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Macarthur was a huge piece of poo poo for gassing the bonus army and wanting to nuke Korea among other things. However he was also army chief of staff during the interwar period, overseeing the reorganization and the modernization of the army and integration of the CCC during the new deal. He also had a savvy understanding of what we now term information warfare- he was big on code breaking and public relations (plays nicely to his arrogant self image). Plus the fact that he has actual operational and strategic success as a commander. Horrible human being but capable General. Lee was a traitor who crippled himself as a commander by faith to the south’s stupid ideology.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:21
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Gnoman posted:Was it really brilliant, or did he just get lucky? Perhaps the same can be said for all incredible tactical coups
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Oct 17, 2019 17:22
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Lee was probably a better operational commander than MacArthur, come on
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Oct 17, 2019 17:22
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Gnoman posted:Was it really brilliant, or did he just get lucky? One of the biggest challenges for a commander is mitigating risk. He took a risk, got lucky, and reaped the benefits
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Oct 17, 2019 17:26
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FastestGunAlive posted:One of the biggest challenges for a commander is mitigating risk. He took a risk, got lucky, and reaped the benefits Also taking calculated risks. Lee at Gettysburg was a risk that he shouldn't have taken. Mac at Inchon was a risk that was worth taking IMO.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:31
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FastestGunAlive posted:One of the biggest challenges for a commander is mitigating risk. He took a risk, got lucky, and reaped the benefits Think you've got to weigh his entirely-avoidable, almost-deliberate misread of China against Inchon, though. Especially in terms of mitigating risk.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:31
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Agree with both of you. Calculated risk taking is the term I was better looking for, thanks st c
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Oct 17, 2019 17:34
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Fangz posted:The thing about Lee was that he was a loving traitor How you feel about his politics or loyalty have nothing to do with whether he's a good general, though.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:40
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Epicurius posted:The thing about Lee is that he wasn't that terrible a general, as I see it. When he was on the defensive, he won victories, and he was well liked by his troops. The problem with Lee is that he was a terrible offensive general. He'd take stupid risks, underestimate his opposition and get his men killed. But he was fine at Fredericksburg, and masterful at Chancellorsville. I think Lee had no real conception of the war beyond "defend Virginia by attacking the Union Army." That's a pretty huge blind-spot. Yes, he was good at the operational level, but lacked strategic vision. zoux posted:He knew the future of war wasn't clever maneuver it was meat grinding I'd argue that Grant was also good at maneuvering; look how he cornered Lee in the Overland campaign. Yes, he took heavy looses, but he inflicted greater losses on Lee and pinned him to Richmond.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:45
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Gort posted:This does ignore the concept of armoured warships, though. If your six-inchers can't penetrate the armour and the eight-inchers can, the eight-inchers have more options. That's true, but the general expectation was that cruisers weren't going to be fighting anything with enough armour for this to matter. 6in guns could penetrate the armour of most cruisers at typical combat ranges, and they weren't expected to fight battleships.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:50
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Randomcheese3 posted:That's true, but the general expectation was that cruisers weren't going to be fighting anything with enough armour for this to matter. 6in guns could penetrate the armour of most cruisers at typical combat ranges, and they weren't expected to fight battleships. 6 inchers were also expected to fight destroyers and raid commerce. I don't think anyone foresaw just how thoroughly submarines and airpower would take over the commerce raiding role from surface vessels, even after WW1.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:52
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Epicurius posted:How you feel about his politics or loyalty have nothing to do with whether he's a good general, though. A good general wont lead his men to the slaughter without a chance of winning. He prolonged the war.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:53
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Cessna posted:I think Lee had no real conception of the war beyond "defend Virginia by attacking the Union Army." That's a pretty huge blind-spot. Yes, he was good at the operational level, but lacked strategic vision. I'm a layman for sure and I wasn't commenting on his tactical acumen but my understanding was that he was the first Union commander who was willing to take the casualties needed, and that made a pretty big difference. Is there a difference in Union casualty rate before and after Grant took overall command?
