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 I can see how early muskets may have been hilariously inaccurate. I've seen a guy try to aim down the sights of a pistol-grip-only 12-gauge shotgun, and it ended rather hilariously badly (busted lip). And that's a modern centerfire cartridge gun; the matchlock has the bonus of setting your face on fire. When did gunstocks start including a bit to brace against your shoulder and allow aiming? In other news:   It eventually made it to India and was rebuilt/upgraded to III* spec (though they didn't bother to mark it as such -- all the numbers match, but the stock doesn't have cutouts for the magazine cutoff or volley sight, and the magazine is a replacement with its original serial struck out and the rifle's number stamped above) and was then exported to the US. We also have a 1915 .455 Webley revolver and a bayonet for the rifle marked March '17. What are the chances that any of these things weren't used to kill a Hun or three? Bringing it all together, the clockwork killing machine of British musketry reached its zenith with the SMLE, in the form of the "Mad Minute" -- putting as many shots as possible into a foot-wide target at 300 yards in 60 seconds. The passing grade was 15 hits; 30 was not uncommon, the record being 36 or 38, depending on who you believe. One simple trick the Boche hate: keep your thumb and forefinger on the bolt handle and pull the trigger with your middle finger. Benny the Snake posted:Gotcha. One last thing, I gather spin-cocking is impractical, but just how impractical/stupid? I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger almost broke three fingers when he tried spin-cocking a real  Different makes, but the stock lever (top) is pretty much the same on all of 'em. As Cyrano said, there wasn't much in the way of reloading on horseback -- the carbines were mostly for dragooning, in a mounted charge it was however many pistols you had, then either break off and hide behind the infantry to reload, or draw your saber and put the spurs to your horse. Cyrano4747 posted:Unless you're a high skilled rider (like most of the trick riders you see in old westerns) you really need to keep a hand on the reins - dropping the reins and loosing control of them entirely in combat would be a bad thing. Using a pistol you can keep one hand on the reins and defend yourself with the other. Polikarpov posted:There was a pistol designed for cavalrymen, the Schofield or S&W Model 3. They were top break cartridge revolvers with an extractor and could supposedly be reloaded on horseback. You would hold the broken-open gun in your reins hand and reload with the other. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 22:18 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 22:13
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Disinterested posted:I mean if you're a good rider and train your horse to some extent you can ride with just your feet. Given what I've seen of Napoleonic-era cavalry manuals/memoirs, and being a mediocre horseman myself, that's also a thing. I forget the source, but back when cavalry was a thing, one of the And then once you earned a horse, you and that horse trained together until the horse knew what you were thinking, and didn't even need your heels to steer. Speaking of cav, I've read that horses naturally avoid stepping on people, and cavalry mounts have to be trained to dance upon the enemy with their pointy hooves. Like, a normal horse will jump over a man curled into a ball on the ground. Is that true? Also, anybody doubting the effect of cavalry has never met a horse in real life. They are huge and terrifying. Tame horses will bite your face off without a second thought. A horse trained for war, running at you at full tilt, even without the lance/saber? Yeah, I'd drop my pike and book it despite objectively knowing the horse won't run into the pike square.
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May 29, 2015 22:43
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HEY GAL posted:Well, not all of them are actually square. The formations that are actually square are pretty strong--flanking doesn't matter unless you flank them while they're engaged in fighting people ahead of them at the same time (which is what happened to Tilly's escuadrons at Breitenfeld), while it's easy for them to replace losses at the front of the formation. I have also heard that the Spanish rotate their pikemen, which would mean a square formation can last longer without everyone getting tired.  Gotta protect the officers. TheChimney posted:Can you paint a picture of combat from that era? I am picturing a bunch of guys in elaborate garb with oversized hats poking at each other with huge pikes, while behind them, dudes with muskets make a lot of noise and smoke.
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May 30, 2015 04:00
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Hummer Driving human being posted:Can someone explain the origin of military radio call sign numbers? Why is the leader/commander the six - as in Big Duke 6. And why are the other numbers the numbers they are? I remember being surprised watching Band of Brothers when one of the radio men is handing the radio to the company commander and says "Easy Red, standby for the six." So they were using this number system at least as early as WWII (if the series is accurate in that way). As far as I can tell, it's just how it's always been. Disambig of "six" goes to this useless thing. 1-5 are platoon commanders, and Six is company CO? I emailed my dad (former SF radioman) asking if he knows, will update when he replies. A thing I do know is that "actual" means you're talking to the man himself. "Big Duke Six" is the CO's radio operator, Big Duke Six Actual is the, well, actual CO. Without the "actual," you're basically talking to his secretary.
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Jun 14, 2015 21:36
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Polikarpov posted:"Fairly Accurate" fire is something like a 1%-5% hit rate at combat ranges. Quoth Wikipedia on the death of Bismarck: "The four British ships fired more than 2,800 shells at Bismarck, and scored more than 400 hits" A good bit of that was at point-blank range, and it wasn't exactly a small target, but still only 14% connected. Naval gunnery: you're lucky to hit the broad side of a barn from inside.
