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Alchenar posted:I mean you can be an ancient major if you really really want, but people know by their late 20's whether they are on track to stay in the military or not and the vast majority who know they are not going up will go get a management job in the city. Part of the point about manning control is it was usually used against NCOs, who in Britain usually tend to be a lot less willing to just go back to civvy street than the ruperts, because their background means they're often going back to an uncertain future. This is something else you don't find in the US Army - the vast majority of British officers still come from backgrounds where they can just go "welp, time to cash in some of Daddy's favours" and get a well-paid job on the outside.
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Dec 22, 2018 12:08
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how have you people not murdered your aristocracy yet.
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Dec 22, 2018 12:19
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We did it like several centuries ago and they came back powerless but still obnoxious.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:15
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Trin Tragula posted:Part of the point about manning control is it was usually used against NCOs, who in Britain usually tend to be a lot less willing to just go back to civvy street than the ruperts, because their background means they're often going back to an uncertain future. This is something else you don't find in the US Army - the vast majority of British officers still come from backgrounds where they can just go "welp, time to cash in some of Daddy's favours" and get a well-paid job on the outside. This isn't really the current situation, there's an enormous retention issue of servicemen, particularly SNCOs who are leaving the forces in droves for better paid private sector jobs. e: \/\/ yup, absolutely losing them to. Particularly in anything that's a specialisation. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 13:23
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Alchenar posted:This isn't really the current situation, there's an enormous retention issue of servicemen, particularly SNCOs who are leaving the forces in droves for better paid private sector jobs. It's one thing to take the RSM, but I bet he's not taking many Lance Jacks with him
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Dec 22, 2018 14:07
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Do ww2-ish era ships have electrical sockets? I'd imagine power tools would be a huge boon to keeping them running but on the other hand, sometimes some salt water comes in right when you need to use those tools, so how was this managed?
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Dec 22, 2018 17:41
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Mycroft Holmes posted:how have you people not murdered your aristocracy yet. Have you looked at the current state of the British Parliament? The Monarchy might be an upgrade at this point.
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Dec 22, 2018 18:10
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Cessna posted:Also: The US military has the "up or out" system, wherein if you get passed over for promotion a certain number of times you get discharged. This happens far more frequently to officers, often for arbitrary reasons. Thus if you're thinking of making it a career and staying in until you retire and get a pension, going enlisted is statistically a much better bet. Norway had something of an up-or-out system until recently, where NCOs[1] had to leave at 35 years of age or become officers. The result was that all the skilled and experienced NCOs disappeared from the units in one way or another, which hurt organizational skill retention. [1] We didn't really have NCOs in the usual sense, having gotten rid of it conceptually in 1930 because it smelled too much of British class divisions. In its place we had sergeants and officers, with all officers having gone through sergeant ("command") school before officer's school. The tasks that would fall on the NCOs in other armies tended to go to either senior sergeants or officers.
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Dec 22, 2018 18:33
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LatwPIAT posted:we had sergeants... The tasks that would fall on the NCOs in other armies tended to go to ... senior sergeants... That's NCOs. You just had NCOs while being snooty about it!
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Dec 22, 2018 19:16
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FrangibleCover posted:That's NCOs. You just had NCOs while being snooty about it! The point is that the strict commission noncomission thing is not as universal as it seems. There are (mostly anglosphere influenced) countries where the gap between officer and nonofficer duties are so large that you need a warrant officer class to fill it. And there are countries where officer and nonofficer duties overlap, and there is no such thing as a warrant officer. And in many cases even military personal would look at you very strange if you asked them to give exact one word translations that reflect the difference between commission and warrant in their language. VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 20:09
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Trin Tragula posted:As long as the company can demonstrate that the employee has genuinely become redundant in the new structure and there is no need for them any more (and there are also rules to comply with about preventing fake redundancies), they're allowed to terminate them without cause, as long as they also offer redundancy compensation. There's a statutory minimum level Can confirm, this literally just happened to me. Note that the statutory minimum level is 'nothing, zilch, zero' (other than your regular pay over the course of your notice period, generally a month) if you've been employed less than two years; after that it's one week's pay per year of employment (you don't pay tax on it, though). Fortunately my employer was rather more generous than that.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:25
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LatwPIAT posted:[1] We didn't really have NCOs in the usual sense, having gotten rid of it conceptually in 1930 because it smelled too much of British class divisions. Was there like an organized effort to dispose of all the trappings of nobility? What's become of the old social institutions of the nobility across Scandinavia in the last couple hundred years?
