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xthetenth posted:Weight and drag are a drag, and remote turrets eventually got good. Even before missiles, planes like the featherweight B-36s show a decided trend towards being able to go higher and faster being a higher priority than any defensive guns other than rearwards. Part of that is making it harder for interceptors to make an intercept happen, part is that at higher speeds, closing shots become incredibly hard. Plus interceptors eventually got missiles and were joined by SAMs and good luck shooting down incoming missiles with your gun turret
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Sep 16, 2019 01:55
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I remember people in the threas talking about how metal shields are dumb in the past,but I'm in a museum at the moment and its got several examples of decorated metal shields from 18th/19th century Persia/India. Are these just for show or would they actually be used in combat? where did Grenrow go? they did their MA on 18th and 19th century Indian personal combat but I haven't seen them around recently.
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Sep 16, 2019 02:22
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Well, birthday gift just arrived... 
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Sep 16, 2019 02:30
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HEY GUNS posted:where did Grenrow go? they did their MA on 18th and 19th century Indian personal combat but I haven't seen them around recently. Still here, just lurking mostly. Those small metal shields were definitely used by Indian soldiers, which the British sometimes found hard to deal with. A lot of the anachronistic equipment people dismiss when looking at colonial warfare (swords and lances against muskets and artillery, superior European weaponry tech, bla bla bla) was stuff that the British viewed as a big problem in hand to hand fighting. Indian cavalry wearing mail shirts were always pains in the rear end to fight. I forget which source this is in, but one officer explicitly talked about how an Indian infantryman with a tulwar and shield actually had really good chances or even an outright advantage against a Brit cavalryman in a direct fight if the cavalryman wasn't able to just pull away and charge again. It's not 100% to clear to me whether the British just noticed it more because it was unusual to them, or whether Indians really did just put a lot of stock into this in their traditional swordsmanship, but Indian swordsmen in general seemed to have a strong preference for having something in their off hands. Shields, sometimes a dagger or another sword, or (once more Indians started being recruited into EIC regiments) bayonets are frequently referenced as being used in the left hand in contemporary accounts. Gurkhas recruited into regimental service, for example, always preferred their kukris in the right hand and used their bayonet-mounted muskets in the left as parrying sticks. This might have to do with how tulwars don't really have great hand protection and the broader cuts they made (with their wrists locked) weren't as effective for the kind of parrying contemporary Europeans were used to. So having something in your left hand to serve as a blocking/parrying implement was probably especially valuable for them.
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Sep 16, 2019 03:15
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that's not unusual, 17th century western/central europeans want something in their off hands as well and even if you don't, "turn your hand so your wrist is pointing towards youself and attempt to block with your hand" is a useful move
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Sep 16, 2019 03:18
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Vorkosigan posted:Well, birthday gift just arrived... Its a good book, there's a second on in the "series" though.
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Sep 16, 2019 03:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:Was there anything wrong about ball turrets? Aside from escapability and being extra weight and drag when speed mattered. Obviously they're irrelevant now in the era of aircraft using long-range missiles for everything, but was there any other reason against their use? I think in a previous incarnation of this thread, somebody posted that its survivability wasn't particularly worse than any other position in the plane. You can sit still and point out the obvious deficiencies, but apparently they didn't really add up to being a unique problem in practice. I'm mostly posting this little in hopes it pokes somebody else to remember.
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Sep 16, 2019 07:40
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I think in a previous incarnation of this thread, somebody posted that its survivability wasn't particularly worse than any other position in the plane. You can sit still and point out the obvious deficiencies, but apparently they didn't really add up to being a unique problem in practice. I'm mostly posting this little in hopes it pokes somebody else to remember. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3872282&pagenumber=320&perpage=40#post494444869
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Sep 16, 2019 08:12
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The British turrets had their sighting hoods (the bit with rangefinding and observation gear) located in a cabin-like deal built into the roof of the turret, which meant superfiring turrets couldn't fire dead ahead or dead astern. Instead of redesigning their turrets like sane people they just didn't bother with superfiring turrets in their first few dreadnoughts. Hold on, why did the sighting hoods prevent firing dead ahead or astern? SlothfulCobra posted:Was there anything wrong about ball turrets? Aside from escapability and being extra weight and drag when speed mattered. Obviously they're irrelevant now in the era of aircraft using long-range missiles for everything, but was there any other reason against their use? Allegiance or Rebel Galaxy?
