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aphid_licker posted:Clockwork solve all problem thats seriously gay black hitler poo poo
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Aug 24, 2016 21:57
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Endman posted:Dragoons are best, but nobody gives a poo poo Lol no go chase some guerillas loser
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Aug 25, 2016 02:31
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hard counter posted:i already do this when playing board-games (monopoly) Don't forget Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet to get in the heads of interbellum air forces.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:48
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Disinterested posted:Would it actually have been worse than what we got, though. you can't possibly be serious
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Aug 25, 2016 20:21
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Disinterested posted:What? No, I'm saying that a long and drawn out WW1 is directly connected to the violent excesses that follow it in the next several decades, so that, regardless of the politics, it's conceivable that a swift and decisive outcome to WW1 by any party would have been better. I picked up Salazar's read, too. Anyway, it's a big leap from "we got the worst possible outcome" to what you said here (which I don't necessarily prima facie disagree with).
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Aug 25, 2016 20:45
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Cythereal posted:However, anyone familiar with WW2 naval history knows that the big-gun warship ultimately proved something of a while elephant. Battleships were important tools of geopolitics, but as far as military use went they were somewhat inconclusive in WW1 and outright of marginal use in WW2. Mahan failed to anticipate the development and maturation of the submarine and aircraft carrier during the 20th century, ships and capabilities that dramatically altered the calculus of geopolitics in general and colonialism in general. Bit of a tough sell on the carrier comment considering he wrote The Influence of Seapower Upon History in 1890, a decade before heavier than air flight was achieved. It's a bit of a tough sell on the submarine, too as they were highly experimental. Peral and Gymnote represented the state of the art at the time, and both were non-viable as war fighting weapons.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:36
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Ithle01 posted:I'm going to have to voice some disagreement that modern soldiers are in more immediate danger at all times than soldiers in older wars because gunpowder weapons and traps have been around for a very long time. Gustav Adolphus had cannon balls shot through his tent at least once. Just about any siege can take the better part of a year and involve snipers, night raids, mining (probably just as dangerous as being a tunnel rat in Vietnam), cannon fire, booby traps, and arson. All of which can kill you quickly and unexpectedly. As for the paranoia of being surrounded by the enemy we know that soldiers had to travel in groups and live in their camps for their own safety when they're not being quartered. Soldiers in the Napoleonic wars generally got at least a few months of the winter off (except the Russia campaign). Of course you were cold and miserable, but you weren't likely to get shot. Even in campaign season, you were mostly marching around and countermarching with very little danger to yourself 95% of days. The Guerilla was really the only exception to that rule.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:09
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Ithle01 posted:I was specifically mentioning the suicides of soldiers during the Russian campaign, but you did remind me that I forgot about the Penisular War and that's another example of soldiers existing in a state of paranoia to stay alive. The Russian campaign was uniquely horrible for everyone involved. It's not representative of the warfare of the period for the average soldier.
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Aug 27, 2016 02:56
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Fo3 posted:I don't understand this at all. Scale is important in mechanized farming, and agricultural protectionism generally makes small farms more profitable or at least viable. You are viewing yield increases as a linear function of capital input; in reality, it's a stepwise function and the capital investments are incredibly large.
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Aug 29, 2016 14:38
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cheerfullydrab posted:You're going off wildly in a lot of directions with this post and you need some facts to give it backbone. The Italians did get some of France. Some was annexed, some was occupied. They were also going to get Nice and Corsica eventually. Also, the Italians had been in Libya before Mussolini, before WWI even, it was pretty important to them. The Italians got a strip of France approximately 30mi x 10 mi including the town of Menton. That's a lovely deal. The promise of Nice and Corsica dated from after Case Anton in 1942, so it has no bearing on Italy's war aims in 1940. Cyrano's point was that the Italians were inherently interested in the area due to their history in the area, not that involvement in North Africa was somehow new.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:45
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Flipswitch posted:What were the factors that kept the armed forces of Italy from succeeding? They seem to have been pretty shoddy throughout the War. Can anyone info dump me on Italy? Don't hear too much about them and a lot of films/books/games would have you think it was just a purely German affair. Also curious on how the Hungarians and Romanians contributed to the Axis war effort, including acting as speed bumps for T-34s. No investment in technical development, especially radar.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:51
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bewbies posted:Re. the Italian navy in the Mediterranean: I've always felt like they should have absolutely owned that poo poo had they put their minds to it and that would have put a lot of other big operations in question. Also it was a great theater for big gun battleship slugfests and they kind of robbed us of that which I'm a little bit bitter about. Campioni and Iachino were cowards, Cavagnari was an idiot, and Italian (and German) land based air should have made up for deficiencies in carriers.
