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Ranging sabot tank - On: Chieftain Fire Control Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Introduction: The Chieftain  The Chieftain Main Battle Tank formed the core of the British Army's tank force between the late 60s and the early 90s and had more than a few upgrades over the years. It was well armoured and had a powerful 120mm gun but was initially let down badly by a poor engine and drivetrain which successive upgrades never quite managed to fix. There's a lot to talk about with Chieftain and it's a surprisingly poorly documented tank from simple Googling so I'm going to talk about it here and hope it shows up on Google when you search for it. Stereonope: Early Chieftain and the RMG When Chieftain was being designed in the late 50s and early 60s the cutting edge of rangefinding was fitting special stereoscopic or coincidence rangefinders, like on this M60 which has the distinctive ears on either side of the turret:  Which are essentially two periscopes mounted sideways into the tank and adjusted by the crew until they both display the same thing, which provides the range with a bit of trigonometry.  Another, simpler method was the stadiametric method where the range to an object of approximately known size (like another tank) can be found by its apparent size in the optics:  Line up a 2.7m tall tank with the tracks on the baseline and if the turret reaches the line marked "16" it's 1600m away. Chieftain didn't use either of these methods, stadiametric rangefinding is inaccurate and stereoscopic rangefinding takes ages to do properly. Instead, Chieftain was fitted with a machine gun that could be fired at different elevations and then when it hit the range to the target was known. This gives away the position of the tank but is actually very accurate, especially given that it can be used to correct for wind as well, and supposedly was surprisingly quick. The first MG used in the prototypes was Cessna's favourite M85 which was found to be highly unreliable and, if the ammunition belt was oily, was at risk of exploding due to high chamber pressures. The M85 was quickly replaced by an M2 Browning which was much more suitable. The sight looked like this:  Usage was pretty simple too. The gunner lined up the first 'dot' on the target and fired the RMG, which shot a three round burst of .50 bullets downrange. The gunner then elevated the gun and fired a second burst with the second 'dot' lined up and so forth. The gunner simply fired as quickly as he could and it was up to the commander to observe effect. When a hit was achieved the commander would call out which burst hit the target and order the engagement in the format "Sabot dot ____ fire" and the gunner would line up the appropriate range line and shoot. This method was good out to 1100m, a creditable distance but something of an oversight when its remembered that the gun was selected for its ability to penetrate a 120mm plate at 60 degrees at 2000m, a distance at which it couldn't actually hit anything reliably. As a result therefore the M2 was modified with a new barrel and new ammunition and the gunner was given a "nine dot" sight which would allow engagements out to 2000m  This diagram also shows the dot-range conversions and labels the ranges. The tiny numbers right up at the top are for the high velocity APDS round and the big numbers down the side are for the low velocity HESH round (if people want me to talk more about ammunition types I'll do that too at some point). Officially the gunner was still only supposed to fire the first four dots and then wait for the commander to tell him to fire every subsequent dot, but quite often the gunner and commander would agree that the gunner should just fire until told otherwise. FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 21:36
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If we’ve got a time machine then assassinating Stalin is a foolproof plan- just assassinate Hitler and watch the fireworks. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ87NTbhS_M https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RnwKNynuqYw
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Jan 15, 2019 21:38
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Randarkman posted:A key point to remember is that these people did not really conceive of our world as being fundamentally separated from the divine like we do (having mostly grown up in societies with both a legal separation of public life and religion Speak for yourself. My head of state is also ersatz Pope 
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Jan 15, 2019 21:41
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HEY GUNS posted:i'm haunted by the fact that we offered marshall plan aid to the ostblock as well, they just didn't take it Czechoslovakia and Poland showed interest in the proposed plan, and the Soviets slapped them down. Jan Masaryk to taken yo Moscow and was screamed at by the Soviet leadership. Not too long after that, the Communist coup happened and he "committed suicide".
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Jan 15, 2019 21:46
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Epicurius posted:Czechoslovakia and Poland showed interest in the proposed plan, and the Soviets slapped them down. Jan Masaryk to taken yo Moscow and was screamed at by the Soviet leadership. Not too long after that, the Communist coup happened and he "committed suicide". it all comes back to defenestration in the end
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Jan 15, 2019 21:48
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Stephen Fry!
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Jan 15, 2019 21:52
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HEY GUNS posted:so how do we do 1) and would it have to involve assassinating stalin Well it's not just that they just didn't take it, it's that the Soviets wouldn't let them. The Soviet Union was excluded from receiving any economic aid, contrary to Marshall's own designs, and so Stalin wasn't about to let any of the satellites start receiving it either, which I don't know is all that unreasonable of a decision when viewed from the Soviet perspective.
