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I made a Javascript version ages ago so it's actually bingo instead of just a checklist: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/p/wehrabingo.html Then again, it's not really that fun to play when one post crosses off half the board in one go.
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Apr 28, 2018 00:11
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Dan Carlin's a wehraboo? I've never listened to his stuff, but a buddy of mine keeps recommending him to me. I've held off because the title "Hardcore History" sounds like stupid machismo bullshit.
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Apr 28, 2018 00:23
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13th KRRC War Diary, 27th Apr 1918 posted:The day passed quietly and the usual routine continues. In the evening there was some hostile aerial activity. One 'plane flying moderately low came over - whereupon the six Lewis Guns at Battn. H.Q. opened out and successfully drove him back. Great interest and good work is being done in this direction by the teams, especially the batmen and mess waiters.
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Apr 28, 2018 00:26
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EggsAisle posted:Dan Carlin's a wehraboo? I've never listened to his stuff, but a buddy of mine keeps recommending him to me. I've held off because the title "Hardcore History" sounds like stupid machismo bullshit. No, and perhaps instead of dismissing things outright you could actually listen and have an informed opinion.
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Apr 28, 2018 00:34
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EggsAisle posted:Dan Carlin's a wehraboo? I've never listened to his stuff, but a buddy of mine keeps recommending him to me. I've held off because the title "Hardcore History" sounds like stupid machismo bullshit. I don't think he's a wehraboo, but he also likes to tell a good story and can be overly credulous when it comes to repeating historical myths. He did a multipart series on the Eastern Front called "Ghosts of the Ostfront", and while it wasn't by any means, the worst treatment of the subject, it did go back a little too often to the well of "superior German equipment".
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Apr 28, 2018 00:38
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He's a grandiloquent twerp, and also the kind of person who will read one book about one thing and then gormlessly recite its conclusions like he's Moses coming down from the mountain with the stone tablets.
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Apr 28, 2018 01:13
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is the really fast thing moving away from the explosion the heat warhead shoving a fine mist of the former drone? Or is this something different? Also, are the missiles physically ramming the target? I thought most anti-air munitions exploded close to the target, to shred the whole thing in tungsten projectiles. That’s the explosively forged penetrator from the HEAT warhead, because it would take  and  to design a missile with a bespoke warhead.Especially considering that it is apparently accurate enough to put the warhead on target, and a HEAT warhead is going to ultra-gently caress any airplane or helicopter it actually hits.
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Apr 28, 2018 01:25
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Love this. It's like ye olde a-10.
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Apr 28, 2018 02:11
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Trin Tragula posted:He's a grandiloquent twerp, and also the kind of person who will read one book about one thing and then gormlessly recite its conclusions like he's Moses coming down from the mountain with the stone tablets. Orson Welles but with history books instead of 19th century sci fi.
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Apr 28, 2018 03:21
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Now that some are mentioning him, I'm curious what y'all think of Hardcore History. Obviously it is embellished a bit to tell the story, but I hope they're not too bad. I really enjoyed his Mongols one, and I highly recommend it.
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Apr 28, 2018 03:24
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When he says he isn't a real historian, Dan Carlin means it. He gets the general idea right. But the more you know about event, the less you enjoy that particular podcast series. I think Carlin's most obvious bias involves primary sources. If the book of the day did not comment upon the source, Carlin typically takes it at face value. Carlin still has some good insights, but he does not keep up with the latest scholarship. For example, Carlin does a good job of reminding us how horrible a mongol sacking would have been, instead of just saying "and then they sacked another city." But he also repeats the craziest stories of Mongols atrocities without much counter, even though trusting Islamic scholars on the Mongols is like trusting Christian monks on the Vikings.
golden bubble fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 05:44
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slothrop posted:The Gloster looks like one of those fascinating “what if” planes. If Wikipedia is to be believed it was a pretty sweet handing aircraft and was designed to be built similarly to the Mosquito. What about the Gloster Meteor?!
