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Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
I've had "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" stuck in my head for days. What was going on with the actual conflict, why were they hiring mercenaries, etc.? Also apparently in the '60s there were still private mercs? You didn't have to join a PMC/one of Hey Gal's dudes' regiments to be a soldier, you could just sign up as an individual?

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Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
So Roland joined a regiment just like Hey Gal's dudes did.

... oh right my father basically did that , but on the payroll of the US Army. (Dad says Thompsons were too heavy, he preferred the M3 if he had to carry a .45 SMG.)

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Thanks for the recs on the Congo thing, I'll see if my local library has any of those, and if not, Amazon order time!

Pontius Pilate posted:

was there any practical reason for Reagan removing the mothballs on the BBs or was it as silly as it seems? Besides the kickin’ rad factor of course.

Aside from just being balls-out completely badass-looking, the Iowas were well out of date as a concept, but they were there and Reagan was in a dick-waving contest with the Soviets, so they got pressed back into service.

They welded a bunch of cruise missile launchers to the decks to make them useful, but the gun battleship as a general concept was proven outdated by airplanes and modern torpedos in, oh, let's be generous and say April of 1945 (when IJN Yamato, the biggest, baddest BB ever built was killed by a combination of the two.) Even by that time, BBs were mostly glorified AA platforms, and rarely used the big guns, and then mostly for making craters in beaches for the Marines to trip over upon landing. Reagan reactivated the Iowas despite their expense to crew and clearly outmoded role just beacuse they were big and cool-looking. And the Marines wanted them, to "prepare" the beaches they were landing on.

The last time a BB went toe-to-toe with another of its kind was in November of 1942, when USS Washington, of the class before the Iowas, beat the poo poo out of IJN Kirishima, a leftover from WWI (imagine USS Texas, she was built at the same time).

Kirishima had been doing pretty well in a slugfest against USS South Dakota, after blowing away SoDak's radars, various other antennae, and fire directors, and closed to searchlight range and began slamming accurate 14" fire into the deaf, dumb, and blind SoDak when Washington snuck up and, in 17 minutes, scored at least nine 16" hitson the enemy battleship, which proved to be fatal.

Washington met up with South Dakota in the morning, and escorted her battered sister ship back to friendly waters from which she could limp home for repairs.

Edit: apologies for not italicizing ship names, I'm posting from my phone.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Oct 25, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

I've heard a variant of that joke set in ... any famously muddy place, in my case the East Texas oilfield in the 1930s. Guy sees a nice hat in the muddy street, picks it up, and finds a man under it. "Gee, fella, you're having a bad day." he says to the man, to which the guy chin-deep in the mud replies "Could be worse, you should see my horse."

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Perestroika posted:

Goddamn:




The B-Stoff was described as being a dark blue or violet (aside from literally being rocket fuel), but I suppose soldiers will drink anything. And as if that was not fun enough, the other two components are T-Stoff, described as being highly corrosive to just about anything, and Z-Stoff, described as being both highly corrosive as well as highly volatile. A true marvel of Nazi engineering! :science:

As far as I can tell from Google, B-stoff was just 75% ethanol/25% water*. T-stoff replaced B, and was high-test peroxide with a bit of Z-stoff as a catalyst.

*so Bacardi 151 is legit rocket fuel.

Edit: For some stupid reason (double edit: to teach a lesson to people stealing the drinkable B-stoff) apparently hydrazine had the same name as the high-proof vodka. Oh, those Nazis. :rolleyes:

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Nov 4, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Milo and POTUS posted:

Wasn't it the swedes who had that turretless one too.

The S-tank was a turretless MBT, it had proper armor and just sacrificed the turret for a low profile because their whole schtick was to dig in and slow down the Red Army for a day or two until NATO got their poo poo mobilized.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

feedmegin posted:

Iirc the effort post re S Tanks in the previous thread refutes this but in any case 'digging in' in Cold War tank warfare is still a great way to eat some arty or a Hind. Hence 'shoot'n'scoot' and multiple pre scouted shooting positions in the Fulda Gap.

