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The smoking gun of Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine Taken out of context from another image/article that is purportedly highlighting evidence of Russian spec ops operating in eastern Ukraine seen here: http://pressimus.com/Interpreter_Mag/press/2383
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Apr 21, 2014 17:28
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Godholio posted:I would totally use a crash axe to smash a scope though. You have no idea how big of a chubby I would get if I got to do the emergency destruction of munitions procedures for real. Actually I would be making GBS threads my pants because if things have gotten to the point where we are blowing muns stockpiles in place I probably have a life expectancy measured in hours if not minutes.
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Apr 21, 2014 18:55
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Patriot procedures are to radiate, lock on to everything in the sky, and fire until the missiles are gone. I'm pretty sure. Or maybe I'm confusing that with 80's Cold War tactics.
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Apr 21, 2014 19:08
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mlmp08 posted:Patriot procedures are to radiate, lock on to everything in the sky, and fire until the missiles are gone. I'm pretty sure. Or maybe I'm confusing that with
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Apr 21, 2014 20:12
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Pfff, they left so many planes alive. And they even got blown up by the air force once. And lost a maintenance company that got chewed up. At least in the frat dept, the USAF frat on Patriot was demonstrably stupider than Patriot shooting down the aircraft, even though the USAF pilot was lucky enough not to kill anyone. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 20:29
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mlmp08 posted:This kind of theorycraft seems really dodgy to me, although I am admittedly not even remotely an expert. When looking at all the second and third order effects of giving up on AAA, I can't help but imagine that suddenly all the supply lines and production facilities feeding/arming/fueling the Army, much less 500,000 extra guys, would get absolutely hammered by much more precise strikes in a way not seen in WWII. No, all that kind of theory-crafting is really, really, super dodgey. The guy running the course was notoriously kinda poo poo and the class itself was a WW2 themed class that was about 60% super-motivated ROTC types who needed to slot in a graduation requirement and 30% self-identified "amateur military historians" aka the sorts of people who watch history channel 24/7 and will argue with you with a passion usually reserved for Naruto about whether Confederate uniform codes specified that the bottom button of the dress jacket be open or closed. God that was not a fun semester. The same guy also claimed that there was no racial component to the German war on the eastern front (because both Germans and Russians are white, you see) and that there was no racial component to the American war in the Pacific, at all, end of story. His understanding of race was. . . interesting. I have a bunch of insane quotes from him that I jotted down that semester and I remember one was something like "there are four races in the world: white, black, red, and yellow." He was also a huge fan of German "super weapons" and liked to spin what iffs about the ME 262 and the Type XXI U-Boat coming out two years earlier. The worst was that he pro-actively, on the first day of class told us to never, ever "teach against" him and we then had to spend the rest of the semester very quietly talking to the 10% of the room that could smell bullshit and basically just telling them to reproduce the answers that he was asking for on the test while recognizing that, yes, <insert crazy thing here> was indeed crazy. Oh yeah, he assigned his own book as well. Not that many people actually do that. It's generally considered pretty gauche with a few pretty narrow exceptions, and in the instances where it kinda has to be done because the professor is specifically an expert in that topic it's usually acknowledged and frequently semi-apologized for. Usually in those cases the book is mind-blowingly good to the point where any halfway decent student recognizes how loving lucky they are to be able to ask the author questions about it face to face. His book was loving terrible and was tangentially related to the course, at best. The only reason I mentioned the whole AAA argument was because someone else already brought it up and I happened to remember those figures from the lectures. Credit where credit is due, he was always spot on with his figures, probably as a result of teaching a steady stream of  "amateur military historians" for the past couple of decades.
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Apr 21, 2014 20:34
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Oh god the 262. At least the 163 had the common decency to blow itself up on the ground every now and then. The 262 is so incredibly overrated.
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Apr 21, 2014 20:57
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Taerkar posted:Oh god the 262. At least the 163 had the common decency to blow itself up on the ground every now and then. I love the 262 and the 163, AND the He 162. But only from 'looks amazing', 'really damned cool' and 'I <3 technology' views.
