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taqueso posted:Did anyone try to make heavy submersible vehicles that would just crawl across the bottom, with battery power or a snorkel for the engine? Like this? _OZON.jpg) Snorkels have their use; helping heavy tanks ford across relatively shallow and calm rivers. But you can't really do that with ship-to-shore operations. You'd have to get the ship VERY close to shore so that you drop the AFV where the water is shallow enough and hope it doesn't get wrecked by the surf. You'd also have to be very sure that the bottom is smooth and hard; this severely limits the number of beaches that you can threaten. You'd also have to be sure the AFV lands right-side-up when it hits bottom. Moving so close to the beach would put the ship in a lot more danger; at that point you might as well just drive the boat up to the beach and drop the tanks like a WWII LST:  In contrast, floating AAVs have enough range that they can move to shore from a ship that is far away (we practiced over-the-horizon assaults when I was in) which gives a much better chance of catching an adversary unawares. They can also go through surprisingly heavy surf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=022KkzFB5Vk (That's an AVTB (test) vehicle and they're deliberately flipping it in heavy pounding surf.)
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Apr 7, 2020 21:07
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Also surprisingly enough most beaches and coastal beds have massive sudden height jumps and drops, doing a rollover drill 25ft underwater could be... interesting.
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Apr 7, 2020 21:10
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Zorak of Michigan posted:How would you even create those turret shapes? You know how the Germans made their helmets? Just scale that up a bit.
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Apr 7, 2020 21:11
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Cessna posted:Do you want it to float or not? Also most of the hull is under water when it's in its element.
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Apr 7, 2020 21:14
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taqueso posted:Did anyone try to make heavy submersible vehicles that would just crawl across the bottom, with battery power or a snorkel for the engine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion#Tauchpanzer
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Apr 7, 2020 21:24
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wiegieman posted:AAVs without an armor kit can be penetrated by a machine gun? That seems like an oversight. Armouring APCs for more than .30 calibre AP is surprisingly difficult. Not because it's technically difficult in itself to armour it to that level, but because they quickly get impractically heavy. There's a couple of exceptions (Sweden, France), but you don't really see vehicle sides protected against .50 cal machine guns until 1975 (YPR-765 PRI), 1982 (BMP-2D) and 1983 (M2A0 Bradley IFV) - and even vehicle fronts getting anything more was also rare until the early 80s. It's also barely an oversight: infantry sections and platoons very rarely carry firearms heavier than .30 calibre AP. The heavy machine gun is a weapon typically either carried by a vehicle, or a fairly immobile battalion-level weapon for infantry. Armouring light vehicle sides against .50 cal or heavier was driven primarily by counterinsurgency and urban warfare experiences in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia (and Vietnam-ish), and to a lesser degree the proliferation of heavy artillery and autocannons on the battlefield. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 21:50
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quote:On the AAVP-7A1 it increases the side armour protection from 7.62 NATO AP to 14.5x114 mm Soviet and 155 mm artillery fragments Am I reading that wrong? Because to me that says the old armor protected from medium machine guns and the new armor protects from heavy machine guns. And 14.5x114 mm is basically a light canon anyway. But there is 10 posts about it not protecting from machine guns so, I dunno.
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Apr 7, 2020 22:12
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LatwPIAT posted:Armouring APCs for more than .30 calibre AP is surprisingly difficult. Not because it's technically difficult in itself to armour it to that level, but because they quickly get impractically heavy. There's a couple of exceptions (Sweden, France), but you don't really see vehicle sides protected against .50 cal machine guns until 1975 (YPR-765 PRI), 1982 (BMP-2D) and 1983 (M2A0 Bradley IFV) - and even vehicle fronts getting anything more was also rare until the early 80s. It's also barely an oversight: infantry sections and platoons very rarely carry firearms heavier than .30 calibre AP. The heavy machine gun is a weapon typically either carried by a vehicle, or a fairly immobile battalion-level weapon for infantry. Sure, the army came to visit me, 'twas in the early hours, With Saladins and Saracens and Ferret armoured cars They thought they had me cornered, but I gave them all a fright With the armour piercing bullets of my little Armalite. And it's down in the New Lodge is where I long to be Lying in the dark with a provo company A comrade on me left and another on me right And a clip of ammunition for me little armalite
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Apr 7, 2020 22:20
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Cessna posted:Like this? You missed the DD Tank from WWII which essentially turned an M4 Sherman into a boat and that today they use LCACs to run tanks up onto the beach. Actually, I don't know if they still use LCACs. Anyway, the whole point of most landings is to attack where they aren't. Which they mostly did in WWII. Most landings were unopposed. You just hear about the opposed ones because they are so horrific. VVVV: One of the really interesting things about amphibious landings is how ineffective massive shore bombardments were at reducing fortifications. Murgos fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 22:22
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This is unrelated but it's a cool photo:
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Apr 7, 2020 22:22
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FuturePastNow posted:This is unrelated but it's a cool photo: I can’t even begin to imagine the noise. Shooting a mosin without earplugs years ago gave me some small appreciation for how loving loud combat must be, but a battleship full of 16” guns a quarter mile away is a whole new level of 
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Apr 7, 2020 22:30
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I can’t even begin to imagine the noise. Shooting a mosin without earplugs years ago gave me some small appreciation for how loving loud combat must be, but a battleship full of 16” guns a quarter mile away is a whole new level of Might actually not be that bad. If you're in the open (as in not in an indoor range where sound is bouncing around like crazy) poo poo drops off pretty quickly with distance. Shooting a Mosin indoors without plugs is nuts. Shooting one outdoors is bad. But if you're standing a few hundred feet from someone shooting one and don't have muffs on it's not bad at all. That said, big guns are loving loud. My grandfather was in the artillery and hoo boy was he deaf as a post.
