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To add even more fun the distinction (and I use that term loosely) between light and heavy cruisers more or less resulted from the Washington and London naval treaties between the two world wars. Before even that you had armored cruisers and protected cruisers, and depending on which country and when you're talking about there are Battlecruisers and Battleship Cruisers.
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Dec 7, 2020 01:44
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Also for the whole shore bombardment thing being able to do it from hundreds of miles offshore with something far more destructive than a 16" HE round that'll also be at least as accurate is a very good thing.
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Dec 7, 2020 02:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Missiles...how are they significantly different from a shell strike, in terms of how they deal their damage? Anti-Ship missiles have hefty warheads with modern designs, so imagine about a ton equivalent of high explosives going off next to the hull and it's also a focused charge. Armor isn't going to stop that. Even near misses from heavier bombs could crack or buckle ship armor. Add in stuff like pop-up attack weapons and you'd have to put on a crazy amount of armor to even have a chance.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:26
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Alchenar posted:Similar to focussing strategic bombing in Germany on fuel production, only quite late in the war was it appreciated how you go from being really lovely and annoying to a country to managing to cause actual structural collapse of a society from the air. Turns out that while factory machines don't exactly burn (or explode) easily, fuel stocks are quite agreeable to getting all torchy and storage vessels don't like getting holes poked in them. Also didn't it turn out that hitting infrastructure actually caused more of a setback than originally believed?
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Dec 15, 2020 00:02
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OctaviusBeaver posted:In Wages of Destruction he quotes Speer complaining in early 45 (I think) that strategic bombing had effectively isolated the Rhineland from the rest of Germany. Factories were still standing but they couldn't get enough raw materials in or finished goods out for them to be any use. Doesn't surprise me at all. A disruption to infrastructure doesn't just hit one point of distribution it hits everything down that line. Things get pushed back and that can cause a cascade effect from bottleneck to bottleneck. One can also see that going on right now thanks to COVID and international shipping issues
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Dec 15, 2020 16:23
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ChubbyChecker posted: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. The most common version I've seen/heard was it was the British dropping the wooden bomb on a German airfield. But at the same time if you know that they're wasting effort on a fake why tell them about it?
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Dec 19, 2020 15:22
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Morholt posted:Why did Warspite have casemate guns? I thought those were obsolete post Dreadnought. Were they used at all in bombardments? Casemate guns remained for the secondary batteries for at least a generation or two of Dreadnoughts until they were finally replaced by turreted secondaries. IIRC the Warspite suffered from some of its casemates being unusable in any sort of rough sea condition. The US for example used casemate mounts for their secondaries until the North Carolina class, the planned but cancelled South Dakota (1920) class would have had casemates for most of its secondary guns as well. The UK stopped with the casement secondaries with the planned N3s and the actually built Nelson class. Casemates are lighter than turrets but are more limited in many ways, especially once the secondaries became important for DP roles. Taerkar fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 17:11
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The current 120mm HEAT round for the US is subcaliber.Ensign Expendable posted:Two is that HEAT jets decrease in effectiveness greatly if the projectile is spinning. There are two ways to go about correcting this, one is to make a rotating sleeve that engages with the rifling while the warhead stays still, the other is to just go smoothbore and stabilize the projectile with fins. Turns out fins are pretty good for stabilization, just as good as rifling, so kinetic penetrators also became finned. Or you're French and you go with a variation in the first and have the HEAT warhead stabilized inside of the shell that is fired
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Dec 24, 2020 03:25
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The tradeoffs change with the size of the projectile and the length of the barrel I believe, also when you want as much velocity as possible you want to reduce drag and friction as much as you can. Throw in the benefit of a better HEAT projectile and other options and it just becomes an easier choice. Unless you're British, then it's bad armored cav island.
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Dec 24, 2020 04:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:Basically the same thing the Germans tried in Norway, when they told the Norwegians they were going to send in the Wehrmacht to protect their neutrality from British aggression. Didn't the Germans inadvertantly beat out the British plan to do mostly the same thing?
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Dec 25, 2020 00:01
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MrYenko posted:In a US Infantry division during WWII, the battalion weapons company would have a single M2 assigned to the company HQ. Yeah, the M2 is not a small weapon. Almost five and a half feet long, weighing about eighty pounds without a tripod (which is ~forty pounds), and the ammo isn't exactly small either. Convenient Gun Jesus video with a size comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmLnwiJRr78
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Dec 28, 2020 16:54
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Some halftracks are truly blessed and have four!
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Dec 28, 2020 17:48
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Like many people TIK is alright when he stays within his main focus but rapidly turns to poo poo outside of it. We really need a recommended/suggested YouTuber list in the OP.
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Jan 4, 2021 17:41
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Ensign Expendable posted:Yeah, there was a high velocity 107 mm gun in development designed to take out German superheavy tanks (this was when the heaviest tank Germany actually had weighed 20 tons). A tank version was tested on the KV-2 and was going to be used on the KV-3, 4, and 5. This was technically a viable weapon and the idea of using it in a tank or tank destroyer came up later in the war, but the fact that there were no 107 mm AP shells in production ruined any chances of this happening. I've always wondered why 107 and 122? You often see stuff in either round inches or millimeters (100, 85, 150) but those two seem rather odd. Old shot weight calibers?
