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Unluckyimmortal posted:
The best part is that all that TURKEY TROTS and THE WORLD WONDERS stuff is just random cruft inserted into the message to make it harder to decrypt, everything after that RR should have been stripped before the message even got to Halsey but it wasn't. So again, fuckup layered on fuckup.
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Nov 18, 2013 21:00
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count_von_count posted:A few pages ago, but this is my favorite u-boat sinking as well. Also, the "someone on board" who flushed improperly was the boat's commander KL Karl-Adolf Schlitt. So it was a complicated ventilation/evacuation scheme where you had to activate all the switches in the correct order, and then somewhere, at the wrong point in the sequence, Schlitt hit the fan?
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Nov 20, 2013 10:58
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Alchenar posted:No it's right there in the Geneva convention. They're not specially recruited to fight in conflicts. They aren't paid more than regular soldiers. They aren't separately organised to the regular army. The Ghurkas and the French Foreign Legion are historical peculiarities but they aren't mercenaries. Exactly. A guy in the Gurkha brigade is a regular soldier in the regular British army, the same as every other regular soldier in the regular British army, he's part of the same command structure and subject to the same regulation. He's not recruited to fight in any particular armed conflict, he's just recruited to be in the Army. He doesn't receive compensation in excess of that paid to other British soldiers (quite the contrary in fact, when it comes to pensions etc). Compare to the Flying Tigers: (a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; most definitely, the US wasn't at war but these guys resigned their commissions to go fight in China. (b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities; again, oh yeah. (c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party; yea, verily. You can validly argue about how much they were motivated by the pay but it's not arguable that the pay wasn't "substantially in excess" of what similar duties paid for what passed for regular Chinese army, however you definite that. Hell, they were getting paid multiples of what they'd be earning in the US military, even before considering the bonuses for shot-down enemy aircraft. (d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict; (e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and (f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces. So in order, that's no, no, and no. (f) is debatable, I suppose, it's not like the whole thing wasn't a subterfuge to get around the US's official neutrality, and obviously they were brought back into the fold when war were declared, but on paper they'd resigned and the whole point is that they *weren't* there officially. You don't get to do things under the table to preserve the US's neutral stance and still maintain you're there officially so you're not a mercenary.
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Nov 25, 2013 14:55
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Fangz posted:The Geneva conventions as applicable to prisoners of war deals significantly with only declared wars between states, not civil wars. It does *now*. Article 3 specifically talks about "conflicts not of an international character," but that bit didn't exist until the post-war.
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Nov 26, 2013 09:25
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Fangz posted:Military grade body armour (with ballistic plate inserts) can stop AK rounds. Modern body armor with plates can stop full-length sniper rifle rounds at close range. This was a Dragunov SVD at under 100 yards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-UNFSZ8VKU Between modern body armor and modern battlefield medicine, it's gotten so people die on the battlefield in one of two ways: Either something really bad happens and you're killed instantly, or you bleed out. For the US in WW2, the KIA:WIA ratio was about 1:2.3. In Korea, it was about 1:3. Vietnam was about the same, but post Vietnam it really started to drop, and in OIF it was 1:9. It's still declining, but most of the low-hanging fruit is gone and continued improvement is very gradual. Part of that is battlefield medicine, but part of that is a willingness to spend great amounts of money on protection. For example, in WWII, the Sherman tank was designed to be mechanically reliable, fairly inexpensive to produce (about $500,000 in today-money), and easy to transport. Crew protection was pretty far down the list. The M1 Abrams, on the other hand, had crew survivability as the single most important design priority, everything else took a back seat, with transportability coming in dead last. Dozens of M1s have taken battle damage, and a smaller number have been combat losses (like, not repairable, tank destroyed), but only a handful of crew have been killed. But an M1 costs about $8,000,000 in 2013 dollars. Flesnolk posted:Probably my last thing on this 'cause it's getting closer to TFR talk, but does this work the same way for stuff like stone and concrete (say in an urban setting) or is your typical building material not hard/thick enough to stop a good round? Depends on the round, depends on the building. A few years ago I saw a video on Google of a series of ballistics tests against a number of "reference" buildings of the sort soldiers would be using in Iraq and elsewhere, ranging from plain old wood framing and drywall to brick and concrete, with the weapons used ranging from 9mm to 30x113mm (the round fired from the Apache's cannon). But, drat you ephemeral nature of the internet, the link is dead and I can't find it anywhere else. It was very illustrative. Basically if someone's firing 30mm HEDP at you you probably cannot find a building strong enough to hide in. And most of the stuff people in movies hide behind won't stop a rifle round. Edit: Oh, Rent-A-Cop found it. Nice. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 16:07
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wdarkk posted:The side isn't going to work, even other Abrams couldn't penetrate the side armor in the Gulf War. I couldn't find info about the rear in a cursory search, but it only has to have 147mm of protection to beat the Sherman. Track hits and then staying the hell away are the Sherman's only hope. Meh. Just wait for the Abrams to run out of gas.
