|
sullat posted:I did, thanks to this thread's recommendation! But the references aren't as universal as Star Wars. If I said "Reuenthal did nothing wrong!" only a few nerds would understand, but if I say "Palpatine did nothing wrong!" all of them would. You mean "Oberstein did nothing wrong", right
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2016 06:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 11:54 |
|
|
HEY GAL posted:i know this isn't what you meant, but remember when i talked about how guys were hot sex objects back in the early modern period? well around the 18th, 19th century that starts to change--men are the people who look at, not the people who are looked at; the people who desire, not the people who are desired. But there are a few exceptions, and one of them is soldiers. Soldiers still spend a vast amount of time fussing over their appearance (more than they used to in the 17th century, since we have uniforms now and everyone's supposed to look alike, etc)--soldiers are still an object of desire. Whose desire, though? that's a lot of highlighting I can't read  E: wait, now I can read it? Wtf Google, make up your mind.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2016 19:33
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:the only word you need highlighted in pp. 95-98 is 'homosexual' Well this is what I was seeing at first  Now I can actually read it for some reason
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2016 19:56
|
|
|
I haven't looked at this site yet because phone, but how do they even define the Fall of Rome? Is there an accepted definition of that?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2016 00:20
|
|
|
The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask / Tell > Ask Us About Military History Mk III: I spent several years wargaming
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2016 05:48
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:we do, and it was groggy as all hell. i think i own a copy Have you played it? If yes, what did you think?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2016 18:59
|
|
|
ponzicar posted:Are we talking people with direct power, or people who had a huge influence on the future? If it's the latter, then I'm going to go with whoever it was that first figured out agriculture. I thought the theory is that agriculture was a gradual development rather than just an invention? Like, one generation people notice that areas where they ate had food next year, then people started burying seeds in a place and slowly became semi-nomadic before gradually moving to stationary agriculture.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2016 19:34
|
|
|
Pistol_Pete posted:I could go on but the whole book is like this. I love the image of the peasant venturing a few fields too far from home, becoming hopelessly lost and wandering the country forever. Did this guy believe in the Phantom Time Hypothesis? It seems right up his alley.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2016 00:03
|
|
|
If money were only used to pay soldiers what would the soldiers do with it 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2016 05:32
|
|
|
a guy wrote a book on medieval European history and apparently never heard of castles, one of the, like, 2 things every Westerner knows about medieval European history.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2016 23:28
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Thanks. I've never heard of this but I went to the worst high school in Canada apparently, so it does not surprise me. It lets you skip some classes if you do well on the ap test; for instance, I didn't need to take calc 1 or calc 2.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 03:44
|
|
|
So this is probably pretty common knowledge in this thread, but my friend asked me this and I didn't really have an answer: why was there no(large scale?) deployment of chemical/biological weapons in WW2? The technology has existed since WW1, after all.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2016 00:12
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:In theory anyway. I doubt that the effectiveness of Jericho Trumpets or such have ever been proven, nor do I know how it could be proven/disproven??? People can panic over lots of things and many times it's things that they haven't witnessed themselves. Like tanks running out of shells and going back to restock can cause supporting infantry to rout because they figure the tankers are routing. Or the death/routing/supposed death/routing of a key leader.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2016 01:53
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:All Pikes Are Beautiful 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2016 18:13
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:I'm guessing the fantasy Italians are in the same boat. I'd argue that sending wave after wave of armies at the enemy is a very Roman thing to do. The difference is that the Romans would, like, probably sack their commanding officer after he failed.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2016 20:41
|
|
|