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Feb 5, 2021 05:42
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Nenonen posted:I think all of you are taking at face value a post that is clearly a joke. Hitler was only doing it to protect German from Russian aggression. What do you think the BT stands for in the BT-2/5/7? BERLIN TANKS!
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Feb 10, 2021 16:47
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I am disappointed that there was pages of Gato vs Type IX talk and no mention of the biggest elephant in the room: The Mark 14 Shitpedo. If that thing has actually worked as a normal torpedo then the IJN may not have even made it past '43. And Japan's merchant fleet may not make it TO '43.
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Feb 20, 2021 00:48
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Acebuckeye13 posted:I don't think that really factored into it—even though Germany was strategically falling back from 42 onward, the StuG III was still used in plenty of counter-attacks, and in the quote I posted above it was compared favorably to the Panzers even at Kursk. Its success really came from the fact that it managed to combine good armor and armaments with training and tools that allowed the crew to make the best use of their vehicle. There's a reason it was the single most produced German tank* of the war. Akin to how a lot of the success of the US TD units being training focused on fighting other armored vehicles.
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Feb 21, 2021 15:58
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Both the US and UK had some rather mediocre designs at the start of the war that were the result of (in hindsight) flawed doctrines and the delay in updating to newer generation designs. Contrarily Germany and Japan both benefited from being the aggressors who started the wars so they had a better understanding of the timeline and targets (not that they reached those targets *cough*Kreigsmarine*cough* Japan also had the issue of trying to do too much with their ships because of Glorious Decisive Battle!!! Not that the USN wasn't counting on such as well...
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Mar 9, 2021 06:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:IJN carriers are superior in all aspects other than DC to RN carriers Protection as well. Most of the RN CVs have armored flight decks. Also keep in mind that the RN has some of the best radar at the time and more operational experience with it compared to the USN.
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Mar 9, 2021 13:42
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SerCypher posted:US Navy: "We can use Radar to fight at night!" RN: "Say hello to my nighttime airstrike!"
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Mar 30, 2021 13:20
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The radar-intelligence reason for the Bruneval raid that followed on 27/28 February served to emphasize matters. I first learned about this one from a YA book I read back in my early teens. Probably one of the bits that really got me interested in it all.
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Apr 23, 2021 04:51
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Fangz posted:Well, by WW2 they were using cruise ships as troop ships. That pontoon doesn't compare to RMS Queen Mary carrying over 15,000 passengers... I'd bet that Queen Mary is a bit swifter than that likely lumbering while.
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Apr 28, 2021 18:56
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Polyakov posted:The curious thing about Japan particularly is that I don't think even a majority of the high command thought they would win, or even that they could. They were men constrained by fear and a lack of imagination, they could not back down from the course that the country had taken, not only because it would be unthinkable bit also because they knew they would likely get murdered for it, and nobody was sure of whether everyone else would support peace and so nobody operant enough took a stand. But there was a lot of private doubt and relatively sober assessment of their odds outside of the public eye. But they had spent too much, invested too much moral capital and had too many deaths to realistically be able to climb down. Most of them had no real delusions of actually beating the US in a drawn out fight, they were counting on that Decisive Battle that would cause the US Public to call for a ceasefire that was advantageous to Japan. Of course this plan was thwarted with the way they started their war, both in terms of how it angered the US populace and how it basically crippled one of the main plans the USN had for fighting, though chances are that it wouldn't have happened anyways. They wanted and needed a Short Victorious War.
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May 11, 2021 00:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also, high explosive bombs are just kind of bad at taking out factories. The machinery itself is surprisingly durable and robust, and most of it can be repaired if you knock it around. The factory buildings themselves are usually pretty easily rebuilt and replaced, as we're talking more along the lines of really huge sheds (as far as the construction goes) than a huge brick and mortar edifice. Of interesting note is that some of the big successes that came from bombing factories weren't actually known by the Allies at the time. Production of the StuG III pretty much stopped at least for a while because of a bombing raid on Alkett. Factories were difficult to put completely offline but the support industries to them were decidedly more fragile. And of course you have the long term consequences of strikes to the oil fields and refineries as well as strikes to the various infrastructure locations. Sure they could fix the rail lines, but it's a lot harder to replace the rolling stock.
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May 22, 2021 21:22
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Fangz posted:I dropped the guy after he posted a video analysing the relative effectiveness of infantry forces in WWII by uh... adding up the rate of fire of all the small arms carried by a platoon to a single total rounds per minute, and seeing who had the most. That's s great way of doing things if you want to declare the side with the MG-42 the winner.
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Jun 2, 2021 18:09
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By the time those rounds fall to earth they're almost certainly at their terminal velocity, which is going to be far slower than what they're fired at. Might still kill, but the chance of that I would imagine to be rather low until you get to cannon-sized rounds.
