Ask me about Military History!

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pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Ensign Expendable posted:

Alpha was better during Soviet times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm-333

Read a linked detailed description of this and wow, it sounds like a real life 80ies action movie.

quote:

As planned, Sakhatov�s group moved out fifteen minutes prior to the beginning of the assault. As they drove through the Afghan 3rd Battalion area, they saw that the battalion was on alert. The battalion commander and deputies were standing in the center of the parade ground while weapons and ammunition were being issued to the battalion personnel. Quickly estimating the situation, Sakhatov decided to capture the command group of the 3rd Infantry Battalion. Moving at top speed, the truck full of Spetsnaz suddenly braked by the Afghan officers and within a few seconds, the officers were lying on the floor of the truck. The GAZ-66 jumped forward leaving a cloud of dust behind. During the first few minutes, the soldiers of the battalion did not understand what had happened, but then they opened fire on the fleeing vehicle. It was too late. The dust cloud hid the vehicle and the firing was ineffective. Sakhatov drove two hundred meters and then, reaching advantageous terrain, stopped the vehicle and unloaded his personnel. The Spetsnaz immediately lay down and opened fire on the pursuing 3rd Battalion soldiers. The leaderless Afghans bunched up presenting a fine target. The two machine guns and eight assault rifles of Sakhatov�s group killed over two hundred personnel.

quote:

Fratricide was also a problem. In the assault on the Tadzh-Bek palace, personnel from the Muslim battalion and the KGB Spetsnaz identified one another by the white armbands on their sleeves, the challenge and password �Misha�Yasha,� and Russian cursing.

For some reason this sounds really funny yet unsurprising :v:

- "Misha!"
- "Yasha! And gently caress your mother, too!"

# ¿ Aug 6, 2010 11:36

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:26

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Speaking of early firearms, why wouldn't have they been used to fire small diameter shot (like a modern smoothbore shotgun) instead of ball ammunition? The early arquebus was basically a huge fuckoff shotgun, so loading that thing with heavy buckshot woulda been awesome even at range. Or not?

# ¿ Oct 21, 2010 15:18

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Puukko naamassa posted:

I love how, among other things, the US Army published a comic book for the soldiers to battle this problem.

"Treat your rifle like a lady."

Art by Will Eisner.

Wow, this "lady" really looks like a bitch. Compare this to the disassembly of an AK-47 style weapon - for which no tools are needed:

# ¿ Dec 14, 2010 16:24

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

I was reading some folk stories about Soviet military aviation the other day, which seemed pretty interesting. Dunno if it's entirely truthful, but..

They say aircraft maintenance was one of the most prestigious specialties in the Soviet Air Force, as the technicians access to the most useful and convertible currency in the USSR - pure, technical alcohol. It was used in all sorts of cooling and defrosting(?) systems, and obviously most of it was amortized to "natural causes". The access to technical alcohol meant that everybody in the VVS, from privates to generals spent all of their free time drunk as gently caress and indeed sobriety off duty was seen as a clear evidence of such a man being a Western spy. :commissar:

Some over-eager base commander didn't take kindly to such prevalent drunkenness and required some gasoline added to the technical alcohol to turn it unusable for drinking, yet have it usable for its intended purposes. Three things happened: firstly, massive, five-fold savings on alcohol usage per hour of flight. Secondly, a massive reduction in fighting capability as the demoralized and now income-less ground crews couldn't give a poo poo about proper maintainance of the planes, and pilots lost the incentive for more training flights. Thirdly, the commander received a swift kick in the rear end and was transferred to Shithole, Siberia by the general staff inspecting his unit and having lovely, gasoline-laced alcohol served to them. :v:

The popularity of planes was said to be directly dependent on their alcohol usage. For example the Il-76 was revered by the ground crews and pilots alike for requiring some 70 liters of alcohol on take-off. The godliest among planes, however, was the then latest and greatest Mach 3 ~~interceptor~~ alcohol tanker Mig-25, whose big gently caress-off radar and other systems required some 250 liters of spirits on board. When some worried generals criticized the plane for presenting such a temptation, the head designer Artem Mikoyan (well aware of the effect) was said to have said "the plane will fly on Armenian brandy if the Motherland demands it".

