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Grand Prize Winner posted:I read in unreliable sources that those things could break the operator's shoulder if they weren't held just right by a very strong man. If I'm remembering my physics right (and that's a big if  ), that gun would generate about ~10.000 Newtons of force. That's a fair bit more than a very strong kick delivered by a human, applied to the user over a very short time period, so I could definitely see it dislocating or even breaking a shoulder under certain conditions.Similarly, I've also heard stories about the muzzle-loaded rifle grenades (specifically, the 22mm ones that were apparently used by pretty much every NATO force) doing the same thing, and I guess they'd be in about the same neighbourhood as that Mauser recoil-wise. VVVVV You can get there through distance travelled (i.e. barrel length) though, which I seem to remember would work out to acceleration = (difference in velocity)^2/(2*distance). That's assuming a constant acceleration however, so I'm not sure how close that is. VVVVV Perestroika fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Dec 2, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 22:45
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a travelling HEGEL posted:I love the word "fein" in this context though, and I would want to preserve something of that flavor in the translation. "Delicately ordered," "finely ordered." That's the same "fine" of phrases like "a fine distinction." Speaking of those phrasings, I love the use of "sehr zierlich und bequemlich" up there as well. For the time, "graceful and comfortable" is the correct translation, but in current german it's more like "daintily and lazily"
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Dec 7, 2013 17:58
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InspectorBloor posted:You can imply that this has something to do with being lazy, but the word means comfortable in its foremost use. I'm used to it in the way of e.g. "Er könnte jetzt rausgehen, aber er ist sich dazu zu bequemlich.". Appparently it seems to be a local thing from where I grew up, though (lower saxony).
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Dec 7, 2013 18:52
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Taerkar posted:Is that true on an individual scale or more of a unit scale? Polearms and spears (and especially pikes for obvious reasons) strike me as being something that are a bit of a liability when you're mano-a-mano, but rapidly become superior the more of you there are with them. I suppose it'd depend on the degree of armour involved. Especially if you're looking at the later middle ages, usually people would be wearing rather comprehensive as well as effective metal armor, against most swords would struggle to even make a dent. While there were techniques developed for swordfightin in full armour, they were usually closer to stopgap measures to give them at least some utility rather than the ideal approach. Meanwhile, especially somewhat shorter polearms like for example a poleaxe were not actually that much less nimble than a longsword, and they also offered enough leverage and mass to be much more effective against an armored foe. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 20:37
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Big Willy Style posted:Can we do a good war movie roll call please? I'd put Das Boot up there as one of the best as well. Largely apolitical and pretty drat  .
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Dec 13, 2014 22:35
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Panzeh posted:The interesting thing is that while bomber gunners were not very effective against skilled pilots, as the pool of German pilots declined in quality they sought more and more stand-off solutions so they didn't have to put poorly trained pilots against bomber boxes. They didn't stop fighter attacks, but they inflicted a continuous attrition that was one of the big effects of the bombing offensive, really. British bombers had a huge disadvantage in defensive armament compared to American bombers, which was one of the things contributing to the day/night split. Another important thing about gunners is that they significantly reduce the offensive options of the attacking fighters. Usually, sitting directly behind the plane you're trying to shoot is a fairly desirable position, because then it's barely moving relative to you which makes aiming relatively easy. But if that plane has a gunner in the back it's suddenly a very dangerous place to be in, especially since their fire can hit your engine and cockpit head-on and they have just as easy a time shooting at you as you have at them. So you attack from a less favourable position that doesn't have you flying straight at a gun, until they put another gunner there as well. And so on and on, until eventually the germans were forced to stick to attacks at very oblique angles and high speed, which severely reduced their accuracy.
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Jan 16, 2015 13:33
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FAUXTON posted:It doesn't help that out of nowhere in like April 1945 comes an intact, high-morale, well-fed-and-supplied SS unit with their own little armored car for fire support. You might as well say a flight of Mustangs and Corsairs showed up to fight the Japanese attackers back out of Pearl Harbor after the fleet had gotten sunk in entirety. To be fair, the movie does make the point that they're not actually too well supplied. At one point it turns out that they only had like one single crate of Panzerfausts to begin with, which is why the protagonists even made it for as long as they did. It could have been a rear-line police unit that was redeployed to the front as a last ditch attempt, explaining their lack of supplies and evidently completely poo poo training and tactics despite their high morale.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:24
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Honestly, I think the bad is primarily this: I'd imagine actually firing two large-calibre machine guns in a tiny enclosed space right next to your head would be distinctly unpleasant as well. Even with hearing protection I could see that giving you one hell of a headache.
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Feb 23, 2015 19:22
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Klaus88 posted:I'd love to see you tear down Ringo's work but I can't find the thread. Can you throw me a link? I think by now it requires archives, here's the link: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3385144. It takes a very special kind of author to take the idea of "the protagonist should have flaws to make them believable and relatable" and decide that the best way to do that is by making him an unrepentant serial rapist.