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Dec 6, 2013 20:09
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Mustang posted:I was under the impression that even other M1s have difficulty penetrating an M1s armor. I can't remember specifically where I read this but I remember reading about an M1 in Iraq that was stuck and another M1 tried to destroy it but couldn't. There was a case where an M1 was immobilized and it was decided to destroy the vehicle in-place rather than try to recover it. Actually, there were a number of such cases, but the one you're probably thinking of was where another M1 went up and fired multiple rounds of APFSDS at it. Hit the ammunition stowage, but the blowout system worked and just vented all that outside. They eventually called up a plane to put a couple of Maverick missiles into it. I think the only lost M1 where the entire crew died was when they drove one into a canal and they all drowned. Alekanderu posted:Weren't some M1 tanks disabled by friendly fire to the rear from Bradleys during the Gulf War? How does the penetration of a Bushmaster cannon compare to the Sherman? Not sure about that, but Bradleys did get kills on T-55 tanks by hits to the turret ring (supposedly they got some T-72s the same way at close range but I'm not sure I buy that). HVAP out of the Sherman's 76mm was good for about 120mm at 1000 yards, the M242 firing APDS is about 30mm at the same range.
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Dec 6, 2013 20:52
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Nenonen posted:Meanwhile peacetime Sweden built Stridvagn-103's rather than turreted tanks because they thought it would fulfill the intended role just as well. But the Stridvagn-103 was always designed for the role of a turretless tank rather than WW2 assault gun. Which is why it had a second driver and a second set of steering controls to go in reverse?
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Dec 8, 2013 22:31
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Just that between 1776 and 1914 the idea that red is probably not the best color to wear on the battlefield should have trickled up to french high command but welp. The best color to paint aircraft if you want to make them hard to see is a pale shade of pink, pretty much the color pink the RAF uses in its low-visibility roundels. It's lower visibility under all conditions than black. Grey is also better than black, but pink is even better. There are exceptions, like really high-altitude aircraft that if you're going to see them at all, you'll see them against a black background (so things like the U-2 and SR-71 are black) Or if you're building your aircraft with the expectation that they'll participate in a full-blown nukefest (in which case white paint is nice because it reflects thermal radiation better). But generally if you're going to fly your airplane in a variety of conditions (day, night, over the ocean, over the desert, over the woods, over the hills and far away), pink is what you want to paint it if your priority is not being seen. So the 160th SOAR, the Army's special-ops helicopter regiment, paints their airplanes absolutely black, even though that's an easier color to see at night than grey is. I conclude that the "it looks cool" factor is relevant even at the highest levels of military accomplishment today.