# ¿ Jan 4, 2011 10:12

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

DarkCrawler posted:

Kind of interested in this since I don't know much about tanks - is M1 Abrams considered to be the best tank currently in service right now?

(and a joke question, how many WWII tanks it would take to beat one?)

Dunno about tanks, but a WWII Stuka would still pancake it with the 250kg bomb in its standard layout. Indeed a 50kg bomb would probably do the trick.

For what it's worth, early in WWII the Germans with their early Panzer IIs and IIIs facing Soviet KV-1 heavy tanks were put in a very similar situation. In one particular battle just 2 KV-1s killed 43 German tanks and lived to tell the tale, despite sustaining 135 hits in return.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2011 13:40

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Nenonen posted:

Yes, just like shot down pilots or retreating infantrymen are until they surrender themselves to their enemy. The enemy also doesn't have to be armed, and you can shoot them in the back - war is not very gentlemanly.

I'm pretty sure shooting bailed out pilots before they hit the ground is quite ungentlemanly. While they're still floating down they cannot surrender, or participate in combat in any meaningful way, so shooting them in that position is very rude. I believe there is a relevant convention about it, but perhaps someone would clarify.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2011 00:55

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

The morale of Soviets fighting the Allies would have also been far worse compared to the existential threat of Nazis whose goal was to literally wipe them out. Every Soviet conscript from the Baltic states would have definitely switched sides given a choice, the same would have probably gone for most Ukrainians, Poles and most other countries from under the Soviet rule, and quite a few Russians weren't so fond of Stalin either, given a better alternative than the Nazis.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2011 13:20

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

DarkCrawler posted:

Oh yeah, the course of the campaign at first was pretty retarded:

"We need to force Hannibal into a decisive battle"

*Battle of Trebbia, Hannibal kills 30,000 Romans*

Thought it was pretty cool that after being outmaneuvered and out-strategized into an encirclement, the Roman veteran troops :clint:

in the middle of it all didn't panic and run, but stood their ground, formed their "empty square" formation and were able to break out in an orderly fashion, saving 10,000 men from what could have been a total annihilation.

The next battles didn't go nearly as well though, at Lake Trasimene and Cannae the Romans got flat out owned.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2011 00:34

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Nenonen posted:

There were a multitude of solutions, but they normally involved a good deal of calculations, drawings on a millimeter grid, correction charts for wind, temperature, air pressure etc. But still much depended on manual calculations. There were also rules of thumb: eg. "a 10� change of temperature from +15�C changes range by 5%".

One effective solution to the problems before computers was the Finnish Correction Converter (1943), a piece of plywood with an opaque plastic disc on it. With it the Forward Observer didn't have to know the relative difference in heading of himself and the battery to do corrections. The converter did this in a turn of hand, enabling the FO to easily control the fire of several separate artillery battalions at once.

I love such applications of analog computing. Rangefinders on early combat ships, stuff like that.

Particularly like the principles behind the Sidewinder missile. Designing a heat-seeking missile isn't hard, you could probably make one with Legos these days... but not so much in the era where computers were measured in the roomfuls. So the engineers of the day just used a couple of spinning mirrors.

quote:

Early development

The development of the Sidewinder missile began in 1946 at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS), Inyokern, California, now the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California as an in-house research project conceived by William B. McLean. McLean initially called his effort "Local Fuze Project 602" using laboratory funding, volunteer help and fuze funding to develop what it called a heat-homing rocket. It did not receive official funding until 1951 when the effort was mature enough to show to Admiral William "Deak" Parsons, the Deputy Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). It subsequently received designation as a program in 1952. The Sidewinder introduced several new technologies that made it simpler and much more reliable than its United States Air Force (USAF) counterpart, the AIM-4 Falcon, under development during the same period. After disappointing experiences with the Falcon in the Vietnam War, the Air Force replaced its Falcons with Sidewinders.
Geometric arrangement of mirror, IR detector and target.
An AIM-9B hitting an F6F-5K drone at China Lake, 1957.

The Sidewinder incorporated a number of innovations over the independently developed World War II German Missile Enzian's "Madrid" IR range fuze that enabled it to be successful.[citation needed] The first innovation was to replace the "steering" mirror with a forward-facing mirror rotating around a shaft pointed out the front of the missile. The detector was mounted in front of the mirror. When the long axis of the mirror, the missile axis and the line of sight to the target all fell in the same plane, the reflected rays from the target reached the detector (provided the target was not very far off axis). Therefore, the angle of the mirror at the instant of detection estimated the direction of the target in the roll axis of the missile.