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Sep 16, 2019 09:31
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JcDent posted:Hold on, why did the sighting hoods prevent firing dead ahead or astern?
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Sep 16, 2019 10:31
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Just hand em some earplugs jeez
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Sep 16, 2019 11:44
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There's no preventing bad attitude
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Sep 16, 2019 12:00
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FrangibleCover posted:Because the muzzles of the superfiring turret, when pointed forwards, sit directly above the sighting hood of the deck level turret. If you fired you'd kill the entire sighting crew with overpressure.  The sighting hoods are those things under the 12-pounders. I guess they're not airtight, then? Also, yes, Dreadnought had 12-pounders mounted on top of the gun turrets for torpedo boat defense.
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Sep 16, 2019 12:04
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SlothfulCobra posted:Was there anything wrong about ball turrets? Aside from escapability and being extra weight and drag when speed mattered. Obviously they're irrelevant now in the era of aircraft using long-range missiles for everything, but was there any other reason against their use? Ball turrets (and manned turrets in general) were only useful in the short period of time between bombers being large and powerful enough to carry large defensive gun armaments, and electrical remote fire-control systems becoming practical and effective. Some of the early B-17Es had an early Sperry (not Bendix, B-17s we’re never equipped with Bendix turrets, that error is EVERYWHERE) electrically-controlled belly turret, which was widely disliked by crews. It was mechanically identical to the Sperry top turret that was retained through production, but equipped with a remote sight that was installed just aft of the turret. The gunner would lay prone, facing aft, and was equipped with a number of windows wrapping around the aft belly of the aircraft, though the sight itself couldn’t translate through the entire field of view. No kills were ever recorded with the Sperry remote turret, and many (possibly most) were removed or replaced with the familiar Sperry manned ball turret. Just three years later, B-29s were being built with an elaborate and effective integrated fire control system built by GE. The Sperry remote turret would go on to find success (in modified and improved form) as the B-17G’s chin turret.
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Sep 16, 2019 12:13
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JcDent posted:Seriously, what's with all the clerk violence? Clerk refers to any of what we would consider probably white collar jobs. It's all of the intellectual jobs that required literacy and potentially numeracy, so that includes of course students, but also includes scribes, accountants, archivists, librarians, etc.
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Sep 16, 2019 13:05
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Speaking of magical techno-turrets, does anyone have insight into the B-29 remote fire control system? Apparently they were aimed optically, so does the gunner just have like a little periscope hood and a steering wheel? Could one gunner run multiple turrets? I’ve never been able to get my head around out how all that got done pre-electronic fire control.
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Sep 16, 2019 13:19
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Clerk refers to any of what we would consider probably white collar jobs. It's all of the intellectual jobs that required literacy and potentially numeracy, so that includes of course students, but also includes scribes, accountants, archivists, librarians, etc. In this case, though, it was mostly students. Medieval Death Bot draws from the Oxfordshire Coroner Rolls, so there's a larger than normal amount of students, and when you combine drunkenness with immunity to criminal prosecution, murder ensues
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Sep 16, 2019 13:34
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Epicurius posted:In this case, though, it was mostly students. Medieval Death Bot draws from the Oxfordshire Coroner Rolls, so there's a larger than normal amount of students, and when you combine drunkenness with immunity to criminal prosecution, murder ensues To be fair, it's an easier explanation that explaining why scribes and librarians ambush people to kill or go on a shooting spree (with a bow).
