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It's an unfortunate convention that we talk about guns merely in terms of calibre, when so many other factors can differ. Not just length, but recoil mechanism, metallurgy, the geometry of the round, whether it uses two part ammo and so on... The famous British 17pdr was also a 76 mm gun, but well, there was a reason why that gun needed a hole cut in the back of the turret and the 76mm upgun didn't.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:51
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SeanBeansShako posted:So uh, what is happening to the on going stuff still being worked on like the Taiping/Polish Soviet War and a few other mega post projects goons in the last thread were doing? they going to keep going and repost the older stuff when they are done? I kind of read this as one thing and my brain kind of melted figuring out how that work. A modded game of Civ gone horribly awry? JcDent posted:Warlord Games have you covered from Biblical warfare (and earlier) to pikes to WWII and even far future. Near future, too, if you count Judge Dredd.  Jobbo_Fett posted:The problem is that "Best X of WWII" often falls flat or has some individual bias that tarnishes the argument. Do you look at the potential a design had? Do you look at the various strengths and weakness and, if so, which variant(s) do you compare? Do you examine combat reports where only tanks fought eachother, or do you allow air-to-ground reports or combined arms actions? Has anyone got Rossmum's teardown of the Panther? Also Ensign's teardowns of the Tiger & King Tiger are things of beauty and really are must reads for any tank grog.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:54
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Ainsley McTree posted:Alright yeah that's what I'm missing. For some reason I thought France and Belgium/Netherlands were allies before the war but Google tells me they didn't join until Germany attacked. There it is then, RIP Yeah, to be clear there was significant coordination between the Belgian government and France, and somewhat less so between the Dutch and the Allies, but it did not extend to "Go ahead and station troops on our soil" since both the Low Countries were strictly neutral. The prepared defenses in the Gembloux gap and along the Dyle line were 100-200km from the jumping-off points of the allied troops, so it took them a couple days to roll forward and get organized. The Allies assumed it would take 8-14 days for the Germans to reach the Dyle in any kind of force, and it took just about four. Even in prepared positions, it takes a while to get everything sorted out. Plus, since the Belgians were doing the funding of the defenses, they weren't that good. They severely underestimated armored and motorized capabilities and just didn't have that much money.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:55
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm? That's a western allied thing. The 75mm the US and UK made were guns designed around the shell and propellant of the famed French 75mm gun. That's a low velocity metric shell. The US did it from the start as a bespoke tank gun, while the British bored out their 57mm 6 pounder, but the main goal was a gun with good penetration by early war standards and a good HE shell. Later in the war they needed a punchier gun with more penetration, so they both made guns in that size range. Both used inches, and 76mm is three inches. It's an accident of history, and doesn't apply to other countries.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:56
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The Panther is simultaneously overrated and underrated. It's Scroedinger's cat.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:00
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Yvonmukluk posted:I know Zaloga put out 'Armoured Champion' to finally put a lid on this and made sure to rate everything both from a commander's perspective but also from a tanker's view. I'm sure there'll never be a definitive answer, but I think we can all agree the Panther was overrated. I just put it down as "okay/good" but great is certainly stretching it. In any case, here's a post I don't think I ever put in the old military thread. Jobbo_Fett posted:Random Assorted Ammunition
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Aug 3, 2016 00:02
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How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ...
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Aug 3, 2016 00:04
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Yvonmukluk posted:I kind of read this as one thing and my brain kind of melted figuring out how that work. A modded game of Civ gone horribly awry? http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/327199-our-problem-child-a-teardown-of-pzkpfw-v-panther/ My long winded grogness can be read here: http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/p/long-winded-articles.html
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Aug 3, 2016 00:05
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The Panther is simultaneously overrated and underrated. It's Scroedinger's cat. Yeah, well, history is a bitch.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:05
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... You can't, not really. Not only can a certain term mean two different things across the front lines, the amount of subunits in one kind of unit can change within one nation throughout a war. A good rule is the "rule of threes": three platoons to a company, three companies to a battalion, three battalions to a regiment, give or take. Usually.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:07
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And then with the soviets during the late cold war it's five battalions to a regiment, and four regiments to a division! Oh but they're weak battalions, like 30 tanks each, so good luck counting one for one!
