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Grand Fromage posted:I moved your old nerd poo poo thread to the dumb goldmine for nerds to read, spergs. Post something cool about Roman military stuff while you're here!
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Aug 2, 2016 04:59
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Part of the problem was that the intersection between times the emperor was willing to back down enough to get a peace treaty and times the emperor was winning was empty.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:20
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Antti posted:Half expected the Emperor to be at least indirectly involved against the Emperor. That's an uncharitable but not inaccurate description of how he kept winning and then immediately doubling down with something so outrageous that the Protestants were guaranteed to keep fighting.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:45
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The only acceptable answer is stuffing the Sherman turret full of high velocity 122mm.
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Aug 2, 2016 20:49
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Ainsley McTree posted:Thanks for the effort post on the French defense, Kyoon. I have a follow up question though: Their defense line wasn't inside their borders. They'd done the fighting a war in their borders thing, it loving sucked and they really didn't want a repeat.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:14
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm? That's a western allied thing. The 75mm the US and UK made were guns designed around the shell and propellant of the famed French 75mm gun. That's a low velocity metric shell. The US did it from the start as a bespoke tank gun, while the British bored out their 57mm 6 pounder, but the main goal was a gun with good penetration by early war standards and a good HE shell. Later in the war they needed a punchier gun with more penetration, so they both made guns in that size range. Both used inches, and 76mm is three inches. It's an accident of history, and doesn't apply to other countries.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:56
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OwlFancier posted:
Also remember that they landed on that. Yes there's no deck in the rear. Do you think that stopped them? Yes it did, that ship killed a lot of pilots.
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Aug 3, 2016 02:52
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I think my favorite part of the South American dreadnought race is the Rivadavia class' ordering shenanigans. Brazil bought theirs from Britain to a British design. Chile bought theirs to a British design after a reasonably normal bidding process where political concerns made it a British slam dunk. But the Argentines did something fun. They took all the proposals tendered to an intentionally vague specification (don't want to rule out the best practices now do you?), looked at them, and called for another round with the best aspects of each. They did it again after that over the panicked howling of all the shipbuilders that their trade secrets were being given away. Then they gave it to Fore River, who tendered the lowest bid. It probably didn't hurt that while various members of government favored various European companies, the US had an ally in the owner, editor and naval editor of Buenos Aires' main newspaper, and some hefty assistance from the US government. And that's how US shipyards ended up building a ship with superfiring turrets like US practice, wing turrets like UK practice, a 6-inch secondary battery and three screws like German ships, and an engine and boiler layout like an Italian ship.
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Aug 3, 2016 03:56
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BattleMoose posted:One of the more remarkable things I learned from military history is human organization. For example, in the US army, the smallest unit is a "fire team" , consisting of 3-4 people with a team leader. There would be between 3-4 fire teams in a squad/section and then between 3-4 sections in a platoon and so on and so forth. There is some variation but the general idea is that any person in the military structure will have between 3-5 direct subordinates, the number of people a single person can successfully manage. Something that is just a result of centuries of warfare and a thing that has been found to just work. Has obvious application in business hierarchies. See also the pentonic (spelling) divisions the US tried in the cold war with 5 elements plus support units. Didn't work well.
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Aug 3, 2016 13:26
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JcDent posted:I think the thread should also have a rule against WWII European bombing campaign, maybe something against air combat in Pacific, too. We don't do pacific air combat enough, other than occasionally rehashing midway and the general state of things before the hellcat.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:41
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Kopijeger posted:One funny thing: the conquistadors would probably have practiced corpse medicine everywhere they went, yet the myth seems to be confined to the Andes region. Why would they cling to the belief that outsiders want to take their fat centuries after they stopped the practice? It's probably partially a function of isolation.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:14
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As a thought experiment, how many places you can shoot a person are actually going to be lethal? For all the other places on the body, a weapon designed to be lethal is a better wounding weapon than a theoretical weapon designed only to wound because pretty much by definition it's going to be depositing more energy or depositing it in a more destructive way. So it's not even proven that a hypothetical weapon designed to wound would do a better job of it than a regular one. Plus killing a guy is a better fail mode than not wounding them enough.Phanatic posted:The ultimate irony is that now that we've switched to fighting in mountainous deserts, engagement ranges are longer, and we've given our troops M4 rifles with shorter barrels, and as a result in a lot of engagements in Afghanistan only a few guys in a platoon are equipped with weapons that are effectively able to be used in those engagements. So people are looking pretty seriously at rounds like 6.5mm instead. These rounds are, again, pretty ballistically similar to the .276 Pedersen MacArthur rejected back in 1932. The funniest bit is that the first place they should look is the barrel length rather than throwing the whole damned thing out and adding yet another caliber (that's totally going to replace one or both of the other calibers we swear), but how often do we hear talk of that rather than some new hotness caliber that's really a small full sized round when you get down to it (as in not relying on small caliber high velocity effects)?
