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bewbies posted:There's a ton of factors that go into it, but even those superhuge Russian ASMs would have a hell of a time critically damaging an Iowa. They're big and they go fast, but they aren't nearly as dense or as hard as the heavy AP shells Iowa's armor was designed to defeat, and just by chance, they'd most likely hit Iowa squarely on the thickest part of her armor. They really weren't optimized for a target like a battleship...they were designed to cripple carriers or cut destroyers in half. However, as AceBuckeye points out it's more useful to shoot those missiles at an FFG that can effectively hunt the submarines which form an integral part of your second strike deterrent or destroy American carriers than it is to shoot them at an oversized waste of money with the same long range firepower as an ABL Spruance. He's not quite right to say that they have inferior long range firepower to a frigate because they've got some Harpoons like the frigates and eight Tomahawks, but eight Tomahawks is sod all.
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Nov 27, 2019 00:32
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HEY GUNS posted:i thought you hated anime, vvg Just the weird fascist-leaning stuff and the whole genre where weapons or vehicles or ships are drawn as waifu bait.
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Nov 27, 2019 00:33
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Just the weird fascist-leaning stuff and the whole genre where weapons or vehicles or ships are drawn as waifu bait. Ah, so 90% of it.
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Nov 27, 2019 00:39
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Just the weird fascist-leaning stuff and the whole genre where weapons or vehicles or ships are drawn as waifu bait. I'm pretty sure that Venn diagram is almost a perfect circle. Or one smaller circle (the waifu tanks/ships/planes/guns) in a bigger circle (the fascist poo poo)
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Nov 27, 2019 00:41
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Alkydere posted:I'm pretty sure that Venn diagram is almost a perfect circle. Or one smaller circle (the waifu tanks/ships/planes/guns) in a bigger circle (the fascist poo poo)
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Nov 27, 2019 00:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:The sad thing is that there's basically a 99% chance that the thieves will melt the stolen poo poo down for precious metals and gems rather than keeping them in one piece. Well there is some good news. While very little stolen art is recovered, the insurance companies for the museums will generally try for see if the thief is willing to ransom it. The ransom they will pay isn't quite at the appraised value but it's in the ballpark. So there will be an offer out there that crushes spot pricing. Of course the insurance company will pay said ransom but will also play with the cops to make it as much of an ambush as possible. If they recover the art, it's cheaper than paying out the insurance. If they recover the artifacts and the criminal gets busted, that is dramatically cheaper. Normally I'd err on the side it won't be recovered but the difference between a likely ransom offer verses spot price will likely be hugely tempting.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:08
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Squalid posted:Also the reason I didn't want to link to the blog I got this from was because the author had some . . . questionable opinions about the Japanese. Still when he was just summmarizing Chinese military manuals he seemed reliable. Is this the Great Ming Military blogspot guy? As far as random internet blogs about East Asian history go he’s better than plenty, but I’ve been getting frustrated by how some people have been seeming to take his word as gospel; a whole bunch of Wikipedia pages about the Imjin War have gotten edited recently based on a couple of his posts, and while honesty he probably knows what he’s talking about at least as well as the authors of the two most famous English language Imjin War books (this is not high praise, mind) that they were citing before, he makes a bunch of really spurious points throughout the posts too and a few of his bigger assertions fly in the face of current English language scholarship. Once you get to those kinds of blog with dedicated followings though I feel like trying to argue with them is just asking for trouble. Also yeah, I think he’s mainland Chinese, and while he’s usually not that bad, he can be more than a little chauvinistic. To be fair in English language stuff things have trended to being way overly dismissive of Ming military history so I think it’s part of his mission to fight against that, but imo he reads Ming sources far too uncritically.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:11
