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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's a number of issues with battleships, but the short answer is that pretty much everything they can do, aircraft carriers can do better. They're really expensive for what utility they provide: it takes a lot of fuel to move a 50kton ship, and a lot of people to man it. In exchange you get guns that can shoot over the horizon but not a whole lot beyond that. They can really pummel that area, sure, but to get into range to do that, you pretty much need air superiority, because otherwise enemy bombers will mission-kill you by wrecking your unarmored superstructure. Your engines, gun magazines, etc. may be OK but you won't be able to do any damage until you get extensive repairs. But if you have control of the skies, why not just send your planes in to do the job instead? Planes give your weapons ranges of hundreds of miles, and if one plane gets shot down it's no big deal compared to losing a battleship. I agree with all this but I want to add that many BB-lovers seem excited about the armor. Modern ships aren't armored, and people look at the old BB designs and think that armor must somehow mean they're tougher than modern ships. That might be true if the threat was enemy BB guns. The modern threats are missiles, torpedoes, and mines. It's impossible to armor a ship against torpedoes and mines and nearly impossible to armor one against missiles. Modern defenses are about active protection (shooting down the threat before it hits) and mitigation (localize damage to the compartments near the impact, keep the ship afloat).
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Dec 7, 2020 05:13
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Taerkar posted: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. An attacker can also scale missiles much more readily. If the US committed the resources, I'm sure we could eventually come up with some insane ship where the hull and deck are a composite armor monocoque, impenetrable to any extent weapon. It would take at least ten years just to create the infrastructure to build that hull. How long would it take our strategic competitors to build an ASM that would penetrate? The ship would be obsolete before it was launched.
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Dec 7, 2020 07:17
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In frigate chat, nobody's mentioned Humphreys' diagonal bracing system, which made the US frigates far less vulnerable to hogging than other designs of the time. I always thought that was a big deal, but this is far from my strongest subject.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:09
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Did Greyhound even released in theaters before covid shut it all down? I don't think you can measure anything by it. And Midway just sucked.
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Dec 23, 2020 02:11
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I've started read BH Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War the past few nights. It's fine so far, but what's his reputation as a historian vs. strategist? Wikipedia says he was a 'clean wehrmacht' kind of guy. He also quotes from Churchill's 'The Second World War alot too-I presume that's worth reading as well? They both have a breezy, decidedly not academic tone that's sort of refreshing after slogging through a book about the HRE. I think Churchill's The Second World War is worth reading but you have to bear in mind that it's a guy who was head of Edit: The first book, The Gathering Storm is my favorite because I'm such a weak student of non-military history. I loved Massie's Dreadnought, and he paints a picture of David Lloyd George as this firebrand who was dragging the Empire into the future. Churchill starts his writing in the 20s and talks about him as a tired old man who had lost most of his mojo. Without ever saying so, it paints a portrait of what WWI did to the people who tried to lead the Empire through it. I don't know if Churchill was prefiguring his own post-war experience or just expressing his personal disappointment, but either way, it hit home with me. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 20:23
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PeterCat posted:What are people's thoughts on the Time Life WWII series? For me it's more nostalgia and I'm sure it's just the popular version of the war in the mid 70s,vut I'm still tempted to get a set. They're pop history but the pictures are real pretty.
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Dec 25, 2020 01:36
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I got curious and tried to find more about nuclear blasts in atmosphere wasting their energy into space and I got nothing in from any source that seemed authoritative. I see it in Wiki/Wikia pages but that's about it. From the perspective of this search engine user, it seems like an idea that got out there and was accepted as fact without ever getting a proper attribution. The rule about the blast radius varying with the cube root of yield explains everything about the move to smaller weapons. If you double the accuracy of the delivery system, you can make the weapon one-eighth the size. That's more than enough reason to look toward small weapons, as long as your delivery system is better than minute-of-nation.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:24
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Libluini posted:If you saw it somewhere in Wiki-pages, could you link it? I'm curious to see what they used as sources, as my own search attempts came up empty It was https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba. quote:Much of its high-yield destructiveness was inefficiently radiated upwards into space.
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Feb 4, 2021 04:14
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The gently caress does this have to do with anything in relation to World War Two? I read it as XD wanting not to be read as agreeing with the strong gendering of machinist work, while agreeing that it makes sense given the historical realities.
