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good god, the last one had 45000 posts? good god
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Aug 1, 2016 23:59
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my dad posted:and you read them all gently caress off nerd, go post in your nerd thread with the nerds (flicks cigarette butt)
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Aug 2, 2016 00:27
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I think the M35 truck has the B-52 beat by a few years. I can't think of anything older than that off the top of my head.
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Aug 2, 2016 18:07
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Is the M35 definitely still in use? All I can find for it is the Wikipedia page, which says it's been replaced, and military surplus sites. yeah, they're all over in the National Guard still. And there's still a handful of them lingering around the active force in really niche areas like shop trucks and so on I was actually signed for a couple of them like 10 years ago and they were dated back to the early 60s. I did not really feel any pressing need to maintain them properly
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Aug 2, 2016 18:50
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm? The biggest difference was the 76mm had a much larger casing, which meant it could carry more powder, which meant much higher muzzle velocity. The barrel length helped but you still needed more boom to get a significant upgrade in penetration.  I think these are the right rounds...the 75x350 is on the far right, the 76mm is next to it. Note how much more brass there is.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:06
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Is it true that the average combat load hasn't changed over time? For the US Army right now, for an infantry guy, the basic load (that is, the load you're expected to carry over distance) is 120-130 lbs, or around 70% of body weight. I feel like the kits during the world wars and the ACW and so on were way, way lighter than that, certainly by pounds and probably by proportion also. Granted it is also a distinct possibility that the modern day US Army is an outlier and is also stupid.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:54
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Fangz posted:I'm comparing That loadout is...really optimistic, especially if you're going to be gone for a few days or if you're carrying any specialized gear. That said I'm guessing the average joe today is quite a bit bigger than his 1860s or 1940s counterpart?
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Aug 3, 2016 17:19
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Mojo Threepwood posted:I recently finished Battle Cry of Freedom and I had a question about Andersonville prison in Georgia. The book spends time explaining how bad the conditions were and how this was a known issue in the north, but the prison wasn't liberated until May 1865 when the war was over. Here is a really good but poorly formatted essay on this topic. Basically 1) Hood was still a danger at that point, 2) he didn't want 30,000 weak, sick men attached to his army that was operating with precarious supply lines deep in enemy territory. In related news the expedition to relieve the camp was an absolute gong show.
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Aug 4, 2016 21:09
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PittTheElder posted:Someone from the forces once told me that a 25mm round from a Bushmaster will kill someone from overpressure or some poo poo on a near miss, which doesn't seem right. Anyone c/d? I've been obliquely downrange from heavy auto cannon fire and full-time and it is extraordinarily unpleasant. Even from a ways away you can feel the air being displaced by the rounds. that being said I seriously doubt that would actually cause injury. what does cause injury, and a lot of injury, is the blast and the fragmentation. Those rounds are like hand grenades when they go off and if it happens in an even partially confined space the effect is pretty bad. What I would guess is this guy probably saw some injury caused by the detonation of the round next to the target and then attributed it to overpressure because that sounds cooler
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Aug 5, 2016 13:35
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So I just got spun up on the latest iteration of Abrams upgrades and their solution to the next generation of missiles is just to slap more ablative armor on the thing and no poo poo I'm not kidding you it's new curb weight is no less than 93 tons. God bless America
bewbies fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 18:04
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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. It is basically being built for one mission, and that is an offensive type operation in eastern Europe, and there basically wasn't a way to do it without more passive armor (apparently, I really don't know much about APS options and how they perform versus modern missiles although the inference is...not well at all). There was also sort of the general theme that this was the end of the line for the Abrams and with it probably tanks as we know them which has all sorts of interesting implications.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:43
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Spacewolf posted:Just to clarify: You have the TARDEC types saying its the end of the line for tanks? Or the contractors? Concepts guys, think...way, way further in the future than DECs or contractors look.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:57
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:Much less mud/snow/sand/other places that tanks ate expected to operate. I *think* the new C-5 can still carry two of them at once but in general those kinds of assets are reserved for more important things so it is sealift all day every day.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:04
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spectralent posted:Isn't that what patriot missiles are for? Patriot could deal with a rocket barrage, sort of, but it'd have to be there in the first place (which is hard as it is slow and fragile and takes a while to emplace) and expending interceptors that cost $6m a shot to take down cheapo artillery rockets isn't a good equation. That is sort of what IFPC is designed to do but it also isn't really mobile as such, at least not how maneuver forces need it to be. Basically unless lasers get a whole lot better the best way a maneuver force can defend itself against artillery is to move a lot or not be seen. 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. This is true, but there's been two big changes in recent years. First, ATGMs (and ATGM targeting) that can significantly outrange tanks, and 2) targeting enablers like drones that can direct rocket artillery fire very accurately even on mobile targets. There will probably always be a need for well protected things with powerful weapons and cross country mobility (like there has been since we started putting armored guys on horseback) but the way these things look is going to have to change relatively soon. bewbies fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 23:23
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:Why can't you put wheels on it and call it a day? We tried that sort of, it worked really well but the USAF/USN priced the missiles out of the realm of reasonable.  Basically NATO needs to buy these or maybe steal one from Iraq/UAE and reverse engineer it like they did with the B-29: 
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Aug 5, 2016 23:32
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Xerxes17 posted:Is there anything public about this yet btw? I know they announced the SEP v3 upgrade last year sometime, I think this was just the final decision following prototyping and whatnot. I'm not for sure on this, but I think this pic is an early prototype in testing...and the things on the fronts of the turrets are weights simulating the additional armor additions. You can still see the additional armor from the last round of SEP underneath the weights. 