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Jun 15, 2015 11:50
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Given that most battleship combat was over the horizon (15,000 yards/meters was ideal, the Brits opened up on Bismarck from 15 miles/24km), 2 miles/3km is knife-fighting range. A lot of the reason for that 1-5% hit rate is because the target had time to turn away while the shells were in the air. At 3km you're boresighting the big guns and the shells are in the air for a few seconds rather than half a minute. James Cameron's documentary on Bismarck is on the youtubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woDk-H4ZOLY Yeah, Bismarck was scuttled. The Brits weren't trying to sink her -- Rodney was aiming high from point-blank range to sweep away her superstructure, and King George V was standing off and putting plunging fire through the decks. It was brutal calculated murder to get revenge for Hood.
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Jun 15, 2015 13:24
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Phanatic posted:Frequently, they'd go off to scatter their dye-marker payload. Spotting the fall of your shells in relation to your target is crucial for adjusting your aim, and when you have a bunch of ships shooting at the same target you need to be able to tell which ones are your shells and which ones are some other ships, so different ships would have different colors of dye packed into their shells. Taerkar posted:The shells typically are not striking the water full-on, so it's not quite like concrete. Also they can pen concrete for a bit. There's only going to be so much movement underwater until the shell slows enough. the JJ posted:This also led to the practice of 'chasing splashes,' where ships under fire (usually smaller one able to pull off the maneuvers) would try to put themselves right where the last enemy salvo had hit, on the assumption that the enemy, seeing the they had missed, would adjust their aim and so not hit the same spot again. In other news, Dad's reply to the "six" issue is, as I expected, useless because he was a snake-eater and therefore played fast and loose with protocol: Sgt. McGee, MOS 18E circa 1970 posted:Must be after my time. When I was playing army men and run through the jungle the senior man with the callsign was "01 actual and second was 02. but that was just for talking to FACs and Guns and HQ. Out in INJUN country it was military sounding poo poo like BillyBadAss and Cheroot and Heathen...sorry I can't help I wish I could get him to tell his war stories in front of a video camera, but he refuses, so I have to make do with posting them in text and embellishing them to make up for the text medium lacking his enthusiasm. I made a thread of his war stories once, anybody with archives want to repost 'em here? "The first five minutes of Patton" is pretty fuckin' hilarious, and my massaging of the prose doesn't even begin to get close to how he tells it in person. Also military history includes pictures of historical soldiers, right? Here's my pa in-country; the kit hanging on the wall is his, the regular M16 leaning on the chair belongs to the photographer:  TFR Goons have a nerdgasm over that CAR-15 (properly XM177E1 or some poo poo) every time I post that pic. And here he is 15 years ago coaching my brother's Little League Team:  Since then he's gone all white in the hair and shrugged off weird bone cancer and a triple bypass, though he has lost a lot of weight. Sill smokes a pack of Camel Lights every day. And his name is Bill.  Also pretty sure his guys could drink HEY GAL's guys under the table. At one point he was in a B-team camp that could get one resupply a week -- they got two pallets of beer and one of ammo. War, despite what Ron Perlman says, might change, but mercenaries don't, apparently. Dad is a teetotaler now, because of an incident involving jumping out of a second-story window
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Jun 16, 2015 15:43
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MikeCrotch posted:I'd read the poo poo out of your dad's war stories written in that Hunter S Thompson stream of conciousness style. ArchangeI posted:Seriously. If he won't do camera, try and get him to write his memoires. Or just a collection of warstories that may or may not have actually happened (he can't tell you because it's all still classified, you understand). Also, funny that you mention "still classified": Dad's oldest brother was a Major in SF at the same time Dad was a sergeant; my uncle hinted at, but was not allowed to say, what he may or may not have done in Laos and Cambodia in the late '60s. Said uncle died in the '80s before his exploits were declassified, sadly. Yep. Also dad much preferred the M14 he had in basic over the sawed-off M16. At least you can beat a guy to death with the M14 when it craps out on you. The Mattel rifle, not so much. Taerkar posted:Those projectiles would penetrate concrete a lot better than steel, but not for more than a couple of dozen of yards before they either break apart or come to a stop (or the fuse detonates the round). The more they go through the more they're moving out of the way and the less overall inertia they have. They're also not really all that likely to 'skip' if the nose of the projectile makes contact with the water before the side of it. Taerkar posted:Uhh... what? How slow do you think the projectiles were? At extreme ranges the target might move a mile or so but no one would be flinging shells at each other at that long of a range anyways. Rocko Bonaparte posted:I feel better reading that. I thought that was crazy too.
