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There's a guy named Scott Army (son of Dick Army) running for office, and I'd like to know about any big military failures of Scotland to compare him with.
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Feb 20, 2024 02:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's a guy named Scott Army (son of Dick Army) running for office, and I'd like to know about any big military failures of Scotland to compare him with. It'd be easier and more subtle to compare him to one of the Scottish Kings, like the one who blew himself up being close to his own cannon.
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Feb 20, 2024 02:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's a guy named Scott Army (son of Dick Army) running for office, and I'd like to know about any big military failures of Scotland to compare him with. Just to get it out of the way : Culloden
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Feb 20, 2024 03:06
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Solway Moss was so bad the king died of embarrassment.
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Feb 20, 2024 03:56
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How did foreign military observers work (I'm interested in the general, but for specifics let's say European observers during the ACW)? I always hear the term, but I've never really understood what was actually happening. Were they somehow embedded into the armies, or did they get information on the battles some other way? Were they credentialed in some way? I would imagine observation and espionage would look very similar depending on the activity.
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Feb 20, 2024 04:34
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I seem to recall reading that sometimes people would go to "view the battle" as a picnic activity. I have no idea how true that was, but I definitely remember an illustration of vaguely Victorian people on a hillside with armies clashing in the distance.
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Feb 20, 2024 04:43
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that was very, very specifically first bull run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run#Union_retreat they sobered the gently caress up after 5000 peeps died
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Feb 20, 2024 04:45
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When the Franco-British fleet was bombarding the fortress of Viapori for two days in 1855 the citizens of Helsinki gathered to watch. There are similar stories of Swedish locals gathering to see what war looks like across the border river in 1944 when Finnish and German troops were fighting over the border town of Tornio.
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Feb 20, 2024 04:52
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Gully Foyle posted:How did foreign military observers work (I'm interested in the general, but for specifics let's say European observers during the ACW)? I always hear the term, but I've never really understood what was actually happening. Were they somehow embedded into the armies, or did they get information on the battles some other way? Were they credentialed in some way? I would imagine observation and espionage would look very similar depending on the activity. Yep. Basically you had foreign officers hanging out with the command staffs of the various armies. I dont know for sure but of imagine they were credentialed like any other diplomatic personnel. That said, much like 19th century diplomacy, sometimes its official and organized by the government, sometimes a few officers decide to go be war tourists and more or less bullshit their way in and get recognize after the fact. A certain young cav captain named George McClellan was one of the American observers in the Crimean war., for example. That was an official junket sent by the US government. Espionage was a worry and batches of observers would frequently only be allowed to see one side. Both the French and and Russians refused to let the Americans observe if they also watched the other. Ultimately they picked to watch the Franco/British/Turkish forces. Sometimes a country would get around this by sending multiple batches. I dont know if the US or CSA had the same concerns, but the Brit sent multiple batches of observers to both sides. Famously they had one with the CSA at Gettysburg.
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Feb 20, 2024 05:18
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Gully Foyle posted:How did foreign military observers work (I'm interested in the general, but for specifics let's say European observers during the ACW)? I always hear the term, but I've never really understood what was actually happening. Were they somehow embedded into the armies, or did they get information on the battles some other way? Were they credentialed in some way? I would imagine observation and espionage would look very similar depending on the activity. They were in their foreign uniform, and accompanied the general or colonel or other high ranking host. Theyd generally not carry offensive firearms, nor did they take part in fighting in ACW. They did indeed carry various papers. Theyd report back home or write white-paper style analysis. As a contrast, in Russo-Japanenese War, there were foreign advisors and observers as well in the navies. However, the nature of the naval warfare meant that they were much more actively partaking in combat on the ship. As far as I know, this wasnt really held against them. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 05:22
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This is why we have...standards.quote:The King of Sweden at the time was Gustav II Adolf, the man who ordered the building of the ship. Today, at least a million people visit the museum every year, but Vallejos says what draws visitors is more than just the beauty of the ship. "The story is also quite special and tragic." From the Metafilter thread about it - well there's your problem: quote:The voet ("foot") was of the same order of magnitude as the English foot (30.48 cm), but its exact size varied from city to city and from province to province. There were 10, 11, 12 or 13 duimen (inches) in a voet, depending on the city's local regulations. This is going to show up in the OSHA thread eventually. And presumably the minutes of the town council meeting that decided that 13 units to the foot were the correct one. Comstar fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 05:53
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It makes total sense. Someone heard about how great 12 is at divisibility and tried to do one better.
