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If you like army organizational groups you will love ship classifications from the age of sail through to the modern day! Also I am hella bad at tank sillhouettes from that tanker book  I think I picked the M10 about 8 times, which is sad because eventually I remembered it's really easy to identify because of the sick turret spoiler.
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Aug 3, 2016 00:38
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1900 onwards is like the best time because the first part of it was spent building bigger and bigger ships with bigger and bigger guns, then they figured out that planes could a) carry bombs and torpedoes and b) could take off from boats and proceeded to spend a long time figuring out how the gently caress to deal with this. The way they figured out how to launch planes from boats was also pretty good.   As uh... was their approach to camouflage. For a brief, glorious time in the first world war there was an aircraft carrier with the hull of a light cruiser sailing around with an 18 inch battlecruiser cannon stuck on the back and a massive ramp on the front.  The werecraftcarrier. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 00:47
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Tias posted:I'm pretty sure I read about it somewhere that seemed legit, but could you maybe expound on why it's dumb instead of just implying that it's dumb? I think the idea was not that it was intended to maim as much as with semi/automatic weaponry, the larger calibre was simply not needed and it was considered that the 5.56 round was perfectly effective while being much more accurate in sustained fire. So I guess it would be intended to wound in the sense that the possibility of wounding the enemy rather than killing them if you hit them was considered sufficient to keep the round effective while reaping the benefits of the smaller calibre in terms of accuracy. But nobody sat down and said "hmm let's see if we can figure out how to cause maximum misery among the enemy with our bullets" Also full size WW1/2 rifle rounds are absurdly overpowered for the kind of actual fighting ranges they saw. They make sense if you're hunting a moose or something and you need to kill poo poo super dead from a long way away, but human beings will stop shooting back with far less coercion, and they don't tend to stand still a thousand yards away while you sit and aim. A lot of fighting in the second world war involved trying to get close to the enemy to increase your ability to kill them, and at close range you definitely don't need a .303 rifle to kill someone. Hence the transition postwar into lighter calibre assault rifles which are still accurate at range but become increasingly effective as the, well, assault closes in on the enemy, with the capacity for rapid fire and also not being over four feet long. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 22:58
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I imagine it depends rather a lot on the individual whether being shot makes you think "oh gently caress I'm going to die" and whether that causes you to switch off or get pissed.
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Aug 3, 2016 23:11
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Comstar posted:Why that distance? I'm suspecting it could be described as a mathematical formula of some sort that could describe it involving distance, speed of a human being with a combat load, and the average hight of a man. And there's another one for fighting in mountains or cities. It's quite hard to shoot accurately without optics at anything greater than that range in non-optimal conditions, there's an effective lower limit to the human eyeball and how steady your hands are that can't really be gotten around without somewhere to rest your gun and a magnifying optic. More than 300m away you need pretty good shooting conditions to be able to hit anything reliably, and of course the people you're shooting at aren't going to sit there and let you keep doing it, so they will either bugger off or try to close range with you so that they can shoot you properly. Guns from even the first world war were perfectly capable of accurate shooting at ranges exceeding the effective limits of human stability and perception, so for the past hundred years or so the main limiting factor has not been the gun, but the user. This is the general conceit of all post-ww1 warfare, and frankly quite a lot of ww1 warfare if you consider that people didn't get very far by sitting in opposing trenches and taking potshots at each other. The object is to get right up in the enemy's grill and gently caress them up from a position that at least negates their positional advantage and ideally, gives you a positional advantage. So fights tend towards happening at pretty close range as one or both sides tries to get closer to, and outmaneuver the other, especially in cities and hedgerows and jungles such as were major features of the second world war. It differs for combat on open plains and in mountains of course but we haven't generally fought in those very much for most of the 20th century, so most of our military doctrine was based around the second world war and then things like Vietnam, and even now is heavily based on the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is why you have soldiers trucking around in MRAPs and carrying short carbine rifles. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 14:04