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Jun 17, 2015 07:31
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chitoryu12 posted:Aren't AR-15 stocks even from the 1960s still solid enough to be used to club a guy around the head? It's not exactly like in Green Berets where you just whack the gun against a tree and it shatters. In other news, I'm working on an email to try to convince that government-sponsored murderer what spawned me to let me interview him on video or at least talk him into writing a book. Hey, HEY GAL, are your boys medieval? I'm trying to sell him on the importance of being a primary source with "I know a person who's working on her doctorate, and their war stories we have from 400 years ago are pretty much just like yours." It's actually kinda funny how war, war never changes. HEY GAL's guys and my pappy would get along quite well, I think. All complaining about their officers over a pitcher of whiskey. chitoryu12 posted:Well, you'd be much more inclined in a modern military to just whip out your M9 bayonet and stab the dude instead of carrying around an improvised wooden club. If anything, you'd get yelled at for being completely ridiculous if you tried to whittle a local branch into a beating stick when you have a perfectly good combat knife already on your gear. Bayonets: an excuse to give the soldiers a bigass knife. When was the last time bayonets were used in combat attached to a rifle (outside SF, of course). In 1968, the US Army was taught to swing that M14 like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Buttstroke, stab, shoot the poor bastard off the blade is how Dad was trained. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 08:35
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Teaser of dad's war stories: The First Five Minutes of Patton Vargas takes one in the chest and whines about it Edit: somebody please find the thread, I didn't save the text. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 08:50
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Kemper Boyd posted:so to avoid the whole "open fire next to black powder" thing.  In other news, I like to imagine armies "foraging" as like this:  And that's why towns paid HEY GAL's guys to go around the town and forage in the next town down the road. (There's a better representation of what they do to a town in the next shot, but it's a terrible '50s racist caricature, so I couldn't bring myself to gif it. Though I apparently accidentally left one frame of it in, so you know how it's going to go.)
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Jun 22, 2015 09:55
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HEY GAL posted:This is nifty, but what the hell do they mean by this: I think they might mean "ability to estimate range". Like, most people can look at a thing and say "that's, oh, about two miles away," whereas a guy like Humphreys there could look at the same target and go "hmm ... 3400 yards," and bracket it with the first two shots. I think the main thing here is different definitions of indirect fire -- they were shooting mortars over walls in the 16th century, but the ranges were such that you had a spotter on the parapet yelling corrections down at the gunner; by some definitions that's direct fire with an arc. True indirect fire requires a forward observer, although as has been said, Humphreys wasn't the first: Wikipedia posted:The earliest example of indirect fire adjusted by an observer seems to be during the defence of Hougoumont in the Battle of Waterloo where a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery fired an indirect Shrapnel barrage against advancing French troops using corrections given by the commander of an adjacent battery with a direct line of sight. Of course the modern definitions since around the 1920s are more clear-cut -- direct-fire guns like the ones on tanks have trajectories like a laser, anything pointed up has a range over the horizon and is thus indirect by default. On the subject of indirect-fire artillery, I hope/prefer to think that the 155mm self-propelled gun M109's nickname was inspired by the TV show that was running at the time it was introduced.   In other news, I recently saw on Tumblr a post about how the A-bomb was used on Japan rather than Germany because racism. I mean, racism was definitely a part of justifying doing such a terrible thing to the Japanese, but the main reason it wasn't used against the Nazis was less "fellow white people" and more that the war in Europe had been over for about four months before the Bomb was ready, no? Dresden pretty much disproves the "going easy on Germany because white people" theory. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 17:14
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Monocled Falcon posted:Can I get an effort post on Napoleonic artillery? I'm mostly trying to get a sense of how many pounds of lead are flying through the air compared to other time periods, like the early modern. Artillery shot was cast iron (in Napoleonic times) and steel now. So, no lead  (except for the case of canister shot, which was literally a keg of musket balls, but that was generally a "keep the guns from being overrun" last-ditch effort).Warning: this post will be in pounds and inches because all this poo poo was standardized before the SI was invented. Field artillery in the Napoleonic era was generally 3- to 12-pounder guns, but I don't know the number of guns in a battery or batteries to a regiment. My (amateur) research tends more toward the British Navy. So here's an effortpost on naval artillery of the era: Cannonballs are a lot smaller than most people think; Pirates of the Caribbean had ships trading CGI beachballs. Actual shot is much smaller -- for field guns, around baseball to softball-sized. The guns are named for the size of the shot; a 6-pounder, for example, throws a six-pound iron ball, which is 3.5" in diameter. A 12lb ball is just under 4.5". The biggest common naval guns of the era were 32-pounders, with a bore of 6.1" (42-pounders existed and had been used on ships vying for the title of "biggest swingin' dick on the Seven Seas" in the previous two centuries, but the guns were too heavy to be practical in an actual fight.) Back when ships were oak and men were iron, the RN had a rating system for ships -- a fifth- or sixth-rate frigate had one gundeck mounting 20-25 12-pounders (plus various smaller guns on the weather deck), up to a first-rate, which had 100+ guns on three decks -- usually 12-pounders on the upper, 24-pounders on the middle, and 32-pounders on the lower, for obvious reasons of keeping the center of gravity low; heavier shot means heavier guns, and more than one ship fell over and sank in the 17th century because they had too many big guns up high. Fourth-rate (46-50 guns) and up were considered fit to fight in the line of battle. The smaller frigates, by gentleman's agreement, acted as messengers and scouts and were usually not fired upon by the heavies. Sort of like battleships and destroyers in WWII. Nelson's flagship Victory was a first-rate, having at her prime 104 guns, throwing a broadside of 1150 pounds if the weather was good.  In all but the calmest seas, the three-deckers would have to close off their lower gunports to avoid shipping water through them from waves and the ship heeling over when turning, which reduced their firepower significantly. So all of Victory's guns, on both sides, firing at once would be somewhat less metal in the air than a single 16" shell from Iowa. Also, naval gunfights are  . You look at that little 6" ball, what's it gonna do? Maybe knock over one gun and kill/maim five men, if it penetrates the hull. But it's not meant to penetrate, they even reduced the powder charge the closer they got to the enemy. Ideally the shot would stop about 2/3 of the way into the hull and throw off splinters. Just like non-penetrating hits on a tank, you kill 'em with their own armor. These splinters are big. Like, you could turn one down into a decent baseball bat if you shaved off the razor-sharp edges. One solid hit could wipe out a couple of gun crews. There's a reason peglegs and hooks for hands are a common trope.If you do manage to get a lucky shot through a gunport and knock a gun off its carriage, hooray! That's two and a half tons of metal rolling fore and aft with every swell, crushing men left and right, tearing other guns loose from their ropes, and if the wind picks up it might even decide to leave the ship entirely, punching a bigass hole in one end.