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Apr 7, 2020 22:33
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Murgos posted:You missed the DD Tank from WWII which essentially turned an M4 Sherman into a boat and that today they use LCACs to run tanks up onto the beach. Actually, I don't know if they still use LCACs. I "missed" because that wasn't what was asked about. This was the question I was answering: taqueso posted:Did anyone try to make heavy submersible vehicles that would just crawl across the bottom, with battery power or a snorkel for the engine?
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Apr 7, 2020 22:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:Sure, the army came to visit me, 'twas in the early hours, Contact close right! Gunner! Traverse right, gunman in house... On! Shoot!
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Apr 7, 2020 22:59
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FuturePastNow posted:This is unrelated but it's a cool photo: having experienced the morale boost of brrrrp runs firsthand i can hardly imagine how rock hard all those dudes must be Nebakenezzer posted:For bewbies: Although he missed the mark on the battleship I think this guy effectively predicted the rise of the mega cruise ship of the early 21st century bewbies fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 23:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:Might actually not be that bad. If you're in the open (as in not in an indoor range where sound is bouncing around like crazy) poo poo drops off pretty quickly with distance. Shooting a Mosin indoors without plugs is nuts. Shooting one outdoors is bad. But if you're standing a few hundred feet from someone shooting one and don't have muffs on it's not bad at all. This was outside. It was still very very loud, but I take your point about distance-from even 20 feet away it is much much less loud. My great uncle was in the artillery as well and was inspecting something up near the muzzle of the gun when some dumbass fired the gun next to him and permanently pretty much deafened him in his right ear.
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Apr 8, 2020 00:51
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Back in the days of pirates, did merchant ships arm themselves much, or did they just rely on there being proper warships to cover them, like I think was the strategy in WW2? I know there was a whole deal where in times of war, ships would get brought into the navy, so presumably civilian ships were capable of being armed, and may even have the gunports and emplacements already installed even if the navy took their guns back.
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Apr 8, 2020 01:07
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This was outside. It was still very very loud, but I take your point about distance-from even 20 feet away it is much much less loud. My great uncle was in the artillery as well and was inspecting something up near the muzzle of the gun when some dumbass fired the gun next to him and permanently pretty much deafened him in his right ear. I hope he beat someone's rear end. I hate people who gently caress around with guns
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Apr 8, 2020 01:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in the days of pirates, did merchant ships arm themselves much, or did they just rely on there being proper warships to cover them, like I think was the strategy in WW2? I don't know about Age of Sail, but in WW2 the term you're looking for is "armed merchant cruiser", and yeah a lot of civilian craft were armed in WW2, typically with a deck gun and some depth charges. I don't know if they were still under civilian control with a Navy contingent on-board to handle the weapons, or if they were wholly handed over to the Navy. Typically the retrofitting was moderately extensive, though; you can't just bolt a 4" gun to a wooden deck and expect it to fire (more than once).
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Apr 8, 2020 01:18
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FrangibleCover posted:dink-dink-dink-dink 
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Apr 8, 2020 01:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in the days of pirates, did merchant ships arm themselves much, or did they just rely on there being proper warships to cover them, like I think was the strategy in WW2? In the age of sail, larger merchants did indeed often arm themselves, and carronades were initially seen as a weapon for merchant ships to carry, but the main problem with merchant ships was that they tended to lack trained gunners(and had a smallish crew in general) and the ships were absolute tubs. Privateers generally sailed small warships like brigs and sloops of war and would just take them by outmaneuvering them or shooting from long range.
