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A potato masher is easier to throw if you didn't grow up playing baseball, so the Americans favoured more baseball-shaped grenades.
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Sep 22, 2015 05:43
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago So what's the answer that would be a long time coming for the British? I'm curious now about that German Intelligence, if it takes months to figure out then I'll probably forget the significance.
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Sep 22, 2015 20:17
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HEY GAL posted:i thought stalin stayed sober while everyone else at the usual russian-style boozeups was getting drunk, which is kind of terrifying if you think about it I thought he became blackout drunk after a couple significant events, like June 22, 1941 and August 6, 1945.
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Oct 1, 2015 16:43
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Japan's horrible damage control has come up before, but why were they so bad at it?
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Oct 9, 2015 22:30
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HEY GAL posted:are regimental guns still a thing in the 19th c I have a 16-pound shotput, it's a bit larger than a softball, and it's much heavier than people expect. People are just not used to the density of a solid steel sphere.
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Oct 15, 2015 20:06
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Hazzard posted:I think so. AFAIK British artillery is fairly poorly organised for most of the early 19th century. Again, density. A piece of steel smaller than my fist, at high speeds, could blow through multiple people.
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Oct 15, 2015 20:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:well, yes, obviously many of us have. poo poo two months ago I did six ACW battlefields in two days. Los of cannon were seen. Plus, I bet museums prefer showing off big cannons over small ones. At Louisbourg all the cannons they have are 24-pounders.
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Oct 15, 2015 23:42
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What year is this from? I'm guessing 1916, because that sketch does resemble armour that a few troops wore at the time. I wonder if the cartoonist knew about tanks at the time he drew it.
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Oct 18, 2015 20:06
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Wasn't there a fight shortly after the surrender of Japan where an American ship fired on a renegade Japanese vessel with a bazooka, then boarded it? I remember this but I can't find an account through Google.
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Oct 25, 2015 01:11
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They could last decades just using different names for the puma. Panzer, Berglöwe, Kuguar, Rottiger, Hirschetiger, Silberlöwe, Katzeberg, Maler...
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Oct 26, 2015 00:42
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Xiahou Dun posted:Panzer is "shell", like on a turtle. Huh. All this time I assumed "panzer" had come to mean "armour" because the Germans named an early tank after the panther.
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Oct 26, 2015 01:40
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FAUXTON posted:Bajazzle your Battleship, your foes won't know what the gently caress.  In a world where face-identifying drones dominate the battlefield, human dazzle camouflage is the only recourse. Attempts to counter this strategy lead to the tragic deaths of every mime, and David Bowie.
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Oct 29, 2015 17:59
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The deception/ruse tactics they used during the war... holy poo poo Are you going to make a post about this too, or no? I've heard a little about the reports of fake surrender, suicide bombing, and the infamous photograph.  severed head  quote:“We came to a big opening on the beach,” Morse says, “and there was a tank with a skull on it, right near the turret. The sergeant leading the patrol looks at it and says, ‘Guys, that skull has been put there for a reason, and the Japanese have probably got mortar shells aimed right at this spot.’ A disgusting scene like that will always draw people in, and the idea, of course, was that any American troops who came along would obviously want to stop and take a look.
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Nov 6, 2015 07:27
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HEY GAL posted:about an inch and a half or smaller, they've got to be thin otherwise they're too heavy to do anything with How heavy is the head? Does the wood bend, and is the pike made with a spine so it can be oriented to reduce bending?
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Nov 21, 2015 02:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:The main problem I have is that a movie like this might exacerbate the "human wave" myth of the Red Army and there's gotta be a better compromise. I don't see how it would exacerbate that myth. Showing actual tactics from the Soviets would be much better than a movie like Enemy At The Gates, where the only depiction of a battle is hundreds of Red Army soldiers frontally attacking a machine gun with no tanks or artillery supporting them.
