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Thanks for the thread, I'm looking forward to hopefully bringing in new posters!
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Nov 13, 2013 19:44
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my dad posted:So, who's going to organize the bets for the next big "HEGEL vs Rodrigo Diaz" fight? Molded around your chest 
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Nov 13, 2013 19:55
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VanSandman posted:Whoa, that's really interesting. I'd... actually like to see those papers. I'd also be interested in that. Cold War brinkmanship is fascinating, and a little uplifting because it never turned into a nuclear war.
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Nov 14, 2013 06:06
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Mans posted:Can't imagine what a memory from a French soldier during the Napoleonic wars would be like. I have a book for you. This book got me really interested in history and I read War and Peace shortly afterwards. It's the memoirs of a French sergeant during the invasion of Russia. Link.
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Nov 14, 2013 08:20
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My favourite analogy from the last thread (I think Hegel posted it) was that a 17th century army was like a Gathering of the Juggalos, except stupider and more well-armed. Simply having it in enemy territory was sure to do a lot of damage.SeanBeansShako posted:For some reason I am now imagining somebody mounting a massive bayonet under the barrel of a 18th century artillery piece. 101. I am not allowed to mount a bayonet on a crew-served weapon.
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Nov 14, 2013 20:39
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Fangz posted:Honestly I'm starting to wonder if we could do with a Soviet Cultural Highlights thread. I love this idea, but I'm not sure I have enough knowledge to start the thread. What I've seen of Soviet film, animation, and music has been very impressive.
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Nov 15, 2013 01:47
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Is it true that Vikings occasionally used massed spearmen against archers, with a thick forest of spears to help deflect arrows?
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Nov 15, 2013 06:05
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Fangz posted:Honestly I'm starting to wonder if we could do with a Soviet Cultural Highlights thread. I've created this thread now, in PYF: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3585505 People who enjoy songchat and other recommendations should go check it out.
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Nov 15, 2013 07:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What is the most important lesson we learned from the World Wars? I don't think the World Wars taught as much as you think. The Bomb is the reason World War II was the last direct fighting between superpowers, not any particular lesson. I'd say a lesson that should have been learned is "don't base your doctrine on the outcome of the last war", but that's one that few nations ever follow.
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Nov 15, 2013 09:31
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a travelling HEGEL posted:I'll be outside looking at the artillery park before I'm inside with the swords. (I met a half-cannon outside a restaurant near the Festung Dresden museum. His name was Julius. Was any old artillery used (in desperation) in World War II? The military museum in Paris has an old cannon with Russian names and a date from 1945 carved into it.
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Nov 17, 2013 18:21
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) So the answer is...maybe not? Sorry.
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veekie posted:As I understand it, surviving field weapons in general are rare as hell, they get broken, stolen, lost, recycled and a whole range of nasty things happen to a weapon meant to be used, leaving us with tons of ceremonial or ornamental weapons but hardly any weapons that actually got used. That's because someone didn't feel compelled to preserve a sword that actually got used, damaged, resharpened, and so on. I love the look of equipment that's really been used, like a sword with sackcloth tied around the base of the blade or a gun with hasty patches around a big crack in the stock.
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Nov 17, 2013 21:44
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Was the Battle of Leyte Gulf the one where an American ship closed so close to a larger Japanese ship that it couldn't be fired upon, but also didn't have the firepower to sink the Japanese ship? I remember reading something about a smaller vessel shredding the superstructure of a large Japanese ship from very close range, not certain which battle it was.
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Nov 18, 2013 22:13
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Is The Mitrokhin Archive, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, a reliable book? I'm 100 pages into it and it has parts that are unbelievably farcical, like the English plot to publicly de-pants and humiliate Lenin.
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Nov 23, 2013 22:08
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Much of the material is supposedly accurate although there's plenty of reputable scholars who have their doubts such as Amy Knight, although most of their doubts are based on the supposed ironclad security within Soviet intelligence. So really it depends on how much you believe in the KGB etc being hypervigilant in document security measures. Considering things like Bradley Manning walking out with thousands of secret documents on a loving fake burned Lady Gaga CD, I have my doubts the Soviets didn't have equally boneheaded lapses in security. Yeah, I don't doubt that security forces could make dumb mistakes at the best of times. Mitrokhin started smuggling documents by memorizing them and rewriting them in secret, then after he eventually became accustomed to the search procedures he'd just put the papers in his pants and take them home. There seems to be a recurring theme of security forces overestimating the competence of other forces, like when the British were leaking so much to the Italians that the Soviets became convinced it was a case of deliberate collusion.
