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The Lone Badger posted:Apparently there's a rough test to see if you are currently being irradiated. Close and cover your eyes. Are there tiny flashes of light showing up anyway? If yes, find somewhere else to be. Anecdotally, this strobe light effect when your eyes are closed can also occur if you have epilepsy and have been exposed to certain visual stimuli (gently caress that poo poo guild wars 2 boss fight). wears off after about 2 hours, but i can assure you that it sucked.
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Jun 9, 2019 22:29
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Question about the Paris Peace Accords: what was the reasoning behind allowing the Viet Cong to keep 150,000 troops in the South? I know the treaty collapsed instantly anyway, but this provision doesn’t make sense. Did the South know they would stay regardless?
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Jun 9, 2019 23:11
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Question about the Paris Peace Accords: what was the reasoning behind allowing the Viet Cong to keep 150,000 troops in the South? I know the treaty collapsed instantly anyway, but this provision doesn’t make sense. Did the South know they would stay regardless? Why would the Viet Cong have accepted not being allowed to stay? They lived there, after all. You're basically asking the side with the upper hand to either pick up and move en masse or unilaterally disarm. Might as well ask why they agreed to the US withdrawing. Or why Germany 'agreed' to let the Allies partition after WWII. the JJ fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jun 9, 2019 |
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Jun 9, 2019 23:40
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Question about the Paris Peace Accords: what was the reasoning behind allowing the Viet Cong to keep 150,000 troops in the South? I know the treaty collapsed instantly anyway, but this provision doesn’t make sense. Did the South know they would stay regardless? The North/Viet Cong didn't want to give up territory they controlled. The South wanted them gone but the US wanted out of the war and getting out of the war was more important than what the South wanted. The US gave a lot of military aid to the South as they were leaving to soften the blow.
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Jun 10, 2019 00:59
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Hey, someone is asking about Vietnam! drat, someone already answered the question!
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Jun 10, 2019 01:26
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreev_Bay_nuclear_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster edit: http://andreeva.1gb.ru/story/obnimka.html edit 2: beria ran the uranium mines and the nuclear program, so they used convicts for the grunt work HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 03:42
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Ensign Expendable posted:I detect a certain anti-antitank rifle bias I care about tanks, not artillery.
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Jun 10, 2019 06:01
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Cessna posted:Hey, someone is asking about Vietnam! I guess you can instead tell us what happened next. The suspense is killing me!
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Jun 10, 2019 07:17
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the JJ posted:Why would the Viet Cong have accepted not being allowed to stay? They lived there, after all. You're basically asking the side with the upper hand to either pick up and move en masse or unilaterally disarm. Might as well ask why they agreed to the US withdrawing. Or why Germany 'agreed' to let the Allies partition after WWII. By 1972 most NLF forces had to be composed of soldiers sent down from the north. But yes, they knew with the US leaving that they had the upper hand so they could demand it in negotiations and Thieu couldn't do much to stop it. Much of 1973-74 was Thieu trying to get back some of the territory while the NVA built up its capabilities.
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Jun 10, 2019 11:23
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HEY GUNS posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreev_Bay_nuclear_accident That first one is great: "keep shoving it into the tube until you start to see cherenkov radiation." Also on the subject of milhist, trying to get a handle on how many nuclear accidents the Soviet Navy had is legit difficult
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Jun 10, 2019 11:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also on the subject of milhist, trying to get a handle on how many nuclear accidents the Soviet Navy had is legit difficult I would expect it to be hard to get a handle on how many nuclear accidents the US navy had in the Cold War too, to be fair. That sort of thing tends to be confidential unless it's blatantly obvious enough that that's not going to work.
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Jun 10, 2019 12:09
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Has someone ever managed to make the reactor core schmelt through the bottom of the boat?