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HEY GUNS posted:i thought you hated anime, vvg is this anime:  I feel like a lot of people in the west often get confused by naginata and other Asian pole arms. One thing you see frequently is the naginata being referred to as an anti-cavalry weapon. However looking at how they are used in art I'm not sure where people got this idea. The naginata was used widely both by mounted and foot soldiers, against anyone facing them. It's clearly a general purpose tool meant to be usable by anyone in many contexts. The naginata belongs to a group of pole weapons used in mounted combat common in East Asia. This group includes the Chinese guandao and Korean woldo. In both China and Japan they appeared in the medieval period, and featured curved blades and sometimes hooks, with total length ranging from roughly 1.5 to 3 meters. One Ming era illustration of cavalry using this style of arms:  Notice in this illustration the men are also carrying bows. I have no idea how you fire a bow without dropping your pole arm, but presumably they found a way. One reason these weapons might not have been common in places like western Europe is that they require both of the riders hands to wield, leaving nothing left to hold the reins. However this would not have been a problem in East Asia, where the vast majority of horsemen were already trained to control the horse without reins so that they could fire the bow. I think especially the longer variants like the one in the first illustration might have served a similar battlefield role as the lance. To avoid the issue of breaking on contact or getting the point stuck in the target they use a slashing strike, and trade some length for a heavier blade and more robust shaft.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:15
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Dude, it was Hilde from Soul Calibur.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:21
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Koramei posted:Is this the Great Ming Military blogspot guy?. lol yes. For someone who has obviously studied the period in-depth he was doing a lot of weird contortions to blame everything bad that ever happened in southern China on the Japanese. Like "Chinese didn't support the pirates, actually the Chinese who fought with the wokou were just kidnapped and forced to wear Japanese clothes." It is very silly.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:28
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Most of what I've seen about naginata focused on their use as something analogous to pikes, used against cavalry but not necessarily by cavalry. I'm not sure how valid it is, but apparently the reason they get associated with lady samurai etc. is because a naginata was seen as a good weapon for a woman, as the reach and weight of it would neutralize the advantage of a bigger assailant. It seems Takeko Nakano took down over 170 samurai in her career of rear end-kicking and went down at the Battle of Aizu (1868) while using one.
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Nov 27, 2019 01:30
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Nessus posted:Most of what I've seen about naginata focused on their use as something analogous to pikes, used against cavalry but not necessarily by cavalry. I think that's the common perception, especially in the west. There's a few reasons for it. The first is the vast majority of Japanese cavalry especially in earlier periods fought as archers. If you look at scrolls from before the sengoku jidai maybe nine out of ten, or even 19 out of 20 mounted samurai will be using bows. The remainder however, will be using naginata. In the medieval period naginata became the most common infantry weapon, but that doesn't necessarily reflect specialization. There seems to be debate over whether it was adopted from China or developed indigenously, but there is clearly influence from related continental arms which probably were originally designed for mounted knights. One thing I've noticed with Japanese weapons is that there's not much specialization. Cavalry and footmen often used the same weapons, especially in earlier periods. I'm not sure why this was the case, maybe it just has to do with the fact that before the Ashikaga Shogunate broke down there just weren't that many professional soldiers in Japan, so they tended to perform multiple roles. Further after the 17th century glaive like weapons seem to have fallen out of fashion among Asian cavalry, however they continued to be used by foot soldiers. In China and Korea heavily weighted gaundao were used in officer's examinations to test strength. These "weapons," which were in reality too heavy to actually wield in combat, got nicknames like horse chopper. These training devices got incorporated into wushu martial arts and contributed to later impressions of the weapons as something too clumsy to use on horseback, but that didn't necessarily reflect their original use.
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Nov 27, 2019 02:20
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Wait, women samurai?
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Nov 27, 2019 02:55
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Carth Dookie posted:Wait, women samurai? They dug up the site of some battle in 1580 and tested the DNA of 105 bodies; apparently, 35 were female.
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Nov 27, 2019 03:38
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The samurai also, were, remember, a social class, and even women who weren't, say, Nakano Takeko, were trained in combat and expected to defend their homes and lands when their husbands were away or not able to..
