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turkey is a european country mate
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Sep 19, 2019 16:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:turkey is a european country mate Not going by the standards the map makers are going for. Which seems like a weird hodgepodge of ethnicity, economic development levels, cold war politics, and integration into the EEC.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:09
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omg I just realized that on that map Åland is rated as category I, most of Finland cat II and the SE corner cat III. In conclusion, Finland is a land of contrasts. 
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Sep 19, 2019 17:42
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The Canary Islands are the most European place on the planet.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:53
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Especially those piloting the single occupant submarines, the Neger and Biber, and even more so for those who were test candidates for D-IX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-IX quote:Though simpler drugs such as Pervitin [link: methamphetamine] and Isophan [link: methamphetamine] helped to keep soldiers properly stimulated 
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Sep 19, 2019 18:07
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The ultralight mortars were also not very useful weapons because chucking hand grenades several hundred meters is not a very good use of a crew served weapon. Most militaries throughout the war phased them out gradually, though the Chinese, always desperate for more firepower made good use of US 60mms in direct-ish fire(the US mortar of this type was probably the most effective). They also loved the knee mortar earlier on to the point where Chinese arsenals made clones.
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Sep 19, 2019 18:16
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Sep 19, 2019 18:17
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Panzeh posted:The ultralight mortars were also not very useful weapons because chucking hand grenades several hundred meters is not a very good use of a crew served weapon. Most militaries throughout the war phased them out gradually, though the Chinese, always desperate for more firepower made good use of US 60mms in direct-ish fire(the US mortar of this type was probably the most effective). I thought they were quite useful, until they got replaced by grenade launchers.
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Sep 19, 2019 18:29
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Panzeh posted:The ultralight mortars were also not very useful weapons because chucking hand grenades several hundred meters is not a very good use of a crew served weapon. If you can toss a lot of them quickly it can be very useful: 
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Sep 19, 2019 18:57
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Fangz posted:I thought they were quite useful, until they got replaced by grenade launchers. Which is why they left infantry TOEs in most major combatants as the war went on. They are vastly outmatched in indirect fire by 81mm mortars and too clunky for use like modern grenade launchers. Cessna posted:If you can toss a lot of them quickly it can be very useful: Yeah, this is a far superior crew served weapon than a 50mm mortar or a british 2in mortar, or even the Brixia, which is a sort of semi-automatic take on this weapon but not really.
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Sep 19, 2019 18:59
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/alexdrace/status/1174239857012592640?s=21 Worse, it's actually from a 1997 textbook, where they still don't consider the former East Germans to be pure Europeans years after the end of the cold war.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:38
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Panzeh posted:Which is why they left infantry TOEs in most major combatants as the war went on. They are vastly outmatched in indirect fire by 81mm mortars and too clunky for use like modern grenade launchers. Good old "better than nothing" but now we have something better than nothing.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:38
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Argas posted:Good old "better than nothing" but now we have something better than nothing. yeah, i'd argue they were really quite useful until they were superseded by a better version of the same thing. they're more of a crew-served weapon in the sense that a contemporaneous LMG is a crew-served weapon and certainly don't have the same crew requirements as an actual mortar. i think Panzeh is significantly overestimating the crew requirement.
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Sep 19, 2019 20:06
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Panzeh posted:The ultralight mortars were also not very useful weapons because chucking hand grenades several hundred meters is not a very good use of a crew served weapon. Most militaries throughout the war phased them out gradually, though the Chinese, always desperate for more firepower made good use of US 60mms in direct-ish fire(the US mortar of this type was probably the most effective). Panzeh posted:Which is why they left infantry TOEs in most major combatants as the war went on. They are vastly outmatched in indirect fire by 81mm mortars and too clunky for use like modern grenade launchers. Commando mortars are still useful and still in service in many militaries around the world. Most have been improved upon greatly and the French LGI F1 2" mortar that they hold at the squad level is very modern and rather technically impressive. The main reason for this, I should expect, is that you could carry five of them for every Mk.19. Saying that a Mk.19 is a more useful crew served weapon than a 2" is true, but an Oerlikon is a more useful crew served weapon than a Mk.19 and proportionately heavier. Additionally, and I will keep hammering this point until it goes home, they can lay smoke and they can do it faster, more densely and further away than a UGL could hope to.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:06
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FrangibleCover posted:Apart from the Germans (who replaced them 1:1 with short 80mm class mortars, showing that they liked the role but wanted extra punch) Say what?? And Soviets were drowned in a sea of anti-tank rifles, which were dual purpose and as such more useful than a tiny mortar.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:28
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Nenonen posted:And Soviets were drowned in a sea of anti-tank rifles, which were dual purpose and as such more useful than a tiny mortar. I should also say that German and Russian attempts at small mortars were rubbish. The German 5cm mortar somehow managed to weigh three times what the British one did with the same size of bomb and the same range and the Soviet equivalent was more than twice the weight and fired a marginally smaller bomb a decent bit further. The Soviets also had a tiny 37mm mortar that turned into a spade, which wasn't a good weapon and probably wasn't a good shovel either. 