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Oct 17, 2019 17:55
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I think it's worth considering some alright or pretty good generals as overrated, just because the power of myth can exponentially inflate the public opinion of these people far beyond any human can stand up to. Like Washington was alright and had his talents (and kinda hosed it in his career in the British military), but his sheer importance in national myth is something that would be impossible to live up to. Although the concept of generals being independently great outside of their contexts is kinda weird, and it's funny to imagine handing totally different armies to different generals. Like trying to get Genghis Khan to lead a bunch of American conscripts in the revolutionary war, or getting constantly-broke Ulysses Grant to do what Simon Bolivar did, when the only reason Bolivar could get his foot in the door was because he had the money to do a lot of financing personally. Take Joan of Arc and get her to do Caesar's conquest of Gaul.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:57
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LingcodKilla posted:A good general wont lead his men to the slaughter without a chance of winning. He prolonged the war. I mean, he ended the war at Appomattox, in spite of some suggestions that the army could have gone guerrilla. And I don't think it was until almost the end of the war that the Confederates realized they didn't have a chance of winning. Surely in 1861-1862, for instance, they still thought they could pull it off, get foreign support, and stoke US anti-war sympathies to get a peace treaty. And I dont know that that was unreasonable. They certainly were at a disadvantage, but the whole founding myth of the US is the idea of the people rising up against a stronger, tyrannical government, and that was a role the secessionists deliberately cast themselves in.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:04
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So on the subject of design-your-own-battleship games, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts just entered pre-release Alpha and looks already like a pretty polished experience. The model is definitely more Rule the Waves than Warship Gunner; it'll have a mission mode and a full global dynamic campaign placing the player in command of a historical power's naval forces but not their political decisionmaking, like Rule the Waves (the campaign is the big component not in the pre-release). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjA8p0w8jc It looks pretty cool! The approach taken with the ship designer tracks statistics for things like smoke obstruction and makes maintaining your center of gravity both longitudinally and transversely a big concern, but still gives a lot of leeway—like, it looks like the hulls are mostly based off of historical designs but there's a slider for displacement that will add more hull sections within a certain range.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:06
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think it's worth considering some alright or pretty good generals as overrated, just because the power of myth can exponentially inflate the public opinion of these people far beyond any human can stand up to. Les Guerres Gallique
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Oct 17, 2019 18:10
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Cythereal posted:6 inchers were also expected to fight destroyers and raid commerce. Yes, though I skipped over those as they weren't armoured. Cruisers were fairly useful as commerce raiders for the RN in the opening days of WWII, and did pretty well in the Mediterranean too. British cruisers swept most of the German merchant marine from the sea in the first few months of WWII - Ajax actually captured more ships off the River Plate than Graf Spee, for example. In the Mediterranean, British surface raiders savaged a number of Italian convoys. In the first half of 1941, the RN's surface forces did more damage to Italian shipping than submarines or aircraft, though over the course of the war, they would come off worse.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:11
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zoux posted:I'm a layman for sure and I wasn't commenting on his tactical acumen but my understanding was that he was the first Union commander who was willing to take the casualties needed, and that made a pretty big difference. I'm not saying you're wrong when you say that Grant foresaw the future of war. I've heard it said that Lee was a Good Napoleonic general while Grant was a good 20th century commander, in the sense that their basic understanding of what war was differed. But, that said, there's a lot more to Grant than "meat grinder." The fact is that denigrating Grant as some sort of uncaring and brutal monster who threw his men's lives away is part of the Lost Cause narrative - to whit, "Lee was a good commander who loved his men, Grant was a butcher." But it isn't true. The situation is summed up well here; rather than paraphrase I'll just quote it: quote:The respective casualty figures of these two generals contradict the myth about who, if either, was a butcher. For the entire war, Grant incurred about 154,000 casualties (killed, wounded, missing, captured) while imposing about 191,000 casualties on his foes. Lee suffered about 209,000 casualties while imposing