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Sep 16, 2019 13:52
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JcDent posted:To be fair, it's an easier explanation that explaining why scribes and librarians ambush people to kill or go on a shooting spree (with a bow). scribes and librarians do that today, and those jobs had money and downtime to get hosed up in towns where a lot of crimes occur
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Sep 16, 2019 14:12
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Timmy Age 6 posted:Speaking of magical techno-turrets, does anyone have insight into the B-29 remote fire control system? Apparently they were aimed optically, so does the gunner just have like a little periscope hood and a steering wheel? Could one gunner run multiple turrets? I’ve never been able to get my head around out how all that got done pre-electronic fire control. It had a lot of configurations and gunners could slave several guns to their own fire control station. It was a fairly rudimentary computer that could calculate lead. There were fewer gunners on a b-29 than on a b-17 for this reason. The little bubbles on the fuselage were the gunners' viewing stations where they would aim at the enemy fighters. The front gunner directed fire control and handed off turrets to the others, and the aiming process was just a matter of training the gunsight on the opponent using a series of dots to get a firing solution and the computer would handle lead and gravity to do the fine aiming.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:20
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Popular Mechanics isn’t the most reliable source, but here we are... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nskFayhBcy0
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Sep 16, 2019 14:27
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Rockets and People, Vol. 1: Now that work on digesting Nazi rocket knowledge has started, a traffic accident badly injures the military head of the ad-hoc rocket organization, General Kuznetsov. (This might be the Kuznetsov that gets his own engine design bureau later, not quite sure.) His replacement, General Gaydukov, grasps the potential of rocketry, and starts lobbying Moscow intensely for more resources. [This is something our narrator is greatful for, since his wife is in Moscow scrounging for firewood and fixing their burned out hotplate for the millionth time, and he thinks he might need leave to go back to her.] This campaign caps with the incredibly brave move of going over Lavrentiy Beria's head and talking to stalin directly about 1) getting rocket/missile research a proper seat in the Soviet structure, and 2) maybe releasing all those imprisoned rocket scientists? Stalin agrees to both, and tells General Gaydukov to talk to the People's ministries to see who Gaydukov wants to attach himself to. The three ministries are aircraft, munitions, and artillery. Aircraft is the best technical fit - but is now enormously busy upgrading the Soviet air force, and is in no mood to take on yet more engineering challenges that Stalin might just gulag you for if something goes wrong. This refusal set up a rivalry between missiles and aircraft that would persist till ICBMs were perfected.The Munitions Ministry was similar; normally they'd be more interested, but are now in the middle of atomic bomb research and construction, which is mos def something that people will be gulag'd for if there are delays. The artillery ministry was in theory the least attractive of the ministries, mainly because making cannons is pretty goddamn far away from missiles. [Note: if you are thinking 'what about the Katushya' that was produced and operated in an entirely separate structure from artillery]. But, they had the political interest: artillery had plateaued in terms of technology, and the new rocket and missile field promised new prestige. What's more, artillery had started doing RnD on technologies nearness for rockets and missiles: namely starting its own SAM program, and developing AAA guided by radar. So rockets and missiles got themselves a patron.
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Sep 16, 2019 15:11
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The Soviet/Russian organization (having a ministry for artillery, and directorates for tanks and infantry) is wild. Anyone ever do q comparison between doing that way and the way rest of the world is handling it? So who was making and operating Katyushas?
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Sep 16, 2019 15:31
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Artillery was handled by the GAU, which was a directorate, same as the GABTU. The separate People's Commissariats/Ministries were for Armament and Ammunition. Armament would deal with production of all guns, tank or towed. This did result in a lot of spats between everyone when something like an SPG was produced. Sometimes the GAU would approve something but the GABTU would reject it and vice versa.
