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Why did the 30 years war go on for so long?
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Aug 2, 2016 11:00
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Zorak of Michigan posted:They also found that almost all infantry engagements happen at ranges of 300m or less, which means SMGs are a little too weak but battle rifles are too strong. The intermediate weapon is a logical solution to modern combat. Why that distance? I'm suspecting it could be described as a mathematical formula of some sort that could describe it involving distance, speed of a human being with a combat load, and the average hight of a man. And there's another one for fighting in mountains or cities. And I also suspect it works out to be the same distance that's perfect for throwing Roman Javelins or the exact range of half a Mongolian bow can fire because someone took the time to work this stuff out 2000 years ago already.
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Aug 4, 2016 12:06
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Dunkink teaser. For a story involving lots of boats and ships it sure seems to be hiding them for the twist at the end. The ticking noise could/will be replaced by the BAAWAHHH sound from the last 5 years worth of trailers, and I'm hoping it does not become a trend. From the guy who's very happy to see a Stuka coming down to the poetic shots at long distance, I'm not very enthusiastic that the director of The Dark Knight can pull it off. Still, it's a movie about Operation Dynamo, so maybe it will be good? I haven't heard anything to say it will actually mention that the French were 50% of the soilders evacuated, or the very heavy losses they took to save the BEF. Edit- I take it back about lack of boats. This Behind the scene movie shows a MTG, and a cute model Ju87 buzzing around. Comstar fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 11:33
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Plan Z posted:It's not impossible, though. There's the famous story of the KV tank at Raisenai that held up a battalion (I think) for a whole day, inflicting a few dozen casualties and knocking out a few guns and trucks. There were isolated stories around the war of similar deeds, usually involving armor facing an unprepared and/or unexpecting enemy. Nothing on the level of what was depicted at the end of Fury, though. Why hasn't someone made THAT into a movie. 6 poor guys holding off an entire Panzer Division, and 3 of them are buried without names.
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Aug 9, 2016 12:03
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Why hasn't the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s* raid on St. Nazaire ever been made in to a movie? Is it because there is SO MUCH over the top, unbelievable heroics by a group of British Soldiers and Sailors straight out of central casting you can't actually fit it into one movie and have any audience believe it? The stand out is the stammering bomb maker who can't talk to his girlfriend ,who steps over 2 bodies that died a second earlier, takes the wheel of a 5000 ton Destroyer from a Royal Engineer who has no idea what he's doing, and says "Don't worry chap, I've got it". Then he realises at the last second he's headed to the wrong Ending with a shot of a furious Hitler demanding that the NEXT time the British Commando's try something like that again, every one of them will be shot. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * - Apologies for using Jeremy Clackson, but I just spent an hour watching it, and it's even more over the top and unbelievable than I'd known. 5 guys escaped all the way to Spain!
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Sep 4, 2016 01:48
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Pellisworth posted:There's also the argument I've seen that marginal upgrades in technology didn't catch on because the old school stuff was perfectly suitable. The Mesoamericans were familiar with bronze-working technology but stuck with the obsidian blades because bronze was a ton more effort for no obvious benefit. That sounds...wrong. Obsidian bladed swords maybe, but how good is an obsidian bladed chisel, hammer, axe, pick and shovel, even if you discount armour too? Then again, I don't know how they cut the stones for their roads, buildings and temples. Copper tools?
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Sep 9, 2016 11:08
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Why don't their chin straps, actually go under their chins?
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Sep 15, 2016 21:58
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Libluini posted:
That sounds more insane than the typical Warhammer 40,000 siege. The latest If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device - Episode 24: Of Khans and Cages talks about a historical siege, and it not as a bad as the one at Candia. Good Grief.
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Sep 26, 2016 14:29
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Holy poo poo, the siege of Candia was brutal.