The yaw/pitch direction of the target depended on how far to the outer edge of the mirror the target was. If the target was further off axis, the rays reaching the detector would be reflected from the outer edge of the mirror. If the target was closer on axis, the rays would be reflected from closer to the centre of the mirror. Rotating on a fixed shaft, the mirror's linear speed was higher at the outer edge. Therefore if a target was further off-axis its "flash" in the detector occurred for a briefer time, or longer if it was closer to the center. The off-axis angle could then be estimated by the duration of the reflected pulse of infrared.

The Sidewinder also included a dramatically improved guidance algorithm. The Enzian attempted to fly directly at its target, feeding the direction of the telescope into the control system as it if were a joystick. This meant the missile always flew directly at its target, and under most conditions would end up behind it, "chasing" it down. This meant that the missile had to have enough of a speed advantage over its target that it did not run out of fuel during the interception.

The Sidewinder is not guided on the actual position recorded by the detector, but on the change in position since the last sighting. So if the target remained at 5 degrees left between two rotations of the mirror, the electronics would not output any signal to the control system. Consider a missile fired at right angles to its target; if the missile is flying at the same speed as the target it should "lead" it by 45 degrees, flying to an impact point far in front of where the target was when it was fired. If the missile is traveling four times the speed of the target, it should follow an angle about 11 degrees in front. In either case, the missile should keep that angle all the way to interception, which means that the angle that the target makes against the detector is constant. It was this constant angle that the Sidewinder attempted to maintain. This "proportional pursuit" system is very easy to implement, yet it offers high-performance lead calculation almost for free and can respond to changes in the target's flight path,[4] which is much more efficient and makes the missile "lead" the target.

However this system also requires the missile to have a fixed roll axis orientation. If the missile spins at all, the timing based on the speed of rotation of the mirror is no longer accurate. Correcting for this spin would normally require some sort of sensor to tell which way is "down" and then adding controls to correct it. Instead, small control surfaces were placed at the rear of the missile with spinning disks on their outer surface; these are known as rollerons. Airflow over the disk spins them to a high speed. If the missile starts to roll, the gyroscopic force of the disk drives the control surface into the airflow, cancelling the motion. Thus the Sidewinder team replaced a potentially complex control system with a simple mechanical solution.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2011 00:42

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

EvanSchenck posted:

This is just a semantic argument over the meaning of the words "lost" or "destroyed" as it pertains to tanks. If you understand "destroyed" to include tanks that have been knocked out and damaged to the point that they must be completely rebuilt from the hull up, sure, a fair number of Abrams have been destroyed. I believe the US army doesn't record tanks as destroyed if they can be repaired and returned to service, hence the claims that none have been destroyed. The actual hull of the Abrams is exceedingly resistant to damage, but replaceable components like the engine, electronics, gun, turret, etc. are much less so.

Are you making GBS threads us? LOOK at the picture. That tank is destroyed. Any vehicle in that state would not be "rebuilt", even if it was a Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa.

Sorry, but the Abrams is not protected by magic, it's still a 60 ton box of metal that's limited by the same physics and materials as everything else in the world of mortals. It's better protected than the run of the mill T-72, but the difference is hardly as large as the hype may have led to believe.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2011 10:47

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Veins McGee posted:

I forgot the exact max effective range for an RPG-7 but it's inside of 200Ms. This is the range as tested by the US military. Something like 25% of aimed RPG shots miss from that range and the number improves to like 75% inside of 50Ms. It is pretty loving lucky that an Iraqi RPG team managed to get within 100Ms of an entire column of vehicles equipped with high quality thermal optics.

Don't underestimate the accuracy of RPG-7. The fact that it's cheap as poo poo means that experienced users can rack up a ton of experience shooting them. Using them as makeshift anti-air weapon against helicopters and all. The tactic used by Chechen guerillas was to shoot a number of RPG-7s all in the same spot on a Russian tank; while a single RPG-7 would hardly do any damage to a MBT, then receiving as many as seven repeat hits in the same spot did serious damage.

pigdog fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Dec 23, 2011

# ¿ Dec 23, 2011 23:20

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

wdarkk posted:

Define "widespread". Because I'm sure there's some terrible soviet biplane they made a thousand+ of. Probably more than one.

