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Khalkin Gol was also a much smaller scale event, one where a single great commander could hold all the strings and prevent disasters from forming. In Finland Stavka spread its attention from Gulf of Finland to Arctic Sea, and they didn't have the necessary experience for something so big. Eventually the actual breakthrough battles in Finland happened on a small part of the whole front.
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Aug 15, 2018 11:46
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Milo and POTUS posted:What explains how well comparatively the red army did at Khalkhin gul with what happened in Finland. Just from the wikipedia page (yeah yeah, I know) they definitely had the advantage in numbers but even so I'm sure they had even more to toss at Finland. Doctrine, logistics, terrain? Were the Finns that drat good or were the Reds still suffering from the purges or both? This early war stuff with the red army's kinda way above my paygrade. The purge was a major factor, along with a lack of preparation for winter conditions and combat. IIRC the VVS was especially lacking in experienced commanders, despite Khalkin Gol and the Spanish Civil War, and the reason is generally attributed to high-ranking personnel being killed by the NKVD.
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Aug 15, 2018 12:39
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Kemper Boyd posted:I don't know if it has ever been confirmed in any way, but a factor might have been that early Soviet operational planning was based around the idea that the Finnish Army might not even resist and possibly would break down due to political rifts within Finland. This didn't happen. The common story is either that the Finnish Army/People will welcome communism with open arms and rejoin the motherland, or the communists will rise up and weaken the state from internal turmoil.
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Aug 15, 2018 12:42
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Terrain certainly has to be a factor as well - Manchuria is a lot better territory for using mechanized troops than a big dark snowy forest.
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Aug 15, 2018 12:44
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Terrain certainly has to be a factor as well - Manchuria is a lot better territory for using mechanized troops than a big dark snowy forest. To add to which, Japanese tanks were steaming horseshit.
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Aug 15, 2018 12:52
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I do ponder if the later soviet success in the winter war is more down to the fighting being on terrain better suited to tanks, vs earlier in the war of doing guerilla warfare with heavy troops stuck to advancing along narrow roads while the Finns had the benefit of mobility and surprise. Recall that earlier account of when the Finns tried to mount an armoured counterattack, and lost most of their tanks immediately to breakdowns and getting stuck in the snow.
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Aug 15, 2018 12:59
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Terrain certainly has to be a factor as well - Manchuria is a lot better territory for using mechanized troops than a big dark snowy forest. Uh, depends on if you go through several mountain ranges or not (the Soviets did). Really the difference is 5 years of hard learning Operational practice and combined arms coordination, getting several months to plan the operation, and having a massive uplift in logistical support.
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Aug 15, 2018 13:14
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Fangz posted:I do ponder if the later soviet success in the winter war is more down to the fighting being on terrain better suited to tanks, vs earlier in the war of doing guerilla warfare with heavy troops stuck to advancing along narrow roads while the Finns had the benefit of mobility and surprise. Recall that earlier account of when the Finns tried to mount an armoured counterattack, and lost most of their tanks immediately to breakdowns and getting stuck in the snow. The terrain on the Karelian Isthmus doesn't change much between Leningrad and Viborg. It's mainly forest dotted by fields and lakes and not that good tank country. Edit: The armored counterattack was flubbed for many reasons, including the fact that the tanks used were obsolete and mostly worthless.
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Aug 15, 2018 13:21
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Alchenar posted:No you aren't. Given the distances involved there's never going to be a situation where 8 mins of order delay will matter. We're already moving towards autonomous drones, by the time (if ever) we start having fleets of warships in space squaring off against each other they will be entirely autonomous at the tactical level. Between Earth and Mars is approximately 6-8 minutes but Earth and Jupiter (where most of the combat in the Expanse takes place, iirc at the belt or past it, Ceres, Io, etc) is about an hour, and Saturn is 5-6 hours. You haven't addressed the possibility that ECM/EW/CW makes drone impractical for large scale long range operations against a near peer; the US military is putting a lot of investment into drones yes, but we've already have had alleged instances where drones were interfered with by hostile EW capabilities. Why would this change in the future? I can agree that the trend towards drones is there, however I don't think you're going to see drones get to the point that they don't have people relatively within at least a light minute nearby baby sitting them; there's going to be either a political consideration that overrules the pure technical aspects, or, there's a reasonable chance at a technological "gotcha" that acts as a road block that exists even today. Drones are probably fine for Earth-Mars because there's nothing between Earth and Mars so either you're at Earth or you're at Mars with no inbetween due to the nature of acceleration and deacceleration; but once you're at Mars how are you going to force a hypothetical Martian government to surrender when strategic bombardment has failed at that political goal for most of its history? Are you going to risk drones having a glitch that bombs a civilian habitat that has no military value (and if remote controlled how do we know the Martians can't meddle with that?)? You're going to need humans anyways for most situations; "space warfare" isn't going to be "just" drones by any means. Unless there is some technical aspect to remote controlled drones where in space they do have a solid chance of being EWAR immune (laser communications? Do they have that property in their favour?) in which case please give me some links so I can learn more. Anyways the three main counterpoints I have are: 1. EWAR/ECM. I haven't seen anything that suggests this is a solved problem, but I could be wrong, but that still leaves. 2. Politics. Even if you think rationally remote controlled drones from a bunker on Earth is the most optimum efficient things politicians are going to say no to that unless it makes the difference between winning and losing. 3. Boots on the ground. If there is any kind of human presence then you need humans to drag them out. Because targeting algorithms are never going to get that good before near peers come up with countermeasures, even street protesters can disrupt current facial recognition tech now; a rival government is going to pour resources into cost-effective solutions if it makes drones useless.
