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Baconroll posted:Ship question - Dreadnaught era ships (and a bit earlier) have 45 degree angled 'something' on the hulls - what is it ? Whatever it is seems to vanish in later ships. Anti-torpedo nets. The idea is that they swing out to catch torpedos. They failed to be effective once torpedos got bigger/faster. 
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Dec 10, 2020 13:38
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Argas posted:It's secretly a debunking of the claims popular media and awful shithouses like PragerU often push forth regarding the use of the bombs. Does it seem like the creator is aware of http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/ or is it yet another discussion of the non-existent "decision" to drop the bomb. Frankly I basically consider Wellerstein's discussion to be basically the start and the end of the bomb discussion at this point. It's been going around and around pointlessly and fruitlessly for decades now. There's very little new to add to it. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 01:44
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quote:The body of the video's argument hinges on the way the US all but knew (due to various American diplomats/dignitaries who were somewhat familiar with Japan) for certain the sort of terms the Japanese leadership was waiting for, while just refusing to do it. That "all but" seems to be doing a lot of work there. There's people who got it right but there's always people who got it right with the benefit of hindsight. This does not equal "well they knew", not when there's major figures that disagreed with that assessment, and pre-war diplomats thoroughly discredited themselves (fairly or unfairly) by being blindsided by the war declaration. It certainly doesn't equate to the US *knowing* that they knew. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 01:52
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GotLag posted:Here's Henry Stimson's diary from August 10, 1945: I don't see how that contradicts what I said. Argas posted:I mean, yeah. The US didn't know know but they had more than a vague idea with what they knew. It's just kind of one of those grim humorous moments how a few small changes might've brought the war to an end sooner. Obviously it's not as simple as it's made out to be but the video does highlight that the change in the Potsdam Declaration could've saved everyone a ton of trouble. And that the concern over lives lost in the invasion was not really the major one that it's often made out to be. There's a difference between "well things could have easily turned out differently" and waggling ones fingers and going "the US KNEW that this one little thing WOULD END THE WAR but THEY CHOSE NOT TO FOR MYSTERIOUS EVIL REASONS". EDIT: The goal posts here seem to have shifted from "all but knew for certain" to "more than a vague idea". Well frankly if you look at the totality of US actions, putting aside the opinions of individuals who might have been correct, the US institutionally as a whole had rather less than a vague idea what it would take to end the war. That's why they were planning a shitload more nukes, for example. EDIT2: Frankly my take home message from the whole situation is really the need for better foreign human intelligence. Does any one have any info on US human intelligence efforts vs Japan - was there even any? Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 02:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Isn't there still a sort of need to maintain the uniquely impressive scale of the nuclear bombs for the sake of averting their usage in modern war? Wellerstein argues that Truman essentially constructed this idea of the unique nature of atomic bombs (and thus the need for unitary presidential authority over them) out of whole cloth following Nagasaki. So yeah, if you buy that argument, and I find it quite compelling, the thought that MacArthur would have gotten his nukes to use if not for Nagasaki seems quite realistic.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:20
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GotLag posted:If a nuke is just a really big, really expensive bomb that's never been tested in combat and isn't perceived by the world at large as being a war-ender, does anyone go to the trouble and expense of building a lot of them, especially after the big war has just finished? It's only expensive to make the first one. Once you have the pipeline in place remaining bombs can be made very affordably. If it's not a war-ender it's still a very cost effective army/fleet-killer. Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 02:35
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I don't go looking at YouTube political commentators for history takes, sorry. Even if I end up agreeing with them I find them supremely annoying. If he has any particularly novel arguments they can be presented here and talked about. I think if the core of what you want to debate, though, is "is this YouTuber virtuous or not", then I don't see that as an useful use of most people's time. Fangz fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 04:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Greetings from Internet VFW: If it's 40x45, does that mean that the casing wasn't included? Was it a dummy round, ultimately?
