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FAUXTON posted:There's a video from Syria showing a tank get hit, followed by a good 3-5 seconds before you see the barrel lift up, start spewing smoke, and flames start rocketing out of the hatch. It was slow enough to know the poor bastards in that tank knew they were being cooked I think I've seen that. Was that the one that had the cameraman go up with the rebel with the RPG-29 to the roof where he fired? The most amazing part of that is right as the flames start shooting out from the hatch, you see one of the crewmen (minus most of his clothes) fall out. And he manages to get up and run! The dude's almost definitely disfigured for life, but he somehow made it out alive and adrenalized enough to book it out of there.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:19
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Slavvy posted:Wasn't there a BMP or something that had fuel tanks built into the troop doors? Yeah, though I hear that in actual combat situations they empty the tanks and fill them with sand or dirt instead.
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Jan 14, 2015 23:20
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So this is actually a question for a friend. I think it's something to do with a roleplay he's involved in. I told him I'd submit it to this thread to see if an answer could be found.quote:Were APHE / APC-HE / APCBC-HE shells at all effective against infantry with their small HE filler? I speak mostly of tank-sized rounds, WW2 and such.
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Jan 17, 2015 03:54
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Phobophilia posted:I think this is also a function of power disparities. Two white southerners will try not to escalate because either one of them can die, and so therefore remain polite. A 30 years war soldier can be as impolite as he likes, because he and his friends can escalate by burning down the village. I read the same article that study was linked from. The thing about extreme politeness is that there needs to be some kind of consequence to the politeness being violated, otherwise there's little incentive to maintain it against all other desires. The typical result is that you end up with people being harshly punished -- sometimes through violence -- for any offense. Every slight becomes a grievous insult that must be avenged. The other issue is that societies that try to emphasize always turning the other cheek and remaining perfectly nice do little to actually prevent the other person from being angry; it just tells them that it's impolite to act on it. So whereas you or I would be more likely to fling back any insults as we receive them, someone raised on "Southern Hospitality" in a study exactly on this subject would remain unflappably calm....until reaching their breaking point.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:46
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Phobophilia posted:Zapping a MIRV with a laser is extremely unlikely to set off a nuke, because it's going to gently caress up the detonation sequence of the explosives around the warhead, and you're not going to get the critical mass you need for an actual nuclear reaction. Just about anything used to stop a nuke won't inadvertently detonate it. Nuclear weapons require an extremely precise set of events to cause the chain reaction that results in an atomic detonation, and disrupting it will simply disable the warhead rather than prematurely set it off.
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Jan 21, 2015 06:43
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I enjoyed Fury's battle scenes, but I found that the actual drama fell flat after the halfway mark. It seemed like it was going to go in a different direction than most American-centric war films: show the German soldiers as decent people no different from the Americans and defending their homes from an invading force, with the Americans including people badly damaged by PTSD to the point of sociopathic behavior. After the first 30 minutes, I thought they were going to depict Wardaddy as effectively being the movie's antagonist, summarily executing captured soldiers and forcing the new guy to do it to "toughen him up". Unfortunately, after the scene with the German women it all went downhill. It's like they wanted to make something unique, but fell victim to all the classic "gritty war movie" tropes. It ends up being nothing really special outside of the awesome battle scenes, which is a drat shame because it started off better.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:16
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Siivola posted:Yeah. I'm guessing from the tracks and general shape it's a British Crusader. Yeah, I reverse image searched it and found a very nice article.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:48
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Arquinsiel posted:I love that the general shape of the camo and the side-panels in particular makes it look like an Opel Blitz too. It's like they were going to try sneak a tank into a convoy or something and then just hose down the supply dump when they got there. Those covers were mainly meant to fool long-range recon like aircraft, who couldn't identify more than general shapes at such a distance.