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Apr 8, 2020 01:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in the days of pirates, did merchant ships arm themselves much, or did they just rely on there being proper warships to cover them, like I think was the strategy in WW2? I don't really know about 17th c. stuff that is maybe more pirate times, but many 18th c merchantmen were nominally armed with a few light 4 or 6lbers and maybe some swivel guns, that miiiight be enough to scare off a pirate/privateer. The bigger problem for them was not so much not having many guns as much as not having enough men to serve them. Labor cost money in 1720 same as 2020, and merchant ships tried to run with as small a crew as possible (not to mention many prime seamen being pressed into the navy in wartime). A merchantman might have a crew of 20 (vs 200 on a ~30-40 gun frigate or even 80-100 on a small 20 gun 6th rate), but they were mostly needed to sail and work the ship. Even a small 4lber gun needed 3-4 men to serve it at least. That merchantman might be able to spare the hands to actually fight 2 of its 4 or 6 guns, but then have nobody left to to fight off boarders, and most pirates/privateers really wanted to board and capture their target, not shoot them full of holes. Even East Indiamen, which were quite heavily armed for merchant vessels, didn't have near enough crew to actually fight their guns and sail the ship. Remember too that the 18th C/height of age of sail is basically a century of only briefly interrupted global war between basically all of the maritime powers, and there was no radio and very little law enforcement on the high seas so anyone who could take you was a potential pirate, and all the belligerent powers issued letters of marque (licenses to privateer/pirate) very liberally. Barbary corsairs were a big problem in the Med and the east indies, especially around Malaysia/Indonesia, was notorious for pirates even in the Napoleonic wars.
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Apr 8, 2020 01:34
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Most privateers and letters-of-marque were converted merchant ships themselves. Occasionally somebody would get their hands of a surplus light warship, but you didn't often see purpose-built privateers unless there was an extended war going on.
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Apr 8, 2020 01:36
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Gnoman posted:Most privateers and letters-of-marque were converted merchant ships themselves. Occasionally somebody would get their hands of a surplus light warship, but you didn't often see purpose-built privateers unless there was an extended war going on. A lot of my knowledge of it is US privateers during the Revolutionary War who did indeed get purpose-built brigs(The colonies had strong shipbuilding industries for their time) and such but yeah that makes sense.
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Apr 8, 2020 01:38
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I think especially in the early days of trans-oceanic voyages the distinction between merchant and warship can be a bit blurry. If we're talking about the East India companies the same ship whose primary job was getting a load of spices and coming home would also get bonuses for sinking any jerk-off rivals they encountered. I haven't read much about later periods but I remember a few anecdotes. There was one I remember about an 18th century colonial or revolution era American ship in the Caribbean that encountered either a Spanish navy ship or privateer. The American merchant ship was caught by the Spanish one which attacked and initiated a boarding action, but the Americans managed to barely fend them off. Eventually, they were just allowed to drift free and escape. The next is not really an anecdote but a short story by Herman Melville, who really did join a crew of a whaling ship and travel to the Pacific. In Benito Cereno, a whaling vessel encounters a slave ship that has undergone a revolt, and been taken by the slaves. The reaction of the whalers to finding this out isn't fear or to run away, but can be summarized as "HELL YEAH, we are going to make so much loving money from these guys!" They immediately arm themselves with boarding pikes, muskets, and whale-butchering halberds and take the ship by storm, slaughtering everyone who resist and mounting the head of the chief slave on the bow. It's fiction but given Melville's personal experience I think it does reflect to some extent the actual attitudes and capabilities of such private vessels in the mid 19th century.
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Apr 8, 2020 02:22
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:You know how the Germans made their helmets? Just scale that up a bit. Did anyone make a press anywhere near that size for doing BB-thickness armor? I thought most late-era BBs had their relatively flat rolled plates which were then welded together because that was the sanest way to make armor on that scale.
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Apr 8, 2020 04:46
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Cessna posted:Of course. Merely owning or playing a German WWII tabletop army doesn't mean someone is a Nazi. I love the Hollywood Tiger! I did once play a guy who filled his infantry squads with "Assholes", rather than any historically accurate uniforms. I recall seeing the usual expected ones like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc but he also had Mike Tyson, Michael Vick, His Ex-Wife, His Old LT From Army Days, Carrot Top, Bugs Bunny (is kind of an rear end in a top hat) and various other things I didn't really recognize (old man references lost on me). They were lovingly painted and arranged into squads for a WW2 game.