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Dec 22, 2018 20:50
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Squalid posted:What's become of the old social institutions of the nobility across Scandinavia in the last couple hundred years? In Finland, mostly in 1919 when the constitution and laws regarding governing the newborn state were set. Most actual privileges had been abolished earlier but this one did away with almost all. Finnish Wikipedia (https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erioikeus) mentions some few rights remaining after this, an example is given of the noble families having wider possibilities to affect inheritance situations. Ataxerxes fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 21:35
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Ataxerxes posted:In Finland, mostly in 1919 when the constitution and laws regarding governing the newborn state were set. Most actual privileges had been abolished earlier but this one did away with almost all. Finnish Wikipedia (https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erioikeus) mentions some few rights remaining after this, an example is given of the noble families having wider possibilities to affect inheritance situations. Even the few atavistic privileges ended in 1995, except for the ones that affect organizations, eg. the state pays for the lutheran priests' educations still. Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 21:55
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To add a naval flavour to the talk of commissions (and the buying of): The Royal Navy is (rather excessively) proud of the fact that it never operated the system of buying commissions and that it has always been a meritocracy. Except that it was meritocracy that weighed heavily in favour of patronage and privilege. All prospective officers entered the Service as Midshipmen, with a minimum entry age of 12. They then had to serve at least three years at sea and be over the age of 18 before they appeared before the Navy Board - a barrage of oral examination questions testing their accumulated knowledge and quizzing them on what they had recorded and learnt via their journals and letters of certification from their various commanders, which had to be presented to the Board. Once they passed this they became a 'Passed Midshipman', eligable for promotion to Lieutenant. The cope for patronage and playing the system was extensive. Around half of all midshipman were the sons of existing naval officers and professional, family or political connections could assure a young son of a berth on a good ship with a captain who had a vested interest in the 'young gentleman's' career. You could also arrange (or pay) to have your young son put on a ship's muster books while they stayed safely on land. Cochrane (the model for Jack Aubrey and Hornblower) 'went to sea' on paper when he was five as a Ship's Boy and 'progressed' through Seaman and Able Seaman before being mustered as a Midshipman when he was 13 - he didn't actually set foot on a ship until he was 17. But he still had to serve the three years at sea in order to pass Navy Board: This was a door that even the most well-connected and patronised young men couldn't open. The 18yrs age limit was frequently brushed aside, with many Midshipman appearing before the Board when they were 16 or 17. In a very few cases a Midshipman could pass Board without the full three years service, but usually only if they had still clocked up a lot of sea-miles and a suitably varied set of experience in less time. A few wealthy gents were disappointed to find out that getting their son a 'prime' Midshipman position with a Port Admiral onboard a harbour-bound flagship often led to them failing the Navy Board through lack of knowledge and experience. On the other hand there were tutors, prep schools and private academies (there was no official naval college until 1729, and then only for 40 students at a time - completing the three-year Royal Navy Academy course counted for two years at sea) who could provide you with a better chance of passing the Navy Board but all these avenues needed paying for. Once you were a Passed Midshipman you still had to be given a posting to become a full-fledged Lieutenant. Here again, those with connections and patronage could both jump to the head of the queue and get the plum postings on flagships, frigates with esteemed captains (but not so esteemed as to have free pick of their officers...) and prestigous overseas stations with opportunities for prize money. Less well-connected Passed Midshipman could spend years, sometimes even their whole career, trying to get a Lieutenant's berth. Once you made that step the patronage system again picked out the well-connected for even better Lieutenant postings and the rare opportunities to become a 'Lieutenant, Commanding' in charge of a cutter, sloop, gunboat or press ship. Only once you made it to Post-Captain did the patronage system weaken its grip. Once you 'made Post' your progression was purely based on seniority. You had your place on the Navy List, with those made Post-Captain before you above you and those promoted after you below you. As those at the top of the List died or retired everyone else moved up a step. Patronage could still weigh in to help a Captain obtain a preferable ship or posting (especially the covetted appointment of Commodore), and to navigate the political side of the Admiralty system, but so long as they stayed alive they would move up the List and eventually reach the (Rear-, Vice-) Admiral ranks. There was certainly no 'up or out' system once you were on the Navy List, so the ranks eventually became top-heavy with Admirals while Captains couldn't gain promotion. In 1747 the Admiralty created the post of 'Admiral Without Distinction' - meaning it did not belong to one of the three notional squadrons the RN was made up of - which Post-Captains and Admirals could be appointed to on the agreement that they withdrew from active service on half pay (effectively a pension) in order to thin out those unsuitable or incompetent. This whole system was gradually dismantled between 1840 and 1860 with the creation of the Royal Naval College and reforms and modernisation to the fleet and rank structures. Speaking of 'up or out', the RN operates one of the most brutal and literal examples of the term; On the 'Perisher' course for prospective submarine commanders (run jointly by the