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Splode posted:Is it the panther or the tiger that's gears break before it runs out of fuel. I can never remember. Yep, even panthers and tigers. There's a picture somewhere around of a row of Panthers with white (not red) stars haphazardly painted on the sides of the turrets, surrounded by soviet tank crews.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 00:10 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:54 |
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Empress Theonora posted:It's more like "the Sherman is literally the only tank I can identify by sight because I'm a WW2 equipment dunce", actually. Bask in it. It also has a second version with a fat turret but it's not as aesthetic. also an early version with a pointy turret, also not aesthetic
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 01:06 |
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Koramei posted:why does it have an eagle on it? i thought those were always associated with nobility/ monarchy That would be a polish eagle! The polish eagle did have a crown on which was far too bourgeois for the soviets, so that got taken off, but the heraldic icon was still an eagle.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 01:12 |
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Ainsley McTree posted:I enjoyed the Brothers in Arms games because they were as much about pointing and shouting as they were about actually shooting anybody. I liked SWAT 4 for the same reason. More FPS games need to be about pointing and shouting, in my opinion. KV-2 is so cute. It was also the tank that stopped a german column on it's lonesome near Raisenai, though I think I remember on EE's blog that the original source doesn't mention if it's a KV-1 or KV-2 so maybe that's wrong.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 10:58 |
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Grey Hunter posted:I'm thinking of running a game of Black Powder that has all the divisions commanded by Goons (on both sides) - with everything going through emails and messages moving via riders. I want to recreate as much of the fog of war as possible - I'm not sure HOW often to make the messengers get lost, or how fast to make them move yet, but the planning stage is there. This sounds awesome.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 13:49 |
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Well, when you have one road through a marsh and a giant column of vehicles, any tank that could reliably penetrate any of the tank therein would've been successful at that. I remember it ran out of ammo, which is why the crew ended up abandoning it and withdrawing. The story I read was that they were attacked at night by pioneers and found dead within the vehicle in the morning. quote:Also, the KV-2 did not like any terrain that wasn't flat. But it's so cute.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 17:07 |
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P-Mack posted:So I'm playing HOI4 as France, and this game is making me think that the Maginot line was actually cool and good. Am I wrong? It did exactly what it was meant to do, which was to force the Germans to not attack directly across the border. As for missing the Ardennes, the forest was considered more or less impassable, since attempts to go through it had been made in WW1 and ended in disaster. And, to be fair, it was pretty impassable; they created what was at the time (maybe still is?) the world's largest traffic jam trying to get everything through the few good routes that were available, and it took something like two weeks for everyone to get through.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 19:21 |
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P-Mack posted:We're the French just totally in the dark while this traffic jam was developing? What stopped them from loving the Germans up before they got themselves through the forest and sorted out on the other side? My memory of it was that they were aware of it, but for one a huge fuckoff forest gives you loads of places to keep out of the eyes of recon, so they didn't realise just how much was coming through the obvious logistical nightmare, were reluctant to commit their own men to a logistical nightmare, and had trouble hitting it via air so close to germany's border where their air-force could intercept them (I think they lost something like 50 planes trying to bomb the trail). EDIT: Oh, and equally the German airforce had good local air superiority; there were reinforcements moving to meet what was assumed to be a relatively small force when they left, but they were moving very slowly, mostly at night, to avoid luftwaffe attack. spectralent fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Aug 2, 2016 |
# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 19:43 |
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HEY GAL posted:the miniatures game? only if our little dudes really exist on a table somewhere and Grey Hunter takes pictures of them every so often But doesn't show anyone until the end at which point we see why half the army marched off a cliff.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 19:57 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:It's 100% for sure a KV-1, but it had an extra guy along for the ride, so everyone thinks it was a KV-2. Ah, I can see where that'd be confusing. any idea why the extra dude was there? Just some straggler? quote:"Tank destroyers vs. towed guns vs. just give every Sherman a 76 mm gun" is as common and uncreative topic as "hey have you guys heard about that bear" and "Gay Black Hitler" I don't want to restart The Wars but is there a link to when this discussion was happening? It's a topic I did hit on a few months ago and wanted some opinions on but didn't want to poke the nest
