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Trin Tragula posted:
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Dec 6, 2020 22:36
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BalloonFish posted:The diagonal scantlings allowed the US heavy frigates to be slightly longer than a conventional 90-gun two-decker but without (obviously) the extra weight or the extra beam needed to provide stability due to the higher centre of gravity. This allowed them to keep the traditional 'frigate-built' proportions of a long waterline and a narrow underwater hull section which made them both seaworthy and fast. Conventional construction limited a single-deck ship to about 140ft on the waterline with 32, maybe 36 guns. Multi-deck ships could be longer because the extra decks gave the hull relatively more strength - a two-decker could be about 180ft and a three-decker about 220ft. The heavy frigates were 175ft on the waterline and 200ft overall. Waterline length determines a ship's maximum speed and the heavy frigates' scantlings and heavy planking gave them both the length and displacement not far off that of a seventy-four, but with the slimmer hull, lower freeboard and lower centre of gravity of a frigate, which allowed them to carry more sail than a normal frigate and make best use of the added power. Thanks, this is really interesting stuff for a Patrick O'Brian fan.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:44
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TK-42-1 posted:Does anyone have that clip of the japanese guys giving an aide poo poo for shaving because they don’t recognize him? Last few posts reminded me of it and I can’t find it. https://i.imgur.com/ti3yHSs.mp4
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Dec 8, 2020 03:56
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Caracole was a useful tactic because only part of the infantry was equipped with muskets, and the og muskets had a slow rate of fire. When armies started to use faster firing muskets and more musketeers its effectiveness diminished. And Swedish cavalry didn't charge intact infantry formations, they used musketeers and lighter field guns to support their cavalry charges.Edgar Allen Ho posted:Didn’t ACW cavalry follow fairly different doctrine to contemporary european cavalry? There’s nothing equivalent to lancers or cuirassiers, and they all seem to basically be dragoons. ACW cavalry were essentially militia dragoons, and proper cavalry requires longer training. And ACW infantry and artillery weapons were so effective, that even good cavalry would have been best used as dragoons or they would have just died in their first charge. That would have made some good poetry but nothing else. Panzeh posted:I don't think it's really true that cavalry ditched carbines and pistols during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps for shooting up formed infantry, but IIRC Napoleon actually deliberately asked for more carbines for his cavalry for the 1812 campaign in Russia, due to the need for them in not-so-pitched battles. Yeah, only part of cavalry's job happened in large battles. Napoleonic infantry had fast firing muskets, and effective firing methods, so a cavalry unit that tried to out-shoot infantry formations wouldn't have fared very well, but guns were very useful in skirmishes and looting peasants. Ataxerxes posted:Well, through the 17th century cavalry charging into pike-and-shot infantry formations didn't have a good time. The various wars of Sweden and Poland are a good example, Polish cavalry absolutely slaughtered Swedish foot at Kircholm in 1605, but by the 1650's Swedish invasion of Poland it could no longer overrun Swedish infantry formations at will. Various countries/realms/proto-states had very different types on infantry, for example the Polish foot were supposedly not up to the standard of their neighbours. The Polish infantry wasn't very good, because the Polish nobility didn't want to pay taxes for it, partially because that would have helped the king.
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Dec 9, 2020 00:11
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The Lone Badger posted:One man in four stays behind to hold the reins of the helicopters. Otherwise the enemy could do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVIGh2bSsxY
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Dec 9, 2020 01:54
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White Coke posted:Caracole seems to me to be the gunpowder equivalent of horse archers riding around an enemy shooting arrows at them, and like horse archers their biggest weakness was an enemy armed with superior ranged weapons. p much yes
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Dec 9, 2020 02:38
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White Coke posted:As infantry got better at fighting cavalry coped by trying to reform along Western lines. Russia succeeded but Poland didn't. The quality of Polish cavalry stayed quite good even after there wasn't an independent Polish state. And the lancers even had somewhat of a renaissance during and after the Napoleonic wars because of the Polish uhlans.
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Dec 9, 2020 03:18
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Ataxerxes posted:Yeah, Sweden sorta went the other side roung. The masters thesis of a dear friend (and his upcoming PhD thesis) is about the transformation of the Swedish army from the semi-feudal "nobility is supposed to turn up with their own troops and some infantry" of mid 1550's to the beginning of the reign of Gustavus Adoplhus. The Kircholm defeat was in part due to king Johan and Karl (sons of Gustaf Vasa) trying to cut corners in outfitting their soldiers (musketeers are cheap! they need no armor!) and ending up with infantry that was good for garrison duties and cross-border raiding (which was wery frequent on the eastern borderlands of Sweden) but couldn't really hold its own in a pitched battle, especially not against the charge of the Polish hussars. By the time Gustavus went to war in Germany he had had the time to both have his native regiments drilled well and to hire good mercenaries, something none of his predecessors could afford, with regards to either time or money. When I was contemplating on the cavalry, I thought about drilling. Were the native Swedish troops actually better drilled than their opponents? And iirc the musketeers didn't wear armor because it hindered loading the long muskets.