Dig in for the the first shot and then scoot/"dig in" in the general sense of "come and take it, but we will make a tactical retreat", yes. I was phoneposting, so :effort: to properly summarize the post mentioned. It had a secondary driver facing backward for that, even.

bewbies posted:

i've always thought those S tanks would've been a nightmare to deal with...they're tiny to begin with and then have even tinier vulnerable spots and you're charging into the woods where these stupid tanks you cant see are shooting at you and even when you do see them its hard as gently caress to hit them

That was the point I was trying to make. Also, the most-sloped frontal armor ever! So in the rare chance that you can see more than the gun tube, your shot's going to skip off like a rock off a pond.

In other news, there's an episode of this stupid TV show on, in which they're looking at a WWI German U-boat supposedly sunk by the Kraken or some poo poo. Yeah, turns out the cable powering the captain's space heater blocked the hatches from closing when they dove to escape a British escort ship, and the captain (maybe, or it may be an internet-era urban legend) made up the sea monster story in an attempt to save his career. Edit: Another story of hilariously incompetent Germans. See also the WWII U-boat that was almost lost when somebody hosed up flushing the toilet while submerged. I made an effortpost on that incident in either a previous incarnation of this thread or the PYF Historical Fun Facts one.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Nov 4, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Hogge Wild posted:

I remember reading about some Italian submarines that gassed their crews when they dived.

Yeah, if you get seawater in the people tube, it shorts the batteries and does electrolysis on the salt water, producing oxygen, hydrogen, and chlorine gases (the sodium presumably dissolves into the water, producing sodium hydroxide (i.e. the active ingredient in Drano). So yeah, submarines are nigh-undetectable, but when they do get hit, it's bad.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Cessna posted:

Let me know when it can rotate its turret like a tank.

There's an exception to every rule.The S-tank's traverse and elevation are just in the suspension, the tracks are the turret ring.

See also the Stryker M1128, which has a fully traversible turret with an antitank gun similar to the S-tank's, but it's an assault gun, like the original StuG.

Also the M1128 is hilarious because it looks like it's going to roll over when firing to the side.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
My high-school JROTC class had a lot of those books. Fun to flip through, nice art. Didn't Will Eisner draw those at one point? (I learned enough from JROTC to not join the services.)

Also I told my father about the person worried about doing war crimes in a game where they're a mercenary, and he found it hilarious. And also said mercs are useful sometimes, which ... not to open a whole can of worms, but he's not entirely wrong. Just hiring some band of soldiers of fortune to knock over Saddam Hussein's regime would've been cheaper and quicker than Operation Bomb Useless Dirt.

Also the conversation eventually turned to HEY GUNS' guys, and Dad laughed at them too, because it was pretty much the same when he was an "advisor" in Vietnam in 1970. Ron Perlman's opening narration of the Fallout games was right, war never changes. It's 95% boredom and 5% terror, and the soldiers fill the downtime by getting drunk and/or doing stupid poo poo.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
I have a Webley Mk.VI and SMLE Mk.III* built in 1915 and '16, respectively, with a bayonet for the rifle made in March of '18. As of today, they've all been retired for a hundred years. How 'bout that.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Cyrano4747 posted:

Did they go through the FTR process? They could easily have been soldiering on for decades after.

FTR? The rifle was restocked/upgraded to * spec in India (it has the Ishapore stock-reinforcing bolt and had the wire wrap until I cut it off), the revolver and bayonet don't have any markings other than those from the British Government and the factories, and export proof stamps on the former (it's milled to take .45ACP in moonclips.) The bayonet I bought on ebay from an American soldier in Iraq, so it's been around as well. But you know what I meant.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

feedmegin posted:

Sure. But 'such dominance over the entire world'? The US couldn't even conquer North Korea, come on now.

Oh, they could have, but decided not to because that would've kicked offf WW3. There might a a reason we pulled out of Korea and Vietnam without taking it all the way, as opposed to Iraq and Afghanistan which weren't under Soviet protection. Hail SS-18 Satan, &c..

And the main reason we haven't had another go at North Korea is because NK isstill kinda friendly with China, and the US can't go to war with China because if we did, dollar stores and the British equivalent Poundland would have to up their prices by an order of magnitude or two. (Before anybody yells at me, that's the simplified version. It could also cause thermonuclear Armageddon, but either way the economic fallout might end up being worse.)

Something something most of the well-known wars/conflicts the US was involved in between 1946 and 1990 were proxies for the US and Soviet Union to have a dustup while keeping the Cold War reasonably cool, and the US mostly bowed out first in the game of thermonuclear chicken.