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Apr 21, 2014 21:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:No, all that kind of theory-crafting is really, really, super dodgey. The guy running the course was notoriously kinda poo poo and the class itself was a WW2 themed class that was about 60% super-motivated ROTC types who needed to slot in a graduation requirement and 30% self-identified "amateur military historians" aka the sorts of people who watch history channel 24/7 and will argue with you with a passion usually reserved for Naruto about whether Confederate uniform codes specified that the bottom button of the dress jacket be open or closed. The ROTC-required military history class here is actually taught by the ROTC cadre, which grudgingly allows the latter category of student to take the course. The university requires the ROTC department to allow anyone to enroll in its classes (once all of the cadets have already signed up). When I was in ROTC we had tons of those kids signing up to take that and the actual ROTC Military Leadership courses, thinking they would learn about tactics and fighting and poo poo instead of listening to retarded powerpoints made by some GS-12 about "time management" and doing map reading quizzes every week. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 21:53
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Taerkar posted:Oh god the 262. At least the 163 had the common decency to blow itself up on the ground every now and then. I have had people in other parts of the internet try to tell me that the F-86's wing design was copied from the 262. Because all swept wings are the same. If we're talking about overrated German weapon systems, one would be remiss if they did not mention the V2.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:16
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LostCosmonaut posted:If we're talking about overrated German weapon systems, one would be remiss if they did not mention the V2. As a weapon at the time it was worthless and a waste of a heck of a lot of resources. But as far as advancing rocketry as a science, it was very successful.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:24
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My favorite bit about the V2 was how the British double agent network sent back false or inaccurate BDA reports to mess up German targeting data. They apparently had radio directional data, but for some reason always trusted their human sources.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:26
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LostCosmonaut posted:If we're talking about overrated German weapon systems, one would be remiss if they did not mention the Fixed it for you. Stupid Tiger fanboys.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:36
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Davin Valkri posted:Stupid Tiger fanboys. Wehraboos are even worse than weeaboos.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:44
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The whole air campaign cuts both ways as well. Would the allies have been better off not mounting a strategic bomber offensive and spending the industrial resources elsewhere. I don't know about America, but i've heard respectable estimates it ate up about a third of British industrial production. Maybe a retooled Britain goes into D-day with Centurions rather than Shermans for example. I also wonder if counter-intuitivley not bombing may have damaged German production more. No, bear with me. What i mean is German production was woefully organised and wasteful for an astonishing amount of the war. Without the galvanising effect of the Allies attempting to disrupt production, i wonder if those efforts would have come later and far less thouroughly.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:20
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LostCosmonaut posted:Wehraboos are even worse than weeaboos. Wehraboos! That's brilliant! Totally using that. The V2 is the gold standard of useless military projects as the program cost a fair bit more than the Manhattan project and actually killed more people in its construction than in its use. Not that the USA and the Soviets were not grateful for the tech, mind you
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Apr 21, 2014 23:20
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Nebakenezzer posted:Wehraboos! That's brilliant! Totally using that. Even the Manhattan project basically did gently caress-all for World War 2. It was probably only doable during wartime due to the way that the government was willing to just firehose money and resources at gently caress near anything that could be used to kill a German or the Japanese, but by the time it was employed the ultimate outcome was beyond inevitable. Oh, sure, it put a hell of an exclamation point on the end of it all and cut short what could have been a really goddamned ugly final chapter, but the over all arc of the war doesn't change much without it. It also stands as one of the most important scientific achievements of the 20th century and directly lead to weapons that completely changed how international diplomacy and great powers foreign policy were conducted. Then again, it's also a little hard to see us waving our cocks at the Russians from the surface of the moon without the lessons learned and technologies developed at Peenemünde.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:Even the Manhattan project basically did gently caress-all for World War 2. It was probably only doable during wartime due to the way that the government was willing to just firehose money and resources at gently caress near anything that could be used to kill a German or the Japanese, but by the time it was employed the ultimate outcome was beyond inevitable. Oh, sure, it put a hell of an exclamation point on the end of it all and cut short what could have been a really goddamned ugly final chapter, but the over all arc of the war doesn't change much without it. Yeah, Edward S. Miller more or less makes this point at the end of War Plan Orange. The atomic bomb solved the previously more-or-less insolvable problem of forcing to the Japanese to surrender without recourse to a long ground campaign that would've rivaled the Eastern Front as the nastiest campaign of the war. This is, incidentally, the fundamental flaw with people who say the war could've been won without Hiroshima and Nagasaki being atomized. It couldn't, at least not without even worse bloodshed. Gar Alperovitz and all who sail in him are just loving wrong.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:I TA'd for a guy who ran a similar argument in one of his lectures. I forget the exact figures, but it was something on the order of a million men in AAA related activities alone. As memory serves, the Germans had something like a hundred thousand AA guns of varying calibre deployed to defend German cities.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:43
