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Slavvy posted:What's up with the tyre tread pattern thing they've got going on there? What is it meant to look like/blend in with? Anything. It would've been green and white, which are going to be the two main colours you'll see in the backdrop of a winter forest at snowy latitudes, and it serves to break up the silhouette; camoflage isn't just about "looking like" specific things and appearing to be part of the surroundings, it's also very much about not looking like a specific thing people are alert to. If people "see" two weird white shapes (because the tyre-track has blended with the tree behind) the brain's more likely to go "Some weird rocks" and move on. EDIT: It's almost certainly happened to you at some point, but think about times when you've been looking straight at a thing like a tortoiseshell cat in some grass or something, and abruptly when it's moved you realise it's there, because before your brain was only processing "bits of weird brown and black". In this respect, being a solid block of tank-shaped white is actually fairly poor camoflage. My question, and it's almost certainly been asked in the past 600 pages but I'm only on page... 14 by honest means, but: Was the war in Vietnam winnable in a realistic sense? Was there anything that could've been done with the best planning and military leadership around, or was it always going to be a meatgrinder that would eventually lose steam and fold? spectralent fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 01:20
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(I realise several people responded but this one stood out for succinctness)Endman posted:An "ideal Vietnam" would not be going to war in Vietnam. This was kind of what I'd felt the more I'd read about it; it seemed like the whole thing was a bad idea from the beginning.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:54
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Jobbo_Fett posted:
It looks like it's just faded and dirtied irregularly to me; nothing exceptional if it's been in the field any length of time.
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Oct 1, 2015 11:50
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This might be a question more for the cold war thread but I can't really find it, so: In WW2 when armour's involvement in war is big, infantry aren't exactly left in the dust. There's a lot in the way of man-portable and towed/pushed field guns that can give a tank a bad day, and even beyond that infantry have some ways of causing tanks to remember they're there and they should be concerned, from early war antitank rifles to bazookas and panzerschreks. Infantry probably don't really want to fight tanks if they can help it, but it's not like they can just trundle on through if there's infantry about. Cold war, though, sees the introduction of composite armour and ERA that makes shaped charges vastly less threatening; this is an issue for things like RPGs and missiles that are presumably sitting near the pazooka/schreck/PIAT kind of role. And this might just be my lack of knowledge, but modern armies don't seem to have things equivalent to gun carriages anymore. So, between the severe attenuation of HEAT's usefulness and counter-countermeasures (if that's a word) to HEAT like tandem charges, what were infantry expected to do if things came to blows in the cold war? I figure most infantry of the period are mechanised or airmobile, so presumably they have an IFV or chopper weapon that can fire shells tanks care about or something, but when dismounted, what do they do when the tanks roll in or they hit the armour part of their attack? I suppose the obvious answer is "shoot the other guy's infantry", but why'd he have infantry in that case? Were infantry actually anticipated to be that important in a potential WW3, or were they a more "specialist" kind of thing for getting dropped off at soft targets while their IFV did the front-line fighting or getting into fiddly areas you can't fly helicopters into like buildings and fortifications?
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Nov 16, 2015 03:44
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Wasn't it the case that the introduction of armoured composites suddenly reversed the entire thing, though? Or were man-portable antitank missiles and such still capable of giving a composite tank a bad day? I'm aware post WW2 up to... I think it was mid 60s? HEAT meant that tanks were primarily dispensers of explosive hate (IIRC this is why the Leopard's armour was comparatively weak, it was expected it'd be up against HEAT rounds that'd make armour irrelevant); but I had thought that composite armours and ERA reversed the situation abruptly leading to adoption of sabot and DU ammo for tanks. It's specifically that bit of time I'm thinking of; between countermeasures for HEAT existing and better shaped charges that overcome them being introduced. Or was that period never really a big deal and it was more like going from "certain death" to "probable death"?
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Nov 16, 2015 03:56
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JcDent posted:Did you ask the same question on /hwg/ by any chance? Yeah, though I figured I'd get more in-depth answers here. Koesj posted:On top of the obvious answers to your questions, let me pose one of my own (and it's an honest one, really!): why are you thinking of the Cold War as some kind of monolithic timeframe? Largely because I know little about the actual hypothetical conflict between NATO and the WarPac and don't really know how best to point to the bit of time I mean regarding a theoretical engagement 
spectralent fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 15:53
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Yeah; I suppose the issue was I was mostly thinking of a conflict where there's your dudes vs their dudes in a big dust-up, rather than modern urban combat against what's essentially a guerrilla force. Though Israelis in '73 sounds like exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. I'll have to check that out.
