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Slim Jim Pickens posted:A tank:  Dat shot trap.E: Holy gently caress it's nuclear powered and it floats. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 01:31
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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SeanBeansShako posted:Because it broken down, got stuck in the mud and for some reason somebody built a foundation around it. They were experimenting with concrete armor, but got slightly carried away.
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Aug 2, 2016 03:29
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E: let people who actually know what they're talking about answer.
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Aug 2, 2016 23:12
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And wasn't it established that being able to maintain a high volume of fire was critically important? That volume is what keeps heads down and allows units to maneuver supposedly.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:02
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As a sort of general counterpoint to the running themes in Trin's post, is there anyone particularly knowledgeable about radio usage in WWII? What level of unit has them? Do they effectively solve the problem of almost any advancing unit having zero situational awareness, and the generals having no idea what's happening during an offensive?
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Aug 4, 2016 01:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is massively dependent on what military you are talking about and what time in the war. The US in 1945 has radio operators running around and pretty OK coordination of front line troops with supporting air and artillery. The USSR in 1940 not so much. Yeah, that makes a fair bit of sense. Did Soviet units have much in the way of radios at all? The Germans had built them into all their tanks by the time the war kicked off, correct? Did their infantry have mobile units as well? Speaking of which, is the problem truly solved now? It seems fairly common in film/TV about modern conflicts to show people having trouble with their radios often, but that might be a media thing. Or I guess since E-War is a big deal now, perhaps asking that about the present day will piss off the Opsec demons, but is anyone qualified and allowed to comment on the state of US communications during say, the first Gulf War?
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Aug 4, 2016 03:19
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm always amazed at the billshit about guns some soldiers will spout with an air of absolute confidence. Someone from the forces once told me that a 25mm round from a Bushmaster will kill someone from overpressure or some poo poo on a near miss, which doesn't seem right. Anyone c/d?
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Aug 5, 2016 06:54
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OwlFancier posted:What's the deal with that guy anyway? He's fun when whingeing about minute errors in historical stuff but he seems pretty up his own arse. In most of his history themed videos, he basically looks at pop history stuff, says "that doesn't make much sense, this is how I would do it" and concludes "therefore that's how it was". He also has a bunch of generally reactionary political and social views. My favorite is the one where he concludes class systems are right and good because of Darwinism.
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Aug 6, 2016 06:53
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Grand Fromage posted:Christ you guys post a lot. Do we know much about the logistic support effort that would accompany a unit in the field? Is it supposed to be integral to each legion? I'm thinking that there must have been a large transport group pulling along replacement javelins, extra equipment, heavy artillery, maybe food and trade goods, etc.
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Aug 6, 2016 20:42
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It's a good plane, particularly the F-35A. The real problem with it is that they cost a god damned fortune, in large part because of the ridiculous requirements imposed by the VTOL F-35B variant. That means there's unlikely to ever be enough of them, and if you're not the United States, also a political issue. Ask in the Airpower thread and you'll get more details: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3373768
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Aug 8, 2016 06:05
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bewbies posted:I've also never really understood why people think they want realistic war movies. If a war movie was realistic it would be really really really really boring for the first two and half hours and then the last 15 minutes would be really loud and confusing I just hate watching stuff and being ripped out the moment when I think "wait that poo poo doesn't make any sense". Comedy response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv7ZdWVjY4
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Aug 9, 2016 18:13
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Today I learned that tanks can jump:wiki posted:Cromwell was the fastest British tank to serve in the Second World War, with a top speed of 40 mph (64 km/h). This speed was extremely beneficial in both attack and defence, outmanoeuvring opponents. At least one case is known of vehicle commanders using the vehicles fast speed to jump large gaps - In Holland, a troop of three Cromwell's was able to leap a 20 ft wide canal when surprised by enemy forces.
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Aug 11, 2016 00:08
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 Was there someone in that thing driving it? I can only hope not. mlmp08 posted:You know what else can jump? mlmp08 posted:Nobody died. Jesus, now that's some morbid poo poo. "Nobody Died" should probably be in there with the original post.