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago: An Announcement I have learnt far more about the events of WW1 than I ever knew- particularly about the non-western front, thank you. At this cliff hanger on The Somme, the audience would be calling for Haig to be shot IMHO. With the series ending, he never gets redeemed, but never faces justice either. I don't have a kindle, any other way I can support the blog?
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Oct 5, 2016 09:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was the strategic significance of the Khe Sanh combat base? Why was LBJ and Westmoreland even willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons just to protect this place? Further to that, why was it evacuated a few weeks after the siege? I thought re-running Dien-Bien-Phu-and-this-time-winning what was what Westermoreland wanted.
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Oct 27, 2016 06:50
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Fangz posted:Today's Time Commanders was pretty good. (One side clearly knew a bit more history than the other....) For those of us who can't see it, what happened?
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Dec 20, 2016 11:45
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Trin Tragula posted:I was there and I have no idea what they were supposed to have done, anyone want to help me out? So, why didn't anyone want to negotiate at the end of 1916? Or did they only want to negotiate a "I won, you lost" level of negotiation.
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Jan 1, 2017 07:06
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ArchangeI posted:I'm not sure, I think it got reported pretty quickly. I've seen the Newsreels, and I think it was reported the same week. They tried to spin it hard as "Moscow orders Anglo-American landing in France" and "Poor French villagers terrorized by allied fighter-bombers" This stuff never shows up on the History Channel. You've got German movies of wrecked Allied gliders (and driving a jeep out of it), allied destroyers under fire just off the coast and shots of allied POW's from wrecked Sherman's with 88mm holes (could be a 75?) right in the side of the engine.
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Jan 28, 2017 00:58
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Why didn't the worlds millilitres change to semi-automatic rifles before WW2, considering they all had military approved versions ready to roll by 1918?
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Mar 16, 2017 12:55
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Any war where you General spend millions of lives and several years working out how to be a General is one where they should not be a goddamm General.
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Mar 31, 2017 10:51
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Libluini posted:Myself, I'd like to watch a movie about the Battle of Coronel. It could even get a sequel for the follow-up battle! There is an entire movie franchise just WAITING for Hollywood to hear about it. Jutland is the version of The Avengers when all the past characters show up in one enormous battle.
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May 8, 2017 14:05
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Fangz posted:Some Dunkirk questions: I haven't seen the film but a ship sinking depends on what kind of ship, where the bomb hit, and the size of the bomb. The Lancastria sank and claimed more lives than the combined losses of the RMS Titanic (1,517 passengers and crew) and RMS Lusitania (1,198 passengers) from one bomb that hit would have hit a wamp rat when it went straight down the funnel. A non-military ship being hit by a torpedo will ruin it's day, though then you get ships like the SS Ohio where... quote:The convoy entered Gibraltar in heavy fog on 10 August. A day later, four torpedoes from the German submarine U-73 sank the aircraft-carrier HMS Eagle, killing 260 men, and losing all but four planes. On this day, German bombers attacked the convoy.[10] On 12 August twenty Junkers 88s attacked the convoy, while a further combined strike by 100 German and Italian Regia Aeronautica planes attacked the merchantmen. It was during the ensuing mayhem that the tanker was torpedoed by the Italian submarine Axum[11] and caught fire. Ohio seemed to be out of control. Captain Mason ordered the engines to be shut down, with all deckhands available fighting the fire with the deck waterlines. Lighted kerosene bubbled up from the fractured tanks, while little gouts of flame spattered the deck to a distance of thirty yards from the blaze. Fortunately, the flames were put out and the tanker managed thirteen knots after being repaired. Then the ship gets re-manned, another bomb hits it, gets abandoned again, re-manned, more near misses and finally Spitfires come and save the day which would end it as any hollywood movie should. They have to dodge more uboats and eboats, avoid sailing into a minefield and the entire population of Malta cames out and cheers them in. Why the hell isn't THAT a movie! Deepwater Horizon, eat your heart out! quote:What AA capability did they actually have on the beach? The film mostly depicts just people trying to fire upwards with rifles. They had 40mm Bofers - there's German military pictures taken of the ruins showing them, along with ones blown up before the BEF escaped.