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Dec 14, 2020 01:41
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ChubbyChecker posted:I don't think that any amount of bombing would have made Hitler surrender, even if he was the last German alive, because he wasn't the sanest individual. Even Himmler was willing to make a deal (that would have kept him and Nazis ruling). The war wouldn't have ended until there was a new flag on Reichstag. "Make Hitler surrender" is a very specific criteria though. There's a fair argument to be made about whether strategic bombing was moral, or cost-effective. But it did have an impact - if nothing else, it's not like the Germans just sat back and let the bombs drop. All the Flaktowers and AAA cannons and Jet fighters and night fighters and special planes with upward pointing guns... all of those were in response to the strategic bombing threat, so from the German regime itself it was clear that the campaign mattered. I think there's a danger that we base too much on state media of the time, which in both Germany and the UK were keen to invoke this idea of a "blitz spirit" of fortitude in response to air bombing, and ignore real morale impact of air bombing on the population that can go unrecorded. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 14:08
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:are you seriously trying to argue that a tank production run is at all analogous to a rifle production run in terms of scale or magnitude? I think the argument is that there is a lot more factors in play about the length of production runs than the essential quality of a piece of equipment. For example, it could be too expensive to produce, you might hit shortages of some underlying material, or it could be replaced by another even better weapon, or - as in the case of both the Jumbo and the FG42 - it could be designed for some specific niche purpose like fortification busting or equipping airborne infantry that became less relevant as the war went on.
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Dec 15, 2020 17:25
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Pryor on Fire posted:I had a friend who went to the marines and explained to me that hearing protection was rarely used in any situation, because the thinking was that you would toughen up your ears and get used to the sound of gunshots. I think it would be a better option to be able to serve in the military without permanent damage but apparently this is the sort of thing a pussy rear end bitch thinks. if you think about it, deafness is nature's hearing protection
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Dec 25, 2020 16:02
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SlothfulCobra posted:I saw a video that mentioned that China's internal airlines are bad because most of their airspace is military-controlled so that the civilian airlines only have relatively narrow corridors that they have to spend a lot of time waiting for them to clear of traffic. They don't want people to overfly their bases I assume. For example there's stuff like second-strike ICBMs that they could be paranoid about people spotting.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:46
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ChubbyChecker posted:Or over their camps. It's easy enough to see the camps by satellite, the significance of bases is that overflights could give more up to date and detailed data on the deployments of assets which could be militarily sensitive. The camps are pretty out of the way anyway, AIUI.
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Jan 20, 2021 19:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:The video implied that there was much more restricted space than just directly above the bases. The ICBMs are mobile.
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Jan 20, 2021 21:00
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steinrokkan posted:I'm the Tiger that squeals like a stuck pig before blowing up That's a Panther.
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Jan 21, 2021 20:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:I have a dumb question even by the standards of my dumb questions : What do you actually mean by dictator here? Someone who gained power by non democratic means? Someone who came to power outside of the usual method of succession? Or do they have to rule or attempt to rule until death or deposition? Because that usually is where the evil comes in. There's a number of Roman Emperors that were essentially dictators and not monarchs, because they did not succeed the previous ruler by pure hereditary succession. Trajan, Hadrian, etc. They were considered quite good... Well within the context of a militarized imperial state anyway. Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 10:37
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feedmegin posted:Well, hang on. The Roman Empire was very explicitly NOT a monarchy, they were rather firm on the matter in fact, and especially not a hereditary one (note that the one doesn't go with the other - see also the HRE or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) . What makes the likes of Trajan less legitimate here? Well my point is that the whole definitions here seem kinda fuzzy, I didn't mean to say that Trajan was illegitimate. "Monarchy" was the only thing that was ruled out by the original poster.
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Jan 29, 2021 11:21
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Libluini posted:Not necessarily, I've read that at some point after Tsar Bomba strength, the explosion will reach the border of the atmosphere and after that point, all additional energy will go towards channeling dirt into space. In other words, the reason eventually everyone stopped making ever larger warheads is that around the point of the Tsar Bomba it becomes loving pointless, as the destruction on the ground stops increasing. That doesn't sound right. I mean I think it'll scale more poorly at that point, but making single big bombs vs lots of little ones was always an inefficient (in both ICBM payload mass, and use of fissile material) way to gently caress things up.