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Jun 10, 2019 12:18
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I guess you can instead tell us what happened next. The suspense is killing me! Spoiler: 
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Jun 10, 2019 14:53
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feedmegin posted:I would expect it to be hard to get a handle on how many nuclear accidents the US navy had in the Cold War too, to be fair. That sort of thing tends to be confidential unless it's blatantly obvious enough that that's not going to work. The US Navy actually had/has an exemplary nuclear safety record. The man in charge of the original program, Admiral Hyman Rickover, was obsessive over safety and professionalism and while working for him was an abject nightmare, he's probably the main reason there haven't been any American K-19s.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:14
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It’s also a lot easier to track USN accidents that involve casualties, either killed or injured.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:20
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The US Navy actually had/has an exemplary nuclear safety record. The man in charge of the original program, Admiral Hyman Rickover, was obsessive over safety and professionalism and while working for him was an abject nightmare, he's probably the main reason there haven't been any American K-19s. Also a serious accident with a naval reactor would be pretty hard to cover up what with it involving a hundred people and families and a free press and all that. I know submariners have a reputation for keeping quiet but if a bunch of them got off the boat in port and then had to go be hospitalized for acute radiation exposure I'm pretty sure someone would notice. And that's assuming the boat makes it back at all. Rickover was dead-set against liquid-metal cooled reactors on US subs, and after one was built over his objections and the problems he'd feared start cropping up he wasted no time in ending the experiment and having the original reactor ripped out and replaced with a LWR a few years later. Guy was nuts, but also right. aphid_licker posted:Has someone ever managed to make the reactor core schmelt through the bottom of the boat? Depends on what you're thinking of. There was a major nuclear accident on the K-431, an Echo-II sub, in 1965. They'd just refueled it in port and were lowering the reactor lid, which held the control rods, into place and it went on crooked. So they lifted it back up with a crane and lifted it too far, pulling all the control rods out of the core, and got a big steam explosion that ruptured the pressure hull. Killed 10 guys outright, and irradiated a bunch of firefighters with some serious but non-immediately-fatal doses. There are a bunch of nuclear subs on the bottom of the ocean, 2 USN and I think all the rest Soviet, and some of the Soviet ones are in shallow water so they get monitored for radiation release, but I don't think any of them have melted through the boat. One of them was a November-class that had a reactor accident that irradiated everyone on the boat, with 4 people receiving high enough doses to be dead in a month. They decided to scuttle the boat in water that was only 100' deep. (The Russians also had a bunch of boats with liquid-metal-cooled reactors get ruined in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union when they stopped bothering to keep the reactors heated in dock, so the coolant all solidified. I'm not sure what the current status of those boats are but at least the reactors are pretty unlikely to melt through anything.) Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 15:28
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Our sub accidents are crush depth events like God intended. I think the first ever military history thing I recall grabbing my attention was reading about USS Thresher.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:32
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feedmegin posted:I would expect it to be hard to get a handle on how many nuclear accidents the US navy had in the Cold War too, to be fair. That sort of thing tends to be confidential unless it's blatantly obvious enough that that's not going to work. Well that's the thing: officially, the USN has never had a reactor gone a single degree out of spec. That's basically impossible to confirm, but the amount of reactor accidents in the USN (and other western navies using nuclear power plants) stands at zero, and there's no story about how this isn't true. Radiological accidents are in the US military, but they involve bombs, not navy reactors. The US navy has lost two nuclear powered vessels, both submarines. One of them, the USS Thresher off of Cape Cod, was lost partially thanks to being nuclear powered, but that's distinct from an accident with its reactor. (The other one, USS Scorpion, was lost in sufficiently murky waters its believed to be some weird case of a Soviet and an American sub attacking each other, with both sides agreeing after to clam up about it.) There have been other accidents involving subs, like the time a Los Angels class ran itself into an underwater mountain, but the vessel survived. Contrast this to the Soviets, who have had so many radiation accidents in their navy it's hard to find a comprehensive list, with another list of nuclear vessels lost by the Soviet Navy. I mean, their onetime flagship Kirov had a reactor uh-oh spaghettios that ended its career before the Soviets fell. The Soviets also had to remove a faulty nuclear reactor from their white elephant spy ship Ural, and then install a new one in the middle of their second city, then Leningrad.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:34