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Aug 30, 2016 03:29
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VanSandman posted:I have a question about naval warfare. Submarines are well and truly hosed once the enemy starts using active sonar, right? Why don't people use active sonar at all times then? Active sonar is basically putting a big sign on your boat saying "THERE IS A BOAT HERE"
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Aug 31, 2016 12:02
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Nuclear submarines generate their own oxygen, and I assume diesel/electric boats can as well. Food supplies is the limiting factor. Nuclear submarines run submerged almost 100% of the time.
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Aug 31, 2016 17:49
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PittTheElder posted:To be technical about it, I don't think it actually says that, what it says is "THERE IS A BOAT THIS WAY". The 'target' of an active sonar pulse can't know the emission time of the pulse, and so wouldn't be able to compute the range directly. Though with a modern boat and long-rear end towed sonar arrays, you might be able to range it if the geometry is right and your computers are setup for it. Well, it says "THERE IS A BOAT ON BEARING X" which is fairly precise even if you don't know the distance.
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Aug 31, 2016 19:28
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StashAugustine posted:See also Hans-Joachim Marseille Was Marseille not cool though?
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Sep 2, 2016 02:34
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Jobbo_Fett posted:He had a black friend that he made sure wasn't mistreated and, by all accounts I've heard, generally didn't give a poo poo about proper dress code or being a nazi. He was just a really loving good pilot. Yeah that's what I thought.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:44
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That doesn't sound significantly different from any of the other WWII air forces, though. Most of that is par for the course.
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Sep 2, 2016 16:49
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spectralent posted:Sure, but I find it pretty hard to believe the Luftwaffe's not got a load of blood on it's hands all the same. Sure, Fallschirmjaeger were certainly not clean - but the fact that they count as Luftwaffe is due to organization, not role. When people talk about a "clean" Luftwaffe, they aren't referring to the Airlanding divisions or the Luftwaffe armored division. If you consider the people flying the planes, and you leave out ground forces, the Luftwaffe is not really demonstrably dirtier than any other major power air force. You could make an argument that a lot of really bad human research was to support the Luftwaffe, though.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:29
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spectralent posted:Yeah, but I don't think you can really play the "other guys were doing it too" card. The Luftwaffe were also guilty of targeting civilians to an unnecessary extent, and by that extent aren't really "Clean", so much as a lot of airforces were "dirty". War is fundamentally a business of doing bad poo poo to other people. Nothing you are saying refutes the idea that a "Clean Luftwaffe" existed - the fundamental point of the "clean X" theory is that relative to other forces the force in question is not appreciably worse. "The other guys were doing it too" is the whole point. "Clean" in the context of "Clean Wehrmacht" or "Clean Luftwaffe" is a relative term based on the concept that they did not actively commit atrocities in the way that the SS did. Sure, they did things that were awful, and violated the rules of war, but no more so than their opponents. The "Clean Wehrmacht" is pretty much conclusively bullshit; the "Clean Luftwaffe" argument seems to have some degree of merit. I'm not saying that the Luftwaffe was some Paragon of Teutonic Knightly Virtue (sup Hermann), just that it was an armed service that behaved much like any other - unlike the SS, significant parts of the Wehrmacht, the IJA, the NKVD, etc.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:16
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spectralent posted:I'm really used to the whole neonazi "Sure the holocaust was bad but what about the nukes? checkmate atheists" kind of degenerate arguments so I do find the "the allies were also bad" defence kind of uniquely annoying, so if I misread you then I apologise. Yeah, no, this is not a "The allies were also bad" defense, it's a "wow the Luftwaffe was surprisingly less lovely than the other branches of the Nazi armed forces" Plus, Adolf Galland was cool.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:18