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Feb 16, 2021 04:15
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The Lone Badger posted:Were u-boat crews given any special privilieges to make up for their tours, or was it just universal suckitude? I remember reading about how they lived like kinds in France in between cruises. In 1941 that must have sounded like a great deal, but in 1944, not so much.
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Feb 19, 2021 13:48
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Mattis only gets a little screen time. Whether it's flattering or not depends mostly on your opinions of the larger situation. I never served, I love Generation Kill, I believe it's figuratively accurate, I believe that some of those people said some of those things, but I'd be appalled if every little thing shown happened as depicted.
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Mar 22, 2021 04:28
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The idea that a Marine isn't happy without something to bitch about may be stupid but it's definitely widespread.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:15
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The Lone Badger posted:(My understanding is that cratering has never been very effective because of how quickly a runway can be patched, but I could easily be wrong) If you don't hear an idea like that and think, "what if we use a bigger bomb and make the crater bigger?" then you don't get WWII bombing planners.
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Apr 9, 2021 04:31
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Cessna posted:Yeah, sorry. I deal with this sort of thing all day long at work, so I sorta spiraled into pedantry there. These are my favorite sorts of posts.
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May 5, 2021 16:18
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Alchenar posted:Had France not collapsed in 1940 then it feels intuitively likely that a strategic bombing campaign based from England ends up looking a lot more decisive. Hrm. It would have meant the Luftwaffe was also trying to bomb France. France's weaker aircraft industry would struggle to produce interceptors as fast as needed. They'd want the British to help out. That would have put some interesting strains on the alliance, since I think the Luftwaffe could still attack Britain (though not as easily) without control of France. I also doubt that bombing could be decisive without atomic weapons, but it would certainly have been more destructive.
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May 24, 2021 19:59
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Gnoman posted:Even with France out of the war, there were large regions of Britain that were effectively immune to the Luftwaffe. Using only German bases and having to fly through areas covered by interceptors based in France to even approach the target? I really don't see that working out very well. I was imagining the Germans staging out of Belgium or the Netherlands. You're probably right though. If they had the range to hit England at all, it'd be a small portion of it, and hence easier to defend. My concerns appear ill-founded.
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May 24, 2021 23:55
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A few minutes of familiarization would be a lot nicer than figuring out how to load a Mauser from stripper clips under fire.
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Jun 2, 2021 01:08
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Phanatic posted:I've wondered this a lot and I've never found the answer to it: If they do, an under-keep detonation from such a small warhead might still be eminently survivable for a large target. On the other hand, if it had a mode for going after props and rudders, a surface target that ate a couple of those would be a mission kill for sure.
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Jun 3, 2021 20:55
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Phanatic posted:It’s also hardly classified that various SAMs have a surface-attack mode. I didn't want to make a meal of it but that's an issue where I thought the Quora Yamato insanity got into chaotic territory. I don't think one SAM in pop-up surface attack mode is going to maul Yamato badly. Having every SAM-equipped ship in a carrier battle group going into panic mode and firing them as fast as they can at one mile range seems like a different story. I don't think they'd actually penetrate the deck armor by themselves, but by the time she's eaten 50+ hits, everything above the citadel that can burn will be burning. If fires reach ready ammo, things could get exciting. If fires get through turret protections into a secondary or AA magazine, life on board could get downright sporty.
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Jun 4, 2021 15:48
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Dumbass Yamato chat continued because I'm honestly curious - at close range, am I right in thinking that whether a Standard managed to arm and detonate, the target would be getting spattered with an assload of burning solid rocket propellant? That's the part I'm really struggling to wrap my head around. Superbattleship takes no damage from explosives, but now it's liberally sprinkled with something not far short of thermite. What even happens? This part of the scenario interests me a lot more than the "durr Carl Vinson is helpless against battleship guns" crap. Edit: I hope the minimum engagement distance for Standard isn't public at all, but even if it is and it's too short for the Quora scenario, I'm taking the missiles anyway. Yamato gets a time/space rift, USA gets a tweaked missile guidance algorithm. Re: what can Yamato do without her superstructure? Well, the turrets have their own rangefinders. They can't match what's in the superstructure but they'll probably good to at least 10k yards. Odds are smoke will interfere with line of sight before the horizon does. Figure the battleship can probably get a couple more salvos off under local control before the smoke or smoke screen ruins their fun. (Unless the answer to my question above turns out to be real interesting.) As the range grows, the ship might also be able to generate misses, since time of flight grows, and the individual turrets don't have directors that can integrate predicted target motion, much less unpredictable target motion.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:53
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I'd be real surprised if a CVN didn't activate an AP fuse. They don't have belts but they're heavily built ships, because the designers knew they might be eating supersonic ASMs, and built them with multiple layers of passive defenses.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:13
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Dive bombers are murder against unarmored aircraft carriers, but consider that after the USN got total air superiority at Midway, they threw every SBD they could at the retreating Japanese, and managed to sink a single heavy cruiser and beat up another. In that era, if you want to sink surface ships that aren't strongly biased toward bursting into flame, you need torpedoes. If you can get air superiority, it seems like the optimal attack pattern was to use dive bombers to suppress flak, then send in the torpedo bombers. If you don't have air superiority, you're kind of screwed anyway, which is why the Japanese had to go to suicide tactics.