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I thought they had no idea what happened to Scorpion.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:38
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Nebakenezzer posted:Contrast this to the Soviets, who have had so many radiation accidents in their navy it's hard to find a comprehensive list, with another list of nuclear vessels lost by the Soviet Navy. I mean, their onetime flagship Kirov had a reactor uh-oh spaghettios that ended its career before the Soviets fell. The Soviets also had to remove a faulty nuclear reactor from their white elephant spy ship Ural, and then install a new one in the middle of their second city, then Leningrad. Don't forget their nuclear-powered icebreakers. In _Hunt For Red October_ Clancy describes a fictitious accident where a cook put his dirty pots under a main steam inspection valve and opened it up, but I'm just gonna quote Wikipedia because the actual accidents are even more Soviet Russia: quote:In February 1965, there was a loss-of-coolant accident. After being shut down for refueling, the coolant was removed from the number two reactor before the spent fuel had been removed. As a result, some of the fuel elements melted and deformed inside the reactor. This was discovered when the spent elements were being unloaded for storage and disposal. 124 fuel assemblies (about 60% of the total) were stuck in the reactor core. It was decided to remove the fuel, control grid, and control rods as a unit for disposal; they were placed in a special cask, solidified, stored for two years, and dumped in Tsivolki Bay (near the Novaya Zemlya archipelago) in 1967.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:48
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E30vb3bmMc For everyone who's interested in the martial arts side of things, Stress Level Zero is coming out with a VR game that uses entirely physics-based combat/movement and Valve Knuckle controllers to allow for probably the most realistic martial arts sim ever developed. John Wick-style pistol combat, stabbing multiple people with one sword, grabbing enemies by the arms to restrain them and using them as shields, etc. What I'm saying is HEY GUNS needs to get this and try out a broadsword manual of arms.
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Jun 10, 2019 16:37
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zoux posted:I thought they had no idea what happened to Scorpion. There are a lot of theories and the USN probably has a better idea than what they have publicly stated. They have pretty decent underwater videos of the ship but haven’t declassified anything but a few still shots of iirc the stern that don’t show much.
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Jun 10, 2019 17:54
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Speaking of Rickover I've always loved that story about his intense officer selection process where he had a candidate come in for an interview and told the guy to "piss me off". So the guy swept everything off Rickover's desk. He made it in.
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Jun 10, 2019 17:58
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Went to visit my Mum at the weekend. She still lives near Portsmouth, UK, where I grew up. Inevitably there are a lot of D-Day 75 things going on at the moment (as well as the big international event on the day itself). Yesterday we went to Southwick, a ridiculously pretty little village just outside Portsmouth. Southwick House, the seat of whichever triple-barrel-named family owned (and still owns) the village and the surrounding countryside, was taken over by the Royal Navy to serve as an out-of-town location for the School of Navigation, HMS Dryad, and then became the on-site HQ for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in the days immediately before, during and after D-Day. Eisenhower and Monty had a meeting in the village pub. Southwick had a '1940s Revival' over the weekend. Since Southwick always looks like it's from the 1940s anyway, it's just a case of sprinkling some Jeeps around the place, putting anti-blast tape on the windows, taking down the road signs and letting in some reenactors walk around the place. Half the village was decked out as if it was D-Day and the other half as if it was VE Day. It was a rather impromptu visit, so by the time we arrived the tickets for the tour of the House itself, where they have preserved/recreated the Map Room with all the plots, comms and markers as they were at 0630, were gone. The rest of it was interesting, although I always get a slightly odd feeling about these sort of events. You come away with the impression that WW2 on the Home Front was actually rather nice, getting rides from GIs in deuce-and-a-halfs, buying things in the village shop with 'Careless Talk Costs Lives' posters on the wall, watching slightly chubby Home Guard platoons do drill on the green, wandering around a recreated tank camp and getting drinks from a NAAFI wagon while a Wren sings 'We'll Gather Lilacs' over a crystal-clear PA system. When in reality it was a six-year slog of hardship, uncertainty and loss for virtually everyone even if it did have its upsides to take off the roughest edges.           