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Aug 3, 2016 00:12
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... Just got to get used to them. Alternatively, use this system code:
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Aug 3, 2016 00:17
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... Same as most other knowledge, you just need to spend enough time thinking about it and then it sticks. There was a day when Jimi Hendrix only knew one chord, and there was a day when I couldn't remember whether the company commander reports to the platoon commander, or t'other way about. Then I spent a few years reading about stuff and now I can usually remember that infantry companies, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries are rough equivalents of each other.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:23
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If you like army organizational groups you will love ship classifications from the age of sail through to the modern day! Also I am hella bad at tank sillhouettes from that tanker book  I think I picked the M10 about 8 times, which is sad because eventually I remembered it's really easy to identify because of the sick turret spoiler.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:38
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OwlFancier posted:If you like army organizational groups you will love ship classifications from the age of sail through to the modern day! I can barely read Patrick O'Brian so I couldn't even imagine
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Aug 3, 2016 00:43
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1900 onwards is like the best time because the first part of it was spent building bigger and bigger ships with bigger and bigger guns, then they figured out that planes could a) carry bombs and torpedoes and b) could take off from boats and proceeded to spend a long time figuring out how the gently caress to deal with this. The way they figured out how to launch planes from boats was also pretty good.   As uh... was their approach to camouflage. For a brief, glorious time in the first world war there was an aircraft carrier with the hull of a light cruiser sailing around with an 18 inch battlecruiser cannon stuck on the back and a massive ramp on the front.  The werecraftcarrier. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 00:47
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Dazzle camo will never not be great.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:55
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OwlFancier posted:If you like army organizational groups you will love ship classifications from the age of sail through to the modern day! That entire family looks pretty similar. Or maybe I'm just an American TD racist. 
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Aug 3, 2016 01:52
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spectralent posted:Ah, I can see where that'd be confusing. Essentially every cool head comes to relatively the same place that Harry Yeide did: The bare-bones paper doctrine for the US TD forces was pretty dumb, but putting a gun on an armored chassis and training the hell out of the crew to be flexible and deadly with them Wasn't So Bad. There were also decisions made after the doctrine like the post-Kasserine converting of GMC TD units to towed that was dumb for an army that needed to stay so mobile but McNair was an artillery man so what can you expect. What we ended up getting out of the GMC units was a bunch of guys who were put out front and had the initiative and training to know what they could do, whether it was M10s as artillery support in Italy, M18s working as mobile armored cav in France, or any of them being direct fire support for armored or infantry attacks, we made the best of a situation that could have been a big waste. Yeah I mean considering that the picture depicts four vehicles, two chassis, three guns, and two turrets, I couldn't blame anyone. Ooh, more questions: What kind of ways did ancient armies get through pike phalanxes frontally? I heard of the Persians charging their blade-wheeled chariots through them, but that seems weird in my brain because the horse literally goes before the cart. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 01:59
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Plan Z posted:Yeah I mean considering that the picture depicts four vehicles, two chassis, three guns, and two turrets, I couldn't blame anyone. Doesn't even include the hellcat.
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Aug 3, 2016 02:21
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OwlFancier posted:For a brief, glorious time in the first world war there was an aircraft carrier with the hull of a light cruiser sailing around with an 18 inch battlecruiser cannon stuck on the back and a massive ramp on the front. And yet it wasn't the carrier that crippled a heavy cruiser with the carrier's own guns. That honor would go to escort carrier USS White Plains and its 5-incher. 
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Aug 3, 2016 02:25
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Don't disrespect guns the length of toothbrushes
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Aug 3, 2016 02:33
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OwlFancier posted:
Also remember that they landed on that. Yes there's no deck in the rear. Do you think that stopped them? Yes it did, that ship killed a lot of pilots.