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Jan 22, 2015 01:58
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I think Fury could have been improved in a few ways. Gonna be unamarked spoilers below this line so I don't end up redacting the whole thing. --------------------------------- 1. After the first big battle when Wardaddy makes Norman execute the unarmed prisoner, he keeps the picture of the soldier's family instead of discarding it. When with the German women later on, he suddenly has a moment of realization and pulls out the photo. Whoops, that's part of his family. He's sitting in the apartment of a man that he just forced the new guy to execute in cold blood and being nice to his family. It would explain why he doesn't intervene when his crew starts acting like assholes: he's still internally dealing with his conflict about what he did earlier and contemplating the hell he's going to have put these innocent women through when they found out that he was one of the casualties. It would force Wardaddy to confront his dehumanization of the German military. 2. During the setup for the final epic battle, the film makes it so that everyone sticks with Fury because it's "their home" and they want to defend it. But in reality, no tank crew would have stuck with a tank for as long as they did; Shermans were mass produced and disposable vehicles and no crew would ever expect to stay with one vehicle from North Africa all the way to rolling across the German border. A better opportunity would have been to use the chance to show Wardaddy's flawed character and PTSD further by having him stay with Fury because he's turned the war with Germany into a personal vendetta. He's willing to stay behind and take on a whole battalion by himself because he has a personal desire to kill his way all the way to Berlin after so many of his comrades have been killed. The crew stays with him not because Fury is their "home", but because they can't bear to see the man who's kept them alive with his commanding commit suicide. Basically, my general idea for improving the film would have been to stick with how they started and make the film more about Wardaddy's PTSD and growing brutality and his personal struggle to justify his actions as they get challenged on the road to his inevitable demise. Make it so that a credible argument could be made that the true protagonist of the story was Wardaddy and Norman merely acted as an audience surrogate. Or if you increase how many times Wardaddy commits war(daddy) crimes and brutalizes people who are trying to defend their homeland from invaders, a credible argument that Wardaddy could be seen as an antagonist figure. Really, anything more than just rehashing the same tired tropes. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 05:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:Wait, really, it's supposed to be the same tank they've been using since Africa? There weren't any M4A3E8s in Africa or any 76 mm armed Shermans at all. That's what my friend and I remember. The reason they trusted Wardaddy and loved Fury so much is because they had all been together since North Africa. My friend John (we've both discussed the film to death) thinks that the script was initially written for the older Sherman models with the short-barreled gun, and some of the anachronisms and their performance against the Tiger make more sense if using the less powerful tank in its place.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:44
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The answer gets constrained by the fact that different formations just have less jumps. The average paratrooper in the US 17th Airborne only gets one jump into combat... because it's the only one his division ever did. The Brothers in Arms games got that right (since they're basically a Band of Brothers game adaptation with the serial numbers filed off). If I remember correctly, Baker makes one semi-disastrous jump shortly before D-Day and then a glider landing for Market Garden and that's it. His guys just get shuttled around via ground transport for the rest of the war.
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Jan 23, 2015 04:23
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Ensign Expendable posted:The VDV, just like the Marines, consists entirely of self-aggrandizing assholes, so it's basically exactly like the Marines, except instead of telling everyone they were in the VDV, they get their own holiday and swim in fountains. Still didn't stop me from buying their telnyashka.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:38
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SeanBeansShako posted:Yeah man be creative, use real world for inspiration but don't let it rail road you in matters of fiction. I mean, what if there was some sort of super tech that makes anything but high orbital drops just not possible to do? My initial idea for something like that would be an air defense system that can easily target atmospheric craft or slowly drifting parachutes, forcing airborne to exclusively perform HALO-style drops from orbit at high speed to slip through the flak and missiles.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:37
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Eej posted:You can always go for a Halo ODST inspired drop. That was my initial thought, but then I remembered this. 
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Jan 23, 2015 20:46
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Ensign Expendable posted:That's now what Soviet uniforms looked like though. That helmet is hilariously obsolete by that time. Also the obscenely huge red star with hammer & sickle adorning it. And, you know, he's happy to be there.
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Jan 27, 2015 03:06
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I found an interview with a Soviet tanker who used a Sherman. Some very neat stories and anecdotes about the Sherman in here.quote:- My tank was hit on 19 April 1945 in Austria. A Tiger put a round straight through us. The projectile passed through the entire fighting compartment and then the engine compartment. There were three officers in the tank: I as the battalion commander, the company commander Sasha Ionov (whose own tank had already been hit), and the tank commander. Three officers, a driver-mechanic, and a radio operator. When the Tiger hit us, the driver-mechanic was killed outright. My entire left leg was wounded; to my right, Sasha Ionov suffered a traumatic amputation of his right leg. The tank commander was wounded, and below me sat the gunner, Lesha Romashkin. Both of his legs were blown off. A short time before this battle, we were sitting around at a meal and Lesha said to me, "If I lose my legs I will shoot myself. Who will need me?" He was an orphan and had no known relatives. In a strange twist of fate, this is what happened to him. We pulled Sasha out of the tank and then Lesha, and were beginning to assist in the evacuation of the others. At this moment Lesha shot himself.
