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The Lone Badger posted:How do you get that extra ammo? Like, your tank is supposed to be issued X rounds standard combat load, right? Do you get some officer to sign off on you getting extra shells, claim you fired more than you actually did and are now light (and nobody cares enough to follow up on it), just grab them in the general chaos....? In training or combat the unit should have calculated how much they are going to fire and issues ammo (plus a bit of padding) according to that, plus the plan of how and when to resupply. Artillery example: calculate how much will be expended in the pre planned fires, factor in some extra for unplanned fires, and determine if you need to give the batteries extra ammo trucks and if and when you can resupply. A standard conventional load isn’t a legal or policy requirement, it’s based on broad generic planning factors and what’s physically possible. there’s a standard conventional load for an infantryman, and then there’s the reality of everyone carrying extra batteries, grenades, mortar rounds, and machine gun ammo belts.
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Sep 14, 2023 12:27
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FastestGunAlive posted:In training or combat the unit should have calculated how much they are going to fire and issues ammo (plus a bit of padding) according to that, plus the plan of how and when to resupply. Artillery example: calculate how much will be expended in the pre planned fires, factor in some extra for unplanned fires, and determine if you need to give the batteries extra ammo trucks and if and when you can resupply. Also the realty of occupying a new billet or FOB and finding the conex full of off the books MK-19 HEDP rounds or the conex full of unissued pristine IOTVs.
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Sep 14, 2023 16:40
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VostokProgram posted:Do tank crews get to add any decorative stuff inside the tank? Cushions for lumbar support? RGB lights? A disco ball? Decorative? Not really. In peacetime you don't personalize stuff because you get inspected regularly. In wartime you get shifted around too often. You do put your personal stuff in there, of course, basically what any grunt would get plus some extras. A cushion or the like, sure. But you don't put pictures on the bulkheads or anything like that. There's no rule against it, it's just not really done, or practical. The big reason why is because you probably won't stay on the same vehicle for long enough to make it homey; you may be shifted to another one on short notice, so you keep your personal stuff portable. I have seen people draw chess boards on the inside of engine panels (access covers) in magic marker and the like. I've also seen some pretty impressive murals drawn on the exterior sides of vehicles using any number of methods - the painty stuff used to paint your face in camouflage works - but that's usually worn or washed off pretty quickly. The Lone Badger posted:How do you get that extra ammo? Like, your tank is supposed to be issued X rounds standard combat load, right? Do you get some officer to sign off on you getting extra shells, claim you fired more than you actually did and are now light (and nobody cares enough to follow up on it), just grab them in the general chaos....? Main gun ammo? You really don't. I've heard stories of WWII crews getting extra rounds and piling them up on the deck, but that's a bad idea for any number of reasons. In my experience you don't get extra main gun rounds, you shoot what you have then call for more. (Again, this isn't WWII, so we were much better supplied than, say, some lonely T-34 in the middle of the steppe all alone.) Machinegun ammo and the like, sure, the truck pulls up and you unload it into your vehicle. Pile it up wherever you can fit it. There are racks inside the vehicle, or you put it in the rack behind the turret. It's not as crucial as main gun ammo. SlothfulCobra posted:You could also probably just steal some of the extra, because there's a lot of crates of stuff at a base, and if people don't care enough to restrict you to only your specific allowance or re too busy with other poo poo to worry about some people with crates. Although it'd probably work less some times than others. Maybe that was the case in WWII or Vietnam, but post then ammunition is accounted for. You get what you need when it's time to shoot, sure, but there aren't crates of ammo lying around unaccounted for or unguarded on a base. Ammo is either locked up, on a range, or in transit between the two places. Even in wartime you're given ammo (obviously) but there aren't just loose piles of it everywhere. If you DO manage to accumulate extra ammo (that is, you didn't shoot all you were assigned and then get more) you tend to keep it close and/or hide it with the ammo you should have as best you can. Food? Sure, you can swipe that; lord knows the British army fed me more times than they knew. But ammo and (even worse) weapons? Not in my experience.
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Sep 14, 2023 17:39
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Cessna posted:Decorative? Not really. In peacetime you don't personalize stuff because you get inspected regularly. In wartime you get shifted around too often. So what do you look at to humanize yourself to the audience when you are going to the climactic battle
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Sep 14, 2023 18:35
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I liked that some of the Abrams I saw during the gulf war had names written on the side of the gun “Battle Bitch” is one I think I still have a picture of.
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Sep 14, 2023 19:12
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They still do that, but with updated references. You can find a photo of a tank called Rick and Morty or Dank Memes.
