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If we're posting effortposts/blogs, I have a few But let me start with a request: does anybody have a link to that history of the Taiping civil war?
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Dec 6, 2020 20:53
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Also on the subject of flying and food, I've been told that USN blimps during WW2 had waffle irons onboard
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Dec 6, 2020 20:56
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Trin Tragula posted:I'd also like to encourage all the lurkers who feel intimidated by big hulking megathreads to get stuck in and just ask whatever's on your mind about military history. Hear him, friends! Nenonen posted:Happy Finnish independence day, btw. Ask me anything about Mannerheim's knights or something It's a subject I know nothing about, aside from this vague impression you were on the edge of other people's kingdoms/empires, and I most definitely salute Finland being on the periphery of the Russian/Soviet empire and managing to thread that needle pretty well.
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Dec 6, 2020 23:43
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Effortposts: on mah blog So it's a cold fact of life lots of people like doing effortposts ITT, and this soon leads to blogging. Some, like our current IK EnsignExpendable or JobbaFett have dedicated blogs to milhist stuff, while people like me have blogs that *mostly* have milhist stuff. Because mine is most, not entirely, I'm'a gonna just quote the milhist relevant stuff. If it seems interesting to you, click it or don't! On the Fw 200 Condor Part 1, Part 2 A twelve part series I wrote for AI's Aviation thread about a decade ago on German Naval Airships in WW1, titled Achtung Zeppelin! A two part series on the Heinkel 219 "Owl" night fighter. Part 1: A Fledgeling in Search of Parents and Part 2: Combat and Bird Puns On the Junkers 290, the very rare large transport and maritime recon aircraft. 1. Actual Facts. 2. The Myth of Flights to Japan. 3. Did the Ju 290 Make Secret Flights to Atlantis?!? The Convair B-36 'Peacemaker' I Watch it so You Don't Have To: Disney's Victory through Airpower If you want to understand strategic bombing as the World War people understood it, it is not bad. Also, gifs Tankom 1/144 P.1000 Ratte I build a model and learn about Germany's hypothetical ultra-tank A three part post on the Soviet/Russian Kirov class battlecrusiers, and their amazingly depressing cousin, the Ural spy ship. On Amerika Bombers, right now an 8 part post. Getting accsess to a university library let me trace big aircraft production in the Third Reich from the early 1930s to after its total collapse. Lots of related themes, including 1) why were the Nazis so bad at it, 2) why the He 177 proved to be a gypsy curse on Luftwaffe aviation, 3) why the Fw 200 and BnV 222 were civilian-developed stopgaps that never saw replacement, 4) why the Nazis had a longstanding obsession with creating bombers to strike at America, and 5) why the fourth point was a insane complication the Third Reich stapled to pretty much all their big aircraft plans.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:30
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Memento posted:The reason I asked this (old thread) is that you were talking about the Short Sunderlands, and then you mentioned the Short Shackletons, but I thought the Shackletons were made by Avro, and I didn't want you to get incredibly politely lynched by any Canadian Avro tragics. Hahaha fair Short Shackletons? Yeah, that's not right
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Dec 7, 2020 01:01
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LoudPipesSaveLives posted:I've been looking but probably someone who knows how to look for this kind of thing can help me, I've never really understood the hierarchy of naval ships in ww2 I get my Destroyers and Corvettes mixed up with Cruisers and Battleships. I keep hoping I'll stumble across a big diagram while I do my little searches online but never have. Just something that is concise and has the biggest ships at the top and the littlest ones at the bottom and a little blurb of why. There's definately a hiarchey insofar as what individual ship can beat up whom, but it's probably easier to understand as "there's a bunch of ship classes, each built for different jobs." Destroyers: Fast, heavily armed, zero armor. Originally invented to protect dreadnoughts against newly invented torpedo boats, they branched out into protecting against submarines, aircraft, and generally screening larger ships, as well as getting torpedoes for sinking larger ships. Destroyer Escorts: destroyers built for escorting civillian ships. Less guns, just as much AA, slower. Corvettes: If there is such a thing as a naval millita, this is their ship. An extremely cheap and cheerful escort ship focused around fighting submarines. The most famous of these were the Flower Class corvettes, which were de contented enough that they could be built by civilian shipyards, based on a whaler design, depth charges, sonar, a gun, as miserable as a U-boat to serve on. PT boats: "Patrol-torpedo" boats were short range small boats that carried a few torpedoes to huck at larger ships. Cruisers [various]: This is probably the most confusing class. Cruisers in the age of sail were largish, long endurance ships that could 'cruise' and raid enemy merchant shipping. This turned into an intermediate class between the very big, enormously expensive heavy armor battleships, and the unarmored destroyers. In the middle pretty much defines them. They can take on smaller naval ships like destroyers, etc, and run away from battleships as the "some armor: approach has its virtues. A destroyer in turn could outrun it, and a battleship could cripple a cruiser without too much of a fight. But then it gets more confusing because cruisers become specialists as well: heavy cruisers have bigger guns and heavier armor, light cruisers are like extra beefy destroyers, being faster and with lighter armor, anti-aircraft cruisers specialize in exploding' aircraft; battlecrusiers are crusiers with a battleship's guns but with a crusier's speed and armor.... battleships: enormous, super expensive both to build and maintain, giant guns of terrible destructive power, very heavily armored. The battleship exists to fight other battleships - and exists as a trump card. This gets almost old school "line of battle ship" type thinking, since the equity of battleship firepower in one fleet has to be matched or beat by the other if you just shout 'get 'em' at the enemy fleet.