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Jan 27, 2015 05:51
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Eej posted:Everyone being hyped to see the ISU-152 take out a Panther getting pelted by glass shards after the shot is the best If you watch the GoPro videos of T-72s in Syria, you'll see just how much wanton destruction heavy guns cause in urban areas. They completely fill the immediate surroundings with dust and smoke, shatter windows and knock things over, and potentially even light nearby flammables on fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bsDP5DznDQ
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Jan 27, 2015 20:25
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There's other videos of BMPs being used for urban combat. They punch holes the size of a dinner plate in everything.
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Jan 27, 2015 22:05
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Rhymenoserous posted:Tanks in urban environs always sounds like a horrible idea. Especially in WW2 era tanks where a dozen people chucking molotovs could gently caress one up. From what I've heard regarding Iraq, armored vehicles actually performed way better in urban environments than anyone expected. Obviously you don't want to send lone vehicles into hostile territory with no support, but a properly supported tank can and will gently caress major poo poo up. It helps that the Abrams is a tough nut to crack open anyway, so it's not like someone can just hurl a Molotov onto a buttoned-up tank and wait for the crew to bail. I think remotely operated MGs are also a big boon, since they can be safely used to fire up into buildings without anyone exposing themselves to danger.
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Jan 28, 2015 00:26
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:As if the rebels were being funded by mysterious and unidentifiable groups of people with great wealth and influence, there's been evidence of rebels in possessions of very modern weapons like RPG-29s. There's many videos and photographs showing the Syrian rebels with modern weapons. Not only RPG-29s, but even TOW-style ATGMs (there's a video of one being used to hit a parked plane). If the war was as simple as "Rag-tag rebel band is inferior to established military", then every war like that would have ended ages ago. In practice, the FSA has a massive number of militia and potential recruits (as of December 2013 they were estimated at 40,000-50,000) and has been quite blatantly supported by various nations. ISIL has also joined the fight as a third side, which complicates matters. The Syrian government has also suffered from defecting soldiers, in some cases delivering their vehicles to the rebels.
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Jan 28, 2015 05:26
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Malachite_Dragon posted:I was under the impression that their M1s would eventually become non operational because they don't have access to the stuff needed to maintain them. Admittedly I heard this from threads in GiP, so... How much racism did you have to wade through to hear that?
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Jan 28, 2015 06:55
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I believe the Maori also had highly ritualized combat, though they were also fine with trickery and actual killing.
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Jan 29, 2015 22:52
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ArchangeI posted:There are sports where people literally throw spears and fight each other with swords. Sports totally are a form of ritualized warfare, although one that has been decoupled from the function warfare performs in the modern system of nation states. It's not like Germany can challenge France in football, winner gets Alsace-Lorraine (not least because the French would have to be stupid to go for it :cryingjogilöw:). But if you assume that warfare also serves to give people a way to prove their courage and skills etc. then sports absolutely qualify. Of course, most modern conflict has involved the guys following highly ritualized rules coming to blows with guys who ignore literally all of that.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:36
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Question about crossbows - were they more difficult maintain than early firearms? To an outsider's eye they look more mechanically complex. And if so, then you might not need all that much training to shoot one, but to keep it in working order on campaign you'd need to have some experience. That combined with their construction (more complicated than late-medieval bows, right?) would lent itself towards a state specializing in them. Why it was Genoa instead of somewhere else, though? Don't quote me on this, but I believe crossbows are generally more complex and expensive to make and maintain than early firearms. The first matchlocks that could be fired from the shoulder with a trigger basically just had a spring-loaded pivoting lever that would lower the burning match to the touchhole. Before that, you were holding the match in your hand.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:45
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FAUXTON posted:Tradition explains a lot of poo poo in almost any military on the earth at any time. The Royal Navy's rum ration was an example of this, so is practically any flag ceremony. There's probably a reason for tradition being followed so diligently, it's probably something related to order and decorum and precision. Go to GiP and do a search for any post related to Chesty Puller.
