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FuturePastNow posted:Modern anti-ship torpedoes, like an attack submarine carries, are also way more effective than the WWII equivalent. A WWII sub had to try to calculate its target's speed and bearing and then fire a spread of torpedoes at where the target will be, and hope one or more of them hits and punches through (not even going into the problems the US Navy had with torpedoes getting that far). At some point they realized that you could blow a torpedo underneath a ship and do even more damage than a direct impact because it'd use the weight of the ship against it. Milo and POTUS posted:If you don't have the attendant ships to protect an aircraft carrier, was it a wiser idea to focus on battleships instead for the surface fleet Tradeoffs plus different dynamics of Europe vs Pacific theaters. A carrier's range is ultimately down to the range of its aircraft, so if you can pin down the location of your target you can strike them from beyond the range of their guns. Now how you get that information is complicated but in WW2 this usually meant scout planes. In Europe, carriers had a very different use because the UK was basically a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier. Likewise Nazi Germany could theoretically consider occupied Europe their carrier. Now you can't magically conjure up an airfield and you'd want intact infrastructure for the place, and a static location is vulnerable in ways a mobile carrier isn't but these are some of the differences that impacted carrier use. Regardless, a solo carrier is able to launch strikes, it's just also completely naked. Sure, it probably operates a CAP but that does come at a cost for older carriers due to the design of their decks among other things. Without the later angled flight deck, it's difficult to launch and land planes at the same time. A single carrier is going to have issues maintaining some kind of defenses while launching a strike. A battleship in a similar situation can defend itself better but a battleship's speed will limit it. If the enemy engages with smaller ships, it should win but engagements will lead to damage to the superstructure which will accumulate over time, and any battle against something similarly armed and armored is going to hurt unless they get lucky. That's always been one of the big drawbacks. Your super expensive navy can destroy all challenges, but any fight against a peer is going to hurt enough for you to regret it. Carriers are not magically immune to this but even in WW2 aircraft had the range to leave the carrier effectively outside the combat area. The thing with Nazi Germany's navy was that they basically had one group wanting a conventional surface navy because that's very imperialistic and battleships look powerful in a way a fleet of submarines don't. It didn't pan out for them and while it became clear that the only way forward was more submarines, it didn't pan out for those submarine crews either. Argas fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 09:16
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Memento posted:Is there a torpedo design that's supposed to explode under a ship as opposed to hitting it? Is there an advantage or disadvantage to that design? The infamous mark 14 used by US submarines was designed to be capable of this. It also had a contact detonator. There's a goon post covering all the issues of mark 14 in thorough detail but it basically ran too deep to trigger the magnetic detonator, had issues with the magnetic detonator that led to premature detonation, and then had a contact detonator that couldn't withstand the stress of a 90-degree hit. It kind of had all the disadvantages because it was just faulty. You might get a bit more explosive into a torpedo that's more specialized but i do not know enough to have a clue about that. In theory a specialized contact-detonated torpedo can probably be more reliable because it "just" needs to hit the ship and doesn't need any complicated additional equipment like magnetic detonators. In practice a submarine only has so much space to carry additional torpedoes and while it might cost more to make one torpedo that can do everything, it means your submarines has all options available whether it has all its torpedoes or it's used half of them. I can only imagine it being a disadvantage if you have a ship that can somehow survive but is magically light enough to have taken more damage had it been a contact explosion. So almost certainly no, aside from the aforementioned whoops all duds of the mark 14.
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Dec 7, 2020 10:04
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PeterCat posted:Let me guess: the Bomb was not justified due to reasons? It's secretly a debunking of the claims popular media and awful shithouses like PragerU often push forth regarding the use of the bombs. The tl;dr is that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not justified, the bombing did play a role in getting Imperial Japan to surrender (Shaun posits that the bombings also gave Imperial Japan a scapegoat to pin blame on rather than their military's performance). Japan would've surrendered without the bombing but it certainly accelerated events. The main thing the video takes time to debunk is that popular sentiment the bombs were justified to save American lives and that Imperial Japan surrendered to save the lives of Japanese people. It goes through how the actions of Truman and co. had various concerns in mind and the lives of American soldiers were not a key motivation. It also goes through how much the Allies knew of Japan's desire to surrender and how stuff like the final draft of the Potsdam Declaration dropping any mention of the imperial household (one of the writers of the declaration wrote that it was in a previous draft, along with the Soviets signing it) being one of the key factors in prolonging the war because though the hardliners and moderates in the Japanese leadership disagreed on things, they both agreed that the throne be maintained. Many US leaders who were more familiar with Japan and had influence on Truman and co. urged them to soften the stance on unconditional surrender. Shaun can't really pin down Truman and co.'s motivation but suspects it's due to popularity at home because of the anti-Japanese rhetoric that had been stirred up for years, and didn't want to be seen as taking a step back.