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Feb 20, 2024 06:03
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I assume that the sane numbers were already in use by another town that they hated so they insisted on being different and had to settle for a number no-one was using yet.
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Feb 20, 2024 07:04
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Comstar posted:This is why we have...standards. Five is a ridiculous factor when you think about it.
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Feb 20, 2024 07:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh ho I got you. This was an incredible watch. Thank you so much for linking it.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:43
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When you talk about fouling is that the barrel accumulating soot and grime from the smoke and needing to be cleaned or is it actual wear that ruins the barrel for good? I'm assuming part of it that plays in for rifled weapons is the bullets wearing on the rifling as they move along the barrel?
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Feb 20, 2024 08:44
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Comstar posted:This is why we have...standards. Xiahou Dun posted:It makes total sense. Someone heard about how great 12 is at divisibility and tried to do one better. That or bakers were the ones calling the shots.
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Feb 20, 2024 09:02
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ilmucche posted:When you talk about fouling is that the barrel accumulating soot and grime from the smoke and needing to be cleaned or is it actual wear that ruins the barrel for good? Nope. It's soot and grime. You can clean up a rifle that's so fouled you can't fire it and the rifling is pristine under it. This is a randomly googled image of black powder fouling in a modern day breach loading black powder hunting rifle. I'm not going to get into the technical details but those are very, very significantly different from traditional muzzle loaders or breach loading cartridge rifles and exist more or less to take advantage of a loophole in hunting laws. The key is to look at all that crap caked on there:  The website I pulled that from said that's after 20 shots. Something to keep in mind is that that's actually really clean for 20 shots. I suspect it's not using real black powder but a modern black powder substitute like Pyrodex that burns much, much more cleanly. That's about what I'd expect to see after a dozen, maybe fewer, shots with "real" black powder (which, as an aside, is actually a mild pain in the rear end to get these days). There are a lot of things that black powder shooters do to try and mitigate that or at least keep it soft and easier to clean. Sticking a bit of grease under the bullet, for example, helps keep the fouling soft and easier to remove. But at the end of the day it's just awful crap and if you let it sit for a while it becomes almost cement like. Oh it's also really, really prone to encouraging rust in your gun which is just dandy as well. A lot of the obsessiveness over having to keep guns clean comes from the black powder days. You can abuse a smokeless firearm - even one using now-obsolete "corrosive" ammunition* - so much more than a black powder gun and have it still function. With rifles the issue is that that poo poo actually begins to narrow the bore enough that you can't physically hammer a properly sized projectile into the bore, which means the bullet can't engage the rifling. As I said before, the Minie ball fixes this by having an expanding base that flares to bore-size when fired, which seals with the bore no matter how clean or dirty the gun is. This isn't as much of a problem with breach loading firearms because of how they're loaded, although eventually they too will foul enough that you need to brush the crap out of the barrel before shooting more. *the ammo isn't corrosive, but the primers leave salt residues behind that promote rusting, similar to black powder but not nearly as badly edit: I just can not emphasize enough just how loving filthy black powder is. The only comparison I can think of would be to look at burning coal vs. burning gasoline. The combustion products are just loving nasty and get goddamned EVERYWHERE. There are a bunch of (militarily) far more important reasons why smokeless was adopted. It's more stable, ages better, handles moisture and other poor conditions better, doesn't create a giant cloud of foul smoke over you position, and allows for much higher muzzle velocities and in turn much better down-range performance especially at distance. But goddamn just from a purely maintenance perspective, it's just a million goddamned times better for the end user. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Feb 20, 2024 |
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Feb 20, 2024 14:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:The main thing that you see them focusing on is the ability of defensive fortifications to break up assaults, especially with ill-trained or ill-equipped defenders. This is something that they put into context alongside other, European, battles where you see similar outcomes. Plevna, as mentioned before. This was a particular concern for them because of just how much emphasis was put upon the offensive in Prussian officer circles, both on the strategic and the tactical levels. There was a constant low-level fear of a repeat of 1807, and a lot of fretting over how a rapidly mobilized army of conscripts would fare against their semi-professionalized reservist system. Something I neglected to mention yesterday and which occurs to me now while doing some related early morning reading (a biography of Ludwig Loewe) is just how much American war production during the ACW freaked the gently caress out of the Prussians. Again, they always had a concern with what would happen if an enemy conscripted a large army from their population and armed them with decent quality weapons. Just looking at rifles: The US built about 1 million model 1861 rifles and a further 700,000 m1863 rifles. That's 