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Sep 19, 2019 21:48
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The dual-purpose shovel is what we all need eh, hello bonjour
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Sep 19, 2019 21:51
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The dual-purpose shovel is what we all need eh, hello bonjour haha yeah i wonder which was the worst shovel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_Shield_Shovel 
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Sep 19, 2019 22:00
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Panzeh posted:The ultralight mortars were also not very useful weapons because chucking hand grenades several hundred meters is not a very good use of a crew served weapon. The entire point of the ultralight mortar is that it's not a crew-served weapon. You can put them at platoon or even squad level, giving the platoon/squad the organic capability of long-range explosive/smoke/whatever delivery. This is a role that can also be filled by rifle grenades or UGLs, but the ultralight mortar typically has advantages in range over both and warhead size over the UGL. It also allows forces that typically wouldn't have any high-arc firepower at all to have mortar support, which is part of the reason the Polish army were getting ultralight mortars in 2017 for their commando forces.
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Sep 19, 2019 22:13
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ChubbyChecker posted:haha yeah quote:Its value as a digging tool was also questioned as soldiers commented against the shovel’s weight, its inability to be easily carried, and the fact that the blade was poor for shoveling loose soil as it contained a large sight-hole  Now by no means am I an expert in shovelry, but even I, the layman that I am, could immediately tell you that a shovel with a hole in it is not a very good shovel. No field tests needed. Here's a video of some PLA guys showing you how to shovel good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ryyAenmzHM
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Sep 19, 2019 22:48
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Yes, but to the best of my knowledge enslavement was for noncombatants. Crusade warfare also had an element of enslavement, which I should have mentioned, especially because it sowed the seed for the systems of the 16th - 19th centuries which we know and love. Yeah, the Vikings in particular enslaved women, most of whom were sold off to slave traders who later went on to sell the slaves in Byzantium and the Islamic world. At least that seems to have been the case for Eastern Europe, for Ireland and such it might seem that most of the slaves ended up on the domestic market so to speak. Having slave concubines was pretty common in Scandinavian societies and especially in Iceland where enslaved Irish women made up the initial majority of the female population, as the Scandinavian settlers were almost all men. As for the Crusades, the enslavement of battle captives, soldiers and non-combatants alike, was very common in the Islamic world, especially as there was in fact a demand for slaves with military skills*. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics but it seems to have been somewhat similar to how it often was with the Romans where enslaved captives were distributed amongst the soldiers to keep or sell off as they wished, which is probably why at Jerusalem when Saladin showed clemency towards (part of) the population and defenders he is noted to have paid the ransom for them, which probably means that he compensated his soldiers for the loss of their booty so to speak. *though the preference here was for young men and teenagers who could be further educated and trained for specific duties, it's often important to note that Mamluks and such weren't as much "slave soldiers" as they were "recruited from slaves". I believe it's an important distinction to make because the status of Mamluks really was not that similar to any other slaves and as part of the military elite their status was also above that of the vast majority of the free population as well (and in Egypt and Delhi and other places they typically saw themselves as a distinct and superior group from the population at large, especially when they seized power).
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Sep 19, 2019 22:57
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Wasn't a lot of the deal with Mamluks and similar that they were enslaved, but eventually manumitted, with the practice being that manumitted slaves were considered and to be treated as part of the former owner's household, making a group that were quite literally household troops, as well as being culturally distinct to a greater degree than even being part of a military subculture?LatwPIAT posted:The entire point of the ultralight mortar is that it's not a crew-served weapon. You can put them at platoon or even squad level, giving the platoon/squad the organic capability of long-range explosive/smoke/whatever delivery. This is a role that can also be filled by rifle grenades or UGLs, but the ultralight mortar typically has advantages in range over both and warhead size over the UGL. It also allows forces that typically wouldn't have any high-arc firepower at all to have mortar support, which is part of the reason the Polish army were getting ultralight mortars in 2017 for their commando forces. How's the ratio of weight to burster between grenade launcher grenades and mortar bombs?