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Dec 9, 2020 12:37
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When did the cool armies start to give tobacco and booze to soldiers and when did the nanny states stop this? I've read about how it was handled in navies, but don't know how it was done on land.
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Dec 9, 2020 12:50
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Gaius Marius posted:I bet you say that to all the cute fillys. gently caress off brony
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Dec 10, 2020 12:45
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HEY GUNS posted:grenadiers postdate me although you will give people grenade launchers for an assault (the final push into a beseiged city for instance) These: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_mortar ? Interesting looking things, hadn't heard about them before.
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Dec 10, 2020 13:26
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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. Paravane poles?
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Dec 10, 2020 13:37
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/hms-dreadnought-large-56a61c3e3df78cf7728b6440.jpg)
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Fangz posted:Anti-torpedo nets. The idea is that they swing out to catch torpedos. They failed to be effective once torpedos got bigger/faster. ah ofc
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Dec 10, 2020 13:40
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:There's kind of an interesting theory, which is basically that the average infantryman's loadout has stayed pretty constant over the millenia. You basically just load the dude up with whatever he can reasonably carry (it increases over time because people get bigger and stronger due to advances in nutrition), and if gear gets lighter, the weight just gets replaced by additional gear. I can't find it but there was a really good slideshow layout of British-based infantry kit through the centuries which included like Roman era, on through to modern. Lobster God posted:I think this might be what you're thinking of with the pics of kit through the ages: https://www.thomatkinson.com/inventories Here's a gallery that had a few more pics: https://imgur.com/gallery/YV3M2
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Dec 10, 2020 23:48
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Nenonen posted:I'm loading all my RPG dice into my musket and see what damage they'll roll! 
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Dec 12, 2020 14:32
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Warden posted:The Russian Empire saw Finland as a “window to the west” and also a test laboratory for new economic policies, and did its very best to attract foreign capital and entrepreneurs to Finland, which led to the birth of Finnish wood industry in the second half of the 19th century. What did the Empire do to make this happen?
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Dec 12, 2020 14:55
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HEY GUNS posted:no what we need; LRADIKAL posted:There's more vids like this? I don't think I've seen onboard cameras recording combat operations like this before.
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Dec 13, 2020 12:13
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Warden posted:Mostly relax the incredibly restrictive and old-fashioned laws and regulations. For example: So it looks like that the empire didn't actively help much, more that they didn't actively hinder the autonomous province's modernizations. While the railroads also help locals, they aren't built by empires from altruism, but to tie the conquered areas more tightly to the empires, and to extract more money from them. I don't think that it was Western criticism that led to the abolition of serfdom, but rising Russian liberalism.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:08
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White Coke posted:This article somewhat answers the question I had regarding the rare use of infantry squares to fight off cavalry during the 18th century. It seems that armies would often be formed into what was essentially a giant rectangle, with grenadiers filling in the gaps between two main lines of infantry. Grenadiers were also deployed at the flanks of battalions, where they could be relied on to wheel around to better fire on the flanks of an enemy when possible so it seems that they were regarded as more reliable units who could perform more complex roles even though they no longer used grenades or were otherwise equipped differently than line infantry. That link is a pro-click for people interested in 18th c. tactics.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:09
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Greetings from Internet VFW: haha drat btw, what's ntc?
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Dec 13, 2020 23:26
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gohuskies posted:National Training Center, where they do the biggest combat training and dress rehearsals. 
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Dec 13, 2020 23:52
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Youtube's Nazi algorithm suggested an interesting video for once, Mussolini speaking English in the early 30s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr-PuuKYn8c&t=512s
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Dec 14, 2020 09:03
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Chamale posted:Wars have some kind of goal. The Allies' goal in World War II was, roughly, to stop Germany from being a threat. That can be accomplished by burning their cities from the air, although they needed a ground occupation afterwards. A war like Vietnam where the goal is to establish a new form of government and change the hearts and minds of the people is different. You can't win that war by dropping napalm from the skies, although the Americans certainly tried their hardest. Could it though?
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Dec 15, 2020 11:05
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Alchenar posted:I think (provided we are willing to set aside the 'moral atrocity' element of the discussion for a moment) there's a really interesting dimension to the strategic bombing argument in WW2. The reason at the time proponents argued for the creation of these vast bomber fleets at enormous expense was that they were a way to carry the war to Germany in the years before the Allies could undertake serious ground operations. Yet its only in February 1945 (the month of Dresden and the commencement of low level firebombing of Japan) that strategic bombing goes from being something that has a noticeable but non-critical impact to having the kind of effects that might be war winning on their own if continued. That's after Allied armies are already advancing on German soil and the US Navy is launching the penultimate set of island hopping invasions before eyeing up the Japanese mainland. 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.
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Dec 15, 2020 12:03
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Nebakenezzer posted:I was going through the old cold war thread looking for posts to highlight, and Cyrano wrote this in 2012 and I never really forgot about it because of his characteriztion of Hermann Goering: The invasion had a naval part too.