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Sep 16, 2019 15:36
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Oh man from the pics thread in GiP, the story of Eliahu Itzkovitz
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Sep 16, 2019 16:40
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JcDent posted:Allegiance or Rebel Galaxy? X-Wing Alliance actually. It's just real neat whenever I get a mission in the Sabra or Otana and I can get MK-09 to start shooting at a target while I'm either running away or maneuvering around to get a shot on it with the forward guns. Having to keep the turrets' range of fire in mind when manuevering kinda reminds me of swinging around for broadsides in Sid Meier's Pirates too, which I guess space combat tends to borrow from both air and sea combat.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:18
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Yeah big spaceships fight like naval warships, small spaceships fight like WW2 aircraft.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:36
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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That's been a common thing at least since Star Wars and probably earlier. Plenty of sci-fi novels set up their tech so that space combat works like that, too. David Weber has an entire series that basically starts out with ships of the line and works its way through to aircraft carriers, all in space.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:59
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Real space combat would be between computers and be over before the humans on board knew it was happening
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Sep 16, 2019 18:00
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Peter F Hamilton wrote space combat like that, basically things accelerating at hundreds of Gs and moving at a good fraction of light speed and engaging one another over thousands of kilometers
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Sep 16, 2019 18:07
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zoux posted:Real space combat would be between computers and be over before the humans on board knew it was happening "Realistically" (i.e no FTL) it would probably take months or years because you'd see the enemy (and vice versa) from literally light years away and it'd probably be all about dumping autonomous projectiles to intersect with what you think their orbit will be in months' time, and jockeying for position with bluffs and double bluffs while you try to get the other guy to commit to a orbit you've seeded with projectiles. So soul crushingly tedious and boring, but yes, wouldn't involve humans much except to send commands to drone ships from an office planetside.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:10
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bewbies posted:Peter F Hamilton wrote space combat like that, basically things accelerating at hundreds of Gs and moving at a good fraction of light speed and engaging one another over thousands of kilometers Lol yeah I was specifically thinking of combat wasps from the Night's Dawn Trilogy. I'm less convinced of his predictions regarding the return of the ghosts of the Chicago Outfit. It's not an uncommon thing in harder sci fi though. I'd also like to point out that the Cylons would've loving waxed the Colonial fighter pilots who couldn't conduct maneuvers at more than 15g Geisladisk posted:"Realistically" (i.e no FTL) it would probably take months or years because you'd see the enemy (and vice versa) from literally light years away and it'd probably be all about dumping autonomous projectiles to intersect with what you think their orbit will be in months' time, and jockeying for position with bluffs and double bluffs while you try to get the other guy to commit to a orbit you've seeded with projectiles. How would you see something that's light years away zoux fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 18:11
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The Expanse sets up a scenario that's fairly realistic and showcases why it wouldn't be just given over to computers anymore than fighter planes would be at any point in real life either. It's just not happening as long as rules of engagement and a desire for a flexible response exists for tensions.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:14
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zoux posted:How would you see something that's light years away The same way we do now, with a telescope? There's no hiding in space.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:19
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Geisladisk posted:The same way we do now, with a telescope? There's no hiding in space. that only works for things with defined, known orbits. How the hell are you going to target a hypothetical fleet from light years away? A planet, sure. Anything smaller then that, good luck even with handwavey magic tech. There absolutely is hiding in space. if you know where the telescope is, you can absolutely hide from it. Also its insanely difficult to spot planets from light years away, let alone something orders of magnitude smaller, and possibly with stealth in one of the EM wavelengths. \/ You could feasibly target planets from light years out, since you know where it will be in X years.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:34
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Geisladisk posted:The same way we do now, with a telescope? There's no hiding in space. This is true, but if you're trying to engage something light years away with targeting data from a telescope you're going to be X number of light years behind.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:35
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bewbies posted:This is true, but if you're trying to engage something light years away with targeting data from a telescope you're going to be X number of light years behind. Make sure you lead them plenty
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Sep 16, 2019 18:38
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I've never actually seen any sci-fi work acknowledge the ways that we observe objects in space in the real world. Nobody uses telescopes (visual or radio) it's always some obscure sensors that can detect things like weapons powering up and "lifesigns" whatever that means. Most sci fi works with space combat wind up either having heavily fictionalized science or entirely fictional logistics, so you can contort basically any scenario into being "realistic" although some explanations involve a lot more reaching than others. So far, nothing will be truly realistic until enough people put enough stuff into space to staging fights with them, although I imagine the first space combat will either be corporate sabotage or a couple angry astronauts flailing at eachother.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:41
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Saint Celestine posted:that only works for things with defined, known orbits. How the hell are you going to target a hypothetical fleet from light years away? A planet, sure. Anything smaller then that, good luck even with handwavey magic tech. It's hard to spot things in space, it's relatively easy to track them once spotted - things in space, even things doing insane double digit G acceleration, move predictably. Once a craft is spotted you would absolutely be able to track it indefinitely. And hostile ships wouldn't emerge from unpredictable places, the enemy will have a finite number of bases, shipyards, planets, whatever, where ships could come from. It'd be real drat hard to keep a ship hidden from an enemy at less than interstellar distances. You couldn't engage them from light years away, but as they get closer the envelope of possibility of where they will be in the future shrinks, and eventually you start dumping autonomous projectiles into where they probably will be, and they will start doing wacky maneuvers to throw those estimates off.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:or a couple angry astronauts flailing at eachother. We probably already have had space battles over the last packet of grape Tang or whatever.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:57
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