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Jul 16, 2015 14:27
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Yeah, looks to be the stowed position of the snorkel.
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Jul 16, 2015 15:10
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Kanine posted:I'm curious at what point soldiers stopped wearing solid bright colors and generally started wearing greens and tans and stuff that blended in with their environments? Also I'm curious about what factors determined the colors of specific uniform colors through a lot of history. Why did British soldiers in the American Revolution generally have Red Coats? Why did Union soldiers wear blue while Confederates chose Gray? Rudimentary trying to not stick out like the proverbial sore thumb started with the British rifle regiments during the Napoleonic wars. Sharpe and his guys were the 18th-century equivalent of modern Rangers/snipers, so they wore dark green uniforms with black trim to blend in. The Brits wore red during the revolution because they always had (probably originally because red dye was cheap and plentiful). Same with the Union in the ACW -- presumably they originally chose blue because it was the opposite of British red. Colorful uniforms helped with unit cohesion on the blackpowder battlefield -- easier to see who's who through the smoke when your whole army is wearing the same color, and each regiment has a different color trim. As for when it ended, almost all armies (except, of course, the fashion-conscious French) were dressed in drab earth tones by WWI (the French were still wearing blue coats and red trousers as the everyday field uniform well into WWI). Camouflage uniforms in the modern sense, with splotchy color to break up one's outline, began to be adopted by the USMC during WWII and became standard for US forces midway through our involvement in Vietnam. Presumably the rest of the world adopted them on a similar time scale, the Americans are just the ones I know best.
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Jul 27, 2015 01:20
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Jobbo_Fett posted:
Mad minute chat: keep in mind that they started with five rounds in the gun (four in the mag and one in the pipe), and the record is 36 or 38 aimed shots in a minute. That's a respectable number even before you factor in the pauses to slam seven 5-round clips into it. Of course, the Brits had been famous for their clockwork musketry for at least a couple centuries before they adopted repeating rifles, getting up to 5 rounds a minute from a muzzleloading flintlock musket; they kept up the drill well into the SMLE era. Cyrano4747 posted:It pains me to say this, but I don't think the Enfield was inferior. Really it was more or less the equal to anything else given the conditions by the middle of the war. All things considered the war doesn't really change one bit if you give the Germans Enfields, the French Mosins, the British Lebels, and the Russians Mausers. gently caress, of all the major arms the Lebel was by far and away the most out of date but it served well enough. (disclaimer: I own a Great-War era SMLE -- I always forget, of it and the Webley revolver, which is '15 and which is '16 -- and it's smoother than any other bolt gun I've fired.) Speaking of which, is the Mosin-Nagant's reputation for needing a hammer to cycle the bolt due to long storage, or were they like that when new? MikeCrotch posted:However there were plenty of reasons guys could survive an artillery barrage. Firstly, in the early war artillery was overwhelmingly firing shrapnel shells. One of the unique properties of shrapnel shells is that they fire a spray of pellets like a shotgun in front of the shell, so depending on the angle, fusing and speed of the incoming shell the guy in front of you might get minced by ball bearings while you are untouched. Even with HE shells you might get missed by all the fragments. There is also a reason everyone built all those trenches - they are really good for protecting you from artillery. Most attacks would consist of leaving your trench, taking the other guy's trench (if you can) and then hunkering down like gently caress to avoid getting smashed by the inevitable artillery strike.  Obviously if you're down in a trench and they don't manage to get a shell in the trench, you're safe, but as Mike said, arty shrapnel is surprisingly easy to be in the right place to avoid. Also he left out one important scenario for WWI: the mud is so soft and thick and goopy that the shell just blurps into it and bounces off the bedrock without the contact fuse triggering, only to ruin some French farmer's day some decades later.