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Aug 15, 2018 13:52
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Alchenar posted:Uh, depends on if you go through several mountain ranges or not (the Soviets did). uhhh khalkin gol and the winter war were roughly contemporaneous so i don't really see the five years of hard learning there. the soviets had as much time as they wanted to plan the winter war considering they were the aggressor. not sure about the mountains assertion considering that every picture from Khalkin Gol shows a gently rolling or somewhat hilly grassland, which is like A-1 grade Mechanized Operations terrain logistical support was better, and Zukhov was able to draw picked units in to a localized conflict
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Aug 15, 2018 13:55
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feedmegin posted:To add to which, Japanese tanks were steaming horseshit. friend let me tell you about the Finnish Armored Corps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Honkaniemi
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Aug 15, 2018 14:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:Between Earth and Mars is approximately 6-8 minutes but Earth and Jupiter (where most of the combat in the Expanse takes place, iirc at the belt or past it, Ceres, Io, etc) is about an hour, and Saturn is 5-6 hours. Did you mean something other than Saturn there? Jupiter is about 40 light minutes from earth on average, and Saturn is about double that. e: Your Mars number isn't right either, it's about 15 minutes on average, but at least it's in the ballpark. OneTruePecos fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Aug 15, 2018 |
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Aug 15, 2018 14:36
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:friend let me tell you about the Finnish Armored Corps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Honkaniemi Sure. Point being though, if you're going to be operating in nice open tank country, your own tanks had better be at least vaguely up to scratch. If you're defending in not-tank-country your own tanks are a bit more optional, and probably better deployed as basically mobile anti-tank guns rather than in an assault role.
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Aug 15, 2018 14:56
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feedmegin posted:Sure. Point being though, if you're going to be operating in nice open tank country, your own tanks had better be at least vaguely up to scratch. If you're defending in not-tank-country your own tanks are a bit more optional, and probably better deployed as basically mobile anti-tank guns rather than in an assault role. tank incompetence was worse for Japan, yes
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Aug 15, 2018 14:58
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Alchenar posted:Uh, depends on if you go through several mountain ranges or not (the Soviets did). I think we are talking about two different operations here. USSR vs. Japan v.1 (Khalkhin Gol/Nomonhan) was in 1939 USSR vs. Japan v.2 was in 1945 and as you say was the final demonstration of what was learned after 5 years of hard fighting.
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Aug 15, 2018 14:58
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:tank incompetence was worse for Japan, yes Except that one time in Malaysia out the blue, yikes. I remember reading in a book about the Singapore campaign about an account of some British junior officer just brokenly pulling his pistol out and shooting at those Ha-Go's  .