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Jan 29, 2021 13:16
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Libluini posted:A lot of things in physics "doesn't sound right" Lemme re-word. This sounds completely wrong according to my understanding of physics and I can only conclude that you misread completely. Firstly there is no clear "border of the atmosphere", secondly the Tsar Bomba's fireball radius was a mere 2.5 miles, not reaching the altitude of the plane it was released from, thirdly if there's a large shockwave, the parts of the shockwave near the ground sure as heck don't "know" that the top of the explosion has reached space and decide to stop expanding, fourthly you ignore direct thermal damage and all that fun stuff, and fifth there's ample evidence that large scale explosions can cause arbitrarily large amounts of damage on the ground, see e.g. the damage from asteroid impacts. So I think your claim is really citation needed. What I would theorize is actually true is that larger explosions than the largest nuclear explosion ever tested will lead to weird, untested dynamics with stuff like the upper atmosphere, which would cause conventional formulae about nuclear explosion effects to break down. This does not however imply there is a ceiling to the amount of boom. Crazy old Teller did in fact propose a 10 gigaton bomb. That's 100x the Tsar Bomba. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ quote:The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.” Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 14:17
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Libluini posted:Yeah obviously, the border to space isn't a literal magic wall, and I think it's really condescending of you to assume I meant that instead of something reasonable. But on your second point: It could be I misremember the details, most of my knowledge stems from books I've read or science articles I've casually read during lunch hour at work, so the details I remember may vary wildly in terms of reliability. You could say I'm more of a Dan than a Duncan. In terms of condescension, maybe don't do the "physics isn't always intuitive" bit when you've got nothing more than "I vaguely remember reading this somewhere". As another poster pointed out, the size of various nuclear effects scale according to the cube root of yield. Hence a 200 Mt nuke would reach up only 60% more than a 50 Mt nuke. In terms of the altitudes we are talking we're talking a decline in atmospheric pressure at the top of the fireball from about 0.6 atm to 0.45 atm. Far more significant to the decline of the megabombs is the fact that the Tsar Bomba weighed 27 tons and required a specialised aircraft to carry it, when the ICBMs that were coming online during this time had a payload capacity of a few hundred kilos. And like, Wellerstein in that article I linked mentions casually in apocalyptic terms the destructive capacity of the gigabombs, so he certainly doesn't seem aware of some kind of upper limit. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 17:43
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I mean, he did lose the war
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Feb 3, 2021 20:38
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I don't know why people haven't mentioned probably the biggest element yet. Dig ditches. Dig lots of ditches.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:10
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Anyway Cessna used the wrong image, but covering yourself from the above with the Scutum while stabbing the enemy from under the shield is a very standard technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veK-HDPzmww
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Feb 8, 2021 19:18
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In the end, the Romans still won, so it's not like falxes were the One Weird Trick that defeated the roman legions.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:37
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Once the enemy gets wise to this, your system will turn into a "make my tank into a highly visible target while forcing the crew to button up and lose all visibility" button
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Feb 14, 2021 12:59
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I think I saw reference to Mercury Fulminate being the explosive. Frankly I kinda suspect the answer is "these things didn't really work". Or at least, not reliably.
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Feb 22, 2021 10:30
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Nessus posted:I remember some goof-rear end Anarchist Cookbook thing encouraging you to drill holes in the front of your rounds and put in plastic explosive to create explosive bullets. Same energy. Were these supposed to hit a guy and blow a hole in them? Mini-shrapnels? quote:B - Beobachtung ("observation") — The German Luftwaffe 10.85 grams (167.4 gr) B (Beobachtung—"observation") high-explosive incendiary ball bullets contained phosphorus and "had a pellet in it which exploded on contact with any target, however frail".[22] The projectile featured an internal floating firing pin mechanism that automatically armed during firing and detonates a small capsule of tetryl which in turn ignites the white phosphorus in the nose of the projectile during sudden deceleration producing a clearly observable amount of flash and smoke. It had a muzzle velocity of 800 m/s (2,625 ft/s) and an operating pressure of 300 MPa (43,511 psi).[24] The B bullet was like any other high-explosive or incendiary bullet, illegal for anti-personnel use according to the Saint Petersburg Declaration and Hague Conventions. "The Germans maintained that it was used mainly for observation and range-finding, but observers report having seen them in rifle clips and machine gun belts".[22] Often this round was used to set vehicles and aircraft on fire.[24] The regular German infantry units were not allowed to use this round; however German snipers on the Eastern Front were permitted by Adolf Hitler in February 1945 to use these rounds that caused horrendous wounds as the projectiles tended to detonate after 100 to 130 millimetres (3.9 to 5.1 in) penetration in human tissue. Karabiner 98k service rifles handled these cartridges without issues.[37] This cartridge can be recognised by the black primer sealant, yellow bullet. This ammunition was also produced in a B-v high-velocity or "v" ammunition variant that added 110 m/s (361 ft/s) muzzle velocity to the normal B variant.[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.92%C3%9757mm_Mauser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXaaybiRiYY Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Feb 22, 2021 |
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Feb 22, 2021 12:52
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The Anarchist Cookbook is revolution fanfiction written by an edgy teenager.