Tias posted:If I may: What are some of the most spectacular dick moves pulled off by middle ages/early modern age mercs or employers? This is neither middle ages nor particularly clever, but mercs played a pretty huge part in the First Punic War so here's some stories. As a disclaimer, our most contemporary source wrote over 100 years after the fact, so there's likely to be some inaccuracies/exaggerations. Several years before the Pyrrhic War, a group of mercs went rogue and took over the city of Messana in Sicily, which is basically as close to Italy you can get while still being in Sicily. About 20 years later they're getting beaten by Syracuse, at the time one of the major powers on Sicily and probably the third most important settled power in the Western Mediterranean, , so they go to Carthage for help, and Carthage sends a garrison. Then, not long afterwards, they also asked Rome for a garrison. It's not entirely clear why; for most of their history, Rome and Carthage had had a fairly friendly relationship and they'd actually been allies, although largely nominal ones, during the Pyrrhic War 16 years back, which was the last major conflict in Southern Italy/Sicily, but their relationship had been deteriorating since then. Anyway Rome sent an army, and that's the story about how a rogue mercenary army took over a city and then 20 years later triggered a grueling 23 year war between the three major powers in the region. Now, you might say that they weren't mercenaries by that point and that's fair; after all, they'd been ruling a city for 20 years, so here's another one. The war has been going for 8 years by this point, and the Roman/Syracusan coalition controls about 2/3s of the island. Many of the remaining Carthaginian cities, however, are basically fortresses and will take an extremely long time to capture, especially since the Romans didn't really have ability to blockade them at this point, so they decide that the right plan to end the war is to land an army in North Africa and force Carthage to come to terms. They assemble an enormous fleet, and so do the Carthaginians. The Roman fleet, supposedly consisting of 330 ships and 140,000 men, beat the Carthaginian fleet of supposedly 350 ships and 150,000, and landed an army in North Africa. They start taking cities so the Carthaginians offer battle and decide to set up in the hills instead of the plains. The Roman general, knowing he has superior infantry but inferior cavalry, simply attacks and because the Carthaginian general was bad, he couldn't use his cavalry effectively(because, you know, lovely terrain) and gets crushed. They try to sue for peace but the Roman general offers such absurd terms that the Carthaginians decide they'd rather keep fighting. This is where our mercenary shows up, because over the winter a Carthaginian recruiter brings back a Spartan general named Xanthippus. Xanthippus basically says "your troops are good but your generals are dumbasses". The Carthaginians say "What, you think you can do any better?" and Xanthippus says "Well, actually, yes" and gets given command and crushes the Roman army a few months later. He beat the Roman garrisons on the mainland and then vanishes from the story with dark hints that the Carthaginian leadership thought he was going to try take control of the city or something. Without that battle, the war might have ended there; as it was, it would continue another 15 years. Last one: it's 240 BC, the Romans and Carthaginians have signed a peace treaty that boils down to "Carthage gets off of Sicily and pays Rome a giant pile of cash". Hamilcar Barca, the only successful Carthaginian general(although he showed up way too late to really accomplish anything), also guarantees his largely mercenary passage back to North Africa, where they'll finally get paid...except, the Carthaginian government claims to be broke and instead of dealing with each little group of arriving mercenaries by themselves, decides that the smart thing to do is to congregate this disgruntled army of troops before telling them "oh we don't have any money, would you like a tiny fraction of what we owe you?" The mercs respond with a "nnnooooopppeeee" and the Carthaginians, realizing that maybe gathering all the mercs in one place and telling them they weren't actually going to get paid, somehow find the money and give it to them. However, there's still this big army of mercenaries right outside Carthage so they're like "you know what, why don't you give us more money?" which the Carthaginians did, but ultimately it lead to a war between whatever troops(including other mercenaries) the Carthaginians could muster and this mercenary army and rebelling cities in North Africa. The Carthaginians ultimately won, but while that was going on another mercenary rebellion broke out in Sardinia, and the Romans, in order to stop those Sardinian pirates of course, took over both Sardinia and Corsica and Carthage wasn't in a position to do anything about it. After they'd beaten the mercenary army in North Africa the Carthaginians prepared a fleet to go to Sardinia but the Romans were like "oh that definitely violates the peace treaty we signed so we're going to take these islands and also you owe us more money for violating the peace treaty" and the Carthaginians decided they had no choice but to agree. tl;dr pay your mercenaries
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 21:15
|
|
|