I think we technically won Afghanistan (the '80's one, when the Soviets tried to invade), if only by giving a bunch of goodies to the side that turned out to be the bad guys and eventually turned against us*, causing basically the third iteration of our experience in Vietnam -- the OG, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan ... Yeah, it may have been for the best that we quit while we were ahead in Korea and Vietnam.

*The Dropkick Murphys sum it up pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPIezg-YyxI

"Now I've trained an army for my kids to fight one day
We'll teach them all of our secrets, and then we'll walk away
We're knee-deep in guerillas, yeah the party never stops
United States of America, undercover cop"

Yeah, the US Government kinda does that on the regular, and not just with the spies. We sent Army SF to Afghanistan in the '80s to teach them ho to use all the cool weapons we were giving them. Oops.

Edit: Also there was that US-sponsored coup in Iran that was eventually overthrown by a rebellion, and anyway they hate us now and are somehow still flying at least some F-14s, which, to be fair, is pretty impressive, given the type's reputation for needing rather a lot of maintenance hours per flight hour, and the US doing their damnedest to prevent them getting spare parts.

On a lighter note, the rebellion happened just before the last F-14 for the Iranian order rolled off the production line. The US Navy just kinda straight-up stole it for themselves, because we couldn't give it to our now-enemies for obvious reasons, even though they'd already paid for it..

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Nov 14, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Cessna posted:

I'll also point out that they most assuredly DID conquer North Korea:



It was China getting involved and, as mentioned, the unwillingness to risk nuclear war in response, that forced them out.

My father was an "advisor" in the late days of Vietnam, and sums it up with "we won all the battles, but lost the war." And, I mean, he's not wrong about that.

Who was it, MacArthur who advocated for turning North Korea into a glass parking lot? And then the guy they put in charge of SAC (Gen. Thomas S. Power, which is an appropriate name for a man in his position), made MacArthur look positively reasonable by comparison.

This is your more-or-less yearly reminder that a) the line from whichever recent Batman movie "Some men just want to watch the world burn," is actually true, and 2) has been true for some of the guys in control of nukes.

Thread favorite book Command and Control is scary enough, but then you realize Dr. Strangelove was so close to being a documentary, and frankly it's amazing we still exist as a species.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Nov 14, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Crossposting because some of y'all don't read the TFR Cold War thread, in which it was relevant so I had to find and post it again:



Photo by my father in Vietnam ~1970-71, I scanned and adjusted it from the negative because his print was underexposed as gently caress.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Comrade Gorbash posted:

if it's within 90 feet of you, you can pretty reliably ruin its day.
Yeah, at long pistol range (say, 25 feet/8m) the pellets in a load of 00 buckshot are still mostly touching each other, putting a 1" hole in your target.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

SlothfulCobra posted:

All I got are books on things like phone phreakers and early civilian hackers

There are books on that? Post or PM me a list, I'm into that, even though I was born ten years too late to play with it myself.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Phanatic posted:

It's not. The chassis is steel, sure, but even on the original M1 a lot of what you're talking about up there is composite. I don't think there's hardly anything on the M1A1 that's just plain steel armor.

Also there's the small matter of the M1A1 being able to put a tungsten/DU lawn dart moving a mile a second through the enemy tank before they can even see the Abrams.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Koramei posted:

could the earliest gen of abrams pierce the armor on the newest one?

The OG M1 with the 105mm vs. an M1A2? The 105 HEAT can definitely get through the back and maybe the sides, but the newer version has better sensors and gun, so good luck sneaking up behind one, and avoiding the three 9kg lawn darts coming your way at a mile (1.6km) per loving second when his buddies see him blow up (and the crew safely bail out, blowout panels in the ammo lockers and all that) and swing their guns around, because tanks travel in groups.

From the front, the 105mm HEAT would just give the A2 crew headaches and piss them off. And then you have four of those tungsten lawn darts coming at you, one for each crewman, before your loader can slam another 105 shell into the breech, because the Rheinmetall 120s were already loaded.

The A1+ versions are, like the last battleships, not proof against their own gun, though -- there have been a few oopsies in the fog of war* and rather more intentional destructions of tanks that were mobility-killed by an IED or similar.