about 240,000 casualties on his opponents. There's also a recent book that really goes after Lee v. Grant entitled The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won by Bonekemper; I'd recommend it for a good summary, and it is NOT kind to Lee. I can recommend lots more on the US Civil War if you like. zoux posted:Is there a difference in Union casualty rate before and after Grant took overall command? Very broadly speaking, yes, Union casualties increased as the war went on, but there's a lot more to the story. For one thing, the armies got bigger as the war went on - 1st Bull Run, arguably the first major battle of the war, had about 36,000 troops engaged. In comparison Gettysburg had about 180,000 troops engaged, and many of the battles of the Overland Campaign which I mentioned above (where Grant was in command) were of about the same order of magnitude as Gettysburg. (For example, The Wilderness had about 180,000 troops engaged (~125,000 Union v. ~60,000 Confederate), Spotsylvania Courthouse similarly had 110,000 Union v. 60,000 Confederate.) When more troops are mobilized and more troops fight, more troops die. For another - well, Grant took casualties because he was winning the war, taking the fight to the enemy. When you attack, yes, you take casualties, but this wasn't Grant being a slow-witted butcher, this was Grant destroying the enemy's army and taking his territory.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:19
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HookedOnChthonics posted:So on the subject of design-your-own-battleship games, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts just entered pre-release Alpha and looks already like a pretty polished experience. The model is definitely more Rule the Waves than Warship Gunner; it'll have a mission mode and a full global dynamic campaign placing the player in command of a historical power's naval forces but not their political decisionmaking, like Rule the Waves (the campaign is the big component not in the pre-release). Yeah, I stumbled across this a week or two ago, and if anything it's encouraging me to double down on not driving a realistic simulation with plausible ships, to better-differentiate myself. That said, I hope they do well; there's plenty of room for naval wargames IMO.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Entirely fair, and thanks for the note. This is one of those things that is basically just waiting for me to build the systems involved so I can experiment with it; right now I not only have no weather, I have no radar either. The in-game HUD is limited to a few lines of text in the top-left corner. :fist bump: If you are thinking of people building their own ships in systems, the nerdy battleship chat does have something to offer, maybe. The characteristics of a ship have basics, like its center of gravity, power, how much armor it has, etc. Displacement especially says a bit about what kind of ship it is, and is it a lithe destroyer or a lumbering dreadnought. Anyway, I just bring it up as these real world rules and limits might be useful both for defining ship classes and to keeping the player from doing things that are totally unrealistic. Similarly, fleet resupply, either in general or specifically with fuel oil, might open interesting tactical options. In more restricted scenerios, you might have to choose between a squadron of cruisers and destroyers, or one battleship supported by destroyers. TooMuchAbstraction posted:On the basis of being mythologized by a substantial fraction of the population, Lee. Can't speak for mythology, but Lee really was a great general. I want to say MacArthur is most over-rated.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:38
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Hang on now, I'm not trying to perpetuate a Lost Cause myth
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Oct 17, 2019 18:50
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The Naval game I want would be a pre-Dreadnought ship designer simulation. You try to build the best battleships you can, to be better then you rival designers and maybe even other countries. But when you come to close to the full Dreadnought you start the design revolution, get fired and it is game over.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:56
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From my understanding, Grant had the miraculous strategy of winning, and it was a poor decision on Lee's part to not try that himself.
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Oct 17, 2019 18:59
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zoux posted:Hang on now, I'm not trying to perpetuate a Lost Cause myth No, no! I wasn't saying you were! Rather, "Grant = Butcher" has become incorporated as a part of that narrative. I did not intend to imply that you were trying to pass along Lost Cause bullshit.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:01
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Cessna posted:No, no! I wasn't saying you were! Ok cool I just didn't want to get that rep lol. My impression of Grant (and Sherman) was that they were somewhat unique among Union generals in recognizing that winning the war meant a lot of blood and pain on both sides, but they didn't like it. Sherman in particular.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:04
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Would overloading a cruiser hull and sinking the ship unlock the Surcouf?
