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Baron Porkface posted:Everyone makes fun of AT-ATs, but what would have been the best way to attack Echo Base on Hoth? Use turbolasers to melt the ice around the base, wait.
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Apr 21, 2014 02:01
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Fangz posted:Knowing the presence of his son, the commander in charge clearly sabotaged the offensive to ensure the rebels got away. Why oh why does the Empire tolerate such incompetence, given the same leader also presided over the failure at Yavin?? Nepotism. The commander in charge is a close personal friend of the Emperor. To bring this back on topic, Cracked had an article about fuckup generals, and Gideon Pillow had basically the relationship described, only he was more cowardly than anything else. EDIT: U.S. Grant posted:I had known General Pillow in Mexico, and judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any intrenchments he was given to hold. I said this to the officers of my staff at the time. I knew that Floyd was in command, but he was no soldier, and I judged that he would yield to Pillow’s pretensions. wdarkk fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 04:00
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Here's another good quote about Pillow:quote:"He thought you'd rather get hold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy," Buckner told Grant.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:06
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bewbies posted:So the Navy is taking its railgun out to play next fiscal year. You forgot "stealth" in there.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:51
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bewbies posted:Seriously though, if we assume 6 rounds per minute of 25 lbs guided projectiles moving at mach 8 it'd be a very serious threat to a carrier or just about anything else. It also seems like it'd be useful against area/access denial if they can get the range up enough. A solid block of metal is a lot harder to shoot down than something with thin walls and full of warhead/fuel.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:22
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ArchangeI posted:How well would that do against infantry, say, in foxholes? Because it seems to me that KE projectiles are pretty bad at killing infantry in cover unless they hit directly. In which case, granted, you only bury the guy symbolically. I recall plans for a projectile that would break apart near its target, saturating an area with "smaller" (probably still 20+mm) metal spikes. Sort of like a rail-shotgun.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:51
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You're not going to use a rail gun to shoot a dude in a foxhole between the orphanage and the puppy orphanage. You shoot the S-300 protecting that guy with the rail gun, then the fighter/bomber/drone goes in with the small-diameter bomb or something for that guy and all his friends.
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Apr 22, 2014 22:59
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bewbies posted:"Approaching" is more like "surpassing", at least for the Paladins. The current Paladin fleet is just an awful thing. Seems like railgun power requirements would mean we'd finally beat the Maus for heaviest SPG/tank/etc.
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Apr 28, 2014 23:57
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JaucheCharly posted:Extra points for posting pics of his armor. I found a modern reproduction. 
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May 10, 2014 14:42
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Isn't there nothing in the USSR worth hitting in range of the coast at that point?
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May 20, 2014 00:14
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Fangz posted:There is a tendency to discuss Barbarossa (this is also the case of stuff like the western front) as though it were a puzzle to be solved, that if only the Germans found the 'right' solution they would have won. I don't think that is realistic or even that helpful, ignoring as it does the tremendous efforts of the Soviets to stop them. There's an argument that regardless of what the Germans did, simply getting enough ammunition and fuel to support the capture of Moscow to the front was impossible.
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May 27, 2014 18:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:It was actually Rommel's taste for gold. What's that from?
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May 28, 2014 17:39
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JaucheCharly posted:Well, unlike Hitler, Stalin wasn't regularly high on meth. What about Syphilis?
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May 30, 2014 21:39
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Vagon posted:Can anyone go into some of these deals in detail? I remember hearing that the Destoyers for Bases contract was laughably one-sided in America's favor. Yeah, it was. The destroyers were pretty poo poo because they'd pretty much been left somewhere since WW1. The US did upgrade many of the bases and let the UK continue to use them though.
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Jun 9, 2014 17:14
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blackmongoose posted:Not even war material per se, but trucks were one of the most important components of Lend-Lease. If the Soviets had to choose between getting American trucks vs. the entire contribution of the American army, the correct decision would have been the trucks and it's not even particularly close. IIRC Locomotives were also a very important part of Lend-Lease. EDIT: According to wikipedia the US supplied the USSR 2,000 locomotives, but the Soviets only managed to build 92. EDIT2: I decided to check the source since the period wasn't clear but OOPS DEAD LINK. wdarkk fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jun 10, 2014 |
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Jun 10, 2014 04:53
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Arrath posted:You seem to be saying only like its all Soviet industry was capable of. If the Americans are happy to provide all that sweet heavy iron, would you rather build a bunch more locomotives yourself or have that many more factories producing tanks or planes? I don't know. It's possible that locomotive production wasn't as easy to set up in the Urals or something, I'm just throwing up what I remembered on the topic.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:08
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The Berlin airlift was very nearly a "Berlin convoy with orders to shoot anything in the way" and that probably wouldn't have ended well.
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Jun 10, 2014 18:06
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P-Mack posted:In honor of yesterday's events in Brazil, can someone elaborate on the current understanding of Spanish decline in the early modern period? My entirely unresearched understanding is Wasn't there also a part where they dropped the value of gold and silver to the point where they were screwing themselves over?
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Jun 20, 2014 02:23
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Lassitude posted:So there's a new WW2 movie coming out and with the Stalin chat I'm curious about the impact of Lend-Lease on the Eastern Front. What I've read on Wikipedia makes it sound like it was primarily about trucks and other logistical aids to the Soviets. Also, at what point did the US and Soviet leadership realize that they were going to be staring each other down over the coming decades following Nazi Germany's defeat? Were there American/British generals/politicians who wanted to turn on the Soviets and get rid of Stalin's regime/liberate the various nations they'd annexed since '39? How practical would that have been, in the sense of how the Allied-sans-Soviet forces compared to the Soviet forces alone? Churchill wanted to do that. Nobody else did.
