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Nebakenezzer posted:So a friend was saying he started watching the new Vietnam documentary, but he actually had to stop because the "rich people send poors to fight and die" was making him angry. (He's an ex-soldier.) Is it true that later to fill the numbers, MacNamara started some sort of "take poor black kids, train 'em 50% less, then shove them in the front line?" Project 100,000 was a hell of a thing that really speaks for itself and everyone ought to take a good look at. It wasn't explicitly racial, but the people it kept from getting drafted trended white as hell.
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Nov 15, 2017 04:21
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Phi230 posted:I'm seriously asking like what were the designations for swords in early modern/medieval? I think you'd describe it. Standardization doesn't really fit with the pre-industrial world.
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Nov 15, 2017 16:33
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OwlFancier posted:That would be hilariously impossible to fuse without modern electronic rangefinding. I think you might actually have been able to do this with WWII US technology, if you don't mind taking a 75mm cannon armed "interceptor" up against bomber formations. By the end of the war, they'd gotten down to 3" VT fuzes. 75mm guns had been mounted in medium bombers. Something like the XP-71 might be a good fit. I mean if we're starting from the premise that this makes sense and is a priority. All you'd need is the US facing down an enemy capable of running a bomber offensive like the one it did. And really weird priorities. What you'd probably actually want to look at is German air to air rockets for attacking bombers. But those aren't incredibly goofy.
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Nov 15, 2017 22:49
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JcDent posted:So with the current trend of claiming that AR-15s are actually more mud resistant than AKs, are there any qualities left that would make an AK more desirable? Mud resistance is not the sum total of reliability. Also, reliability (the ability to avoid malfunctions when in good repair) isn't durability (the ability to be used for a long time without degradation in performance). The AR platform resists mud specifically because it is sealed very well. Other than the ejection port, the only real places for ingress are the trigger opening in the lower, and everything down there is under pretty solid spring tension so it's less likely to jam up, or the charging handle maybe, and that's a real stretch. That's an exceptionally good performance. Bullpups pretty universally jam, lock up, and are a bitch and a half to clean out. The AKM is likely to turn into a bolt action that can be cleaned out with a garden hose or even canteen. That's not exceptional, but it's still good. Even better, if you're dealing with things like sand that don't have real adhesive properties, you can pop the dust cover off, turn it upside down, give it a good smack and likely have a semi/full auto firearm. The AR is good at handling most particulates, but if you get the bullet end of a magazine dirty, it's likely hosed. Same goes for getting dirt/mud/sand in the action when you've shot a magazine and the bolt hold open is keeping the bolt from sealing the ejection port. The AR is almost definitely the best infantry small arms platform around right now. It's reliable, it's light, it's accurate, it's not overly hard to maintain, and it's very easy to accessorize. However, everything's a set of tradeoffs. What happens if you have an industrial base that revolves around stampings and a logistics chain that can't handle guns that may be reliable but aren't great at handling long periods of poor maintenance? Then the AK is still a great platform for your needs. Honestly the biggest problem of the AK platform for high end users is that they tend to end up very heavy if you add on a bunch of force multipliers compared to a modern AR that's got a lot of mounting systems integrated into it. I mean good mud resistance and being relatively easy to make a sub minute of angle gun is nice, but being able to drag through a mess of tactical kit and not ending up with 12 pounds of rifle because of all the extra mounts you needed to add is probably the bigger difference. Some of the qualities are mutually contradictory by the way. The loose tolerances that make it easier for an AK to admit fouling than an AR are the precise loose tolerances that let you run the drat thing till parts breakage with minimal maintenance.
