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HEY GUNS posted:are any forms of smokeless tobacco allowed on subs Yes. quote:“Smokeless tobacco hasn’t been banned, so a lot of people have turned to dip and snuff,” said Benjamin Grover, the Charlotte’s chief hospital corpsman. Grover, 36, of Rockville, Maryland, said he hasn’t seen any major nicotine fits, though some of the crew have been noticeably more on edge.
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Aug 23, 2019 09:20
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The US navy is dry as well isn't it? Bunch of humourless puritans over there imo. The RN was still issuing free rum up until the 1970s 
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Aug 23, 2019 10:35
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feedmegin posted:The US navy is dry as well isn't it? Bunch of humourless puritans over there imo. The RN was still issuing free rum up until the 1970s
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Aug 23, 2019 10:38
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What about the lash and you know.
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Aug 23, 2019 11:47
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Milo and POTUS posted:What about the lash and you know.
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Aug 23, 2019 12:05
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I spent this week at a joint discussion about the USN's Future Surface Combatant, and it felt very...similar in a lot of ways to what the world's navies must have been doing prior to WWI, and I found it absolutely fascinating even if a lot of the material went way over my head. The question(s) are, 1) do we need a new Big Ship, and if so, (2) what form should it take. The main issues driving the question are 1) the Ticonderogas are getting very old, 2) the Zumwalt build was cut way short, and 3) the Arleigh Burke's have some limitations when it comes to air defense and command/networking. The Ticos have typically been the seat of the air defense commander (ADC) in a strike group thanks to a somewhat specialized suite of command and air defense capabilities, and the navy wants to update this capability in a new ship. There are two camps as to the direction the navy should take. Most navy surface people and capability developers want a Big Ship. By big, I mean....pretty goddamn huge by modern standards, something around a 20,000 ton displacement, and with physical dimensions similar to those of a late WWI/interwar battleship. The other camp, which unsurprisingly includes the CBO and the Armed Services Committee, wants a much smaller ship, even smaller than the Zumwalts -- which are roughly the size of a pre/early-WWI battleship, though they displace far less -- and possibly more of them. This question is more interesting than I thought it would be. Capability for these ship types generally scales exponentially with size. Bigger/more powerful sensors, deeper magazines, a larger/more robust command and network capability for the ADC, and a more diverse and specialized crew are some of the big advantages. Smart people do the actual math on this stuff in the analysis of alternatives phase, but imagine something like, for an X% increase in displacement, you get X+Y% increase in capability. Cost scales exponentially too, however, in a very similar line...bigger ships need more yard and port space, more specialized machining and techniques, more life support requirements and so on. Bigger ships aren't just more expensive...they're a lot more expensive. The one thing everyone agrees on is the ship needs to be very modular, which should make incremental upgrades a lot simpler and less expensive...theoretically. This was a major limitation of the Ticos. As you might imagine, a lot of the discussion immediately went to vulnerability and cost vs capability. Assuming the planned buy is one FSC ship per strike group, that's a huge sum of money to build a bunch of Big Ships. The alternative is to build some number of smaller, less capable ships that operate in concert with one another, sharing the workload and spreading out the vulnerability between them, with probably two per strike group. Big Ship advocates argue that if one of these is neutralized, it so depletes the air defense capability of the strike group that the other one might as well not even be there, which means we've spent more money for two ships and saved nothing in vulnerability. Small Ship advocates argue that if the big ship is neutralized, that's pretty much that, so why not have some residual capability, even if it is far less. Anyway, all that is to say, I can picture the old admiralties of the world having the same kinds of discussions in 190X or whenever. All of these discussions are essentially theoretical...there hasn't ever been a major surface action that featured modern missiles and radars and jet fighters and drones and anti ship ballistic missiles and a contested electronic environment and so on. There's every chance that literally everyone is wrong, and something unforeseen, like individual rocket packs or lasers or Cyber Attacks wind up being the decisive capability in the future naval war. Much like....there hadn't been an action featuring torpedoes and aircraft and director-laid big guns prior to WWI. As it happened, a lot of the theories from that era turned out to be very incorrect despite being perfectly logical and reasonable. Historians are always kind of smug when it comes to analyzing/criticizing the decisions made by these past people, but man, doing it for real is very, very hard.