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Apr 28, 2018 06:50
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Milo and POTUS posted:Love this. It's like ye olde a-10. There were a couple of other attempts at the same concept during WW2.  The Germans tried strapping a semi-automatic 75mm gun to a HS-129. Unfortunately the added weight and drag made an already underpowered donkey of a plane even worse.  There was also a dopey looking ME-262 variant with a 50mm gun, not intended for ground attack, but to shoot down bombers.  Finally there was a B-25 variant with a 75mm gun in the nose. None of these were very successful because as it turns out you can't hit a loving thing with a fixed cannon on a WW2 era airplane. 
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Apr 28, 2018 09:50
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I'll never not respect the sheer ambition of the mitchell's hung dong.Geisladisk posted:
Why so much firepower? Didn't 30mms or multiple 20s gently caress up even the biggest of bombers? And probably cheaper and more effectively? Milo and POTUS fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 09:53
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I think the idea was that they could engage the bombers from a greater range, out of the bomber's gunner's range. Afaik it was never deployed in combat, so who knows how that would have turned out.
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Apr 28, 2018 10:05
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How did the 75mm B-25 perform against ships? Was it mostly for blowing up cargo ships and the occasional torpedo boat?
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Apr 28, 2018 10:11
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I thought the Ju88 P with cannon was quite effective?
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Apr 28, 2018 12:03
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An airplane with a big gun seems like it would cause damage against boats, since you could come from angles where one might hit things that arent as armoured. I'm probably wrong AF though?
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Apr 28, 2018 12:40
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Greggster posted:An airplane with a big gun seems like it would cause damage against boats, since you could come from angles where one might hit things that arent as armoured. Damaging boats is easy, it's sinking them that is tough, armoured or not. You would need a substantial hole under waterline, and preferably in several sections, but guns of that size can only damage parts above waterline and the damage by the shell (680 grams of TNT) is relatively limited so any leaks would be easy to counter. That said, if the hits start fires or damage crucial systems then maybe the ship will be lost or in need of long repairs anyway, or you have killed a bunch of sailors and marines and damaged its cargo.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:03
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Greggster posted:An airplane with a big gun seems like it would cause damage against boats, since you could come from angles where one might hit things that arent as armoured. Decks usually weren’t as well-armoured as the belts, but battleships for instance were specifically designed to help resist plunging fire from enemy battleship shells drilling down from above - imagine the arc a shell would describe for really long range fire. A plane with a cannon on it could still gently caress up exposed parts of the superstructure like radar dishes, the bridge or whatnot, but it’s unlikely to sink any but the absolute lightest of ships.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:06
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Were the five inch guns on the escort carriers basically 127mm howitzers?
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Apr 28, 2018 13:09
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Were incendiary weapons (napalm etc) used against ships at all? Sure it won't do a lot of damage, but it'll certainly make operating the ship a lot harder. And if you can deliver enough of it it'll deoxygenate the decks and kill all the crew.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:11
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Fangz posted:Were the five inch guns on the escort carriers basically 127mm howitzers? Casablancas and Bogues had standard 5"/38, same guns as almost everything else in US Navy.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:21
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The Lone Badger posted:Were incendiary weapons (napalm etc) used against ships at all? Sure it won't do a lot of damage, but it'll certainly make operating the ship a lot harder. And if you can deliver enough of it it'll deoxygenate the decks and kill all the crew. I've read about at least one case of this being done in desperation, but as a general rule ships are very hard to hit and if you're going out to attack them, you're hoping to sink them rather than simply damage or impair them. Planes using weapons not meant for sinking ships against warships (most notably rockets) was a thing of desperation and throwing whatever you've got at the enemy, not standard practice.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:37