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Jun 10, 2019 18:37
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BalloonFish posted:
I’ve been cringing hard at a lot of the greatest generation nostalgia you see in reporting on the event. Last weeks Shields And Brooks was especially bad about sounding like Cicero bemoaning our frivolous modern society and lamenting how the nobility of our grandfathers isn’t something we could replicate today.
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Jun 10, 2019 19:00
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The problem with historical reenactments of things like that is that you can't exactly recreate the miserable parts of wartime legally. They can't arrest you for violating defense regulations and they certainly can't have the village bombed by a flight of Stukas. Having said that, I have an idea for a Animal House-type ending for a comedy film where a regiment of Union Army reenactors interrupt one of those ghastly "plantation weddings". Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 21:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:There are a lot of theories and the USN probably has a better idea than what they have publicly stated. They have pretty decent underwater videos of the ship but haven’t declassified anything but a few still shots of iirc the stern that don’t show much. The most credible theory, at least from what I've heard, is that one of Scorpion's Mark 37s had a hot run in the tube and either caught fire or detonated. Seems much more likely than a Soviet SSN killing it because ??? and it being covered up.
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Jun 10, 2019 21:25
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The problem with historical reenactments of things like that is that you can't exactly recreate the miserable parts of wartime legally. They can't arrest you for violating defense regulations and they certainly can't have the village bombed by a flight of Stukas. Reenacting presents a ridiculously clean and sanitized picture of war. I think there's some value in it from a first-person perspective for things like drill, looking at artifacts and uniforms, etc, but you have to be VERY selective in what you're looking at and very wary of misinterpreting things. (And if you ever get a "Sherman's march through the plantation" reenactment going I'll find a way to be there.)
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Jun 10, 2019 21:27
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https://twitter.com/jaredbkeller/status/1137394732294987777Cessna posted:Reenacting presents a ridiculously clean and sanitized picture of war. edit: and then we discussed it a lot because some children in the audience may have been legit disturbed. oops. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 21:29
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So are we reenacting the margarita-fueled Twister game?
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Jun 10, 2019 21:41
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Should have added realism by having a British soldier on leave get really drunk in the pub and suffer a PTSD flashback that turns into a bar brawl.
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Jun 10, 2019 21:45
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If you aren't scaring the children, you aren't doing it right
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Jun 10, 2019 21:53
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LostCosmonaut posted:The most credible theory, at least from what I've heard, is that one of Scorpion's Mark 37s had a hot run in the tube and either caught fire or detonated. Seems much more likely than a Soviet SSN killing it because ??? and it being covered up. IIRC it was also playing Cold War "i'm not touching you" games next to a Soviet naval exercise. Well, next to in nautical terms so I guess within a few hundred miles or whatever.
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Jun 10, 2019 21:55
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HEY GUNS posted:we had a scenario where we threw a guy off the belltower in a town we were sacking That's nothing. Disney has been running an Indiana Jones stunt show with a massive stuntman body count since 1989 and all the kids cheer when the bad guys get thrown off roofs or machine gunned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Ep2zr8vn8 I should clarify that "body count" is for fake deaths. They've only killed one guy for real so far!
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Jun 10, 2019 21:57
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The problem with historical reenactments of things like that is that you can't exactly recreate the miserable parts of wartime legally. They can't arrest you for violating defense regulations and they certainly can't have the village bombed by a flight of Stukas. Absolutely. I enjoyed walking round Southwick, reading the placards, looking at the Jeeps and listening to the swing band. It was a nice day out with some lightweight education on the side, which is all the event is supposed to be. Southwick actually had some very good details. Your ticket included a 'ration book' which you got stamped as you bought food and drink, printed on one side with the actual civilian rations and the other with the produce available in the shops and cafes, so you could see how just getting an ordinary 2019 pub lunch and a mid-afternoon slice of cake and a mug of tea used up your weekly quota - but of course you weren't served horrible 'national loaf', powdered egg, snoek and sausages that are mostly breadcrumbs. You could take your kids to the school to have a '1940s style' lesson, including being given a 'gas mask case' (a parcel-paper wrapped box on string) and being walked through the air-raid drill. There was a 'camp' of tents next to the village hall, each one occupied by a historical or military society and dedicated to a specific topic or area and they seemed to be very well done. Of course it was most lightly-trafficed part of the village... It's much better than no education/reenactment, and this slightly 'Home Front theme park' take is supported by a lot of very good and thorough history and research. But having a little appreciation of the reality nagged at my brain. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 21:59
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BalloonFish posted:but of course you weren't served horrible 'national loaf', powdered egg, snoek and sausages that are mostly breadcrumbs. As a weirdo I would have gladly done this.