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spectralent posted:I guess this is kind of an emphasis problem because I would far prefer we also condemned any allies who strafed civilians. Or maybe I'm misreading again and the point is that we condemn both but call them both clean, in which case that sounds weird and not like how I usually hear the term but I'll go with it. Both committed your run-of-the-mill bad warcrimes. I agree "clean" is a bad term that doesn't quite get to the hear of the issue, but it's what's in the discourse so we run with it, I guess. I think it's good to condemn any war crimes, but really at some level all war is just legalized criminal behavior in state interests so like - what is a war crime really? makes u think 
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Sep 2, 2016 18:28
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ArchangeI posted:The comparison to the allied airforces just falls flat on its face. Three years before Dresden, the Germans had already launched a campaign of targeting culturally significant British cities, specifically for their cultural value. The fact that the Germans carpet bombed fewer cities out of existence does not absolve them, because that was not caused by superior ethics but by weaker resources. Had the Germans possessed something like the 8th Air Force, they would have quite happily leveled British cities. A serial killer caught after two victims is not morally less bad than one caught after ten. This is getting in to a really dumb argument (edit: that I think you're mistakenly trying to make) but the Area Bombing Directive dated from early 1942.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:30
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Is HOI 4 any good? It looks bad. I still only play DH and basically only Kaiserreich.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:40
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StashAugustine posted:EU4 is the best paradox game and has all the pikes and Napoleonic warfare you'll need Operational warfare too abstract...
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Sep 2, 2016 19:53
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lenoon posted:Is OIF a widely accepted term or can we lobby for Iraqi Wars: Revenge of the Bush? I've always used GW2
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Sep 6, 2016 20:04
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MikeCrotch posted:presumably since your dudes are trying to avoid a battle in the best of circumstances anyway, trying a pitched battle at night would be pretty pointless. I don't think Hegel's guys are trying to avoid battle, I'm pretty sure that's a dumb Machiavelli falsehood.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:50
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MikeCrotch posted:I'm pretty sure Hegel mentioned earlier that there wasn't such a thing as a decisive battle and keeping your army as intact as possible in the face of constant attrition was the most important thing, so there wasn't the same sense of bringing the enemy to battle and defeating them in the field like there would be in other periods. I believe alternative methods of defeating the enemy like starving out their armies by control of territory and sieges were preferred. I'll wait for her to provide a more expert analysis but if you just look at the 30YW there are a poo poo load of field actions so the thought that armies actively avoided battle isn't directly borne out by evidence.
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Sep 7, 2016 15:57
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MikeCrotch posted:I'm pretty sure Hegel mentioned earlier that there wasn't such a thing as a decisive battle and keeping your army as intact as possible in the face of constant attrition was the most important thing, so there wasn't the same sense of bringing the enemy to battle and defeating them in the field like there would be in other periods. I believe alternative methods of defeating the enemy like starving out their armies by control of territory and sieges were preferred. Everyone has pretty much preferred to destroy the enemy by not fighting a pitched battle throughout all eras of human history.
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Sep 7, 2016 16:13
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feedmegin posted:Well for one thing it takes a lifetime to train a longbowman. Meanwhile crossbows have serious rof issues. Is a crossbow slower to load and fire than a matchlock?
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Sep 7, 2016 22:39
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The A-H photo is definitely of a private since a noncom would have stars on his collar patches, and an officer would have lace and other decorations. He also appears to have a plain isignia disc on his hat but I really cannot make out what the regiment would be. Based on pictures online, he looks like he is K.u.K rather than either of the Landwehr. Where is the man's family from?