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Jun 5, 2021 22:29
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I love late war US design. More is better! More size, more dakka, more planes, just... More.
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Jun 5, 2021 23:18
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aphid_licker posted:Unless you're unlucky enough to be in a navy that is stuck with a fuckin Harpoon as their primary ASM I know the Harpoon is lighter than a lot of foreign weapons, but wasn't there a sinkex where one Harpoon put like a 30ft hole all the way through a Perry?
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Jun 6, 2021 01:58
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I can't see either why you couldn't or why you would.
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Jun 6, 2021 02:01
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US bomber doctrine was to fly in tight formation for mutual defense. I imagine they wouldn't want a rain of expended brass falling through the formation.
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Jun 13, 2021 22:47
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Regarding casualties, one point I don't think anyone made yet is that not all casualties are the same. Getting killed or wounded in some life-altering way absolutely sucks, but a wound that will heal clean means our hypothetical young serviceperson gets a scar that proves their courage and determination once and for all.
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Jun 15, 2021 15:18
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SubG posted:I don't know about building one from scratch, but if you found an M4 up on blocks tucked away in a barn somewhere you could get all the information you'd need to get it running again out of the technical manuals, which are in the public domain. They've got exploded/cutaway diagrams of just about literally everything. But they're all going to be period data, and so won't contain essential modern information like how to do an LS swap. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Jun 20, 2021 |
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Jun 20, 2021 15:29
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The problem with anyone allying with the Soviets to protect eastern Europe from German aggression in 1938 is that the Soviets have to put troops in those countries to fight the Germans. I don't think anyone had any illusions about how much freedom they'd have once there was a Soviet army operating on their territory. Knowing what we know now, a sufficiently cold-blooded leader might decide it's better to be occupied by the USSR than by Nazi Germany, but in '38, I think it was a lot less clear.
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Aug 5, 2021 22:44
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kill me now posted:I think Tom Sizemore and Paul Giamatti as Sargents are more egregious then Hanks as a Captain in SPR. Not because of their actual age, just the fact that they look so old and broken trying to move around. IIRC Giamatti's character explains that he hurt his knees when he landed, which is embarrassing for him, but more plausible than the Army just deploying a sergeant who can barely walk.
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Aug 27, 2021 15:56
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It doesn't count for credit unless it actually puts the weight on your hips, IMO. The transfer of weight makes the real difference.
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Oct 3, 2021 18:54
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Hard disagree here. The French fleet had the capability to threaten British shipping in the Med and an intervention at the right time could have been decisive in favor of the Axis. The Empire, fighting for its survival, could not afford to trust its security to French promises that they would never do that. They had already promised not to sign a separate peace, and look how that worked out.
Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 01:31
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Alchenar posted:e: also those French sailors have families in France which is now largely under German occupation. This is a point which I think needs to be emphasized. The French fleet insists that it will remain in harbor but would scuttle rather than attack the British. If they won't flee or scuttle now, when the entire thing is a surprise and they're under the guns of the RN, why would they scuttle at some arbitrary point in the future when the Nazis might have their families hostage? Hostage-taking would certainly be a typical Nazi move. French intentions are not sufficient surety for the security of the Med. French capabilities had to be neutralized.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:17
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I hadn't stumbled across Churchill's eulogy for Chamberlain until Indie covered it in WWII in Real Time, but it is a dang nice piece of writing. Winston could appear gloriously magnanimous when he wanted to, and knowing that he was writing for effect doesn't diminish its impact for me.