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Could the overpressure be enough to throw off someone's balance? Cause him to fall down instead of a planned "hit the dirt" dive response? That could result in a lot of false kills. You might poo poo your pants from the crack of the round going past. Assuming 25mm rounds are supersonic, I would guess they are. I doubt there's very many people who would manage to behave in a dignified manner when being shot at by one, in either case. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 11:53
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Fangz posted:Can someone explain what exactly happens in a tank when it is penetrated by an anti tank shell? What actually 'takes out' the tank? Depends on what type of shell it is. I think the most common types are probably AP((FS)DS) and HEAT rounds. AP rounds (armour piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot if you like your stupidly complicated acronyms) are essentially a highly evolved form of the cannonball. It's a heavy slug of metal inside a fancy shell and it works by being heavy, pointy, and going really fast. Turns out there isn't a very good way to defend against that sort of thing except by having really thick armour. Composition and sloping of the armour helps, but in the end you still need quite a lot of it to stop a heavy, pointy object going really fast. These generally rely on hitting something vital in order to actually stop the tank. On the plus side, they can punch clean through a tank so they have plenty of opportunity to wreck something like the engine block, the ammunition, the gun or turret mounting, the fuel tank, the treads, or the crew. Or on a British tank, the BV, which might make the crew abandon the tank due to morale loss. Tanks are full of important things because they tend to pack them pretty densely inside the armour so punching stonking great holes in them is a good way to knock them out. HEAT (high explosive anti tank) shells are a bit more complex in that they have a solid core of something, usually copper I think, and an explosive charge which ejects and partially liquefies the core and rams it into the tank at hypersonic speed. The net effect is that you get this horrible slug of superheated crap flying into the tank and it tends to spray all over the place once through the armour, sort of like some kind of hellish shotgun blast. HEAT rounds are more likely to hit and kill crew but won't punch clean through a tank, they also see a lot of use because, critically, they don't need to move very quickly in order to have their effect. HEAT rounds were used in the second world war in rocket launchers because they work just as well from a slow moving rocket as they do from a cannon shell, and in fact are easier to engineer on slower projectiles because they need to detonate at a specific distance from the armour to work, which they usually achieve by having a long nose with the detonator on the end of it. As the shell also is, well, high explosive, HEAT rounds are also often used as a general purpose round against buildings and the like if the tank doesn't have any proper HE-Frag rounds. HEAT rounds however are not as effective against modern tanks because most of the advances in armour have been designed to defeat them, being as they are extremely ubiquitous in missiles and rockets. This is why you see tanks and APCs rolling around with cages on the outside, they're designed to catch incoming shells and detonate them away from the armour, stopping them from penetrating properly. It wrecks the cage but the cage is extremely cheap to make and replace so it doesn't matter so much. This is also how explosive reactive armour works by detonating when the shell hits it, creating an opposing explosive force which messes up the shell's ability to eject its core into the tank. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 15:38
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Xerxes17 posted:The bold part isn't really true insomuch that it isn't because of the temperature of the material that makes it go through armor, but down to the fact that you've got a bunch of metal being subjected to a lot of pressure on a singular point that makes the HEAT shell liner punch through the armor. While it will be hot, it isn't "superheated". Rather than thinking of HEAT as being some short-lived plasma torch burning a hole through the armor, you should instead think of it as being a KE shell that is propelled and shaped by the HE in it going off right next to the target instead of from a gun-barrel and at a factory respectively. Oh, yes sorry it won't be like, that kind of hot no, superheated is probably a bad word, it just gets hot because putting metal under that amount of pressure makes it hot. Hot horrible shrapnel going everywhere inside the tank, whereas pure kinetic shells tend to hold together better post-penetration so they usually don't fragment as much. E: If you like armour and shell design as well as botes/tanks I highly recommend the game "From The Depths" as it includes a shell designer for cannons ranging from 18mm to 500mm and roughly simulates things like HEAT penetration. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 15:54
