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Ice Fist posted:poo poo you guys beat me to the blood grooves thing. It's like, the only thing I know is totally false about swords. So what were these grooves for? Asking for a friend. Because I knew they weren't for the blood. Obviously. That'd be silly. I'd never accept that explanation.
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Contingency plans like this are always fascinating to read, and I have to think they are pretty fun to actually work on. Even just using publicly available information, making a contingency plan for an alien invasion of New Zealand was a lot of fun.
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Sep 22, 2016 16:56
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HEY GAL posted:i love all battles where the punch line is "yes you can get artillery up that slope" Wouldn't be surprised if there was an infantry commander in Afghanistan going all "There is no way any Tah-lay-bahn are getting up that there hill, no sir, it ain't happening, no way no how, sure as Jesus is the son of God OH poo poo WHERE IS THAT FIRE COMING FROM"
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Sep 24, 2016 11:27
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also, I'm endlessly amused by the Hapsburgs controlling like half of Europe and having an empire that literally hauls money out of the ground in the new world, but is still constantly bankrupt. I mean, what were the Hapsburgs doing? Playing cards with those Genoian brothers? Addicted to art collecting? Having to constantly shell out the florins for massive armies to garrison against the Ottomans? Lol if you're an early modern European monarch or other ruler and you aren't constantly broke as gently caress you are doing it wrong Look that money isn't going to spend itself go to war or something, gently caress fund a new cathedral if you have to ask whether your castle is sufficiently prestigious yet, it isn't also if you are the Habsburgs, you may or may not have to pay the Ottomans off because you lost a war or two (this is not tribute, you see, just a payment agreed upon in a peace treaty. Completely different). I think Geoffrey Parker tells a story where the Spanish make peace with the English and the Amsterdam stock market crashes as a result because now neither side will need new war loans and no one has any idea what to invest in anymore.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:56
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Tias posted:Well, when I checked with my embassy it turned out that, in spite of Schengen, I have to have my passport with me when entering( and particularly leaving) Germany. It might even be legal to ask for a processing fee, but since he bitched out after other passengers confronted him, I doubt it. It's not a processing fee, its a fine. Which German police likes to collect immediately when they are facing foreigners because by the time that whole thing has gone through the process used for German citizens (involving a letter and a period in which the fine can be challenged in court), the foreigner is probably safe and sound back in his home country and then getting to him becomes that much harder. And by God we're not letting someone who went 132 in a 130 zone on the left lane of the Autobahn get away with it if we can help it.
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Sep 29, 2016 12:44
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A carrier does everything the battleship is supposed to do at probably less cost, longer range (with more survivability because it stays further from danger) and with more growth potential as you can upgrade it just by buying better planes. Any battleship that wanted to enter contested waters needed air cover, and for much of the earth's surface, that meant a carrier as escort. So you have to buy the carrier anyway.
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Sep 30, 2016 16:10
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FrozenVent posted:Someone call Spike TV or the discovery channel, cause this needs to be a thing. Anime already did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6yMg94dJ9I
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Oct 1, 2016 23:52
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Polikarpov posted:The US Bureau of Ordnance was really into cramming extra machine guns on tanks for a while. Still do, the Abrams has 3 MGs (coax, Commander, Loader) where most other tanks only have two. They might have changed that in later versions.
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Oct 2, 2016 11:03
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Nenonen posted:Get on with the times and roll out the Rabbi, Ayatollah, Guru and Atheist Professor SPGs! I hear the Atheist Professor SPGs can get knocked out by a Marine with a sufficiently strong right hook though I read that in an email somewhere
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Oct 2, 2016 21:35
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Nenonen posted:BMPs also have rifle ports so all passengers can participate in the drive-by shooting. Which makes more sense when you remember the original idea of mechanized formations having to drive through an NBC inferno where any footmen would have to be wearing heavy hazmat suits and so would be disadvantaged. I never quite understood that logic. Were the gunports sealed in any way? It sounds like it would just produce openings for the VX to seep in, forcing anyone inside to still wear full MOPP gear.
