HEY GAIL posted:

These people are not heartless--they just don't know as much about medicine as we do, and in many cases they don't have enough resources. And given the way surgery progressed, with centuries of slow advancement until the late 19th century, my hot take is that a well-trained, experienced 16th or 17th century military surgeon is probably among the best you can get until the beginning of antiseptic surgery. Possibly the best--in contrast to the mid 19th century, the great surgeon Ambrose Pare believed that an abdominal wound is not an automatic death sentence. He recounts saving several people whose intestines he sewed up, and regarded it as a delicate thing but certainly not unusual.

zoux posted:

No whistle? Is that a modern thing or is the popular conception of artillery shells whistling as they fall fake?

chitoryu12 posted:

The Dreyse needle rifle as well, which also had the added problem of putting the primer at the base of the bullet. Somehow nobody thought "Maybe we shouldn't have the firing pin surrounded by exploding gunpowder?"

Jamwad Hilder posted:

No, I'm not referring to any of the "why the Greeks were the best" stuff. I mean the things he's written about the actual mechanics of Greek vs Greek hoplite warfare, the types of people who may have fought as hoplites, his theories on why that style of warfare may have developed in the context of Greek agriculture, etc. That stuff is interesting even though I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions.

FAUXTON posted:

They'd literally never get off the ground if they were propelled by their wheels but goons gonna goon.

HEY GAIL posted:

yeah when i was a child i was into, i guess you'd call it the "high point" of world war 2, Nazi Germany at the height of its powers, all the cliches are there, and now I'm most interested in countries/armies as they either begin or fall apart.

i think it's that when you're very young the sheer impressiveness of the big cliches are what push themselves on your mind, and then when you gain a further understanding of complex systems you can appreciate the beginnings or endings of things

HEY GAIL posted:

inflammation (and picking at it) makes microscopic traces on the bone

SeanBeansShako posted:

Even if they cut their hair, which they did if they wore wigs the lice would just infest their head gear and return to their home skull with ease. Also, Barbers were minor surgeons and Dentists too and rarely around, if they weren't busy assisting the regimental surgeons with more important matters.

aphid_licker posted:

Are they that mobile? That's mildly terrifying. I thought it was bedding/clothing/body contact only.

SlothfulCobra posted:

For the longest time, if you didn't wear something on your head, it meant something was wrong with you.

zoux posted:

chitoryu12 posted:

Karl from InRange and Forgotten Weapons sometimes gets accused of being a Nazi or Wehraboo, but I think it's just because he likes to wear some German WW2 stuff when filming. All of the videos he and Ian have done that actually touch on politics have shown both of them to be sensible and far more left-wing than most other gun nuts.

I think a guy in TFR said he knows Ian personally and he used to DM their D&D games, so he's as much of a nerd as you would expect from looking at him.

chitoryu12 posted:

I've played some regular airsoft quasi-roleplay games that take place in a sort of Man in the High Castle universe where Germany won WW2 and occupied the United States. The German forces are just supposed to wear regular camo patterns (depending on which "division" they're in, like the SS Charles Lindbergh Division is in gray or urban camo and the Fallschrimjaegers are in woodland camo or solid green).

And then there's the guys who show up in period accurate SS uniforms from head to toe, carrying an airsoft MG 42 between them.

FAUXTON posted:

*crashes a Chinook into an Osprey*

Hazzard posted:

That sounds like an argument for more statues rather than less fewer statues. I would also be interested in knowing how famous Mosby and Longstreet are. I recognise Longstreet's name, but know nothing about him and don't think I've ever heard of Mosby. I just keep pronouncing it to rhyme with Oswald Mosley.

OwlFancier posted:

The attempt by an enterprising individual to turn the Enfield into a semi automatic rifle by bolting a load of gubbins to the side of the gun which automate the bolt cycling process, would qualify if not for the infuriating fact that it does actually work.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U682yOpNafg

Still wasn't taken up because it wasn't judged necessary and I don't think it would have been taken very seriously. And also it requires a bunch of extra steel bits to be stuck on it in order to prevent it from taking your fingers off or putting your eye out while firing, turns out putting all the guts on the outside of the gun isn't the best idea!

Pharmaskittle posted:

Why are Gurkhas so prominent in crazy heroic war stories? Are they really overrepresented, or is it like an orientalist thing that they get fixated on more than other folks?

HEY GAIL posted:

acw correspondence indicates "kick rear end" is a hundred years older than we thought
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/10/10/the_phrase_kick_ass_was_discovered_in_civil_war_correspondence.html

i knew already that "wicked" for "cool" and "crib" for "home" are from the 1840s, but i didn't know about Private John B. Gregory and his desire to kick rear end.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Most modern dress swords are at least in the same shape of either smallswords or cavalry sabers of some kind, both of which are perfectly serviceable weapons. Especially against opponents not wearing armor. Older swords, the "classic" design like arming swords and viking swords etc., were designed to deal with opponents likely to be wearing leather or chain armor of some kind. Plus there was just less knowledge in general of how to optimize a blade.

Smallswords and cavalry sabers came about after the flintlock musket and socket bayonet largely drove armor off the battlefield. Once that happened, if you were fighting on foot, speed mattered a lot more than anything else, so shorter and lighter was the way to go. You wanted just enough blade to stab someone in an important place as quickly as possible, and no more. Cavalry sabers were heavier, but again the goal was different. You needed enough reach to hit a man on foot from the saddle. You also needed enough weight that if you hit someone in the head, it would kill them without the blade breaking. After that, again, speed was more important than power, and lighter was better.