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I realise that the ERA blocks do help the tank survive but they don't half make them look scruffy.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:36
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chitoryu12 posted:HEAT rounds were also developed for low-velocity guns, which gave tanks and self-propelled guns carrying them a fighting chance against armor when HE just wouldn't cut it. At that time they could only be used for low-velocity projectiles, as a fast one would detonate too late after impact and penetration/deflection to really have the effect needed. This does mean that range no longer matters for penetration: HEAT will detonate and penetrate equally well at widely varying ranges, whereas a KE penetrator loses power over distance. They aren't as good as proper HE rounds but they're sufficiently close in design that HEDP rounds are fielded, which are basically HEAT rounds with a fragmentation casing stuck on.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:51
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HEY GAL posted:not everything You wait till insurgents start trying to fight the new abrams by sticking RPG7 rounds on the end of pikes and waiting for it to charge them. I'm taking bets on whether that or sticking them on lances and charging the tank on horseback is a better idea.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:44
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It makes sense if you consider what the invention of the anti ship missile would have meant for the battleship if the aircraft carrier hadn't got to it first. Frankly, cold war era cruise missiles could probably have signaled the end of the aircraft carrier if they'd ever been deployed. Turns out that there just isn't a hugely effective defence against mass producible munitions that can total your probably $8m tank (with all the extra crap stuck on it) in one shot. And unlike aircraft carriers, tanks don't serve as mobile bases, a tank without effective armour is essentially a motorized field gun and if that's what you want, it's much cheaper to just build a motorized field gun than a really expensive tank with armour that isn't reliable against the kind of things it's likely to face. If ATGMs continue to advance and proliferate you're going to either need lasers to shoot them down or be very careful how you field your tanks. I'd also expect to see a trend away from big heavy tanks towards lighter vehicles, similar to what happened with navies. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 19:57
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Ice Fist posted:Speaking of all this armor talk: can someone do an effort post or otherwise point out some good places to read up on modern tank armor types/variations? Some of the more fancy proprietary types probably won't have an abundance of information available on them because they're deliberately kept secret.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:24
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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. Generally I believe they have dealt with it by being produced in large numbers and being fairly expendable. Which is not quite the same idea as the current Abrams. Armored fighting vehicles may not be dead but the consistent trend in design across tanks and naval assets has been that once you start getting too big and too expensive, it becomes ruinously difficult to properly protect the vehicle in the face of advancing weapons technology. For some things such as carriers, they need to be huge to do their jobs, but for everything that can bear it, we've found that using more, less expensive, less difficult to make but still serviceable units gets the job done better. The panther comparisons seem pretty apt.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:03
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:Why can't you put wheels on it and call it a day? Because they already did that.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TWQ-1_Avenger Not actually airplane missiles, stingers, and it doesn't strictly have a radar though it can be linked into a radar network. But it's basically eight AA missiles strapped to a humvmee.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:12
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Xerxes17 posted:If anything, I wonder if tanks will go back to being "penny packeted" out to infantry units instead of being operated in large tank groups to avoid the threat of precision artillery. The awesome power of a Cluster MLRS is kinda wasted if there was only ever 2-4 tanks in that area to begin with instead of a massed grouping of 30. I can see that happening, it's still a big gun that can move fast and carry a bunch of useful optics. A tank as an infantry's heavy fire support would make sense. I'd still expect to see probably a lot more development into lighter, smaller tanks to fill that role though, or greater use of IFVs.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:35
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Groda posted:God help us if Lindybeige ever sees this... What's the deal with that guy anyway? He's fun when whingeing about minute errors in historical stuff but he seems pretty up his own arse.
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Aug 6, 2016 01:47
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Looks kind of like Hind > Ka52 in tank form.