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Nov 3, 2021 17:25
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I just started reading Fuller's Grant and Lee and how the hell did an Englishman writing post-WWI get such a head full of Lost Cause nonsense? My dear chap, talk all you want about mercantile interest vs agricultural, tarrifs vs an exports, and every other drat thing, if you took slavery out of the mix, there's absolutely no reason to think an evolving political and economic balance between these interests wouldn't hold. But hey, he's about to tell me why Lee sucked, so I'm settled in for the long haul.
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Nov 11, 2021 22:06
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BalloonFish posted:There was also a level of "acceptance" rather than support - there were British business interests that didn't particularly want the Confederacy to survive (or even that it could), but were happy to make money off it while it existed. Lots of shipbuilders in Birkenhead and Glasgow became very rich building blockade runners and cruisers for the CSA, often financing the construction of the ships to their owners for a cut of the profits. Glasgow's preeminent status as a world shipbuilding centre in the 19th century was in large part created by its activities during the US Civil War: Glasgow had already become rich as a terminus for trans-Atlantic trade (especially tobacco, while Liverpool majored on cotton imports) and had a significant shipbuilding industry, but it mainly built ocean-going sailing ships (especially clippers) and smaller steamships for coastal trade. It had a particular niche making fast shallow-draught paddle steamers which were used up and down the Clyde estuary, the lochs of western Scotland and for linking the Hebrides. That was why the businessmen of the CSA came to the Clyde shipbuilders when they needed blockade runners - paddle steamers based on Clyde packet boats could go fast enough to outrun the Union blockade and could land in minor ports with shallow waters. A lot of the blockade runners were manned by crews drawn from Glasgow and it made the sailors, owners and builders very wealthy while it brought the quality of Clyde-built steamships to the world's attention. I was broadly aware that the British were making money off the war and also wanted to regain access to cotton exports from the rebel states. I guess I had hoped that by the interwar era, other British folks would be thinking of those days in terms of "hold your nose and get rich shoveling the (moral) poo poo" rather than Fuller's enthusiastic talk of states' rights and use of the word "darkie" in one quote. I guess the Trump era left me a little raw about certain topics.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:56
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feedmegin posted:Or if we are talking about JFC Fuller he was notoriously and controversially a fascist, on the BUF policy committee even.The interwar period is kind of known for racism after all! I remembered him as "that tank guy who couldn't convince anyone in the UK" and had not retained any recollection of his fascism. You got me checking Wikipedia and oh hey look quote:Fuller spent his last years believing that the wrong side had won the Second World War. So, I went into this book with wrong expectations about the author's point of view, but now I get it. Furthermore, what an rear end in a top hat. Worse than Lee, even!
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Nov 12, 2021 22:44
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Alchenar posted:He's a good writer and is very good at presenting human stories from conflict and history, but he's also lazy and casts broad strokes that are wrong. For example he writes about the German soldier being an inherently better fighting man than British or American soldiers in 1944, which is a grossly misleading misstatement of the nature of the armies fighting in Normandy. I am so tired of these generalizations. It's one thing to generalize about equipment, doctrine, training, and so forth, and conclude from there that in a certain context, a typical German soldier had a higher combat value than a typical American soldier. Even then, I want the author to show his work, but there's plausibility there. But "inherent" comes with a fantastic amount of baggage and needs to go in the scrap bin. I am not a researcher but it seems to me that there are plenty of examples of individual soldiers of every skin color, religion, nationality, etc fighting with bravery, discipline, and utmost determination. Where units ended up with negligible fighting value, it's not because the individual soldiers suffered from "inherent" defects, it's because of rot that started at higher levels and worked its way down.
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Nov 15, 2021 21:37
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Movies might have worked better. I don't think you can do a miniseries called _The Pacific_ that doesn't include Guadalcanal, and Sledge wasn't there, so...
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Nov 16, 2021 04:22
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My kid (college graduate, not little kid) was drawn in by the fighter combat scenes in Dunkirk and asked me for reading suggestions. I realized that I have a lot of books that include discussion of the air war but nothing that really focused on the air war from the start of WWII to the end of the Battle of Britain. I'd be happy to have recommendations for the latest and deepest scholarship for my own reading too (for comparison, I loved The First Team), but what I'm really looking for is something for the non-grog but free of myths they might have to unlearn. What's good out there?
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Nov 23, 2021 03:00
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