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Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad
Welcome to the new Ask Us About Military History Thread 3: Ask Us About Military History with a Vengeance

If you have a question about military history, ask and someone will answer. They might even know what they're talking about!

First thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3297799
Second thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3585027


Don't be shy! Don't worry if someone asked the same question 20 pages back! :justpost:

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Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Empress Theonora posted:

It's more like "the Sherman is literally the only tank I can identify by sight because I'm a WW2 equipment dunce", actually.

Being a dunce for obsolete equipment that you'll never have reason to identify without the aid of a plaque is a pretty good type of dunce to be, imo.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

bewbies posted:

I think the M35 truck has the B-52 beat by a few years. I can't think of anything older than that off the top of my head.

Is the M35 definitely still in use? All I can find for it is the Wikipedia page, which says it's been replaced, and military surplus sites.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad
I just went through those memes about the middle ages that were posted on the 2nd-to-last page of the old thread and lol. Though I'm not sure what's funnier, that each of those is wrong in some way or that I've seen people in the threads repeating the bad info.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

SeanBeansShako posted:

Well perhaps these images will give you at least help, these photos depict what the average English/British soldier had on them through the last couple of centuries:



I think there's some pretty liberal interpretation with the housecarl and knight in as much as those weapons wouldn't all be carried by one guy. Indeed I don't think the housecarl would carry the spear or smaller axe at all, and I doubt they would carry both a sword and a seax. My only other real complaint is the armor for thee knight. The coat of plates he's supposed to be wearing (the leather thing) I understand to be more typical of 50 years later. This is ironic given that the great helm is of an early 13th century type.

My only other complaint is that the man-at-arms from the "English civil war" has mail sleeves on his arming doublet but no voiders for the armpits by the look of it, which is odd.

I like the personal items in those, generally. They're nice touches.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

ArchangeI posted:

Was it so unusual for a medieval soldier to wear equipment together that was wildly out of date? I mean a helmet is a helmet is a helmet, if you take good care of it it might last 50 years.

The point I was getting at is his equipment is implicitly top-of-the-line, given the coat of plates, but his helm is much older.

It's not unusual as such, though you usually see things be updated and adapted (new grips, new hilt on an old blade etc) rather than used as-is. Also the only way a helm is going to last 50 years is if you never fight in it.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Also the only way a helm is going to last 50 years is if you never fight in it.

this is actually an interesting thing because I've never actually seen a study on damage to plate armour (of which helmets are of course a type) over time. This would require care if set up as experimental archaeology because the higher slag content in medieval iron vs. modern steels would make them more liable to break if repeatedly deformed.

The other thing to consider isç even if reworked by a smith a certain amount of weight is lost to oxidation. Not sure how many times it could be reworked even by a very competent hand.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

if you buy it for me, i'll wear this armor
this will solve my problems and yours at the same time

While I would love nothing more than to beat you over the head for hours on end, I don't have that kind of money lying around.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Grand Fromage posted:


Armor: Torso armor, typically lorica hamata which was a ring mail adopted from the Gauls or lorica segmentata, which is the lobstery looking thing you picture for a legionary. It is disputed how much both were used. Lorica segmentata was much better--lighter and stronger, but was probably more expensive since it stops being used once the empire no longer has the kind of military mass production resources it had during the classical height.

According to Dan Howard segmentata was the inferior armor. First, segmentata was significantly cheaper to produce. Pulling wire of the size used in lorica hamata requires more highly refined iron than the lames of segmentata, and this not only adds to the labour cost but to the material cost, which was the more significant of the two to my understanding. Segmentata was also in some ways inferior to hamata in practical terms. It didn't protect the lower abdomen, and the brass hinges on the shoulders were liable to break and thus disassemble the armour.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Grand Fromage posted:

I ask in a non dickish way, who is Dan Howard? I've not encountered an argument for hamata as a superior armor before and would like to read it.

He's an armour scholar who wrote this article: http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
He lays out his argument of the advantages of hamata vs. segmentata there.

I don't always agree with him, but at the very least his arguments as far as cost & ease of manufacture jibe with my own experience working iron.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

Someone just posted this in the map thread

note the clear superiority of The Empire, specifically Bohemia, and the part where nobody gives a poo poo about England.