bewbies fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Aug 6, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 14:53
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Xerxes17 posted:It's just that with the current M1A2 hitting 72t, some other people I've been talking to find the 93t figure to be unbelievable. 20t of new additional armor? It'd have to be pure plates of DU for that. I'm just parroting what the maneuver center guys said, I really don't have any other info past that.
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Aug 6, 2016 15:08
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I think Fury is the first movie I've seen that actually got the way bullets sound and tracers look right. I always appreciated that. Why is it that war movies always feature actors that are way, way, way too drat old to be in the army? Hey, I'm 40 year old lieutenant clint eastwood and I'm taking orders from 42 year old tom hanks who must be the oldest infantry captain in the ETO, except then he meets 51 year old airborne captain ted danson and everybody is surprised until 46 year old lieutenant brad pitt walks up only to be outdone by 51 year old staff sergeant brad pitt
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Aug 9, 2016 13:39
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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
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Aug 9, 2016 17:55
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Is there a useful measure of how much a medieval castle cost in modern terms? Cathedrals too, for that matter. They seem to me like they must've been projects on the order of the Hoover dam or the international space station or something
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Aug 15, 2016 14:05
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WP is a terrible AP weapon, especially when you need to control effects which we nearly always need to nowadays. it is a crazy good obscurant though.
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Aug 16, 2016 15:34
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Fangz posted:Am I right in believing that despite the dramatic effects as shown in various photos and videos, ordinary HE would be a lot more lethal than WP rounds for artillery? the only reason to ever use WP is for obscuration or if you REALLY need to light something on fire for some reason and you don't have a fuel air or thermobaric weapon
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Aug 16, 2016 17:05
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I'm kind of giggling at the National Guard guy who wears his Stetson apparently regularly outside of formal military events
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Aug 18, 2016 23:01
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I don't know how big of a deal this was in World War II but I know now at least tankers are absolutely fanatical about the way they handle their ammo not because they're concerned that it's going to detonate or something but because any imperfections in the long rod will make you miss your shot at a couple thousand meters
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Aug 19, 2016 15:24
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PittTheElder posted:How destructive is the firing of a 15 inch battleship gun anyway? Like is it dangerous to any crew who might be topside during a firing? Undoubtedly it would be deafeningly loud I guess. The big guns could be lethal if you got too close...managing their blast effects was a big consideration in design and....led to some significant issues for those that didn't manage it well (eg, the Nelsons). That being said I'm honestly not sure how the external gun crews dealt with the blasts, especially if the gun was firing at an angle that put it closer towards the superstructure. That would have sucked some rear end at the very least.
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Aug 19, 2016 21:25
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I finally got to see the future howitzer which the engineers are lovingly referring to as RJ. Sorry but this is the best pic I can find of it, you can kind of see how ridiculously long the barrel is. This is the new barrel and chamber mounted on a 777 chassis; they're also looking at mounting it on 105s and on the new A6 Paladins. Here is a contemporary 777 gun from about the same angle for comparison:  It can throw a 155mm round about 5 times the range of a WWII era equivalent or twice what a 777 can do, which is a really cool capability but it has a lot of issues associated with it, like it throws the rounds so high they enter into airspace normally only used by high flying aircraft, and we don't have a reliable way to see that far but hey 70km is 70km.
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Aug 22, 2016 16:12
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hogmartin posted:
That pic is of a 54 caliber barrel and it can be slingloaded under a 46 or 47 just like the current 777. There is also a 58 caliber barrel being evaluated and I don't know about that one. Disinterested posted:What's the travel time of a round traveling 70km? It's roughly 2.5 mins at max range, assuming round isn't rocket assisted. Also it is always really strange to me when people argue that decision makers in a fog of war type situation "should have known" something as significant as "my country has no chance to gain anything at all from further resistance".
