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I'm still catching up on all the posts (up to page 254, started reading the previous thread last year), but there was discussion about why the Nazis didn't use gas in WW2 and there's a question I have about that. I've read/heard (not sure where) that at least part of the reason is that the Nazis didn't use nerve agents on the battlefield is because they thought the Allies had them too, due to their discovery being published in some scientific journals in the 1930s before being clamped down on, and that the lack of published material on them in the West was put down to them having been immediately classified as secret. How much of this is true? Additionally, I have the impression that nerve agents are so much more devastating/effective than previous chemical weapons, how true is this? A quick wiki browse indicates that other agents like Lewisite can be absorbed through skin, so require more than just a gas mask.
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Mar 19, 2017 11:08
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Tias posted:Depends on what you mean by effective. Lewisite and other blister agents will probably not kill you on contact( unless you really snort it all the way into your lungs, and even so it depends on concentration), but it will burn every inch of exposed flesh and cause soldiers to panic and eventually become combat ineffective. I'm thinking of, say, nerve agent in V1/V2 missiles aimed at a city like London. I'm surprised the Nazis didn't use chemical weapons against the Soviets towards the end, as well. Edit: Unrelatedly, can people linking YouTube videos please include a title or similarly searchable description of the video, and not just the URL? It's fine for stuff like Forgotten Weapons that's not going anywhere, but a documentary uploaded by Josef Randovich or Anna Whoeva is probably going to be taken down or have the channel deleted in fairly short order and it would be nice to have something to go by when trying to find another copy. GotLag fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Apr 2, 2017 |
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Apr 2, 2017 07:26
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The USA didn't have nerve agents until after the war. The Germans believed the lack of publications in Allied nations about nerve agents was because they'd all been classified, whereas in reality the papers in 1902 and patent filings in 1937-38 had simply been overlooked.
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Apr 2, 2017 13:30
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Speaking of Marines, the women from the Marine Corps University at the SMH conference were wonderful to hang out with, and everything at their bookstall at the conference was free. I now own more books on the Marine Corps than I can ever hope to need. Sydney Morning Herald? Shaking My Head?
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Apr 2, 2017 20:07
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Agean90 posted:tldr: Its like helping someone who was doused in gasoline then set on fire by dumping liquid nitrogen on them. Uh, almost exactly not like that.
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Apr 3, 2017 00:35
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FAUXTON posted:Bullets ain't free, soldier. Nor do they carry themselves to where they're needed. Well, except for the last stage.
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Apr 4, 2017 08:33
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The M14 really does look good, but I guess that's a deliberate feature of procurement scams. Edit: see also the Nazi big cats
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Apr 4, 2017 14:45
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I was reading about the Battle of Cable Street again for the purposes of Arguing Over The Internet, and this passage in one of the references caught my eye:The Hackney Gazette posted:By 1936, Oswald Mosley’s party had been waging a hate campaign against Jews, communists and the Irish in the East End for more than two years, writes Bill Fishman. This makes me wonder, what are the reason(s) that Nazism failed to take hold in the UK? Lack of establishment support? Lack of supporting paramilitary organisations (like a Freikorps equivalent)? There was opposition from the left but Germany had that too.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:16
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BattleMoose posted:The economic situation in Germany in the 30's were vastly different to that of the UK. Promise of jobs, bread and worker socialism drizzled with a bit of "make Germany great again" sounds much more appealing in that context. Working class life in the UK wasn't roses and sunshine either: http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/0.html
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Apr 5, 2017 06:43
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That makes sense, thanks.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:49
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Eastern North Carolina was where the Goldsboro B-52 incident occurred so nothing of value would have been lost. Wasn't there some kind of above-ground open-air reactor somewhere in that vicinity too? IIRC it was in a pit or something and for irradiation testing they'd just hoist it up and light up the surrounds. Edit: it was in Georgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Nuclear_Aircraft_Laboratory https://northgeorgiamountainramblings.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/when-the-cold-war-came-to-dawsonville/ GotLag fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Apr 7, 2017 |
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Apr 7, 2017 19:33
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Tias posted:I should do an effort post on british antifascism, if peeps are interested. Very much so.
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Apr 8, 2017 19:28
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Quinntan posted:The F-4 Phantom was originally designed without a gun, the idea being that the missile had made the gun obsolete. The US also skimped on dogfight training, as the overriding priority was intercepting Soviet bombers coming over the north pole or coming towards carrier groups at sea. Vietnam revealed the problems with this idea and the USAF developed the F-4E, equipped with a 20mm rotary cannon. Wasn't there a similar theory in the interwar period, that the increased speed of planes in general made dogfighting with guns impossible for the human pilot to keep up with?
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Apr 9, 2017 13:30
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I assume the navy wasn't too small, due to the necessary lead time in naval construction.quote:In 1940 the Army was divided in three: the regulars, the National Guard and the Organised Reserve. The Regular Army numbered 243,095 and was scattered in 130 posts, camps and stations, the men serving short-term enlistments: the officers numbered 1,400. The National Guard was 226,837 strong and was equipped by individual states and received two weeks’ training each summer. Edit: according to Wikipedia, IJA had 376,000 active in 1940, 460,000 in late 1941. Edit 2: huh, so in 1941 US regular + national guard was about the same as IJA regular, I didn't think it was that large. Edit 3: on the other hand, IJA had like 2 million reserves GotLag fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 10, 2017 |
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Apr 10, 2017 18:38
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P-Mack posted:What's blowing my mind now that I look it up is the US Navy also expanding to twenty times it's size. That is a lot of loving ships. It's also an imperial assload of steel, too.