Edit: You might even call it..."the heart of Europe" :v:

Bohemia is really more in a stomach or small intestine position. Bohemia, the land of puke.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

House Louse posted:

I remember reading that the trench latrines made very good targets because they attracted flies. Whenever someone went in the flies would fly away briefly, so if you had a sniper watching it he knew there was someone to shoot at. Apparently some snipers killed as many as ten men a day just watching the latrines, although you'd reason that they could just start building latrines out of line of sight. Is this right or just a story?

If the latrines were in LOS then why wouldn't the snipers just look for the soldiers instead of flies?

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad
A lot of Fury was teens trying to write the most hosed up and badass poo poo you can think of. Like that one lieutenant shooting himself while on fire. That and some other stuff came off as so ridiculous as to be laughable.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Endman posted:

It's Warhammer 40k in World War Two, and if you take it as such, it isn't too bad.

I don't think it was campy enough for that, and wanted to be taken too seriously about the horrors of war.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

look at the background of this Bosch!

pikes

Woah look at the foreground that dude has a cat skin on his basket. Nice.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Arquinsiel posted:

A lot of WWII combat situations are the result of a weird balance in tech where things like this are possible but would now just not happen due to our ability to simply blow the poo poo out of them with a single flyover.

Thanks to a mix of reinforced concrrte and urbanization, the cities themselves have become semi-fortified positions in ways they weren't in the past. You can see it now in Aleppo, but there are earlier examples like Stalingrad or Sarajevo.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

V. Illych L. posted:

couldn't it also work as a terror weapon

i mean WP is seriously nasty, chemically speaking

I feel like blowing people apart is pretty terrifying already. If you really need to set things on fire there are more effective methods, as bewbies already mentioned.

The only real reason to use WP as a terror weapon is for plausible deniability.

A Renaissance Nerd posted:

Speaking of, what makes a fuel-air explosive a good incendiary weapon as opposed to just straight high explosive? Is it just because the explosion has a large area and the fuel will spread through enclosed spaces before ignition?

EDIT: Thinking about it, yeah, spreading a fuel aerosol through a space then lighting it would probably be really loving good at lighting things on fire.

High explosives are not great incendiaries, and the shockwave they produce can actually blow fires out.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

nothing to seehere posted:

Terrorist fundraising was alot easier before brown people were involved, it seems.

No, it's still really easy

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

it's a stereotype. these guys played to kill.

Yes and no. Battles were not bloodless affairs but taking prisoners and ransoming them was still common practice. They could even release prisoners en mass, as Carmagnola did after Maclodio (8,000 in that case). This isn't really distinct from the rest of Europe at this time (except the Swiss) but it's still worth mentioning.

Endman posted:

The Italian Condotierri loving ruled the 15th and 16th centuries.

No. They were the major fighting force in 15th century Italy, yes, but they had no major effect beyond that region. In the 16th century meanwhile, they were certainly effective in their own right and often valuable, but they did not make up the core of the armies that the French, Germans, and Spanish brought to the Italian Wars.

Don't swing the pendulum too far the other way.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Foul Fowl posted:

is there a good book to read about these mercenary armies? and also about italian city state politics during that period?

http://www.deremilitari.org/REVIEWS/Mallett_MercenariesMasters.htm
Though Mallett repeats some of the stupid myths of medieval armies being unprofessional and lacking a "science of war", this book is very good overall.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Endman posted:

I apologise for my broad generalisation. I was blinded by the magnificence that is Italian fashion of the period.



The Condotierri ruled.... my heart.

That's Swiss/German fashion, which the Italians probably purloined eventually.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Endman posted:

You've shattered my entire worldview.

I'm sorry. Here's a reislaufer to make up for it

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

swiss, look at the orientation of the crosses

Not all the outfits have crosses and the cross on "M" is very obviously Burgundian.

quote:

edit: and it worked both ways, i've heard that german/swiss mercenary fashion was taken from fashion for rich italians, then modified, then civilians picked that back up from them because mercenaries were sexy

I find that hard to believe. Careful examination of Germanic art from the late 15th century like Dürer shows a much clearer lineage to the 16th century style that we know. The patterned slashing in particular has always been presented to me as a Swiss innovation, and I haven't been able to find any examples of it in late 15th century Italian art. This Dürer from 1489 already shows slashing at the shoulders
http://duerer.gnm.de/tintenwiki/Drei_Kriegsleute,_Berlin_KuKa,_KdZ_2_Tinte

