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I still have to catch up on the last ten pages of the last thread  Can't believe I've been posting in these fuckin' things for nearly 6 years now. Edit: For context, I was finishing up my last year in high school when I first posted on page 47 of the original thread. I've since just finished grad school with a degree in museum education, and I'm starting a paid internship at Air and Space next week. Time flies when you're having tankchat 
Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 23:08
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Goddamn, I got really busy right after the new thread started and it's taken the rest of the month to catch up. It's all been worth it though-this is by far the best goddamn thread on this entire forum.
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Aug 29, 2016 06:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit x2: So, how about that Panther tank? Kind of a piece of poo poo, right? Tank Destroyers, what's up with that?
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Aug 30, 2016 01:02
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Koramei posted:When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? There's a bit in Slaughterhouse-Five IIRC where Vonnegut reminisces about getting strafed by allied fighters while being marched away from the ruins of Dresden. War is hell.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:36
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Cythereal posted:I found this over in the Firing Range of all subforums. Hey, don't you go badmouthing TFR. That Airpower thread is probably my second favorite thread on the forums, right after this one. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Sep 25, 2016 |
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Sep 25, 2016 03:37
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Raenir Salazar posted:Hypothetical question time: Had D-Day somehow failed, the alternative wasn't focusing on Italy, but instead pouring more resources into the already-planned Operation Dragoon. Italy itself was basically a dead-end; going through the Alps would have severely eroded the Western Allies' advantage in manpower and logistics.
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Oct 29, 2016 21:44
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Fangz posted:Don't believe the bullshit about the X-wing, they broke down constantly and were produced in only small numbers. TIE fighters were still the best fighter of the Galactic Civil War. It's pretty much indisputable that the Rebellion would have been better off if they'd stuck with the Y-Wing instead of constantly developing expensive and unreliable fighters like the A-Wing or B-Wing.
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Nov 11, 2016 21:39
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OwlFancier posted:I'm familiar with the propensity of anti-aircraft designers to just glue four of an already good gun together, I just... didn't really think anyone would try it with a 40mm bofors gun. How about a side-by-side 128? 
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Nov 11, 2016 22:05
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spectralent posted:You know, it's weird; I knew 5" guns were sometimes AA guns, but it didn't click with me that a 12.8cm gun is basically the same thing. They were super-AT in my mind. A good number of tank and anti-tank guns were adapted from anti-aircraft artillery, since they share a number of characteristics in common-you want a high-speed shell with a relatively flat trajectory. The 88 is probably the most famous AA gun that was adapted for use as a tank gun, but it's far from alone-other examples include the American M1 90mm gun (Used in the M36 Tank Destroyer and M26 Pershing), the Soviet 85mm gun (Used in the SU-85 and T-34-85), and the German 128 (Used in the Jagdtiger). Edit: Of course, like EE mentioned, there's an upper-limit to these kinds of things-the bigger the gun, the harder it becomes to move (And reload). And while that's not necessarily an issue when your gun is mounted on a ship, a concrete flak tower, or a railway car, it's very much an issue when it comes to towed and tank-mounted AT, where mobility is a massive supporting factor in overall effectiveness. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Nov 11, 2016 |
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Nov 11, 2016 23:44
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Nebakenezzer posted:Tankchat: I remember reading (someplace) that the 128 on the Jagdtiger was actually a different gun from the 128 mm anti-air; the Germans actually developed two different guns with the same caliber? Hahaha I just looked it up to check and of course it was.
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Nov 12, 2016 01:39
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Goddammit, I thought we'd banned all the Empire apologists. Mods?
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Nov 13, 2016 02:40
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>Ask Us About Military History Mk III: the whole thing is kinda gay (in the non-pejorative sense)
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Nov 17, 2016 20:26
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zoux posted:Oh I for sure believe they did it, it's just so perfunctory I was wondering if it had some significance in a military context, as if "compliment" had a different meaning in this case. Googling for "military compiliment" is, of course, useless for this purpose. It's worth mentioning that for his part, Longstreet was an extremely pragmatic guy. He even joined the Republican Party after the war (The only major Confederate figure to do so) so that he could try and prevent the North from completely dictating the terms of Reconstruction. (It's also worth mentioning that because of this, he became utterly vilified by Confederate sympathizers, to the point that he was actually blamed for Lee's loss at Gettysburg for not being aggressive enough on the second day).