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Oct 2, 2015 09:28
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MikeCrotch posted:British SMLE had a capacity of 10 rounds so they were not having to reload as much.  Two clips = one magazine, as shown. Put your thumb on top and press down, it's half-loaded (don't worry about pulling out the clip, it'll kick it away when you close the bolt). I'll debate Cyrano on the relative merits/shittiness of the SMLE, but the quoted comment, I will not abide. (Also now that you've made me go and get it, the rifle was made by the Enfield factory in 1916, so the Service Revolver is an even hundred years old. The bayonet we have for the rifle is not original -- dated March 1918, we bought it on eBay from an American soldier who dug up a crate of 'em in Iraq circa 2004 -- but pretty sure all three have put a hole in a German at some time). Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 12:14
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Keldoclock posted:Yes, but their stripper clips were 5-round capacity. Let me repost this: quote:I think with a sufficiently short, light bolt, positive extraction and a well trained operator, 300 yard minute of man at one shot per second should be possible, although I doubt it could be sustained for 60 seconds, or even 30 seconds. That's the beauty of the SMLE, it cocks on closing, as opposed to the Mauser and its many knockoffs which cocks on opening. If it's not full of mud, you can open it with a fingertip, if it is jammed, you're not fighting a spring while you're ripping the case out, and you're slapping it closed anyway, so the mainspring isn't that much an additional hurdle. Murgos posted:Was the trial conducted from a specific position? I.e. Prone, sitting, kneeling, offhand supported, offhand unsupported etc...? Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 12:53
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Tias posted:An uncontrollable tic in the eye. Oh god, how do I remember this but I forgot long division? I dunno specially about the former, but everything I've read confirms the latter. Dude was mainlining Heroin™ and meth, at least, and probably a lot of other poo poo. As my partner (a trans man, who is obviously knowledgeable in such matters) points out, it was probably just poorly refined testosterone supplements, rather than actual bovine jizz. Cyrano4747 posted:(bolt-action rifle chat) Right, the SMLE served its purpose, it was revolutionary when it was introduced in the half-a-step-removed-from-musket era (with twice the magazine capacity as its contemporaries, but still loaded five at a time), good enough in the Great War, and then they left most of 'em on the beach at Dunkirk before they could wear out. And yeah, I know the whole story of the proposed .276 cartridge, which would've been a killer app for its time, but they decided not to got with it for the P14 because they had so much .303 laying around from the colonial wars, and it'd be a waste to throw it all away. Turns out the rimless-case-small-bullet crowd eventually won with 5.56; the P13 was just ahead of its time. On that note: one of the major failings of the SMLE is loading the clips. You have to stack the rounds just so, otherwise the gun jams when the rims catch on each other. But weren't the clips loaded at the ammo factory, and the clips themselves disposable?
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Oct 3, 2015 09:05
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Yeah, "short, magazine", in that it's barely more than carbine-length barrel, and has a magazine. There was a long magazine LE (well, just MLE at the time, having no short version to compare it to) with a more traditionally musket-length barrel before it. Edit: also those abbreviations were pronounced "Emily" and "Smelly" by the soldiers who used them. Edit: The O.G MLE.:  and the various "short" versions:  At bottom is the improved WWII-era No. 4. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Oct 3, 2015 |
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Oct 3, 2015 10:04
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Hazzard posted:This probably belongs in a Photography History thread instead of a Military History thread, but how did they get those WW1 photos? I thought early cameras needed you to stand still for hours to get the picture? I've taken a Photo History class. Mathew Brady's kit had exposure times of several seconds during the American Civil War; by 1914 photography was pretty much the same state as it was in 1985, what with the introduction of gelatin-silver film ~1880. Photographers during the Great War captured images of (rather blurred) artillery shells in the air. I finally emailed Dad with HEY GAL's plea of recording his war stories for future historians, if nothing else. Also asked if he knows which nuke his oldest brother walked toward -- prompted by InediblePenguin asking "so was your uncle in Tumbler-Snapper Dog in '52, or Upshot-Knothole Encore in '53?" Dad claimed to have forgot all his war stories last time I asked him to retell them for y'all, and I'm pretty sure his brother's (SF MAJ) exploits in Laos and Cambodia while Dad was in Vietnam will never be declassified, what with the technically-war-crimes and all. (said uncle died of cancer when I was a wee baby, if he was still around I'd ask him directly) FAUXTON posted:So that's how Patton, a man who decided a new cavalry saber design was appropriate in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and thirteen, ended up in Europe. (Patton was a loving nutjob, but he knew heavy cavalry tactics and went on to beat Rommel at his own game.) (That game being Panzer Blitzkrieg) sullat posted:See, that's just it. A spade can chop a dude, and can dig a trench, or a latrine. Whereas a slick piece of hanzo steel can just do the first thing. So much more efficient to make sure everyone gets a shovel than to design a separate implement. And cavalry would still look pretty cool wielding special cavalry spades into combat. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 17:42
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Re: where do tankers sleep? from several pages back: they sleep on top of the tank. Nice and warm and up out of the mud. Watch Nicholas Moran's other videos, he often gives his opinion of the comfort level of the vehicle's engine deck.
