Ask Us About Military History: Remove Balls To Fire Blanks

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Ask Us About Military History: Remove Balls To Fire Blanks

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Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

IM_DA_DECIDER posted:

Hows loving Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, a.k.a. Vangelis, for a recent Greek cultural contribution? You uncultured swines.

Whom amongst us does not enjoy Yanni

# ¿ Jun 24, 2016 01:04

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 13:10

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Xiahou Dun posted:

Hey.

Hey.

I beat you and I want credit.

Congrats on your first good post

# ¿ Jun 24, 2016 02:30

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Throatwarbler posted:

Historically wouldn't the ancient dyes have faded quickly with weather and travel, and everyone on campaign ends up wearing faded grey or brown? That was something said about even the Napoleonic era uniforms, they may have been intended to look bright red or green when they left the mill but mostly just looked grey or brown after some wear.

No. Scots were known to wear saffron yellow tunics, and that is a bright yellow. Maybe they dyed them frequently (though that seems implausible), maybe they used a dye or mordant lost to us. Indigo blues were prized because of their light fastness, and madder red is also very good.

Edit: the transition from wool to cotton also doesn't help. Wool holds color much better.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Jun 26, 2016

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 11:42

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

i look like poo poo, but at least i look like authentic poo poo lol

That's not because of the dye

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 12:48

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

the weapons are in perfect working order though, come try me and see

I'll just yell "I think your dagger is too long!" and gub you while you're inspecting it.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 12:57

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

P-Mack posted:

The end result is that Chinese Democracy is delayed indefinitely.

You don't even know how wrong you are homeboy. Chinese democracy was released in 2008

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 07:00

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Kemper Boyd posted:

I got a bunch of rowan trees growing in the yard of my new house and I started wondering if people used that for pikes. I should make a pike.

According to Wikipedia it's used for walking sticks so if it isn't too weak in the modulus of rupture and doesn't flex too much it should be usable but because it's dense when you get out to serious lengths you have to worry about it breaking under its own weight.

Edit: I missed it the first time through on the wood database, but found it this time. So Rowan is harder and stronger both against crushing and rupture than European Ash but it is also noticeably more flexible which means your pike would sag a lot. Cornus Florida (they don't have data for Cornus Mas) is better on all counts than ash, which makes sense.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jul 10, 2016

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 15:10

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Hogge Wild posted:

The first cleric was a vampire hunter in the first D&D campaign and Gary Gygax later made them use maces because a Bishop in the Bayeux tapestry used one.

He didn't though. He had a wooden club, which was really a symbol of office.

P-Mack posted:

Yeah, that waist level horizontal cut is really hard for me to do properly with a longsword. What kind of sword were German executioners swinging, anyway?

Seems like whatever was available, to a point. Urs Graf shows a falchion being used in one example. Then there's this one:

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 01:10

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Hunt11 posted:

I know that, it is just that my point was that the Union whilst in a lot stronger position then the Confederacy, it was no where near strong enough to have the major super powers actively join in the war effort.

Do you think France and Britain would intervene on a total war footing or something? Why would Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Prussia allow that?

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 15:14

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Fangz posted:

Historically wars ending in negotiated settlements because 'oh gently caress it it's not going anywhere' is very much the pattern. Consider the 100 Years War

The HYW ended with England completely ousted from the continent except for Calais and the Valois fully in control of the French crown. That is not war weariness, the French achieved their territorial and political aims.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 16:33

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Fangz posted:

Yes, but it also ended in no sense with the English militarily crushed with soldiers in London. The English could have chosen to continue escalating the conflict. But the reality was that they couldn't afford to. The French's aims were to get the English to accept the situation, not to merely momentarily occupy most of the contested territory, and it was weariness and financial hardship that did that. The map at the war's end was not so militarily different from how the map looked at several points during the war.