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Jun 13, 2021 17:05
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The roll (and apparently pilot impulse) is part of why carriers ended up with the island on the right I have a suspicion that the prevalence of right handedness means that there's an inclination to push the stick to the left as well
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Jul 2, 2021 19:19
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More than a bit of concern regarding Communist Uprisings. And anti-Soviet Union stuff in general.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:01
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zoux posted:It's always the specter of communism... Well there was a bit of a rough spot that didn't really get settled in the 1860s.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:10
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There was a replacement attempt in the form of the M85 but I believe one poster tore it apart in a previous thread. There's probably some wooden ships that hung around for a long time but that can get into Ship of Theseus territory. Taerkar fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jul 12, 2021 |
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Jul 12, 2021 05:06
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One pattern or another of the Brown Bess stayed in service for over a century, though that depends on how distinct the patterns were. Some saw use well after their nominal end of service as well. I think a few even showed up in Afghanistan?
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Jul 13, 2021 04:14
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Nessus posted:Yeah, I was mostly wondering on there being guys taking pictures at literally points like that one guy gesturing for his dudes to go over the top, and how common it would be. On a ship, on a plane, even a little ways back from the front line: absolutely. Literally during an assault? I was unsure. It wouldn't surprise me that most of the photos taken during such were unusable. Weren't most of Capa's D-Day landing photos ruined?
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Jul 30, 2021 21:56
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As compared to all of the previous months of bombing of Japan and the reduction of pretty much the entirety of their offensive forces outside of China? The people in charge didn't give a poo poo about the populace, or at least a significant enough didn't to keep the war going. For the general American populace they weren't experiencing all that much hardship back home and the newsreels at the cinemas were full of victory after victory. Any potential mass casualty event of a landing would likely not really be public knowledge until well after the fact.
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Aug 6, 2021 16:38
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It's worth remembering that the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of US production in World War II didn't come from nowhere. In fact, nearly everything the United States did was predicated on the American experience in the First World War—where, despite enjoying similar industrial advantages, the US army was forced to rely on French and British production to remain supplied. The lack of American production of aircraft in particular was so severe that the vast majority of American pilots would end up flying in French or British-built machines, and the newly founded US Army Tank Corps was equipped entirely with FT-17s. And to make matters worse, when the US was able to spool up production of war material, it was often in the service of boondoggles that had managed to impress someone in the Ordnance branch back in the US but would have been near-useless in the trenches, like the Pederson Device. To add to this it's important to know that it wasn't an issue with production, indeed many American manufacturers were making weapons for the allied powers before the US's involvement and in rather significant numbers at that. The US Army could have had Lewis Guns and M1917s in good numbers but due to various reasons they did not, ergo the Chauchat in 30-06. Beyond that there were weapons that were held back for use in the planned the 1919 offensive so that the Germans wouldn't learn about them beforehand, including the aforementioned Pederson Device. If you're not familiar with that it was an insert for the M1903 that replaced the bolt with a semi-automatic .38cal weapon, or maybe .32 cal? It was weird.
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Aug 12, 2021 04:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, to start with, Allied paratroops dropped with their weapons (at least in theory - a fair number were lost during the drop due to how the US military designed the bags for them and the drop conditions) while the Germans just dropped with a pistol and were expected to find a crate with a rifle when they landed. I would imagine that the general size of the area of the operation also played a fairly big part as well. While the airborne troops were scattered all over the place, hampering their effectiveness, it also meant that the German command structure in the area was getting reports of contact all over the place, which almost certainly added quite a bit of confusion regarding what was going on.
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Aug 12, 2021 15:51
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Mazz posted:Hans sighs as he closes the drivers hatch of his Panther and immediately takes a M829 depleted uranium dart fired from a Abrams 2700m away. The neighboring Panzer IV hurriedly ties to shoot back but they can’t even see what fired through the smoke and dust. Meanwhile the another dart proceeds to pass through the Panther and knocks out a Hanomag 30 meters behind killing everyone on board. Some say the dart is still going. This gets into a big component of the whole thing. If you can't see your target then you're chance of anything approaching effective return fire is on the level of winning the lottery jackpot. Even ignoring the difference in Killing The Other Guy potential the difference in vision/detection technology is stupefying.
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Aug 16, 2021 17:50
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah pretty much. This scenario is kinda simulated in Wargame: European Escalation when swarms of Warsaw Pact T-34s try moving across a map defended by Abrams. Only from the aft-sides and the rear, though again that runs into the issue of Who Spots Who first with the US Army more or less running the equivalent of hacks thanks to modern optical systems. The 88L71 or the 128 could probably get through some of the front-side armor. Taerkar fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 19:10
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City fights are never pretty for the tanks. Not that they're much better for anything else
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Aug 16, 2021 19:21
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No one expects the Sturmtiger.
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Aug 16, 2021 19:23
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Also The West only had so much there in the first place.
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Aug 16, 2021 19:31
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