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Feb 2, 2015 19:54
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ArchangeI posted:It increases unit cohesion by giving soldiers a shared identity. Granted, this works a lot better if you're in the Queen's Own Light Buckfortshire Rifle Dragoon Guards, which has an unbroken line of tradition and battle honors going back to the 16th century than if you are in Reserve-Panzerbattalion 322, which was formed in 1956 and never deployed anywhere. Or part of the American units that repeatedly get formed, disbanded, reformed, shoved into other units, reformed again with a different mission.... quote:Yeah, in some sources they're 'OMG, ancient Chinese super weapon'. Even Wiki says 80 yards effective range and militarily useful. I think they'd do their best as wall-mounted guns. Just set up a battery on a fortification and mag dump into an advancing army. At the very least, the hail of incoming fire should be demoralizing.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:15
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Bringing the subject to feeding an army, I just ate my first MRE. Got a pair off eBay, so I brought the chili with beans to my night shift at work for dinner. I can see why they're such an improvement over the past. The package isn't exactly small or super light, but it's worlds ahead of canned rations in bulk and weight. The Flameless Ration Heater is wonderful as long as you get it into the carton quickly after pouring the water in and don't burn yourself, but it lets off a bad smell kinda like burnt metal and you don't want an open flame near hydrogen gas vapors. The food quality itself is basically that of cheap pre-packaged food, like canned beans and grocery store beef and Cheese Whiz-like cheese spread on not very salty crackers. At the same time, I can also see why assault rations like the First Strike were made. The theoretical calorie content is based on a soldier eating literally every bite. You need to not only finish the entree and side dishes, but also drain the packet of cheese spread and down your dairy shake and instant coffee. It's really easy for a soldier who can't stomach one or two parts of his ration and isn't able to trade up to only eat 400-500 calories out of the intended 1200-1300.
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Feb 3, 2015 04:23
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Bacarruda posted:Congratulations on the coming constipation. Unless you ate the gum, in which case you're going to get a monster case of the shits. I'll probably be fine. I very rarely suffer digestion issues from foods, even the worst New York street carts.
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Feb 3, 2015 05:56
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Panzeh posted:The whole plan was really fanciful, probably an attempt to gain negotiating power. Was Sealion ever looked at with seriousness after they held their test landings in France and found that with their current equipment and training, any mass amphibious assault would be a hilarious farce of death and mishaps?
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Feb 4, 2015 19:10
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:The plans that the Germans did have for a Channel crossing weren't predicated on anything like taking time to develop the necessary equipment and procedures. They were going to tow river barges stuffed with troops and horses and guns at a sea snail's pace under cover of night with what (utterly insufficient) naval escorts they could deploy and basically cross their fingers that the Royal Navy didn't notice in time to cut them to pieces with a few destroyers. If I remember correctly from reading about their test landings to see how feasible it was, it would have been a disaster even without being under attack. They couldn't handle the weather conditions and ended up drifting all over the landing zone, and more than one outright capsized or otherwise sank. I think they actually had multiple deaths from the test.
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Feb 4, 2015 21:01
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Arquinsiel posted:Someone asked a while back about when the last time a head of state led his military into combat was. It's actually plausible that this never happened. The picture of him supposedly preparing to fly shows him in cotton fatigues rather than a flight suit and there's no evidence that he has any flight training at all, let alone military. He was British infantry and commander of the Jordanian Special Forces, but there's no record of him being in any air force. All of the American sources repeating this story are right-wing papers, with the story having a "That darn dirty Barrack HUSSEIN Obama is a coward who doesn't want to fight terrorism!" slant. The story itself is probably the Jordanians just hyping up propaganda to make their government and armed forces look badass. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 14:55
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Disinterested posted:WW1 was a bloodbath for the sons of British members of parliament and the aristocracy, so it's no guarantee. It was also a bloodbath for former privileged members of my alma mater, Cambridge - long lists of them are splashed liberally on war memorials across all of its colleges. I think it's because of the infamous problem of World War I being fought by classically-minded leaders without fully understanding the gigantic bloodbath that was about to be caused and especially not realizing how massively deadly modern technology had made war. Military service is a longstanding tradition for wealthy/royal/important families, so many of the officers would be from rich families or the sons of important politicians (which often went hand-in-hand with aristocracy) following in their forefathers' footsteps. Then they actually arrived in the glorious gentleman's war and found a torn-up wasteland scattered with dismembered limbs and chemical weapons and likely got themselves evaporated by an artillery strike.