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Aug 23, 2019 13:55
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HEY GUNS posted:oh the latter is everywhere. i dunno if the USN flogged It was outlawed in 1850 after a fairly extensive anti-flogging campaign and a novel by Herman Melville where he described a pretty brutal flogging.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:18
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There’s beer on US ships but only the captain will authorize it be issued out while at sea. Some people claim you’re supposed to get two beers if you go x days without a port call but that’s not true- it’s at the skipper’s discretion. They’ll also utilize it if the ship pulls into a port and doesn’t allow liberty out in town: set up a “beer on the pier” event.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:37
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HEY GUNS posted:i think this came up in the discord and i think what chitoryu12 said is there was a historically significant number of teetotalers in the us from early times The teetotaler Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels banned alcohol from Navy vessels in 1914. He also banned non-necessary work on Sundays and vessels setting sail on Sundays. They did institute Beer Days at some point after his tenure though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_day I've been told as well that when Beer Days happen, they open the beers too so you have to drink them there.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:43
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I guess I stand corrected as that wiki says 45 days. I’ve hit that before on two different ships and there was never even discussion about a beer day so I figured the 45 wasn’t a hard rule.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:47
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Yeah, the US has historically had a lot of teetotalers and temperance movements, usually with a religious backing. They tried getting a dry army in the Civil War, which didn’t exactly work out.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:50
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A Samurai Warrior slicing an arrow in flight into clean halves, colourized.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:54
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zoux posted:Poking around on wikipedia: To my knowledge Stalin was an antisemite before he was a dictator.
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Aug 23, 2019 15:17
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bewbies posted:the ship needs to be very modular, Oh God, not again, not again 
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Aug 23, 2019 15:26
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The Soviet Union was pretty antisemitic in general due to wanting to stamp out Zionism as a nationalist movement and Judaism as a religion. The rise of Israel as an anti-communist bulwark in the Middle East also soured the USSR towards Israel, Zionists, and observant Jews. It wasn't the same as Nazi antisemitism but more based on militant atheism, a suspicion of ties to a foreign power, and that constant push to create a Soviet nationalism. quote:Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists have teamed up for anti-communist activities with Israeli Zionists. The wolf and the fox: separate ancestry, same habits. This cartoon from a 1977 Ukrainian humor magazine Perets illustrates that pretty well.
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Aug 23, 2019 15:43
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JcDent posted:Oh God, not again, not again They're not not not considering LCS take 2, if I may speak for bewbies (bewbies, let me know if I'm right?) from a more limited knowledge base. They mean modular as "future-proofed without necessarily needing to open holes in the hull", not at all as "modular" as LCS was supposed to be, which was absolutely a disaster. My source, however, is CRS stuff.
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Aug 23, 2019 15:45
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Some things were also a little better in the USSR than in the Russian Empire previously to it; and lets not forget that Israel's support in its founding mostly actually came from the USSR, iirc they were only able to acquire weapons from the Eastern bloc, not from the West. Things probably could have gone very differently for want of a nail and positions easily could have swapped. Israel also did some interesting foreign policy themselves, iirc, they actually had sought out to partner up with China and Iran as fellow pariah states during the Cold War.
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Aug 23, 2019 15:50
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:The rise of Israel as an anti-communist bulwark in the Middle East I'm not sure this really tracks. Israel early on was actually kinda lefty (kibbutzes are socialism in action, for one very obvious example) and I'm not sure you could generally count the Arab nations in the middle east as communist. I mean some of them are literally kingdoms, the others were more nationalist or even fascist depending what you think of the Ba'ath party. Also, early on Israel actually got most of its support and military gear from well known Eastern Bloc nation France...