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 20:51 |
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P-Mack posted:Thanks for the in depth summary. The above is what I did in HOI, managed to hold the line until the yanks showed up. Enormously, yep! I remember a lengthy article somewhere about how if the western allies had just invaded Germany during the funny war they'd have probably blown right through them.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 21:06 |
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It's really interesting, reading the link, how back in 2011 the thread was full of death-traps, every german tank is a tiger style wisdom.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 21:56 |
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pthighs posted:Can someone explain what was so special about that extra millimeter between the 76mm and 75mm? Yeah, the major change wasn't actually the calibre but the fact the gun was way longer. The panther's gun was 75mm but it had a barrel length almost twice that of the 76mm sherman, with accordingly higher speed rounds, and consequently higher KE.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 22:54 |
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If the question was "Did the extra millimetre matter", then not really, no; there's no reason a longer 75mm with higher-powered ammo wouldn't behave basically the same. The fact they were different guns did matter, though, since you couldn't just make the existing 75mm longer. Following on from my earlier soviet T-34, I know very little about the soviet polish army, Berling's army; anyone got any good material on that?
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 23:38 |
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Plan Z posted:Yeah I mean considering that the picture depicts four vehicles, two chassis, three guns, and two turrets, I couldn't blame anyone. Doesn't even include the hellcat.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 02:21 |
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As a thought that just struck me, is the increased amount of mechanisation, as well as the increasingly lighter weight of body armour, a factor in the increased adoption of it in military use? WW2 practically nobody has body armour, but they're also just expected to be walking wherever they're meant to be, right? I figure if your assumption is that you're going everywhere via carriers, airlifts, and that kind of stuff, then maybe making everyone heavier is less of a problem. Or am I completely wrong?
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 14:50 |
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Xerxes17 posted:As others have said, the total weight carried per soldier has generally been the same since ever as humans haven't changed much. Lighter body armor is kinda why it has been put into practice as it has to have a certain level of protection given for a certain amount of weight. Like in WW2 you possibly could have given dudes rifle-protective breastplates, but they would have weighed far too much and often not made much of a difference anyway due to getting shot in the extremities or the face. (See: Kelly Gang from 19th century Australia ) That's before you get into the whole thing of artillery, mortars and etc. Wow, that's really interesting too. Thanks.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 17:31 |
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SeanBeansShako posted:I just had a disturbing thought. I think this is probably true, yeah. I run into it a lot with science stuff, which is a thing I'm actually qualified to correct people on
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# ¿ Aug 4, 2016 00:21 |
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Doubtful, since again you're not creating enough of a pressure difference by missing with a projectile. You might react instinctively by going to ground because you heard (or saw) a projectile coming your way /passing you by, but you're not getting dizzy or knocked off your feet by a miss. Does it have an explosive round, or something similar? If some of the shrapnel hit someone in the leg or something they might think they'd been hit full-on and go down, maybe.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 11:48 |
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Sorry to repeat a question, but anyone got much on the 1st Polish army/Polish I Corps? It's really easy to get polish army stuff... If you want the II Corps, but the soviet-organised army is much harder to dig up info on.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 12:28 |