England was quite simply incapable of invading France until the reign of Henry VII due to the madness of Henry VI and the subsequent Wars of the Roses. The question of English "acceptance" is not the issue. The Kings and Queens of England did not relinquish claim to the crown of France until 1802, but it would be ridiculous to suggest the timeline of the Hundred Years War be adjusted correspondingly. Unless you wish to suggest that "war weariness" caused Henry's madness, I don't think you can make this argument.

I also agree with my dad.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 20:25

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

SeanBeansShako posted:

So the idea of the Victorian British doing anything military intervention wise like joining with either side in the US Civil War just seems adorable and silly. The Indian Mutiny caught them on the hop and the Crimean War was a slogfest now. I can't imagine they'd have anyone that insane or title hungry enough to do such a thing. At least in our own history.

By "military intervention wise" I'm guessing you mean an invasion.

In case you don't (because military intervention can take all sorts of shapes) I'll just say that it's not any kind of secret that William Gladstone and Lord Russell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary respectively, both advocated heavily for intervention. To whit, on October 7, 1862, Gladstone declared in a public speech that "We know quite well that the people of the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup [of defeat] � they are still trying to hold it far from their lips � which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation."

This is tantamount to officially recognizing the CSA.

When the issue of intervention came to Parliament, the Secretary of War, George Cornwall Lewis, advised strongly against it and it was struck down. War was certainly unlikely given Lewis' staunch opposition but to think no-one in the government wanted it is naive.

Incidentally, Russia was possibly the Union's closest ally, and that alliance helped check Anglo-French interventionism.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 13:13

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

feedmegin posted:

To be honest, I'm not sure quite how you get from that speech to 'and therefore we'll start shooting at the North'...

I was specifically talking about things other than invasion, such as supplying arms and ships. You can still get into a shooting war over that, and probably would have given that the Federal Government treated the war as an internal matter. Internal affairs have very different diplomatic significance to a war between nations. Hell, the American ambassador to London threatened war over the building of ironclad steam rams in the UK for the Confederacy.

The European powers could also provide themselves with further pretext to intervene by proposing a ceasefire, which would either be rejected by the Union and thus give pretext for war, or be accepted and thus allow the South to remain separate and cement its legitimacy. The French and British would then have free reign to intervene.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 14:52

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

It's quite a leap from "I'm going to sell you poo poo" to "I'm going to assemble an expeditionary force"

Please tell me where I said they would assemble an expeditionary force.

Edit: They would garrison Canada, as Pain Mainframe suggests, but I don't know enough about Union war plans or British to say what that war would be like. I'd definitely expect combat at sea, given the blockade.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jul 19, 2016

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 16:39

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

FAUXTON posted:

They probably drank what we would consider unsafe amounts of "beer." This however was frequently closer to O'Doul's or Buckler than Guinness, and was generally seen as a good way to consume calories without having a full-on meal. At most it imparted a mild buzz after concerted drinking efforts. However, water was almost certainly the primary source of hydration for the average soldier.

I can't remember the exact details off the top of my head but when Henry, son of William the Conqueror, was being besieged by his brothers he was sent barrels of water as relief.... by Robert Curthose, one of his brothers. William, the other brother, was predictably incensed. In any case they clearly had barrels of water lying around in enough quantity to spare for the defenders.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2016 15:20

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Beer tended to be somewhat weaker but wine was still wine, and distilled spirits were about ~35% ABV on up.

In the Middle Ages wine was almost always drunk mixed with water.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2016 20:07

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Oh, interesting. How late did that persist? I knew that spirits tended to be mixed with water as distillation was originally seen as a process to make wine more portable.

Off the top of my head I know it was still going on in the mid 15th c. After that I'd have to check my sources.

Edit: but these only go til the late 15th

# ¿ Jul 21, 2016 23:17

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Ainsley McTree posted:

This is a good post; worth adding to the OP maybe?

When the OP was being written we specifically decided against saying this sort of stuff in order to keep from discouraging new posters who might have valuable knowledge.

Edit: also im never editing the op

Double edit: point being that putting people on pedestals, especially goons, is a stupid idea.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jul 30, 2016

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 05:51

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

my dad posted:

Jealous?