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Sep 20, 2019 01:36
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FrangibleCover posted:Is bad at both purposes really better than good at one purpose? what the gently caress I’m not going to leverage on a tube that will, tomorrow, be the only thing keeping a sizeable explosive heading downrange and not, like, all around and also inside of me.
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Sep 20, 2019 02:02
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xthetenth posted:Wasn't a lot of the deal with Mamluks and similar that they were enslaved, but eventually manumitted, with the practice being that manumitted slaves were considered and to be treated as part of the former owner's household, making a group that were quite literally household troops, as well as being culturally distinct to a greater degree than even being part of a military subculture? I'm not sure about the universality of such a practice but I think I can remember reading at one time that part of some sort of Mamluk training/education was that the conversion to Islam involved being freed. Though I can't remember where I read that and I can't say how common that was. My point more generally is that whether they were formally freed or not, was that their status as Mamluks so superceded their status as slaves or freedmen (in many slave societies, not just the Islamic world, there are alot of similarities in the status of slaves and freedmen, as you mention freedmen typically legalled remained the wards of their masters, the difference being more one of degree than much else) that they become something completely different from the rest of the slave population, and as the military (and often administrative elite) they stood above the free population as well as officers, governors, ministers and "ordinary" elite soldiers. It's probably not a surprise to anyone in this thread that they do not have much in common with how slave soldiers are depicted in fiction and fantasy (think of the unsullied in GOT) in that for all that they are soldiers they are still expected to be servile and seem to occupy a humiliating position in society compared to free citizens. Not really so with Mamluks at all really who were aware of their status, proud of their distinct origins and typically disdainful of most others outside their own group. That's probably part of the reason Mamluks and similar soldiers ended up seizing power in, or otherwise dominating, many Islamic states, because of how they saw themselves in relation to society at large. You touched on it a little bit, but part of the reason such soldiers were recruited to begin with a general pre-modern conception that, for a ruler, foreigners are often more loyal and reliable than a country's indigenous elites. The reasoning being that foreigners were not part of the existing networks of power within the elite and thus really had no other patron or ally than their employer, thus their loyalty was more absolute and less likely to become compromised, especially in cases of civil war and such. Thus you often see foreign mercenaries and such compose an elite core, especially household and guard troops of many rulers (this goes beyond Islamic societies, think of the Swiss guards of the Pope and the Bourbon kings for instance). That reasoning then goes a bit further in the Islamic world and arrives at the conclusion that ofcourse foreign slaves would be even more loyal than just foreigners in general. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 02:06
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Randarkman posted:for Ireland and such it might seem that most of the slaves ended up on the domestic market so to speak. Platystemon posted:what the gently caress Arquinsiel fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 02:39
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I think he's saying he wouldn't use it in the manner you'd normally use a shovel for fear of bending or pinching the barrel
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Sep 20, 2019 02:52
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xthetenth posted:How's the ratio of weight to burster between grenade launcher grenades and mortar bombs? It varies from round to round, but the 40x46 mm M381 has 32 grams of explosive filler in a 172 gram projectile, the 40x51 mm M384 has 55 grams of explosive filler in a 175 gram projectile, a 60 mm Hirtenberger Mk.2 has 300 grams of explosive filler in a 1900 gram shell, and the 60 mm Czech Mk.98 has 280 grams of explosive filler in a 1450 gram shell. 40 mm projectiles seem to hover at around a 3-5.5 mass/filler ratio, while mortars are in the 5-8 range. (That's including the propelling charge for mortar shells, since I couldn't find data without the propelling charge. So really the mortar ratios should be a tad bit lower.)
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Sep 20, 2019 02:59
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Randarkman posted:I'm not sure about the universality of such a practice but I think I can remember reading at one time that part of some sort of Mamluk training/education was that the conversion to Islam involved being freed. Though I can't remember where I read that and I can't say how common that was. My point more generally is that whether they were formally freed or not, was that their status as Mamluks so superceded their status as slaves or freedmen (in many slave societies, not just the Islamic world, there are alot of similarities in the status of slaves and freedmen, as you mention freedmen typically legalled remained the wards of their masters, the difference being more one of degree than much else) that they become something completely different from the rest of the slave population, and as the military (and often administrative elite) they stood above the free population as well as officers, governors, ministers and "ordinary" elite soldiers. Yeah, I remember the conversion to Islam involving being freed as well. The class I remember it from approached it from a direction of how the practice arose rather than the longer-term upshot.
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Sep 20, 2019 03:02
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Milo and POTUS posted:I think he's saying he wouldn't use it in the manner you'd normally use a shovel for fear of bending or pinching the barrel I assume it needs to be reinforced down the barrel so you can use it for this, making it much heavier than it needs to be?