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Apr 26, 2015 23:08
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PittTheElder posted:One inch to a side would be absurdly thick though. I thought most broadswords were supposed to weigh in around the 4-9lbs. Yeah, to my knowledge most blades would be decidedly thinner. From what I've gathered, with an "average" (I'm aware that this is an incredibly broad term, expect to see plenty of variance in either direction on individual examples) arming sword, you'd have a blade length of about ~75cm, a width of about ~5 cm, and a thickness of about ~0.7cm (at the widest/thickest points each for width and thickness). That gives you a volume of ~260 cm³, which works out to almost exactly 2 kg = 4.4 lbs in weight, going off of the density of carbon steel. Note that this only describes a perfectly rectangular slab of metal, whereas in reality of course you'd have the blade tapering in thickness from the spine towards the edge/s and from the hilt towards the point, and depending on the blade type you might also see the width significantly tapering from hilt to point. There might also be a fuller ground into it which further reduces the actual amount of metal present. Tang, grip, and handguard would come in at maybe a hundred grams or three all told, so I'd feel pretty confident to say that many or even most swords would fall into a range of around 2 kg or less. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 13:19 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 13:07
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V. Illych L. posted:again, though, the popular depiction of vikings as fond of axes is pretty accurate - axes require less training, less dexterity and more brute force, and they are also a better match against the unarmoured men with large wooden shields which made up most of the viking opposition. spears were also popular, but in the sagas, at least, spears are typically javelins or home-defence weapons rather than something you actually go out to war with This bit is something I've seen repeated fairly often (also commonly in relation to clubs or maces), but it never really made all that much sense to me. Sure, a sword offers you a whole lot of advanced options including thrusting, draw-cutting, binding, etc. that may require a fair bit of training to use effectively, but there's nothing that forces you to make use of those if you don't know how. If all you want to (or can) do is just kinda whack people with it, a sword wouldn't be any more difficult to use for that purpose than an axe. If anything I'd imagine it would be slightly easier with a sword, as it would have a better balance and easier control over the edge alignment.
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May 22, 2015 16:30
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Koesj posted:Isn't the trajectory you're going to get from firing an unpowered projectile upward always going to come back into the earth's atmosphere, unless it actually exits our SOI and then you're on a solar orbit anyway? That'd be the 'gun alone' part right there. Presumably you wouldn't be shooting straight up, but rather at a sideways angle that would give it enough horizontal velocity to achieve most of a proper orbit. Put some stubby wings on it and it'd be basically an unpowered spaceplane. Still, it'd be supremely difficult to build a useful spacecraft rugged enough to survive the absolutely ridiculous acceleration. To reach low earth orbit with a traditional spacecraft, you need to achieve a total change in velocity of about 10 km/s. That spacecraft has the luxury of spreading out its acceleration throughout the whole ascent and perform much of it once its at an altitude where the atmospheric drag will be severely reduced. A projectile from a gun needs to have that entire acceleration (and then some to account for the severely increased air resistance) happen while it's still traveling along the gun's barrel, and even if that's several hundred meters long that still results in forces that would put immense stress on the internals of the craft and would turn humans into mush. All things considered, we'd probably have better luck getting stuff into space by shooting lasers at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-powered_propulsion 
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Jun 10, 2015 17:11
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Thanqol posted:What are some armies that used clubs in warfare? How do they do against armour? I have a pop culture image of Aztecs using clubs but I have no idea how accurate that is. In addition to the examples already mentioned there's also the goedendag, which was fairly popular in the 14th century among flemish soldiers. Apparently it was used as something like a cross between a club and a short spear, and was hefty enough to be a danger even to heavily armored knights. It's a rather simple design, but apparently it was pretty effective for its time. 
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Sep 12, 2015 21:37
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So, this question is probably mostly going to be up Hegel's alley, but of course all input is welcome. Basically, I'm wondering how gunpowder was handled in the later 16th and early 17th centuries. How relatively easy or difficult was it to manufacture in sufficient quantities? Would the soldiers of a given regiment be mostly making it on their own from the raw ingredients (like they did with bullets, I think?), or would they just buy the finished product directly? Was every soldier or sub-unit that needed it responsible for carrying (or even procuring?) their own supply, or was there a centralised powder store for the whole regiment? Personally I can't help but picture it as a rickety horsecart piled high with leaking powder kegs just waiting to go up in a giant conflagration, because that seems like exactly the kind of thing Hegel's people would do. But of course I have no idea how close to or far from the truth that might be
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Oct 13, 2015 12:45
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Ensign Expendable posted:If you don't spend your weekends digging in the forest where a bunch of nazis got blown up, why even bother living in Eastern Europe? An older acquaintance of mine has a story like that. When he was still a small kid in postwar Germany, his mother found him playing with some small marbles, each of them having a hole bored through the middle. She asks him if he could get her some more of those, because she wanted to fancy up the curtains with them. He says sure enough, and gets her a whole handful of them. Later on his grandfather finds out he'd gathered those, and promptly gives him a thorough spanking, telling him to stay well away from wherever he'd gotten them from. The reason for that? He'd gotten all those marbles from these:  He'd happened upon some grenades in an old weapons stash and painstakingly managed to dismantle the knots on the cord holding them, without ever pulling it strongly enough to arm them. Or perhaps the grenades just didn't have primers put in. Either way, that could have gone pretty bad pretty quickly.