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Aug 15, 2018 15:01
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The tanks used were fairly ill-suited for a breakthrough role since about the mid-1930s, when light antitank guns became accessible to pretty much everyone. This lesson was learned in the Spanish Civil War, but the designs that came out of that were not ready for production. The closest thing that was available was the KV, which was deployed in miserly numbers. The other thing was self propelled guns. It takes a pretty big beast to blast through reinforced concrete, and the Red Army had no self propelled artillery to speak of. Urgent development began as soon as it was clear that the offensive was bogged down, but it just resulted in a few bandaid solutions, the best of which was the still wildly unsatisfactory KV-2. The Red Army's desire for a fully armoured self propelled 152 mm gun (not gun-howitzer, mind you) was never realized, despite many attempts during the war, which is why you see towed heavy guns firing on the streets of Berlin.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:So railguns use magnets to get a projectile going really, really fast, like Mach 5. What would happen if you shot a missile out of the railgun? Shouldn't it go even faster? Is that correct but it's not worth it? That is not correct. Railguns do not work that way at all. A railgun contains no magnets. A railgun consists of two parallel electrically-conductive rails. The projectile is a conductive armature that completes a circuit across those rails. You then dump an enormous current into that circuit. A moving current creates a magnetic field. That magnetic field then exerts a force on the moving current. Since part of that current is moving through the armature, the result is a force on the armature, in a direction orthogonal to the direction of current flow and the orientation of the magnetic field. This force is ILxB, where I is the current, L is the distance between the rails, and B is the magnetic field strength. Since this is a cross product, the resultant force vector points down the barrel, so the projectile moves in that direction. Any projectile you want to fire out of a railgun needs to have as low an electrical resistance as possible and needs to be tolerant of millions of amperes of current flowing through it. Missiles do not qualify. Alchenar posted:Also it's laughably expensive. The way you get to that cost is by developing a new round, then cutting the buy order for the gun to, like, two, and then amortizing the program cost over the vastly reduced number of rounds you're going to order to feed those guns. There's no reason for a guided artillery round to cost that much and, indeed, the other ones we have and use do not. The M172 round is guided and costs less than a tenth of that. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Aug 15, 2018 |
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Aug 15, 2018 15:12
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razak posted:I think we are talking about two different operations here. Yeah I made a mistake there, my bad. On space battles - obviously this is all cloud gazing but tactical decisions will almost certainly be made by autonomous but networked drones all moving at incredible speeds and making constant evasive micro-maneuvers and targeting adjustments at instantaneous speed. Human tactical control of an engagement will almost certainly be unnecessary and/or detrimental to the speed of decision making necessary. The human decision making will be 'fight or don't fight' and that will be made hours or even days before forces actually engage each other - that can all be done from the safety of your own home.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:39
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Has anyone read Orlando Figes's Crimea? Audible keeps giving me credits and I like listening to history.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:46
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I'm skeptical that anyone actually knows what deep space combat would look like in the current day.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:51
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Fangz posted:I do ponder if the later soviet success in the winter war is more down to the fighting being on terrain better suited to tanks, vs earlier in the war of doing guerilla warfare with heavy troops stuck to advancing along narrow roads while the Finns had the benefit of mobility and surprise. Recall that earlier account of when the Finns tried to mount an armoured counterattack, and lost most of their tanks immediately to breakdowns and getting stuck in the snow. Also, at least one of the divisions sent to Raate consisted of Ukrainian troops who were really not used to the winters that far north. There was a single, barely maintained road and the divisions stretched into multi-kilometer columns that were separated into pieces and the pieces destroyed one by one. I wouldn't call it guerrilla warfare though, since the soldiers were a part of the Finnish Army, not a band of randomly armed volunteers.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:59
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So why did God look at the already immensely confusing clusterfuck organization of the Holy Roman Empire and decide that, you know what, let’s add in a major religious schism as well? That’s just mean.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:07
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:So why did God look at the already immensely confusing clusterfuck organization of the Holy Roman Empire and decide that, you know what, let’s add in a major religious schism as well? That’s just mean.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:19
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OneTruePecos posted:Did you mean something other than Saturn there? Jupiter is about 40 light minutes from earth on average, and Saturn is about double that. He probably just went by memory. I did the same and thought there was nothing wrong, until I checked the numbers on Wikipedia. Anyway, apart from that his argument is still valid. He did forget the obvious counter to his argument, though: If you switch your drones to autonoumous mode, just jamming their command frequencies won't be cutting it anymore. 
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Aug 15, 2018 16:32
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HorrificExistence posted:It's in the vein of the "we came up with that first" type of revisionist nationalism, you see it most often with aeroplanes, like Hindu nationalists claiming ancient planes and blimps or Russians claiming that this steam-powered monstrosity would have flown (which was the official Soviet version until it was disproven in the 1980s, and even then they said it just needed a better engine) What about Richard Pearse?
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Aug 15, 2018 16:38
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After the Peace of Augsburg did individuals have the right to practice their choice of either Catholicism or Protestant regardless of the official denomination of the territory and it’s ruling Prince or were they forced to convert or else emigrate to somewhere else ruled with their church? Was freedom to choose only permitted in officially sanctioned bi-confessional territories?