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Nov 27, 2019 04:38
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History is always more diverse than people think.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:27
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So I just came back from seeing “Knives Out” (highly recommend) and during the previews saw a trailer for a movie called 1917 I am shocked I never heard of this before. Directed by Sam Mendes (Skyfall) the trailer gave me Saving Private Ryan mixed with Gallipoli vibes. Two soldiers must deliver a message to a battalion of British troops warning of an ambush, with the twist a brother of one of the soldiers is in the battalion. Looks interesting, and there are not many WWI based films
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Nov 27, 2019 05:27
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Solaris 2.0 posted:So I just came back from seeing “Knives Out” (highly recommend) and during the previews saw a trailer for a movie called 1917 The trailer had a surrealist bent to it that seemed interesting. I'll probably watch it.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:44
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Alkydere posted:I imagine something along the lines of "Rip out anything of moderate value, beach or drydock it, spend several months to a few years ripping it apart with a small army of welders." Pretty much this. Ships go through phased stages when they're decommissioned. Broadly speaking, at first they're docked and kept in decent shape with a skeleton crew. Eventually they're moved somewhere (a Reserve/Mothball Fleet) and put through "Maintenance Categories." The top tier has ships which are maintained and given periodic updates or overhauls. The mid-tier ships are given some preservation measures and just sit there until they are stricken from the Registry. The bottom tier ships are actively stripped for parts and will soon be towed out and sunk as targets or scrapped. One of my jobs when I worked on Pampanito was to go up to the mothball fleet in Suisun Bay, North of San Francisco. We were given permission (and boat rides) out to the older ships to salvage whatever parts were worthwhile for the museum. It was always fascinating. The ships were completely dead and we had to work in teams with all sorts of confined space entry procedures and other safety measures; it was pretty much like spelunking in dark old ships with cutting torches and power saws. Sometimes we'd find very worthwhile equipment, like the sort of engine parts (Fairbanks-Morse) or piping or gauges. We'd also occasionally find oddball items that hadn't been removed from the ships, like dinner plates or, in one case, an old food mixer that we restored. Some of the ships had just been moved there (end of the Cold War) and were in good shape. Others were disasters. There was one, a sub tender named Nereus that had been there for decades and had become a home for the birds. All of the decks were ankle deep with bird poo poo and dead birds; we had to wear hazmat suits and the smell was just overwhelming. I can't imagine ever returning that poor thing to service; eventually it was scrapped. Especially haunting was the graffiti on old troopships. The troops were packed aboard and had canvas slings for their mattresses and inevitably they'd write things on them. Usually it was typical obscene drawings, but some of it was just - well, I remember some of them. "Off to Korea, if you read this pray for me." Or "Vietnam in July '67, home in July '68." And almost all navy ships have some sort of official murals somewhere, especially on the mess deck bulkheads. I hope someone managed to document some of it, but I suspect most of those ships were sunk without a second thought for recording that sort of thing.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:47
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It's also my understanding that parts like the engine are preserved in some way, to prevent rust from building up. I'm not sure where I read that, though.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:59
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I could never be let on a mothballed ship now because I’d be stuffing plates and other small items in my jacket.
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Nov 27, 2019 06:01
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Juuuust above the water line though. Nobody said he wasn't a hell of a pilot
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Nov 27, 2019 06:36
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Cessna posted:Some of the ships had just been moved there (end of the Cold War) and were in good shape. Others were disasters. There was one, a sub tender named Nereus that had been there for decades and had become a home for the birds. All of the decks were ankle deep with bird poo poo and dead birds; we had to wear hazmat suits and the smell was just overwhelming. I can't imagine ever returning that poor thing to service; eventually it was scrapped. All very interesting stuff, as always. I looked up Nereus - launched in 1945, decommissioned in 1971, went to Susan in 1993, scrapped in 2012. So she spent near twice as long in various states of mothballs than in active service. There was a Fairbanks-Morse engine lurking under all the birdshit, apparently... Ships can linger such a long time in scrap yards. I grew up in Portsmouth (UK) and the main road into the city (more accurately onto the island on which its built) was flanked by the site of a scrapyard and shipbreakers called H.Pound & Co. ('Harry Pound's', locally). The yard had basically filled to capacity with WW2 surplus which had been left to slowly rot while the yard got on with day-to-day work. Whenever the scrap market took a downturn they'd switch to working on the stockpile but by the late 1980s (when I can first remember it) they'd barely made a dent. The landward side was filled with old landing craft of various sizes, some sunk, some sinking and some beached, along with ranks of Sherman and Patton tanks and old US Army trucks. There were scores of old tugboats, oilers, lighters, tenders and other service craft. The harbour side was packed with ships - most notably a trio of WW2-era LSTs and some old Battle-class destroyers reduced to bare hulls sinking into the mud. There were some WW2 RN submarines, at least one US S-boat from the 1920s and (it was always rumoured...) at least one Type VII U-boat. They were joined by a pair of more recent RN O-class subs. In the 2000s the high value of the scrap meant they began making a serious effort to get rid of the 'stock' and the city council began putting pressure on the yard to sell off most of its site as it wasn't a good look for the first thing anyone driving into Portsmouth to see being a rotting and rusting pile of scrap. When the WW2 stuff was mostly gone, they began finding the remains of the stuff that was there before all the 1940s/50s scrap had been brought in - old M-class monitors, WW1 Motor Launches, dozens of unidentifiable small craft, miscellaneous engines and boilers with builder's plates from the 1880s, and a flat-iron Ant-class gunboat from the 1870s. It's all gone now. I think the last LST was there until the 2010s.