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A good bit before the war the general scientific consensus seemed to be that there would be an A-bomb and it was merely a question of who would get it first and when. So in a scenario where Manhattan ran further behind schedule and didn't get to Trinity before V-J day, it likely would've had funding reduced with everything else, but I'd consider it highly unlikely we wouldn't have had bombs by the mid-50s. The idea that there wouldn't be some form of US bomb development project is unrealistic, considering every major nation had one, productive or not. The bombs not being critical to the war effort can be considered dumb luck as much as anything else. The only reason they were dropped in August 1945 is because that's the earliest they were ready, the third one (if not later ones) quite possibly would've been dropped if it'd been ready in time, and of course they fell at war's end since they essentially ended the war, and imagining scenarios without them (or scenarios where they were ready much earlier, or the Pacific War had just gone more poorly, etc.) is pure conjecture. I'd argue that the strategic bombing campaign led to a variety of technical and doctrinal lessons learned that we would've had to figure out painfully at some point, but I'm not going to bother arguing it was worth the cost. The A-bomb itself would've been impossible to deploy without a mature fast-high-far bomber to carry it. Post-war politics also would've been a helluva lot different if the US didn't think it could largely solve problems with huge planes flying from domestic airbases. Again, pure conjecture. If you don't read The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, I highly recommend you spend an afternoon churning through it; here's just a few relevant articles: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/04/atomic-bomb-used-nazi-germany/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/09/why-nagasaki/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/
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Apr 22, 2014 00:17
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yeah, Edward S. Miller more or less makes this point at the end of War Plan Orange. The atomic bomb solved the previously more-or-less insolvable problem of forcing to the Japanese to surrender without recourse to a long ground campaign that would've rivaled the Eastern Front as the nastiest campaign of the war. The you always get the people who say that there was a third option. A blockade. Those are the best ones, because you get to point out that they enjoy starving people to death.
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Apr 22, 2014 00:26
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VikingSkull posted:The you always get the people who say that there was a third option. A blockade. The weirdest ones are the ones who think we should've dropped the first one off the Japanese coast to scare them.
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Apr 22, 2014 00:30
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It's been a while since we had aircraft pics, so here you go. I can rip off the Aviationist*     *They just gank their pics/stories from elsewhere anyway.
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Apr 22, 2014 00:35
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In his book Hell to Pay D.M. Giangreco points out that the Japanese had predicted fairly precisely when and where we intended to land in both the invasion of Kyushu and the invasion of Honshu and that the defenses for both were highly robust. It's actually a little chilling how accurate their plans were.
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Apr 22, 2014 00:48
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Well, in a situation like that, you know the terrain, you know the enemy's capabilities and tactics, and you know how to mission-plan.
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Apr 22, 2014 01:15
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mlmp08 posted:It's been a while since we had aircraft pics, so here you go. I can rip off the Aviationist* Someone needs to photoshop this with the cost of the Karbala raid. Godholio posted:Well, in a situation like that, you know the terrain, you know the enemy's capabilities and tactics, and you know how to mission-plan. You're just a little...resource limited.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:13
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Godholio posted:There are procedures in place. It's probably different for different airframes because we all carry different poo poo. As mentioned, that's a bad question. I would totally use a crash axe to smash a scope though. Is that part of the procedure, though, or would it just be for jollies on the way out the door?
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Apr 22, 2014 03:26
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I just finished reading this excellent thread, I think I've learnt more from here than anywhere else (shows how little I know). About 5 years ago I was in a chemistry class and a Vulcan did a low pass over the school, it set off a load of alarms in the car park. Turns out it was flown by a kids dad who wanted to show off  .Definitely the coolest thing I've seen/heard.
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Apr 22, 2014 11:00
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iyaayas01 posted:Someone needs to photoshop this with the cost of the Karbala raid.