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Sep 8, 2016 13:47
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HEY GAL posted:the early modern... I've got a friend who's a professional early modern musician who plays things like this. It's pretty neat.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:44
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Grand Prize Winner posted:The Spanish usually reduced their armor to padded cloth surcoats due to the sweltering heat. They kept the morion helmets. Even so those coats were plenty to stop stone-tipped arrows and macuahuitls, at least for a few hits. Think like the trauma plates in modern ballistic vests. * I was just on St. Croix where Columbus lost a guy due to arrows from the locals. Of course, no word on if the Spaniard was wearing armor.
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Sep 9, 2016 14:27
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You can teach a solider to be proficient with a musket and follow close order drill in the Napoleonic era in something like 9-12 weeks. If you're just taking it down to load and fire and care for weapon, it's probably two weeks. Siivola posted:I'm hardly arguing that one can become a successful archer overnight, but I feel you're seriously underselling the practice required to actually shoot a gun worth a poo poo. Aiming with a gun is just as much about motions and stance (and breathing and trigger pull and), and good loving luck trying to reload a musket in a proper battlefield hurry. At least you can't quadruple-load a bow by accident. Breathing and trigger pull are irrelevant and the standard of fitness is such that literally any 16 year old non-disabled male of the time period should be able to use the weapon. You're recruiting from peasants and city-dwellers who work hard for a living, not shut in internet nerds. edit: loading a musket in a hurry is difficult, hence the emphasis on drill. If you do it a couple thousand times, you won't have much issue. Practicing loading a flintlock 2,000 times is less than a hundred hours.
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Sep 9, 2016 17:48
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The shield wall was a very viable tactic at various points in time, and your read is basically backwards for much of human history - the light cavalry / skirmishers screen for your more decisive arm, whether that's a shield wall or a pike block or line infantry.
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Sep 9, 2016 19:44
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OwlFancier posted:Surely a mortar team would be more effective? I'm pretty sure you do that when you don't have other poo poo available.
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Sep 13, 2016 18:27
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Plus, the M1 only had an effective range of 3,000m - I sort of assume a rifled tank gun in an indirect fire role can reach out a bit further.
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Sep 13, 2016 18:30
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75mm (or 77, or 3-inch) artillery has historically been quite effective.
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Sep 13, 2016 18:51
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Production never fully switched to the 76mm because it fires a much smaller HE shell and most of what a tank does is shoot HE at buildings/people.
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Oct 4, 2016 15:57
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Eela6 posted:I have a bunch of questions about cannon in the late 18th / early, 19th century, if anyone minds taking a crack at it. How is it made? Is it something that can be made relatively ad-hoc, like musketry? (can muskets be made ad-oc? I think so but I'm not sure. Or are people mostly using rifles now?) Or do you need sophisticated facilities? Is most cannon in the colonial wars made in the Americas, or overseas and shipped over? How much training do you need to use it? What kind of ammunition does it use? No artillery would have been produced domestically in the Colonies until after independence, and likely after 1795. Artillery is really difficult to make and require a poo poo ton of infrastructure. Gunners are highly trained specialists, literate and with advanced formal school education, because artillery is math. There are three types of guns: cannon, mortars, and howitzers. The gun or cannon is a direct-fire weapon using primarily solid cast shot (with a short-range backup of canister, essentially a giant shotgun cartridge). The mortar is an indirect-fire weapon using fused hollow explosive shells firing a shell at a very steep angle. The howitzer is an unnatural hybrid between the two, which generally fires shell in direct fire. It has a shorter barrel and larger bore than a gun, and is less accurate in direct fire than a gun. It is useful because it fires shell. I don't know much about the Americas outside of the Colonies, though. Smoothbore flintlocks are still de rigeur until about 1845 or so. The first musket was produced at the Springfield Armory in 1795.
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Oct 4, 2016 18:20
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