*I remember one story from Gulf War 1 where an M1A1 took a DU "silver bullet" through the front, they hosed out what was left of the driver, replaced him, and kept fighting for two weeks before the tank got sent to depot-level maintenance to have all the radioactive dust scrubbed out and the hole patched. Hope those guys didn't want kids. Edit: in trying to look up the source of that, it appears it's fallen off the internet, and all I could find via :google: was my own post of the same story in the original (?) version of this thread, circa 2011.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Dec 10, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Phanatic posted:

The debris from a DU penetrator is noise compared to all the other toxic and carcinogenic poo poo that's floating around a battlefield filled with burning vehicles and other things.

Good point, those burning artesian oil wells weren't doing any favors to anybody's health. On the other hand, the Abrams is NBC-sealed, so as long as they keep it buttoned up they're safe from the external pollutants, happily breathing the DU dust that's coating the interior of the vehicle.

(But they never button up unless steel rain is falling on them, the commander needs to see. Whatever the case, sucked slightly more for that tank crew than the ones that didn't get own-goaled.)

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

fishmech posted:

Yeah the depleted uranium is the somewhat less radioactive than plain uranium ore stuff that ends up left over when you're trying to pull out the more radioactive stuff for various purposes. The more serious issue is that like most other heavy metals, uranium is toxic outside of the radioactivity. Think of it basically like getting a lot of lead exposure.

Yeah, that.

Also, my hot take on 73 Easting from 2011:

I posted:

the APC results were pretty funny -- drat near every shell hole in a Bradley (and there were quite a few Bradleys hit) was small and "slightly radioactive," which means depleted uranium penetrator, which means it came from an M1. The report does not say whether they were targeted or just drove between an M1 and a T72. Whatever the case, it turns out an APFSDS lawn dart doesn't do much to a lightly-armored APC, it just goes through and leaves a tiny hole and the crew barely notices. The only friendly-fire hard kill was one Bradley putting a TOW missile into another.

IDK what the Iraqi T-72s were firing, but I'm pretty sure only M1A1s had DU bullets at the time. Oops.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Dec 10, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

zoux posted:

Also, does c3 stand for Command and Control Center or something less obvious?

Command, control, and communication. Take out the general, the platoon officer, or the radioman at either end, the enemy can't get anything done.

EvilMerlin posted:

More or less, if you are in a major city. You are gonna get nuked. The East Coast from Maine down to North Carolina is gonna be gone. Like totally wiped off of the face of the planet. As is most of the California coast. Florida doesn't do well either.


See that big purple splotch in northeast Texas? That's Dallas/Fort Worth, where all the tech/airplane companies live. The black dot and triangle just across the border in Louisiana is where half the B-52s live. I'm the black dot between them, because my town is (was) sitting on top of Kuwait levels of oil.



zoux posted:

everyone does a little genocide now and then

Nominating this for next thread subtitle.

Polyakov posted:

The importance of India to the British Empires perception of the world and the threats therein almost cannot be understated.

Every SMLE MkIII* I've seen in the US was made or upgraded to * spec in Ishapore, so yeah, India was pretty important if only as an arsenal away from the fighting in Europe.

(The ones made in India have straight vertical bunny ears around the front sight, the English/Australian/other ones have curved sight guards. Also the Ishapore SMLE i used to have was stamped "G.R." despite being made in 1949, well after India threw off the British colonial yoke in 1947. I traded it in for a 1916 Enfield-made one that was upgraded to * in India, presumably sent over as surplus when they started making No. 4s -- it has the slot for the magazine cutoff, but the newer stock that mostly covers the slot, the mag cutoff being deleted in the * upgrade. I can go on about WWI British service weapons for ages -- I also have a Webley Mk VI dated 1915, and the bayonet for the rifle made in March 1917.)

(Did British officers still routinely carry swords in 1915? If so, I need to get one to go with the revolver.)

Edit:

Tekopo posted:

Are you really making jokes about a recent tragedy? Might be reading too much into this.

You should've been here on 9/12/01.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Dec 13, 2018

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Vahakyla posted:

If it is a SF team, some sort of Recce team, or perhaps a cavalry element, it might have an officer in charge of as few as 8 men, or perhaps 16.

SF is all officers and sergeants because they're training the locals. An A-team (CPT, LT, and ten SGTs) ideally* runs a company-sized force of local guys in the field.