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Nov 20, 2017 17:42
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FAUXTON posted:Iirc, and this is going off the comparisons done by Ian and that super tense dude, the tighter fitting of the AR suggests it will do better with larger particulates but worse with finer stuff, so if you are ingesting dust into the action it will eventually stop feeding/ejecting smoothly. InRange's tests are good (and the channel's great, watch their stuff if you want to see really interesting shooting competitions with real thought put into gear), but they use mud. That's one metric of many. Getting a good variety is worthwhile. For example Military Arms Channel locked his AR up by dumping dirt into the magazines. Someone else used sand ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHlFfhrDn2c ) and really buried the gun, and that's another useful one. AK operators union, local 47-74 runs their guns into the goddamn ground and tell you if it can survive 5000 rounds and some seriously unkind use and they'll tell you all about what happens. For example, their daniel defense AR's handguard shifted when dropped from shoulder height onto concrete.
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Nov 20, 2017 19:31
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A friend of mine decided to make something like that whole "coding duck" thing for me to talk to and explain my code to. Yes the arm lengths are intentional. I'm unreasonably happy. Siivola posted:Wouldn't cheap CNC machining also drive down the price of milled AK variants? I'd be amazed if those don't take fewer machine hours than any AR design. The AK is designed to use a lot of stampings. Designs tend to be based on the technology of their time.
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Nov 20, 2017 21:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:Stampings are still dirt loving cheap if you're making a lot of them. The main expensive parts on an AK are the trunnions and the bolt, and those are all forged and machined. Yeah, absolutely. I meant there wasn't really room for much savings from CNC.
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Nov 20, 2017 21:59
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:So sad the Rule the Waves LP died. I know. Still, it's perfect. The Kaiser has a natural affinity for bad ideas.
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Nov 21, 2017 00:15
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Perestroika posted:There's a surprising amount of stuff in WWII that seems like it shouldn't even have been possible with pre-digital technology. I think the Germans actually managed to build an integrated automatic air-defense system to protect one of their dams, where the guns would be aimed and fired at radar signatures with next to no manual input necessary. That's pretty much how the radar directors on US and UK ships worked.
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Nov 21, 2017 15:53
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What is that, and does it come from something bigger?
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Nov 21, 2017 17:09
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my dad posted:If anything, the avoidance of unpleasant topics and the implicit glorification of war resulting from that has been consistently a downside of these threads. And even then, this is one of the better places on the internet for acknowledging that sort of thing. Incidentally, is Notre Gloriaeux Pere watching the most recent fight against the perfidious Boche?
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Nov 25, 2017 01:19
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zoux posted:What, half hated her for being divorced, the other half hated her for being American? There definitely seems to be something coloring opinions.
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Nov 28, 2017 04:26
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Who posted the Warsaw memoir again? I've been sleeping better. I'm looking to fix that. Actually over all, are there any actually good memoirs by Germans of the Eastern Front that aren't better described as "historical" fiction?
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Nov 30, 2017 00:42
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Is this the Warsaw memoir you're thinking of? I believe so.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:28
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Cythereal posted:As far as I know, that's a myth - I've seen it mentioned as a myth in many history books from the early ironclad era onwards, but never a confirmed account. It's always "That old rustbucket of ours is so poorly designed!" or "Come on, their battleship is so poorly designed!" Never any firsthand accounts of it happening. There's a discussion of bugle calls worked out to get men out of the way of the primary armament's blast wave on French predreads in Friedman's US Battleships, and so on, but actual deaths to it no.
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Dec 6, 2017 00:42
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Being pretty disingenuous about what you're replying to, among other things.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:48
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SimonCat posted:What was he referencing then? Serbian policy in the 90s? The generalized case of shooting when in doubt, which is something we have literally covered on this very page as being distinct from the Holocaust?
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Dec 13, 2017 20:55
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mllaneza posted:The Fuchida book is not, it's a good narrative of the battle and an entertaining read, but key moments are fabricated. Destroyer Captain hasn't been debunked, but there's a few passages I could pick out as having been written with hindsight. Anyway, read Destroyer Captain, it's one of the great first hand accounts of any war. Yeah, I think Hara's pretty good about not trying to hide what he's writing with hindsight but it's definitely there.
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Dec 20, 2017 15:25
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