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Jul 25, 2017 11:23
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Cythereal posted:Eh. That didn't happen with the midget submarines captured at Pearl Harbor. They were carefully and very quietly picked over for anything of value, then scuttled. One of the midgit submaries that attacked Sydney Harbour is hanging in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Comstar fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Oct 21, 2017 |
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Oct 21, 2017 05:19
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I know next to nothing about the French failure in Algiers- what happened? They know everything there is to know about a COIN war, take all the lessons home, have a short logistic distance and no external war to worry about. Did they take the wrong lessons on how the Gestapo and German army tried to deal with the Resistance? The pressure of the war caused a large blowback, but who was complaining about how they acted, considering most other European countries had just tried to do the same thing in the decade or so before hand?
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Nov 28, 2017 09:30
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JcDent posted:They seem well informed about going-ons at the front for prisoners. A lot of the POW camps had hidden radio's to listen to the BBC. Late in the war they started printing out the news and reading it to the German guards who would get more accurate news that way,
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Jan 8, 2018 08:16
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The guy from the Chieftens Hatch gives a talk on: US AFV Development in WW2, or, "Why the Sherman was what it was".
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Jan 20, 2018 05:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:The guy in charge of the British-Commonwealth bombing campaign was a interesting dude named Air Marshall Harris, who thought he was literally going to win the war with bombing - and was not on the ULTRA list, so he didn't know how ineffective a lot of night bombing efforts actually were. In the Battle of Berlin (the night bomber's effort to literally destroy Berlin and prove the "break the enemy's morale aspect" of the strategic bombing thesis) the Allied Air Forces lost more heavy bombers than the Luftwaffe built in WW2, and that was just in later 1943 / early 1944. What? I'm sure Harris had access to Ultra - he just chose to disbelieve the intel. Finding out that more German civilians died from car accidents that British bombs for example, or that 90% of the bombers arn't getting within 50 miles of the target or that having 3 different signals coming from the bombers was lighting them up as a Christmas tree to German detectors. Granted I got this all from Most Secret War (which has it's own agenda) but considering the chief of British Science At War knew all about Ultra, I find it hard to believe Harris did not. Still made him just as much a butcher as Haig was, if not more.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:22
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Gort posted:Eh? One of these was intentionally attacking civilian targets, the other was a WW1 general. They're not comparable. They were both very good at getting their own men killed for no appreciable impact until they had several years of practice and the enemy was losing for other reasons. Granted, a solider under Haig had a better chance of survival than an airman under Harris, so there's that.
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Feb 2, 2018 12:27
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Polyakov posted:Not to be overly dismissive of the people who died. But this judgement is incredibly hindsighty, organisational learning curves are very rough and when you are doing it in war people die. It would have been marvelous had bomber command had the experience, tools and capability to fight efficiently at the start of the war, but they didn't, same broadly for Haig, both constantly and consistently tried to innovate but came up against situational obstacles that were very hard to overcome. Bomber command was told for months that their bombing couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view. Then after they had evidence they *could* hit single targets they kept up targeting cities to "break the enemies morale" after winning a campaign where Fighter Command had just proved it won't work. Much like Haig, Harris had (lower level) people telling him he was doing it wrong and took a long time to come to the conclusion that there might be a better way. Haig at least had pretty bad intel (did he ever get rid of his bad intelligence officer?), but Harris has much less excuse.