RN and the Royal Navy of The Netherlands), if one of the candidates fails any of the practical sections of the course at any point the instructing officer will immediately take over, hand the conn over to the sub's CO and end the exercise. The candidate is then given a brief chat confirming that they failed the exercise and why while the sub is surfaced and a boat called alongside. Within minutes the candidate and their kit is sent ashore. They will never have another chance at commanding a submarine, will be required to leave the Submarine Service as a whole and will in all likelyhood never set foot aboard a submarine ever again. Their future RN career will be entirely Surface or ashore. Asehujiko posted:Do ww2-ish era ships have electrical sockets? I'd imagine power tools would be a huge boon to keeping them running but on the other hand, sometimes some salt water comes in right when you need to use those tools, so how was this managed? It's a boring answer but yes, they did have electrical sockets and they just made them as weatherproof as they could, just as they do today. Sockets on weather decks or areas likely to get soaked would be of 'waterproof' design themselves (screw-in connectors with gaskets) and housed in weatherproof junction boxes. But even so faulty connections and tripped breakers/blown fuses were common and the electricians would have been busy cleaning and re-packing all the plugs, especially if everything got a good soaking in bad weather. WW2-era ships often made more use of compressed air for operating heavier-duty power tools - you had a main air circuit running around the ship with connector points wherever needed. Electrical plug-ins were more for portable lighting and communications gear, plus portable/de-mountable weapons. A lot of the deck machinery now run by electricity or hydraulics would have still been steam- or muscle-powered.
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Dec 22, 2018 23:44
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How deep did the ships sink in Pearl Harbour?
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Dec 22, 2018 23:47
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Hogge Wild posted:How deep did the ships sink in Pearl Harbour? Not very - quite famously the superstructures of many ships sunk at Pearl were still above water, and they were easy enough to refloat. The shallowness of the water, in fact, was thought to make the docked ships at Pearl immune to torpedo attack. It took a certain depth of water to drop a torpedo successfully and have it run straight. Unfortunately, the British had already come up with a way to rig air-dropped torpedoes in shallow water during the assault on Taranto, and the Japanese copied the British innovations and added an improvement of their own.
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Dec 22, 2018 23:51
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Cythereal posted:Not very - quite famously the superstructures of many ships sunk at Pearl were still above water, and they were easy enough to refloat. Didn't they also have some aircraft carrying armor-piercing bombs?
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Dec 23, 2018 00:31
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StandardVC10 posted:Didn't they also have some aircraft carrying armor-piercing bombs? They did, but the torpedoes were the bigger threat. Air-dropped bombs in WW2, even armor-piercing ones, were not generally effective at sinking large warships. They could damage a big ship, even severely if well-aimed and/or start fires that cause secondary explosions (this was what did in the IJN cruiser Mikuma at Midway), but air-dropped torpedoes did most of the damage to the big ships.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:48
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Didn't the Arizona blow up from a bomb hitting a magazine?
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Dec 23, 2018 00:57
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Taerkar posted:Didn't the Arizona blow up from a bomb hitting a magazine? ...Huh. Now that I check, yes indeed it did. Still, Arizona was the only major ship sunk by bombs alone at Pearl. The Oklahoma in turn was sunk by torpedoes alone. Every other major ship that sank was hit by multiple torpedoes and bombs.
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Dec 23, 2018 01:05
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I can't remember if that observation deck thingy over the Arizona lets you see the ship below or not. I feel like I personally remember seeing the bubbles still coming up, but memory lies so idk
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Dec 23, 2018 02:30
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Cythereal posted:...Huh. Now that I check, yes indeed it did. I’d pose bombs did their job six months later, directly leading to the sinking of four fleet carriers in a single battle. Lest someone gets the impression that dive bombing in general was never “generally effective at sinking large warships” and all that (I know you didn’t claim this was the case).
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Dec 23, 2018 02:35
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I couldn't find accurate depths from quick googling, would anyone know those?
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Dec 23, 2018 02:35
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Koesj posted:I’d pose bombs did their job six months later, directly leading to the sinking of four fleet carriers in a single battle. Bombs are not nearly as effective as torps for causing water to get into ships, limiting their ability to reliably sink vessels. Bombs can still do a very good job of ruining ships and at the very least rendering them combat ineffective. Most (all?) of the Japanese carriers at Midway were scuttled but they were effectively destroyed by dive bombers.
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Dec 23, 2018 02:41
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Yeah the bombs didn’t technically sink any of the 4 carriers at Midway but they blew the superstructure and most of the deck to hell. So assuming the Japanese could have gotten them into a repair dry dock they would have had to rebuild like half the ship. And considering that they knew that US subs would undoubtably sink them during the long tow back to Japan they decided to just scuttle them.