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Fangz posted:Can someone explain what exactly happens in a tank when it is penetrated by an anti tank shell? What actually 'takes out' the tank? Yes. Less facetiously there's multiple ways of knocking out tanks, and nowadays there's even three "kill" categories. IIRC they're "mobility kill", "fire kill", and "catastrophic kill", being "We can't move", "we can't shoot", and "the tank and/or crew is lots of little pieces" respectively. In WW2 stuff you run into loads of ways a tank has been "killed", and many of them are done in such a way that the vehicle can later be killed again. Off the top of my head, I've read about tanks being abandoned because they've lost mobility (and the crew don't want to sit around and await death), tanks being taken out by the shell killing everyone inside, spalling wounding people inside who decide to leg it, shells getting jammed in the turret ring which cause the crew to bail, tanks getting hit by smoke grenades and thinking they've caught fire and abandoning it, ammunition cook-offs, slower-burning fires... It's worth noting a huge amount of vehicles that list "fire" as the cause of loss were probably actually "taken out" by a different hit, but it's hard for the other guys to know your vehicle is abandoned or the crew inside are dead, so tanks were often shot until they caught fire since that made sure they were dead. There's a russian soldier interview somewhere where he notes that their tank went over a mine and the suspension blew off, so they just decided to abandon it and return on foot when someone came around asking awkward questions and they all agreed their tank had been hit and caught fire so they'd had to abandon it. An inspection of the field after showed their tank had indeed been hit and caught fire, because nobody had told the germans there wasn't anyone in it.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 15:18 |
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Xerxes17 posted:Czech Tanks at the start of WW2 were notorious for having terrible spalling because the plates were rather brittle high-hardness stuff and everything was riveted. I used to wonder why the hell anything was riveted, but I realised a year or two ago it was probably quite a while before tanks existed that were both up against really high kinetic impacts and had armour enough to survive penetration anyway. Like, getting hit with a rifle probably isn't going to cause massive rivet failures, but at the same time since you've got like 20mm of armour everywhere anything like a .50 cal or an antitank rifle is just going to go in anyway. In an environment where weapons are pretty all-or-nothing rivets probably don't seem that bad. I'm probably completely wrong but it made sense.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 16:40 |
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Not sure, but at that point its not overpressure anyways so Oh, sure, I'm just wondering if they might've seen someone hit by what's basically a small grenade going off by then and misunderstood what happened.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 16:41 |
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Dick Trauma posted:Can someone talk a little about the change from rifled to smooth? I always thought the rifling was to give stability through spinning. Are the rounds themselves stabilizing now? Yes. That's what the fins are for, to stabilise it in flight.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 18:23 |
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Also a 93-ton tank is 20 tons heavier than a jagdtiger, but somehow still half the weight of the maus! I wonder how the track's going to look. Are they just going to make them the width of a small car or are things in "what is ground pressure?" territory?
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 18:26 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:If you define "good" as having the heaviest armored vehicle ever deployed, hell yeah, eat poo poo Jadgtiger Still loses to maus
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 19:31 |
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bewbies posted:To expand a bit more the developers aren't idiots, they put a ton of work into analyzing all of the mobility and sustainment requirements for what we have taken to calling jabba the tank. I don't know any details but they seemed...less pessimistic than you'd have thought.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 19:51 |
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I remember someone saying that artillery in games always sucks because if artillery was as effective as it is in real life and you had the precision of targetting and battlefield awareness that you did as someone playing a PC game artillery would be all you need. I guess we're moving towards that kind of battlefield.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 20:10 |
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Phanatic posted:1. Any round will precess/nutate a little bit. As the projectile length:diameter ratio increases, the degree of spin required to keep precession to an acceptable degree becomes impractically high. For a kinetic penetrator, you want to maximize cross-sectional density, which means increasing length:diameter ratio, which means you reach a point where spin-stabilization doesn't work anymore and you use a fin-stabilized projectile at which point you go smoothbore. Isn't that what patriot missiles are for?
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 21:45 |
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Xerxes17 posted:Okay, so. There's also the various new "hard-kill'" types of "armour" which work by shooting the rounds as they get near, and stuff like that. I think they're mainly for missiles, but I've seen some talk about shooting down HEAT too.