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Oct 3, 2016 10:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:When we talk about how breakthroughs and offensives in WW1 would always peter out because the reserves would always arrive to put a stop to it, can't the artillery shift their fire farther out, from the enemy trenches now occupied by your side's troops, to instead hit where the reserve will be/will come from so that they can't get close to your troops as they re-entrench in the newly taken ground? That was the idea. It just falls apart rather quickly when you don't know what trenches have been taken by your troops (because good luck running a wire through the former no-mans land while the enemy artillery is trying to suppress your reserves moving up) so you may be shelling the areas your guys actually want to move through because things are going better than expected (this is the war-winning push after all). Plus the ranges involved make proper interdiction require airplanes with the range and the payload to actually affect the battle.
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Oct 3, 2016 10:57
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The ABC-defense battalion: we don't need no stinkin' alphabets
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Oct 3, 2016 13:41
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Fangz posted:Hmm, maybe not in terms of shooting lots of people, but extra sets of eyeballs in your transport is not the worst thing in potential ambush situations. The new German Puma IFV apparently has video screens in the infantry compartment so they can help spot targets for exactly that reason. Although presumably it would be preferred if they spotted the ambush before they drove into it.
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Oct 3, 2016 20:47
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:As someone who's read everything he's written, multiple times, it's all bad. Honestly the worst copy paste potboiler stuff you could imagine, it's all terrible. I'm still seriously disappointed whenever I find something that looked like a neat setpiece in a book to have been a shameless copy of some reallife event transported to America.
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Oct 4, 2016 13:12
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lenoon posted:Things are rumbling in the Baker-verse - might have another postscript update coming along soon. Man the Bakerverse is my favourite Marvel series.
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Oct 6, 2016 20:19
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Maybe we would all do well to remember that this thread is not supposed to be for discussing the morality of warfare.
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Oct 10, 2016 20:40
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Raenir Salazar posted:Sigh, my googling is failing me. Have you looked at niehorster?
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Oct 15, 2016 11:14
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OwlFancier posted:I guess I just get kind of grumpy with the battlefield games because to me it seems like there's this steady trend from 1942 onwards where the footage I see just looks progressively more stupid looking, considering the games put so much effort into co-opting real settings and equipment. I think you are confusing BF1942 with one of the ten thousand realism mods that came out for it. Vanilla BF 1942 had the Prince of Wales defend Midway from Japanese troops carrying Stgw. 44s.
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Oct 22, 2016 16:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also some poor Nun / Abbess was put on trial for having a disordered life, WTF Early modernity was HUGE on order. It was probably the most important thing in their entire worldview, to the point where laws weren't so much made to solve problems but to restore a previous state of good order that has been abandoned, as evidenced by the fact that problems exist. There is a huge body of works as to how good order is best achieved, what the monarch should and shouldn't do (mostly things he should do). Order was something handed down from God Himself, with the monarch/authority tasked with implementing it. If order is not present, God will literally rain fire down on your cities and poo poo. Remember that city one day down the road? Burned down because they allowed their women to wear wolf pelts. They were asking for it, really. That poo poo just don't fly. In a more concrete sense, the entire society only works because everyone knows his place instantly and knows how to act according to his status. For that to work, your status has to be instantly visible. In that age, soft power and hard power are very closely related - you are the king because everyone treats you as the king. That's not a tautology, when the Hohenzollers managed to become Kings in Prussia they were super eager to make everyone aware of that fact and the Habsburg Emperors were always insisting on putting them on the kids table with the other markgraves/electors rather than letting them sit with the full kings. This poo poo mattered. So an Abbess having a disorderly life was a big loving deal because a) it directly threatened her community with divine wrath and b) it undermined the very fabric of society because she acted different than what her status demanded.