*when my father was an "advisor" in the late stages of American involvement in Vietnam, they more often got sent out to do the stuff Rangers do.

tonberrytoby posted:

There are (mostly anglosphere influenced) countries where the gap between officer and nonofficer duties are so large that you need a warrant officer class to fill it.

US Army helicopter pilots are a good example of that. We can't trust a dirty NCO with command of an aircraft, but they only need to maanage a fireteam-sized (at most) helicopter crew, so let's make this weird half-officer half-enlisted rank.

See also the rank of specialist, which I think has been phased out. It was the same pay grade as corporal without the management skills, weird area between private and NCO.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Why is the poopdeck called the poopdeck?

Feom the French "la poupe", meaning "the stern" according to wikipedia.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

FrangibleCover posted:

I don't know the answer but I think I know the question: Try looking into gun convergence patterns, since they'll be set at average engagement distances to produce the greatest possible chance of hitting.

Yeah, fighter guns were very far apart in the wings, so the distance where they aimed them to cross is your answer. (Inside that distance or out to convergence distance*2 would probably be acceptable if you had to, given that the enemy fighter is about the same size as yours, you may not hit him when straight and level, but he's flying through a wall of lead if he tries to shake you.) A cursory Googling says 300 yards (which, at that low of a number, are functionally equivalent to meters.)

Somebody else can do the trigonometry and confirm my suspicion that a WWII fighter at 300 yards is "just big/visible enough to actually aim at", but I have a feeling that with unmagnified gunsights, a 37-foot-wide (around 12m) target (as the Spitfire and Mustang were, I didn't look up the dimensions of the Fw 190 but IIRC it was the same or a bit smaller*) is a dark speck in the sky at ranges beyond that.

Randarkman posted:

Like a decade or so ago, T-Rex was a scavenger kind of animal that just waits 'till smaller animals kill something then barges in and scares them off to eat the thing for himself, before that he was an apex predator
That hypothesis never really went mainstream among paleontologists, and we have fossils of herbivore bones with partially-healed gouges that could only have been made by T. rex

Not to say that they didn't, but they killed when they had to. Cf. modern lions -- they'll steal a kill from hyenas when they can, but they do their own hunting when they can't steal from smaller predators.

Dammit, beaten on the dinosaur thing.

*edit: The Fw 190 was indeed smaller than its allied counterparts,, but again, not enough to matter at the ranges in question-- 34'5" wingspan as opposed to the Spitfire's 36'10". If your guns were dialed in and you fired when it was [x] wide in your reticle, you'd hit either one.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Jan 7, 2019

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
To kinda get it back toward on-topic, white dudes from various European empires hunted hippos, or canoed through hippo-infested rivers. Yay, colonialis--

"bit off his head and shoulders" comes up rather often in the hippo literature. Sure, they're gentle herbivorous beasts, if a bit unsanitary. Until you make them angry and then they do to you what the T. rex did to the lawyer in the OG Jurassic Park movie.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Tumblr's anti-porn algorithm flagged my post of this:

I appealed, and apparently the human second-level censor recognized it as a historical badass photo, so we're cool, and it was reinstated to my blog. Dude stripped and jumped into the ocean to rescue a downed Marine pilot and then went right back to his gun without bothering to put his clothes on, because the PBY was being shot at at the time.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

I mean, there's the "hot dog down a hallway" joke/insult, but :drat: . On the other hand, dude's living his whalefucking dream while on the lam as a murder suspect, gotta respect that.

many people in the last few pages but I can't be arsed to find them and pull quotes posted:

CIA/America world policeman stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPIezg-YyxI

"Now I'll train an army for my kids to fight one day, we'll teach 'em all our secrets and then we'll walk away."

Amusingly, most of the posts on songmeanings.com say it's a good Iraq war protest song. Uh, we kinda curbstomped Iraq the first time around, it's pretty obvious DKM are talking about Afghanistan, innit? What with the training/supplying our current enemies against the Soviets in the '80s, and those Stingers we gave them shooting down our helicopters, and all?