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# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 23:48 |
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Thank you for this! It's very comprehensive. So to be clear, the Polish army was kind of a soviet army that dressed up like a Polish one? I'm assuming the kit would've been the same, or did they bring loads of polish rifles and such with them too? Edit: Actually if they didn't have loads of captured materiel, how did they get all the uniforms? EDIT: Spec forgets to shorten big posts. spectralent fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Aug 6, 2016 |
# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 03:53 |
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TerminalSaint posted:To expand on that question, at what point do we switch over entirely to remotely operated tanks or tankettes? Ditching the crew compartment might open up some interesting design possibilities. South Korea's looked into this, IIRC.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 11:15 |
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Tevery Best posted:The gear was 100% Soviet-spec. The uniforms were made in the USSR based on those taken from POWs, but it's not hard to reverse-engineer a uniform. And even then, some uniform pieces (e.g. helmets and overcoats) were Soviet-spec. That sounds like what I'd meant; apologies if I phrased it in an offensive way.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 12:53 |
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Xerxes17 posted:I recall reading in Anthony Beevor's Berlin that the Navodchiks (artillery spotters) consider themselves to be snipers but with much bigger guns. Sounds accurate. Trin Tragula posted:Short answer: yes, everywhere on every front where there's trench warfare, every so often there's a ping as some idiot gets up on the fire-step to let a working party come through the narrow trench, forgets to duck down, and catches the wrong bloke's eye at 500 yards. That particular loophole is such an obvious target, high on the highest hill, that it almost certainly has one or more sniper posts that were put there to cover it and with standing orders that your first priority is to immediately shoot any fucker who opens it, and given the accuracy it's probable that the main post covering it has a fixed rifle. This is super interesting, but I keep reading thing below the sniper's elbows in the diagram as "Bear".
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# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 19:30 |
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For what purpose?
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 23:36 |
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MrMojok posted:OK tankophiles, I know of no better place to ask this. I haven't seen Fury yet, outside of clips, but I've been told everyone in it is meant to be hitlerjugend-tier SS who're big on fanaticism and low on training. It'd explain the tiger fight (except for the whole "we have to shoot it from behind!" thing).
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 15:45 |
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:It's more like the SS troops in Fury aren't supposed to represent real people. Neither is the Tiger supposed to represent a real tank. That would explain why it couldn't be shot from the front but a 76mm sherman would go clean through KT side armour too.
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 16:58 |
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MrMojok posted:Sorry, was tanks trying to maneuver around to shoot each other in the rear end not a real thing? The main thing is that the 76mm Sherman could go through a tiger I's armour from the front. It can go through the side of the king tiger as well as the rear, as well, because they're both pretty much the same thickness. In short, either fury could've opened up from where they were sat (if it was a tiger I), or would've been fine with a side shot (if it's a II). Of course, there's plenty of reasons why they wouldn't; not wanting to sit still, for instance, or they could just have panicked and forgotten, which sounds entirely plausible. I'm not really trying to about the physics of it, just nitpicking about tank numbers in the milhist thread.
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 20:05 |
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feedmegin posted:Likely, even. How likely is it that a tanker at the time would remember the minutiae of Tiger I versus Tiger II side armour in a situation like that, even if they realised it was a Tiger II and not a I, as opposed to thinking 'we've got one shot at this we've gotta make it a rear shot or we might be toast'. Not to mention this isn't binary, it's not like it's 100% certain a side shot would work on a I, just more likely, so even then hitting it on the rear is more of a sure thing. Again, not to be terrible and nitpick, but the tiger I and II looked really dissimilar, to the point where soviet intelligence assumed the Tiger II was an improved Panther. The boxy look of the Tiger I is completely gone. More importantly, the tiger I and II have almost identical side and rear armour (82mm vs 80mm respectively), and they're both the same thickness all the way around; in fact on both the I and II the rear plate is more angled than the side plates, so the rear armour is effectively thicker (though in the Tiger I's case, by very little. Tiger II gets something like 20mm out of it, though). This is all and not really relevant to the film, of course.
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 21:34 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:54 |
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Perestroika posted:Huh, was that based on intelligence reports or actual frontline experiences? I'd always kind of assumed that the Ferdinand was another white elephant () like the Sturmtiger or Jagdtiger, produced only in small numbers and with such reliability and mobility issues that it never really made a meaningful impact anywhere. You can compare this to the T-34 and KV-1, though; even if the tank isn't actually accomplishing very much because of strategic factors, the existence of a capability that could be dramatic generally prompts a move to counter it, as was the case with the Panther, or Britain's experiences with the Tiger prompting the creation of things like the Archer, Avenger/Challenger, and Firefly.
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# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 19:47 |