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Dec 7, 2020 01:39
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Camrath posted:So where do frigates fit into the naval ship hierarchy? Both historically and in the present day. People with the boat-smarts can say more about age of sail frigates. Post ww2, frigate became the name of essentially the standard fighting ship class, because it did almost everything all the old ship classes did with precision munitions and advanced sensors.
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Dec 7, 2020 02:44
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P-Mack posted:Shamed with my unfinished effortpost series... Unfinished?! Goddamnit, how does it end?!
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Dec 7, 2020 03:36
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Cythereal posted:Also something to bear in mind for these discussions is that you don't have to sink a ship to effectively kill it. None of the Japanese carriers at Midway, for example, were actually sunk by the Americans. They were gutted and reduced to drifting, burning hulks, but none of them sank until the IJN scuttled them. 2020 can serve you up an example of this, and from a kind of carrier, no less: Phanatic posted:Stuff like the USN's decision to scrap its burned-out LHD: For those that don't know, the US Marine Corps had its amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard catch on fire while docked, and if you look for photos you can see many things melted and distorted
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Dec 7, 2020 22:40
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I don't know where this is from but it is nice to see 'taking the piss' is universal
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Dec 8, 2020 18:07
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Point of order but destroyers were absolutely not invented to protect dreadnoughts from torpedo boats. They were invented specifically to hunt down torpedo boats more than a decade before Dreadnought herself was even an idea. So ships that could keep up with the fleet but were fast/small enough to waste trash mobs of PT boats?
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Dec 8, 2020 18:34
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bewbies posted:remember during iteration 54 of the atomic attacks debate when some guy was arguing they should used bombers to drop food instead of bombs? that was cool I do simply because it was so dumb/funny
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Dec 14, 2020 00:52
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Ensign Expendable posted:This week's article is one of mine and is a pretty specialist topic: Sherman tank mobility in mud I thought the Panther had good ground pressure, at least, so it surprises me it wasn't terribly good in mud. Was it a traction problem? Spoiler:The panther's transmission broke during the trials 
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Dec 14, 2020 01:17
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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:quote:The short version is that before the war, when the army was exploring the possibility of airborne operations like just about every other country on the planet, Goering thew a giant loving hissy fit and said that any German airborn units had to be part of the Luftwaffe because they had something to do with airplanes. No compromise here, either - you couldn't have Luftwaffe aircrews flying army dudes over the drop zone, they had to all be Luftwaffe. Since Goering was really good at screaming and crying until he got his way he got handed his own personal little mini-army inside the German airforce.
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Dec 15, 2020 02:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also I don’t know how true this is but I’ve heard that part of the reason for that early grip was to fit the gun in the drop tubes the luftwaffe used for their gear. The Luftwaffe also attempted a paradrop during the Battle of the Bulge which was a disaster, partially because of this "drop poo poo seperately" thing. The reason why poo poo was dropped separately was that the Ju 52 was so tiny relative to even the C-47 that getting the paratroops and their gear just didn't fit. e: ^^^ or what Cessna said? Hm. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 16:56
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Cessna posted:No, like I said, it was doctrine. Yeah, sorry, I just noticed. Was this docterine thing because of the Ju 52 being small, or was their doctrine always about dropping into defended airspace to take strong points? For that matter, were Allied Paratroopers looked at differently (kinda like Air Dragoons - you get em into combat via plane) or did they believe that paradrop surprises just worked better dropping next to defended airspace?
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Dec 15, 2020 17:03
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BalloonFish posted:This bit reminded me of something I read recently: While I have not read this specific story, I totally believe it. I've read that the Luftwaffe was raiding aircraft in training (in this case, Ju 52 fuselages) and reassigning them to transport during the invasion of Poland.
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Dec 16, 2020 20:53
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Drachinifel has an new video that is pretty interesting, on what sank the HMS Hood. I'd always known it was a lucky (or unlucky) shot that destroyed her, and by Drachinifel's account it was that, but I didn't realize how lucky it was.
