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JaucheCharly posted:I just googled 1632 series. Somebody makes real money of this? Multiple dozen people, actually, via the fanfiction. Personally? Yeah, OK, I get why the real historians look down on the 1632 series. And why it's probably not great literature. But it doesn't have to be great, it just has to be good. And it is that, fairly consistently. It's...Look, it's the literary equivalent of macaroni and cheese. Not exactly healthy, but it's comfort food. (Also, Baen makes their whole catalog available, free, to disabled readers in Kindle/Nook/etc formats. I am one of the people who benefits by it - Baen's program lets me stretch my SSI checks a lot farther and lets me keep up my reading habit, which is sometimes my only real entertainment source. It also makes me wish other publishers (especially of Scifi/Fantasy) would do the same thing, because it's not like they lose much in sales (yes, they do verify that you're disabled - I got into it with a letter from my voc rehab counselor saying I was blind), and it *does* get books out there. I don't just read, I *frequently* loan copies to friends looking for stuff to read, and I'm not alone in that.)
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Jun 12, 2014 15:58
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Tomn posted:I semi-jokingly want to hear a post about the evolution of hats in the military - how and why we went from, for instance, landsknecht caps to big ol' cavalier hats to tricornes and bicornes to shakos and kepis and peaked caps and whatnot. Yes please? Seriously: I've always been interested in what one might call the "Speculative fiction" of uniforms - IE, trying to figure out what they'd look like in the future, acknowledging that most sci-fi uniforms (HI STAR TREK) suck as actual uniforms. (My current big timekilling project is to redesign Trek uniforms from the ground up, for a Post-Nemesis RPG I'm involved in. Similarly, I'm *also* trying to design uniforms for an "Ender's Game"-universe RPG...And before you ask, no, I can't draw. (The RPGs involved are all-text.) I would gleefully ask for help, but don't exactly have the  to get the ability to PM or the like...)May as well figure out what's been tried before if I'm to usefully figure out where they're going.
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Jun 16, 2014 12:55
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Raenir Salazar posted:Didn't Enterprise have decent looking Uniforms that looked evolved from NASA uniforms? Enterprise's uniforms were decent, but were missing something important: They didn't project the "air of authority" a military uniform (IMHO) needs to in order to work. They looked, as it were, too civilian. The TOS-movie uniforms (from Wrath of Khan to TUC), by contrast, were military enough, but looked more fitting for a dress uniform, not a duty uniform, and hence failed the "practicality test". I'll quote here from the document where I laid down my thoughts once, a compilation of posts to a Trek web forum mixed with stuff for some Trek RPGs I'm on - the []'d stuff was written as "margin notes", commenting on the original document. "The idea behind these redesigned Class Bs is that they are (in no particular order): A. More practically designed; B. Harken back in various ways to wet navies and/or the early spaceflight organizations; C. Lend the air of authority a uniform should; D. Look like they're meant for a (para)military organization, with the need for rapid identification and the like. Notice that I did not include 'Look cool'. This isn't because I don't want all these to look cool! I do! But uniforms that meet criteria A-D will tend to look cool sort of naturally. [I've had extensive conversations about how, if you're designing uniforms for sci-fi, they ought to at least look cool. Coolness is defined differently by virtually everyone, I know that. But you should stretch for it. This paragraph is my 'How to achieve a cool uniform without trying very hard'.]" (By redesigned and "more practically designed", I was comparing them to the duty uniforms seen from TNG forward (in in-universe chronology terms, so excluding Enterprise). By duty uniforms, I'm referring (as the terminology hints) to what the US Army once called "Class Bs", the uniform used for daily office/classroom use, and for shipboard positions where you aren't likely to get too dirty or something - so most of the positions we see on TV, particularly for senior staff.) This is where I swear at my lack of available (and not-previously-allocated) money, because if I had PMs I'd PM those interested (or ask them to PM me, more precisely), get email addresses, and email the .doc file to help the conversation - I've considered posting to Google Drive and sharing the link, but don't want to link my identity here with my RL identity. Oh well. If someone has a clue how to avoid the identity-linking issue (besides creating an all-new Google Drive account), let me know?
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Jun 17, 2014 13:36
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I have to ask. Just when did Europe sober up?
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Sep 2, 2014 19:06
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Trin, if you could compile these posts into one great big thing of awesomeness, that would be glorious?
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Sep 30, 2014 05:49
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Trin Tragula posted:To which I now heartily say: gently caress you. Thanks Trig! I am actually grateful.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:17
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Were there actual "sign here" mercenary contracts? (If there were, I'm forced to ask "Why?" and "Who the hell would enforce them?") Were mercenary units incorporated (in a manner of speaking)?
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Oct 18, 2014 22:15
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Ahh. Yeah, whether it was a legal person was what I was asking. Iiiinteresting.