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Dec 10, 2013 21:26
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Flesnolk posted:So for someone not interested in a bunch of naval technobabble, what's the tall and short on what these things do that other ships/destroyers can't? The ship class was basically in development hell for a while. It was originally a program called DD-21 (21st-century destroyer, rah rah), packing two vertically-firing guns (gun fires straight up, getting the shell above most of the atmosphere as fast as possible, and then it glides to the target), a shitload of VLS cells, and an all-electric drive (which is actually a pretty neat idea, instead of gas turbines turning a mechanical transmission to turn the screw, your turbines are just electrical generators and the electricity goes to turn a big gently caress-off 30,000-horsepower electric motor). It got pared back appreciably, and now has two regular guns, far fewer VLS cells, the electric motor isn't as advanced as the one they wanted to use because that one couldn't be made to work right, and its capability for local air defense isn't as good as existing AEGIS-equipped ships. Basically what it does that other ships/destroyers can't is (a) be ridiculously expensive (b) do a better job at NGFS which is pretty much who-cares because if you're doing NGFS two cheap ships with one gun each is probably a better idea than one really expensive ship with two guns and seriously there's going to be at least one aircraft carrier helping out so it's not like you're going to re-live Iwo Jima and (c) keep Ingalls and Bath Ironworks in business so that we don't lose more shipbuilding capability than we already have. quote:And while I'm asking ship questions, how is naval warfare even supposed to work now that the age of battleships and firing cannons at other ships/things you can actually see is over? The submarines kill everything so the carriers can keep sending up planes and dropping bombs on things.
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Dec 12, 2013 14:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was under the impression that ASW technology had advanced to the point where submarines are just (?) one-shot weapons now. Or was that what you meant. We have probably the best ASW in the world and it's still a very hard job, and even 20-year-old diesel/electric subs are a serious threat if they know where you're going. Submarines have a lot of advantages and modern submarines are terrifying.
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Dec 12, 2013 15:15
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veekie posted:What makes the difference in the noise level of different subs? A whole bunch of different things, it's an entire field of study. Diesel boats can run on batteries for a while which is very quiet since there's nothing moving except the electric motors turning the propeller. Nuclear boats have reactors that heat water (usually water, sometimes not) that gets moved around by a pump, which creates noise. But with newer nuclear boats, if they're willing to move slowly enough the reactor coolant can circulate just by convection in which case you can turn the pumps off. Machinery like the pumps or the gears and so forth is mounted on isolation mounts to minimize the coupling of any vibration from the equipment to the hull, and from there into the water. The actual propeller has a lot to do with it. Ducted prop vs. conventional makes a difference. The shape of the blades and hub is generally top-top secret; as the blade turns it generates an area of low pressure behind it, and bubbles can form there. These bubbles then collapse, which generates a good amount of noise, and shaping the propeller to minimize this phenomenon is a very big deal. There was an incident in the 80s where Toshiba partnered with a Norwegian company to illegally transfer CNC milling machines to the Soviet Union that let them cut the complex shapes required to improve their propeller design. Flow noise over the hull makes a difference, so hull shapes, fairings, through-hull fittings, hull coatings, all make a difference; if you look at a modern sub you'll probably see tiles all over it, these are rubber and/or plastic tiles with voids in them, all intended to minimize sounds at various targeted frequencies. The ambient conditions make a lot of difference; speed and transmissibility of sound through the water varies with temperature, salinity, depth, frequency, and does so in a complicated and non-linear fashion. Suffice to say this rapidly approaches ridiculous level of complexity and there are some good textbooks. http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Underwater-Sound-3rd-Edition/dp/0932146627
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Dec 12, 2013 16:28
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Shade2142 posted:This is the honey boo-boo of fighter jets. Beats being the Christopher Reeve of fighter jets.
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Dec 12, 2013 20:28
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hogmartin posted:
That, plus being able to lower a sonar transducer on a cable to a target depth to listen can be a lot better than being limited to a hull-mounted sonar that's necessarily pretty much at the surface. Towed arrays give a similar but different capability and there are tactical concerns to having them deployed (your ship now has a few miles of cable trailing along behind it, and they work best when trailed out straight which means you've got to travel in a straight line for a while). And then they can drop a torpedo on a target with little or no warning (surface ships can have a similar capability with rocket-launched torpedoes, but not necessarily).
