HEY GAL posted:

Not judging, everyone loves a good froth. And I didn't fly into a nerd rage when Animal implied that the New Model Army won because they were Protestants, I did some revisions and went to bed like a normal person.

SeanBeansShako posted:

And it made Bismark even smugger than he usually was too. Seriously, poor Napoleon III. The last thing he needed at Sedan was one of the smuggest 'I told you so son' speeches in military history.

Ofaloaf posted:

Smoking Crow posted:

Commentary on the Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar.

Phanatic posted:

I don't get this. The 1903 Springfield is a bolt-action rifle, it's single-shot in the first place. "Feeding normally" is you fire one shot and need to work the bolt if you want to fire again.

Bacarruda posted:

Tang was lost to a circular-running Mark 18 electric torpedo, not a Mark 14.

Bacarruda posted:

Carl von Rosen, Eric's son, was one hell of a dude.

We held a The Most Interesting Man in the World contest, Carl von Rosen would have won it, easy.

Some highlights of his life:
-Hermann loving Goering was his uncle
-flew in a flying circus
-survived being mustard-gassed by Italians in Ethiopi
-bombed Russians in a DC-2
-smuggled secret documents out of the Netherlands during the Nazi invasion
-assigned to be UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld's pilot in the Congo. At the last moment, von Rosen got sick and had to be replaced by another pilot. Hammarskjöld's plane crashed, killing everyone on aboard
-flew sea-skimming mission in a DC-7 flying food aid into Biafra
-converted sport planes into attack aircraft, formed a mercenary squadron called the "Biafra Babies" and then blew up half the Nigerian air force on the ground

Verr posted:

If he could beat the debt collectors to the courtroom doors, that is. Which I think is a good question: I know that the current American military prohibits getting higher clearances based on debt, but was there any similar sort of debt-related hassles for officers of older armies? I can't imagine that very many people would want to mess with a Roman officer/SS commander/one of Hegel's dudes while surrounded by their troops.

\/\/ - Haha, the regular troops codifying IOU's is great.

Ensign Expendable posted:

That's not entirely correct, it was more like "you're going to develop weapons faster if we give you this nice space to concentrate in! But oops, is also prison". The prisons weren't a part of the GULAG system, IIRC.

quote:

You have let down our country and our Red Army. You have the nerve not to manufacture IL-2s until now. Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats. Shenkman produces one IL-2 a day and Tretyakov builds one or two MiG-3s daily. It is a mockery of our country and the Red Army. I ask you not to try the government's patience, and demand that you manufacture more ILs. This is my final warning.
— Stalin

bewbies posted:

It changed the NATO concept for defending western Europe from being basically a static defense-in-depth suppored by tactical fires to being one that relied heavily on counterattacking with armor supported by fires in deep areas. It was largely in response to changes in weapon capability like ATGMs and PGMs that allowed smaller units to delay/disrupt mass armored assaults while mobile protected forces massed for the counter.

HEY GAL posted:

Thanks very much!

Here's something; "What do I care about your dog?" and punches the child square in the face.

Benny the Snake posted:

It was before the world conflict. Russia, Japan, and Germany had a gentlemen's agreement that none would interfere in the other's conquests.



Dr. Seuss was an awesome political cartoonist

JcDent posted:

In a semi related question, why didn't the Nazis build a heavy bomber?

gradenko_2000 posted:

How important was it for the Allies to have airfields on French soil in 1944? Granted, flying from France instead of having to cross the Channel from Southern England meant longer loiter/patrol times and probably less pilot fatigue and faster sortie turnaround, but was there a specific plane/mission that needed the extra distance?

HEY GAL posted:

The Habsburg Girls

MrYenko posted:

I find that, by most modern U.S./Western standards, most flavors of new world Hispanics are hilariously racist about blacks, Mexicans, indigenous South Americans, and sometimes all three, just for variety. [Anecdotal]

JcDent posted:

Also, Paras vs, Helos - helos are kind of succeptible to RPGs, 50cals and such and such. Plus, a big rear end helo convoy needs to cross a lot of space, full of enemy observers and such, and they have trouble with weather, altitude, etc.

Nenonen posted:

Why don't they just build an aircraft that combines the qualities of F-35 and Osprey?

Pornographic Memory posted:

Maybe we could scale that back to a jet that can take off and land vertically, from the same ampihibious assault ships the Ospreys do.

Hogge Wild posted:

The Hague Conventions wouldn't allow it. Even pilots are humans.

HEY GAL posted:

They're terrible places to have at your back because it'll gently caress up your retreat. Also bridging them or finding a ford is a lot of work.

Ensign Expendable posted:

He was quite fond of Russians and their culture and actively dismissed the kill claims attributed to him and other German tank aces as propaganda.

HEY GAL posted:

No, the opposite

Arquinsiel posted:

The line between cause "plane" and effect "shot up" may be long and involve several steps of communication and an artillery barrage, but at the end of the day you just don't want that plane to figure out who you are.

Slavvy posted:

I'm honestly pretty surprised that war hasn't been reduced to a form of ritualised competition where victory/defeat terms are agreed to, and then the amount of time and money a given nation is willing to put into it's contest entry determines the winner. Like formula 1 but with killing.

the JJ posted:

What I mean, I don't think he's HFY because he's actually kinda sour on a lot of H. They can be quite good but also bad. The whole AI-FY is his way of going "nevermind the how, assume we start with a utopia. Okay, how do we gently caress with it." So it's not really AI-FY but AI's good enough to run a utopia (and, since we're dealing with essentially post-scarcity space opera, realistically handle the serious pew-pew aspects of the setting) are kind of part of the package. The OCP novel, Excession, is really quite good. Throwing the an aforementioned OCP at a post-scarcity space utopia and letting that play out. The AI's don't come out super well.

The thing with the Culture novels is that they all take place around the periphery pretty much by default being either citizens to problematic for the utopia to fit well or folks from outside the Culture being drawn into the orbit. Most of the novels deal with, in some way, the ethics of a utopia. Especially w/r/t intervention. This is repeated on micro and macro scales. F'r instance, Excession is on one level about how the AI's handle the OCP (and what the OCP does about them), on one level about the AI's dealing with a cartoonishly vile (but within their own context perfectly moral) tentacle aliens, and then on another level looking at how the utopia processes problematic people (what do you do with someone who want's an exclusive relationship but falls in love with someone more into the freewheeling polyamory more common in the Culture? What do you do with a guy who just... is kinda a self-centered narcissist who doesn't really fit with the Culture?) And it's all kinda muddy as to what the best way forward for any of these folks is, and who you really ought to be rooting for. (Probably not the tentacle dudes, even if, well, they're kinda being hosed over by everyone.)

IDK, it's kinda my sleeper favorite of the Culture novels, and OCP is one of those perfect terms that I never really knew I needed but just really works for some poo poo.

chitoryu12 posted:

Also, the bullets were standardized to the desired oversize for the bore. Black powder is hideously dirty and rapidly clogs up the barrel with byproducts of the lovely combustion, but soldiers in battle don't exactly have time to swab it out every few shots. So rather than deal with their perfectly sized bullets not fitting down the barrel, they would manufacture a few hundredths of an inch oversized so they could be quickly shoved down a dirty barrel. The downside is that oversized bullets obviously make the gun quite inaccurate, hence the infamous "100 yards or less" accuracy of the typical 18th century musket.