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Nov 21, 2015 15:36
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EvanSchenck posted:It happens that I wrote my undergrad thesis about the German Revolutions of 1848 Brilliant post, thank you. What events caused the revolutions to begin in that particular year?
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Nov 28, 2015 04:38
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I was looking at some old material from my grade 3 Canadian History curriculum and noticed it said that white settlers overhunted buffalo because they "didn't understand how important it was to the First Nations' way of life". Looking back, it seems pretty hosed up to teach a bunch of 8-year-olds about the history of Native American peoples without explaining, in an age-appropriate way, that much of their decline was due to genocide.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:42
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FAUXTON posted:E: I wonder if Dr. Seuss ever got into that kind of thing. I'm aware of the general fact that he did some stuff for the war effort at the time but I don't know whether he was asked to make something involving a dolorous lorax warning some green helmet that unless someone like him cares an awful lot about barrel snakes, the war won't be won, it won't. Dr. Seuss wrote dozens of training cartoons for the army, and yes, they rhyme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJV5wwK12NI The above, Spies, is my favourite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1M0G12Fc4U This one, Going Home, was never released because it depicted (at 1:32) a "secret weapon" that coincidentally seemed similar to the atomic bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKYtiQ5WMSY Gas was written by P.D. Eastman and it's not entertaining. I'm just posting it for the Bugs Bunny cameo at 0:54.
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Dec 1, 2015 01:56
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Merry Christmas, military history thread, I received Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:01
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My maternal grandfather lied about his age to enlist after Pearl Harbor, and briefly served in the US Navy. When they found out he was 15, he was sent to work in a shipyard and spent the rest of the war there. He didn't tell stories because I think he felt guilty that he didn't fight on the ship. My stepdad's father was a bomber pilot who firebombed Hamburg. For the rest of his life he couldn't eat mutton because the smell reminded him of burning human flesh.
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Jan 3, 2016 20:15
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FAUXTON posted:The pickelhaube, because it makes me think someone in the Kaiser's military bureau decided infantry should charge like bulls Has anyone ever been stabbed with a pickelhaube?
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Jan 18, 2016 05:37
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chitoryu12 posted:He's got nothing on US Civil War General William "Bull" Nelson. Supposedly his last words were "Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized. I have been basely murdered." Did people really talk like that in the 19th century, even when they'd been shot, or was it typical for witnesses to one's last words to edit them into something more flowery?
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Feb 11, 2016 03:36
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FAUXTON posted:To follow up on this, would there be more force behind the arrowhead at the end of a high-angle ballistic arc versus low-angle fire? Or were aerodynamics and bows advanced to the point where they were firing the arrows above terminal velocity (and thus faster than they could ever get via gravity)? That's just physics - it's impossible to shoot something upwards so that it's moving faster when it comes back down (unless you shoot downhill).
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Feb 17, 2016 17:17
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PittTheElder posted:Well, she was already in the convent... Presumably they'd notice if there were two missing nuns, but just one charred dead body.