The Italians seem to have preferred longer tunics and tabards, and high collars as we can see in this piece by Lorenzo Costa the Elder from 1488, depicting Giovanni II Bentivoglio and his family:

http://www.wga.hu/art/c/costa/lorenzo/maggiore/triumph.jpg

There are a few exceptions to these fashion trends, but they are exceptions. Consider this detail from Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds http://www.wga.hu/art/g/ghirland/domenico/5sassett/shepherd/shepher3.jpg

Notice that althoug there is someone in a doublet and hose, they are a foot soldier, not a noble, and there is no apparent slashing. Noble clothing in Ghirlandaio is instead in-line with other Italian fashion as we see from this c. 1490 portrait of Francesco Sassetti and His Son

http://www.wga.hu/art/g/ghirland/domenico/7panel/12sasset.jpg

The ostrich feathers also seem to have been a Swiss or German fashion innovation, as almost all the Italian hats I've seen are featherless.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

edit: i wonder if this clothing thing has the same reason why italian noblewomen in the 17th century don't wear corsets as much as their counterparts over the alps--it can be hot down there

Dunno! Italian fashion in this period seems really stuffy for the men (Sassetti has fur-trimmed sleeves!) so maybe things weren't quite as hot as we expect. edit: Alternatively maybe the business season worked a lot like the warring season, so Italian nobles would get their portraits done between autumn and spring, i.e. business time.

Also, look at the bottom left corner of the Adoration detail. The bearded guy is wearing a cowboy hat.

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Aug 20, 2016

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Tias posted:

The beautiful goat has won my heart, and, I think we can safely say, the thread :allears:

Cry havoc and let slip the goats of war

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Endman posted:

Speaking of Italian hats, what was the purpose of the Mazzocchio? (The sausage-like cloth wrap on the top dude's helmet in this picture):



Honestly I'm not sure. I can spitball a couple of guesses though: The first is that it might be soaked in water to help keep the helmet (and thus the head) cool. That looks like it fits the helmet right at the line where it meets the head, but since the wet cloth would be on the outside the water wouldn't run into your eyes (hopefully). The second is that it provides one more layer of protection. A thick layer of cloth like that is surprisingly hard to cut through. Though I doubt it would last beyond two blows, that is still two blows to the head that are considerably softened. The third is that it might be a fashion decision, to resemble the turban-type hats that were somewhat popular in Southern Europe at the time. You can see one on the right hand side of this Berrugete painting from the end of the 15th c: http://www.wga.hu/art/b/berrugue/pedro/dominic2.jpg

Again, these are all just guesses.


Grand Prize Winner posted:

You seem to know a lot about the history of European fashion. Know any good books (preferably with lots of pictures) that provide sort of an overview from... I dunno, some arbitrary point in the distant past until 1840 or so?

I don't, really! My fashion knowledge is pretty much relegated to the late 15th and early 16th centuries because of my love of the Italian Wars, and the 11th & 12th centuries because of my love of everything. Aside from looking at a lot of artwork with a careful eye, I also learn a lot from talking to Hegel, talking to weavers and spinners, reading an article here or there, and going to museums. The National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin is really great for this, because a lot (the majority?) of their collection is bog finds. The bogs preserve clothing very nicely, though they stain it all a kind of deep brown.

Fashion is one of those weird "soft" subjects that few people are interested enough in to pay for serious research, so it often goes by the wayside.

There are still cool things from time to time, especially (in the English language) relating to Shakespearean stuff.

Here's a couple of cool vids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ17XEDxlkk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91hysO_suRo

edit: Ulinka Rublack, who appears at the start of the 2nd video, wrote this book: https://www.amazon.com/Dressing-Up-Cultural-Identity-Renaissance/dp/0199645183 It's probably pretty good!

Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Aug 21, 2016

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Grand Prize Winner posted:

I know a couple costume designers who are deeply into the history of fashion. If I remember later this week I'll see if I can dig anything up. One of my former professors really knows a lot about this kinda thing but we had a falling out so I'm a little hesitant.

I hear ya. Well I'd be interested to know whatever you encounter

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad
Were Russia and France the only states that came out well from that war?