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Feb 2, 2018 13:14
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Epicurius posted:What do you mean by "Bomber Command was told for monthsale that they couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view"? Bomber command got really good at hitting cities. See, for instance, Luebeck, Hamburg, Dresden... Sure...by mid 1943 and it's half way through the war already. And Hamburg was a one off that didn't repeat for awhile. Which is also right around the time Bomber command starts to have the technology where they *can* hit more precise targets, but now they can hit cities, would rather use it on that. It's not just a matter of looking back and seeing they did it wrong- they were being told during the time that there were better ways of doing things and wilfully and with bloody-mindedness chose not to. At one point the high command was refusing to tell the crews to turn off their (3!) broadcast electronic transmitters which the German night fighters were homing in on because it helped keep the crews morale up. Ignoring the ULTRA traffic that is quite plainly telling them it's a bad ideas and the Luftwaffe was using it against them. Not to mention the same use the Fighter Command had been doing the exact same thing in the night time Blitz. This went on for a year or more and from what I recall wasn't ordered to be stopped till late 1944. Granted, Harris was a product of his time and the creation of such a man was probably inevitable with the way the RAF had been built up. Haig for the same reason for WW1 - the culture was going to end up like that, and for nearly all the armies of WW1, did. But then you get people like John Monash or Dowding of Fighter Command who DO learn lessons and spend the time to work things out that there is a better way. Comstar fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 13:57
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Mycroft Holmes posted:if i may suggest something, a guy named Sbiper on ah.com is doing a really well researched and written Bomber Command story. It's essentially an academic sent back in time and inhabiting harrises body. dude has like 100 books about bomber command he has read just to write up to September 1944. it's really good. https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/and-they-shall-reap-the-whirlwind.333009/ That sounds interesting. What does he do differently or end up doing the same thing?
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Feb 3, 2018 02:31
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Tias posted:I'm not positing a thesis, I'm just saying that their violence is inextricably linked with football. They believe in their bones that they're defending their football club by participating in offs and other fights, and without the club they or the violence literally would not exist. it's quite amazing to me how Games Workshop took that and designed Space Orks and they are still somewhat interesting to read about.
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Feb 5, 2018 09:44
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Gaius Marius posted:Yeah every major power in WWI was acting totally rationally using the information they had at the time. What it led to is unfortunate but if you were put in the same situation with the same information you'd almost certainly make the same decisions. I have to disagree. The war started because of Greed. Everyone wanted more land, more population, more resources and invading someone else would get it.
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Feb 23, 2018 12:14
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mllaneza posted:That's one thing I like about Charlie Stross' Laundry series. When the honest-to-god Elf King's army gates into central England, getting a motorized regiment and a battallion of MBTs heading in their direction is a serious pain in the rear end. You can't just leave us hanging at that. What happens in a battle between the Elf King's army and a motorised regiment and a battalion of MBTs? Wikipedia tell me the Elf King is slain by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone which seems rather anti-climatic.
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May 5, 2018 10:43
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JcDent posted:Is there a war that exhausted the sides so much that the tech level went down during the conflict? Like, the WWI might have had ehat one LP goon called "ulcer battalions" of not really service level troops, but the technology level increased during the war; same goes for WWII. The Greek mainland when the Sea Peoples were active. Writing went away and huge fortifications the later Greeks thought were built by giant Cyclops. The Maya city states lost the ability to build cities after their final wars.
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May 21, 2018 13:19
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Panzeh posted:some of the divisions that entered the ETO were substandard, most notably the infamous 106th ID. So, what's their story?
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Aug 14, 2018 12:05
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FAUXTON posted:https://twitter.com/HNTurtledove/status/1030444016859369472 Now I'm wondering what happened in the other time line where Harry Turtledove wrote an alt-history novel where Donald J Trump becomes president. Maybe the less ludicrous one where Alien Space Lizards invade in the middle of WW2. From what I recall, he didn't discuss Tank Destroyers much,
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Aug 18, 2018 01:59
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 09:57 |
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Clarence posted:
It reads like an SCP report...which is unnerving. They could be fighting Martian tripods, mechs or a ghost army and it still mostly works. So, with the amount of POW's taken it sounds like it was pretty successful?
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Aug 27, 2018 12:48
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). That's the bad news.