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Dec 12, 2020 21:35
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Koramei posted:I'm not gonna watch the video, perhaps this guy does actually mention this, but I really despise how the narrative focusing on saving lives tends (really often) to forget about Imperial Japan's victims when weighing up the calculus. Someone on AskHistorians recently did some napkin math implying something on the order of 250,000 deaths a month as a lowball at this point in the war, i.e. well more than both bombings put together. Shaun makes a point how the crazy delusional hardliners in Japan were fine with the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the whole point of the war after a point was trading lives for war gains. The moderates just didn't think they could get away with keeping the empire and were more worried about getting non-apocalyptic peace terms. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not an especially large or notable dent in the number of deaths. He also talks about strategic bombing and how it's just not really useful against authoritarian regimes where the people are as much a group to oppress as their enemies. Bombing just made civilians more apathetic, because the military leadership was insulated enough from the effects of it that they could just shrug. Even against democracies its effectiveness is questionable at least in part because "the terror bombing" of Britain just did not involve the sheer scale of Allied bombing but what did happen sure didn't seem like it was going to make the Brits give up. 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. The earlier draft of the Potsdam Declaration was the closest they came to doing it prior to the actual surrender, and in the end they did basically word things so that the guarantee of the survival of the Imperial household was coming from the American side rather than something the Japanese were demanding so it didn't seem like they were giving ground to the enemy. It's hard to say with 100% certainty that America knew how to end the war by guaranteeing the survival of the household but they had more than an inkling and came quite close to doing it earlier, but didn't.
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Dec 13, 2020 01:49
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Fangz posted: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. It certainly doesn't equate to the US *knowing* that they knew. 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. Terrible Opinions posted:Well even with those terms it would still take the Emperor himself to break the deadlock, and he was unwilling to exercise that power until after Russia declared war. Which was something that wasn't going to happen until Stalin got big attack on Manchuria geared up. The "aha, this will break the deadlock" followed by "and then they were deadlocked" is pretty much a comedy routine by the end of the video.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:00
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Yvonmukluk posted:So I finally got around to reading Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors (it owns, BTW), and how on earth has it not been made into a movie or miniseries yet? You'd have to depict the Americans making the mistakes that exposed Taffy 3 to attack in the first place.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:10
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Panzeh posted:The idea behind Romanian participation in the first place was that they would provide oil to be paid for in military equipment but the Germans were very flighty about paying for the oil, and it's one of the contributing factors to their defection. Well that sure is an oops.
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Jan 18, 2021 10:36
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I wish I too could be inefficiently radiated upwards into space sometimes.
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Feb 4, 2021 04:29
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If they haven't invented the wheel, how do you expect them to invent the square.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:15
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What if Imperial Japan wasn't insane
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Mar 15, 2021 21:13
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Once again the IJN was ahead of its time. First it was aircraft carriers as a crucial arm of the fleet, then it was specializing in night fighting. Unfortunately it is hard to pivot from night fighting at sea to night fighting on land. Spotlights probably are a mixed bag.
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Mar 29, 2021 21:52
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SerCypher posted:US Navy: "We can use Radar to fight at night!" We'll call them Dai-noculars
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Mar 30, 2021 08:13
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Chocolate fingers of light and darker colors remain a "delightful" little thing in Belgium to this day.
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Apr 6, 2021 16:48
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Hunt11 posted:I would be morbidly interested to see what type of horrific machinery they would design to do it. The cow's nipples are tender and require a firm but soft Prussian grip.
