies had somebody up the chain who'd look at them and go "Yeah nah this is a waste of time, stick with what works". Meanwhile on the Nazi side often as not you'd have the superior in question go "clearly this is the Wunderwaffe that will turn this war, present it to the Führer immediately!". And the Führer, being a huge grognard armchair general himself, would of course rubberstamp just about anything as long as it had HUEG GUNS. A person smarter than me could probably tie this in to the larger topic of fascist ideology. Fascism has this whole thing about your will being the one deciding factor in everything, no matter the factual odds. So a Nazi in charge of procurement might look at a design that has a lot of potential but is brutally impractical, and decide that to make it work the engineers just need to try harder, damnit, and reality will fall in line. And some of the time, the engineers even delivered. That's how you ended up with a whole lot of Nazi engineering that, on a purely technical level, is really ingenious and clever. The issue is just that such complex engineering is wholly unsuitable for any kind war machine, and had they gone with a smarter design it wouldn't even have been necessary in the first place.
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Feb 2, 2018 14:13
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Inescapable Duck posted:Everything I hear about Nazi weapons seems to indicate they were made specifically to give boners to slavering war-nerds with no sense of practicality, tactics or logistics, which to be fair is probably entirely accurate. There are number of examples of superb German gear from the WWII era but the internet in general is incredibly bad at discussing it.
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Feb 2, 2018 15:29
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ubachung posted:I seem to recall hearing that this story is a myth. Of course this is just a speculation about an undocumented event.
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Feb 2, 2018 15:38
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"Not very well thought out and massively impractical" basically sums up the entire Nazi system of government so of course it extended to their weapons manufacturing.
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Feb 2, 2018 16:47
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Alhazred posted:During the Napoleonic Wars a french ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey wearing a french uniform. Having never seen a monkey before the hartlepudlians thought it was a french spy and gave it a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging. People from Hartlepool are still known as "monkey hangers". The most recent time the U.K. was invaded was during the Napoleonic war. The invading force was driven off by a very angry Welshwoman with a pitchfork. Edit: Actually, since we're talking about WW2, I have an interesting fact that is thankfully not about tanks. The U.K. 'trained' a bunch of militiamen to act as immediate defence against Nazi invaders, particularly around areas thought to be vulnerable to paratrooper attack - you may have heard them jocularly known as 'Dad's army's, due to the average member being a bit long in the tooth. They were given pretty shoddy equipment and were often more a hindrance than a help. But the thing is, they were totally unnecessary. At no point during operation Sealion was a paratrooper assault considered. Samovar has a new favorite as of 17:12 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 17:05
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At no point during Operation Sealion was anything remotely actionable considered. "Let us invade the largest naval power with an armada of Rhine river rafts  "
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Feb 2, 2018 17:25
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Samovar posted:
The germans more or less invented the paratrooper assault and managed to take both Norway and Crete with the help of paratroopers. Despite this Hitler banned the use of paratroopers because he thought that the losses was unacceptable.
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Feb 2, 2018 18:18
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Inescapable Duck posted:Everything I hear about Nazi weapons seems to indicate they were made specifically to give boners to slavering war-nerds with no sense of practicality, tactics or logistics, which to be fair is probably entirely accurate. Over-engineered to point of having worse practical usability than the more simple design is a thing and it actually exists even today. Just look at the Berlin airport, Finnish Olkiluoto 3 project or F35 fighter jet. Or that littoral combat ship that does not hit poo poo with its impractical weapons, while the hull aggressively* dissolves in salt water. Everything in the Nazi war machine and superiors expecting to have "wonder weapons" made this problem even more flaring than what to usually expect. EDIT: *
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Feb 2, 2018 18:40
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