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Aug 6, 2016 15:28
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I like the description of the artillery section as "seven mile snipers"
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Aug 7, 2016 18:00
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I can't imagine anyone would built a crapper raised above the trench. If you can't manage to build the floor high enough to stop your own feet rotting off I don't see why you would give your turds the privilege. To say nothing of the obvious stupidity of exposing yourself to fire.
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Aug 8, 2016 02:41
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sullat posted:Don't be ridiculous, he had spells to protect him from snipers. The spells don't work against a piece of your own clothing. Wouldn't a garderobe be pretty easy to spot because of the huge streak of poo poo running down the side of the wall?
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Aug 8, 2016 12:44
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NLJP posted:Generally there was actually a shaft that went down to a repository at the bottom that was shovelled out every now and again. It wasn't usually just a straightup hole with your cladger swinging in the wind. I guess that fell off on all the ones I've seen because they literally look like half an outhouse sticking out of the wall with a little shelf that I presume has a hole in the bottom.  Maybe I've only ever seen budget castles. An internal shaft would make more sense as I doubt many lords would like their castle to have a long brown streak down the side. Or I guess you could do it like the Germans and build an entire viaduct and extra tower to put the shitter in: 
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 01:13
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Plan Z posted:It's not impossible, though. There's the famous story of the KV tank at Raisenai that held up a battalion (I think) for a whole day, inflicting a few dozen casualties and knocking out a few guns and trucks. There were isolated stories around the war of similar deeds, usually involving armor facing an unprepared and/or unexpecting enemy. Nothing on the level of what was depicted at the end of Fury, though. I was going to mention that, a heavy tank getting tracked at an important point may conceivably present an obstacle if you don't have a gun big enough to penetrate it, but if people are getting close to the tank and can't figure out a way to blow it up, that says more about the people than the skill of the tank crew or mightiness of the engineering involved.
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Aug 9, 2016 14:43
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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 I seem to remember early WW1 tanks were not actually bulletproof and could be stopped by machinegun fire. xthetenth posted: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. Watch pubbies play ARMA3 and you might get a reasonable idea, apparently. I still can't get over that ISIS video where the guys start slowly rolling sideways away from the outcropping with machineguns on it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 18:39
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Trin Tragula posted:I've been trying to work this out for a year and I still don't know. The first exhaust venting system came on the Mark V, which was basically a really big fan that blew the gases back out of a hole the top. Anyone know the history of exhaust systems on cars? I've got an It-Stands-To-Reason suspicion that perhaps if all contemporary car/tractor/aeroplane engines just belched exhaust straight out of them and nobody had yet thought you might need or want a pipe to take the gases somewhere else... I know WW1 biplanes were a bit notorious for chucking crap at the pilot if the engine suffered damage, and I think they just vented the exhaust out the side of the front of the fuselage rather than bothering to run the exhaust very far. But this diagram of a model T shows a quite clear rear exhaust and what even looks like a muffler:  So gently caress if I know.