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Apr 11, 2021 20:27
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Carl Gustaf is my friend but only in Bad Company 2
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Apr 15, 2021 00:31
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The last page of this thread had me going for a bit.
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Apr 23, 2021 01:34
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Milo and POTUS posted:Seems a huge oversight to me That's history, folks.
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Jun 2, 2021 11:04
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bulletsponge13 posted:What would the spiritual successors to Paratroopers be? Logically, I think Cav, but there is a long standing animosity between the two, so it doesn't feel right. Hussars? Dragoons? Landsknechts? I'm not very good at premodern history, and I'm sure it would vary by time, region, country, etc- I was just looking for cool unit names/types that would be in the same vibe, but sound cooler for a project. I love the way some sci fi (40k comes to mind) reuses older language. You mean spiritual ancestors?
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Jul 5, 2021 20:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Irritatingly, the tank turret faced backwards when it was airborne, so it couldn't actually shoot anything until after landing and ditching the wings. I had to fix that when I imported the concept into my game Probably a mix of it being slightly more aerodynamic with the back of the turret and so the barrel doesn't get in the way of flying/landing.
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Jul 7, 2021 05:37
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More consistent than my signature
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Aug 12, 2021 18:36
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I do wonder how well radar would track wood and canvas aircraft but that's not the luftwaffe at all.
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Aug 16, 2021 17:08
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Cessna posted:Radar isn't just a metal detector - yes, metal is more reflective than wood or canvas, but those materials aren't entirely invisible. There are other factors, like the size and shape of the object. Well yes, I was just thinking that radar would have slightly different behavior with different materials and since we're on this thread of what-ifs, why not go further back than WW2 where planes are mostly metal.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:08
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Every modern reproduction of those tiny rear end cho-ku-nu repeating crossbows has revealed that it is entirely ineffectual, and you'd need to coat the tip in a fast acting poison so if you're lucky enough for it to break skin it might just do something fast enough to kill someone trying to kill you. Crossbows are definitely effective but those wooden toys clearly have made too many compromises to be worthwhile.
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Aug 19, 2021 06:41
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The Lone Badger posted:My understanding is that they were intended for use in defensive siege warfare, so you're shooting down at people who aren't able to kill you right-here-and-now but may have intentions to do so eventually. The usual explanation I hear is that it's a civilian/woman's weapon, a last ditch thing because it's light enough that even an old grandma could operate it. There are some texts of it as a civilian self-defense weapon for when you're being burgled, which makes some sense given that you're more trying to scare the would-be thief into going after someone easier, while being harmless enough that nobody would mistake it as an attempt to arm yourself in preparation for rebellion.
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Aug 19, 2021 07:38
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:They can be scaled up but the power and weight increases accordingly. The big ones had to be mounted on ships or walls or some other kind of firing platform. Once you're no longer constrained by the various limitations (size, materials, draw weight, semi-auto firing), there's many ways of improving it. The Korean ones depicted in illustrations still seem to have the same basic design but they're much larger, mounted, and have recurve bows. Argas fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 10:49
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Apparently most of the recordings made of the landing were on the same boat going back to England and sank. One guy kept his film and that is partly why Omaha is reused so much in media because the rest of the recordings were lost. One of the critical differences between the beaches is that the majority of their DD tanks sank at sea (deployed too far out) at Omaha. But that is one of the reasons things got bogged down.
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Aug 26, 2021 01:34
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Also, racism
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Sep 10, 2021 17:44
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Gosh that sounds so easy to fix just give the commander a protective cover from all sides so they can look out without having to leave the bank
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Sep 13, 2021 19:01
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Have you tried not getting shot at
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Sep 13, 2021 19:32
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Tradesoffs. You could move vehicles and such with gliders, and troops had most if not all of their gear on hand. Dropping with chutes meant going light. And for the Nazis at least, it meant not having your guns on you.
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Oct 20, 2021 18:53
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Vacuum Battleship Hoodmark
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Nov 1, 2021 04:56
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Bismood. It's a Bismood alright.
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Nov 1, 2021 06:14
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I feel like it used to be way more common for games to not care about getting the official names and designations for this poo poo. Nowadays it lends an air of authenticity and poo poo I guess. Ace Combat vs Project Wingman.