zoux posted:I know about the time-keeping/latitude thing but that seems to be more of a navigation issue to me, so I get why the ancient Athenians never sailed to Bolivia (or did they!?!?!). What I was getting at more was were the kinds of advances seen in the age of sail only particularly useful for transoceanic voyaging or Why Didn't The Romans Develop Tall Ships? Or am I just overvaluing the highly romanticized period of the age of sail vs. ancient ships and a ship-of-the-line absent gunpowder cannons just not that much better than a trireme or whatever the Phoencians used. I'm not a naval expert, but this is my understanding. You need a very different design for ships intended to paddle around the Mediterranean and for actually oceanworthy ships. The Mediterranean is a fairly placid sea, while a real ocean has a lot more wind and currents and so forth.As a result, the design of the Phoenician/Greek/whoever ships was probably more unstable and much more muscle-powered("trireme" refers to 3 banks of oars), rather than wind-powered. I'm not sure they necessarily needed a large advance in technology(although I think there were some with regard to being able to control the sails), but if you took a quinquereme out into that atlantic it would probably sink and I'm pretty sure it couldn't possibly sail across because the design just wasn't compatible. Kopijeger posted:What made it so costly? Did the Romans expect the occupation to bring greater rewards than it did and if so, why did they miscalculate? Why couldn't they simply withdraw early on, like what happened with Armenia and Mesopotamia when Hadrian became emperor? They never really pacified Wales and the northern areas, so they had to deal with lots of raids and revolts or leave a large standing army there, and that's ignoring pirates and raiders from Ireland and Germania(where Germania refers to anything to the east that the Romans didn't control). As for not withdrawing, the Romans really really didn't like withdrawing. It was hard for Hadrian to sell retreating, and part of the reason he'd been able to manage was because it hadn't really been conquered yet, just occupied. When Aurelian backed out of Dacia(a province that had been conquered around the same time as Britannia), it was incredibly unpopular, even though having this province on the other side of the Danube made the defensive lines much harder and the silver mines were exhausted by that point.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2017 18:27
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Up to a point. French rifles were really, really bad in WW1. Probably not bad enough to have mad that measurable a difference in a war decided by artillery and attrition, but wow they were crap. What made the French rifles so bad?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
Professor Shark posted:I just assumed they did it based on movies, I thought it was a way of making sure injured soldier didn't make their way back to the enemy Don't trust movies for facts.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2017 22:30
|
|
|
DiHK posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUGQkpk3RE Polybius Book 2 posted:The Insubres and Boii wore their trousers and light cloaks, 8 but the Gaesatae had discarded these garments owing to their proud confidence in themselves, and stood naked, with nothing but their arms, in front of the whole army, thinking that thus they would be more efficient, as some of the ground was overgrown with brambles which would catch in their clothes and impede the use of their weapons. [...] Very terrifying too were the appearance and the gestures of the naked warriors in front, 8 all in the prime of life, and finely built men, and all in the leading companies richly adorned with gold torques and armlets. 9 The sight of them indeed dismayed the Romans [...] It ends up backfiring because it turns out javelins hurt more when you're not wearing clothes Translation taken from here
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2017 21:22
|
|
|
Carcer posted:I'd argue that javelins hurt exactly the same as when you're wearing normal, unarmored clothing as that text suggests. (Unless I'm terribly mistaken and the armor is either implied or mentioned elsewhere.) same text: quote:But when the javelineers advanced, as is their usage, from the ranks of the Roman legions and began to hurl their javelins in well-aimed volleys, the Celts in the rear ranks indeed were well protected by their trousers and cloaks, 2 but it fell out far otherwise than they had expected with the naked men in front, and they found themselves in a very difficult and helpless predicament. 3 For the Gaulish shield does not cover the whole body; so that their nakedness was a disadvantage, and the bigger they were 5 the better chance had the missiles of going home.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2017 21:36
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:24 November: A funny thing happened last night during our guard duty at the power plant. We heard someone approaching in the dark and cocked our rifles and asked for the password twice. The answer was I-AA. That was not the password so we fired and then investigated. We had killed a stray donkey. We titled the report, "Donkey Battle at the Power Station."  this is the best thing. It makes sense, but it's still the best thing
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 07:45
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Wow, no kidding. Also: 200 meters underground? What the Christ, that's one hell of a deep cave. It's way underground, you wouldn't have heard of it 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2017 21:31
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:
What would the competition metric be in a machine gun shooting competition? In my head the normal metric for a shooting competition is accuracy, but that would be kind of weird for machine guns, right?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 02:35