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Aug 10, 2016 02:01
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Ensign Expendable posted:Naturally, while Germany and the USSR duked it out in the east, the rest of the world wasn't sitting still. The Churchill tank was developed in Britain, with quite obvious roots in WWI heavy tanks. This was an awkward boxy design which was very long, very narrow, and had very confusing choices for armament. Unlike the Tiger or IS-2, various modifications of the Churchill carried guns that were also available on much lighter vehicles, with the exception of the "flying dustbin" engineering spigot mortar. This was rather by design, as the Churchill was a very different style of tank from the IS-2 and Tiger. As has already been pointed out the British produced a few types of "infantry tank" which were basically intended to be big slow boxes that the infantry could hide behind, and which carried guns not for taking out other tanks, but for providing support to the infantry. A Churchill is not a tank designed for independent operation or blitzkrieg, being slow as poo poo and poorly armed to take on tanks, but it was quite good at not exploding when shot at, and taking shots at buildings, bunkers, church steeples, and anything else that looked the wrong way at the infantry. The armament choices were indeed rather odd, the ones that spring to mind are the aforementioned spigot mortar on the AVRE (armored vehicle, royal engineers) variant, which fired 290mm high explosive shells at, well, anything you wanted replacing with a bloody big crater. Generally stuff like concrete bunkers.  (shell pictured right) The AVRE variant was also used as a general engineering vehicle which meant it carried bridges and trench-crossing tools, and mine-clearance tools such as this... thing:  (decidedly less metal than the American approach to mine clearance, I might add) The tank was also equipped occasionally with a flamethrower instead of its forward hull mounted machinegun. Just in case it wasn't offputting enough.  As well as being used as a mobile crane, again the utility of the large body and powerful engine of the tank showing through:  The primary default armament of the tank however, was a bit shite. It started off with a pretty pissweak 40mm (2pdr) cannon which, for a tank as big and slow as the Churchill, is very poor. It was upgunned for the invasion of Normandy with an improved British 6pdr (75mm) gun which significantly improved its firepower but was still identical to the gun used on the much lighter Cromwell tank. (for reference, the Churchill weighed about 40 tons, the Cromwell 26) The Churchill really was a quite specialized, if versatile tank. It was a chassis generally able to carry whatever equipment the situation called for, while in its most basic form, being very durable and well suited to working with infantry in confined spaces and slower advances, where the speed of the Cromwell cruiser tank would not be very helpful. It contrasts quite strongly with things like the IS-2 and Tiger/Panther designs which were very much geared towards fighting other tanks with superior armour and weaponry giving them the edge.
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Aug 10, 2016 17:45
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HEY GAL posted:for the past few years i've been really into things that are less flashy/sexy, more workaday, utilitarian, or durable. dashing cavalry charge: no, digging a trench in the right place: yes. so this post pushed that button. tank good? Tank pretty good AFAIK yeah, cromwells and similar were very useful in places like north africa where they have wide open plains between fortified rocky outcroppings, in that sort of theater you really do need a cruiser tank because you just want to get up in the enemy's grill as quickly as you can and no infantryman wants to slog it on foot over that much open terrain. Well suited to mechanized warfare and motorized infantry. But for dense terrain tanks and infantry need to work together, with infantry screening for the tank and the tank supporting the infantry when they need something big and bulletproof with a heavy gun on it. I think for a lot of the invasion of Normandy this job was farmed out to Shermans and similar just because they were so ubiquitous, but a tank purpose built for it makes a lot of sense. I think the main reason it didn't see more action was just because it was kind of expensive and nothing could quite compare with the American ability to churn out Shermans like they were going out of fashion. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 18:01
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Flashy and fast is what the British thought would be great, but in practice all they accomplished was getting wasted by AT guns before anything else. Cruiser tanks were garbage in practice. Shermans were a medium tank which the British doctrine at the time did not try to produce, the interwar period saw the development of the Infantry and Cruiser tank philosophy in Britain, where you build both heavy, slow tanks and fast, light tanks with medium-grade armament. The infantry tank supports works with the infantry sections to push through contested terrain as part of a combined arms approach, the Cruiser tank serves a similar role to historical light cavalry, being ideally used for raiding and supply line disruption as well as fast strikes behind the main line. This does, of course, run into a few problems when your light cavalry costs a lot of money and the enemy may not leave their flanks undefended. It also means that you have a disadvantage of numbers, because you have to split your production to build both types of tanks and neither one is suitable