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Nov 23, 2013 23:39
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Panzeh posted:While there were better ways to conduct infantry assaults in World War I What would have been the best way to conduct infantry assaults?
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Nov 27, 2013 00:27
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Squalid posted:Except that isn't what happened. Bows are not obvious at all, and it is entirely possible they were only invented once on earth, subsequently spreading everywhere else through diffusion. Arrow points are unknown in the Americas until 2000 years ago, and probably spread to the continent over the Bering strait from Eurasia. Places like Australia which were very isolated from most of the human population just never figured it out. Any bored gradeschooler with a rubber band can rig up a simple bow and arrow using their fingers and a pencil. I think just about any place with stretchy animal tendons available could come up with the bow and arrow, it's possible that Austraiian aborigines didn't have the right materials for good bows so they used the boomerang and woomera instead.
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Nov 27, 2013 19:38
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a travelling HEGEL posted:As far as I'm concerned, it's been the future since 1494. Any reason for that year in particular? The Treaty of Tordesillas?
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Nov 29, 2013 18:32
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a travelling HEGEL posted:The Italian Wars begin. Gunpowder artillery, mother fuckers Would you like to go into detail about the artillery innovations in the Italian Wars? I was under the impression that early cannons just kinda steadily improved from the 12th-century Chinese fire lances until the development of breach-loading guns, but there must have been some paradigm shifts along the way.
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Nov 29, 2013 21:24
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Grand Prize Winner posted:One thing that confuses me about the whole standing army thing is I've been to a couple bases and there are still a lot of chairs. Technically they only need to stand while declaring attacks. 
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Dec 1, 2013 08:46
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Edit: If you want to watch Italy still not be a nation, you need to read R.J.B. Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy, in which a bunch of nerds, roughnecks, and thugs try to hammer Fascism on top of the heterogeneous hate-pile that is Italy and it doesn't work. Most common punishment under Fascism: internal exile, where you send a dude you don't like to a part of Italy that he doesn't come from, i.e., a foreign country. My Christmas list this year is just a giant pile of books mentioned in this thread. e: "heterogeneous hate-pile" was the big seller, yes Chamale fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 19:26
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Flesnolk posted:Why dirt? I've heard sandbags are good for fortifying a position but it's always seemed to me that if I fired a rifle at say, a boxing heavy bag, it'd just go through. And on a similar note, how is modern armour not pointless? It seems like anything beefier than a handgun round turns it into a false sense of security. Dirt is cheaper than steel. Isaac Newton figured out a simple way to approximate how deeply a bullet will penetrate a target - find the ratio of the bullet's weight to the target, and multiply that by the bullet's length. The speed of the bullet doesn't matter. Lead is 7 times denser than dry sand, so 21 centimetres of sand will stop a 7.62 NATO round (3 centimetres long). You can stop that bullet with only 4.5 centimetres of steel, but surrounding your base with a 4.5 centimetre thick steel wall is much more expensive than surrounding it with sandbags. Note that Newton's approximation doesn't work with fabric, which explains kevlar's unusual defensive properties. Lastly, remember that armour can stop a bullet but it won't stop the energy - being shot in a bulletproof vest is like being hit with a blunt weapon. 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? Cotton candy can stop a bullet provided there's enough of it. 14 centimetres of concrete will stop a 7.62 bullet. Chamale fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 22:19
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Fangz posted:http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb57.htm The Americans and Soviets were antagonistic at Potsdam, but "friendly" relations were maintained for a while longer. It was a steady decay from the Potsdam Conference to the Berlin Blockade.
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Dec 5, 2013 00:35
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Phanatic posted: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. Who wins in a fight, a single M1 or 16 Shermans? My money's on the M1 because it has better aim, maneuverability, and it would take a lot of hits or a lucky shot to incapacitate it.