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:Funny thing is that while still being Communist, Vietnam IS an US ally today in SEA, preferring the help of the old foe against China's land and sea border claims than the alternative. North Vietnam/Vietnam was always more of a USSR ally than a Chinese ally; in fact, a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Chinese actually invaded the country. My understanding is that Ho Chi Minh et al were interested in independence, not in being anyone's vassal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2017 17:53
|
|
|
When I look closely it looks to me like it's on something behind the vehicle yeah
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2017 20:45
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Has anyone done modern experiments to see how effective heated shot actually is? I think you'll find that it's good, but doesn't do much if the other guy starts to build Cannon Galleons
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2017 21:01
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:Saladin was pretty successful. Hammurabi 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2017 06:41
|
|
|
So I've been catching up on the tabletop game Trin is running and no spoilers, but I've wondering, why did the Allies refer to the Germans as "the Hun"? That's like, not remotely accurate in any way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 02:28
|
|
|
Fangz posted:The Germans (probably incorrectly) also connected the Huns to the Hungarians, so a positive view of the Huns makes sense considering who Germany's allies were. There's no probably about it, this is wrong. The Hungarians are descended from the Magyars, nomadic horsemen who showed up in the 700-800s, and that name gradually got corrupted into Hungary. I think the Hungarians still refer to themselves and their language as Magyar. Elyv fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Feb 26, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2017 19:51
|
|
|
nrook posted:Speaking of narratives about war, I'm reading Grant's memoirs right now, and jeez. I did not realize how much of a general's time was spent prosecuting dumb pissing contests with other generals on the same side. Every time Grant meets another general he's very clear about who he thinks has the right to order whom around, and half the time the other guy disagrees! You should read about Middle Ages wars. That the First Crusade succeeded in its goals is honestly kind of amazing to me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 21:20
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:The fact that they succeeded owes a lot to the fact that the other side was equally if not more disorganized by their own internal politics. Oh, for sure. I'd go so far as to as say that there wasn't a single "other side" really, just various lords and kings who were as worried about each other as they were about the "Franks". Still pretty remarkable though, I think.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 22:14
|
|
|
Pontius Pilate posted:Jamaica was more profitable than the thirteen colonies combined. Another example: At the end of the Seven Years War, the French were given the choice of keeping either New France(a swath of territory extending from Newfoundland to Mississippi), or Guadeloupe and Martinique. They chose the latter and it made perfect sense.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2017 16:06
|
|
|
quite stretched out posted:im not a very smart man can someone set out what Straight Black Kaiser actually is? I've seen it used several times and can't work it out Gay Black Hitler is sort of a catch-all in this thread for "hey what if <insert incredibly improbable thing here> were to happen, could Germany have won WW2?" Straight Black Kaiser is the new WW1 equivalent, seems to me.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2017 08:40
|
|
|
What is actually being sold there, anyway?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2017 03:29
|
|
|
Does anyone know a book that's a good introduction to the various Turko-Mongolian steppe groups/culture, whether it's the Xiongnu, Gokturks, Avars, Khazars, or others? If that's too broad, does anyone know of a good work on one of them? I've been reading some stuff and listening to podcasts on the period roughly between 600-1000 and I'm realizing that I know absolutely nothing about them and they seem pretty significant.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2017 18:52
|
|
|
Jamwad Hilder posted:I read "Empires of the Silk Road" a couple of years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Silk-Road-History-Central/dp/0691150346  thanks!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2017 20:23
|
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:Red Star Citizen Username-post combo. Also this just makes me want to play Papers Please, even though that's about being a low level functionary.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2017 06:38
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:That's pretty funny, here in North America we learn about how the Seven Years War was a huge and descive colonial war between Britain and France. Powers like Austria, Spain, Russia and Prussia are never even mentioned (nor are Britain's Hanoverian possessions), despite the European portions of the war being both more important and more interesting. I'm not sure the phrase "Seven Years War" was ever used in my High School History class, they called it the French and Indian War instead.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2017 15:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 11:54 |
|
|
Mycroft Holmes posted:will the deathtoll outweigh that of starcraft? Many zerglings died in the battle of Tau Cross
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2017 16:48
|
|