One of them was perhaps the 1928 Po-2 cloth and plywood crop duster biplane, which the Soviets made good use of in the war as, well, the precursor of the modern stealth bomber. Being a biplane it had excellent agility, it could be flown only meters from the ground, its cloth and plywood construction meant that bullets and cannon shells often went right through it without doing much damage, and with its maximum speed being lower than the stall speed of any German fighter it was really hard to shoot down. Since it had a good glide ratio, the engines could be shut off on approach to target, so there would be no engine noise to give it away. The Soviets put female pilots on them, and they kinda kicked rear end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches

# ¿ Dec 26, 2011 16:19

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

I believe part of the reason why the Mongols were so successful was that they were much more self-sufficient than their opponents. The average Mongol warrior had both the means and skills to hunt, as well as having horse meat and milk available for sustenance.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2012 00:44

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Ensign Expendable posted:

Yeah, the Germans hated partisans to the point where they would burn down entire villages that were suspected of collaboration. This kind of worked against them, since all it did was create more Russians with nothing to lose out for revenge.

Eh, the Soviets themselves would burn down entire villages as a scorched earth policy in order to deny the Germans food and shelter. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, one of the revered martyrs of the Soviet era, was a partisan who was handed over to the Germans by the local peasants themselves, as she intended to burn down their households to deny them for the Germans.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2012 11:19

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Bagheera posted:

And yet Tito took over Yugoslavia, stood firmly against Stalin, and never joined the Warsaw Pact. He sent personal letters to Stalin (not just diplomatic cables, personal man-to-man letters) calling Stalin a tyrant and wanring him never to set foot in Yugoslavia. If all Stalin cared about was "spheres of influence", he would have thrown all of his military might into conquering Yugoslavia and put Tito up against the wall.

Stalin did want Tito dead, which resulted in a letter that, especially considering whom it addressed to, must be one of the most badass things ever written in the history of Man.

Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second. �Josip Broz Tito
:black101:

# ¿ Apr 20, 2012 16:18

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Trouble Man posted:

The Commissar Order was flagrantly illegal and was being circulated among the General Staff well before the commencement of Barbarossa. The general staff knew drat well what they were signing up to do.

It was written just two weeks before Barbarossa, and cancelled a year later - when it turned out that it prevented Russian troops from surrendering and made them fight harder instead.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2012 13:41

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Throatwarbler posted:

There is a number of rounds one could fire at a fast enough speed that will heat up the barrel enough to cause permanent damage, but it's much higher than 30. It's not usually a problem for rifles but it is a serious problem for belt fed machine guns. The Maxim guns talked about a few posts above had a water cooling jacket around the barrel for this reason, and modern machine guns like the FN Minimi and MAG are issued with multiple quick changeable barrels that can go for around 400 rounds before getting too hot.

Is it really permanent barrel damage that's the concern, rather than ammo cookoff?

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 10:22

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Nenonen posted:

It would take a lot for a rifle's ammo to start cooking off. Before that you'd run to some other issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNAohtjG14c

That's pretty good advertisement for the AK, as if it needed any.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 17:50

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Kemper Boyd posted:

Battle rifles might still be seeing some specialized use, but kind of like SMG's, they're an evolutionary dead end gunwise.

Aren't they making a comeback though, with 5.56 mm being not quite effective enough against modern body armor?

# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 00:55

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Nenonen posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9y1foVaIkA
Don't laugh, they have nukes.

Nukes or not, I laughed.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2013 15:27

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tz_von_Berlichingen

# ¿ May 14, 2013 14:36

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:26

pigdog: Apr 23, 2004; by Smythe

Siege of Wesenberg from my country's history comes to mind. Swedish/German/local/Scottish mercenary force was sieging a castle under Russian control.

The siege went on for some while, the attackers got bored, drank a lot to kill time, and a drunken brawl at a tavern escalated into a full-scale battle between the Scottish mercenaries and German cavalry, with over 1500 dead. Ending up breaking the siege, and halting the campaign, with no effort from the defenders' part. :downs:

pigdog fucked around with this message at 09:57 on May 16, 2013

# ¿ May 16, 2013 09:55

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