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Aug 22, 2016 17:28
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Can that thing actually be slung under a helo, or was that not a design goal?
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HEY GAL posted:what is a division? what is a corps? This isn't really apropos of the current discussion so forgive me but this kind of cracked me up because the contemporary US military has absolutely no idea what these two things are or will be in the future. Basically a bunch of senior officers just asked the same question and got a resounding  as an answer
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Aug 23, 2016 15:04
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OwlFancier posted:The ammo for that is going to be real expensive because surely without guided rounds you're gonna run into accuracy limitations based more around the intervening atmosphere rather than any limitation of the gun. With conventional rounds it is actually quite a bit more accurate at the 777s max range and has about the same CEP at 70km as the 777 does at 35, something something muzzle velocity and RPM as it leaves the barrel (basically, the ballistics are a lot better which makes it more accurate), plus the met stuff isn't really any different for this than it is for rockets. That being said the rounds probably are going to be a big expense because the existing 155 rounds almost certainly can't be used due to the stresses they endure during firing, and the new rounds will have to have some manner of new stronger alloy in the casing. We don't know yet what round (or actually even what caliber) they're going to go with though. CoolCab posted:yeah as I understood it immediately after the fall of Germany the Soviets probably would have had little trouble rolling over the remainder of Western Europe had it come down to a conventional war I do not agree with this assessment
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Aug 24, 2016 14:27
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I feel like we've argued this scenario quite a bit but I've never seen any convincing evidence that either side would have gotten much further than where their final lines after Germany gave up. The Soviets would have had one hell of a time dealing with the allied air forces and keeping their guys fed and equipped though.
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Aug 24, 2016 16:38
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FastestGunAlive posted:What do you do for a living? I love nerding out about artillery I write future warfare stuff, primarily. I'm generally pessimistic.
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Aug 24, 2016 17:16
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FAUXTON posted:I wonder how a Russian underground resistance would have gone, had there been a proper occupation a la France. That's pretty much what they did everywhere there were Nazis about. We just did an interesting study on defending lines of communication and we used the Wehrmacht in Russia in WWII as a prime example: a lot of times forward-based maneuver units had to fight backwards to get to their sustainment help. This wasn't as common later on as they were consistently falling back, but during the offensives a typical division commander had to reserve at least a battalion's worth of dudes to first fight back through to the corps support area, and then to escort the goodies back up to the things that needed them (which could sometimes be dozens of kms away). I dunno, kind of blew my mind. Bypass criteria is a crazy thing.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:59
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Re. the Italian navy in the Mediterranean: I've always felt like they should have absolutely owned that poo poo had they put their minds to it and that would have put a lot of other big operations in question. Also it was a great theater for big gun battleship slugfests and they kind of robbed us of that which I'm a little bit bitter about.
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Aug 29, 2016 21:49
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It seems to me like emission control is one of the things that laypeople really don't understand very well about the modern battlefield. It is absolutely crazy when you see graphical representations of how emitters "look" to collection assets...it really is like turning on a flashlight in a dark room, except that you can tell exactly who manufactured the flashlight, and when, and you can be pretty sure who the specific owner of the flashlight is, and how much juice the flashlight batteries have left, and etc In semi related news the army and marines are trying really hard to figure out how to reduce signatures of units in the field and the biggest issue currently is cell phones that the joes haul around with them.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:14
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I am far from an expert on this and the details are obviously super classified but as I understand it the use of different layers of temperature and salinity to mask a submarine signature is a whole lot more important than sheer depth and a lot of technology and training go into maximizing those techniques
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Aug 31, 2016 18:18
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The " clean luftwaffe " thing has a bit more validity than the rest of the clean wehrmacht stuff . With a few notable exceptions (Goering Milch, Rudel etc) they by and large weren't particularly enthusiastic Nazis. This was mainly a coincidence as they tended to be drawn from the wealthy and educated, and the fact that highly trained service men like pilots couldn't be easily replaced by stooges, but it still meant that the Nazi ideology wasn't particularly ingrained in the organization except it's very highest levels. They also fought a relatively clean war, certainly by German standards, and in comparison to their Western Allied counterparts , although I do think that was due as much to a lack of capability and opportunity as any deliberate policy decision.
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Sep 2, 2016 03:57
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spectralent posted:I find a clean Luftwaffe very hard to believe. I'm a little hesitant to respond as it seems like you kind of have some sort of axe to grind here, but just to be clear, I offered this in terms of comparison to the rest of the Werhmacht and to the Allied air forces. No one is suggesting they didn't do loads of repugnant stuff (or at least I'm not).