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Nov 6, 2015 17:05
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Tevery Best posted:The 303. Fighter Squadron, which may or may not have been the single highest-scoring RAF squadron in the Battle of Britain, flew exclusively Hurricanes until January 1941. It definitely was more than just barely good enough. hurricanes are poo poo planes for remtards on free dinners. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGp4DvFEgh8
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Dec 30, 2015 15:53
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Jobbo_Fett posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/152_mm_howitzer-gun_M1937_(ML-20) Looks right (Well, you wrote the equation wrong but did the math right -- it's K=1/2*M*V^2, you left the square off the formula but included it in the calculation, and got the right answer). I found a nifty little plug-in-the-numbers calculator; the latest version of the Rheinmetall 120mm's long-rod penetrator is somewhat over 15 million J, an AP shell from a 16"/50 of, say, Iowa's main battery has 355.6 million joules of muzzle energy. (The ship itself, btw, at flank speed and assuming the displacement on wikipedia is in short tons, has just about 6.6 BILLION J of kinetic energy. No wonder the panic stops wore out the rudder pins.  )(edit again: a standard tractor-trailer rig, at maximum legal weight in the US -- 80,000 pounds -- at 65mph, has very nearly exactly the same KE as the depleted-uranium round out of the Rheinmetall 120mm -- 15.3MJ and change. Neat!) Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 18:37
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Eej posted:More than anything else, the idea of Knights having to remember to pay their Knight licensure fees every year is doing the most work in dispelling the mystique of knighthood for me. It's not all that different from paying dues to be in any other club/trade guild/labor union, is it?
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Feb 1, 2016 19:14
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feedmegin posted:Vietnam was an unpopular war which America lost. Not much of a market for people to write their reminiscences in the immediate (call it a decade or two) aftermath, and I guess it's long enough ago now that guys who fought in it don't feel the need to write up their accounts of it decades later, especially as it's still a bit controversial. That's pretty much the reasoning my father used when I (with HEY GAL's help) begged him to write down his war stories for the benefit of future historians. But really, Fallout was right, war never changes -- I'm pretty sure dad and his fellow "advisers" would've got along fairly well with HEY GAL's guys. They even had silly clothes! Girl scout hats and boots with dress uniforms, tiger stripe camo in the field, basically the only regulation thing they had were the medals they couldn't avoid having pinned on 'em. Which, I mean, makes sense to wear "sanitized" outfits in the field when you're up to no good, but he was a white guy in southeast Asia in 1970, maybe at best he could be mistaken for a very confused Frenchman, who the NVA also hated. Though I guess the fact that they all wore the same (locally-made, all labels removed) outfits meant it'd be a war crime to shoot them as spies. Cyrano4747 posted:or just give very sanitized versions that are acceptable for telling the family - the sort of humorous old soldier's tales or sanitized versions of key moments and victories that leave out their buddy with his jaw shot off drowning in his own blood. ThisIsJohnWayne posted:e: And know I'm on a google memoir spree His favorite song of all time is "Bad Moon Rising". That's what they'd play when putting their war paint on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=424T65BTQTY Also them's some real unprofessional Huey drivers at 1:12 -- Dad's pilots never touched the ground in the LZ, because might be mined.If they liked him and they weren't being shot at, they might slow down a bit while truckin' along at three feet AGL. ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Eh, I'd vote for him. Yeah, they were the original boy band, got the job from replying to a newspaper ad, JcDent posted:So is it a richman-ish thing? How would an inheritanceless peasant get arms, armor and training? Other way 'round. If you're rich and don't have an inheritance, you buy your way into the clergy. If only mildly rich, you buy a commission in the military (or Pa buys you your sword and armor which is basically the same as buying a commission later). If second son of a poor dirt farmer, you abscond with your farming implenent and enlist ArchangeI posted:By showing up at his local lord, who may be in need of a warm body.
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Feb 13, 2016 04:14
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Anyone read Burwell Puller Jr. memoirs? I don't care if its good, it's a memoir from a soldier in the Vietnam war titled 'Fortunate Son', wich is so. god. damned. perfect.