While I agree with not putting anything like this in the OP, it's silly to imply that we're putting goons on a pedestal just by giving suggestions where to start looking for good posts in a thread that has over 45000 total posts to a goon who asked about that.

I'm saying putting them in the op would be putting them on a pedestal. That's why I quoted the guy talking about putting them in the op, not you.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 12:38

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Yvonmukluk posted:

So I'm curious, what obscure battles/theatres/units would you include in a WWII game?

Anything involving actual French armies fighting, so Operation Dragoon or the invasion of 1940.

quote:

Or what other wars would you want to see covered? I mean, aside from Landsknecht Shooting out of Window Sim 1642, that one's a given.

Honestly I've never been entirely satisfied with melee weapons in an FPS game and doubt I ever will be, but mount & blade is probably the closest to getting it right, so that would give you some lead. But to really do a pre-gunpowder game right an emphasis on ravaging and siege would be necessary, and they don't really handle either well.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 13:22

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

I'm hoping to close the thread on page 1137 since that's the year Louis VI died and he's my bro. That should give people time to do some cleanup and get together a new OP or whatever. If I miss 1137 because I'm too busy having sex at the gym (or playing dota) i'll close it on 1143 for the death of Emperor John Komnenos.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2016 14:59

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 13:10

Rodrigo Diaz: Apr 16, 2007; Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Suger of St. Denis posted:

That summer was very hot, even more punishing than usual, and we found ourselves exhausted, weakened, and completely worn out by its all-consuming heat. The lord King Louis himself suffered another severe attack of diarrhea and dysentery in Paris, and the summer's unbearable misery totally wasted him away. Never lacking in prudence at these moments, he summoned the venerable Bishop Stephen of Paris and the pious Abbot Gilduin of St. Victor to his side; and he made his confession to Abbot Gilduin with great intimacy, for he had built his monastery from its foundations. He recited his confession, and devoutly sought to be fortified for death by the viaticum of the Lord's body. He also wished to be carried to the church of the holy Martyrs to discharge with great humility a vow he had made. But, overcome by the agonies of his illness, he fulfilled with his heart, mind, and will what he could not carry out in deed. He ordered that a carpet be spread on the ground and ashes be shaped on the carpet in the form of a cross. Having been laid upon it by the hands of his attendants, he made himself ready by the sign of the holy cross and sent for this spirit on the kalends of August, in the thirtieth year of his administration of the kingdom and nearly the sixtieth year of his life.

At the very same hour his body was wrapped in a precious cloth and carried for burial the the church of the holy Martyrs. But something happened when his men went ahead to prepare his burial site; it does not seem proper to pass over it in silence. The king had talked with us on occasion, nay many times, about the tombs of the kings, showing pleasure at the thought of meriting burial between the sacred altars of the holy Trinity and the holy Martyrs. There he would obtain forgiveness for his sins by the help of the saints and the prayers of visitors; and in this way, he quietly made his will known.

Before departing with his son, we had made plans with Herveus, the venerable prior of the church, for him to be buried before the altar of the Holy Trinity, on the side opposite the tomb of the emperor Charles, with the altar between them. But this place was already taken by Carloman, king of the French; and what we had proposed could not be done, for it is neither right nor customary for kings to be exhumed. Nevertheless, they defied the belief of nearly everyone that the site had been taken, and examined the location where, as if by some premonition, he had ardently desired to be buried. And they found a space unoccupied that was neither too large nor too small but fit the length and width of his body perfectly. So, in accordance with royal custom, he was buried there amid a multitude of prayers and hymns, with very solemn and devoutly conducted funeral rites.Now he awaits his part in the future Resurrection, as near in spirit to the company of the holy spirits as in body to the holy Martyrs, for he lies buried very near them so that he may obtain their aid. "Happy the man who knows in advance the exact place he will lie when the whole world totters in ruins."

879 years ago today

New thread here: forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3785167

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Aug 1, 2016

# ¿ Aug 1, 2016 22:38

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Ask Us About Military History: Remove Balls To Fire Blanks

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