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Nov 27, 2019 07:57
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BalloonFish posted:a flat-iron Ant-class gunboat from the 1870s. This thing is loving adorable
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Nov 27, 2019 08:11
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https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/mothballing-the-us-navy-after-wwii-pt-1/ https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/mothballing-the-us-navy-after-wwii-pt-2/ A good article (or at least full of good photos) about how the US Navy mothballed thousands of ships after the war, how they were prepared and protected for long-term storage and the different readiness categories.
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Nov 27, 2019 09:13
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Cessna posted:Mothballing 
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Nov 27, 2019 09:34
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Squalid posted:is this anime:  Glaive was a cavalry weapon in Europe too. Squalid posted:The naginata belongs to a group of pole weapons used in mounted combat common in East Asia. This group includes the Chinese guandao and Korean woldo. In both China and Japan they appeared in the medieval period, and featured curved blades and sometimes hooks, with total length ranging from roughly 1.5 to 3 meters. One Ming era illustration of cavalry using this style of arms:  Bashkirs carried their lances with two slings.
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Nov 27, 2019 09:55
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In my mind this sounded like an explosion followed by a slide whistle
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Nov 27, 2019 10:01
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The trailer had a surrealist bent to it that seemed interesting. I'll probably watch it. This suddenly has me remembering watching another WW1 movie that was also really surreal. I can't remember who was in it or what it was called, the only thing that stands out is an unpleasant sergeant knifing a kid with a bayonet stuck to a revolver or pistol 
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Nov 27, 2019 10:03
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Webleys did have a bayonet attachment.
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Nov 27, 2019 13:03
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Milo and POTUS posted:This thing is loving adorable  See? It's so cute 
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Nov 27, 2019 13:09
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Milo and POTUS posted:See? It's so cute
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Nov 27, 2019 15:01
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ChubbyChecker posted:
That being called a glaive postdates the actual image by hundreds of years. If we just want to start calling anything that vaguely resembles a polearm after that polearm then I'd like fair warning so I can get my affairs in order, and eat my dinner with a yari and naginata.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:15
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Taerkar posted:Webleys did have a bayonet attachment. Also a stock attachment that came with it turning it into a Frankenpistolcarbine monster.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:16
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Isn't that a detail from the Morgan (or Maciejowski) Bible? That book's full of crazy weapons found nowhere else but it and Battle of the Nations tournaments.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:17
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:If we just want to start calling anything that vaguely resembles a polearm after that polearm then I'd like fair warning so I can get my affairs in order, and eat my dinner with a yari and naginata. There's nothing worse than the Mongols invading just as you're sitting down for dinner.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:41
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You need your skull to eat after all.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:43
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HEY GUNS posted:one (1) cannon It's 10 inches!
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Nov 27, 2019 15:44
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BalloonFish posted:I looked up Nereus - launched in 1945, decommissioned in 1971, went to Susan in 1993, scrapped in 2012. So she spent near twice as long in various states of mothballs than in active service. There was a Fairbanks-Morse engine lurking under all the birdshit, apparently... Nereus must have been in terrible shape when she was moved to Suisun Bay. I saw her in the late 90's, and there had to be decades of decay and debris aboard. Once you got below decks it wasn't that bad. As a sub tender Nereus had some good artifacts aboard; I already mentioned engine parts, but another big prize was a mostly intact TDC. Our volunteers used parts from this to maintain the TDC aboard Pampanito in operating condition. It was a bear to get it out of Nereus - imagine a wall-locker sized box that weighs almost a ton, and having to rig it through passageways - but it was worth it. quote:It's all gone now. I think the last LST was there until the 2010s. Fascinating, thanks!
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Nov 27, 2019 15:45
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Holy gently caress
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Nov 27, 2019 15:49
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