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i just noticed that the makeshift sword-wall is properly sloped upwards, which is a nice touch
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Nov 13, 2016 18:56
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The VT radar-based proximity fuse used by American anti-air munitions in WWII comes to mind.
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Mar 22, 2017 20:12
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That can't be right, can it? Bagration is going on at the same time on the Eastern Front.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:11
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they are (or were) standard in elementary schools iirc, so every public restroom has to have one. which, yes, is obnoxious in the case of one-toilet restrooms in the middle of nowhere.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:07
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did it actually contain wormwood back then?
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Dec 30, 2017 21:12
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the 17th century owns
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Dec 30, 2017 21:41
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Monocled Falcon posted:Anyone know of any cocktails named after noted European conquerors? the french 75 isn't named after a specific dude, but you might be able to get away with it and after a few of them nobody's really going to be able to argue with you
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Dec 31, 2017 06:50
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FishFood posted:it's named after a gun! the famous french 75mm field gun of wwi vintage, or so the story goes. I'm aware, though the literature is actually kind of muddled. The first "75" anyone's ever been able to find in a bar book is completely wild, based around calvados and absinthe. It becomes bubbly-based by the time it's definitively the "French 75" but there's some confusion over whether brandy or gin is the spirit being used (you'll still get one with cognac if you order it in New Orleans today, I think). The gin-based version shows up in the 1930 cocktail book published by the legendary American Bar at the Savoy London, and it's the one that's spread across the world today.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:06
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A possible contributing factor to that idea: "full" (100) proof spirits were supposed to be the norm back then and extremely aren't today. If you just make a lot of really old recipes without keeping that in mind, I'd imagine you'd get something insipid. For the reaaaallly old measurements, you also need to remember that the imperial volume measurements changed in like the 1700s or something.
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Dec 31, 2017 07:10
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Sorry for circling back around to the 1632 arguments, but a Chappe-style mechanical semaphore would have been technologically viable basically as soon as somebody built a good optical telescope, right? Was lensgrinding a developed industry by the 1600s? If so, that seems a lot more viable than rigging up a long-distance electric telegraph line.
Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 20:08
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ChubbyChecker posted:How deep formations did cavalry use in the Napoleonic Wars when charging? Both Napoleonic French and British medium/heavy cavalry charged knee-to-knee, with a line of individual squadrons, each in lines abreast two deep. Competently commanded cavalry divisions usually formed two or more such lines to charge in echelon, to deliver successive shocks to the enemy. Whenever possible, a reserve was kept to the rear made out of squadrons in column, which could be easily controlled and quickly launched for a pursuit or rallied to countercharge. Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 01:05
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aphid_licker posted:Where does the first line go when the second wants to charge? Off to the side? Often, yes. The second line could also open up gaps in its line--or even form into squadron columns--and allow the first line to pass through, though if the first line was obviously routed it could take good officering for the second line to form for its own charge afterwards. This is for dealing with other cavalry or infantry in line, incidentally. If given a chance to charge artillery without interference, cavalry generally advanced in a more open formation, for obvious reasons. Trying to crack competently officered infantry in square with just cavalry was generally an awful idea, but if you had to do it you charged in a column of squadrons against a corner of the square.
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Jun 27, 2018 18:15
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ChubbyChecker posted:Thanks for this and other cavalry chat. i'm gonna be honest, it was an Armored Core reference
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Jun 27, 2018 23:05
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zoux posted:So my question then is: what's the benefit for a nuke powered carrier over a diesel one? I thought one of the top reasons for nuclear powered ships is extreme range without refueling, but a carrier is never going to operate by itself, so it's still going to have oilers or whatever they call them now in the group for the escorts. What are the other advantages of a nuke plant over a diesel one? A bit late but the question of nuclear powerplants on carriers is a bit more complicated. Power density isn't the factor exactly--Queen Elizabeth's generators are rated for 112 megawatts total, which isn't that much less than a Nimitz-class. Neither is endurance/efficiency--nuclear reactors are massively overpriced compared to conventional powerplants over the lifetime of the ship (hence why the QE's designers decided not to go with them), and the carrier is still going to be tied to its presumably conventional escorts. The specific reason nuclear power is great on some aircraft carriers is that nuclear reactors are excellent at generating massive amounts of steam for CATOBAR-style flight operations. It's not an accident that the Charles de Gaulle, the only non-American CATOBAR-equipped carrier, is also the only non-American nuclear carrier.
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Jul 9, 2018 23:35
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zoux posted:The Ford class is nuclear right? But they don't use CATOBAR I mean, once you've started building up the institutional knowledge and expertise for naval nuclear reactors, you're pretty much locked in--that poo poo takes decades to build up, and if you just...stop building nuclear ships it'll be a pain to get that capacity again. There's some discussion that nuclear powerplants will be necessary to deploy vaguely-specified future warfare-ish technologies (read: railguns), though the physics behind that assertion seem dubious to me.