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Sep 2, 2016 18:10
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D&C is actually useful in the sense that it makes it a lot easier to move hordes of teenagers around in a relatively organized manner, and get their attention, and so on. That being said we've been having a lot of discussion the last few years about the validity of the "teamwork and discipline" aspects of D&C; specifically, if we're wanting soldiers who can think and act and react to ambiguous situations, then what is the value in drilling reflexive reactions to discrete orders? If you can believe it there are some very serious opinions on both sides of this issue.
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Sep 4, 2016 19:47
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So to drag up D&C chat back upSpacewolf posted:I'd love to see a summary of the more common talking points on each side, if you could, bewbies. preface: this is me parroting a bunch of smart people who know a lot about this stuff; I'm just at the same venues and I find it really interesting so I listen sort of closely. There are a lot of actual org behavior "terms" and "other things" that I do not know, so if anyone who DOES know this stuff wants to amend/correct my wordology please do so enthusiastically...the limit of my personal academic knowledge is the couple of OB classes I had to take in grad school. stage: this stuff all falls under the umbrella of the thing the army calls "institutional training", that is, the formal, schoolhouse type training environments that are done on an army-wide basis. Think: basic training, job training, NCO/officer training, and so on. Institutional training differs from unit and individual training in that it is strictly controlled by big army, they're carefully planned and executed, issue diplomas/certifications, and so on. The army is trying very hard right now to transform itself in some way or another to meet what we think the challenges are going to be mid-century, and institutional training in general hasn't been significantly overhauled, or even really analyzed, since the Vietnam era...various attempts have been made to modernize things and so on, but they are usually either dialed back or axed for any number of reasons. So me, I find myself in neverending seminar/wargame things wherein this stuff gets discussed for hours. At practically all of them, there are three basic factions: a cohort of retired general officers lovingly/disparagingly referred to as "greybeards", a bunch of super smart folks with little to no military experience with PhDs in various disciplines that the army pays big money to give outside/expert perspectives, and then a bunch of field-grade (mid career) officers, civil servants, and contractors. The general officers are usually hardline Cold Warriors - they usually entered the military just after Vietnam and left in the early days of GWOT, so their primary combat experience was Desert Shield/Storm and maybe a TOC as a colonel or general in early OIF. They remember the trainwreck that the army was in the 70s, and in fact this was really during their formative years so it kind of defines their perspectives in a lot of ways. They also remember BIG ARMY, the giant armored cold war force of the 80s, as this was where they did their field grade time. The current field grade officers etc, on the other hand, almost universally came in during the post-cold war drawdown, chilled during the easy pre-9/11 military, and then have multiple combat deployments in our various COIN fights since then (this is my cohort by the way). The reason I say this is to sort of outline who thinks what; I'm sure you can guess at this point how the battle lines are generally drawn up. So now to the actual topic. First, we have to establish exactly what the point of basic training is from an OB perspective. Among other things, it: 1. The practical stuff. it teaches you how to do basic soldier things like work a rifle and move around tactically and make your bed and keep generally clean and so on. 2. The culture stuff. it provides the "price of entry" into the organization, in the same way that training camp for sports, or hazing for a fraternity, or dissertations for PhD candidates, or any other difficult rite-of-passage thing. This gives the recruit some investment in the organization - you did something hard, so now your membership has value. It also provides current members in the org a basis for mutual understanding with new members, since they did it also. It also adjusts the recruits to cultural norms and behaviors in the org, teaches them expectations and rules, and so on. 3. The interpersonal stuff. For most recruits, this is the first big organization they've been a real part of. In BCT, you're a part of a squad, and then a platoon, and a company. You have to learn to live and work with people you've never met and might be from wildly different backgrounds, in VERY close quarters, in fairly stressful situations. The military is unique in this respect to other large orgs as it has a large number of new members going through the process all at the same time, whereas the far more common approach is to introduce new members individually into already established small groups (think: your first day of work, for most of you). So if these are our general objectives in basic training, what does D&C add to this process? - It teaches a bunch of cultural norm stuff, like saluting, standing at attention, marching, and so on. - It creates the first true team oriented objective. In the army and marines at least, there is a D&C competition between platoons during each cycle, and so the platoon has to work together to achieve said goal. D&C is unique in this respect because it teaches the value of "the individual not loving up things for the group" (I'm sure there is an academic term for this but I don't know what it is), which is obviously very important in a military setting. The consequences for getting out of step marching or loving up the manual of arms are minimal; the consequences for loving up your job in a combat situation can be enormous. So, D&C provides this method for easing new members into this setting where their individual actions can have