for the other role. American tank doctrine on the other hand focused on building general purpose tanks, of which the Sherman is an excellent example. A Sherman can be pressed into almost any role and could be produced in staggering numbers. It is neither too slow to be used as a raider nor too lightly armoured to take hits, its weaponry can fight other tanks or be loaded with specialist ammunition for other roles, it's quite adaptable and can serve in engineering roles if needed, and it bears repeating that it was both cheap and immensely mass producible. You could build the finest cruiser tank in the world but it probably wouldn't matter a great deal if your opponent can field twice as many merely acceptable tanks. Or, er, ten times as many if you compare Cromwell to Sherman production levels. As can be seen in later years, the general purpose tank doctrine won out. Aside from specialist vehicles, most tank designs are equipped to do a bit of everything, and where the original design doesn't serve, modification kits are developed to help it function better such as the TUSK kits for the modern Abrams tanks. Ensign Expendable posted:The Cromwell was inferior to the Sherman in literally every conceivable way and also came out two years later. 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. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 18:34
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ArchangeI posted:Is sloped armor just really difficult to make or why did they decide to go with a box tank in tyool 1943? Genuinely not sure about that as they built the Crusader in 1941 which is a bizzarely modern looking design.  But then the Centurion is quite boxy looking as well and that was built in 1945 and continued to serve for some time. They didn't seem overly fussed on whether they used sloped armour or not. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 18:44
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't know why you wrote a huge block of text about it, but I agree, cruiser tanks were dumb British obsessions that never amounted to anything. I would personally suggest that they, like the infantry tank, became somewhat irrelevant in the face of advancing technology. They make sense for a certain set of conditions (powerful raiding vehicles utilizing speed to evade fire rather than relying on limited armour technology and sacrificing mobility) but by the time they were produced, the conditions ceased to really exist. By the late second world war you could produce an effective medium tank which could do everything. As an interwar tank (which is where the ideas it was based on come from) however it's quite sensible, because interwar tanks were more restricted in what they could achieve with their designs so specialization was more important. The idea wasn't stupid, it just got folded into the capability of the Main Battle Tank, as did the capabilities of the infantry tank. Because nowadays you can just straight up build a 70 ton tank that goes like poo poo off a stick and that's not even considered odd. 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. North Africa had a lot of fortified positions with excellent visibility. While the terrain favors tank mobility, it also gives great line of sight to anything wanting to shoot a tank. And the Germans had some really good AT guns. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 22:11
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Well cruiser doctrine would probably suggest that the tanks should go on their own and operate independently. Which is to a certain degree a fuckup when you do that without scouting ahead with something less valuable than your tank squadron and end up running into a bunch of AT guns. If you get your tanks shot and killed because they're not designed to fight a protracted battle in close quarters, that's them being pressed into a bad situation. If you get them shot and killed because you tried to take them on a joyride through the countryside looking for stuff to blow up, because that's what your tanks are for, that's probably more stupidity. The story about the canal jumping Cromwell is a relatively good illustration of the latter category save for the good fortune of the tankers. You shouldn't really be stumbling on an enemy camp on the other side of a hedgerow by accident with your tank squadron. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 22:23
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Cruiser tanks were obsolete when the war started. Of course people wanted fast tanks, but the tradeoffs were enormous. The British were making tanks like the Crusader well into 1943, even thought it was essentially an unreliable Panzer III (a 1937 tank). The Crusader could go really fast, but what good is that when tanks have to stop to shoot anyways? The Covenanter was a cruiser tank with 2000 produced units. It lit itself on fire so constantly that it was only fit for the Home Guard. A whole tank delivered to Dad's army! The MBT concept is a somewhat inevitable result of advances in engineering permitting the creation of an effective tank that is heavier than a heavy tank, faster than a light tank, and better armoured than an infantry tank. Britain didn't invent the MBT, everybody eventually gravitated towards building them because they just became the obvious thing to build. Yes you can have as much armour as you want, yes you can have a massive gun, yes you can get up to 30mph offroad, yes you can shoot missiles out of the main gun. Tradeoffs ceased to be particularly necessary. Cruiser, infantry, heavy, medium, light, all foms of tanks for the most part were subsumed into the MBT as technology advanced because there ceased to be a pressing need for any of the other