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Dec 19, 2020 |
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Dec 19, 2020 23:16
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Biographical note from "Rockets and People": quote:19. Iosif Samuilovich Shklovskiy (1916–85), head of the radio-astronomy department at the Shternberg Astronomical Institute, was one of the most prominent Soviet astronomers of the 20th century. His memoirs were published posthumously in English as Five Billion Vodka Bottles on the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991)
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Dec 21, 2020 21:32
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Later adapted into the Bill Murray comedy "Stripes"
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Dec 28, 2020 22:07
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HEY GUNS posted:It is ubiquitous but despised--to the point where I have been told by more than one person to use euphemisms to describe what I do. I woud probably agree with your last sentence there. That's messed up.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:09
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Fearless posted:Yeah but we didn't do it this time hush, "a noble spirit enbiggens the smallest man"
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Dec 30, 2020 01:36
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So I'm trying to finish a post I started a long time ago. Did you know the V-2 had a third variant to its guidance system? So the Lorentz company did something fairly amazing in the early 1930s: it developed a blind landing system. Since radar was not a thing, how it worked was two guidance beams would be broadcast on either side of the runway. The landing aircraft has a radio set receiving both signals. When out of alignment it'd produce noise, but when in the approach path, the two signals would create a continuous tone. So a system very similar to this was built to improve V-2 guidance. Two signals broadcast into the sky, a reciever on the V-2 to steer the missile into the continuious signal. This control signal also seems to have been wired into the first guidance system, initially used in tests, of measuing rocket speed by radar Doppler shift, and sending the cutoff signal when the time was right. In order to achieve an accuracy of 250m CEP at a distance of 250 km, "the speed at burn stop had to be 0.5% exact." So this accuracy assist system appears to be completely done, ready for production in the end of 1943. But fortunately it took an entire year for the equipment to be manufactured and issued to Missile units. Another cool thing I found: this site has an example of a high speed low altitude photo run by a Mosquito.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:26
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Neophyte posted:Why not just make tiltrotor C-5s? Ah, yes sir, we did consider that! Executive summary Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 01:12
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Tulip posted:The PRC is extremely paranoid about geographic data, to the extent that official maps of the PRC are straightforwardly wrong, and possessing maps or other geographic data without the right approvals carries hefty fines (that are actually pursued). Restricting civilian flight lanes feels like a reasonable extension/enforcement of that law (regardless of how you feel about the law itself). WTF, why? It's not like anybody who's an actual threat to the nation of China can't get that info anyway.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:Here's a list of the currently active units that trace back to the Revolution. They're almost all National Guard due to militias. The 101st Airborne is a weird example of this, since their screaming eagle symbol dates back to units in the civil war, but the rest of the unit does not: quote:The 101st Division headquarters was organized 2 November 1918 at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, having been constituted on 23 July in the National Army. World War I ended 9 days later, and was demobilized on 11 December 1918.[6] It was reconstituted as an airborne division the next day.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:15
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Ensign Expendable posted:T-34 was basically World of Tanks: The Movie. I still haven't seen it, maybe I can do a video series on awful Russian war movies. This sounds great, just post
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Jan 22, 2021 19:17
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This looks like a book that would be my jam, as well as a few other people's ITT https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/hitler-conspiracies-antarctica/
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Jan 24, 2021 16:42
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1354096176778387456 Haha, wow. I assume everybody there would have been super embarrassed to have the president witness a nuke test a couple ordered of magnitude bigger than planned.
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Jan 26, 2021 23:23
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feedmegin posted:2.5 times is 2 orders of magnitude? I am  incarnate at my incorrect use of the term orders of magnitudezoux posted:Assuming time machines or massive geopolitical shifts: would you guys go to a nuclear test shot if you could? Absolutely.