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Aug 11, 2016 06:34
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. My granddad was a welder's mate in World War 2 (and manned AA guns in his free time), so it's certainly not like the concept was unknown. Granted, he was building ships not tanks. In general I'd be very surprised if 'union rules' would be an issue for something like that in wartime, both because patriotism on the part of the workers and because the government wouldn't gently caress around with unions disrupting the war effort. Not WW2, but wasn't there a bunch of labour disputes in Britain in '17-'18, in the face of rising costs and frozen wages in the mining and munitions sectors?
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Aug 11, 2016 23:07
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Koesj posted:Bagration Bagration Bagration
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Aug 12, 2016 15:34
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Is there any solid exploration of why the Wehrmacht got bogged down in urban warfare within Stalingrad? Contrary to the case of a star fort, it seems like organizing a major offensive through the city would have been extremely difficult, and that it would have made more sense for the German forces to just ignore what was within the city limits itself. Was it just a case of Hitler wanting to destroy the city that had Stalin's name on it, or was there some real military purpose for the prolonged fighting there?
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Aug 15, 2016 05:24
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spectralent posted:Would the phosphorescent element in a tracer from a machinegun, or the burning element of a smoke shell, possibly do it? Maybe, but it needs to hit the stream of fuel that's already issuing from a broken tank. If a tracer or burning chunk of something penetrates a pressurized fuel tank, it still won't explode, because there's nothing to oxidize the fuel. You need it to get out and mix with the air first.
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Aug 15, 2016 23:46
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HEY GAL posted:But when they get to Prague, every request they make fails. There is no money for the troops, whether or not the Hungarians are heading toward Moravia. ... What exactly does this commission entail? Does he just tell everyone to go home? Is any money found to pay them for disbandment, or do they immediately start plundering everything they can find?
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Aug 17, 2016 20:49
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How destructive is the firing of a 15 inch battleship gun anyway? Like is it dangerous to any crew who might be topside during a firing? Undoubtedly it would be deafeningly loud I guess.SlothfulCobra posted:If Hitler was competent, he wouldn't be fighting Russia in the first place. At least not while he still had a war going on in the west. I love this question though; if Hitler doesn't invade Russia, what the hell is he going to do instead? He has no meaningful way to end the war in the west, so the only other option is to sit on your hands waiting for the economy to collapse. What was the German general staff's opinion of the rapidly reforming Red Army? Were they as concerned about it in '40 as they were in '13?
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Aug 19, 2016 21:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:If WW2 happened 20 years later, would all the belligerents be close enough to the atomic bomb for it to end in a nuclear hellstorm? I'm about half-way through Rhodes' excellent The Making of the Atomic Bomb right now, and as always with these counterfactuals, my answer is maybe. Currently I'm in the winter of '40-'41, and there's some interesting stuff going on. Fission has been discovered (and explained, which took a surprisingly long time) by 1940, and public articles have gone out about it. German, British and American scientists are all actively involved. A Japanese team is aware of the goings on in the physics world and has estimated that they do have access to enough Uranium to build a bomb, assuming it's possible. Soviets aren't really doing much beyond small lab studies. Assuming that the Soviets would have gotten wind immediately, that does suggest they all would have figured it out. But there's loads of stuff happening that's extremely grounded in the political situation of the day (Nazi's are jerks, scientists do not like them); Leo Szilard (who has had secret British patents on matters related to nuclear reactions going back to the damned 30s, inspired by Orson Welles) is trying to convince everyone fission chain reactions are totally going to be a huge deal, that the American government needs to start funding this poo poo pronto, and everyone needs to stop loving publishing about it lest the Germans learn about it and beat them to a bomb. Interestingly enough, a lot of the American powers that be are convinced that all this Uranium talk is a waste of time, and that a bomb will never be possible. This is due to an oversight about neutron absorption in 235U vs 238U, and the fact that most people are convinced isotope separation is a fools errand anyway. Plutonium has only just been created in the last few weeks, so nobody important thinks much about it yet. Conversely the British have basically everything figured out by March of 41. They know a bomb is possible, that they need about 12 pounds of 235U to build a bomb, and they have identified