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JcDent posted:I've read two books from Honorverse, I think (Basilisk Station and the one where they blow up ubermenchen eugenics HQ) and the part about the books ending up in a "x ship launched bajillion missiles, y missile got intercepted, z got through" is definitely true. It wants combat to be tragic like in real life, but manages to make it extremely boring. The hot thing in trashy Russian historical fiction is a hero from modern days who appear in the past and influence WWI, the revolution/Civil War, or WWII somehow. The genre is called popadantsy (those who ended up in something), while actual historians gave it the derogatory nickname vpopudantsy (those who let you put it in their butt). As far as I can tell, the only value of those books is in their amazing cover art.
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Jun 14, 2016 18:11
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JcDent posted:I've seen some trashy Russian sci-fi stuff on sale in newstands here... it's something. It's not their fault, at least one of those things is in sight any any given time in Russia.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:37
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Hogge Wild posted:I haven't driven any tanks, but I have driven Soviet trucks, and I find it plausible that some vehicles really needed a hammer or other tools to change gears. I managed to change gears in a Soviet truck as a feeble 14 year old  There is one instance of documentally confirmed application of a mallet: in getting the PTRD bolt to unlock. The response from NIPSVO was two part: a) you guys are assholes, fix this bullshit and b) after 40 shots the handle fell off, fix this bullshit. This is why the more complex and heavier PTRS was favoured over the lighter, cheaper, but jammier PTRD. Soviet tank trials also measured the efforts required for controlling the tank. The most I've seen on a drivers lever was 35 kg of effort. The equivalent lever on the Sherman took 30 kg, on the Pz38(t) it was 50 kg.
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Jun 17, 2016 22:13
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my dad posted:This might sound weird, but I think people sometimes attribute too much of Stalin's (and Hitler's and Churchill's and...) decisionmaking to his personal traits, rather than to the imperfect information he had available to him and how the choices he made relate to the overall goals he was working on. I have a document from a "reliable source" from Germany saying that an attack is imminent where Stalin wrote "tell your source to go gently caress himself" over it, so maybe it was a little to do with his personal traits.
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Jun 19, 2016 17:43
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Raenir Salazar posted:What happens? Bolton pikemen surround the Stark infantry in a horseshoe shape, with retreat being cut off by a literal wall of corpses from the previous battle. The pikemen are set up in a weird as gently caress pattern (row of shields, row of pikes) and slowly and dramatically close in, stabbing a few Starks at a time. This somehow works, even though tightening the shield wall while still leaving a row of pikes behind it to stab seems incredibly difficult to coordinate. Also this whole formation is completely unprotected from all sides and gets easily wrecked by cavalry in reserve.
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Jun 21, 2016 04:58
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my dad posted:Unless the documents you're reading... were faked too! It's a Swedish conspiracy. I saw more than one person claim that all German WWII documents are faked by the British and all German officers' memoirs were written under duress.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:39
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Then there will probably be a constitutional crisis.
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Jun 25, 2016 22:08
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feedmegin posted:This is also true of Britain, and no doubt France (though it's usually both world wars not just the first). Hell, the secondary school I went to, with a student body of ~1000 kids, had a big wooden board up in the assembly hall with the names of about 100 Old Boys who died in the wars. There are monuments like these in many villages in Russia. It's weird to see a list of several dozen names that died out of a village of maybe 150. Among those several dozen, you have maybe five different last names too. Entire families died fighting.
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Jun 29, 2016 16:28
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HEY GAL posted:which reminds me--Ensign Expendable, I know a relative of yours was on the Reichstag roof when they raised the Soviet flag on it, but are they in that one photo? His battalion took the Reichstag, I don't know where he was personally. Also by that one photo, I assume you mean of Yegorov and Kantaria. They raised the flag on May 1st, my grandfather's battalion did it on April 30th. Also the famous photo was a reenactment taken after the fact.
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Jun 30, 2016 21:34
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Frosted Flake posted:
Only if you don't read the records of the people they were fighting against.