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Koesj posted:

How about them United Provinces.

the biggest losers of the war. still full of dutch people even today.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Cyrano4747 posted:

This is from a bit ago but no, don't.

This is the milhist thread. People doing awful poo poo to each other is pretty much its reason for being.

That post was also prefaced with what it was about, and it was something you have to consciously read and interpret, not like a picture of a dismembered corpse.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

hmmm, good point

but we don't say "armada" so when we think armada we think the armada, even though it just means "armed [noun]" in spanish

armadillo is, of course, the diminutive of that

In a modern spanish-language military context armada means navy.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Raenir Salazar posted:

I can't exactly find if this source I have Here presents GDP figures but it's assessment does provide a somewhat more nuanced view than "left the country weaker":



"Many" had "barely seen" steel seems like a lot of hedging, and doesn't take into account that while steel may have been comparatively rare, China had good iron production all the way back to the medieval period. For a lot of agricultural tools like hoes, shovels, rakes and certain kinds of plough there is very little practical difference between iron and steel.

I also would assume (though this is only an assumption) that knives would be about as common in agrarian China as they were in agrarian Europe (i.e. everywhere) so there would be at least SOME steel that these peasants were highly familiar with. It wouldn't be like modern foundry steel but it would still be steel.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad
Stop piling on. He's already admitted he was wrong and clarified he was speaking from the perspective of certain mistrustful Western political figures, which is valid.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

lenoon posted:

Is this piling on? Rather thought we were all just chipping in a few thoughts about it

When you repeat arguments that have already been made, especially when the person you're arguing against has given up their position, that is piling on, yes.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

OwlFancier posted:

And yet my takeaway is "Why the gently caress did anyone invent the wheellock?"

Like seriously how does this:


Get invented before this:


It looks like someone tried to weaponize a loving astrolabe.

I think the difference in simplicity can be overestimated. Yes they are simpler overall but they still require a lot of forging, filing, and some fairly tricky tempering. I think Cyrano is also correct in saying that the wheelock is more reliable. At the very least, it provides a greater shower of sparks.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Cyrano4747 posted:

Short answer: it's a legacy of how influential English industry and English engineers were in the late 19th century. You hear up with tooling for one industry bought from the Brits then build your own stuff to that spec. Eventually you mostly get onto metric but there is always some remanebt.

Though it does replicate English units, Russian use of inches goes back to Peter I. Peter's huge boner for navies and The West are the cause, not late 19th century industrialization.

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

SlothfulCobra posted:

Yeah, I guess there's sort of an emergency release valve in the brain for that sort of thing.

How did people clean up battlefields back in the day? I mean taking care of the bodies seems simple enough, but how did they clean up all of the blood when there was a battle at a village or city or on somebody's crops? They can't just do daily life when the ground is all bloodstained, can they?

Why not?

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

one sack that tilly's guys were involved in left the central fortress of the place they were sacking as bloody on the inside as though it had been painted and it stayed that way for years, but i can't find the name of the city

"My lord, the crossbowmen all have hand cramps from scrubbing the dirt!"
"drat, if only we didn't have to clean the blood out of everything... But them's the rules."

Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

HEY GAL posted:

that entire incident is loving sleaze as hell

Early_Modern_Period.txt

So I've got a question for anyone who cares to answer: why did the scramble for Africa go so well for the European powers? I have my own opinions which I'll share when I'm not on my phone, but I'm interested to know what the rest of you think.

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Rodrigo Diaz
Apr 16, 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow;
their ease is weariness and sweat;
they have one good day after many bad

Polyakov posted:

Sitting on a horse is hard.
If you suck

quote:

Barely domesticated horses are not naturally inclined to fight.
Good thing they haven't been domesticated since like 2000 BC or before

quote:

Horses are a big vulnerable target that when they charge at you an infantryman will casually shiv it up.
lmao

quote:

Early horses were small and sitting on them in armor is difficult.
Early armor also sucked but people used it

quote:

Chariots are apparently superb.
If you like falling over and dying

quote:

Stopped about the time of the Romans with a brief afterword about stirrups.
for obvious reasons

quote:

There are no upsides to cavalry except in their use as chariots and logistical movers.

1. gently caress. 2. If a horse is being used as a pack animal it is no longer cavalry.

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