designs as tanks. You get light armored vehicles sure but they're not fielded like tanks. It's just... odd to me to say that other tank designs are stupid because they were invalidated. It's like saying battleships were stupid because the aircraft carrier invalidated them. Yes they would be a bad idea to build nowadays and even in their heyday they did not function as expected because people were very shy about actually committing them to battle, but the idea that brought them forth was not stupid, they were the logical progression of naval warfare at the time, as the specialist tank was a logical development of interwar tank theory, as were medium tanks. Even stuff like the Tiger weren't stupid ideas, because building tanks that were too tough to be destroyed did work, that the tiger was mechanically unreliable was not a problem with the concept because the Russians built heavy tanks that worked, so I'm not comfortable saying ideas are bad because they aren't executed well either. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 23:47
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my dad posted:I stopped playing World of Warships, but I don't think I'll ever stop being salty about cowardly battleship players (who inevitably end up in my team) in that game. Look we spent like the entire navy's budget on this thing and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you take it into a fight to get shot at. Just you get back to work griding down those bulkheads, I don't care if they keep the water out as long as they look nice and shiny. Also less gunnery drills please and more time pressing your trousers.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:58
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spectralent posted:That reminds me: Does the concept of pure infantry exist anymore? I'm aware infantry do still train to march and actually do marches (especially in asymmetric war where stuff like "the people we need you to attack are up this mountain, which is impassable to vehicles" happens), but if WW3 ever kicked off and there was peer-state tier conflicts going on, do we have any militaries that still envisage a significant role to walking, or is a BMP or M113 or whatever basically assumed to be standard for modern infantry? Hard to tell honestly because modern militaries are so scaled back that there's always enough vehicles if you really need them. If we had WW3 we would probably massively expand the military and enlist shitloads more people, which would lead to shortages of equipment and vehicles unless they started raiding the mothballed stuff. I think to get accurate ideas for large scale warfare you'd have to look back at the USSR/NATO cold war stuff because that was probably the last time we had military spending high enough to really do a conventional WW3. My guess though would probably be no, even if they're not mechanized/airborne they're going to be at least motorized, they'll be driving to wherever they're going even if they fight on foot. As a side note I think I found my favorite word, Russian for "infantry who ride on tanks" is "tankodesantniki" loving trilingual word salad, amazing. I really wish English did compound words sometimes. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 00:10
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Not parachute, generally, I think. They probably insert by helicopter because paradrops are still rough on troop organization even with modern parachutes and radios. And yeah I wouldn't really like to be flying in a C-130 over enemy territory. And we've never fought a war in a while that benefited from massive numbers of them being dropped in enemy territory like D-Day.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:33
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SeanBeansShako posted:Can't we agree to disagree and just make fun of the Maus? If the tank as a concept had been invented a bit earlier you loving know that we'd have had land dreadnoughts by 1914 and the first world war would have been essentially the plot of Mortal Engines with the British and German tank fleets driving all over France trying to find some small, 150 ton tanks to blow up without risking their 800 ton flagtanks.
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Aug 12, 2016 16:07
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cheerfullydrab posted:But... rivers? I'm sure we can build a tank with a track length longer than the Rhein is wide.
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Aug 12, 2016 16:33
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Nebakenezzer posted:What the gently caress is this? It looks like some sort of dual flintlock shotgun. If you ever get the chance, visit the Royal Armouries at Leeds in the UK. They have so many stupid loving guns. I'm not sure if the weird flintlocks are best or whether I like the punt guns the most.
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Aug 13, 2016 02:24
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Endman posted:What about the Puckle Gun? I want to learn more about the Puckle Gun. It's a crank operated six-nine chamber anti-popery device. Seems pretty obvious to me? E: To clarify, a device to oppose popes, not a device to facilitate antipopery. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Aug 13, 2016 |
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Aug 13, 2016 03:15
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I know they wrote a big manual on how to attack star forts by digging trenches towards it, but I was under the impression that the general advice for doing so was "Don't."
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Aug 15, 2016 00:24
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