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Oct 18, 2014 22:41
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HEY GAL posted:Nah, they think "legal authority" comes from the War Law and, beneath that, an Oberst who has a valid appointment, not "the regiment." Mmmhmm. So did regiments have, uh, non-warfighting people on the rolls? Like, for example, accountants or someone to keep track of the money? Better way of asking that, now that I think about it: How business-like *were* mercenary units? Is it more "random unit that just happens to switch armies" or is it more "really well-armed businessmen, complete with HR and finance people?" I know you've mentioned that the usual employees were terrible at life decisions, but its their employers I'm curious about.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:17
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True story re Iraq. So my dad worked for US Army CECOM (he's now been retired 10 years, hence I am reasonably safe telling this story) as a civ engineer. Among his projects was the system tank guys use (or used, anyway) to communicate inside their vehicle, and with anybody friendly hanging alongside like infantry. Before about mid-2002, he resolutely swore up and down: "We're going to go into Iraq, but not into Baghdad. We're not that dumb, we are not going to get involved in urban warfare." See, everybody kinda knew, even before 9/11, that Iraq was going to come eventually. I can't entirely describe (by which I mean I do not have words to describe, not that I'm not allowed to) how this was known, but it was known. Bush 43 or Gore, we were going to eventually go into Iraq. One day, I guess it would have been summer of 2002, as I'm packing up to go to college and stuff, Dad comes home swearing. Which, OK, sometimes that happens. I ask what's up, more out of idle boredom than anything else, and he tells me he got a call from someone. I'll step aside and note here: See, one of the ideas they'd always shelved as not being workable for a bunch of reasons was making their system cordless/wireless. It's not a big thing, after all, in most scenarios. Except for one. He's swearing because it turned out plans had changed. Nope, they weren't going to stop at open-field combat...They were going into Baghdad. With tanks. (Thus that except...The exception, the one point where cords/no cords matter, was for urban warfare, because then you gotta communicate with infantry in close proximity to the vehicle...And since the system relied on there being an actual corded connection between all parties, that needed to change fast.) (Epilogue: For those wondering, the system itself performed amazingly in Iraq (and Afghanistan, as it's the intercom system used in everything from tanks to Bradleys to uparmored HMMWVs), and saved any number of lives. Screw the cost savings, screw the fact they were on time and on budget. The thing Dad was most proud of when he retired in January 05, and what I'm rather proud of him for looking back, is the fact that the soldiers and Marines seemed to like the equipment, and it was (and this is saying something) reliable enough that nobody died or was wounded as a result of failures (that he, and thus I, knew of).) Basically: Yeah, Iraq was poo poo planned. Or rather, it wasn't...But they ignored the plans that were there. In some respects that worked OK...ish. The initial run to Baghdad, the 3 weeks from 19 March 2003? That, it seems pretty hard to dispute, was good warfighting. But...The plans for Occupation and such? Those plans? Looking back, I don't think the plans were being followed at all there. Bremer and Franks and such were making poo poo up as they went. So to answer Acebuckeye, I don't think we could have avoided going in. No, whether Bush was President or Gore was, eventually we were going to go into Iraq. But I completely agree, if they hadn't chucked years of planning for the post-war scenario, the world could have avoided a ton of poo poo. Like Daesh. Daesh would not be as much of an issue had we kept to the plan as much as possible, instead of trying to do "Post-WW2 Germany, but cheaper!".
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Oct 21, 2014 01:14
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Hogge Wild posted:Didn't Americans jerry-rig armour on their Humvees in Iraq? Were they any good? They worked sometimes. Sometimes is the key word. The biggest problem is that the jury-rigged armor did a number on everything else on the vehicle (including comms gear which is how I know much about this), which is one reason why the chain of command frowned upon the practice so heavily; Eventually, they rushed out the uparmored humvee to at least end the need to jury-rig armor (and improve the suspension and transmission and everything else that needed to be upgraded to handle the armor), with the MRAPs following very slowly behind. (It is absolutely true, however, that Rumsfeld and friends did not provide gear that everybody knew was going to be needed. They tried to do war at bargain prices. Hint: You get what you pay for.) The secondary problem is that often times, jury-rigging armor reduces very necessary things like visibility, which makes you easier to attack. The short of it is, they ban the practice for very good reasons, not the least of which is, if it doesn't work, you've screwed yourself.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:01
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Both! At the same time! (Gotta ask: Did the Early Modern era punish drunkenness in combat at all, or is that more a later thing?)
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Nov 7, 2014 14:53
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So a random question provoked by nothing: Are there any countries with debts still outstanding from Lend Lease in WW2? Like, did the Soviets ever manage to pay up the debts (nominally) racked up by Lend Lease?