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Dec 6, 2013 19:23
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Frostwerks posted:What the gently caress is going on in this poster? Is that the nimitz in the foreground with some even more super super-carrier in the background? I'm really trying to figure this out. What is the height of a ship from the waterline called? Or even from the keel for that matter? I found something that says it's 20 stories about the waterline. That thing in the background looks like it's at least a thousand feet tall conservatively. That's the Nimitz in the foreground and the same ship in the background. The 80's were difficult years for everybody.
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Dec 7, 2013 16:46
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This is probably a typo, but on the off-chance it's not, I'd love to hear more about the history of insults in warfare.
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Dec 8, 2013 03:24
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Maybe it's worthwhile if you have more tanks than trucks, but in the long run something like the Katyusha is much cheaper to make and use.
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Dec 8, 2013 05:46
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Slavvy posted:Why would you want to try to disguise your kilt? Embarrassment.
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Dec 10, 2013 21:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:Haha, yup, early artillery was sketchy as gently caress. I saw a painting of some battle (Kazan, maybe) where a bunch of guys are all recoiling in horror as the gunner approaches the fuse. His face is pretty expressive too. Some artillery now is still sketchy. Here's a propaganda video from the Syrian civil war with everyone running for cover whenever they launch a shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k7d3ZGIlu4 a travelling HEGEL posted:The future has arrived! And we are in no way prepared to deal with it! Really? I'd love to read any accounts you have where someone thinks new technology is a magical weapon.
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Dec 11, 2013 23:17
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SlothfulCobra posted:How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else? It was known to happen during the American Civil War, especially early on in the war.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:53
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steinrokkan posted:Few years ago there was a novelty piece of news according to which professional athlete oarsmen of today were unable to match performance of ancient trireme crews. There are methods of comparing baseball players across different eras, and it turns out that even Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig would only be about as good as an average modern major-league player. Simple athletic activities, like sprints and freestyle swims, have seen steadily improving times since the first modern Olympics. I find it hard to believe ancient athletes had better overall fitness than modern stars, although of course they were probably better trained at specialized activities of their eras.
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Dec 27, 2013 03:28
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Koramei posted:Better understanding of anatomy, along with a whole world of fighting traditions The key difference between sport and military training is that athletes fight in a way that doesn't kill or maim the opponent. I think an elite modern soldier would win a fight against an elite ancient soldier, and an MMA fighter would beat a pankration fighter, but either athlete would lose to a soldier who knows how to cripple or blind his opponent rather than subduing him. edit: Lamadrid is right, the rules make a huge difference. When there are no rules, the dirtiest fighter will win.
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Dec 27, 2013 05:59
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to build off of. I dunno about our figure skaters and rhythmic gymnasts and skiiers and synchronized swimmers, but for our boxers and wrestlers these days I don't think there's much of a contest. It is important to disabuse the notion that knights were plodding and useless, but modern professional athletes really are on a league of their own.