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Apr 8, 2020 05:28
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Did anyone make a press anywhere near that size for doing BB-thickness armor? I thought most late-era BBs had their relatively flat rolled plates which were then welded together because that was the sanest way to make armor on that scale. I’m pretty sure that was a joke. There’s no way you’re pressing armor anywhere near that thick. Curved tank armor tends to be cast for this reason.
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Apr 8, 2020 05:58
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in the days of pirates, did merchant ships arm themselves much, or did they just rely on there being proper warships to cover them, like I think was the strategy in WW2? They needed something for the dragons and krakens in the middle of the sea, those things are like the size of texas on maps.
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Apr 8, 2020 06:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:I’m pretty sure that was a joke. There’s no way you’re pressing armor anywhere near that thick. Curved tank armor tends to be cast for this reason. Battleship armour plate was typically run through presses, though they could not create especially complicated shapes. The most complex were probably the circular arcs for the barbettes. To do this, you needed massive pieces of equipment - British armour manufacturers had up to 12,000 ton presses.
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Apr 8, 2020 09:18
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FrangibleCover posted:dink-dink-dink-dink And then you blow up the family in the next room, it gets into the papers, Ted Kennedy starts creating congressional inquiries into British atrocities, etc. Turning Northern Ireland into Fallujah wasn't the aim.
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Apr 8, 2020 10:31
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feedmegin posted:And then you blow up the family in the next room, it gets into the papers, Ted Kennedy starts creating congressional inquiries into British atrocities, etc. Turning Northern Ireland into Fallujah wasn't the aim. Wasn't whose aim? Getting the government to retaliate against you, hurt civilians, and create their own enemy is a time-honored insurgent tactic.
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Apr 8, 2020 10:37
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The Lone Badger posted:Wasn't whose aim? Of the guy in the armoured vehicle, I meant, yeah.
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Apr 8, 2020 11:03
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Randomcheese3 posted:Battleship armour plate was typically run through presses, though they could not create especially complicated shapes. The most complex were probably the circular arcs for the barbettes. To do this, you needed massive pieces of equipment - British armour manufacturers had up to 12,000 ton presses. To roll dreadnought turret and barbette armour three British steelworks were fitted with a 12,000hp steam engine - similar in size and power to the main engines on the Titanic - to run the rolling mills. The engines had special fast-acting valve gear so they could be reversed under full power to run the steel back and forth through the rollers. They could go from full speed ahead to full speed reverse, under load, in two seconds. The Japanese government bought one of these engines too. The surviving one worked at Cammell Laird before being moved to British Steel's River Don Works in the 1950s to produce nuclear reactor shield plating, which it did until 1978 when it was retired and preserved.
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Apr 8, 2020 12:01
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Kind of cool to be doing engineering on a level where you have to check whether The Press, the only one in the country that can do what you need, is available
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Apr 8, 2020 12:59
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BalloonFish posted:To roll dreadnought turret and barbette armour three British steelworks were fitted with a 12,000hp steam engine - similar in size and power to the main engines on the Titanic - to run the rolling mills. The engines had special fast-acting valve gear so they could be reversed under full power to run the steel back and forth through the rollers. They could go from full speed ahead to full speed reverse, under load, in two seconds. The Japanese government bought one of these engines too. The surviving one worked at Cammell Laird before being moved to British Steel's River Don Works in the 1950s to produce nuclear reactor shield plating, which it did until 1978 when it was retired and preserved. It's definitely worth popping in to the Kelham Island museum to see the Don Engine in motion, it's quite big. Even better if you go see it during a beer festival
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Apr 8, 2020 13:09
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The side armour is penetratable, not the front. Apart from the Soviet Dolphin Force, there aren't many threats to the side of a beach. well, the classic way to defend a beach is through positions in enfilade to the shoreline. you can cover the most possible landing sites with the fewest weapons, and protect your positions more effectively from the invader's support assets that are firing on you from positions perpendicular to the shoreline front is most important because usually you are sticking that part towards the enemy, and then of course you are dealing with the reality of the mass of the vehicle.
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Apr 8, 2020 14:07
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aphid_licker posted:Kind of cool to be doing engineering on a level where you have to check whether The Press, the only one in the country that can do what you need, is available This is a neat video about a few giant presses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk
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Apr 8, 2020 14:07
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aphid_licker posted:Kind of cool to be doing engineering on a level where you have to check whether The Press, the only one in the country that can do what you need, is available Presses are still highly strategic assets. The US Heavy Press Program is a good example.
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Apr 8, 2020 14:08
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Wonder if they have time to squeeze in a pair of my pants e: I did not know the bit about the Germans having press superiority in WW2 e: so if today we decided gently caress it, we're building an even bigger press, what would that let us do? aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Apr 8, 2020 |
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Apr 8, 2020 14:37
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