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Jul 3, 2016 02:15
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This photo makes me think of why no one invented the drinking straw for knights.
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Jul 3, 2016 19:46
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Frosted Flake posted:I've read Stumbling Colossus and Colossus reborn, and am a big fan of Glantz's writing generally, but I cannot follow what was going on in the Soviet side of Barbarossa. The planned counter-attacks by large armoured reserves didn't accomplish anything, which is not at all what I would expect. What were the Soviets doing in those early few weeks of June-July? The Soviet plan relied on being able to mobilize faster than the enemy in case war broke out, so the border units were prepared to fight equal strength border units until the main forces and supplies pulled up. When the entire Wehrmacht trampled over the border, a fuckton of what was needed for war, like most of the fuel, nearly all 76 mm and up AP ammunition, etc was in Moscow. Plus no one had any idea what was going on, so tanks burned their engine lifespans pointlessly driving back and forth, maybe engaging with whatever formation they could find. But even if they beat them, now what? There is no front established, everyone's running, good luck getting infantry to stick around long enough to support you. The counterattacks played out like a broken record: tanks arrived piecemeal and instead of letting them assemble, perform reconnaissance, and go in as a coherent unit, infantry commanders threw them into the enemy straight off the march. Infantry, artillery, and aircraft cooperation was nonexistent. Tank unit reports from this time period are depressingly uniform: few tanks are thrown towards vague objectives, infantry does not follow them. The surviving tanks realize no one is coming to hold ground and turn back. Rinse, repeat. quote:I'm also curious to learn more about NKVD border guards. In the same book I'll read that the border guard formations were all destroyed before the end of 1941, but then that border guard units were involved in the battle for Berlin in 1945? Were these surviving units? Cadres and men on leave/hospital? Did the Soviets raise new border guard regiments while being invaded? Border guards were a part of the NKVD, so surviving members were retained for other interior duties, such as protection of the rear, fighting bandits, sabotage missions/partisan work, etc. The division between interior and border units still existed, but it was purely administrative. quote:There are also apparently two kinds of Naval Infantry regiment, that has me scratching my head. Some are sailors fighting as infantry and some are trained marines? The first kind had their ship sink, but were still trained soldiers in fighting shape. Why not give them a rifle and have them fight? The second are indeed trained marines, plus there were some cool units like EPRON diver commandos, but the image of naval infantry in Russian culture is overwhelmingly from the first group: a guy without a lot of infantry training, but with a whole lotta balls.
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Jul 6, 2016 05:47
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my dad posted:That's a rather interesting read. I'm an engineer and all this C3 black magic is kind of far removed from what I study, but the text seems pretty legit.
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Jul 6, 2016 15:04
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Frosted Flake posted:That was amazing thank you! F-22s were field guns, not anti tank guns, and it really showed. Sure, the ballistics of the 76 mm shell meant that it could wreck any German tank of the time from any combat range, but then you get things like separate gunners for vertical and horizontal aiming, incredibly heavy mount, etc.
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Jul 6, 2016 15:07
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Russian 122mm howitzer still gets issued with HEAT shells for anti-tank use. Now that is forward thinking right there. The D-30 mod. 1963, not the M-30 mod. 1938, although I'm sure the latter can still be found kicking somewhere in the Middle East.
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Jul 6, 2016 15:16
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Frosted Flake posted:All of the ammo and fuel had to be somewhere right? Was it all left at the railhead? All the fuel was in Moscow. The shells weren't anywhere. Production of new 76 mm AP shells began recently, but hadn't come even close to meeting the needs of the army. 85 mm AA guns were also used in the antitank role in 1941, even though they weren't designed for it. Production of an 85 mm field gun that could function as an antitank gun was supposed to begin, but never did since 76 mm was more than enough to deal with current threats. Production of the 57 mm ZiS-2 and ZiS-4 guns also stopped for that reason. The 85 mm guns that ended up in the T-34-85 had the same ballistics as the AA gun, but were a lot more compact. There was also a 76 mm AA gun, and the ZiS-5 was an attempt to get it into a tank. Eventually the conclusion was the same: the extra power isn't worth the added complexity, so the barrel was replaced with the one from the F-34, even though it was capable of using a much more powerful round. The S-54 gun with 76 mm AA gun ballistics was briefly tried on the T-34, but since the T-34-85 was around the corner, it never entered mass production.