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Feb 5, 2015 17:40
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Tias posted:Please tell me he actually made laws, and that I can go to jail for breaking the Boner Laws. The Bonar Law Law.
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Feb 5, 2015 17:57
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Going to the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in Tampa next week. I wonder if the Landsknecht guys will be there again doing lessons.
chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 00:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:Yes. If a tank's infantry escort falls behind, it's extremely vulnerable to even primitive tricks like this. I was reading on your Tank Archives one of the stories about a Panzer I or II, where a lone Russian soldier came across a lone tankette. He killed it by whacking the first guy to pop out of the hatch with a shovel after climbing aboard, smearing mud on the viewports and air vents and plugging the machine guns with branches, and then beating up the crew with his saperka when they tried to climb out.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:06
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Eej posted:This was basically standard anti-tank doctrine for the IJA/IJN wasn't it? "Back scratches" date back to WW2, I think, but they were also used in Korea because of the nasty tendency for the enemy to use human wave attacks or have guys hidden in the cities like Seoul jump onto tanks and garrote the commander or throw a grenade in. My friend John sent me a story from a German tanker where the unit's lead tank was getting ready to hose off one that was being swarmed by Russian infantry, but the machine gun jammed. Without time to do anything else, the commander ordered the gunner to fire an HE round at it. It didn't penetrate the armor, but it scared the poo poo out of everyone inside.
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Feb 10, 2015 19:43
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MrYenko posted:Takes enormous balls, though. Shooting a tank makes it angry. Enormous balls, you say? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc_6cV8GF78
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Feb 11, 2015 19:35
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Fangz posted:When did these shovels get introduced, anyway? I assume they didn't have them for the American Civil War. The Soviet saperka dates back to I think a Dutch or Danish design patented in the mid-19th century, but entrenching tools go all the way back to the Roman Legion; Legionnaires were engineers as a rule, and they immediately built fortifications whenever they could sit down long enough to at least entrench their camp. They even worked as construction workers when not fighting, since they were all trained on at least basic construction techniques. This ancient site has some images of Civil War entrenching tools; they're generally larger tools (too big to hang off a belt or haversack), but the small entrenching tool was already a thing at least in Europe around that time.
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Feb 11, 2015 21:44
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Slavvy posted:Hownottousetanks.avi Welcome to Syria. The army has been having a lot of problems when it comes to urban warfare tactics; a lot of tanks are being sent off with little to no support and the rebels are getting their hands on weapons that can really put a hurting on them, like RPG-29s and even a lot of ATGMs. I think it's just rapid semi-auto. I've seen many of the FSA in videos have been using semi-automatic fire as a rule even for their spray and pray and blindfiring. Considering the design of the selector, they may just be slamming the lever down and going to town without making a conscious decision for exactly how to set their gun.
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Feb 11, 2015 22:21
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SquadronROE posted:Were Gatling guns or any other rapid fire gun ever used in a line battle? I know they were used against the Zulus, but that is about it. The Civil War only saw a tiny bit of product testing of the Gatling Gun; it saw heavy use starting with the Indian Wars later on. It did feature some other neat guns, though, like the Agar Gun. It was a single-barreled crank gun that used a sort of primitive metallic cartridge system: you loaded steel tubes with a primer, powder, and bullet (or just a primer and nitrated paper cartridge) and put them into a hopper, with the crank feeding the gun. It even had a gun shield to protect the gunners. It suffered from some overheating problems and you needed to reload the casings by hand, but it was a very cool tool. Unfortunately the Ordnance Department didn't take a shine to them and they mostly saw their use guarding bridges. Organ guns (a bunch of barrels in a row that would be touched off by a primer and powder train) were in the same boat.
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Feb 13, 2015 03:42
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