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Jun 10, 2019 22:03
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chitoryu12 posted:That's nothing. Disney has been running an Indiana Jones stunt show with a massive stuntman body count since 1989 and all the kids cheer when the bad guys get thrown off roofs or machine gunned.
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Jun 10, 2019 22:04
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HEY GUNS posted:ah well, in this reenactment we were the bad guys. Oh you can have Waterworld then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAUqViqKvps
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Jun 10, 2019 22:06
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LostCosmonaut posted:The most credible theory, at least from what I've heard, is that one of Scorpion's Mark 37s had a hot run in the tube and either caught fire or detonated. Seems much more likely than a Soviet SSN killing it because ??? and it being covered up. Trouble is the acoustic signature doesn't match what UNDEX sounds like.
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Jun 10, 2019 22:07
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Cessna posted:Reenacting presents a ridiculously clean and sanitized picture of war. Frankly the reenacting is the least problematic part of all of it, and I'm a person who will be the first to point out the problems with reenacting. My issue is all the bullshit where people are just waxing poetic about how it was a different breed of people (usually men) back then and how we all got together and rationed and 40% of the vegetables were coming from victory gardens and we all endured huge sacrifice etc. with the implication that people back then were somehow nobler than they are today and we couldn't do something similar now. It's the main thesis of the Greatest Generation mythology bullshit and it drives me nuts. Why? Because it completely loving obscures the fact that people in the 40s were loving people and, on the whole, just as heroic, noble, tragic, flawed, corrupt, and idiotic as people today. This really comes through in a few of the better wartime memoirs by guys who were self aware enough to write about the lovely stuff. Helmet For My Pillow comes to mind that regard. Slaughter House 5 too. This was a wartime America that built internment camps. This was a wartime America that cut a deal with the mob (including releasing people from prison) in return for making sure the harbors ran OK and nebulous help with the invasion of Sicily. For all the talk about how rationing brought us together it was a political nightmare that was gotten rid of as soon as they were able to. Some soldiers came home to pregnant wives with kids that weren't theirs, some came home to devoted spouses they stayed with for the next 50+ years. Some people were brave heroes in combat, some were cowards, and some did heinous poo poo to POWs and civilians. Some dudes stormed the beaches at Normandy and a whole loving lot more stacked boxes in Omaha - the one in Nebraska. You know - the same general spectrum of behavior and experience that you can find in every conflict in American history. The only thing unique about the "Greatest Generation" was that they had the ill fortune to live through one of the most traumatic events of human history. Then they had the good fortune, in the US and Western Europe / Japan, to live through a loving spectacular couple of economic decades. They weren't loving supermen and you see examples of heroism and villainy in their ranks the same as you do in any goddamned generation you care to look closely enough at. Note that all of this is specifically a reaction to the Brokaw-esque "Greatest Generation" bullshit that has become the basic formula for any major anniversary coverage. It was all over the place with the 50th, the 60th, the 70th, and now we're getting it at the 75th. There are ways to honor people who did a thing and honor the memory of people who fought to get rid of Hitler without resorting to ruminations on how they were just a unique generation that stood taller than all the others. To the extent that they are somehow unique it's because they were uniquely shaped by the context of when and where they were born - you know like every single loving other generation ever. edit: if you want a single major difference between that generation and ours (well, except casual, overt racism) it's that you had a draft that drew people of all walks of life into the military. That's a shared experience you don't see today and is a big part of why we can get into forever wars without having a domestic political crisis. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 22:10
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