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Jul 10, 2018 01:52
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Zorak of Michigan posted:There are other, minor, benefits to a nuclear carrier. No exhaust gasses coming out of the island means landings are a little easier. I also recall reading that particulates from the ship's exhaust are corrosive to the planes, so nuclear power reduces some maintenance tasks. It's not stuff that would make you decide to go for a nuke plant, but it adds up eventually. The QEs supposedly deal with the turbulence problem by distributing their generators fore and aft, and having two islands instead of one, both of which emit exhaust. No clue how well it works in practice.
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Jul 10, 2018 05:36
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Phanatic posted:The Ford class is absolutely a CATOBAR carrier. The steam catapults are being replaced with big linear induction motors. So there's no requirement to generate a bunch of steam, but that's been replaced with the requirement to generate an additional bunch of electrical power to replace it. future-war-y naval technology like railguns and linear induction launch systems are incredibly power hungry; the hypothetical 64 MJ railguns they're trying to fit onto the Zumwalts would consume something like the entire west coast's generator capacity while firing. but, since you can't actually fit all of california's power plants onto a ship, that energy has to be stored in capacitor banks (or flywheels) anyway. they are actually not very energy hungry in the grand scheme of things, because the power is being delivered over such a short amount of time. as long as the ship has a turbo-electric transmission, which the Queen Elizabeth and Zumwalt both do, it doesn't really matter what's feeding electricity into the system. as an actual amount of energy, 64 megajoules isn't really a lot by the standards of either a nuclear powerplant or a modern diesel turbine. Zumwalt'd (gas) power plants can put out that amount of energy in like a second. storing and shaping the pulse is the hard part. i totally forgot the Fords started out as CATOBAR though. got that program has been a shitshow.
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Jul 13, 2018 02:25
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Chillbro Baggins posted:And those pieces of paper are about stabby-type soldiers, not ... I can't think of a cutesy way to decribe Napoleonic-era light cavalry. The time Bad Cav Island almost got it right? A bit late but Wellington was constantly fuming about his light cav. There's a pretty famous quote in one of his letters where he's complaining about "the trick our officers of cavalry have acquired, of galloping at everything - and then galloping back as fast as they galloped on the enemy. They never consider their situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy - so little that one would think they cannot manoeuvre except on Wimbledon Common: and when they use their arm as it ought to be used, viz. offensively, they never keep nor provide for a reserve." The British heavy cav and especially the King's German Legion were well-respected, though, so half points.
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Aug 7, 2018 21:44
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Well, there's not much point attaching a rocket motor to the back of a railgun shell even if you could pull it off, but they will have a guidance package. People have this idea that naval railguns will just fire slugs of inert metal, but they're not going to--at the ranges that we're talking about you're simply not going to hit anything useful without guidance. A guidance package that can survive tens of thousands of Gs of acceleration isn't easy to make, but it's substantially easier than building a gun with enough mechanical precision to hit a jeep from 150 miles off from a floating ship. Some of the "smart" GPS/INS artillery shells in use right now are in the same zip code as what you'd need.
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Aug 15, 2018 00:47
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my dad posted:THE WORDS!... the Words... the words 
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Aug 17, 2018 10:39
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TropicalCoke posted:the right wing in japan is no joke. japan has no support are troops movement like the united states, but the ultra nationalists love to hang out at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo in their cool cars painted with the rising sun. Yasukuni is also the closest thing Japan has to a military history museum, which is interesting considering they are a dime a dozen in the USA. there's a good, if extremely depressing, museum in chiran in kyushu at the old kamikaze airfield there. you walk through grave markers to get there.
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Aug 27, 2018 23:01
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Incidentally, one thing that gave me fits when I tried playing the Ultimate General games -- in the Napoleonic wars, field guns firing canister had very little trouble outranging and disassembling infantry unit that tried to come at them head-on. Certainly the same thing on a smaller scale appears to have happened at various points during the historical ACW, like at Malvern Hill during the Seven Days' Battle. Every time I try this in Ultimate General games my batteries get shot to hell by infantry firing from outside their effective range. I'm aware that Civil War rifle muskets had a substantially longer range than their Napoleonic counterparts, but the numbers I see are on the order of maybe 300 yards, which even Napoleon's field guns would have been able to easily beat, even firing canister. Is this a game mechanic sort of thing, or am I missing something here?