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Jul 6, 2016 16:12
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Rockopolis posted:007 drink gin erryday 007 drank vodka martinis.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:08
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HEY GAL have any of your guys been to Eastern Europe? I'm reading a series of articles about the cossack uprisings and it says that Lithuania hired some ex-30YW mercenaries to supplement their very humble army. Also I found a report on glorious Aryan SS ubermenschen who managed to sustain 50-70% losses on the march because they're morons who can't drive.
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Jul 14, 2016 15:24
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This is a Polish cossack uprising in modern day Ukraine, so I don't think that was it.
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Jul 14, 2016 15:35
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HEY GAL posted:in their (grudging) defense, wide familiarity with cars is not a big thing in the lives of lots of people back then! Yeah, the regiment had three weeks of rest, and no one bothered to train the new drivers during this time, oops.
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Jul 14, 2016 19:45
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spectralent posted:Probably-dumb-question: Modern armour has hilariously high RHA equivalent protection against kinetic penetrators, like several meters worth. Sure if you slap a modern tank with 152 mm of HE it will sweep the outside clean, but I highly doubt you'd get more than a mobility kill out of it.
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Jul 17, 2016 03:45
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Oh yeah, there's a difference between a hit to the front plate and a hit to the engine deck. It isn't possible to armour a tank to withstand 152 mm HE landing on it from the heavens, even for modern armour. Interestingly enough, you don't even need to score a direct hit on a tank to disable it. There was a neat article about it: Who says dumb artillery rounds can't kill armour?quote:Test Results. The first test was conducted in 1988. Researchers However, you absolutely need big guns for this. The Soviets recorded poor effectiveness of Japanese indirect fire field guns against even T-26es, and the British tests of the Churchill showed that it was almost immune to 20-pdr HE.
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Jul 17, 2016 05:45
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Phanatic posted:Really? So if your tank's engine stalls or you run out of gas in an NBC environment you're proper hosed? Hope that your ventilation runs on batteries and that the battery lasts long enough to get your gas mask on!
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Jul 17, 2016 20:25
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They could barely manage armoured trains, there is absolutely no way an armoured car would have been feasible.
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Jul 18, 2016 00:18
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Oh look, someone tore apart that idiocy so that now I won't have to! https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/07/17/editorial-rebutting-a-civil-war-tank-article/
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Jul 18, 2016 02:15
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feedmegin posted:Imprisoning people is expensive en masse, and you can't deport people who are citizens of your own country, without the agreement of whatever country you're sending them to anyway The trick is to have a large country and deport them to the parts of it that nobody wants. goodness posted:New to the thread and military history, reading through the beginning I see some posters do regular updates about wars or time periods. Are there any exceptional ones that are recommended to read? Shameless self promotion: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca
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Jul 29, 2016 16:40
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spectralent posted:I think the average person's awareness of the eastern front goes "Barbarossa, Staleningrad*, Kursk, Berlin"; they were probably just playing to that. Yeah basically the only game series that handles the Eastern Front well is Men of War, and it's a difficult one to love.
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Jul 31, 2016 05:35
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:22 |
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The armour of the T-26 and BT was indeed too thin for modern war, which was discovered during the Spanish Civil War and only highlighted by further interbellum conflicts. That's what caused the T-34 and KV to be developed. But yes, the 45 mm gun was reaching the end of its dominance in 1941 with German tanks that had 50 mm of front armour that just started being produced, but the vast majority of German tanks still had 30 mm armour or less, and even the tanks with 50-60 mm of armour had it bolted on (25+25 or 30+30), with the extra armour falling off after one or two shots. It was still very much an effective weapon in 1941 and 1942.
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Jul 31, 2016 21:39
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