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Sep 14, 2023 19:29
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Ensign Expendable posted:They still do that, but with updated references. You can find a photo of a tank called Rick and Morty or Dank Memes. We have to stop war before the current youths come of age
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Sep 14, 2023 19:29
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Proud crew member of the M1A2 Snake Jazz
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Sep 14, 2023 19:30
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Skibidi Turret
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Sep 14, 2023 19:42
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My buddy is a giant 40K nerd, and when he was in the army with 1st Cav a few years ago this was his tank:
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Sep 14, 2023 20:01
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Acebuckeye13 posted:My buddy is a giant 40K nerd, and when he was in the army with 1st Cav a few years ago this was his tank: When my buddy was in the navy he said he was expecting a lot macho manliest mans of men but nah, every second dude was a fellow huge nerd for Warhammer and D&D E: come to think of it owner of my lgs back home is also ex navy. How can America even hope to compete on the high seas when everyone is shirking duty to throw dice? Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Sep 14, 2023 |
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Sep 14, 2023 20:29
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Question not the dice lest ye roll to save versus keelhaul.
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Sep 14, 2023 20:41
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https://terminallance.com/2019/09/13/terminal-lance-559-geek-corps/
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Sep 14, 2023 20:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When my buddy was in the navy he said he was expecting a lot macho manliest mans of men but nah, every second dude was a fellow huge nerd for Warhammer and D&D You joke but there is literally a senator having a very public meltdown right now because there was a poetry night on a nuclear carrier and if our navy isn’t the manliest men who ever manned a manly tall ship then the Chinese are going to invade Nebraska.
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Sep 14, 2023 20:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When my buddy was in the navy he said he was expecting a lot macho manliest mans of men but nah, every second dude was a fellow huge nerd for Warhammer and D&D I have never seen as much D&D in one place as I did in the USMC. When you're on ship there's only so much to do, and it's a good way to pass the time. Every berthing area had game tables; about half were used for card games, half for D&D campaigns.
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Sep 14, 2023 21:14
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BTW, this came up in passing during the D-Day talk, but it’s something I’ve always wondered. Someone mentioned that during WWII, the British had pretty much rolled up every German spy on the British Isles. Why was this? What was it about the UK that made the German intelligence services bounce off it?
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Sep 14, 2023 23:15
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Cessna posted:I have never seen as much D&D in one place as I did in the USMC. Absolute truth. I had not played the game since middle school, and then played more of it in my 20s in the USMC than I ever had before.
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Sep 14, 2023 23:18
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Quackles posted:BTW, this came up in passing during the D-Day talk, but it’s something I’ve always wondered. You're looking at it the wrong way. British counter-intelligence wasn't that good. German intelligence was simply ludicrously loving incompetent.
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Sep 14, 2023 23:24
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When my buddy was in the navy he said he was expecting a lot macho manliest mans of men but nah, every second dude was a fellow huge nerd for Warhammer and D&D Lot of them might not be exactly philosophers, but even infantry units have riflemen go to MWR Pottery nights titled "beer and buckets" where they drink beer and learn pottery, or various arts and crafts classes like painting. In Italy there were art classes every weekend, never any shortage of signups of young american soldiers. There's lots of different kinds of people and the reactionary image of them as all some MANLY MEN WHO SHOOT GUNS AND BEER or whatever is just so out of touch. There's MTG clubs at the barracks and DnD nights on every floor. And Warhammer. I'm long gone but on Instagram I see that the current commander has some sort of treasure hunt where enlisted can hike historical battlegrounds on the Alps and get geocaches the Brigade CO and CSM have left on them, and they earn points towards four-day passes with them. Some months ago there was an equivalent for historical roman sites. So yeah. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Sep 14, 2023 |
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Sep 14, 2023 23:27
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When my buddy was in the navy he said he was expecting a lot macho manliest mans of men but nah, every second dude was a fellow huge nerd for Warhammer and D&D
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Sep 14, 2023 23:30
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Vahakyla posted:
Okay that is rad
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Sep 14, 2023 23:37
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Gnoman posted:German intelligence was simply ludicrously loving incompetent. Oh.
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Sep 14, 2023 23:47
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Quackles posted:Oh. It goes a bit beyond that, the breaking of Enigma encryption completely hosed the Abwehr. It got to the point where the English were picking up inserted spies hours after they landed, and a lot of them were given the choice of being hung as spies or working for the UK and radioing bad intel to Germany. The ones who did then formed the basis of what the Germans thought was a functional spy network, which led to MORE people getting sent right into MI5's arms, and the cycle repeated. Look up "Operation Double Cross" for more details on that. So there was a fair bit of incompetence, but the real issue was that British code breakers ate their lunch and then leveraged that into building an entire network of fake spies that spoon fed the Nazis poo poo all war.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:09
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It's also really difficult to build spy networks when you're a Nazi, since your ideology is reprehensible to most people and also you're trying to infiltrate places your government is actively bombing explicitly out of spite. Also German intelligence remained terrible even after the war, funnily enough.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:14
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Acebuckeye13 posted:My buddy is a giant 40K nerd, and when he was in the army with 1st Cav a few years ago this was his tank: 
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Sep 15, 2023 00:14
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Part of it was due to the efforts of one man, Juan Pujol García, a Spaniard who effectively tricked the Nazis into thinking he was one of their most effective agents when all he was actually doing was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY He was effective enough by himself that the British caught on that someone was feeding the Germans bad intel, so they brought him to Britain and made him an official part of their counterintelligence efforts. He managed an entire fictitious intelligence network, got the Germans to trust him by feeding them intel that was just outdated enough to be useless but recent enough to feel important, and played a big role in convincing the Germans that the actual invasion of France would take place at Calais. He was considered to be such an effective agent that he was awarded an Iron Cross, just a few months before he was awarded an MBE. An absolutely wild story.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:35
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Part of it was due to the efforts of one man, Juan Pujol García, a Spaniard who effectively tricked the Nazis into thinking he was one of their most effective agents when all he was actually doing was: IIRC he told the British what he was doing and they told him to get lost, so he told the USA what he was doing and they told the Brits to give him a chance.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:41
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Aim assist is a great name
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Sep 15, 2023 01:03
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Tevery Best posted:It's also really difficult to build spy networks when you're a Nazi, since your ideology is reprehensible to most people and also you're trying to infiltrate places your government is actively bombing explicitly out of spite. I’m not sure that’s really true. There were plenty of British fascists in advance of the war. You don’t need all that many to have a relatively decent recruiting ground for spies. Germans are really good at spying on other Germans but their poo poo doesn’t work in the playoffs.