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Dec 23, 2018 02:55
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Hogge Wild posted:I couldn't find accurate depths from quick googling, would anyone know those? Accurate boating charts are publicly available. http://www.charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart/19366_BookletChart.pdf The current location of the Arizona has the bed at 36 feet down, the primary channels and basins are between 40 and 50 feet deep.
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Dec 23, 2018 02:59
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oystertoadfish posted:I can't remember if that observation deck thingy over the Arizona lets you see the ship below or not. I feel like I personally remember seeing the bubbles still coming up, but memory lies so idk I was there recently, you can not only see the ship you can see the oil that is still leaking out.
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Dec 23, 2018 06:12
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Yep. Was still leaking when I was there in 2010
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Dec 23, 2018 06:40
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the JJ posted:History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth is a good book that also has a lot of great meta commentary on the history of the history. Well looks like i have some reading to do over Christmas vacation
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Dec 23, 2018 07:52
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fishmech posted:Accurate boating charts are publicly available. Thanks!
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Dec 23, 2018 11:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yep. Was still leaking when I was there in 2010 Love your new AV, btw. I assume someone in the Cold War thread threw a snit...
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Dec 23, 2018 12:32
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feedmegin posted:Love your new AV, btw. I assume someone in the Cold War thread threw a snit... Is it still the which one of you mentioned politics red text? On a phone but that’s what I’m seeing. That’s maybe a month or two old now. Forget whose dick I slapped for politics in TFR but it was pretty mundane.
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Dec 23, 2018 13:02
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Don Gato posted:I was there recently, you can not only see the ship you can see the oil that is still leaking out. Cyrano4747 posted:Yep. Was still leaking when I was there in 2010 Weren't they planning to pump it out?
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Dec 23, 2018 13:12
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BalloonFish posted:It's a boring answer but yes, they did have electrical sockets and they just made them as weatherproof as they could, just as they do today. Sockets on weather decks or areas likely to get soaked would be of 'waterproof' design themselves (screw-in connectors with gaskets) and housed in weatherproof junction boxes. But even so faulty connections and tripped breakers/blown fuses were common and the electricians would have been busy cleaning and re-packing all the plugs, especially if everything got a good soaking in bad weather. SS American Victory is moored in Tampa, and when I took the tour in 2010 or so, they were in the midst of installing a marine 120vac system. She was originally outfitted with either a 6vdc or 12vdc ungrounded electrical system (I can’t recall) which requires rather specialized (and now completely unobtanium, not to mention marginally-safe in the first place) appliances and tools.
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Dec 23, 2018 15:00
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GotLag posted:Weren't they planning to pump it out? Iirc they looked into that and a few factors argued against it 1) damage to the historical site which is also a war grave 2) slow leak really isn’t a major environmental hazard. It’s pretty much in line with what happens at any harbor anyways. It’s not great but it’s not exceptional either. 3) the oil has undergone some chemical changes since the attack due to long submersion and it’s not as simple as running a hose down. I think it was low grade poo poo to begin with and you need to heat that crap to get it warm enough to pump too. The tldr is a lot of effort and angst to fix something which is less of a problem than a ton of other way easier environmental issues just at that one harbor.
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Dec 23, 2018 16:42
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How long do places stay war graves? Rest time on normal graveyards are 15 years here, then the plot is reused.
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Dec 23, 2018 19:18
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aphid_licker posted:How long do places stay war graves? Rest time on normal graveyards are 15 years here, then the plot is reused. Without wishing to throw my job around too much (CWGC) it depends. I’m given to understand that cemeteries under our care - physical graves or alternative commemoration memorials - are usually either indefinite, or moderate to long term renewable grants or loans unless the government of the nation who owned/requisitioned/loaned etc. the land boots us out for some reason or the cemetery is unmaintainable due to outside factors. No idea about graves at sea, however.
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Dec 23, 2018 19:36
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Have you looked at the current state of the British Parliament? The Monarchy might be an upgrade at this point. toffs are part of the aristocracy hth
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Dec 23, 2018 19:38
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Serpentis posted:Without wishing to throw my job around too much (CWGC) it depends. I’m given to understand that cemeteries under our care - physical graves or alternative commemoration memorials - are usually either indefinite, or moderate to long term renewable grants or loans unless the government of the nation who owned/requisitioned/loaned etc. the land boots us out for some reason or the cemetery is unmaintainable due to outside factors. Aren't there terrible people more or less plundering 20th century war graves for scrap metal right now too?
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Dec 23, 2018 19:46
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