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Dec 13, 2013 04:30
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Bacarruda posted:ASW Helicopters can also carry a MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detectors in a towed array. Essentially a giant metal detector that lets you know if you run across a giant hunk of metal in the ocean like a submarine. You've got to be very close, though. The P-8 replacement for the old P-3 has no MAD boom like the P-3 does. Davin Valkri posted:Out of curiosity, do these advantages of ASW helicopters also apply to fixed-wing aircraft? Now I'm wondering what you gain for the extra logistical requirements of a fixed-wing vs. a rotary wing ASW platform. Loiter time, payload, something else? Loiter time is a huge one, as is range. The P-3 can feather an engine and reduce its fuel consumption to the point where it can stay up all day. Almost literally, the endurance record is over 20 hours. And they can range over a much wider area of ocean and drop a lot of buoys. The P-8 seems to be optimized a bit more for a general-purpose maritime patrol/anti-shipping mission and a bit less for dedicated ASW, and can't stay in the air nearly as long.
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Dec 13, 2013 15:47
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gfanikf posted:
If you tell me he's got one of the Lugers in .45ACP I'm going to poo poo myself.
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Dec 31, 2013 17:27
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why were the US torpedoes so loving awful in WWII? Because the same single government agency, the Newport Torpedo Station, was by act of Congress the entity in charge of designing them, building them, and testing them. And the latter pretty much never happened. Raskolnikov38 posted:The torpedoes were expensive so they never tested them and just assumed it was all the captain's fault when they didn't work. Enough finally complained of hearing duds bounce off hulls that they finally tested them and found the fuse didn't work. It wasn't just the fuse. There were a bunch of problems and each problem was masked by others. The first problem was that they ran too deep. Tests that were done involved a dummy concrete warhead, which was lighter than the actual live warhead. And eventual development replaced the original-design warhead with an even heavier one. So they'd under-run the target and the magnetic detonator just wouldn't sense it and blow the thing up. The Bureau of Ordnance eventually realized this and in the meantime the sub captains started setting them up to run at zero depth, which makes them easier to spot and avoid but at least they'd get close enough for the magnetic detonators to react. So once that change was made, they started getting more hits, which revealed the second problem: now the magnetic detonator was revealed to suck and torpedoes would start going off too early. BuOrd refused to believe this expensive fancy-rear end magnetic detonator could possibly be flawed, and one of the inspectors actually tampered with a test article in order to shift blame away from the design and towards the crews, so submarine captains started deactivating the magnetic detonators. Once that was done, it was discovered that the contact fuse also sucked, it was so massive and had so much inertia that when a torpedo ran straight into the side of the target, the kind of hit crews were trained to aim for, the elements in the fuse would bend and jam and not actually set the torpedo off. Eventually those fuse components were redesigned to be lighter. By the end of the war it was a reasonably reliable weapon but if it had been that way in the first place, *man*. One sub would have crippled or sunk three Japanese carriers in 1943, but the 7 "hits" he achieved were all ones set off too early by the faulty magnetic detonators. Good reading on the problems: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/BuOrd/BuOrd-6.html Phanatic fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jan 1, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 10:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:Would it have been possible to load the Paris Gun with weed and use that? With 130km of range, you could almost send it right to San Diego from Mexicali. If we're going for "most absurd," one of the envisaged uses for what became the Saturn rocket was to resupply Army units in the field. I'm pretty sure whoever came up with the of using what is effectively an ICBM to deliver bullets and beans to some troops on the next continent over was high as a loving kite.
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Jan 6, 2014 18:53
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I think it was more a direct threat to the population: IE: surrender after your fortification is rendered indefensible (IE a breached wall/gate) but allow us to enter peacefully instead of forcing the breach and losing a lot of guys and we won't/might not sack the place. This might be my favorite non-porno Oglaf: http://oglaf.com/bilge/
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Jan 8, 2014 17:00
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wdarkk posted:
A Phoenix paper has a good article on the 3100 German POWs who were imprisoned at the Papago Park POW camp, for loose values of "imprisoned." Specifically, the two dozen who tunneled out Great-Escape-style. quote:The housing was only adequate, but living at Papago was like a vacation," sighs former Papago prisoner Hans Lammersdorf, in a phone interview from his home in Seattle. "There was no bitterness about the war on either side. The guards, the people we worked for, were all very nice. I would gladly have signed a life contract to stay in Arizona if I could have. But then the war ended and they made me go back to my homeland." Whole thing's a ridiculous comedy of errors. One of the escapees would routinely break back *into* the camp to get the local camp gossip, and then leave again to report to his comrades outside the wire.