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Oct 24, 2016 22:57
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Cyrano4747 posted:If the Nazis were really Jewish wizards and Chang Kai Shek had 3 war dragons that he raised from eggs found on the Tibetan Plateau, would the A-Bombs have been necessary? Hypotheticals do offer a good opportunity to look at what lead to an outcome and what merely supported it. I think poo poo like "could the Japanese have actually taken Midway in a contested landing if they had won the naval battle" is a good hypothetical where you can discuss the major issues pretty well.
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Oct 29, 2016 20:05
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OwlFancier posted:Why bother with zimmerit when a faint dusting of mud will suffice? Are you perhaps suggesting that glorious tanks of third reich (never penetrated in combat) are DIRTY!? But seriously, Zimmerit is like the perfect example of German engineering under the Nazis: a complicated yet elegant solution to which no problem existed.
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Oct 31, 2016 20:13
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Ensign Expendable posted:It's hardly comparable, the last T-70s were taken out of service when the war ended, the Stuart is still in service. I think by this point Paraguay is just doing it so they can say they do.
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Oct 31, 2016 21:59
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LostCosmonaut posted:Yep, they were. Most countries built huge AA guns. The US had the 120mm M1 "Stratosphere Gun", and I think Japan had some 120mm and 150mm AA guns. The 5" (12,7 cm) gun of the US Navy was probably the most effective AA weapon of the war once they got proximity fuzes. Smaller guns might fire faster, but anything hit by a heavy shell will just flat out die.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:01
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Grand Prize Winner posted:From my understanding (based on reading this thread and little else), there were 88 AA units and 88 AT units, which were generally expected to do just one job, but either type of unit could be pressed into service for the other duty in a relatively short time. I think you confused Army AA and Luftwaffe AA units (because of course the Nazis had two different outfits doing the exact same thing). But both were supposed to be AA units first and foremost, they were just trained to also engage ground targets. Initially that was more consider an OH SCHEISSE PANZER ability, but Rommel in Africa quickly developed a taste for using them as blocking units against tank attacks. As the war progressed, the AA units became more and more dual-role.
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Nov 12, 2016 14:02
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CoolCab posted:Right, and I absolutely get that but there always felt like there was some sort of...distance, somehow? Like that's all History, all something that happened before my time. I've seen plenty of graves with two dates horrifically close together. There is that opening scene in the animation visualizing the dead of war in WWII posted a couple of pages back that starts out with tracing the lifelines of famous people through the war. For them the war was just a section of their lives, they got pulled into it, participated in it, survived and lived on, no doubt telling stories and having experiences well after the war. And then it shows the hundreds of thousands of lifelines that just stop at some point during the war. It was incredibly sobering. It's so easy to see the dead of war as essentially NPCs in the great video game of history, where the major players survive and tell and influence the story.
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Nov 26, 2016 15:29
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Josef bugman posted:Has anyone read "The face of battle" I was recommended it as a good introductory book to the idea of what it was like to be part of an actual battle. It's not as good as later books at that, but it is very important as one of the first attempts to write a military history that wasn't just endless narratives of divisions marching here and there and treating battles as essentially scientific problems where one side got the solution wrong and showing where they went wrong so the reader could avoid making the same mistake. It was hugely influential in that regard.