Doubly amusing: At least for me, Googling the song title, the first result is songmeanings.com, the rest of the links on the first page are various actual CIA recruiting pages.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Valtonen posted:

a star fort is considerably easier scaling-wise to storm than an earlier fortifications. The only logistic you need is men- they’re built for maximum amount of casualties inflicted to the attacker at shortest possible time period. Like an open invitation of “come and get it- if you’re willing to lose X amount of soldiers in the process”

:thejoke: Star forts were designed to scrape the attackers off any spot on the walls with treble-shotted canister, while the walls were sloped to deflect the attackers' roundshot from reducing them to rubble, weren't they?

Sort of like how modern tanks will (hopefully) bounce any incoming AT shells, and can hose each other down with MG fire if the enemy infantry gets too close.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Epicurius posted:

There was the Pig War, which started when somebody's pig got into somebody else's garden, and almost led to war between the US and Britain.

Definitely the silliest pretense for a war: 1859, luckily the governments realized how stupid it was and called it off before any humans got shot.

wikipedia posted:

During the years of joint military occupation, the small British and American units on San Juan Island had an amicable mutual social life, visiting one another's camps to celebrate their respective national holidays and holding various athletic competitions. Park rangers tell visitors the biggest threat to peace on the island during these years was "the large amounts of alcohol available".

Also the one place in the US where the Union Jack is still officially flown without diplomatic status. We got the island in the boundary resolution (arbitrated by Wilhelm I), but we still fly their flag at their fort. :3:

Raenir Salazar posted:

God I hate this guy already.

Also aren't training accidents like that not something specific to women? I swear I've heard of plenty of bootcamp idiocy stories committed by guys as well.

There's a whole hilarious/depressing thread in the SA military subforum.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jan 27, 2019

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

HEY GUNS posted:

this thread is extremely good

I forget what page it is where it gets to the level of your guys shooting out windows and oopsie, but one time, somebody had a sidearm fall overboard from a helicopter, and like 12 people died in two helo crashes trying to find a lost pistol.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

HEY GUNS posted:

is that better or worse than that FBI agent last year who was getting drunk at a country western bar, did a backflip with a loaded pistol shoved into his waistband, and accidentally shot someone

Worse. The incident you mentioned was on par with your guy shooting outvthe window, the one I mentioned was two choppers lost with all hands looking for a pistol some dumbass let fall out of his kit.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Edit: three guys who look like young Tim Curry with different facial hair, and their grandma.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Jan 27, 2019

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Cessna posted:

C.f., the entire US military in Vietnam 1971-72.

My father saw the proverbial elephant in '71-'72. Lifehack: enlist into the non-medical MOS with the longest stateside training time (18E) , you're guaranteed only one tour, rather than being drafted and sent to the 11B meatgrinder. Minor drawback: the NVA has put a bounty on your head equal to a year's wages for a laborer, and you're carrying a radio on your back with an antenna that does double duty as a "shoot me first" flag.
Worked out for him, though, seeing as how I exist. (My sister was born while he was deployed, I'm ten years younger.)

Squalid posted:

is increasingly based around advising and assisting local forces.

Point of order, that's how we STARTED Vietnam. Just saying.

Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Feb 12, 2019

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

zoux posted:

How long does it take to mag dump an m4? Would dudes just be constantly reloading?

Quoting from way back again, but I know this. Assuming 600 rounds/minute cyclic rate, typical of such rifles, a 30-round magazine lasts three seconds if you burn it all at once.There's a reason some models of M16 had semi and burst instead of full auto, and the full auto models were only entrusted to Rangers and SF who could modulate the trigger instead of holding it down ... but if the poo poo hit the fan and they needed to, they could. Y'know that one scene in "Predator".

Dad had a bag that originally held a pair of Claymore mines, refilled with mags for his Hobbesian rifle (nasty, brutish, and short, sort of the proto-M4) that they'd throw around in battle, just toss the tote bag of magazines to whoever needed ammo.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Don Gato posted:

not unheard of for people to join some new hotness because they're angry at the current regime,

isn't that how Bonaparte, Jeff Davis, Sam Houston, and even History's grearest Arshole got their starf?

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Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!
Remember those "DRILL HERE" stickers for laptops? I told my father about those, and the more extreme desktop case of thermite on the HDD activated by a big red button. Dad was talking about how computers aren't secure these days, I mentioned those, he said "Yeah! Just like we taped thermite grenades to the tops of all the radios."

Some men just want to watch the world (or at least the classified parts of it) burn.

Also one of those radios with a thermite grenade duct-taped on top was on his back.

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