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is the really fast thing moving away from the explosion the heat warhead shoving a fine mist of the former drone? Or is this something different? Also, are the missiles physically ramming the target? I thought most anti-air munitions exploded close to the target, to shred the whole thing in tungsten projectiles. This is also a case where millimeter-wave radar guided hellfires happen to work for low, slow aerial targets rather than a weapon being designed for surface-to-air, so the whole thing is a little bit goofy, but works. Here's a Stinger engagement from a Stryker. Smaller warhead, impact-based fuze, much faster missile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLR9GL_5afM
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Apr 28, 2018 13:48
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Geisladisk posted:The really fast thing moving away is the HEAT jet itself. HEAT works by tightly focusing a explosion via black magic fuckery into a tight beam that propels molten copper to about Mach 10. HEAT warheads are designed to cut through tank armor, not unarmored drones, hence why the beam cuts a hole through the drone and then merrily keeps going. Sick. Looks like Ms. Marvel just blasted it. I confess I once thought the Panther was a early crack at a MBT, simply because it was it seemed to be a "one design that does everything" sorta thing. Shame about the armor
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Apr 28, 2018 13:49
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Milo and POTUS posted:Why so much firepower? Didn't 30mms or multiple 20s gently caress up even the biggest of bombers? And probably cheaper and more effectively? What Geisladisk said. Even the 30mm armed Fw 190s slathered in armor took casualties from American defensive guns. Having a big cannon that could shoot bombers outside of the .50 cal's range was a pretty effective tactic, assuming you could get into position.
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Apr 28, 2018 13:52
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I don't remember the details (at work right now), but the big reason for the 50mm 262 was that the plane went too fast to reliably get enough 30mm shells into a bomber to bring it down. Replacing the 30mm guns with a "one hit anywhere on a bomber will kill it) was supposed to sol"ve this problem.
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Apr 28, 2018 14:33
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is the really fast thing moving away from the explosion the heat warhead shoving a fine mist of the former drone? Or is this something different? Also, are the missiles physically ramming the target? I thought most anti-air munitions exploded close to the target, to shred the whole thing in tungsten projectiles. they modified the hellfire to detonate its warhead a couple of feet before the target, which is only possible because the new variants are radar guided and it was pretty simple to just write in a code. The prox fuse stingers are having to be extensively and very expensively modified. Milo and POTUS posted:I'll never not respect the sheer ambition of the mitchell's hung dong. the idea of engaging bombers from outside of the defensive range of the .50 cals was very attractive...that's why they tried various kinds of rockets along with the heavy cannon. The problem with most big aerial autocannons is their ballistic performance, and thus range and accuracy, were very poor. so, to improve the ballistics, you have to give it a whole lot more barrel. it never really worked particularly well but it was a decent and relatively cheap idea.
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Apr 28, 2018 15:04
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spiderbyte posted:Now that some are mentioning him, I'm curious what y'all think of Hardcore History. Obviously it is embellished a bit to tell the story, but I hope they're not too bad. I really enjoyed his Mongols one, and I highly recommend it. I heard of him by way of some friends who recommended his WW1 series, which I listened to. Overall it was enjoyable enough, he's a decent storyteller and upfront about not being a historian, though I'm not sure that does excuse repeating popular myths when you are at this level where a lot of people get their entry level knowledge listening to you. I can't remember that many details but I do seem to remember him pretty much repeating some of the old myths of the German army still not being beaten after the summer of 1918, and despite not getting heavily into it leaning very heavily on the Versailles Treaty being too harsh and opening the way for German resentment (which alot of modern scholarship is challenging), I seem to remember him quoting "This is not a peace, this is an armistice for twenty years!" out of context, which really bothered me. If I want to listen to something about history while working, driving, exercising or playing games I have come to actually prefer the great courses lectures they have on audible for that purpose. It's a lot drier, and these guys are professors not radio people or actors, so they aren't as good at the presentation part, but I feel that if you can get past that (which I guess requires existing interest and knowledge of the subject) I feel that many of those are excellent.
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Apr 28, 2018 15:17
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Revolutions by Mike Duncan is phenomenal if you're looking for historical podcasts, I also hear very good things about his previous series History of Rome. I'm far from an academic so I can't critique it there but he has an endearing and light tone and is genuinely pretty fun to listen to. His Haitian and South American chapters are some of my favorite podcasts ever.