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Jan 15, 2019 21:59
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:There's also the other play: tell American strategists that the Soviet Union totally knows about the bomb, and will be able to develop a nuclear weapon within 5 years, and you cannot rely on being the sole nuclear power for any prolonged period of time. Further, bombs will be miniaturized, ICBMs will exist, you will be at risk of nuclear attack. Oh, nuclear proliferation would be mentioned. I was thinking though that the end goal would be to prevent a few smaller wars for starters and get cracking on global warming on a civilization wide scale early. Since we're in the realm of pure fantasy anyway.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:07
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bewbies posted:really begs the question who was worse nazis or communists This is absolutely true, and its because the Brits are more dangerous because they don't have as many ideological blinders on, and until recently, had the instincts to lurch from crisis to crisis while still leveraging the worst consequences of their regime on foreign countries. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I know I'm late to this but I finally got around to seeing Fury, which was great, but what exactly was wrong with it? I feel like they would have had more artillery and air support in 1945 but other than that, it doesn't seem that crazy outside of the end. Nothing, unless you were expecting to get a realistic experience of WWII out of a movie
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Jan 15, 2019 22:08
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I know I'm late to this but I finally got around to seeing Fury, which was great, but what exactly was wrong with it? I feel like they would have had more artillery and air support in 1945 but other than that, it doesn't seem that crazy outside of the end. Non nerd answer: Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and Fury doesn't have anything new to say.
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Jan 15, 2019 23:17
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It was offered on the condition of a free market system, effectively forcing them to join the US alliance to get aid. That is not a serious offer.
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Jan 15, 2019 23:18
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Party In My Diapee posted:forcing them to join the US alliance
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Jan 15, 2019 23:26
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is absolutely true, and its because the Brits are more dangerous because they don't have as many ideological blinders on, and until recently, had the instincts to lurch from crisis to crisis while still leveraging the worst consequences of their regime on foreign countries. I have some news for you re: the British and ideological blinders.
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Jan 15, 2019 23:27
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HEY GUNS posted:as opposed to the comforting arms of russia, which wants only what is best for them That was self-defense see The real injustice in all this was that, for self-defense in the face of repeated historic invasion, the régions of Luxembourg, Belge, Zélande, and Rhénanie-Palatinat were never realized.
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Jan 15, 2019 23:33
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Randarkman posted:I dislike how many modern people and media tend to kind of treat and assume pre-Christian pagan societies as being so much more chill about religion and even "progressive" compared to Christianity and Islam and such. See also the way people who don't know a whole lot talk about the Cathari or Irish Paganism (this was so bad in the late 90s and early 00s). I heard the same thing about the mongols on twitter today: that the Great Wall of China was to prevent Chinese peasants from running away and joining the pluralist Mongol empire HOWEVER: considering this thread is at least technically about milhist and i am also the OP of a continuing thread about religion, we could discuss these issues there HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 23:33
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The real injustice in all this was that, for self-defense in the face of repeated historic invasion, the régions of Luxembourg, Belge, Zélande, and Rhénanie-Palatinat were never realized. edit: quote:That was self-defense see HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 23:34
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Alchenar posted:Non nerd answer: Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and Fury doesn't have anything new to say. I didn't like Fury. If you want to watch a tank movie, go watch Lebanon.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:07
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FrangibleCover posted:Honestly I'd say it does have something new to say. Between the extrajudicial executions of POWs, the rape and the breakfast what Fury wants to say is Americans Were Just As Bad. Ryan not only has an extrajudicial execution, it straight up plays it as the correct decision. Fury isn't trying to say Americans Were Just As Bad (you really misread that), it says that war dehumanises people and forces them into a place where in order to cope they have to adopt a mindset that is incompatible with and sets them apart from civilian life. But that's the whole point of Saving Private Ryan (and to an extent, any post-Vietnam war film).
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Jan 16, 2019 00:23
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Alchenar posted:Ryan not only has an extrajudicial execution, it straight up plays it as the correct decision. Saving Private Ryan also has surrendering "German" soldiers getting shot on Omaha Beach.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:28
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dublish posted:Saving Private Ryan also has surrendering "German" soldiers getting shot on Omaha Beach. I remember going back and forth emotionally in the theater. Like jazzed at the Nazis getting torched in their bunkers after the Allies take the beach, to feeling really bad about the Mickey Mouse guy begging for his life, to later hating the “shhhh shhhh” stab guy. There’s probably more but its been years since I saw it. I dunno what that says about me or war movies or what but I always thought it was interesting how the film manipulated your emotions like that. Also I was a teenager and probably not thinking super critically about all that stuff
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Jan 16, 2019 00:33
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Alchenar posted:Ryan not only has an extrajudicial execution, it straight up plays it as the correct decision. I don't think this was the point at all the movie was trying to make when Opum kills the "Mickey Mouse" German guy
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Jan 16, 2019 00:38
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I know death of the author and all, but knowing the writer of Saving Private Ryan followed that up with Mel Gibson's The Patriot really hurts my enjoyment of the film, and lends some credibility to the "yes, SPR was that bad" interpretation, at least from the POV of the screenplay. Spielberg did a great job though. EDIT: Jeez, what a career quote:Fly Away Home (1996) Fangz fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 00:43
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Ice Fist posted:I don't think this was the point at all the movie was trying to make when Opum kills the "Mickey Mouse" German guy People I’ve seen it with take it that way. Which is pretty dumb. Don’t they send him off bound and blindfolded? So he blunders into his friends first and has to go “Sorry fellow germans, the allies made me promise I’d surrender so I must be on my way!” And they’re like “oh yeah mate, rules is rules. See ya. West is that way!”