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Jul 4, 2014 00:49
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HEY GAL posted:I feel so sorry for those people. God, how sad and weird that must feel. Would being alone for that length of time literally drive you crazy? I heard that prisoners in solitary confinement experience brain damage due to the loss of socialization, but the circumstances aren't quite the same (closet vs tropical island).
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Jul 28, 2014 23:30
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Flesnolk posted:Something I found myself curious about, and I figured this was the best thread to ask - the North Korean military once came super close to conquering the whole peninsula and handing the US their first total defeat in war. How did they end up going from that to the huge-but-barely-equipped joke they are these days? There's no Soviet Union propping them up.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:56
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Rhymenoserous posted:Probably had more to do with the Chinese offensive. The war started in June 1950, by September US forces crossed into North Korea and started stomping around. The swing back towards a "War we may actually lose" came when the PRC invaded to prop up a pretty much dead Korean army. Didn't the "US is almost pushed out of Korea" bit happen BEFORE the Chinese entered the war? I thought the Chinese just reversed all the gains the US made north of the border but didn't get that close to finishing things.
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Aug 13, 2014 23:32
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Wouldn't a breakthrough tank have been pretty useful for the hedgerow areas? Granted it wouldn't be as useful once you left.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:56
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uPen posted:Keep in mind that over a year after pearl we were having trouble committing battleships due to their insane fuel consumption. IIRC around 1930 the brass took a look at the "sail straight over there" plan's fuel requirements and threw it straight into the "gently caress no" bin.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:09
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Alchenar posted:So with a Japan victorious in the Pacific but having lost its continental Asian empire you end up with the reverse of the historical position at the end of 1944/start of 1945. Given how delusional the Japanese peace efforts were in reality and how much everyone lied after the fact, it becomes really difficult to even hypothesize over what point the Japanese government decided to sue for peace and what terms it would ask for. Wasn't delusion among Japanese peace efforts encouraged by Stalin?
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Sep 17, 2014 00:04
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Kemper Boyd posted:There was also the fact that the Imperial Army completely refused to take part in any of these plans. Inter-service rivalry between the IJA and IJN was amazing. I'm not sure any country had a worse inter-service rivalry (not counting civil wars).
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Sep 17, 2014 19:17
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Any particular sources on this you'd recommend? Not offhand. I remember it being discussed many times in works on some other aspect of the Pacific war. Shattered Sword, for example, quotes Tojo being smug about goddamn Midway because he's part of the army faction.
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Sep 17, 2014 19:49
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Actually it was a colonel. And yeah it was super-dysfunctional.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:44
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So when did the US first try launching combat drones off carriers? Apparently WW2.
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Sep 28, 2014 04:36
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shallowj posted:this isn't going to be true forever, right? wouldn't drones be capable of maneuvers that would kill/incapacitate human pilots (from G forces)? what's the "bottleneck" right now for drone performance? software? bandwidth?
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Oct 2, 2014 21:16
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MA-Horus posted:Not a terrible idea, actually, since Comp-B/C-4 burns quite readily. Wouldn't that be carcinogenic as hell?
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Oct 8, 2014 23:53
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:I think Rumsfeld was more cynical about it than is commonly presented, not that that's really any better. He thought we'd go in, topple Saddam, then wish the Iraqi's luck and get the gently caress out. Then at the eleventh hour Bremer convinces Bush to crumple up the crude sketch of a plan they had on a back of a napkin and completely wing it. It would be interesting to see what kind of different hosed up consequences we would have gotten from the original plans. It seems like that'd give you "Saddam II, (possibly the literal) son of Saddam."
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Oct 21, 2014 02:40
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MA-Horus posted:In hindsight, we could only wish things would have turned out so drat well. The Hussein kids seemed a bit more unstable than their dad, but it might still beat ISIS.
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Oct 21, 2014 03:08
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Slavvy posted:An excerpt of badassery: I have to wonder what percentage of those kills actually took place.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:01
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"I fired at the tank and then it wasn't there anymore so clearly I killed it."
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Oct 31, 2014 21:45
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JaucheCharly posted:The wreck probably despawned, clearly showing that I killed it. This is pretty close to the system used for calculating hits from the AP bombs used at Pearl Harbor. Basically they assumed that if you could see a flash, it's the bomb hitting something like the ground or water and making a crater rather than a hole. If you can't see the flash, it means that the bomb penetrated something. The effect of duds on this scoring system is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:26
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Garbo got an Iron Cross for his "efforts".
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Nov 1, 2014 16:14
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P-Mack posted:Lol, I just finished a book about the French intervention in Mexico which was yet another desert clusterfuck happening at the same time. ( Should we enter Emperor Maximilian in the goony leader contest?) Maximilian is kind of weird. According to the wikipedia page on him, the one about his execution is accurate 
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Nov 4, 2014 21:36
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SeanBeansShako posted:The image of a lone GI stumbling blindly around in circles in what essentially is a big plastic bag wearing his vision constricting mask is loving hilarious. How the gently caress would you even use a gun in that?
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Nov 14, 2014 00:46
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IIRC there was no credible civilian leadership thanks to a bunch of assholes assassinating anyone who wasn't "patriotic" enough.
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Dec 5, 2014 02:39
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