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Nov 27, 2016 12:59
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HEY GAL posted:you could try living in dresden instead, where the elbe floods every fifteen minutes Nonsense, it floods only in the winter when the ice creates a blockage, in the spring when the ice melts and in the fall when the heavy rains come. Well, and sometimes in the summer too. Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah the year I spent in Berlin I remember seeing at least two in the news for the city area alone. Well, Berlin is pretty big and was heavily bombed. But yeah, its not exactly considered national news when it happens unless its in a really awkward position and a lot of people have to be evacuated. And even then only on a slow news day. Really the best example is that you have to get your construction lot checked for UXO before you can build a house in Germany, it's a legal requirement.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:42
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MikeCrotch posted:Is that because of the ordeal of being swept by floods from the Czech Republic to Germany or does Dresden just really hate seals or something Given that it is Dresden it was probably the fact that the seal was a foreigner.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:50
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HEY GAL posted:how does the author think people hunted without dying Aren't humans like pretty drat good at navigating by landmarks since that is evolutionary selected for when you are hunter-gatherers? Also something something the story of Martin de Guerre (admittedly a few centuries later, but still somewhat relevant)
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Dec 8, 2016 19:59
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chitoryu12 posted:barely being able to tell anyone how old they were. Point of order: we actually have evidence for that. Early modernity is the time when governments get very serious about census to figure out what the hell their tax base is. So they start assembling all kinds of statistics, including sending commissions into every loving hamlet in their realm and describing the state of each household (a lot of that is hilarious to read, to the tune of "This guy is a noble but somehow thinks he should totally plow his fields himself, which he fucks up so badly it looks like a horde of pigs went through them. Also owns three cows and a horse, but it is old and lame. Also own a couple of chickens. Assessed at x marks."). One of the things they ask for is age, and there are very marked spikes in the numbers of people answering 30, 40 or 50. Which works well enough and shows that people did at least have a rough understanding of numbers, they just didn't necessarily celebrate their birthdays.
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Dec 9, 2016 23:52
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Fangz posted:There hasn't been a lot of major industrial wars and I don't think this is broadly true in most cases. Not much innovation in late war Imperial Japan. I would disagree. There was certainly a lot of innovation, just not in fields that would become important post-war. As cynic as it sounds, the Japanese were the first to employ guided weapons in massed attacks and placed the Allies in a pretty serious situation. There was never any hope of Japan winning the war by any metric, but there were serious concerns on the allied side whether they would be able to bring the war to a quick and decisive conclusion by the summer of 1945. Raenir Salazar posted:I think I recall some articles that they may have gotten further than the Germans on the atomic bomb; and I think they had some late war developments in aircraft and jet engines; maybe they had a procurement process that was a little more willing to pull the plug on napkinwaffle? Lol the Japanese procurement process was at least as hosed as the Germaan one. When your Navy and your army both operate landbased aircraft with different types and different guns, and your army is also operating aircraft carriers, you know poo poo is hosed.
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Jan 9, 2017 21:00
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chitoryu12 posted:A photo I found on Tumblr of an Italian machine gun crew that drew the short end of the stick not only with their gun, but their position: That looks way too big to be an MG.
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Jan 20, 2017 23:21
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MikeCrotch posted:If I remember correctly it wasn't for a long time 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" Fake edit: found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCducL04Iv0 So about ten days later. Not sure if newspapers reported earlier.
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Jan 27, 2017 21:00
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Mr Enderby posted:Well you can probably dig up parallels to modern racism across a lot of ancient and non-western cultures, but I'd say it arises in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. Portugal and Spain had a pre-existing racial caste system, which marked those with Moorish or Jewish ancestry, and barred them certain positions. I would argue that the system you described was not racial in nature but entirely based on religion. It only turned into modern racism when people who converted from one faith to another (usually from Judaism or Islam to Christianity) were still treated like members of their old faith. This was actually a source of conflict between the Church, which held that all Christians were equal, and the local elites, who were quite insistent that some Christians were more equal than others.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:45
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Baron Porkface posted:This has more to do with a chaotic DIY Bronze Age financial system than actual spending. Could you elaborate on this? My only knowledge of financial oddities in the US is the CSA's weird fetish for harbor fees as a source of national income.
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Mar 9, 2017 21:47
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Ensign Expendable posted:That sounds great. Did the Navy try to nab the Army's civilians too? They couldn't, since the Army ran the conscription system. But if they could have, they absolutely would have.