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Apr 22, 2014 11:21
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MrYenko posted:Is that part of the procedure, though, or would it just be for jollies on the way out the door? Just for the hell of it. Scopes are just display/user interface, no memory of any kind. But seriously...AXES. There's one 5 feet from my seat.
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Apr 22, 2014 13:44
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The one last thing to remember about the idea of an US invasion of Japan at the end of World War II would've been Soviet involvement and a probable division of the Japanese islands between a Soviet administered North and American South. Then again, I don't think we know much about Soviet plans for Japan because Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened right as the Soviets declared war and rolled over Manchuria. But imagine what a post-war world/cold war world we would've lived in without a united Japan and it's post-war economic miracle.
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Apr 22, 2014 14:08
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Quoting the book I mentioned earlier:quote:Lastly there were the Soviets, who planned to invade the northernmost Home Island of Hokkaido little more than two weeks after their armies stormed into Manchuria. It must be noted, however, that both the Soviet army’s intent and capabilities are regularly blown well out of proportion by breathless individuals who have not bothered to closely read the works of the principal Western scholar to have intimately examined this subject. At one point the Soviets had looked at the possibility of conducting an amphibious operation to seize the relatively populous southern half of the island. But between their essentially nonexistent assault shipping, some transportable artillery but no armor, woefully inadequate naval gunfire support, and no ability to provide air support for the operation, plus the fact that the Japanese Fifth Area Army’s defenses in southern Hokkaido, although undermanned, were well developed and recently upgraded, the Soviets wisely changed course. U.S. planners looking at the same territory estimated that four U.S. infantry divisions and one armored division, with the customary lavish support, were required for much the same task. Basically, the best they could hope for was not being thrown back into the sea. I don't know that a tiny beachhead would have given the Soviets the leverage to split Japan into their puppet state in the north and a free state in the south. It very well may have made life difficult for us though so it's probably a good thing they didn't get the opportunity to try.
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Apr 22, 2014 14:40
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Booblord Zagats posted:NATO reporting name "Shark Vulva" Uh that's a male shark. Twin claspers, they work similar to a penis. So not only are sharks cool and bitey they also have dual dicks.
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Apr 22, 2014 14:52
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I recently picked up the book "Vipers in the Storm" on a whim because I got interested in the Desert Storm air war and F-16's in particular. Anyone else who's read it or knows about it, is the book worth reading? It does have a foreword by Dick Cheney 
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Apr 22, 2014 18:22
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Karl Rove posted:It does have a foreword by Dick Cheney Username/post combo right here.
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Apr 22, 2014 18:27
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Godholio posted:Just for the hell of it. Scopes are just display/user interface, no memory of any kind. But seriously...AXES. There's one 5 feet from my seat. Kinda what I figured. 
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Apr 22, 2014 19:04
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Snowdens Secret posted:The weirdest ones are the ones who think we should've dropped the first one off the Japanese coast to scare them. This one is good too because the Japanese would probably just think a ship loaded with munitions exploded and we were trying to play it off as a weapon.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:04
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VikingSkull posted:This one is good too because the Japanese would probably just think a ship loaded with munitions exploded and we were trying to play it off as a weapon. I like the "Just drop it on a remote military installation", because by 1945 Japan would totally be shocked if one of their remote bases suddenly reported an attack and then stopped responding.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:30
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The Japanese trying to figure out what the hell just happened at Hiroshima is pretty interesting (and macabre, and sad, too). They obviously knew nothing about the weapon, no major bombing raid had occurred, the US fleet was a thousand miles away, and an entire city was burning. They came up with some pretty crazy ideas: the US had initiated a tsunami, they'd tunnelled under the city somehow and set off some sort of volcanic explosion, they'd managed to "cloak" a bombing raid somehow...and so on. The military's final best guess was that the US had spent months covering the entire city with magnesium and had then detonated it with a single bomb; this kind of makes sense when you read about all of the eyewitness reports saying that the explosion was exactly like that of a magnesium flash going off.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:58
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There was a letter attached to the instruments dropped right before the Nagasaki bomb with a letter to Japanese atomic scientist Ryokichi Sagane basically saying "tell your bosses about what a nuclear bomb means and how hosed they are". Source
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Apr 22, 2014 20:18
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