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Sep 15, 2023 01:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:It goes a bit beyond that, the breaking of Enigma encryption completely hosed the Abwehr. The assumption that Enigma was unbreakable was a major problem for the Nazis. Cracking Enigma would have been impossible if not for the capture of some Enigma machines, and the inevitable transmission mistakes that made it possible to crack the daily cipher. Like the famous example on Hitler's birthday, where a number of similar enciphered messages were sent to Berlin, which allowed Bletchley Park to guess the plaintext and compute the cipher for all of the messages sent on that date. But even though the earlier versions of Enigma had all been cracked within a couple of years, the Nazis didn't realize the latest version was cracked and kept broadcasting their plans in Enigma-coded messages for the Allies to read right until the end of the war. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Germans are really good at spying on other Germans but their poo poo doesn’t work in the playoffs. Q: How do you know the East German secret police have bugged your house? A: You have a new closet, and it's plugged in to a generator.
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Sep 15, 2023 02:05
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IIRC part of the Allies troubles in late 1944 when they got to/near Germany was that more messages started getting transmitted via cable so some of their intel started to dry up? I think I remember reading this contributing to the surprise around the 1944 Ardennes Offencive.
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Sep 15, 2023 02:07
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Are there any good books on the invasion of Grenada?
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Sep 15, 2023 02:14
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Prior to D-Day the Germans had also compromised a bunch of allied spies in France. IIRC they captured and tortured them into sending back false reports
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Sep 15, 2023 02:17
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BLACK PE___ is the new “For sale : baby shoes, never worn”
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Sep 15, 2023 02:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:BLACK PE___ is the new “For sale : baby shoes, never worn” The true name can't be as good as what our imaginations come up with. God bless the little barrel widget blocking the rest of the word out
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Sep 15, 2023 03:09
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Tevery Best posted:It's also really difficult to build spy networks when you're a Nazi, since your ideology is reprehensible to most people and also you're trying to infiltrate places your government is actively bombing explicitly out of spite. I also have a feeling that many of those working class people who under different circumstances might have felt less love for the king and country, were aware that Germany had invaded Soviet Union and therefore was enemy of the proletariat. For example communists were ordered not to have any strikes anywhere involved in Lend-Lease deliveries to Russia. That's also a challenging environment to find some begrudged dock worker to bribe for your cause.
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Sep 15, 2023 03:57
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I vaguely recall something about the guy training the german agents to be sent to britain was deliberately setting them up to be caught, and because the Brits were so good at turning them into double-agents the germans never realised and thought he was doing a wonderful job. Does anyone know what I might be thinking about?
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Sep 15, 2023 04:01
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Chamale posted:The assumption that Enigma was unbreakable was a major problem for the Nazis. Cracking Enigma would have been impossible if not for the capture of some Enigma machines, and the inevitable transmission mistakes that made it possible to crack the daily cipher. Marian Rejewski's group at the Polish Cypher Bureau built a complete functional duplicate of the Enigma purely through cryptanalysis, and were reading Enigma decrypts in 1932, so it definitely wasn't impossible. The chief purpose of Bletchley Park wasn't to "break the Enigma," it was to accelerate and parallelize the decryption process so that a great many messages could be read, rather than just the number that could be decrypted by individual people working with crib sheets. There wasn't a single Enigma machine, is the thing. There were different versions for the army and navy, and there were progressive developments made throughout the years. It was a back-and-forth arms race.
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Sep 15, 2023 04:19
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Quackles posted:Oh. Turning every agent in the UK is impressive, but one of my favorite examples of clowning on the Nazi intelligence services is Operation Scherhorn, where the USSR invented a fake resistance pocket starting with one captured German, then captured or killed many attempts to rescue it and used the captured troops to lure in more Germans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn
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Sep 15, 2023 05:17
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Canaris was also most likely sabotaging his own agency because he started having second thoughts about that Hitler fella fairly early on in the war. According to Richard Bassett, Canaris for example told Franco to make insane demands to Hitler in return for the Spanish joining the Axis, just to prevent an alliance with Spain.
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Sep 15, 2023 05:21
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