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Aug 23, 2019 16:09
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quote:None of this is stoppable. It will be remembered, as the smoke clears, as something that worked far better than critics thought it would, but something you’d never, ever want to do again HEY GUNS posted:i see this man has done a phd project I'm just catching up from the last thread but I didn't want this to go unacknowledged 
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Aug 23, 2019 16:13
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Spacewolf posted:They're not not not considering LCS take 2, if I may speak for bewbies (bewbies, let me know if I'm right?) from a more limited knowledge base. They mean modular as "future-proofed without necessarily needing to open holes in the hull", not at all as "modular" as LCS was supposed to be, which was absolutely a disaster. My source, however, is CRS stuff. Yeah its this, just basically designing the ship so big chunks of it can be taken out and replaced as new and better stuff, such as railguns, lasers, and larger railguns, become available, not at all like the "mission tailoring" thing.
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Aug 23, 2019 16:23
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So the discussion of elephants reminded me: on Twitter I saw that apparently the King of Siam offered to give(? lend? sell?) President Lincoln war elephants for use in the Civil War. Assuming they'd survived the trip and the Americans weren't assigning them a gallon of wine as their rations... what would elephants have... done? How do you use an elephant at Gettysburg (or... or any of the other major battles that I don't know because I grew up in a state that wasn't a state yet during said kinetic military action)?
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Aug 23, 2019 16:38
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure this really tracks. Israel early on was actually kinda lefty (kibbutzes are socialism in action, for one very obvious example) and I'm not sure you could generally count the Arab nations in the middle east as communist. I mean some of them are literally kingdoms, the others were more nationalist or even fascist depending what you think of the Ba'ath party. Also, early on Israel actually got most of its support and military gear from well known Eastern Bloc nation France... Yeah, I think it would be better to term them as an anti-Soviet nation by way of how alliances formed. As Israel became more and more of an American ally, the Arab Socialist and Baathist nations became more and more Soviet aligned.
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Aug 23, 2019 16:43
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zonohedron posted:So the discussion of elephants reminded me: on Twitter I saw that apparently the King of Siam offered to give(? lend? sell?) President Lincoln war elephants for use in the Civil War. Assuming they'd survived the trip and the Americans weren't assigning them a gallon of wine as their rations... what would elephants have... done? How do you use an elephant at Gettysburg (or... or any of the other major battles that I don't know because I grew up in a state that wasn't a state yet during said kinetic military action)? Probably what elephants were used for WWI- big meat locomotives pulling railcars at depots. If you really really needed to use them at the front line to win a bet or something presumably they'd be employed pulling heavy artillery.
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Aug 23, 2019 16:49
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When were elephants last used as proper war elephants rather than beasts of burden? (Did they get shredded by 19th/20th century firepower  ?)
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Aug 23, 2019 17:30
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In The World Was Going Our Way, a book based on KGB archive documents, it's pretty clear that the Soviet Union got fairly aggressive towards Jewish people as time went on. A lot of Jews were refuseniks and at one point the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was a raging anti-semite to the point where at one meeting Brezhnez called him out on it by saying "This Jewish obsession is making us stupid" or something to that effect. So, it's safe to say that the idea of a world-wide Zionist conspiracy was alive and well in the Soviet Union all the way until the end.
Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Aug 23, 2019 |
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Aug 23, 2019 17:30
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bewbies posted:Yeah its this, just basically designing the ship so big chunks of it can be taken out and replaced as new and better stuff, such as railguns, lasers, and larger railguns, become available, not at all like the "mission tailoring" thing. Or more relevantly, what I think is being discussed is designing these ships so smaller but important bits like the ship's radar or sonar or SAM launchers or whatever can be swapped out for improved models. Ships normally are not designed for these bits to be taken off or replaced, but ships are now such an expensive investment and technology is developing so rapidly that the military really wants to have a ship that won't be obsolete before it launches with no way to upgrade it except in the smallest ways.
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Aug 23, 2019 17:31
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When were elephants last used as proper war elephants rather than beasts of burden? (Did they get shredded by 19th/20th century firepower The last example supplied by Wikipedia is the Franco-Siamese War in 1893.