1.7 million examples of just the two most modern types of firearms, built by one half of the United States (albeit the more heavily industrialized half), and AFTER one of the two major government arsenals was destroyed early on in the conflict - Harper's Ferry stopped mattering for American firearms production after 1861. I don't have specific figures for Prussian production of the then-contemporary version of the Dreyse, the Zndnadelgewehr M/62, but I can say that between 1862 and 1867 they made a point of modernizing and updating their manufacturing techniques and raised the annual output of the Spandau arsenal from 12,000 rifles a year to 48,000. The Association of German Engineers met in Berlin in 1867 specifically to discuss how to update what they saw as Prussian backwardness in manufacturing techniques, and the staggering output of the US during the Civil War was a specific topic of concern (as were agricultural machines and sewing machines). Note, though, that this is already after efforts were made to improve production at Spandau. Then in 1870 you have the Berlin industrialist Ludwig Loewe traveling to the US specifically to study the "American method of production" which was also called the Arsenal System, after the way that guns were being mass produced. In particular Singer was breaking new ground on making the era's most complex examples of precision engineered machines - sewing machines - and that's specifically what Loewe wanted to study and bring back to Germany. The end result of that was nothing less than a revolutionizing of German industry, as it was Ludwig Loewe & Co. that not only made some pretty good sewing machines, but quickly pivoted to manufacturing and selling industrial machines themselves, in essence selling the rest of the German economy the tools to modernize the production of everything from farm equipment to rifles. LL&Co of course also expanded into firearms and that's what they're largely most famous for today, in large part as a result of how they spun out into DWM after Ludwig died and his brother Isidore took over the firm. But to give an idea of just how important they were to the industrial side of things, in 1889 when the contracts for the new Gewehr 1888 were being handed out LL&Co were initially kind of shafted, in large part because the German War Ministry wanted them focused on fulfilling a contract to produce tooling and equipment for the Spandau arsenal. Their contribution to helping upgrade government production was considered more important than the arms that they could produce. Anyways, long story short the American Civil War really stood out among the other mid-19th century conflicts as being one that showcased just what no bullshit total war would look like. Both the USA and CSA focused their entire economies on winning the war, and in the end it was the raw industrial output of the USA that doomed the secessionists. Europe had seen plenty of conflicts, even serious wars, but they hadn't seen total war on that scale since Napoleon, and the Americans provided a very clear picture of what the logistical and industrial requirements of a full blown continental throw-down would be. And that is something that made a lot of people sit up and take notice and realize just how ill-prepared they might really be.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:49
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btw thanks for posting that gunsmith video. I don't care so much about guns but seeing the craftsmanship and machining made my day.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:46
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I'm reminded of how the British Martini-Henri had this massive loving lever for the action because after a few shots just getting the breech open would be a huge pain in the arse due to all the fouling.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:57
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MikeCrotch posted:I'm reminded of how the British Martini-Henri had this massive loving lever for the action because after a few shots just getting the breech open would be a huge pain in the arse due to all the fouling. Which is kind of ironic, because one of the specific reasons that the British dismissed the Dreyse in the 1840s and 50s was because they believed that the fouling issues with a breach loader would lead to lower over-all (i.e. over the course of a battle) rates of fire than a muzzle loader. And, in fairness, they had some NASTY loving problems with their own breach loaders when they went that direction, but then again so did everyone. The Trapdoor Springfield was notorious for having difficult spent shell extraction after a few rounds. That's one of the major benefits of a turn bolt style like the Mauser m71 - it lets you have a gently caress off big claw extractor that pulls the cartridge out with a significant amount of authority.
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Feb 20, 2024 17:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:Anyways, long story short the American Civil War really stood out among the other mid-19th century conflicts as being one that showcased just what no bullshit total war would look like. I think it's also important to keep in mind the fact that by European standards the US Civil War was an aberration. The Union Army was a tiny amateur army that was slowly expanded to be a "mass army" through conscription - a process that took years - to gradually strangle and crush a rebellion in a huge swath of territory. That's interesting - and well worthy of study - but that's just not how European wars would, or could, work. The US was in a very different situation due to the geography, the demographics, and the politics in play. The thinking was that a European nation just wouldn't have the time and space necessary to allow wartime production to build an army from scratch as the US had. This dictated that European nations had to have "come as you are" armies; a war in Europe would be a fast strike by a professional army augmented by rapidly mobilized (and already trained) conscripts. Trying to integrate the lessons of the US Civil War too closely would be counterproductive, if not suicidal.