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Nov 8, 2021 20:12
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My tiny rear end addition to Xiahou Dun's post would be that while there is (in theory) a mostly unified written "Chinese" that is usually what's taught in Mandarin class, it is effectively disconnected from all the regional variations because they have their own grammar rules and "deviant" vocabulary due to reasons. In practice written "Chinese" is not going to match a transcription of the same sentence in Cantonese although large portions of it may be shared. I think that's mostly right? Unifying the written language is usually attributed to Qin Shi Huang but that's almost definitely leaving out a ton of crucial details for the sake of a handy China-as-a-shared-identity narrative. For fun vocabulary, Hong Kong Cantonese largely just adopted foreign loanwords by recreating the sounds in Cantonese without giving a gently caress about the characters used. If the characters could have a related meaning, then great. If they didn't, who cares you're using it for the sound. Mainland Cantonese, meanwhile, due to various reasons, tries to go for a more localization approach. And this is why ba-si (or however the gently caress you romanize Cantonese, I do not have a formal education) is bus in the many HK expat communities and... whatever the other translation is, is also bus. And vaguely related to mil-hist, Taiwan was a big financial backer of Hong Kong's film industry back in the Cold War.
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Nov 23, 2021 01:43
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standard.deviant posted:Speaking of Cantonese, I really do not recommend asking a Cantonese speaker if they speak 普通话. There are some *ahem* Political Implications and they may not be super eager to engage. It's usually fine if it's two Chinese people trying to figure out if they both know a language to converse in and poo poo. Just given the way things are, learning "Mandarin" is pretty common even outside of China. But yeah given the lit. meaning of it, it cannot help but be laden with politics. And big rip if you're asking someone that out of the blue.
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Nov 23, 2021 01:55
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It's like that meme about how much you know about the ACW. If you don't know anything, then Chinese is a language with a lot of dialects. If you know a little, then Chinese has many spoken variations but a unified writing system. If you know a lot, the Chinese language is a BS construct for the sake of a single national identity. There's many languages in China and abroad, and while its written forms share a lot, both verbal and written forms are all sorts of mutually intelligible/unintelligible depending on which ones you're talking about. Argas fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 02:15
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hypnophant posted:I've had a question about this for a bit of a while: to what extent was there ever a "unified" spoken Classical Chinese? The analogy to Latin has always seemed flawed to me, because the Han don't seem to have been conquerors in the way that the Romans were, and it's not clear (with my limited knowledge of Chinese history) where or from what culture a comparable language might have originated and how it would spread. Is there evidence that, say, spoken Sichuanese and Shanghainese were influenced by a common language, during or before the relevant time period? Was Classical Chinese mostly a written artifact even when it was new? From what I recall the usual order of the day was classical Chinese for the government, regional/local for everything else. So the imperial government runs everything in classical. Scholars train on classical and those who become officials use classical. The result is that if you wanted a cushy government job, then classical was the way to go. Given how often scholars debated about the classical texts with each other seemingly without any language barriers noted, I imagine there was definitely a spoken component to the language. I doubt it influenced regional languages very much though. It was very much a language of the upper class. You learned it to get away from the riffraff and ascend to the heights of being an imperial official. Or failing that, you became a classical teacher yourself, or joined the ranks of all those adult men who spend their days talking classics and doing very little work. Edit: This post is bunk Argas fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 06:01
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Part of it is English doesn't have the strictest rules on how to pronounce things. Another part of it is that there's just an expectation of prior knowledge due to the aforementioned inconsistency. Sounds that don't exist normally in English... Well, you just gotta know them, right? None of this helps a first-time speaker. Sun Tsu vs Sunzi, which is more accurate? Both expect you to know the right sounds to reading it. It's just that when you usually encounter Wade-Giles, you're just running into it out in the wild and there's usually nothing to teach you how to read it. Meanwhile, a standard Mandarin course in highschool or university will drill the proper pronunciation into you while you're learning it such that once you are familiar, you will learn that the syllables sun and zi are read in a particular manner.
Argas fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 19:47
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Works great until it doesn't is a staple of existence.
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Nov 26, 2021 19:27
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They could've probably designed the tiger to have more sloped armor.
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Dec 1, 2021 00:58
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