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Aug 3, 2016 02:52
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I did some learning today about an obscure part of naval military history: the South American naval arms races of the early 20th century, specifically Brazil's Minas Geraes class battleships when they were announced as Brazil's unique unit in Civilization 6. They made Brazil the third country in the world, after the UK and US, to order and build modern dreadnought-type battleships, and set off a naval arms race between Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. A Brazilian poster in the Civ6 thread in Games commented they'd never heard of the ships (there were two), and after reading up on their service history I'm not terribly surprised. They had a huge international impact when they arrived, but their history afterwards was less than glorious - both were among the ships that mutinied during the Revolt of the Lash, and the crew of the Sao Paolo (the second of the class) subsequently mutinied again in 1924. The only battles either ship were involved in were internal Brazilian revolts - the Tenente revolts in 1922 and the Constitutionalist Revolution in 1934. Both ships nominally took part in the First and Second World Wars, but didn't do anything noteworthy: they were offered to the British during WW1 but the British declined due to the ships' poor condition and lack of modern fire control systems. Both were top of the line warships among the most powerful in the world when they were launched, but were outdated by the time Brazil entered WW1 and hadn't been maintained well or modernized. They both then served as harbor guard ships during WW2 and never fired a shot in anger.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:12
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Speaking of ships, I'd love if somebody would get down and dirty in detail about Gunboats.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:27
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I think my favorite part of the South American dreadnought race is the Rivadavia class' ordering shenanigans. Brazil bought theirs from Britain to a British design. Chile bought theirs to a British design after a reasonably normal bidding process where political concerns made it a British slam dunk. But the Argentines did something fun. They took all the proposals tendered to an intentionally vague specification (don't want to rule out the best practices now do you?), looked at them, and called for another round with the best aspects of each. They did it again after that over the panicked howling of all the shipbuilders that their trade secrets were being given away. Then they gave it to Fore River, who tendered the lowest bid. It probably didn't hurt that while various members of government favored various European companies, the US had an ally in the owner, editor and naval editor of Buenos Aires' main newspaper, and some hefty assistance from the US government. And that's how US shipyards ended up building a ship with superfiring turrets like US practice, wing turrets like UK practice, a 6-inch secondary battery and three screws like German ships, and an engine and boiler layout like an Italian ship.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:56
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Why did the US suffer less casualties from Iraq than Vietnam?
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Aug 3, 2016 04:45
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If I'm not mistaken, lower casualty rates are generally attributed to improvements in medical technology and training, combined with improvements in body armor.
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Aug 3, 2016 05:20
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Stairmaster posted:Why did the US suffer less casualties from Iraq than Vietnam? They were completely different conflicts, hugely driven by terrain. In Iraq, the USA was able to destroy the Iraqi army in a matter of weeks (?). Was a complete walkover, there was the Iraqi army and then it was destroyed. At which point it was effectively an occupation with an insurgency. In Vietnam, the USA was never able to destroy the enemy army in the field. Largely because it was unable to find it. Throughout the Vietnam conflict, the Viet Cong continued to exist as an effective fighting force and maintained the capacity to engage with the USA army proper, in the field. What the USA was able to achieve in Iraq in a matter of weeks, it failed to ever achieve in Vietnam. drat Jungle. Very simplified overview.