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Nov 22, 2016 04:29
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The P-40 was overshadowed later in the war by the Mustang and Thunderbolt, but it was a pretty good fighter for its time and saw widespread use in the US, UK, Soviet Union, and probably a dozen other places.
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Nov 24, 2016 20:21
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spectralent posted:"My Tank is Fight"? This is actually a pretty good suggestion, imo. It's funny, it's got some interesting information, and it's not even age inappropriate (surprising for an SA product, I know). I got a decent kick out of it at his age, at least  edit: Nebakenezzer posted:Thread, this is coming out soon: quote:Christian DeJohn, a published historian completing a masters degree in military and American history, is a former United States cavalry tanker with hands-on experiences as a gunner in an M1 Abrams tank. 
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Nov 25, 2016 04:17
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Well What Now posted:Patton was on his staff at the time and, IIRC, was pretty "uhhh..." about the whole thing. No, that was Eisenhower. Patton was in fact the guy commanding the armored cavalry, and IIRC he was pretty enthusiastic about it.
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Nov 25, 2016 22:27
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Fun fact: The A-10 was designed with input from Nazi Stuka ace Hans Rudel   
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Dec 1, 2016 05:42
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Hunt11 posted:If we are going to go with a religious founder I would go with Muhammad over Jesus. Alternatively, you could go all the way back to Abraham, since without him there's no Jesus or Muhammad.
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Dec 7, 2016 06:02
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Ensign Expendable posted:Suvorov/Rezun, literally everything he wrote is kind of "wink wink nudge nudge" scholarship where he just kind of bring up a lot of semi-relevant and sort of correct facts and then goes "eh? eh? isn't that weird?" to prove his point. There's literally a book (Antisuvorov) written that goes step by step through Icebreaker and explains why every claim he makes is bullshit. Hahaha, for shits and giggles I decided to check out the Wiki page for Icebreaker, and an anonymous user cut out the entire section calling the book out as discredited with the edit reason "Removed biased and unscientific assumption and misrepresentation and hypothesis" Wikipedia really is a true gem.
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Dec 8, 2016 06:13
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OwlFancier posted:How... How does the author think agriculture worked with no concept of time? Crop Rotation is a myth, apparently.
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Dec 9, 2016 05:17
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Pontius Pilate posted:I'm choosing to interpret this as Debate & Discussion peasants. Nah, these are D&D peasants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
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Dec 9, 2016 06:04
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wdarkk posted:It just occurred to me that it's quite possible that a war in the near future might result in people who played World of Tanks/War Thunder commanding real tanks against each other. I've got a friend who drives an Abrams that I play War Thunder with. The future is now.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:08
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Fangz posted:Carriers were really not very relevant to the war the Royal Navy was going to fight in WWII. Convoys were implemented swiftly, sonar was widely used, and on the whole I think the British were significantly the most effective in the area of anti-submarine warfare, relative to the US and especially the Japanese. I'd highly disagree there. Escort carriers were key tools in the fight against U-Boats, and Britain's lack of significant carrier assets in the Pacific directly contributed towards their early losses against the Japanese. Ceding their advantage in carrier aviation burned them badly in the early war, and even by the end of the war they were still highly reliant on US carrier assets in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
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Jan 4, 2017 05:33
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MikeCrotch posted:I kind of see Rommel as a kind of equivalent to Westmoreland, who was regarded as a popular and competent commander of the 101st Airborne and a guy who was in touch with his troops, but when promoted to be in charge of the Vietnam was hopelessly out of his depth and couldn't break out of his mental picture of how the war should be fought, to everyone's detriment (except I guess the North Vietnamese). Whoops, I'm an idiot, he was! Should've checked that before posting. 
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Jan 23, 2017 18:35
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turn it up TURN ME ON posted:Was Patton actually a good tank commander? He had unprecedented success against homeless veterans.