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Sep 20, 2019 03:10
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Milo and POTUS posted:I think he's saying he wouldn't use it in the manner you'd normally use a shovel for fear of bending or pinching the barrel Yeah I’m not opposed to poking the plate into the dirt to steady it, but I wouldn’t dig a foxhole with it.
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Sep 20, 2019 03:33
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This could be another "knee mortar" thing, where someone doesn't quite understand the logic behind a tool and fucks themselves up with it.
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Sep 20, 2019 04:04
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Spade mortar as a spade. Apparently it really was intended to be used for digging, but it's such a tiny shovel that you aren't going to bend it out of place (the biggest force in digging is from the foot pushing the blade into the ground, anyway)
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Sep 20, 2019 04:21
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In one of the previous iterations of the thread somebody posted a folding shovel that could be used as a bow saw, IIRC it was some setup where one end of the saw blade would clip onto the shovel's pick (or a cut out on the corner of the shovel, I forget which) and the other would go through a notch in the handle where it would be tensioned. Probably not super great in practice but also probably way better than trying to cut through stuff with one of those shovels that have teeth vaguely stamped/cut into one of the sides of the spade.
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Sep 20, 2019 05:28
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some horrible shovels in this thread
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Sep 20, 2019 05:38
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Shovelware History.
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Sep 20, 2019 05:41
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LatwPIAT posted:The entire point of the ultralight mortar is that it's not a crew-served weapon. You can put them at platoon or even squad level, giving the platoon/squad the organic capability of long-range explosive/smoke/whatever delivery. This is a role that can also be filled by rifle grenades or UGLs, but the ultralight mortar typically has advantages in range over both and warhead size over the UGL. It also allows forces that typically wouldn't have any high-arc firepower at all to have mortar support, which is part of the reason the Polish army were getting ultralight mortars in 2017 for their commando forces. nah they were crew served weapons
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Sep 20, 2019 06:07
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Randarkman posted:I'm not sure about the universality of such a practice but I think I can remember reading at one time that part of some sort of Mamluk training/education was that the conversion to Islam involved being freed. Though I can't remember where I read that and I can't say how common that was. My point more generally is that whether they were formally freed or not, was that their status as Mamluks so superceded their status as slaves or freedmen (in many slave societies, not just the Islamic world, there are alot of similarities in the status of slaves and freedmen, as you mention freedmen typically legalled remained the wards of their masters, the difference being more one of degree than much else) that they become something completely different from the rest of the slave population, and as the military (and often administrative elite) they stood above the free population as well as officers, governors, ministers and "ordinary" elite soldiers. Yeah, mamluks and ministeriales were technically slaves and serfs, but also part of the upper classes.
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Sep 20, 2019 06:11
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ChubbyChecker posted:nah they were crew served weapons I will grant that some ultralight mortars were crew-served, but the squad-level ultralights such as the M4 Patmor or the LGI Mle F1 can and are used as individual weapons.
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Sep 20, 2019 08:36
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Calling ww2 light mortars 'not crew served weapons' because they could be theoretically operated by one person is a bit off base.
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Sep 20, 2019 12:13
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Panzeh posted:Calling ww2 light mortars 'not crew served weapons' because they could be theoretically operated by one person is a bit off base. This is a pedantic as hell argument. The original context is that supposedly light mortars are bad because "they are a waste of a crew served weapon". The implication of that statement is that any 'crew served' weapon is essentially equivalent in terms of the costs both literal and figurative. This is obviously untrue. A 88 mm and a bren gun are both 'crew served weapons'. They are not remotely the same. Contrarywise, the disposable MBT LAW rocket launcher is meant for one individual soldier, but that doesn't mean it's not big and cumbersome. The very light mortars that weigh about 5 kg firing ammo that weighs 0.5 kg can be easily carried and fired by an individual soldier but WWII armies decide to typically use them with two soldiers... because it's no big deal to have one more guy help out with the reloading/sighting targets/taking fire orders via radio/carrying ammunition to improve the accuracy and rate of fire. Whether or not it's crew served has no bearing on the efficiency of a weapon system - indeed, the fact that a second soldier can help replace ammo belts and swap out hot barrels can be a *benefit*. It's not warhammer or something where you get a finite number of heavy weapons team slots and can pick which weapon each get. If you are concerned with the use of manpower, the real question is: "Are two guys chucking 25 explosive (or smoke) 50mm shells per minute better than just having two more guys with bolt action rifles?" Well the armies that used these weapons sure as hell seemed to think so and I'm inclined to agree. Fangz fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 12:33
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