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Aug 3, 2016 05:34
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P-Mack posted:Would it be fair to say that the invasion of France, and Russia for that matter, depended heavily on the defenders making a poo poo ton of mistakes, large and small? I just get the impression that gay black Hitler is really facing an uphill fight just to reproduce Germany's historical performance, let alone do that and also add that one weird trick wehraboos think would win the war. It seems like, on the macro scale, the side that eventually lost started out with less resources, spent them at a pretty commensurate rate to the side that eventually won, finally ran out, and had to surrender. The whole thing was in one sense a bet that their enemies wouldn't want to spend all those lives, all that money, all that material, so soon after the last insanely devastating war. This is all with the benefit of hindsight though of course
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Aug 3, 2016 06:03
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P-Mack posted:Pyke and schottte Du mener pik og skud?  BattleMoose posted:They were completely different conflicts, hugely driven by terrain. All cogent points, I'd add that the US forces were not permitted to invade north Vietnam on the ground and rout their main armies and demolish/occupy their production facilities for good (which is what happened in Iraq right away) for political reasons, out of fears that it would start a world war involving China and/or Russia. The NVA had no such compunctions, and often entered south Vietnam, where the terrain permitted ambushes of U.S. forces.
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Aug 3, 2016 06:54
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I am going to UK/France soon. Part of my trip I certainly plan on going through the Normandy beaches and maybe spending a night in Caen and so forth. Have people here been through that area before? Can you tell me if there are anything specific I should go to/do? Even if its a little out of the way and worth it, very interested. Will also be in Paris. Thanks!
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Aug 3, 2016 07:25
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See if you can dig up any tours of the Zone Rouge or Zone Jaune, the former frontline areas of the First World War.
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Aug 3, 2016 07:34
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xthetenth posted:That's a western allied thing. The 75mm the US and UK made were guns designed around the shell and propellant of the famed French 75mm gun. That's a low velocity metric shell. The US did it from the start as a bespoke tank gun, while the British bored out their 57mm 6 pounder, but the main goal was a gun with good penetration by early war standards and a good HE shell. Later in the war they needed a punchier gun with more penetration, so they both made guns in that size range. Both used inches, and 76mm is three inches. My recollection (and wikipedia's assertion) is that this actually became a big thing when the Soviets reverse-engineered the B29 into the Tu4, because the B29's materials were all measured in Imperial units and the Soviets used metric - they struggled to get a conversion that a factory could use. It's interesting to consider how an essentially arbitrary way of thinking - how do we assign value to a unit of distance? - has fundamental implications like this in the real world.
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Aug 3, 2016 08:05
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Let's not forget the Mars Climate Orbiter, that desintegrated in orbit because engineers failed to convert units from imperial to metric 
Tias fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 08:15
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Tias posted:All cogent points, I'd add that the US forces were not permitted to invade north Vietnam on the ground and rout their main armies and demolish/occupy their production facilities for good (which is what happened in Iraq right away) for political reasons, out of fears that it would start a world war involving China and/or Russia. The NVA had no such compunctions, and often entered south Vietnam, where the terrain permitted ambushes of U.S. forces. There was also the border with Cambodia, one the U.S. at least had to appear like they respected while the NVA was able to funnel manpower and supplies to the south by breaching it.
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Aug 3, 2016 08:21
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Endman posted:There was also the border with Cambodia, one the U.S. at least had to appear like they respected while the NVA was able to funnel manpower and supplies to the south by breaching it. Very true, the Laotian one as well, though bombing that one was more palatable. Tias fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 08:26
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Yvonmukluk posted:I kind of read this as one thing and my brain kind of melted figuring out how that work. A modded game of Civ gone horribly awry? There actually was a Soviet/China-war inbetween world wars, but I think he meant two different post series here: The posts about Taiping, and the posts about the war between Poland and the Soviet Union (coincidentally, that one also happened between WWI and WWII).
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Aug 3, 2016 09:04
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HEY GAL posted:the miniatures game? only if our little dudes really exist on a table somewhere and Grey Hunter takes pictures of them every so often As the game would be large and take weeks to play, it'll be digital maps I'm afraid. HEY GAL posted:also the same company makes pike and shotte Now there is a thing. I love the idea of putting HEY GAL in charge of a 30YW army..... I'm just waiting for my kids sleep pattern to settle down a bit, but I'm probably going to do this now. It'll just take me time to sort out the art assets.
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Aug 3, 2016 10:45
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TasogareNoKagi posted:How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ... 
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Aug 3, 2016 11:36
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