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Apr 10, 2017 19:33
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Germany did the same thing too, didn't they? It's getting to where you can't trust militarist dictatorships
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Apr 11, 2017 03:56
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The sun shall never rise on the American Empire!
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Apr 11, 2017 08:19
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To go back to carbon monoxide chat for just a moment, I am pretty sure that CO is what people are actually talking about when they say stuff like fuel air bombs "sucks the oxygen out" of a room/bunker/whatever. Also Google can go gently caress itself for treating "monoxide" and "dioxide" as synonyms when searching.
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Apr 13, 2017 08:54
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Wood has issues of its own. Can't for the life of me remember where I read it, but Australian SMLEs with stocks made of coachwood were apparently notorious for splitting.
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Apr 13, 2017 11:05
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There are a lot more amputations now that soldiers are wearing body armour (without the armour they'd have been fatalities instead). I believe this is in much the same way as helmets caused an "increase" in head injuries in WWI, from shrapnel and other falling debris. Anyway the takeaway from all this is that kevlar marks your limbs fall off. GotLag fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 17:22
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I am very interested in that tank's suspension
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Apr 15, 2017 18:29
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I'm communism at Pearl Harbor
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Apr 16, 2017 14:40
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Nenonen posted:Dances with wolves was a huge success. Compare its box office take to the 3d remake
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Apr 16, 2017 15:51
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meatbag posted:Its like that Churchill quoute, America will always do the right thing after having exhausted all other options. He certainly seems to have admired that approach.
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Apr 18, 2017 15:23
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The good old Victorian gunboat. Those Soviet baby warships with T-34 turrets? Edit: http://wio.ru/fleet/ww2armorb-1124.htm GotLag fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Apr 18, 2017 |
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Apr 18, 2017 16:20
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Hogge Wild posted:Why didn't Mongol cavalry use shields? The power requirements were too high for portable generators.
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Apr 20, 2017 10:42
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feedmegin posted:To be fair, he is translating articles written in Russian by someone else. You're addressing the wrong dude. I dunno, I feel like it's part of the translator's job to address glaring errors or biases in the source work.
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Apr 22, 2017 22:44
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Gully Foyle posted:Wolfenstein: The New Order?
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Apr 27, 2017 02:48
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:CoD 3 took place around the same time as Wittmann's death, and missed a great opportunity for the player to chumpstomp him imo. Unfortunately pretty much all of CoH's tank stuff is straight out of Death Traps. CoH2 manages to be even worse in its treatment of the Soviets.
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Apr 27, 2017 03:24
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chitoryu12 posted:Ironically, the only guns with a 100% reliability rate (firing every single round flawlessly) in the mud test were the AR-15, Luger, and CETME-L. The tight tolerances that are claimed to result in the AR-15 being easy to jam actually seal the gun from the elements and prevent mud and gunk from getting inside even if you smear it all over the bolt with the dust cover open. They should try and Owen gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23M6H_rec6Y
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May 8, 2017 17:06
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gohuskies posted:German soldier carrying a PPSh - I haven't seen real statistics but anecdotes say this wasn't uncommon on the East Front. I wonder how they handled ammo resupply, were there enough that is was worth it to produce and distribute PPSh ammo? Is that not a Soviet soldier?
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May 9, 2017 08:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:Um, I'm pretty sure the Commonwealth would have something to say about that. Indian PM dropping a truth bomb on Britain in 1997: "Britain is a third-rate power nursing illusions of grandeur of its colonial past. It created Kashmir when it divided India. Now it wants to give us a solution."
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May 11, 2017 00:06
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Ensign Expendable posted:You joke, but that was the Pzgr.Patr.40(W): a subcaliber armour piercing shell with a core made of hard steel rather than tungsten. The shell with W in its name doesn't contain any W? The Nazis disgust me.
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May 16, 2017 16:47
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I don't think anything can top the IRA vs Taliban episode.
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May 26, 2017 13:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:There's a new thing on steam, "Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator" which looked cool for 5 minutes until I realized it completely lacked any depth. You could try http://landfall.se/totally-accurate-battle-simulator/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jhC92ZFCkI
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May 26, 2017 17:54
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Iraq too
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Jun 3, 2017 09:40
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I know it's going back a few pages, but on the topic of fraternisation: in the 19th century Royal Navy, was it actually an offense for an officer to socialise with the enlisted ranks, or was it merely a career-killer?
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Jun 3, 2017 16:11
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Trin Tragula posted:If it was officially prohibited, you'll most likely find it somewhere in the Queen's Regulations; a free download of the 1862 regulations is here: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=SjIWAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-SjIWAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1 Thanks for clarifying that for me. What a bizarre age.
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Jun 4, 2017 14:37
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HEY GAIL posted:once you figure out the honor thing, their unique gender ideas, and the part where magic and religion are 100% real and can have physical effects on your life, i "get" people from the 17th century. i still don't really "get" the victorians I found this article which helped me (as a manchild who views the world through the lens of video games) understand a little bit, but it's still so foreign to me.
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Jun 4, 2017 15:47
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:General Patton on being caught up in a battle between the US and French navies: "I was on main deck... leaning on the rail when one [French shell] hit so close that it splashed water all over me... Some of the people got white but it did not seem very dangerous to me – sort of impersonal." Vichy French?
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Jun 5, 2017 09:06
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