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HEY GAL posted:and did he? Nope. He did have a hearty chuckle re: your degree in military history, though. His too-young-for-Vietnam-draft brother has a daughter with a doctorate in English Lit., so at least I'm not the most useless among my cousins. (As opposed to Dad's older brother, who was an SF officer when Dad was a SGT, and that guy's son was the first Ranger into Panama in '89)
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Feb 13, 2016 06:03
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P-Mack posted:I remember hearing somewhere that this was a not uncommon thing for ACW soldiers to do. Most famously (and possibly just a legend) done ~25 years earlier at the Alamo. Edit: which was this week in history, 23 Feb - 6 March 1836. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 28, 2016 |
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Feb 28, 2016 01:19
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Cyrano4747 posted:Note that when you butt stroke someone the stock is supported at both ends which makes breaking the stock less likely. And is being stressed in the proper fore-and-aft direction, if you're doing it right. Ideally, of course, you stab the guy with the bayonet and then smash his face in with the other end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1gYUSgcfZ4 See the bit right at the end (2:43). "Left jab, right cross." Edit: it's terrifying up close -- the first time I showed my SMLE to my pappy with bayonet fixed, he did that move, then complained about how you can't properly buttstroke a guy with an M16 because the plastic stock will break and/or bend the buffer tube. (He had an M14 in Basic, and preferred it over the special snowflake sawed-off M16 he mostly used in-country.) Edit: also, if it comes to fixing bayonets, even in the musket days, things have gone incredibly poorly. Bayonets are still issued, but it's more an excuse to give every soldier a utility knife, nowadays. Well, I guess they were useful for poking at enemy horses up until Victoria's reign, but since cavalry stopped using horses ... Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Feb 28, 2016 |
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Feb 28, 2016 01:30
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chitoryu12 posted:I also got video of a 2.5 pound cannon being fired! I had to balance the DSLR on my knee while plugging my ears to do it, but it worked. Video or it didn't happen. I've been near six-pounders and I ain't deaf. (the ACW-reenacment arty set off all the car alarms tho)
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Feb 28, 2016 07:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIWINsaEpnw Cav song. Point of order: 'twas Blucher's Prussians what routed Bonaparte at Waterloo. Otherwise p accurate. edit: "I's the fustest with the mostest when I fought for Bedford Forrest" that's why the CSA has sympathizers today. Sort of like how the Nazis had the best tanks, the CSA had good cavalry. Edit: I have another complaint, it's "do AND die" not "or" with the Light Brigade. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Feb 28, 2016 |
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Feb 28, 2016 10:29
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Xander77 posted:So here's a question - circa the Napoleonic wars, being good with a bayonet / sword / melee in general is still a valuable skill for your average soldier / NCO / elite unit. At what point is that skill superceded by being a fast / good shot (moreso than it was already in 1800) and at what point did it become completely irrelevant? I'd think it was superseded by marksmanship around the time metallic cartridges became a thing (so it takes 2 seconds instead of 15 to reload) and completely irrelevant (outside of extreme cases as has been mentioned; modern militaries still teach hand-to-hand combat, just in case) around the time every man was issued a bolt-action rifle and could fire as fast as he could shove 5-round clips into it. FAUXTON posted:That's how you fight with a sword, kick the other guy in the sack and then stab him. Swords:  Yeah, I own a katana. But my grandfather either killed a Japanese officer or won it in a poker game from the Marine who killed the officer, so it's legit handmade and poo poo. Also a delightful little artillery saber (the cav version is 3" longer) left over from when Japan tried to be like the West (Type 32, 1899). Never did figure out the maker's signature on the katana:  (Filled in the lines in Photoshop because I didn't have a camera/lighting setup with enough contrast last time I had it apart, here's the original:  )Ainsley McTree posted:On a subject related to ACW weapons: At what point in the development of firearms did line battles stop happening? Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Feb 29, 2016 |
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Feb 29, 2016 04:12
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Fangz posted:If it's a WWII era officer's katana, it's quite likely not *that* legit, honestly. It's made in the traditional way instead of stamped out in a factory like the NCO version and the western-style sword, and has actual ray skin on the grip and eight layers of shims in the guard (the NCO version had a cast aluminum hilt), it's as legit as a WWII piece can be (and may be an older blade put in military fittings, which was common for the really rich officers, put the family heirloom sword in approved fittings and wear it to war; that maker's name is from the 18th century. More likely though, since apprentices took the name of the master who trained then, it's the great-great-etc. grandson of the master smith from 1750).
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Feb 29, 2016 04:30
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Alchenar posted:PS. Napoleon was not a cold steel guy. He was an artilleryman, he remained an artilleryman when he became a general, he never stopped believing in the power of the artillery to win battles. Not necessarily a bad thing. Stonewall Jackson was also an artilleryman, and he had a pretty good run as a general. Raenir Salazar posted:Um why? The Chieftain also works for World of Tanks and generally represents a huge effort at primary research to make the game more accurate. As is The Challenger, the guest speaker in question. feedmegin posted:Turboprops (and specifically Tucanos) have always been a thing for COIN, though. They can fly slower than jets which is handy when trying to shoot up guerrillas in jungles or whatever. Hell, piston radials -- the Douglas A-1 -- lasted well into the '70s for CAS/COIN (the US military gave all theirs to South Vietnam by '73, and the last user retired the Skyraider in 1985.) Of course, nowadays with guided bombs/cruise missiles, for the USAF (not denying that the Super Tucano is great for South American countries fighting drug cartels/poorly-armed rebels), it's more effective/safer/even longer loiter time to have a B-52 or F-15E orbiting at 50k feet, isn't it? And if the poor fucks in the infantry get in so tight a bomb won't do, the Mudhen can still drop down and do a gun run. Dad hated the fast movers in Vietnam because they had zero loiter time and your options were inaccurate napalm or nothing; since then they've figured out precision munitions, efficient turbofans, and put guns back on fighters, and the USAF no longer needs prop planes for CAS/COIN. Cyrano4747 posted:loving lol looking at wikipedia we also got waaaaaaay outproduced in subs. 245 vs. more than 1000 for Germany. ArchangeI posted:Weren't the numbers partially to fool allied intelligence? The highest numbers are well over 4000, with huge gaps in between. Also we kinda dominated the surface, the U-Boats were the only way the Kriegsmarine could get out of port after the US threw in (and they didn't do all that well when they were just fighting the RN, see Bismark's ill-fated first sortie). Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 08:52
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Siivola posted:Textron is apparently making a cheap CAS jet mostly out of off-the-shelf parts. To echo the post immediately before you: JcDent posted:What about upgraded Mig-21s and stuff? Or is it that if you're going jet for CAS, you might as well buy top of the line stuff? Yeah, it's a cheap jet, but anybody doing CAS on the cheap is going to go with Tucanos and everybody that can afford jets is going to buy Vipers for just a few million dollars more (to be fair, the prices wikipedia lists are rather out of date for the alternatives, but I'd assume the Tucano still costs 1/10 what the cheap jet costs, and a proper jet is only twice that or so, especially if the F-35 ever makes it to full-scale production and we start selling off pre-owned F-16s).