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Jan 27, 2021 02:18
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https://twitter.com/nelianne90/status/1353779360289992705 I'm pretty sure this is not from the recent riots in the Netherlands Also, Mike Duncan is back with the revolutions podcast, so he can complete his final chapter on the Russian revolution. So, you know how the founder of a nation is usually idolized (both for the obvious reason and because they did great things, and had they been less brilliant the nation likely wouldn't have been founded?) Well I'm starting to think there's an opposite trend in revolutions: where if a big revolution happens a part of it is some King who had they been less oblivious and dumb it never would have happened? Exibit A: Czar Nicholas II After the 1905 revolution uprising after murdering lots of people an actual Duma has been established. Naturally there was an upper house filled with aristocrats, and a lower house filled with *electeds*. So the Czar addresses his aristocrats exclusively in a short speech to the Duma. He wanted 'unity' and 'mutual understanding' in the face of the almost-revolution. So the commons decided to write a note responding to the Czar's short address. They did attempt to draw a distinction between power the duma had, and mere requests to the Czar, they did want stuff, like the dissolution of the posh clubhouse of the house of lords, which the Czar put together only after he resoundingly lost the election, amnesty for political prisoners, land reform, actual governmental oversight, etc. The Czar refused the note, insisting that the plebs hand it to his prime minister. Then the PM gave a long speech to the duma, where he rejected all of this "doing stuff" talk, and just so they got the message, made it explicit that the Duma's ideas had not been considered and rejected, the PM had just rejected them because who the gently caress do you think you are peasants, and Poles, and Jews The Duma did about the only thing they could: loudly denounce all of this to the continuous applause of their fellow Duma-ists. They then drafted a statement saying that the government had lost the confidence of the Duma, and that the PM and all the ministers should resign, so that others more reliable could be appointed. The response from the Czar was to completely ignore the Duma and instruct everybody in the government to ignore the Duma, and if they did need to communicate, send underlings instead of themselves. They also cranked their fake news apparatus up The funny thing here is that all this was actually making the aristocrat clubhouse worried. The whole idea behind the Duma was to maybe solve a few problems so that another almost-revolution didn't happen.
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Jan 29, 2021 00:48
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:You've set an impossible bar, I challenge you to name any temporal government that hasn't done anything evil. Castro and Tito? Lee Kuan Yew
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Jan 29, 2021 16:26
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Gaius Marius posted:Being published doesn't mean poo poo. Which as we've seen here is absolutely true and thus a little weird that Duncan is being criticized for not having credentials. ChubbyChecker posted:wrt. duncan, he isn't a historian, he's just a guy with a microphone and internet connection So what you're saying here is...the czar was unfairly treated by duncan in that episode? 
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Jan 29, 2021 16:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:All this talk about blast radii reminds me of this: gently caress. You'd have to be in a high earth orbit to even be able to perceive it as an event
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Jan 31, 2021 02:27
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While propaganda broadcasts in the Third Reich usually didn't talk about defeats at all, I think the fall of Stalingrad got a dignified announcement saying there was a big defeat. They didn't talk about *why* it had happened, but it was too big a catastrophe to treat any other way. Actually, here's a question about propaganda the Third Reich and conquored regions: I know radio broadcasts from the BBC were covertly listened to. How factual were they? If I were in change of programming the German/French BBC broadcast, I'd keep it as factual as practical to counter Nazi propaganda to build credibility.
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Feb 3, 2021 01:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:While that's not wrong, I wonder if a more competent Fuhrer would have never gotten to where the Germans were in the Winter of '41 just because he'd have been smart enough to not, you know, invade all his neighbors at once and never gotten the string of lucky wins that let Hitler look like a military genius for two years. Yeah, I feel like "risk-assessing Hitler" doesn't get as far, because he'd give up the idea of becoming a dictator in another country as farfetched
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Feb 3, 2021 22:03
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I love German Wikipedia:quote:A lorry ( truck , truck ), short truck or lorry , in Switzerland also Camion , [1] commonly known vices or truck , is the commercial vehicles belonging vehicle with which goods are transported. A truck can also be operated with a trailer; this combination is called a truck , the truck in this combination is called a motor vehicle . If the tractor is short and the Trailer is placed on it , the trailer combination is called .
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Feb 4, 2021 02:57
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Tias posted:Pionier-Bataillon 233 (divisional pioneer unit) Should I be inferring something about these units from where they are attached? I'm fuzzy on German army organization.
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Feb 6, 2021 14:06
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Cessna posted:Yes and no. We know a lot, but there's a lot we don't know. I had a History prof use the analogy of "trying to study the US Army in the 70s through Beetle Bailey cartoons." The joke will be on us once in a thousand years time a major document for understanding the last decade of the cold war will be the movie "Stripes" And then the belief of the Anti-Tank RV will become the new morning star (IE the spiky ball on a chain)
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Feb 10, 2021 21:14
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wiegieman posted:There's literally no end to it, god drat. Just one horrible loving atrocity after another. From what I've read, when it comes to Nazis and slave factories, the Nazis always had two goals. The first was to kill lots of untermenchen, and the second was to use untermenchen slave labor, and while they may or may not succeeded with the second, they always succeeded with the first. I saw Schindler's List for the first time last year, and I thought they did a good job with that SS commander in portraying what an actual SS dude would have as motives. His main job as he sees it is to kill all the untermenchen, and the use of their labor is just a lark for awhile, and no matter how many he murders, he can't get out from under this feeling that the job is still nowhere near done...
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Feb 17, 2021 01:56
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