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Mar 11, 2016 06:07
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HEY GAL posted:(although the title is misleading, Blackwater was tiny at its height, for really big news you want to look at Securitas, the company with three red dots as its logo. Those dudes are the largest single employer in the world) You mean largest security firm, right? The largest single employers in the world are the US Department of Defense and the People's Liberation Army.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:16
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nothing to seehere posted:Also the NHS According to the list I read, they're smaller than Wal-Mart and McDonald's.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:28
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oohhboy posted:How important is it to take a country's Capital? Would have France fallen if they lost or had fighting in Paris for even a day in World War 1. What impact did it have in World War 2? Is taking a Capital today meaningful or was it a lot more important in the past where you might no have been able to move your government since everything might have been tied more strongly to it? There's no consensus on this, but there's an understanding that it depends on the war. Clausewitz (one of the most influential military historians ever) wrote that a military has a "centre of gravity" that is the source of its power. Sometimes this is the capital or government. In World War II, these were Hitler and Hirohito. In an insurgency, it's the support of the people. This is harder for a superpower to capture than a tangible objective would be. Part of why the Iraq War went so badly was that the US thought capturing Baghdad and routing Saddam Hussein would be enough to win the war, when it turned out that many Iraqis would become insurgents against the American occupation. A Great Power like France needs to protect its capital because the seat of government is such a powerful symbol that losing it greatly impairs the government's authority to keep fighting the war. Germany's objective in World War I was to increase its power relative to France, Britain, and Russia. If they had captured Paris, that's a point where the French would seriously consider negotiated surrender. In World War II, France surrendered because of the prospect of Paris becoming the site of heavy fighting. But the French Resistance continued to fight because they still had the will. Italy ousted Mussolini and started negotiating to join the Allies, and signed the deal as 500 planes were on their way to bomb Rome. The capture of Berlin directly led to Hitler's death and the Nazi surrender. Hirohito surrendered because of multiple factors, including intelligence reports that the Allies intended to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo soon. The capitals mattered in World War II because if they weren't the centre of gravity, they at least hosted it. Wars of annexation are rarer now, and so are existential wars between nation-states. Since 1945 there have been more wars fought over ideology, or coercing a state to do certain things. These wars usually involve a powerful state intervening in a weaker one, and that often leads to asymmetrical warfare, which means insurgency and counter-insurgency, and capitals are less meaningful then. If a war broke out between two superpowers, destroying the capitals would be important because they are command centres for nuclear weapons, and the United States and Russia each have hardened backup facilities designed to withstand direct hits from nuclear weapons. In the event of nuclear war, hitting the capital and hitting those facilities would each be important for destroying the ability to coordinate, because destroying the enemy's ability to counter-attack is the only way to have a minute chance of winning a nuclear war.
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Apr 1, 2016 10:00
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The character's real name turns out to be Franek Dolas. I just found out that the actor playing him died two weeks ago.
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Apr 2, 2016 08:13
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The ballistics gel seems to explode when it recompresses, is that because of adiabatic heating? And then it expels some gas out of the entry hole, is that hot powderized ballistics gel?
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Apr 14, 2016 18:49
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Deteriorata posted:Beats me. It's not something I spend a lot of time keeping current on, it's just something I read a while back. The Bermuda Triangle is one of the most trafficked parts of the ocean. Ships sink and planes crash at an average rate there, it's just that there are so many of them that it results in a lot of losses. Trin Tragula posted:
Should that be June?
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Jun 9, 2016 00:45
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HEY GAL posted:yes except for the part where some of them agree with us already and are therefore not backwards There's a fun bit where a character talks about how the Americans are just another city-state republic but for some reason they think their form of government is the best and that no one's ever tried it before.
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Jun 15, 2016 16:06
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spectralent posted:I have no idea! When you understand the principle of propellant + fuel, you can make rocket fuel of varying quality from thousands of compounds. Gunpowder was invented without understanding why it works, it was basically luck, systematic invention and testing of explosives wouldn't be developed until the 19th century.
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Jun 15, 2016 19:45
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Nebakenezzer posted:
In that situation I'd just piss out the window.
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Jun 18, 2016 19:08
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Ainsley McTree posted:Same but unironically (or, also unironically, depending on how ironic you were being) History has preserved George Washington's bar tab from a party a few days before framing the Constitution. quote:55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch. I calculated the amount of alcohol in all that, and it's almost precisely equal to one 750mL bottle of Jack Daniel's per person.
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Jun 24, 2016 19:04
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HEY GAL, what words were used to describe the men thought to be invincible to normal weapons? I've seen you mention "Frozen" and "Hard", was there much other vocabulary around this concept?
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Jul 3, 2016 08:41
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HEY GAL posted:just those, iirc. why? Because that poo poo's dope. I'm thinking about putting together an early modern modpack for Skyrim, and if I mod in some bulletproof generals it could make for some interesting assassination missions.
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Jul 3, 2016 17:36
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