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Nov 8, 2014 14:32
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Trin Tragula posted:Sainsbury's have a spectacularly tasteless Christmas advert this year. What's sad/terrible about it is - it's a *great* ad, IMHO. But the match of creator/piece is all wrong.
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Nov 13, 2014 18:39
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Is it just me, or has the soldier's load invariably been "About 100 pounds, give or take 10" thoroughout recorded history?
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Nov 25, 2014 22:39
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Inquiry: Going by Hey Gal's posting of the treaty definition of a mercenary...Where do the Pontifical Swiss Guards stand? They're not really nationals of the Vatican City State (though they carry Vatican passports, they lose em when they leave the Swiss Guard), they're Swiss. They're apparently paid very well, basically at pay rates in excess of the Italian Army if I read right. And so on. Basically, how the heck are they legal, in international law terms?
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Nov 27, 2014 04:40
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My family memory comes from my dad's side of the family (mom's side, my grandfather was a...plumbing apprentice during the war, IIRC). Poppy was a cook. Went ashore with Operation Dragoon I think, also saw time in Italy. This is relevant because he *came* from Italy (American father, Italian Mom), and had only come to the states in 1938. All through the war, where was my grandmother (who he'd married in 1938)? In Italy, in Taurasi. Yes, you got that right - the plan was for Poppy to go over and then send for Nana when everything was ready and he was established. Well, he got drafted in 1940-41 or so. And then the war happened.  Nana had basically the entire village lying their asses off to the Fascists - "Nope, nobody here with American relatives!" - in hopes that they wouldn't figure out she was married to an American soldier.Apparently, when the Allies recaptured that part of Italy, the scene was like something out of a movie, with him banging on the door of his in-laws' house and reuniting with her. Nana came to the states as a war bride - a bit of a lie, but hey, close enough. So his war was spent in kitchens, basically. Plus, since he spoke Italian, I presume he was often his unit's translator. Eventually, he was encouraged to stay on with the Army after the war. Except...It went kinda like this: Him: "Sure! Where'm I gonna be stationed, since you say I get my pick of places if I re-up?" Army: "Germany!" Him: "Then, uh, nope. I'm mustering out." Army: "But it's Germany!" Him: "I want Italy so I can be with family, or I'm going byebye!" Army: "Germany! This is the army, Corporal!" Him: "Oh, what's that? I'm demobilized? Bye now!" Come 1946 he started having kids (my dad was born in 1948), so he was annoyed as hell when he got called up from civilian life for Korea. They did, however, make him a Warrant Officer along the way...As a cook, don't ask me what specialized skill cooks have that would require a warrant. He died when I was 5 though, so I never got the chance to ask him (or Nana, who died when I was 8) about the war. Which makes me sad.
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Dec 21, 2014 21:39
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So, translated, they liked their women rather masculine?
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Feb 8, 2015 00:58
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This seems like an appropriate point at which to ask: Yes, the Armenian Genocide was, IMHO, a genocide. No real question there, I think. But what I'm wondering is: Was it an intentional genocide, or was it a genocide the Ottomans somehow...I dunno...blundered into? Did they go in intending to wipe out the Armenians (a la Germany and the Jews 20-30 years later), or did they just...do what they did and the effect was to commit genocide in any case? (It feels weird to describe a genocide as accidental, but stranger things have happened...)
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Feb 25, 2015 17:25
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Precisely. To me, the North American peoples' situation wasn't, strictly speaking, a genocide (for the most part) - it was horrible, but not nearly planned or systematic enough to qualify as a genocide. Whereas the Holocaust was planned, and I guess? the Armenian genocide was, too. (I fully admit not knowing enough about events in the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenian Genocide.) It's the element of planning, the "when we are done, if we are successful, there will be no more X" intent that makes a genocide a genocide, I think I'm trying to communicate. What I do know re the Armenian Genocide had me wondering how planned it was, really. Because what I had known previously was that measures seemed sporadic and almost more the result of incompetence and lack of foresight.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:45
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Poor horses. That's a lot of weight to concentrate on their back, rather than spreading it out.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:58
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Disinterested posted:This hasn't gone away, btw. For Guards regiments, the cost of uniforms and social bills are considerably higher, so at the junior officer's level it is highly desirable to have a second income or your entire salary will be consumed by just paying for being a guardsman. Also a lot of guardsmen are the sons, grandsons etc. of guardsmen. This boggles me. How are officers assigned to regiments in the British Army, anyway? If there's a markedly higher financial cost to being in certain regiments, then I can totally imagine going in, not expecting to be assigned to whatever regiments...And ending up in a regiment that takes your whole paycheck, which would suck.
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Mar 6, 2015 17:37
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Ah. That answers the question nicely, thanks.