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Oct 17, 2019 19:05
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FastestGunAlive posted:Macarthur was a huge piece of poo poo for gassing the bonus army and wanting to nuke Korea among other things. However he was also army chief of staff during the interwar period, overseeing the reorganization and the modernization of the army and integration of the CCC during the new deal. He also had a savvy understanding of what we now term information warfare- he was big on code breaking and public relations (plays nicely to his arrogant self image). Plus the fact that he has actual operational and strategic success as a commander. Horrible human being but capable General. He was a horrible human being and a useless general who got lucky once. FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 19:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think it's worth considering some alright or pretty good generals as overrated, just because the power of myth can exponentially inflate the public opinion of these people far beyond any human can stand up to. This is a valid point and I think any student of military history or a military professional needs to look beyond battles won. Washington being a great example of someone worth studying not for being a tactical genius but because he understood the bigger picture of the war. As an aside, I will gladly take a Washington=genius National myth over the recent right wing depiction of the war being won exclusively by minutemen/3 percenters/militia. Mostly because it’d be easier for them to accept than understanding the French contribution or Britain’s “gently caress it” at the end.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:21
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Milo and POTUS posted:I had a pretty solid idea for pirate themed RL with FTL-inspired mechanics. You could even target different parts of the ship during ship to ship combat. This is my dream game and I'm mad it hasn't been made yet. All I want is to feel the creeping doom as water floods from compartment to compartment in my battleship, instead of the typical ship hitpoints system. Tias posted:There are really many references in both fiction and documentaries that marines would end up shooting AKs in firefights because their own rifles failed. I don't know the truth of the matter, but with that much smoke, you'd think there was fire. With many military history anecdotes, something that happened sometimes can become exaggerated into something that was commonplace, or part of doctrine.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:24
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LatwPIAT posted:Basically the system I know the most about is the D-cat PAL fitted to the B61 nuclear bomb, so I'll talk about it: So...is there anything practical preventing someone who gets their hands on a bomb from just feeding power to the X-unit until it goes boom? Like, that was a very detailed and interesting post on how difficult it is to get the PAL to detonate the bomb except when it's meant to, which is great if your threat model is sabotage, accidental release from an airplane, plane crashes, etc, but it sounds like it doesn't really provide any defence if someone manages to walk off with an entire bomb and can dissect it at their leisure.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:31
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If you're talking about overrated generals, surely Rommel would be high up on that list as well.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:34
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Nebakenezzer posted::fist bump: Sir. This game will have guns that go all the way up to 36". I don't know what you're implying. Rockopolis posted:Would overloading a cruiser hull and sinking the ship unlock the Surcouf? The Surcouf is getting an upgrade to boss status. Current plan is a submersible supership that, when you finish destroying all the guns on the topside, inverts and reveals the other set of guns on the underside. Here's my reference data.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:36
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:... Little Mac for most underrated Unconventional, but you've got my vote.
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Oct 17, 2019 19:52
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fishmech posted:In World War II, L Ron Hubbard had the ship he was in charge of repeatedly attack "Japanese subs" that were in actuality random stuff on the seabed/bottom of bays. There was also the incident where he decided some gunnery practice was in order. So he decided to shoot at the Coronado Islands, which weren't an American possession like he thought and also wasn't empty like he thought. The Mexican government complained about their Naval personnel coming under fire. The fitness report written after includes the following: "Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgment, leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results. He is believed to have been sincere in his efforts to make his ship efficient and ready. Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time. Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be properly supervised."