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Jan 14, 2014 15:04
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Top Hats Monthly posted:I really enjoy reading about counterforce and countervalue nuclear war. Creepy, I know. Are there any really good papers or reports on this? This goes into it a fair amount. It's not specifically about that, but it's a good read. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C5R7F8G/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title
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Jan 20, 2014 03:13
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Tekopo posted:Another question about pre-WW2 boats: What effect did the switch from coal to oil have? Is oil-burning that much more efficient than coal-burning? I know that coal was both difficult to bring into a ship and also required a lot of crew to work their rear end off in order to keep the fire stoked, as well as the entire process of coaling at sea being time-consuming and potentially dangerous, but apart from that, is oil an improvement? Turbines were available for both coal and oil-powered ship, so I'm not sure if there is any performance increase when switching from one to the other. Oil is enormously more efficient than coal, about double the heat per pound. So for a given mass of fuel you could go twice as far, and your boilers could also be smaller. Designing oil tanks into a ship is a lot easier than designing coal bunkers into a ship, and oil makes use of space more efficiently (which extends your range even more). Refueling at sea became practical, as did oilers to do it with so that you didn't need a global network of coaling stations. And not only do you not need to exhaust your entire crew in regular recoaling operations, you reduce manning requirements since you don't need all those stokers anymore. You become less visible at sea because you're not emitting huge clouds of coal smoke. Ships that could operate on both might see a performance increase of as much as several knots, but there are other limiting factors; maximum speed is typically limited by the engines themselves, designed to operate at a given steam pressure. Just changing the fuel doesn't increase that. Speaking of protected cruisers, the Olympia's still tied up in Philadelphia. The museum's trying to unload it because they can't afford the maintenance: it's been sitting in the water since 1945 and desperately needs maintenance. It's a shame because the interior of the thing looks like this:     
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Mar 24, 2014 18:29
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steinrokkan posted:I'm not sure where I read it, but the Allies were supposedly less than impressed with Japanese swords and rated their close quarters effectiveness not just below bayonets and handguns, but also below shovels. quote:Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
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Jul 1, 2014 18:21
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JaucheCharly posted:
Pretty much every Japanese infantry weapon? But especially this one:  Type 11 LMG. Note the feed mechanism: instead of a box magazine or a belt, it's got a hopper on the side of the receiver, with the idea being you can use the same clips used by the Type 38 rifles the other guys have. Makes reloading a breeze, just stack 6 of those clips in the hopper and you're good to go. And you never have to stop firing to change a mag, some other guy can just keep dropping fresh clips in the hopper while you're blazing away. Except if you're advancing, then it makes reloading a pain in the rear end. And even better, all sorts of dirt and crud and muck and pieces of blown-up guy find their way into that hopper. Oh, and it turns out that the 6.5x50 round used in the Type 38 tended to break the gun, so they needed to design a new dimensionally-identical round with a reduced powder charge.
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Jul 11, 2014 14:22
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bewbies posted:I need a new book. Recommendations? Any period, any topic. http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/1594202273
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Jul 24, 2014 19:53
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MA-Horus posted:The Space Shuttle was originally designed to be a cheap, reusable platform to get relatively smaller payloads into Low Earth Orbit. The idea was that there could be a fleet of a dozen or more, and you'd have weekly launches, which would bring the cost down per vehicle. Keep in mind, though, that NASA *sought out* the USAF because the commercial interest in launching satellites could in no way utilize the enormous overcapacity NASA was promising. They figured with all the spy satellites the USAF needed to launch, they'd be interested, and they were, but that generated the polar orbit requirement, which meant a bigger launch rocket. And meant you can't launch out of KSC because now you're launching over populated USA or risking dropping a spy satellite on the Cubans.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:02
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PittTheElder posted:There was a launch complex at Vandenberg though, I think they could have launched a shuttle into a polar orbit. They could have, once they spent billions to build it, but the point is that to launch into a polar you need a bigger rocket because you're not getting as much free velocity from the eastwards component of the launch. The real damage came from the insistence of the aforementioned and ludicrous steal-a-Russian-satellite mission capability, because that in turn demanded and enormous cross-range capability which meant bigger wings on the orbiter, which meant more area to heat-shield, which meant more weight, which meant an even bigger rocket. quote:I'm not sure why they didn't, I'm much more of an Apollo guy. It took the USAF forever to get the Vandenberg complex ready for the Shuttle, and then Challenger happened. quote:Well the lack of a launch escape system is sort of forced on you by the design. Then that should be a factor that causes you to reevaluate the design, not excuse the lack of escape system. In fact, the escape system requirement was dropped in response to the redesign crunch caused by the USAF requirements for polar launch and 1000-mile crossrange. quote:And no, no self-destruct on the Orbiter itself. Doesn't really need them, if it goes off course in powered flight the tank and booster detonation will take it out, There wasn't even a detonation during Challenger, just a very large deflagration. Very big chunks of orbiter made it down intact, which is why you can't launch a polar profile out of KSC.