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Mar 6, 2015 17:41
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chitoryu12 posted:Likewise, there's the issuance of cigarettes and/or cigars in the 19th and 20th centuries and the change in the 19th century among the US navy to coffee in favor of alcohol. We often forget that caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine are all drugs in the same class of substance as cocaine and heroin. Not as strong or dangerous to your health, maybe, and lacking the stigma due to being legalized and commonly available, but they're recreational drugs just the same. Was the USN's change to coffee vs alcohol that early? I know prohibition of alcohol aboard USN ships was a thing from 1914 onward (due to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, racist fucker), but I've always wondered when the USN basically started to run on copious amounts of coffee.
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Mar 18, 2015 23:19
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:This whole thing with Wolfgang has had us all entertained over here. It's getting exaggerated in our minds at this point. Like, imagine a bunch of special forces emerging out of some muck in Ghillie suits in the middle of the night, and getting caught in the glare of a pair of headlights. They instinctively think their cover is blown and the exercise is a disaster, until they hear the bell in the truck, and then it's a race to the front of the queue. The guy's been presumably working since the Cold War, yeah? How the hell is everybody so sure he's not secretly a Russian spy?
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Apr 3, 2015 02:26
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Murgos posted:Surely one of you fine folks has access to a library that houses it? My guess is it's a religious purpose having to due with the Eucharist. Nope. Eucharist would be unleavened (in the Latin Rite, which the Templars were), only handled by clerics (which the knights aren't), and specifically not made from anything but fresh bread.
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Apr 17, 2015 18:22
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It's so easy to mock the 1632 series (I dunno, I kinda liked the story about land ownership in Thuringia...I'm weird tho), but I get why people do. It is bad, seen in a broader context than alt-hist. It really is. But let's be brutally honest, most alt-history stories are bad. At least it's not as terrible as Turtledove.
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May 3, 2015 12:13
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Not bad, Klaus88. You just have terrible taste in alt-history authors.
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May 3, 2015 15:29
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Alchenar posted:Nobody really doubted the soldiers on each side in the ACW, it's more that the US army had no conception of how to manage armies of a hundred thousand strong prior to the war (I don't think there was even an established staff college until afterwards) and it shows in a lot of the early battles. To be pedantic: There wasn't a staff college of any sort for the Army until 1903 in the US, with the reforms of Elihu Root. (The Naval War College was established in 1884.)
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Aug 21, 2015 20:10
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Yes, please, Cyrano. Especially interested in how Nazism dealt with the skilled trades, honestly. In the US they were left-wing bastions (and remain so even today to a degree), but even things like how the hell trade unionism in Germany *recovered* from the Nazis would be good, IMHO.
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Oct 4, 2015 15:55
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Mr Enderby posted:There was no evidence of religious opposition to astrology. It features heavily in the work of the puritan Milton, and I think crops up in Bunyan as well. So, wait. The Popes presumably had astrologers, then? And yes. That last sentence...How did astrology go from big deal to pseudoscience so quickly?
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Oct 14, 2015 21:56
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Oh it's written by Gavin, not about...y'know...
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Dec 9, 2015 04:55
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Mycroft Holmes posted:be the change you wish to see in the world. write for their ezine. Echoing this. Yes the 1632 series isn't great in terms of accuracy; that's in part because massive chunks of the research have been done by total amateurs. Because those were who was available.
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Dec 31, 2015 15:14
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OK, maybe this is because the Mideast thread over in D&D is depressing me (also I can't sleep because I took my morning meds at 1030 at night when I meant to take my night meds, anti-whee....), but maybe someone can answer this for me: Since the signature of the First Geneva Convention in 1864, have the Geneva Conventions ever been observed in full (as applicable at the time) by both sides/all sides in any major conflict? Ever? (To give even the slimmest chance of a yes answer, let us for the moment exclude the Additional Protocols from the definition of "in full"...) I'm suspecting the answer is no.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:14
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So....why does anybody bother with them, or the Laws of Armed Conflict in general, at all, then?
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Feb 5, 2016 11:12
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HEY GAL posted:you know who was really good at spies? the papal states. So wait, when did this end? Because in everything I read from later on, the Papal States seem uniformly poo poo at basically everything, from warfighting to spying to running a drat country competently, and it doesn't vary with the Pope.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:01
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Semi-relevant side question. In Germany, has the Basic Law ever been given constitutional-level entrenched status, or will reunified Germany ever get around to writing a proper Constitution someday?
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Mar 1, 2016 23:52
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Duly noted, thanks for the answer Archangel!
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Mar 2, 2016 00:31
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It's the same mindset that birthed That Guy.
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Mar 4, 2016 18:45
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Trin Tragula posted:Mrs Magdeburg, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you? Here's to you, Mrs. Magdeburg, Jesus loves you more than you can know oh oh oh
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Mar 8, 2016 03:17
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