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Aug 3, 2016 22:57
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If I want to do effort posts about carriers, none of you lot care if I do it in order, right?SeanBeansShako posted:I just had a disturbing thought. Knowing things provides dopamine. Doesn't need to be true. So absent a motivating force towards correctness, the simplest explanation wins.
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Aug 3, 2016 23:55
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MrMojok posted:PLEASE do it! Yep, I'm taking time off work once the thing I'm working on is done, and I'll get to it. Overall, I think I've got most of the books I want to have at hand to do it right, but getting through the ones I haven't already may take some time, so I may as well get rolling and make it a thing I do.
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Aug 4, 2016 02:52
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SeanBeansShako posted:Seriously, if anyone cares about it I'd read a big effort post on Gunboats too. Yeah, that'd be cool.
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Aug 4, 2016 15:32
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I'm always up to talking about planes. May not have a lot on Japanese Air Force tactics, unfortunately. Yeah. I don't have a ton of that yet either, I'll need to decant sunburst into my head before I get rolling, and probably ought to do at least some light reading of the start of Dull's battle history of the IJN. Current plan is to do WWII start through Midway first, because I've just about got a firm base to work from. Problem is my attention span comes in a little orange cylinder with a child-safe top, so I'm real vulnerable to slowdowns. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 22:24
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spectralent posted:I used to wonder why the hell anything was riveted, but I realised a year or two ago it was probably quite a while before tanks existed that were both up against really high kinetic impacts and had armour enough to survive penetration anyway. Like, getting hit with a rifle probably isn't going to cause massive rivet failures, but at the same time since you've got like 20mm of armour everywhere anything like a .50 cal or an antitank rifle is just going to go in anyway. In an environment where weapons are pretty all-or-nothing rivets probably don't seem that bad. Also just developing a way to get consistent good welds sounds may or may not have happened and even if it had it may not have reached the maker of the tank's production lines. You need all of that to get it done. Did the US do any riveting? They were generally the leaders in process tech so I wouldn't be surprised if they were pretty much all welding all the time, although they might have just done big complex castings like loving maniacs guessing by the Sherman's development.
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Aug 5, 2016 16:53
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It's probably a good thing the H8K was a good flying boat, the H6K was obsolete enough I believe only one made contact with US ships while scouting and survived in the period before Coral Sea. On the other hand they might have benefited from getting production going sooner rather than later.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:42
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bewbies posted:To expand a bit more the developers aren't idiots, they put a ton of work into analyzing all of the mobility and sustainment requirements for what we have taken to calling jabba the tank. I don't know any details but they seemed...less pessimistic than you'd have thought. I'm guessing the rationale is that the answer to whether you can get the tank over a given bridge is less relevant than the answer to whether you can get any tank over the bridge and have it last more than a timespan of minutes. Better a tank that can survive to operate in a limited region than one that can't survive anywhere. Which is holy poo poo pessimism about missiles and artillery.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:05
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Ensign Expendable posted:If you have a mega-fuckoff-supertank and can't move it anywhere fast enough, the enemy will just attack where the tank isn't with their own tanks, which might have less armour, but that doesn't really matter from the point of view of the infantry it's driving over. Which would not be a problem if (and pretty much only if) the assumption that those tanks' insides are going to be playing host to artillery or atgms almost immediately holds true.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:Artillery and man-portable methods of killing tanks have been around for almost as long as tanks themselves. Somehow tanks managed to deal with it. I'm getting the impression they feel that isn't going to remain the case.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:20
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feedmegin posted:You can probably fix the rifle in place, so all you need to do is walk up and pull the trigger. Windage, but yes.
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Aug 7, 2016 16:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Which tank is lovely enough that a large man with a titanium spear with say a tungsten or depleted uranium point could defeat it Well, if you take advantage of uranium being pyrophoric you might be able to set a Sheridan on fire. Maybe, I'm probably wrong.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:50
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bewbies posted:I've also never really understood why people think they want realistic war movies. If a war movie was realistic it would be really really really really boring for the first two and half hours and then the last 15 minutes would be really loud and confusing Honestly I want one so that I can point my mind's eye to it when thinking about combat. A curated collection of liveleak videos would probably go a long way but some shots you just can't get in a real fight.
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Aug 9, 2016 18:01
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HEY GAL posted:take your glasses off, you'll see exactly what Gustavus Adolphus saw in combat Sorry, got my eyes fixed. Actually really good vision now.
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Aug 9, 2016 18:16
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MrMojok posted:Sorry, was tanks trying to maneuver around to shoot each other in the rear end not a real thing? They'd do it if they could but that meant spotting the other guy first and moving out of sight to where you could open up from the side whenever possible. Just trying to rush headlong to the enemy's side would make you exceedingly vulnerable on your sides.