the correct method to sufficiently enrich the Uranium. Currently they're trying to agitate the Americans to build the facility (it'll be big, and presumably they're trying to avoid it being in range of German bombers), but that's getting lost in bureaucratic infighting. The Germans are pursuing their own program, but have made a critical error about the neutron absorption cross section of carbon, meaning that they believe Heavy Water is the only moderator useful for further fission research. A hydroelectric plant in Norway is the only place capable of producing it in any quantity, but the French, aware of its potential, managed to procure all of the existing stocks immediately before the invasion of Norway, and then dumped it all during the Fall of France. I don't know the whole story of the plant, but if memory serves, Brits and Norwegians manage to gently caress with the plant to sufficient degree that it doesn't produce much. If we're talking about a world where Nazi Germany exists, but there's no war, it's very doubtful that they manage to produce or procure enough heavy water for their research. Maybe they correct their estimates about using Carbon as a moderator, but that's anybodies guess. Ultimately all of this is so intertwined with the political realm that no bomb is getting built without wartime funding considerations. If you avoid the war by deleting the Nazis from history somehow (the time travelling Albert Einstein hypothesis), then my guess is the physicists continue their open publishing ways, and the knowledge that a bomb is possible and the requirements for it would be known by '45-'50 or so. But that is still a long rear end way from having a functional bomb; isotope separation and plutonium production (in quantity) are such massive undertakings that I doubt governments would be looking to fund it. Even when you have the core material, actually building a reliable bomb is a whole other task. But we're also talking about a world with a completely unknown political and economic situation, so who the gently caress knows? --- Semirelated: I watched The Pity of War on Netflix the other day, and man Niall Ferguson is such a tool. A whole 90 minute special about how the British Empire (and preserving the Empire is clearly his key motivation) would have been better off if Britain had stayed out of WWI, presumably resulting in a fast German victory in '14-'15. He offers no arguments for this other than "the western front suuuucked", and assuming that a victorious Germany would have promptly created an EU that Britain totally would have been allowed into on equal terms. When he turns to the panel of good historians, pretty much everyone tells him that none of his counterfactuals make any sense. Even the audience is against him; I guess that part was pretty excellent. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 18:11
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OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure that "a european union" would be my word for "imperial german rule over europe" Nor is anyone who isn't named Niall Ferguson.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:09
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Disinterested posted:Would it actually have been worse than what we got, though. Maybe it could have been better (better here probably being extremely dependent on your point of view), maybe it could have been worse. There's no possible way you can invent a century of alt-history and pretend that its likely or even plausible. Disinterested posted:What? No, I'm saying that a long and drawn out WW1 is directly connected to the violent excesses that follow it in the next several decades, so that, regardless of the politics, it's conceivable that a swift and decisive outcome to WW1 by any party would have been better. WW1 is directly connected to the violence of the later 20th century, but it didn't singlehandedly cause them. Arguably the rise of the NSDAP and the events of WW2 have a lot more to do with the market crash of '29 than it does Versailles.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:42
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Koramei posted:Decolonization probably wouldn't have happened if the European colonial powers weren't crippled by two world wars would it? Depends who's in charge. Dudes like Churchill would have been loving stoked to put a bunch of upstart natives back in their place.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:12
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OwlFancier posted:That thing where Hannibal won them battles with them numidian horses, didn't happen. Mongols? Never heard of them.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Active sonar is basically putting a big sign on your boat saying "THERE IS A BOAT HERE" To be technical about it, I don't think it actually says that, what it says is "THERE IS A BOAT THIS WAY". The 'target' of an active sonar pulse can't know the emission time of the pulse, and so wouldn't be able to compute the range directly. Though with a modern boat and long-rear end towed sonar arrays, you might be able to range it if the geometry is right and your computers are setup for it. Jobbo_Fett posted:(millions captured) I'm almost afraid to ask, but what happened to all the Russian POWs that were captured during the advances of '41? Presumably nearly all of them were shipped to rear areas and worked to death? Are there any instances say during the winter counter offensives of advancing Russians suddenly liberating a bunch of captured dudes?