By turn of the 20th century they really were useless in combat though, and just became a symbol of authority. So naturally they started being made out of cheap, light metal, with the look being the only thing anyone cared about. The design is fine, but the materials and build quality suck. They'll just break if you try to use it in combat seriously. You could probably get away with stabbing one guy who didn't expect you to do it; even a steak knife works for that. A steak knife is a good comparison for the quality of most modern dress swords, actually. Unless you spend a stupid amount of money to get a combat ready blade for some reason.

On a side note, the katana stuck around in Japan for cultural reasons, but it also turned out to be a nice balance between the factors driving smallsword and cavalry saber design. A small sword is quicker, but a katana is almost as fast and has better reach. A cavalry saber is harder hitting and tougher, but the katana is a bit faster and heavy enough. For the brief window where Japan was modernizing their military and carrying a sword into combat was a reasonably good idea, the katana was a good one to have. Of course, they kept issuing full up combat ready blades well into the Second World War, which was a gigantic waste of time and quality steel.

Rockopolis posted:

I'm just disappointed that the IJA didn't take the concept of the sword bayonet to its logical conclusion and issue a bayonet that made the rifle into a naginata.
If you're going for ridiculous warrior spirit gimmicks, don't half-rear end it.

FAUXTON posted:

Imagine being on a horse and having to stab at people with that Patton one as you rode by, instead of slashing, as you would with all those other ones curved for that purpose. Even assuming the Patton saber was phoneboothed 50-100 years backward so that you'd have some kind of actual application in a regular order of battle, depending on which of his past lives Patton was channeling at the time.

You'd fall off your horse trying to get a good stab in, or you'd get the drat thing hung up in someone's ribcage/foofy uniform bits and get dragged off your horse. Maybe it's designed for more of a melee situation where you aren't all that mobile and/or are already dismounted and complementing it with a carbine/pistol?

Fangz posted:

When it comes to swords, I defer to Matt Easton... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bee71tYERBw

HEY GAIL posted:

this looks to my uneducated eye like everyone's trying to get to the sweetspot of the late 16th century cut and thrust sword, just a lot shorter this time (because let me tell you, rapier blades blow for a bunch of things)

HEY GAIL posted:

Shorter's better on horseback

Comrade Gorbash posted:

There's also the weight. Light cav trade the lance for greater speed, dragoons swap it for rifles or carbines or other gear.

As for bringing back the cuirassier, why mess around with real horses instead of building a robot horse?

Comrade Gorbash posted:

This was mostly the Germans right around the turn of the century, I think? The Germans had issued a lance with a rolled steel tube for a haft that was only about 4lbs (I've seen a couple different numbers but they're all under that; it might have been closer to 3lbs). Everything I've read indicated most them got rid of the lance as soon as they could once the actual fighting kicked off, and it doesn't look like they carried sabers, based on the photographs I have and can find.

Scratch that, some did and some didn't. Found some photos with German cavalry with lance and saber and it's listed as part of the kit. But there's also photos where they definitely don't have the scabbard on their saddle where it's supposed to be.

HEY GAIL posted:

poland-lithuania, motherfuckers

HEY GAIL posted:

goons with spontoons

Plutonis posted:

Comrade Gorbash posted:

The armies of the Roman Republic are great for this. Particularly the period where they were at loggerheads with Carthage and the Greek colonies on Sicily. They lose battles a lot more often than they win them, but end up winning the wars because they just raise another legion and try again.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

The 3rd Century in general, really. Rome won those wars but they're generally not noted for inspiring generalship or combative prowess, not did they have decisive outcomes.

It's less that Rome was bad at war and more that they were just decent at it, punctuated by occasional bouts of sheer idiocy. What makes it really interesting is that ancient states with that profile usually get themselves conquered or at least have their political administration overthrown, but the Roman Republic always managed to raise one more army to stave off disaster, and then grind their way to at least a negotiated peace.

HEY GUNS posted:

isn't that back when they elected their war dudes? renaissance florence tried that and renaissance florence BLEW at combat

Tevery Best posted:

I'd say at least a hundred years. The Romans were absolutely notorious for how much they disdained everything that was new, so unless you could somehow claim gunpowder was invented by Archimedes or someone equally ancient, they'd just scoff and tut-tut for about a century.

But 50 bucks says they'd then immediately jump to small-unit loose formation skirmisher tactics in the Napoleonic light infantry model.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

On a pedantic note, I'm not sure the Romans would have developed pike specifically, mostly because there's a reason they didn't use it or an equivalent in actual history. At least, not until well into the Imperial era. There just weren't a lot of effective cavalry forces they had to contend with, and the scutum and gladius worked better against the kinds of forces they did fight. They'd probably keep those for their heavy infantry.

I agree that the bigger question is who they'd give muskets to. Pre-Marian reforms, they'd be an obvious way to improve the effectiveness of the velites, especially since the way the velites were used is pretty close to early gunpowder tactics anyways. Post-Marian, it's hard to see them handing them out to auxiliaries, so I'd guess they'd effectively reconstitute the velites from regular legionnaires.

Siivola posted:

Heyyy guysss it's the t h r e a d f a v o u r i t e youtuber!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DaMACz1FrM

Hell no I didn't watch it.