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Aug 15, 2018 16:40
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:After the Peace of Augsburg did individuals have the right to practice their choice of either Catholicism or Protestant regardless of the official denomination of the territory and it’s ruling Prince or were they forced to convert or else emigrate to somewhere else ruled with their church? Was freedom to choose only permitted in officially sanctioned bi-confessional territories? As far as I'm aware 'Cuius regio, eius religio' meant what it said. You religio'd the way the dude who regio'd you did, or you got out of town.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:45
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Siivola posted:Has anyone read Orlando Figes's Crimea? Audible keeps giving me credits and I like listening to history. I read it and liked it. I'm not an expert on the period, but Figes does a solid job presenting the Great Power politics of the mid-19th century, and the way that the state of the Ottoman Empire turned into a war between Russia, Britain, and France. He's less good on the actual military history, but then the Crimean War was such an omnishambles its not easy to write great military history about it.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:46
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feedmegin posted:As far as I'm aware 'Cuius regio, eius religio' meant what it said. You religio'd the way the dude who regio'd you did, or you got out of town. There was some fuckery with Imperial Knights being able to do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted to do it but they're technically sovereign so it's kind of internally consistent.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:49
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Glenn Curtiss got the real deal airborne during the Wright patent fight That's a bit like saying that if I dug up Scott's corpse, strapped it to a rocket, and shot it across the South Pole, he would retroactively become the first man on the Pole. Curtiss had to completely rebuild and redesign the thing, and even then it only managed a couple of sad hops.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:52
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Alchenar posted:Yeah I made a mistake there, my bad. Peter Hamilton wrote a series of books called the Night's Dawn trilogy that I can't recommend because it involves literally Al Capone's ghost BUT it was the first thing I ever read that didn't have sci fi space battles like you see in Star Wars or Trek. Sentient AI ships would fire autonomous drones called combat wasps at each other from light minutes away and they would try to kill each other and which ever drones won went on to almost instantly destroy the enemy ship. All of this would happen faster than a human could process it, and it really makes the idea of combat in space terrifying. No heroic captain shouting maneuvers to a helmsman, outwitting his opponent through tactical brilliance, but instead you're either dead or victorious before you even realize you're in combat. Makes for terrible drama. Space dogfights are awesome in SW or BSG but in reality the kind of maneuvers that are possible and necessary in space would turn human occupants into a thin jelly. It's even more ridiculous if you consider that both universes have fully sentient AI entities that could be doing all this. Literal robot Cylon pilots should be ripping apart human squadrons in microseconds. Anytime people complain about realism in Star Wars or other soft scifi-style combat, for me the conversation starts and ends with human pilots in star fighters so why bother trying to argue tactics.
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Aug 15, 2018 17:36
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zoux posted:Peter Hamilton wrote a series of books called the Night's Dawn trilogy that I can't recommend because it involves literally Al Capone's ghost BUT it was the first thing I ever read that didn't have sci fi space battles like you see in Star Wars or Trek. Sentient AI ships would fire autonomous drones called combat wasps at each other from light minutes away and they would try to kill each other and which ever drones won went on to almost instantly destroy the enemy ship. All of this would happen faster than a human could process it, and it really makes the idea of combat in space terrifying. No heroic captain shouting maneuvers to a helmsman, outwitting his opponent through tactical brilliance, but instead you're either dead or victorious before you even realize you're in combat. Makes for terrible drama. There was another author (forgetting the name but he wrote a ton of pulpy books) who essentially depicted space battles as involving ships maneuvering around at dangerous fractions of c using kinetic impactors as something between mines and slung rocks, trying to juke the enemy into your stuff while dealing with stuff being thrown by them but all while dealing with the causality problem of only knowing where your enemy was some light-seconds/minutes ago, and that delay shrinking as you maneuver around closer and closer to each other until you're knife fighting in real time. At least I think that's what it involved, it was a few years ago.
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Aug 15, 2018 17:48
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OneTruePecos posted:Did you mean something other than Saturn there? Jupiter is about 40 light minutes from earth on average, and Saturn is about double that. I used this and it seems the number I used for Saturn is actually for Neptune. Though Mars does have a minimum distance time of 4-5 minutes depending on the relative orbit. But still 15 minutes even for Mars I think helps my argument, you're not piloting drones in real time with a 900000 ms lag. quote:that can all be done from the safety of your own home. This claim is the core claim I am refuting, we absolutely can't know this unless there is some scientific paper or military journal article thats says that remote communications can never be jammed or spoofed and even then there's major fundamental unsolveable problems with the concept even in theory (at least with current international norms). As an example, anything can happen that you will need to change the orders the drones are given, such as preventing accidental war crimes if new intelligence is received t-minus 15 minutes out from the stand off distance to target that actually that's a civilian space station with civilians on it; but it's 20 minutes from Earth... There's a lot of scenarios where you just don't want to trust the AI to make the intelligent decision; and ultimately there just for all you know, international treaties signed that make it law that there must be a human on board any craft that carries nuclear missiles; politics always trumps efficiency because war is to accomplish political goals. Here's a current example, Canada because of treaties has to maintain an arctic presence with humans because otherwise we could lose our "claims" on the Northeast territories; a human presence or patrol is required. I guarantee you if we tried to use drones instead, Russia would object. The same logic would almost absolutely in my opinion be used in space; just to arbitrarily add gatekeeping to space exploration the UNSC powers might demand that any nation that wants to plant a flag on Io has to have people there to do it.