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Jul 30, 2014 23:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:Just don't get them started on Napoleon III. "Each kit represents the personal equipment carried by a notional common British soldier at a landmark battle over the past millennium." 1485 Yorkist has some pretty baller armor for a notional common British soldier, no?
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Aug 4, 2014 15:37
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MA-Horus posted:Yeah, and the advent of rifle grenades/grenade launchers like the m79/m203 kinda did away with the need for a pitcher's arm. On the same team as Jackie Robinson, too. And he played football in the Rose Bowl. After the war he turned down a minor league baseball contract and became an LA cop, and then a detective, while getting his law degree at night, and then became a deputy DA and then chief DA. He's the guy who prosecuted Sirhan Sirhan. Then Ronald Reagan appointed him as a state judge.  Buck by Phanatic, on FlickrHe was also a really nice guy.
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Aug 5, 2014 18:49
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PCjr sidecar posted:This is an example of counter-force vs counter-value targeting, an ongoing argument in nuclear weapons policy. I thought that as well, but checking the map closer I see a lot of countervalue targets in the 2000-warhead scenario as well. Granted, there are military targets there as well, but it's still hitting every population center east of the Mississippi. I don't think it's a clear counterforce vs. countervalue split.
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Aug 5, 2014 19:32
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Panzeh posted:Keep in mind that during the war, the amount of armor needed to deal with modern anti-tank guns made a tank really heavy which caused a lot of issues. This is still basically true today. The Abrams and other modern MBTs are ridiculously effective against HEAT warheads from the front, but cheap, man-portable weapons can still penetrate large areas of them, and the protection they offer comes at the cost of making them only air-portable in a technical sense and unable to make it across a whole lot of bridges.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:23
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Slavvy posted:I thought the abrams/challenger were basically impenetrable to shoulder mounted weapons. Didn't a few abrams break down/get disabled in Iraq and have RPG's just ping off them until they were recovered? Or is this just a matter of new technology vs 30 year old technology? From the front, where the fancy composite Chobham armor is, they're basically impenetrable, but that's also why they weigh 70 tons and much of the tank is still protected by plain old RHA steel. Modern tandem-warhead RPG rounds can penetrate something like three-quarters of a meter of that. There was one case in Iraq where the penetrator went through the side of the tank, through the crew's compartment, and penetrated into the armor on the other side of the tank, leaving a smear of copper liner across one of the crew's armor vest. The Abrams is the first tank where "crew survivability" was the #1 design priority. "Transportability" was the lowest priority. So basically it's the exact inverse of the Sherman.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:04
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:How far can the jet from a HEAT warhead travel in air? It's not really a jet. What's going on is you're using the force of the explosive warhead to shape and propel a penetrating slug of copper. At the pressures involved the distinction between "solid" and "liquid" pretty much disappears; the metal liner of the warhead doesn't have *time* to melt and vaporize into a jet or a plasma or anything, and it doesn't burn or melt through the armor. The armor deforms plastically and yields, it's more like pushing a screwdriver through an empty beer can. The penetrator could travel quite a ways through air, since you're talking about a lump of metal that you've accelerated to Mach 25. But the geometry of the warhead is intended to focus all that force on a small area of the target, and HEAT penetration is extremely sensitive to standoff distance; if the warhead detonates too close to the target the liner doesn't have time to collapse into the smallest frontal area before it encounters the armor, and if the warhead detonates too close away the liner will already have collapsed and begun to disperse again. In either case the larger area of the armor it's pushing against means that penetration falls off fast. So while the penetrator could travel some large distance after only a little distance it's not going to be much use at penetrating. You've seen the cage armor around Strykers and other