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Jan 24, 2017 06:19
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P-Mack posted:I remember these from the Pauly Shore film In the Army Now. I'm more familiar with their appearance in the seminal classic Battlefield 2
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Feb 1, 2017 16:13
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HEY GAIL posted:handcrafted, artisanal torpedoes, each one lovingly fashioned according to the ancient traditions of italian small-studio craftsmanship Still better than the Mark 14
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Feb 3, 2017 04:59
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Polyakov posted:Fair, i was unaware that it hadnt been verified, it turned up in more than one of the books i read for this so i somewhat sloppily assumed it was true without checking thoroughly, i can certainly believe it was in error as it feels like the sort of thing that might be a mistake, a prayer book sounds more believable especially as just a standard believability test, its a lot more easy to make a lot of small books than a lot of small keys, this being before the days of cheap polymer mass production, ill go remove it until i can find some satisfactory evidence. The use of the Pasadaran does certainly get a lot more sophisticated later on and i will cover that, when they switched to infiltration and proper light infantry tactics but at the start of the war in the scramble to throw back Iraq they hadnt gotten that far, they do eventually get a hierachy and a proper chain of command and communicate with the regular army and its at that point that Iran starts doing very well for a while. Maybe, maybe not... though I don't believe they've ever been confirmed to be a widespread thing, they're definitely mentioned in the memoir/graphic novel Persepolis:  Obviously, that's far from concrete evidence, but I think it does point away from the keys being a mere translation error.
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Feb 4, 2017 06:16
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Wow this sounds like a complete disaster. Their captain was more afraid of getting fragged than he was about the Vietnamese. It seems like there was no plan at all other than to walk around the jungle on patrol hoping you don't make contact with the enemy. Army leadership in general during Vietnam was a disaster. It was a war where the top-level leadership continually attempted to apply tactical solutions to strategic problems, and junior officers were simply focused on trying to survive their 6-month tour. To an extent the Army still suffers from the first issue, but it's hard to overstate just how poorly Army leadership performed during the war from Westmoreland on down.
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Feb 14, 2017 08:35
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chitoryu12 posted:According to the article, this is also when a lot of the people in the war were draftees who didn't want to be there in the first place. It's bad enough when you volunteer for a lovely job that can't be completed and just have to stay alive long enough to go home, but now add in the "I didn't want this job and was threatened with imprisonment if I didn't take it" factor. The thing is, it wasn't just draftees who didn't want to be there (And IIRC, only 1/3 of US Forces in Vietnam were ever actually draftees). The terrible leadership environment under Westmoreland, the lack of measurable progress other than inflated body counts, and the rotation system (Where individual soldiers would be shipped home after a 12 month tour, and junior officers after 6) all served to utterly destroy morale and unit cohesion across the armed forces in Vietnam as a whole. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 18:06
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JcDent posted:Tell us about terrible leadership under Westmoreland before the thread weers back in WWII Japanese DC or ACW. Oh, there's no getting away from World War II, my friend  Getting back on topic, Westmoreland was part of a generation of generals that had risen up as junior officers during World War II. During the war, he had served as an artillery officer and later as a staff officer, and after the war continued to rise through the ranks, eventually coming to serve as commander of the 101st Airborne and later the XVIII Airborne Corps. Along the way, he served as superintendent of West Point, and even completed a brief management program at the Harvard Business School. Much of his rise was due to his friendships and connections-in particular, Westmoreland was well-liked by Maxwell Taylor, former commander of the 101st Airborne during World War II, and Chief of Staff of the Army during the buildup to Vietnam (In fact, it was Taylor who spent the most energy pushing for US involvement in Vietnam, and was the one who recommended Westmoreland for the job of overall commander). Once in place, Westmoreland proved very quickly that he was entirely unsuitable for the job. Intellectually incurious to a profound degree, Westmoreland had no interest in either building up South Vietnamese forces or in conducting proper counterinsurgency operations, and instead was obsessed with an attritional theory of the war: Kill enough of the enemy, and they'll run out of resources and give up. Spending nearly all of his time in his headquarters, Westmoreland was entirely reliant on numbers and reports, including