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Nov 16, 2015 16:23
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Also I realise this is pages ago but:chitoryu12 posted:I went searching and found a really good video showing exactly where everything is on the Chieftain. World of Tanks, I know, but it's really high quality footage of the loader's station. What you're looking for starts at 10:45 Hey fellow tabletop goon! I've wanted to run a tank crew game for forever but I've always struggled with how boring 2-3 members of the crews jobs would be to represent via tabletop mechanics. You're playing the loader, so I assume you must've found a way to make that fun in-game; how'd you manage that? To my mind I can see loader being a trap of "spend an action to load a shell" every round.
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Nov 17, 2015 12:25
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JcDent posted:Only War with a Russ? Yeah, that's kind of the issue I see with a lot of tank positions. Driving the tank (and potentially ramming things) could be fun, as would getting to shoot things, but the guy who's commanding is at best just rolling a load of spot checks and loaders have nothing to do that's not "keep loading shells". Assistant might get a hull MG or something depending on era. The solution I always came back to was "The PCs are tank commanders and do everything through NPC crew members", so it'd end up like WoT or WT with funny dice, but the siren call of having one tank for a party has always interested me, I just couldn't make it work.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:05
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I am now legit up to date. That was wild.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:48
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This may be a question that reveals a shameful lack of historical knowledge, but: Were tank crews in WW2 aware of "angling" armour? WoT and WT players will be aware of trying to create armour slope artificially by presenting your vehicle at an angle, but would this be a thing tankers would've been taught to do, or even a thing they'd pick up, or is it just one of those gamey quirks PC gamers pick up on? And would this continue into the modern day, or do sabots normalise too much to make it viable?
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Nov 30, 2015 01:01
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Tias posted:Guys, if you weren't replying to him, he'd go away. Use the loving ignore function, that's what it's there for. It doesn't work if people keep quoting them, otherwise you have to ignore the problem and everyone who keeps talking to the problem.
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Dec 3, 2015 10:51
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Tomn posted:In that case, when did camp sanitation start being directly linked with disease? Sometime in the middle of the Victorian period? I remember being taught in epidemiology that one of the contributing factors to axis defeat in north africa was that the allied forces improvised drainage in the areas they camped, while the axis forces were more "just go by the bushes and chuck some dirt over it" kinds of guys, and thus had endemic gastrointestinal diseases amongst the ranks which the allies didn't have to deal with so much. Granted, that was from epidemiology, not history.
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Dec 3, 2015 11:54
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Tomn posted:Seriously? I'm honestly kinda curious now if there's any modern-day armies that tend to slack on basic sanitation, and simultaneously kinda afraid to learn the answer. Well, I found a cite in a book called "Challenges in military healthcare" by Jay Stanley and John D. Blair: quote:Virtually nonexistent field sanitation and a host of associated preventable diseases had a disasterous impact on Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in 1942." That's from a quick googling, though, and I can't see where they got it from. My source was my epidemiology lecturer.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:53
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HEY GAL posted:nah, regions in italy are loving rife with it. thomas aquinas died of that, i think To the extent that southern europe has endemic congenital blood diseases (beta thalassaemia) that're preventative of malaria much like sickle cell is in africa! Also, relevant to war, it was deliberately reintroduced by the nazis to slow down the allied advance through italy, and also because nazis were loving monsters.
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Dec 3, 2015 22:25
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The marshes were deliberately reflooded the year prior to Anzio with saltwater for the purposes of reintroducing malaria and destroying farmland; it was done to reintroduce malaria and make the region more treacherous to cross, and destroy farmland of the population that had "betrayed" them. EDIT: Woah, holy crud, managed to find a paper archive from the period, dating the reflooding to at least Oct 31 1943: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17862861 EDIT2: In fact other secondary sources say it had very little effect on military targets and was largely civilian directed  Wait gently caress they were hoarding quinine too. I know this isn't going to surprise anyone but the nazis were loving assholes.