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Mar 6, 2016 13:20
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Xander77 posted:The Russian translation (which I generally prefer, as far as Kipling goes) is of two minds - does discharge refer to battles (of which the second Boer War had practically none) or getway/relief? Pretty sure "discharge" means "getting out of the loving Army because I'm well done with this poo poo." Speaking of war poetry, Lord Tennyson can go eat a dick like the Light Brigade did, Kipling knows what it's like to be a racist imperialist... wait, let me try that again. Nah, gently caress it, Kipling was racist and working for the Empire, but drat, dude had a way with words, Tennyson wrote about both cav brigades at Balaclava, Joe R. Kipling is still quoted by SF types today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drBIhnATwuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Nj6OpFssM Me pa's quoted both of those. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs" and "When it comes to slaughter you will do your work on water, and you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im what's got it."
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Mar 6, 2016 15:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a useful capacity. The part I don't quite buy is that we would ever use it in a case where a normal CV group couldn't support the landing, which gets me back to my original idea of throwing out the SVTOL bullshit and putting Marine air on Navy CVNs. All the close same-service integration, none of the being hamstrung by the engineering compromises SVTOL requires. I agree. Even with USAF bombers doing 26-hour sorties and a USAF fighter wing packed up and ready to go and be there in three days with enough supplies and mechanics to last a few weeks until full mobilization kicks in, Naval aviation still has its place; an aircraft carrier is still a hundred thousand tons of diplomacy/Roosevelt's proverbial big stick. But the Marines aren't going to be taking any beachheads without a carrier group (or, by lunchtime, the landlubbers from Bossier City) backing them up, so having their own jets is pointless. Or like you said, even have Marine squadrons on Navy carriers. Once the Marines secure their beachhead and dirt airstrip, the USMC squadron can transfer from the carrier to the FOB and the Navy can gently caress off back out to a safe distance. USMC did well enough without VTOL back in WWII when they were relevant, they can do without now, right? Really the Navy should have forced something similar to the Key West agreement like the USAF did to the Army.
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Mar 10, 2016 02:30
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P-Mack posted:McGee, off topic but I effortposted on your katana's signature a while back. Was it even vaguely helpful? Phanatic posted:And how are the Marines getting the fuel and bombs and parts it needs to keep their planes flying from their dirt airstrip? That's not happening, either, the logistical tail of an F-35 is much, much larger than that of a Corsair or SBD. Marines poo poo bullets and piss JP-8, to hear them tell it. If they want to run a self-sufficient dirt airstrip, let 'em try. That's the joke. Let them have their fun, leave them on their dirt airstrip with no logistics, then push a Key West-type ultimatum when they come back begging for kerosene and MREs. edit: the second part of the quote is the lesson the USMC apparently hasn't learned yet. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 03:23
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Tomn posted:For that matter, what exactly differentiates a class of ship from earlier methods of shipbuilding which didn't use such distinctions? A class is a batch of ships built from substantially the same plans. There were, of course, usually not built all at once, so the later ships in a class would have improvements over the first one to fix any flaws, but on the whole, Iowa and Missouri are like, say, two year models of the same car. It goes way back -- as bewbies said, the French were doing it in the 18th c. The "number of guns" rating system is more akin to "coupe/sedan/van" in car terms, purely a size ranking. Much easier at the time, since every navy was cranking out so many ships of a given size at any time that it wasn't really useful to define them by classes. The class thing became the main way of talking about it probably around the turn of the last century, when there were only relatively few warships being made, and mostly only one or two classes at a time. Also the trend of fewer, bigger guns probably was a big factor -- in Nelson's time, more guns = more murder, but in Jellicoe's, the newest, most badass ships had fewer guns than the much weaker state of the art from as little as ten years prior. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 05:02
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