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Feb 22, 2021 13:13
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What does this mean?quote:"Due to radical simplification of the traverse mechanism a backlash forms after the first few shots."
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Feb 22, 2021 14:56
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Looking it up, it seems that most every other major power other than Japan (And, obviously, the USSR) contracted out AFV design to various private companies—see, for instance, Vauxhall designing the Churchill, Renault designing the R35, Krupp designing the Panzer IV, etc. I mean you can re-write that as "the vast majority of tanks that fought in WWII were the product of a nationalised tank design..." Which I suspect would kinda point to the issue here. While the US had industrial expertise, they had almost no expertise at designing and building and operating tanks at the start of the war. So they had a crash course program aimed at producing tanks, lots of tanks ASAP, utilising lots of foreign experts. Fangz fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Feb 24, 2021 |
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Feb 24, 2021 19:43
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Acebuckeye13 posted:But you can't, because that's clearly not what happened (Unless you're putting every Sherman and T-34 in a bucket and weighing it against the rest of the world, which isn't useful or helpful at all). Why not? Like that's the point I'm making, you've got a few designs made by centralised design bureaus that got loads and loads of units built, and then you've got dozens and dozens of mostly crummy, often over-complicated designs that got a small number of runs. EDIT: Look not at "isn't it weird how the US had centralised design", look at e.g. how the British centrally designed the WWI tanks, and developed a sizable private sector tank design and manufacture industry between the wars. Look at why the Germans turned to the private sector to secretly design "Large Tractors" during the interwar years. Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 02:04
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Arquinsiel posted:^^^^ Link was broken, try this one https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMgCQyFNaMPsK9GtzM5dQ
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Feb 26, 2021 20:18
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The Vietnamese managed to do some logistics with bicycles, didn't they?
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Mar 4, 2021 12:16
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My understanding is that in Vietnam, the bicycles weren't so much ridden as they were pushed along, to allow individuals to carry large loads across longer distances. See e.g. https://www.vietnamheritage.com.vn/pushing-to-victory/ quote:A pack bicycle could carry 200-300 kg, five times more than a man. It could operate on many kinds of terrain inaccessible to motorised vehicles. Bikes didn’t consume fuel and were easier to fix and to camouflage. The groups could be small or big, and they could move in any weather. Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 12:39
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I'm guessing the British would probably rely on cover from land based aircraft in a hypothetical UK vs Japan throwdown.
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Mar 9, 2021 13:49
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Raenir Salazar posted:It's interesting to think what happens in a alternate universe where Japan never does Pearl Harbour so the US doesn't enter the war (but is presumably still doing lend-lease to the Allies and the USSR) and Japan takes another crack at the USSR but after Germany is still defeated by the USSR/UK/USA Lend Lease. Uh is Japan supposed to be invading the USSR while under an oil embargo in this scenario.
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Mar 10, 2021 19:57
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I'd like to mention that the children's anime series Gegege no Kitaro had a pretty good episode on how Japanese media depictions of the war tends to play into an idea of Japanese victimhood when they were the aggressors.
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Mar 11, 2021 03:00
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Wasn't there an US assessment of anti tank CAS done in training conditions that found that they were totally ineffectual but pilots vastly overestimated kills? Can someone find it?
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Mar 24, 2021 17:13
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How does privateering during the early years of colonization factor into your argument?
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Mar 25, 2021 14:16
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Alchenar posted:Drake is a prime example for this discussion. He might have been an extremely good pirate, but ultimately his piracy did nothing for the strategic balance between England and Spain. Scattering the Armada in a conventional action (an Armada that was, on paper, the far superior force) was something that actually mattered. If the Armada invasion had landed then none of the privateering would have mattered one bit. The privateering was one of the factors that drove the decision to launch the armada in the first place. I think the argument you are trying to make is rapidly becoming rather absurd, if you're trying to argue that privateering was a bad idea. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 14:48
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