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Feb 20, 2024 17:30
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Cessna posted:I think it's also important to keep in mind the fact that by European standards the US Civil War was an aberration. The Union Army was a tiny amateur army that was slowly expanded to be a "mass army" through conscription - a process that took years - to gradually strangle and crush a rebellion in a huge swath of territory. Well, Europe did have living memory of mass conscription raising armies quickly: The levee en mass of the French Revolution and the nasty surprises that it produced early on when foreign Royalist forces tried to strangle Revolutionary France in its cradle. You're right that the continental solution was generally conscription and an extensive reservist system to keep all military aged males roughly aware of how to handle a firearm, but there was a fair bit of lingering fear over what the outcome would be if you just, you know, grabbed half a million assholes off the street and handed them a decently modern rifle. Something else I found going through some old notes: the Germans also hired Pratt & Whitney to also make a bunch of machines for them and help modernize specially small arms production in the state run arsenals in 1872. It was a ~$300,000 contract and importantly involved hiring a bunch of what we'd describe today as contractors to advise them in streamlining and upgrading their facilities. The thought that they might not be able to produce enough small arms for a future large conflict was a major concern. They also fretted a lot about being able to make guns quick enough to re-equip their forces as new innovations took over. There's a mini panic in the mid-1880s as they wonder if they can make enough repeating m71/84 rifles fast enough to prevent the French from having a small arms advantage, and then another in 1887-89 as they freak out about the French adopting smokeless powder and wonder if they can make their own Gew88 fast enough. Also, I'll note that there were European examples of army raising techniques more akin to the US Civil War out east. In the 1877-78 Russo-Turkic War both sides pretty rapidly backfilled their ranks by expanding the military after hostilities began.
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Feb 20, 2024 17:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, Europe did have living memory of mass conscription raising armies quickly: The levee en mass of the French Revolution and the nasty surprises that it produced early on when foreign Royalist forces tried to strangle Revolutionary France in its cradle. Oh, absolutely. But in the meantime things like railroads and telegraphs had made the pace of operations so much faster that the time required to raise and train a massive army from scratch was simply not available to belligerent nations like France or Prussia. An enemy would be in Paris/Berlin before those conscripts were ready to fight.
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Feb 20, 2024 17:54
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Cessna posted:Oh, absolutely. But in the meantime things like railroads and telegraphs had made the pace of operations so much faster that the time required to raise and train a massive army from scratch was simply not available to belligerent nations like France or Prussia. An enemy would be in Paris/Berlin before those conscripts were ready to fight. Absolutely. It was just a much more densely industrialized area. Thinking about it, a lot of the worries that you see on the German side of the equation are similar to the ones you see today about the ability to backfill munitions and equipment expenditures in a serious war: think the dialog surrounding aid to Ukraine, or the hand wringing that happened when NATO exhausted most of their European PGMs in Libya. Basically the sheer loving scale of what was produced in the ACW made a lot of people sit up and say holy gently caress.
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Feb 20, 2024 18:09
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Feb 21, 2024 03:22
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Well, maybe. Who can say? I'm just asking questions. (Joke stolen from someone on Tumblr)
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Feb 21, 2024 03:57
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I assure you he didnt exist and if he did he was more like D. Ire
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Feb 21, 2024 10:39
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David Irving didn't happen but also its good he's dead
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Feb 21, 2024 13:03
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Do you have a source on this? Early morning google isn't turning anything up but I REALLY want to be the one to break this news to a friend, but I equally REALLY don't want to be wrong.
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Feb 21, 2024 13:46
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His official Twitter is denying it. I hope you're all grateful to me for checking so you don't have to. mind you, his official Twitter denies many things
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Feb 21, 2024 13:54
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Fangz posted:
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Feb 21, 2024 14:01
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My copy of the Roman Logistics At War has shipped! 
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Feb 21, 2024 14:29
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Fangz posted:His official Twitter is denying it. I had no idea who this guy was, but thankfully a quick Google cleared it up quote:
Thanks Toronto Sun https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/kinsella-holocaust-denier-david-irving-is-dead Edit quote:So, really, there’s only one thing left to be said about the death of this Holocaust denier. loving ZING McGann fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 15:26
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McGann posted:I had no idea who this guy was, but thankfully a quick Google cleared it up That is an amazing way to start an obituary.
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Feb 21, 2024 15:27
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Fangz posted:mind you, his official Twitter denies many things 
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Feb 21, 2024 15:57
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Fangz posted:mind you, his official Twitter denies many things 
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Feb 21, 2024 16:21
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Fangz posted:His official Twitter is denying it. Goddamn, son.
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Feb 21, 2024 16:24
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Who? There's no such person as David Irving. Fangz posted:His official Twitter is denying it. 
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