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Aug 15, 2018 17:53
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And as we all know, international law ist immutable and unbreakable
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Aug 15, 2018 18:00
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Parties to a treaty generally keep to the terms of the treaty for its duration, because presumably signing the treaty is in their interest and maintaining it presents obligations and duties on both parties of mutual benefit. If the treaty wasn't to their benefit it likely wouldn't be signed; so in a hypothetical where such a treaty is signed, it's fair to assume that at least one generation of warships were designed with it in mind, the Washington Naval treaty is a good example, where even though Japan and Germany cheated, it did cause them to keep it in mind in their cheating. I am not saying that treaties are immutable but I'm sure it's a easy hot take to have, but I am saying that assuming everyone in a frictionless vacuum (heh) is going to go for technocratic optimal efficiency and not consider things like "rules of engagement", "politics", or "international law" is naive in the opposite direction; it also assumes that all technological advancements are equal and happening at an equal rate which is... Optimistic. Also you didn't respond to whether war crimes would be acceptable in space or is that also a treaty you think is mutable? All I am saying is, nothing about the future of warfare should be assumed, and the historical trend has been for most people to be constantly being proven wrong whenever they make that claim.
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Aug 15, 2018 18:24
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Man, your ignorance about things are done in politics is staggering. Those treaties won't be worth the paper they could theoretically be printed on. And yes, war crimes are very acceptable! It's like you never watch the news or if you never even looked at a history book from afar. You remind me of the poor assholes who, after WWII was over, honestly did not know where are all their Jewish neighbors had gone, since the state had told them a lot of lies about what they were doing with them. I guess if someone showed you a treaty saying that AI drones are bad, you will just solemnly nod while death machines are munching babies right behind your back. Raenir Salazar posted:All I am saying is, nothing about the future of warfare should be assumed, and the historical trend has been for most people to be constantly being proven wrong whenever they make that claim. If that is all you want to say, why do we even have this discussion. "Nothing is certain", is not really a good base for talking, or did you want us to just post "Yes" a couple dozen times? 
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Aug 15, 2018 18:35
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zoux posted:Peter Hamilton wrote a series of books called the Night's Dawn trilogy that I can't recommend because it involves literally Al Capone's ghost BUT it was the first thing I ever read that didn't have sci fi space battles like you see in Star Wars or Trek. Sentient AI ships would fire autonomous drones called combat wasps at each other from light minutes away and they would try to kill each other and which ever drones won went on to almost instantly destroy the enemy ship. In Excession, Iain M Banks depicts a space battle engaged in by his super-intelligent AI-controlled ships taking place at superluminal velocities, it goes on for pages and when it's over the victorious AI does the equivalent of checking its watch and the whole thing took 11 microseconds. On the more realistic side of things, there's Children of a Dead Earth, which is pretty much Kerbal but with railguns and missiles and nuclear thermal rockets.
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Aug 15, 2018 18:45
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Pretty sure Canada isn't at risk of losing its territories, but rather the natural resources off the coast(s) of said territories.
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Aug 15, 2018 18:48
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I'm skeptical that anyone actually knows what deep space combat would look like in the current day. I mean there are a few core assumptions we can build on. There's a trend towards autonomous systems happening right now on Earth so the idea that a human is necessary is evidently not true. Physics isn't going to change for the foreseeable future, so conflict plausible revolves around opposing forces on different orbits deliberately converging to weapons range (space is big, so you aren't going to get battles unless both sides choose to have them). 'Weapons range' means flinging missiles/railgun rounds(conservation of momentum is a thing though!)/laser beams at each other. All of that implies conscious decisions to fight well in advance of forces meeting, followed by short, sharp, and very lethal engagements where the forces and calculations involved mean a human would add no value by being present.
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Aug 15, 2018 18:49
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