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Apr 28, 2018 15:27
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Greggster posted:An airplane with a big gun seems like it would cause damage against boats, since you could come from angles where one might hit things that arent as armoured. They were mostly shooting up merchant ships, which are conveniently unarmored and usually loaded with things that readily burn or explode violently when shot.
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Apr 28, 2018 15:37
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Polikarpov posted:They were mostly shooting up merchant ships, which are conveniently unarmored and usually loaded with things that readily burn or explode violently when shot. Merchant ships also would have way less crew than a military ship and relatively poor damage control. Fw 200s occasionally sank merchant ships with bomb near misses.
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Apr 28, 2018 16:27
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Randarkman posted:leaning very heavily on the Versailles Treaty being too harsh and opening the way for German resentment (which alot of modern scholarship is challenging), Can anyone get more into what modern scholarship is saying here? I'm interested.
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Apr 28, 2018 16:30
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Nebakenezzer posted:Sick. Looks like Ms. Marvel just blasted it. The claim is usually not that the Panther was some kind of proto-MBT, but that it was the first MBT, or even that it inspired the concept of an MBT. These claims typically ignore any tank that came before it, since the T-34 or even the French Char de Bataille concept predate it bya long shot.
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Apr 28, 2018 16:50
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Wasn't the Panther a tank designed explicitly to beat the T34?
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Apr 28, 2018 16:54
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Due to its design problems, the Panther ended up being best used in a fixed position firing at known points that the gunner could easily reach (because he had no unmagnified sight, so it took 20 or 30 seconds of work with the commander to find a new target). Its gun was really good against tanks but not as good as some less powerful ones for infantry support and couldn’t be fired rapidly without stressing the barrel. It couldn’t really be used on mild slopes or while moving and the driver could wreck the transmission with sloppy shifting or neutral steering. The T-34 and Shermans with bigger guns are probably more MBT than the Panther. They weren’t the most powerful or fastest or most heavily armored tanks, but they were good enough at all of those and could handle any non-specialized armored vehicle role pretty well.
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Apr 28, 2018 17:04
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Geisladisk posted:
IIRC there was a squad of uniquely successful ground atrack B-25s in the Pacific mounting something like that, wasn't there? I don't remember where I read this.
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Apr 28, 2018 17:28
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is the really fast thing moving away from the explosion the heat warhead shoving a fine mist of the former drone? Or is this something different? That's the penetrator. A HEAT warhead works by lining a conical hollow in a block of explosive with some malleable metal liner, frequently copper. The dynamics of the conical explosion deforms the metal liner into a narrow rod and propels it forward at ludicrous speed, at least several kilometers per second. I like the video because it gives you an idea of how fast the thing's moving; even when the film's slow-motion enough to show you the explosion happen the HEAT jet still moves almost too fast to see. quote:Also, are the missiles physically ramming the target? I thought most anti-air munitions exploded close to the target, to shred the whole thing in tungsten projectiles. Many do, some don't. Particularly if you're dealing with a smaller warhead (like a Stinger, with a whole six lbs of HE), that's not really enough to throw enough fragments a long enough distance, so in those cases the weapon's hit-to-kill. Ditto for anti-ballistic missile systems, where the engagement speeds obviate fragments as a kill mechanism and you need a hard kinetic kill. In this case, the Hellfire's specifically designed as an anti-tank weapon, but this application can fire it against air targets as well. Bothering with two different missile types, one for air and one for ground, isn't really necessary here since the AT warhead on a Hellfire's going to gently caress up any plane it hits. It's also probably next-to-useless against an actual maneuvering jet as opposed to just a plodding-along drone.
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Apr 28, 2018 18:39
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Phanatic posted:It's also probably next-to-useless against an actual maneuvering jet as opposed to just a plodding-along drone. It’s going to absolutely ruin a help pilot’s day, though.
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Apr 28, 2018 18:44
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