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Jan 16, 2019 00:52
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Ivan's War posted:The fate of one, P. M. Gavrilov, who was among the very few survivors of the battle of Brest in 1941, would prove the quality of Soviet justice. Gavrilov was a real hero. Although he had been wounded, and although certain that he would die, he fought to his last bullet, saving one grenade to hurl at the enemy as he passed out from loss of blood. His courage so impressed the Wehrmacht (which was seldom given to sentimental acts) that German soldiers carried his almost lifeless body to a dressing station, whence he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. It was for this act of ‘surrender’ that he stood accused after the liberation of his German camp in May 1945. His next home was a camp again, this time a Soviet one. In all, about 1.8 million prisoners like him would end up in the hands of SMERSh.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:People I’ve seen it with take it that way. Which is pretty dumb. Don’t they send him off bound and blindfolded? That's a different guy, the actors just look similar.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:53
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Speaking of Fury. For a movie about tanks and people in them, I prefer The Beast (of War), not because I think it's like super realistic or anything (that's a pretty drat roomy T-55 they've got in that movie), but because I think it's a really good and underrated, even relatively unknown movie. Watch it if you get a chance.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:And they’re like “oh yeah mate, rules is rules." HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:02
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OctaviusBeaver posted:That's a different guy, the actors just look similar. No, it's exactly the same guy. That's how he knows Upham's name. He's *not* the same as the guy who kills Mellish. But the German they capture-and-release at the radar site, Steamboat Willie, is the guy who shows up rearmed at Ramelle later and ends up shooting Miller, before being shot by Upham. And in any event Band of Brothers is infinitely better than Saving Private Ryan.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:06
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HEY GUNS posted:so how do we do 1) and would it have to involve assassinating stalin doesn't assassinating Stalin empower a Beria-type faction? which would have been horrifying, like possibly worse than the late years of Stalin.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:doesn't assassinating Stalin empower a Beria-type faction? which would have been horrifying, like possibly worse than the late years of Stalin.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:31
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I thought Beria's thing was that he didn't have a faction, everyone hated him, and that was why Stalin trusted him - because he was entirely dependent on Stalin and wouldn't last five minutes in the absence of Stalin (or the withdrawal of Stalin's support). Which is exactly what happened when Stalin died (as seen in the recent documentary The Death of Stalin) FMguru fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:35
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FMguru posted:I thought Beria's thing was that he didn't have a faction, everyone hated him, and that was why Stalin trusted him - because he was entirely dependent on Stalin and wouldn't last five minutes in the absence of Stalin (or the withdrawal of Stalin's support).
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Jan 16, 2019 01:36
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:doesn't assassinating Stalin empower a Beria-type faction? which would have been horrifying, like possibly worse than the late years of Stalin. Personally I think it's difficult to say. If you know something about the power struggles following Stalin's death then you should be aware that Beria, once free of Stalin did not command nearly as much influence as he would have liked, pretty much everyone was uneasy about him and his allies such as they were tended to be weak men he manipulated or people he controlled through threats and blackmail (then again in 1942 he'd be head of the NKVD, which he wasn't in 1953). Beria, like his predecessors, owed their position essentially to how they were useful to Stalin in spreading terror and using that to control the party and therefore the country, they were despicable cretins (and Beria's predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov, may have been even worse than Beria) but they seem to have been the people preferred for these positions. Without Stalin and his reign of terror (assuming that Stalin dying would have brought about a change or at least halt in policy on that front) these guys' positions becomes much less secure, bereft of his patronage and themselves being useful. FMguru posted:I thought Beria's thing was that he didn't have a faction, everyone hated him, and that was why Stalin trusted him - because he was entirely dependent on Stalin and wouldn't last five minutes in the absence of Stalin (or the withdrawal of Stalin's support). Yes. Beria himself was aware of this I think, which is probably the reason why he wanted to champion political liberalization and end the purges in order to build up popular support to make up for his lack of support in the inner political structures of the Soviet Union (primarily the party, but after the war the military also becomes important in this regard as an entity controlled by the party through the state, but with its own hierarchy and bureaucracy apart from the party). He may even have considered trying to leverage foreign suppport in order to sustain himself in power, supposedly he was considering ending Soviet occupation of East Germany and accomodating the West on a bunch of foreign policy issues. e: poo poo, 1953 not 1956 Randarkman fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:39
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Randarkman posted:Beria, once free of Stalin did not command nearly as much influence as he would have liked, pretty much everyone was uneasy about him and his allies edit: Yezhov was not a serial killer and it's possible that a bunch of the sex he had was with consenting adults. (It's difficult to tell because the guy I remember who accused him of rape did so under torture, and then was killed with him.) Beria was worse. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:41
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If this happened during the war it seems like Zukhov would take over, no?