spectralent fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 23:22
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ArchangeI posted:Oh god not another History as a science derail I mean, the others I can all see, but... Where's the controversy on Wojtek..? (Did I just break the thread?  )
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Dec 6, 2015 03:08
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Ensign Expendable posted:Significantly. In practice, the D-25T had better penetration than the 88 mm KwK 43, while also being useful against infantry and fortifications. The Panther, not so much, since it had a weaker HE shell than the T-34. Panthers mostly had 75mm (long-rear end ones, though). I think there was a design for an 88 panther, but it probably never happened. Kafouille posted:The IS-2 gun is significantly more powerful, and the long German guns had pretty bad issues with sloped armour. The Panther gun was considered good, but not because it was some mighty god gun, it's because it had very high muzzle velocity for the day. That means you get less ballistic drop, and so you can make more of an error in range estimation and still hit your target. That actually got distorted into 'It's really accurate' but that's not actually the case, the long barrel is actually not that great for mechanical accuracy as it tends to flex too much and reacts a lot more to various changes in temperature. This was also the same for the 88mm the Tigers had, I believe. But yeah, Panther was a bad tank. It didn't really match other heavy tanks in it's weight class, but if it did that wouldn't matter, because it was a heavy tank that was being brought in to replace a medium.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:32
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You probably already know, but machineguns were also used as indirect fire weapons by pointing them up more, and PIATs were converted into macguyvered rocket batteries by strapping a bunch together as well.
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Dec 12, 2015 12:42
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spectralent posted:PIATs were converted into macguyvered rocket batteries by strapping a bunch together as well. I never realised how literal this was: Making Tracks - British Carrier Story 1914 to 1972 posted:Improvised by the Canadians in 1944, this consisted of 14 PIAT projectors mounted on a frame at the rear of the carrier in two series of seven. Each row could be fired simultaneously by means of a mechanical contrivance of steel rods attached to the firing triggers. A few vehicles so fitted were used in Europe in 1944-45 lol
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Dec 12, 2015 13:03
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hogmartin posted:The Spitfire did have an issue with fuel starvation in negative G. The carburetor wouldn't function properly which is why when you see them diving, they roll inverted first and then 'pull up' into a dive. This was addressed with Miss Shilling's Orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice My favourite thing about this is that it's left a lasting effect on fictional dogfighting to the point you can tell who's meant to be the good plane/spaceship or bad plane/spaceship or whatever by whether or not they roll into dives like good, heroic allied planes or if they just pitch down straight into a dive like evil axis planes.
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Dec 30, 2015 03:30
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My grandma's brother was in the Guards, fighting in North Africa, and she thinks he went to Italy after but isn't sure. Her eldest brother was in WW1, and died escorting German POWs back to base when the entire line was ambushed. that's it that's my relative's war stories I know more about my granpa's service in the RAF but he was much later, 60s-90s.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:51
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Are there cold war versions of wehrabingo for all the "The tank needed an autoloader because soviet crews were too stupid to load shells the right way" type stuff?
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Jan 16, 2016 19:34
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Nine of Eight posted:Of course! Just look for any instances of "Autoloader that eats conscript arms" and you've found one. I meant specifically a bingo sheet for it Maybe I should make one.
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Jan 17, 2016 11:22
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Arquinsiel posted:Picked up Tank Men by Robert Kershaw of It Never Snows in September fame, and when reading through the "dramatis personae" (or list of dudes he quotes as sources This seems bizarre to me, given brits notably did have fireflies in NW europe and the usual argument goes "Why didn't America make the firefly?".