enormous consequences, along with introducing peer pressure as a primary method of policing this behavior (at least for low level members). - It gives the recruit a pretty profound connection to the profession of arms. Essentially, ever since we as a species have had soldiers, we've had D&C. Hoplites formed straight lines and left and right faced. Legionnaires marched about in columns and rows. Knights saluted one another. Musketeers did the manual of arms. And so on. Speaking for myself, the first time you really feel like a soldier is when you're issued a rifle and begin to drill as a platoon with your drill sergeant yelling and the rifle butts clicking and the boots stomping, and so on. - It teaches immediate, reflexive response to command. This was traditionally the primary focus of drill - instilling discipline, providing the officer with a coherent, rapid-reacting formation that could do as it was told to do quickly and efficiently, which made everything from maneuver to marching to firing more effective. Now, the debate. The overarching issue is what the army wants/needs to look like in 15-20 years, and how does it get there. The approved vision for the individual soldier/leader is what they're calling "operational adaptability"; that is, a soldier comfortable with ambiguity, able to act and react appropriately without direct instructions, and so on. This vision is really a byproduct of OIF more than anything else - militaries have always wanted this quality in leaders (especially senior leaders), but in general, discipline is preferred to initiative at lower levels. So, the major fundamental shift is changing the focus at the individual training level to prefer initiative, which more or less fundamentally has to come at the price of discipline. The greybeards, as you can imagine, are generally opposed to this. They still see the sergeant as fundamentally a follower - his basic task is to link his soldiers with the orders of the officers above him and then ensure those soldiers act in accordance with those orders. The soldier basically does what the sergeant tells him to do and very little else. They recognize the need for soldiers and NCOs who can act on their initiative, but when pressed with the reality that the two are somewhat mutually exclusive, they always side with discipline. Coincidentally, they favor action with larger formations (read: divisions > brigades) and are not big fans of modularity and task organization. They see D&C - particularly the discipline element of it, as very fundamental to any military training. The field grades almost universally grew up in an environment where they wanted more initiative from their subordinates, and as such they generally want soldiers and NCOs who can act appropriately even when given vague or incomplete orders. This is reflected in the "mission command" philosophy - relatively complete freedom of action within defined (or undefined?) limits. This essentially breaks down the traditional top-down relationship between military echelons in a lot of cases. Instead, subordinate units are acting largely independently in accordance with their view of the battle; higher's job is to prescribe limits and feed them information. When you neck this down to the individual soldier or squad, what you need is constant application of initiative - not only not waiting for orders if they aren't there, but not acting in accordance with orders if they are not aligned with your current understanding of the situation. So, the D&C reflex-action stuff has very little application here. In other words, if we want soldiers who react rapidly and appropriately to the situation, why are we teaching them to react rapidly and appropriately to orders? The PhDs generally offer a lot of counterexamples and are very confused as to why the army is as backwards as it is. Football team counterexamples are a constant - football players are carefully drilled in running elaborate plays requiring everyone to move with one another in sync and so on, but often plays break down, and the player who can improvise well is prized. They try and build this comfort with the system breaking down into their training, with varied results, but the value of the ability is clear. They also do not understand why the military is so slow to adopt change (this goes for practically every area, not just training), especially when "agility" is supposed to be so important. You hear "organizational inertia" a whole lot, basically. D&C is kind of a central pillar of this inertia - no one really knows why marching around parking lots in formations is still worthwhile, especially in combat units, but that's how I was taught, and that's how my teacher was taught, and his teacher, and so on. Ultimately the question is, can we provide the useful elements of D&C (teamwork, cultural aspects, etc) through other means, thus getting around the potentially deleterious effects of D&C on leader development? The answer is obviously yes, but it would take a really significant culture shift, and really, a shift in how pretty much all of us view the profession of arms.
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Sep 6, 2016 16:11
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:I was interested in this: the standard trope (probably inaccurate) in Commonwealth militaries is the green officer with the experienced sergeant who really runs the platoon, the only three words a second lieutenant needing being "carry on, sergeant", and the classic "are you sure, sah?". Is that stereotype common in the US? That is a stereotype in the US also , certainly one that the NCO corps is very fond of. the platoon leader position in general is a very developmental one, and at least in theory the Platoon Sergeant is supposed to act as something of a mentor as a platoon leader and so on. it doesn't necessarily work that way in practice though, as he might imagine. Speaking anecdotally, I was prior service had some poo poo NCOs so you can probably guess how that worked itself out. Numerous peers of mine had similar experiences. As such we are a little touchy about the accuracy of said stereotype.....
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Sep 7, 2016 13:17
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