the infamous "Body Counts". Westmoreland was also hostile to alternatives to his strategy-when the Marines began using more traditional counter-insurgency tactics, for instance (Which were, for the most part, fairly successful), Westmoreland rebuked them for not engaging in enough offensive action. There's an anecdote in The Generals by Thomas Ricks that, when Westmoreland was giving a speech to a group of senior officers,he told them he'd learned the highest principles of leadership during his service in World War II. He then proceeded to pull out a small card from his wallet, and began reading off of it-and it turned out to be a bunch of platitudes like "Make sure your men are changing their socks", and other advice that was best suited for squad leaders, and nowhere near applicable to the leadership required of general officers. The man simply didn't have the capacity to understand what was needed of him in Vietnam, and the entire American effort there suffered for it. VVVV Edit: I'd forgotten the exact circumstances of the quote, thanks! VVVV Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 20:22
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VanSandman posted:I must know more, but I don't know where to look. The first thing to look up is probably the USS Forrestal disaster. The tl;dr is that it was an incident where an aircraft carrier stationed off of Vietnam suffered a devestating fire that nearly destroyed the ship, in part due to atrophied DC practices in the aftermath of World War II. The event precipitated a renewed effort in the Navy to create and sustain good DC practices, and is still used as a case study in DC training today.
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Feb 16, 2017 04:24
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Nenonen posted:My Summer Tank is a simulation of a Finnish tank crew who must keep their T-26 in driveable condition even though it keeps breaking down all the time, also you must drink beer and go to sauna to keep your mental and hygiene meters up and win duels to strip spares from Russian tanks Sounds like my last game of Only War.
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Feb 19, 2017 18:57
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JcDent posted:Please tell me more! In the game of Only War I'm currently playing in, we're a bunch of rear-line troopers assigned to an Atlas Recovery Vehicle (Basically a MBT with the guns removed and a crane thrown on top) who've been send into combat due to losses. Hijinks currently involve assaulting an observation post armed with nothing but pintle-mounted .50 cals, towing away and stealing enemy heavy weapons, and somehow shooting down a transport plane and towing away the (Mostly-intact) wreck. There's also the game I ran over Christmas, where the group was a tank platoon that ended up stranded behind enemy lines. That was a fun game, since instead of the typical "Each PC is a different member of the tank crew" setup that most tank-based games go with, I took advantage of OW's Comrade system and made it so that each tank was effectively crewed by two PCs, a driver and a gunner. Having three player-controlled tanks on the table really opened up some interesting tactical scenarios, especially since one of the players was an Abrams driver in real life (And part of the reason why I ran the game was because he was home on leave), so he was available to consult/complain about the military realism of the setting Unfortunately, that game only went for about 3 sessions, but it was a fun concept I'd definitely be interested in trying out again.
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Feb 20, 2017 18:49
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spectralent posted:Running an all-tanks game sounds cool, though I wonder if it wouldn't become somewhat stale if you didn't lean heavily on logistics/psychosocial issues for surrounding material, given the relative lack of variety in most 40k army's vehicle sections. Clearly you've never played Imperial Guard
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Feb 20, 2017 19:56
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Mycroft Holmes posted:i can't stop reading kancolle fanfics. send help. 
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Feb 27, 2017 02:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:Oh, so is that why the F-35 was outfitted with a ball turret. The patented GroverLaser.
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Feb 28, 2017 06:16
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zoux posted:What's the better B-17 story: Memphis Belle or the Amazing Stories episode where they have to do a belly landing and they can't get the guy out of the ball turret so he magically draws some cartoon landing gears that become real and he escapes when they land? Old 666 hands-down.
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Feb 28, 2017 21:06
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There is approximately a 124% chance that Modern Hitler would have a lovely DeviantArt account.
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Mar 3, 2017 00:12
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golden bubble posted:How the hell was slavery still profitable with that level of mortality? Could they just buy slaves for pennies on the dollar? IIRC Sugar was insanely profitable.
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Mar 8, 2017 00:56
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