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Jan 18, 2016 00:44
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) I find the following in the British and Commonwealth section:
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Libluini posted:What is the firefly? I never heard of a British tank with that name. Assuming that's not  : A sherman with a 17pdr crammed into the turret.e;fb In an effort to be more useful: It was a spectralent fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jan 18, 2016 |
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Jan 18, 2016 00:50
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Bonus fact: Both the US and UK had both a plane and armoured vehicle which shared a name; the UK's firefly and firefly, and the US's hellcat and hellcat. Kind of pointless fact I guess. Also checking, the firefly was literally equipped to Monty's 21st specifically for Normandy, so god knows what the book meant.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:24
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Libluini posted:Interesting, a British counter to the German Tiger tank. I'm thinking I never noticed them because whenever I read something about the war in the West, they got thrown in with all the other Shermans by the authors. It's one of those things that, if you know more about WW2 than "Blitzkrieg, France Falls/Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, wait a bit, Normandy, Germany Beaten, War Over!" in the UK, you've probably heard of. Interesting it's not as well known elsewhere, though, I suppose.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:32
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Fangz posted:If you've played videogames involving the Brits in Normandy you'd know them and love them. Mainly they seem to be the only Allied tanks devs think can match up against the invulnerable hordes of German Panthers and Tigers. "Really" heavy may be an overestimate, but I didn't mean to imply they were typically firing sabot; sabot was an additional cool thing they got. The gun as standard was better (that is, better than the 75mm, not better than sabot. Sabot had better AP properties but unreliable accuracy). The 76mm is more of a surprise; I thought the 76mm was in US service in 1943 also (on hellcats IIRC), but wasn't in a Sherman because there was no anticipated need for it? i.e. when looking for a gun to upgun the Sherman, the obvious answer was "Just stick the 76mm we already developed and make on it, instead of importing the design"? I was aware of the 3:1 organisation, though; it's an interesting pattern that keeps cropping up in British armoured squads, three "standard" vehicles and a heavy-killer variant. Though IIRC, New Zealand groups sometimes concentrated the fireflies together instead of allocating them out on a per-troop basis. EDIT: Didn't most sabot end up going to Challengers*? *the first one. No, not that one, the first first one.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:19
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barrel camo is the best thing.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:40
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feedmegin posted:Hmm, I wasn't aware of this. Certainly not something that shows up in popular media 70-30, and it included the majority of tigers and panthers*, to the extent that the US encountered only a handful of tigers period on the drive to berlin. *though even then not many, since the bulk of german armour was still Panzers and StuGs.
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Jan 18, 2016 12:45
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bewbies posted:Here's a big post I made a while back: I realise I didn't request it, but this is fascinating stuff, thank you.
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Jan 18, 2016 17:58
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I would assume the knowledge (or even widespread sincere belief) that you were fighting an existential war and not just your grandad's diplomacy smack talk getting rough would do something for morale, though. And actually doesn't that bear out comparing the amount of German surrenders on the western front to the amount of surrender on the eastern front?
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Jan 18, 2016 20:45
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SeanBeansShako posted:It's funny really, we got a shitload of arena based WW2/Cold War vehicles out now thanks to that game but nothing infantry based. I'd love a good combined arms game but WW2OL was such a slog and was full of arbitrary restriction bullshit. Acebuckeye13 posted:The thing I love about that tank isn't that they designed it, or even that they built it, but that they somehow managed to lose it for like thirty years until it showed up in the middle of a goddamn field. I want to know more about this story 
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Jan 22, 2016 18:58
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Red Orchestra is good but A: It's limited to a couple of types of vehicle which was a downside and B: It's definitely in the round-based shooter with some extras category.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:58
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SeanBeansShako posted:Back in 2002 even before Planetside was a thing a WW2 themed online always going on FPS is a fantastic idea, especially if you promise an almost realistic scale and sim level vehicle/plane handling and operation. My experience very much was "spending forever getting somewhere before being mown down by an MG parked in a bunker a kilometer away" but it's probably worth noting I would actually like a game where the map sizes were like, a chunk of a WW2OL map. RO2 maps are so tiny and you spawn immediately behind the cover from the enemy and there's no real manuevering room ever. Also it'd be cool if truck/APC driving was an actual thing that was useful. Of course maybe I am wildly overestimating the popularity of my hybrid game idea and nobody would play it. Such tends to be life.
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Jan 22, 2016 20:42
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Ensign Expendable posted:Both of those tanks are fictional and also impossible. They weren't prototypes. Huh; I thought the E-100 and the 10cm tiger were both designs that someone was going to try and make, just germany was too exploded too have the manufacturing capability to do that by the point it got to them? They'd definitely not be prototypes, but I thought they were "real" in the sense that some lunatic in a nazi war office was excitedly flinging his blueprints at people.
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Jan 23, 2016 03:27
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Aaah; I assumed the E-100 was the 128mm one. Apologies; I don't actually play WoT.
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Jan 23, 2016 03:59
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HEY GAL posted:everyone involved is white, if italians are white (???) They mean for the "beta cuck lol" thing.
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Jan 23, 2016 04:30
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Eej posted:Is there a scenario where modern nations go to war and end up salting low earth orbit without resorting to nukes? Like do they have a plan for when every satellite is rapidly orbiting debris and they can't rely on GPS and such? Is everyone gonna be navigating like it's WW2 (except a computer can do dead reckoning for you)? As with most huge but avoidable existential threats the answer is we'll worry about that when we get there!
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Jan 24, 2016 13:10
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