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Oct 26, 2015 20:12
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Antti posted:I only understand a bit of written German but is it really using the sliced sausage to illustrate the ideal penetration angle? That's brilliant. It's surprisingly hilarious, too. On page 69 where it describes determining range it's got a few cross references to other chapters like: "The commander measures or estimates his distance - cf. 'Measuring'" "The loader measures or estimates his distance - cf. 'Estimating'" and then "The commander calculates the mean of the two results - cf. first grade of elementary school." 
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Nov 30, 2015 12:46
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Well, since we're all sharing grandfather stories: My paternal grandfather was in the Wehrmacht almost start to finish. Naturally he wasn't all that eager to share, but every now and then he'd talk about certain bits and pieces. He participated in some fighting in eastern europe at first, where he was wounded by a shot to the gut. The wound was very severe (its aftereffects troubled him for the rest of his life), and according to him he only survived because a comrade pulled him out of the fight. It took almost a year until he was fit to return to duty, at which point he was posted to occupied Paris. He fell in love with a local woman there and often described the ~year he spent there as one of the happiest of his life (much to the annoyance of my grandmother, who he met after the war ). Shortly before the allied advance reached Paris he was redeployed to the eastern front again, as part of a fresh formation (I wanna say a regiment?) of more than a thousand soldiers. A few months later he'd basically only had his squad left, they'd lost contact with everybody else.As he tells it, spending Christmas 1944 with only them was his personal turning point where he realised that all was lost. It was basically the idea that it's goddamn Christmas, and he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with thousands of russian soldiers coming towards him and no way to ever stop them. They deserted then, basically just heading back home, and managed to keep ahead of the soviet advance until he reached his home town and the war ended. After the war, he and my grandmother traveled a lot, visiting some of the places he'd been to during the war, including Paris. By comparison, my maternal grandfather's story is pretty short. Ge was drafted towards he end of the war and deserted on his way to the front before getting into combat. Apparently his flight was actually fairly eventful, but unfortunately he never really got around to writing his memoirs like he'd planned to do.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:27
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Ensign Expendable posted:Link these idiots to Generalplan Ost and see how they weasel out of that one. Somehow I can already foresee their comeback: 
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Jan 7, 2016 21:24
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SeanBeansShako posted:The Maus is a ugly piece of poo poo. Seriously. The Panther and Tiger at least manage to looks somewhat imposing and tank-y. The Maus on the other hand is really just a steel box with a smaller box on top of it. It's the kind of thing a grade-schooler scribbles when trying to draw a tank, except without any rad lasers or rockets.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:41
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HEY GAL posted:do you know german? http://www.30jaehrigerkrieg.de/ quote:Schmer: The bodyfat of delinquents [poor sinner's fat] was used by the hangman for medical purposes. Your guys were a very practical people, it seems. 
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Jan 23, 2016 23:22
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bewbies posted:In mildly interesting future of artillery news I had a tech presentation today about a "next gen howitzer" that fires a guided slug or HE round at between 1.5 and 2 km/s out of a smoothbore 60 caliber 155mm tube. As designed it is supposed to be capable of engaging most atmospheric air threats along with a surface2surface range of between 250 and 400km. Admittedly I don't know all that much about ballistics, but isn't 400km range kind of extremely on the optimistic side? Taking the basic trajectory formula, 2 km/s velocity does you some 400km maximum distance, but that's completely ignoring air resistance. And since drag increases quadratically with with velocity that would be pretty signficiant, even with an extremely aerodynamic shape.
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Feb 10, 2016 10:33
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HEY GAL posted:It's not just the state or symbols of the state, they're apparently really touchy about insults in general and willing to go to court over the least little things. And have been ever since Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and friends or probably even earlier. I just didn't know that the Chancellor was also allowed to bring suit on a foreign head of state's behalf (they have to file for permission first). There are two different paragraphs as play here. The big one that most people are talking about is §103 StGB. This one applies to insulting foreign heads of states, a member of a foreign government who is currently in Germany, or a foreign diplomat. This is only prosecuted if the federal government actually gives the go-ahead like Merkel just did. The second one is §185 StGB, which deals with "regular" insults, and carries a lighter maximum sentence. In this case it should just work like a regular suit, with no particular need for the federal government to get involved. Fun fact, there's also a paragraph for mutual insults: If both parties insulted each other in the same time and place, the judge might just decide that things are even and that no punishment will be necessary.
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Apr 20, 2016 13:10
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Nebakenezzer posted:
I'm pretty sure that's to assist in taking off, and I suppose also in landing. The wings have a relatively high angle of incidence*, offering improved lift especially at low speeds. In return, the fuselage of the plane will have to be pointed relatively further downward to maintain level flight at speed. *For reference: 
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Jul 31, 2016 18:14
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