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Aug 9, 2016 19:51
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pthighs posted:I was just flipping around in Netflix the other day and noticed there is a Jarhead 2 and Jarhead 3, both of which, judging by the poster art, hilariously seem to be the exact type of macho shoot-'em-up movie the first one isn't. http://terminallance.com/2016/06/03/terminal-lance-jarhead/ Yes they are.
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Aug 9, 2016 23:25
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OwlFancier posted:The Cromwell was about 30% faster than a Sherman, as befitting its design as a raiding tank. It also served as the basis for the rather better Comet, and subsequently the Centurion, both quite successful tanks, arguably benefiting from the armour increases they received as a result of the drift towards general purpose tank design. It can be seen as a bit of an early attempt at something which got significantly better with a bit of revision. On any scale larger than the tactical a Sherman unit was as fast or faster than a Cromwell unit. The Sherman was a ludicrously reliable tank, even when powered by a metastasized car engine.
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Aug 11, 2016 20:13
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spectralent posted:Is that the case? I'm aware that AT guns took a real toll on tanks in france, but I thought that had more to do with the conditions there, i.e. being on the offensive in a place littered with narrow hedgerows. The friendlier interpretation would be them taking heavier losses on their tanks to reduce overall casualties because manpower was short. That would be a good match with Churchills, less so with their other tanks.
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Aug 11, 2016 20:49
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spectralent posted:As I say, I feel like the powerplants involved are enormously important in these kinds of things. Kicking another 100hp out of an engine is a pretty big deal when 150 gets you from Valentine to Churchill. It's probably kind of simplistic to say "Better engine=better tank", but it certainly seems to help. Better as in more power to weight does in a vacuum mean a better tank. It means that for a given speed you can put less weight into the engine and therefore more into gun and armor. Still, all hail the multibank. King of the things that shouldn't work but do. Do we have any paperwork of what other countries thought about that horrifying thing?
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Aug 12, 2016 00:08
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Phanatic posted:What's specifically the difference between blitzkrieg and deep battle? I'd say it's the existence of clearly defined Schwerpunkt(en). If you know where your focal point to break through is, it's Blitzkrieg. If you're awaiting results to figure out where the weak spot is that you can exploit, it's deep battle. Alternately deep battle is blitzkrieg that knows when to stop to regroup and resupply.
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Aug 12, 2016 16:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I don't agree with your understanding - just because the maneuver based combined arms exploitation of space occurred after a phase of attritional warfare (driven primarily by terrain) doesn't negate its characteristics. Yeah, I'd say it has to do with how they staged their breakout and encirclement, although there is a way to look at it where it's got similarities to a really protracted deep battle.
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Aug 12, 2016 18:11
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Hey don't make fun of the Kearsarge and Virginia classes!
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Aug 12, 2016 19:02
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Saint Celestine posted:I don't see how anyone gets into that mindset, when if you look at Bagration or August Storm, they just such brilliantly planned and executed operations. Their knowledge is things happened in the east, Enemy at the Gates, and things based on bitching by German commanders that they always seemed to get attacked by superior numbers of Soviets (a much bigger disparity than they had over the front, which should set alarm bells ringing but apparently 11 time zones means literally limitless people). Translation, the Soviets got a reputation for having ludicrous dudes because they so badly fooled the Germans they were still fooled by the time they wrote their memoirs.
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Aug 13, 2016 00:35
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ArchangeI posted:We might get criminals and slackers, but by God, they will be smart criminals and slackers! At a certain point, a person who manages to hide their criminality and slacking is functionally equivalent to a decent employee.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:20
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hogmartin posted:Presumably not every engineer, but probably every officer. ADM Rickover was famous for conducting uncomfortable and humiliating interviews of potential nuclear submarine officers, it would be very surprising if he hadn't enacted some kind of plan to ensure that his successors continued the tradition now 30 years after he died. If Rickover hadn't specified interview protocols for his successors to follow, interviewed them and all that, the CIA would probably be interrogating whoever was sitting in his chair within the day since it clearly wasn't him. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Aug 14, 2016 |
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Aug 14, 2016 14:14
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HEY GAL posted:sieges are the new black, have you seen the 80yw Something something flanders field?
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Aug 15, 2016 02:36
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I maintain that him not loving a woman was a terrible mistake in retrospect though.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:03
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HEY GAL posted:there is still no guarantee that the eventual child would inherit the brains and not, say, being real short Honestly I think that even a short dude with his mom's brains wouldn't be a bad thing and being raised by a guy who'd done the militarism thing and kind of soured on the costs might have helped that family not end up ruled by a manchild with a brain full of withered arm and battleships in the margins of his notes.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:10
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HEY GAL posted:my subjects, on the other hand, would fit in nowhere else in world history but the early 17th century. except for wallenstein, sadly. Deprivatize yourself and face to Hapsburgs. Wallenstein would either end up with a C level job somewhere or totally blacklisted from his industry. Possibly both.
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Aug 16, 2016 22:16
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