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a travelling HEGEL posted:It's also what all of them use to speak to people they don't know. A few weeks ago in a hostel some women came in speaking...something. It sounded almost Slavic, but it was German I think? Then one of them turned to me and, in accentless Standard German, said "Do you mind if I open a window?" I said fine, and they went back to...whatever it was they were doing. English is a bit like this, but only when touring foreign countries, since regional dialects cover large areas. If I ever meet another Albertan while abroad the speech becomes a lot faster and slangier, and I'm sure the effect is more pronounced for less Americanized dialects of English.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:30
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Frostwerks posted:Would somebody smart who knows what they're talking about do an effort post on bicycles in war, both in terms of bicycle infantry (who I gather functioned akin to dragoons), scouting use, couriers, and logistical mounts? I guess there could be a huge overlap with motorcycles. Comedy option Bicycles were important to logistics in the Vietnam War, with supply-laden bicycles being the main method of getting goods through the Ho Chi Minh Trail before they could cut a road wide enough for trucks. Even later in the war when the road situation became easier, a person pushing a bicycle was the best way for the NVA to move supplies cheaply and quietly. I don't know much about this subject, this article might interest you. Chamale fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 12:00
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KildarX posted:I saw earlier someone wanted an effort post about freshwater navy stuff. This has also peaked my curiosity as I really don't know much of this stuff. As far as I am aware what you have now is small attack boats right nothing like Iron Clads during the ACW which where heavily armored heavily gunned is this correct? Do countries even have a fresh water navy any more it seems you'd do better with close by airbases and attack helos? I can think of two notable exceptions. During the War of 1812, the Americans and Canadians (British North Americans) built ships on Lake Ontario and fought some indecisive engagements. Eventually the Canadians built a ship of the line and the Americans kept their ships in port. The war ended before the Americans managed to complete the New Orleans, their counter to the Saint Lawrence. During the Three Kingdoms war in China, all sides used river barges as a sort of portable archery platform. I don't know much about this period, but I remember reading about it in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Liang promised the impossible task of producing 100,000 arrows in three days. On the third night he floated a river barge covered in straw warriors past the enemy camp. He then brought it back to camp and let his side's archers pull the 100,000 arrows lodged in the straw men. Daysvala posted:If we assume that the glorified giant church bench that those soldiers are riding on is made of iron, and each of those soldiers, plus armements and gear, weighs, on average, about 200lbs each, wouldn't that make the overall apparatus weigh at least 2 or 2 and 1/2 tons? There are 4 horses. If the wheels are well-made it should be fairly easy to get going, but forget about turning that rig efficiently. I see it doesn't have axles, which should make things much better for turning but still not good. Chamale fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 19:36
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Daysvala posted:Right, the sheer amount of mass involved would create a huge amount of forward inertia and prevent efficient turning, but wouldn't pulling a couple of tons of iron, meat and gunpowder tire out even four horses long before a troop transport of that design could travel any useful amount of distance? Probably, but I recall from reading this thread that horses aren't actually good at travelling a useful amount of distance. They tire more quickly than humans, so an army on horseback can only go as far as an army on foot anyway. Slavvy posted:Would the St Lawrence have been in the same position as a WWI/WWII battleship, where the effort and expense of her construction made her an asset beyond value and therefore useless for any combat operation where she might be sunk? The Americans kept their ships in port after the St. Lawrence started sailing around Lake Ontario, so it seized control of the lake without fighting any battles. Maybe the Americans could have tried sailing against it, but that would have mostly likely ended in disaster for their sailors.
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Jan 28, 2014 21:09
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Hogge Wild posted:How much does it cost in World of Tanks? An assload.
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Jan 29, 2014 22:30
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Stalin was seriously paranoid about capitalists in England and even thought the war with Germany might be cover for a surprise attack by England. There was a case of rank incompetence by the British government when they let a known Italian spy's brother keep working in the embassy in the thirties, and the brother passed on more information to the spy. The KGB reported this up the ranks and Stalin took it as incontrovertible proof that the fascists and capitalists were working together. Even the day before the invasion, KGB intelligence officers were being sentenced to hard labour for reporting that a German invasion was imminent.
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Feb 1, 2014 05:21
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Ensign Expendable posted:It would be pretty hard for a KGB officer to get sentenced for a crime in 1941. Or, you know, exist.  NKGB.
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Feb 1, 2014 05:42
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I believe it was the NKGB but I could easily be wrong, I'll have to get my copy of The Mitrokhin Archive to check and post more details. P.S. I go by "he".
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Feb 1, 2014 06:50
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Libluini posted:NKGB? Now that's cute. Does that stand for Neo-KGB? I checked my book, the time period was a mess. Apparently the security and intelligence portion of the NKVD was briefly known as the NKGB in February-July 1941, then renamed the NKVD, then became the NKGB again before becoming the MGB and later KGB. The page I was thinking of described four NKVD officers overseeing NKGB operations who were ordered to be "ground into labour camp dust" for making "false" intelligence reports of an imminent Nazi invasion. The day before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Beria wrote this letter to Stalin: Lavrentiy Beria posted:I again insist on recalling and punishing our ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, who keeps bombarding me with "reports" on Hitler's alleged preparations to attack the USR. He has reported that this attack will start tomorrow... But I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich, have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion: Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.
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Feb 3, 2014 04:42
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