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Aug 31, 2016 19:00
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Well, it says "THERE IS A BOAT ON BEARING X" which is fairly precise even if you don't know the distance. hogmartin posted:Fair point, but if you know the bearing, you can start concentrating on that particular bearing. All the target motion analysis stuff you have to do afterwards is the same stuff you'd have to do if it wasn't going active. Going active just announces "here's an interesting thing that can't see you yet, go ahead and investigate, track, avoid, or destroy it". Oh yeah, it doesn't fundamentally alter the calculus of what's happening, I just wanted to make a mostly pedantic point about ranging. Submarine ranging is cool in general, in that you can never really know how distant a target is from a single short observation. Although I guess now that I think about it, that's most every non-active ranging method.
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Aug 31, 2016 23:33
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Hogge Wild posted:GBS has a thread What's your favorite published study? I love their offered explanation for why that would be the case too. Division of labor, where they have their husbands manage the household and estate while the Queen gets poo poo done. Shame this couldn't have come out in the 50s, people would have flipped out.
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Sep 1, 2016 17:21
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Also that. A (very rational) Josephine complex, if you will.
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Sep 1, 2016 17:39
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Xerxes17 posted:I feel like also jumping in here to mention the fact that Rommel was getting all kinds of good intel about the British Army in North Africa thanks to the Americans. No really. And that soldier's name was
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Sep 1, 2016 21:09
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HEY GAL posted:brother, i bump into doorways on my way across the room put down the pike
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Sep 2, 2016 21:26
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Crazycryodude posted:In this specific case, I'm pretty sure nobody actually holds a patent on nuclear weapons Well Leo Szilard did secure a British patent for nuclear chain reactions way back in 1933, and convinced the Admiralty to classify it. But yeah, if it involved strategically important weapons, any state level actor would just tell a developer to go stuff themselves. Also, it doesn't make the most sense to patent a cutting edge military technology, because you usually have to publish the details, and then hostile nations are pretty free to steal your work.
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Sep 5, 2016 04:52
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The Germans never had proximity fuses though. That poo poo was one of the closest guarded secrets of the whole war, on par with the Manhattan project.
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Sep 5, 2016 06:32
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ArchangeI posted:There is that story where Wilhelm II just kind comes to visit him during late July 1914 and goes "yeah, the mobilization is off we are only going to fight Russia, see to it chop chop" and Moltke just starts crying because goddamn he just wants to have a loving world war like the one he planned for is that too much to loving ask? And then Wilhelm is all "Your uncle could have done it". Well I've always thought Moltke was on edge because he was sure Germany was going to lose. Based on the various pre-war plans drawn up by the German staff, finding yourself actually charging towards a war with France, Russia, and Britain and only A-H in your corner could not have been a fun time. Dealing with Wilhelm would only be icing on the cake.
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Sep 9, 2016 05:10
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Phanatic posted:This was the USS Midway as launched: Looks like they moved all the elevators too.
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Sep 13, 2016 17:17
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 That uniform feels like some 19th century chic. Actual subject and date: Eric Shinseki, 1965
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Sep 15, 2016 20:57
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Comstar posted:Why don't their chin straps, actually go under their chins? Seriously, I would love to know the answer to this.
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Sep 15, 2016 22:25
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Deteriorata posted:According to Audie Murphy, an explosion nearby would rip the helmets off their heads, and their heads off their necks if the chinstrap was buckled securely. They would either leave the strap unbuckled or let it catch beneath their nose if it kept falling off. Isn't an explosion strong enough to pull your head off that way going to kill you anyway?
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Sep 15, 2016 23:04
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also that link you posted describes some of the "King of the Romans" as "Anti-Kings." Should I even ask Sometimes the electors charge their mind.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:Has there ever been a conclusive answer to "how much damage will make the enemy surrender?" Sure, you just damage them until they surrender, and then you know.
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Sep 19, 2016 01:25
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? The wikipedia article on counter-insurgency is extensive, and references the main successful examples, including the Philippine-American War and the Malay Emergency. Lots of theory there. As a social science, there is likely to never be a concrete answer, but the generally supported options are "make the insurgents less popular than you", or "deploy an overwhelming number of troops and police such that the insurgents have no room to operate"; the second option may or may not involve genocide. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Sep 19, 2016 |
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Sep 19, 2016 21:28
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