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Apr 10, 2017 20:23
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PittTheElder posted:They're not competing stories. The Japanese were not ready to surrender, as evidenced by their lack of surrending, and pursuit of a negotiated end to the war. And as long as the war is still going, the bomb will be dropped; you don't spend billions of dollars on a new weapons system and then decline to use it. There are a couple of holes with that theory, foremost the fact that the US leaned heavily on the Soviet Union to enter the war in Asia. Stalin demanded supplies and equipment, and only declared war after they had been delivered. The US knew that the Soviets were entering the war, because they asked them to. It makes no sense to ask them to and then try to end the war before they do. The Japanese decision to surrender hinged heavily on the idea that they could avoid an unconditional surrender. The fate of the Emperor is often touted as the central concern, but the Allies very publicly stated that the Japanese would be permitted to choose their form of government, and the Japanese government took that to mean that the Emperor would be kept in some form. What was probably more important was the fact that the key Japanese decision makers wanted to to avoid having to sit through war crime tribunals and thought they could push through a deal where the Japanese military would be in charge of the tribunals and its own demilitarization (for some reason, the Allies were somewhat less enthusiastic about the idea). For some reason, the Japanese government had convinced itself that the Soviets would argue their cause before the Allies, and that they could get their negotiated peace with the backing of Stalin. With the Soviet attack, that entire strategy went up in flames. Claiming that the Allies used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet implies that the Allies knew that the war would soon be over, and that the bombs were not needed to make the Japanese surrender, neither assumption is necessarily true. The Allies fully expected that they would have to either carry out an opposed landing on the Japanese home islands (and the prospect of that was nothing short of terrifying) or starve the Japanese into submission, both options would have taken until early 1946.
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Apr 23, 2017 19:18
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SeanBeansShako posted:Also, they dropped the official Dunkirk trailer today, thoughts? Movie better has a scene where a French general turns out in his finest dress uniform to tell his British counterpart (dirty, ragged) "Go. We will buy you the time." and then there is a twenty minute sequence where the French die gallantly to stop the Germans, to the point where Hitler declares that he needs to preserve his tanks to finish of the French before they can counter attack and leaves the job to Göring. aphid_licker posted:My questions itt keep getting dumber and dumber but what's the difference between a monarch and a dictator? Monarchs draw their legitimacy from the crown their predecessors (usually their ancestors) wore, and which they will give over to their children. They are the legitimate ruler because they are the truebon heir of the last king, and he gave the crown to them like you might leave your favourite DVDs to your children. The crown is an entity that is entirely separate from the person wearing it, and in essence private property being inherited. Dictators draw their legitimacy from strength. They are the legitimate ruler because if you say they aren't you go to jail (if you are lucky) or get shot (if you are not). The line gets blurry at times, and there have been royal dictatorships (Romania in the interwar period being a famous example). Of course, republican enlightenment was big on the idea that the first kings were just dictators that managed to be remembered fondly and get their sons to keep their lands. put simply: in a monarchy, people follow the commands of the head of state because he is the King. In a dictatorship they follow commands because bad things happen if they don't. Take away the king, and the crown remains. Whoever holds the crown can then issue commands with the same authority. Take away the dictator and you have a power struggle at best, and a civil war at worst.
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May 7, 2017 15:29
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Fangz posted:Death rate calculations for medieval times are probably going to be complicated by the fact that the lives of poor people are gonna be far more spottily recorded than the lives of the rich. I kinda doubt there's a lot of 60 year old peasants hanging around. In all honesty I would assume that the only empirically solid data on it comes from archaeology. I've seen age records from the 17th century that just plain made no sense unless you realized that people back then didn't really count their age like we do - you were 30 until you were about 40. Then you were 40 until you were pretty clearly past 50, and so on.
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May 20, 2017 17:31
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Libluini posted:To be fair, Germany had all those things but was still officially occupied until 1998, when we officially got our sovereignty back. When it happened in 1998, I watched the British troops march out of my hometown. It was kind of a somber experience, considering we had lived with the soldiers and their families for our entire lives. That's some conspiracy theorist poo poo right here. West Germany was practically sovereign since 1955 and fully sovereign since 1990. The only people who claim otherwise are neo-nazis and affiliated folks who think the current German government is illegitimate because something something the Geneva convention in connection with Admirality law and the Hague convention on the use of explosive shells...
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Jun 18, 2017 15:58
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