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Oct 17, 2019 20:03
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Chamale posted:With many military history anecdotes, something that happened sometimes can become exaggerated into something that was commonplace, or part of doctrine. Also the simple fact that countless tests from groups like InRange conclusively prove that the AR-15 and AK don’t come close to matching the myths about their respective reliability. The only time the M16 legitimately struggled was the early stages when it was intentionally issued without cleaning kits or proper instructions on maintenance, which smells of sabotage to make the M14 look good. Keep in mind that soldiers aren’t necessarily weapons experts, even special forces. There’s no guarantee that a Ranger whose M4 jams actually understands how unlikely the malfunction is or exactly what caused it, or that his stolen AK would suffer the same problem in the same situation, but thinks his status gives him special ability to speak on the subject.
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Oct 17, 2019 20:21
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FrangibleCover posted:He also completely hosed everything up in the Philippines and left the troops on Bataan with insufficient food and medicine due to not moving the stockpiles there as planned, failed to work effectively with anybody in SWPAC, insisted on a pointless invasion of the Philippines to get a picture of himself walking up a beach and saying "I have returned!", failed to effectively defascise Japan and completely hosed up the whole China thing. not that he wasn't a horrible human being but i don't think the entire CARTWHEEL campaign counts as getting "lucky"
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Oct 17, 2019 21:12
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Nebakenezzer posted:Also Mr. Abstraction, let me ask this question for you: did weather affect World War 2 Radar? If a squall was between two groups of ships, were one effectively hidden from the other? In general it's "kinda", weather won't block the signal but it can degrade it by causing clutter or rain fade (a "shadow") that obscures targets behind it if the weather is dense enough. The latter is actually a problem for weather radar too, because meteorologists and pilots will want to see inside a storm to see what's going on or if there's more weather behind it. This is less of a issue with lower-frequency radars, but since most radars on aircraft or escort ships are smaller UHF/microwave and up ones it's a issue for them. Code7700 has a short page about it: http://code7700.com/radar_attenuation.htm There was also the "Battle of the Pips" in the Alaskan theater where the Navy lit up a flock of migratory birds with 14 inch fire.
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Oct 17, 2019 21:12
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ToxicFrog posted:So...is there anything practical preventing someone who gets their hands on a bomb from just feeding power to the X-unit until it goes boom? Like, that was a very detailed and interesting post on how difficult it is to get the PAL to detonate the bomb except when it's meant to, which is great if your threat model is sabotage, accidental release from an airplane, plane crashes, etc, but it sounds like it doesn't really provide any defence if someone manages to walk off with an entire bomb and can dissect it at their leisure. It's unlikely that anyone would have had access to both a B61 with this flaw and the documents describing the flaw at the same time. Documents describing this sort of thing have been declassified now, and the bombs with this flaw are probably not in service anymore: chances are they were far less likely to be declassified if they described a plausible attack on the US nuclear stockpile. Additionally, while I make it sound easy, the B61 is not designed to be easy to dissect. That said, it's a truism in security design that you can't hold a sufficiently motivated attacker out forever: Eventually they're going to figure it out.
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Oct 17, 2019 21:22
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chitoryu12 posted:Also the simple fact that countless tests from groups like InRange conclusively prove that the AR-15 and AK don’t come close to matching the myths about their respective reliability. The only time the M16 legitimately struggled was the early stages when it was intentionally issued without cleaning kits or proper instructions on maintenance, which smells of sabotage to make the M14 look good. The stats on AR jams in post-Vietnam actions are actually really good, as well. If I remember right, the numbers from Iraq include a significantly nonzero number of soldiers who literally never had a jam. In Vietnam is a whole mess. Chroming a .22 caliber bore was hard and they didn't do it until later. The powder they were going to use and tuned the gun for wasn't in reliable production so they changed it without changing the gun design. Turns out that stuff burns differently and gives a harsher impulse, so the bolt tugs on the cartridge harder while extracting. (Also increases the rate of full auto fire significantly). Basically this leaves the soldiers with a gun that can rust and gunk up in the chamber with casings getting ripped out of the thing. Sometimes only the rim goes along and the rest of the cartridge stays. Meanwhile the AKM is a mature design.
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