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Sep 28, 2018 06:08
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as a thread lurker: im getting the vibe that nobody in this conversation is actually chinese or an asian affairs specialist, because y'all seem really determined to jam a round country into a square DAS-KAPITAL/NOT-DAS-KAPITAL shaped hole without understanding any of the associated societal context, it's kinda offputting
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Oct 18, 2018 22:05
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for starters, cessna is the only person here who's (obliquely) mentioned the entire 中国特色 concept, which isn't so much a fly in the ointment as it is a giant firebreathing dragon
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Oct 18, 2018 22:07
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Cessna posted:You sure that was me? that usually gets translated to "chinese-style socialism" or "socialism-with-chinese-characteristics," which was in a news article that you linked. the big thing that a lot of western readers miss when this phrase comes up is that it means something. what it means is a take on marx that's often deeply cynically subordinated to the political needs of whoever is in the ascendancy in the CCP right now, but it's still a real way of thinking about marx that real people really do. i dont like using this word when it comes to well-meaning people (edit: not you) who are missing context, but reducing the grotesqueries of modern chinese state capitalism to "YEAH BUT WAS IT IN MARX/ENGELS" is...kinda racist, yeah. they have an answer for that! that you'd know about, if reading chinese takes was as important to you as reading westerner takes on china which happen to support your own political ideology! e: the first character is zhōng, which just means "middle", as in "middle kingdom", as in china. it's a on a mahjong tile too though, yeah Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Oct 18, 2018 |
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Oct 18, 2018 22:23
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Squalid posted:Since you apparently understand a bit more about Chinese politics than me, can you explain what Xi would mean by exporting revolution? I'd really like to know the significance of this policy in Chinese policy and ideology, but don't know where to start. I don't think there's anything super deep going on here. Chinese governments have always advocated for (and mostly practiced) non-interventionism outside of what they see as their specific sphere of influence (Korea, Vietnam, the SCS, etc). Obviously their neighbors who are inside what the Chinese consider their sphere of influence have other opinions about this, but it's definitely true that Chinese foreign ministries don't feel the need to put out tsk-tsk statements everytime something happens in Argentina or the Middle East or whatever. Partially this policy of mutual noninterference is because they'd really rather not talk about what's going on with Tibet/Xinjiang/Taiwan, and partially because they genuinely do not give a gently caress what other governments do in their own spheres of influence as long as they're willing to do business. It's almost tautological: obviously "Chinese-style socialism" isn't going to work super great anywhere that's not China. Why would they export it? Why would anyone want to import it? The implicit comparison here, of course, is the American belief that American-style democracy is a panacea for whatever ails your country. What Xi Jinping is doing here is reinforcing a tacit agreement that you can run your country however you want and the Chinese aren't going to mess with you as long as the checks clear and the natural resource exports keep flowing. They're not going to press for IMF/World Bank style reforms, and they're not going to press you to make your own political system look better to CNN viewers. For a lot of political leaders, that's a really attractive offer! Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Oct 18, 2018 |
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Oct 18, 2018 23:07
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Trying to get back on topic: another thing internet observers have difficulty with is exactly how terrifying the current Chinese naval expansion spree is to everyone else in the region, especially at this precise time when the United States is sending, uh, mixed messages about its defense obligations re: its Asian allies. They can already assemble credible carrier strike groups around Liaoning and whatever they name their new 001A, including surface combatants qualitatively superior to anything Japan/Taiwan/Korea can field. Type 055 is in most respects (the PLAN is generally considered to lag in ABM and ASW operations) a match for the hypothetical Flight III Burkes, which puts it at least two generations ahead of Burke I derived designs like the Japanese Atago-class. And even running flat-out, the US' Asian allies simply can't come close to the scale of shipbuilding that the PLAN has already locked itself in for. The PLAN already has no peer navies aside from the USN, at least within the bounds of a hypothetical conflict in the SCS/Strait of Taiwan.
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Oct 18, 2018 23:28
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that's definitely true, but it's hard not to watch an entire fully constituted CBG roll out of the shipyards in the space of a year next door and not get nervous
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Oct 18, 2018 23:55
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i mean, if the pla has deployed to mosul to protect chinese investments in iraqi oil companies from isis (direct investment/futures are how they usually prefer to operate, not literally buying all the oil, which is still in the ground) i haven't heard about it it yet
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Oct 19, 2018 00:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:You got any cool reading on this? I’m hella interested because my interactions with the CCP have been entirely “on the ground”, but they’ve been extreme enough I try to avoid the Chinese government if I can because gently caress they can be terrible. Chinese military stuff is always a pain to get solid sources on, because the PLA is famously secretive about its capabilities. Presumably they don't feel the same need to justify their budgetary allocations to the public, the way western navies do. What's available to people like you or me is pretty much all filtered down from either squinting at officially released photographs/satellite imagery or translated from various chinese-language military sperg forums. I'm serious. You can read it, so go ham. It's just as bad as military forums everywhere else on the internet though. As far as English language sources go, Popular Science of all places has an actually really good blog column which follows developments with the PLA, though maybe not at a level of detail that would satisfy thread regulars. After that, it's basically all privately run blogs and Jane's writeups and reddit arguments and it's basically terrible. There's a pretty good writeup of the PLAN's new surface combatant here, at least.
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Oct 19, 2018 07:00
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are we just tacitly agreeing to ignore the great leap forward
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Oct 20, 2018 00:53
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