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Dec 15, 2020 18:11
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Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, sorry, I just noticed. The troops that took the Eben-Emael fort weren't parachute troops, but airborne combat engineers that landed on top of the fort in gliders.
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Dec 16, 2020 16:04
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Dance Officer posted:The French loss was due to strategic shortcomings like having a small professional army and being reliant on conscription, command failures, and luck on the Germans part. Wasn't that everyone in the war?
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Dec 17, 2020 13:12
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BalloonFish posted:This is the problem with finding interesting stuff after falling down a rabbit-hole of links and archived .pdf papers on ww2aircraft.net - I can't track down the article in question. I'll keep looking. Yeah, the same thing has happened to me so many drat times.
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Dec 17, 2020 23:52
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OctaviusBeaver posted:They only had a few months of fuel reserves (~6 months) which eased after they beat France since Romania fell into their orbit, but if France holds out then Germany is on a ticking clock. The French and British can import whatever raw materials they need from the rest of the world and can buy manufactured goods from the US while Germany can't. I think if France survived the initial confrontation then their chances started looking quite good in the medium to long term. White Coke posted:If the Soviet Union wanted to it could prop up Germany for awhile, at least regarding raw materials. Then you have the possibility that the Soviets will be dragged into the war directly. The French considered bombing the Baku oilfields but the British shot that idea down. During the Battle of France Germany and Soviet Union were allied. They made a new trade deal in February 1940, and among other things Germany bought 900,000 tons of oil. As long as their alliance held, Germany wouldn't have ran out of raw materials or fuel.
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Dec 18, 2020 11:54
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Wasn't 'Blitzkrieg' used mainly by Allied press, and not by Nazi propaganda?
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Dec 18, 2020 17:14
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Chamale posted:Did the Nazis ever strafe an inflatable army and uncover the ruse? SlothfulCobra posted:In a twist, the strafing is actually a plane pulling a bunch of realistic kites, because the germans want to fool the allies into thinking they fell for the trick. I've read a story, which was probably made up, that during some bluffing operation a single German plane flew over a fake airfield that had dummy planes and dropped a wooden bomb on it. e: typo ChubbyChecker fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Dec 19, 2020 |
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Dec 19, 2020 13:37
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Its a fake airfield, what's gonna shoot it down? Quaker AA guns.
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Dec 20, 2020 00:51
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PittTheElder posted:Sadly there's no shooting but yeah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lhx6Q3WuvU haha nice
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Dec 23, 2020 21:30
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Given that the Allies invaded Iceland and Persia, why didn't they bomb Sweden who was supplying Germany with critical materials? Were there any plans for it?
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Dec 26, 2020 20:30
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Grimnarsson posted:They were willing to basically invade in March 1940 if Finland provided a pretext by a formal request for aid. Otherwise, wouldn't the nature of the resources require a lot of bombing, sustained and intense since it's mines, ports, railways? From what I understand Sweden started distancing itself from Germany as soon as it could and diplomatic channels were open with the Allies so they probably understood Sweden's predicament. I checked the numbers. The Swedish iron ore was higher grade than elsewhere, so about 60% of the prewar iron for Nazi Germany came from Sweden. It had the most importance during the late -39 and early -40 after the West had stopped trading with Germany and before Germany had conquered Belgium and France. During that critical period about 75% of the German iron came from Sweden. For the rest of the war the percentage was about 20%. Sweden stopped the iron ore trade only in November 1944, so they definitely didn't mind collaborating with the Nazis. Strategic bombing wasn't very effective at hindering the Nazis war machine, but since Sweden was trading with Germany to make profit, they might have stopped it earlier if they had had to account the cost of rebuilding their cities. And the Allies bombed France killing 70k people, so bombing collaborators wasn't off the table.
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Dec 27, 2020 12:21
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Speaking of Napoleonic historians, iirc this guy was mentioned in a previous thread: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12...%20dismembered. He got 12.5 years sentence a few days back.
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Dec 27, 2020 15:01
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Which level infantry units got .50cal mgs or DshKs in WW2? Was there like a platoon of them in regiment or something?
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Dec 27, 2020 15:07
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Ensign Expendable posted:Don't turn events from over a century ago into personal attacks, thanks Serbia does it again!
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Dec 27, 2020 19:11
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Solaris 2.0 posted:What would the consequences of a British loss had been? This is 1982 and the Cold War is very much in full swing - I image NATO get's embarrassed that one of their members surface fleets gets destroyed by a non-communist aligned state, and the Soviets win a major diplomatic coup by default. In addition, the UK itself is probably thrown into turmoil and the Thatcher government collapses. The "special relationship" with the US is probably strained as suddenly the RN can't adequately protect the North Atlantic. Maybe China tries to make moves to force the UK to hand over Hong Kong early? This is in the realm of fantasy books.
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Dec 30, 2020 16:44
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Right, but that's my point, it feels like that should be a big deal. I mean I am sure the Falklands War is a huge deal in UK and especially Argentinian circles but as an American I had only barely heard of it, and I never even knew the UK had lost so many ships. India and Pakistan had some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_Naval_War_of_1971
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Dec 30, 2020 17:06
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