LAVs? Part of the utility of that is it can cause incoming rounds to detonate early, while they're too far away for optimum penetration (The other is that if the nose fuse misses the slats of the gage and the side of the warhead hits a slat it'll crush the side of the cone and short out the electrical path between the fuse and the detonator at the base and the round will be a total dud but that only works against certain weapons, I think the newer RPG warheads have corrected that design issue). quote:Like, I know spaced armour is a thing, but hypothetically if you didn't care about visibility, couldn't you put a steel plate on stilts like a metre or two above the top if a tank and hope that couple metre gap of air dissipates the jet from a top attack warhead? Yes. But then I could do what's already done against ERA and the like, use a tandem warhead where the first warhead removes your steel plate and then the second one detonates at the proper standoff distance. Or I don't use a HEAT warhead for top attack, I use an EFP (explosively-forged projectile) instead. Similar construction but different principle of formation, and penetration is not greatly affected by standoff distance. The downside is that where a HEAT warhead can penetrate something like 6 or 7 times the charge diameter in thickness, an EFP might be able to penetrate about the same as the charge diameter. bewbies posted:Just about all of the visible armor on an M1 is the composite stuff, and all models fielded now have DU plating integrated everywhere on top of the composite...there isn't much steel in the construction outside of the chassis. Also the only model that gets near 70 tons is the A2 with the TUSK stuff strapped on. The side skirts and engine deck armor are still basically just RHA, no?
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Aug 18, 2014 17:57
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Arquinsiel posted:I shall oblige! They killed them and raped their corpses?
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Aug 19, 2014 16:19
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Azipod posted:The 1903 Springfield has a magazine disconnect that converts it to a single shot mode. Its actually useful because you can take slow, aimed shots without depleting your magazine. Then if you need 4 shots quickly just flip the switch and you're feeding normally again. I don't get this. The 1903 Springfield is a bolt-action rifle, it's single-shot in the first place. "Feeding normally" is you fire one shot and need to work the bolt if you want to fire again.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:53
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:
Don't forget that in _Independence Day_, which is pretty much a remake anyway (aliens invade, we greet them in peace but they blow us up anyway, our weapons are useless against them, including the atomic bomb, and then they're defeated by a virus), another Northrup flying wing drops another ineffectual nuke on them.
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Sep 2, 2014 15:53
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jng2058 posted:To be fair, though, that one bomb landed in the middle of a flight deck full of refueling and re-arming planes. Lots of poo poo that went boom, in other words. The Yorktown had clear decks when she was hit. Yes, American damage control was much better than the Japanese, but as they say, timing is everything. This is one of the popular notions dispelled by _Shattered Sword_. The bomb that killed Akagi landed on the middle elevator, penetrated to the upper hangar deck, and exploded there in the middle of the armed and fueled torpedo planes that were about to be spotted for their strike. This also removed the fireproof curtains separating the elevator well from the hangar.
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Sep 18, 2014 15:48
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wdarkk posted:Wouldn't that be carcinogenic as hell? So's wood smoke.
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Oct 9, 2014 15:29
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Well that's a uniquely Russian solution Uniquely? Naw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(flamethrower) Phanatic fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 12:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've got two weird hypothetical questions about submarines: The submarine sinks. You probably get sympathetic detonations of the rest of the weapons in the room so the sub's really, really dead. quote:What would happen if a nuclear warhead that a submarine was carrying detonated while the sub was underwater? The submarine is vaporized or pulverized down to tiny little bits, and is really, really, really, really dead.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:49
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