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Aug 23, 2019 17:34
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure this really tracks. Israel early on was actually kinda lefty (kibbutzes are socialism in action, for one very obvious example) and I'm not sure you could generally count the Arab nations in the middle east as communist. I mean some of them are literally kingdoms, the others were more nationalist or even fascist depending what you think of the Ba'ath party. Also, early on Israel actually got most of its support and military gear from well known Eastern Bloc nation France... Nothing is as staunchly anti-communist as a non-Moscow approved type of socialism.
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Aug 23, 2019 17:53
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Nenonen posted:Nothing is as staunchly anti-communist as a non-Moscow approved type of bourgeois-revisionist social fascism.   
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Aug 23, 2019 18:08
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bewbies posted:Yeah its this, just basically designing the ship so big chunks of it can be taken out and replaced as new and better stuff, such as railguns, lasers, and larger railguns, become available, not at all like the "mission tailoring" thing. Does this requirement manifest in something similar to StanFlex or is it less interchangeable and more design-for-serviceability-and-upgradeability?
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Aug 23, 2019 18:24
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zonohedron posted:So the discussion of elephants reminded me: on Twitter I saw that apparently the King of Siam offered to give(? lend? sell?) President Lincoln war elephants for use in the Civil War. Assuming they'd survived the trip and the Americans weren't assigning them a gallon of wine as their rations... what would elephants have... done? How do you use an elephant at Gettysburg (or... or any of the other major battles that I don't know because I grew up in a state that wasn't a state yet during said kinetic military action)? considering that the 3" rifle and the 2.9 parrott were supposedly in the 1-2 MOA range, and the whitworth supposedly was sub-0.5 MOA, it's probable that trying to employ an elephant on a battlefield would cause the elephant to be very quickly shot. however they might be useful dragging 10" parrott guns and other superheavy siege artillery around, i think
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Aug 23, 2019 18:30
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I know that I've heard a bunch of times that the Iraq war was about oil, although I also know there's a lot more reasons involved that were often even more short-sighted. Certainly oil was a priority. From that perspective though, was it successful? Does the US get any more oil, or have more oil-related economic interaction with Iraq than it used to before the war? I remember hearing that China bought up a lot of the oil production in the chaos, and considering how much of a trainwreck the planning of the whole operation was, I'm given to believe that even if oil was the main goal, the US would've hosed it up.
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Aug 23, 2019 18:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When were elephants last used as proper war elephants rather than beasts of burden? (Did they get shredded by 19th/20th century firepower I've read anecdotes of elephants being used on patrol in Sumatra by KNIL forces between 1946-50, but I havent found any photos or official documents.
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Aug 23, 2019 21:34
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elephants were used as heavy draft in ww1 https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/circus-animals-helped-britain-wwi.html
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Aug 23, 2019 21:38
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:considering that the 3" rifle and the 2.9 parrott were supposedly in the 1-2 MOA range, and the whitworth supposedly was sub-0.5 MOA, it's probable that trying to employ an elephant on a battlefield would cause the elephant to be very quickly shot. however they might be useful dragging 10" parrott guns and other superheavy siege artillery around, i think So you're saying they could hit an elephant at that distance...
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Aug 23, 2019 22:12
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P-Mack posted:So you're saying they could hit an elephant at that distance...
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Aug 23, 2019 22:21
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Something I was not aware of (though it makes sense in retrospect): tanks in WW2 had hand-cranked starters, in case the electric starter failed.
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Aug 23, 2019 22:51
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Something I was not aware of (though it makes sense in retrospect): tanks in WW2 had hand-cranked starters, in case the electric starter failed. Also compressed air starters. But yes, the worst case scenario is that you get out and crank. The same thing was true for cars until relatively recently.
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Aug 23, 2019 22:59
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Something I was not aware of (though it makes sense in retrospect): tanks in WW2 had hand-cranked starters, in case the electric starter failed. On the upside for that particular one, it spun up a flywheel that disengaged from the starter crank when dumping its energy over to the crankshaft so you didn't end up risking having a tanker with a shattered arm
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Aug 23, 2019 23:14
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Ensign Expendable posted:Also compressed air starters. But yes, the worst case scenario is that you get out and crank. The same thing was true for cars until relatively recently.
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Aug 23, 2019 23:43
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