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Jan 16, 2019 01:42
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Phanatic posted:And in any event Band of Brothers is infinitely better than Saving Private Ryan. BoB is a little too in love with the Greatest Generation and misses the point of the book that the guys in Easy Company aren't out of the ordinary. It also has a little too much "Clean Wehrmacht" for my taste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg6IXfCz0vg
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Jan 16, 2019 01:45
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Fin tank - On: Chieftain Fire Control Part Two Part One Part Three Part Four Forged in the white heat: TLS By the early 1970s Chieftain's mechanical woes had been more or less fixed by the Mk.5 variant and designers turned their attentions once more to the fire control system. The cutting edge thing at the time was the laser rangefinder, the first vehicle to be fitted with one being the SK-105 Kürassier, an Austrian  Most of the sight is taken up by the HESH range lines again, with the APDS lines at the top. The ring with a point in it at the top of the sight shows where the laser is pointing and the engagement is very simple. Just point the laser at your target, press the Lase button, check the range in the separate display and engage with the appropriate range line. Tanks fitted with the TLS had the ranging MG removed, which was apparently unpopular with crews who liked having an intermediate option between Coax and HESH for light vehicles. This is quite surprising to me because the .50 ammunition area was replaced with interior crew stowage, which tank crews generally love to bits. Dance of the Ellipses: IFCS TLS seems to have been viewed as only an interim solution and it was quickly followed in the late 70s by Marconi's Improved Fire Control System, Britain's first fire control computer for tanks. In the inimitable way of British procurement, a meteorological sensor was designed but not fitted that would have provided external temperature and wind readings but at least the sensors for trunnion tilt, barrel wear and charge temperature survived the Treasury.  The initial version of the IFCS sight looked like this, with a simple ladder sight retained and a stadiametric rangefinder added to provide a reversionary mode in case the laser rangefinder was out of action. The engagement procedure became somewhat more complicated again, the gunner lased the target as with the TLS, which would cause an ellipse to appear on the sight that represented a tank sized target at that range and was positioned where the projectile would hit if the tank fired immediately. The gunner could then either use the autolay function to have the computer move the gun so that the ellipse was on their old point of aim or manually lay the ellipse onto the target if required. This system was considered a little slow but highly accurate, it was an IFCS in manual lay mode and an L11A5 gun that achieved the famous 5km first round kill during Desert Storm. Chieftain was subsequently upgraded with the Thermal Optical Gunnery System, a big thermal optic that lived in the old searchlight housing and got a new sight which is way simpler.  I don't actually have a good description of how this one works, but it looks like the box has replaced the ellipse and everything else is the same tbh. The IFCS underneath is unchanged FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:47
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It does have Speirs who doesn't give a gently caress if you're "clean Wehrmacht." Also this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qocmVDu3BE And he's only probably a war criminal. Speirs is an interesting character because he's at odds with the aw-shucks heroism we're used to in WWII movies. He's a psycho, he's nuts and he's scary. Another thing that kind of made me reexamine my thoughts about the Greatest Generation is at the end where some of the ETO guys think they're getting shipped off to the Pacific and they're like "gently caress that, we did our bit." That's in contrast to the never-give-up fight-to-the-end mythology we've built around WWII vets. The Pacific is even better about this, but since it doesn't have as good a narrative structure as BoB, people got mad. zoux fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 01:50
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Fangz posted:If this happened during the war it seems like Zukhov would take over, no? As I said it's difficult to say. I would love to hear some speculation and theories about who would be likely to take over if Stalin died in say 1942 (or if he actually was arrested and deposed as he himself seems to have thought was imminent in the early days of Barbarossa). I think someone from the Party would be more likely than Zhukov though. He was a soldier, not a politician, he likely would not have lasted if he tried to set himself up as some kind of ruler in the Byzantine world Soviet political infighting (and indeed he had a shot at political influence after helping bring down Beria, but he was outmaneuvered and eventually shoved out of the public eye, which left him powerless, by Khurschev and his crew).
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Jan 16, 2019 01:52
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Does he have a power base? Does he have a posse?
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Jan 16, 2019 01:53
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