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Trin Tragula posted:Most of France's industrial base is up in the north-east near the borders. It would have been like robbing a Dominos and then giving them all the pizza back. You could always set up a Vichy Dominos with the help of Little Caesars.
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Aug 16, 2020 16:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:You could always set up a Vichy Dominos with the help of Little Caesars.  Technowar in Vietnam: corpulent American planes so loaded down with technology and engines and needless frippery because of capitalism's/America's/Technowar's [same thing really] myopic focus on numbers evidence: airplanes that could fly at mach 2 rarely did so and Thunderchiefs required aerial refueling to AND from Thailand when loaded with bombs e: the author, no poo poo, implies that going past mach 2 was useless because doing so would cause the aircraft to run out of fuel Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 16:36
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  The author is critiquing some stuff in Vietnam's air war and his mouth is writing checks his butt can't cash. For example, he's critical of the USAF staging out of Thailand even though for the past few hundred pages he's shown very effectively that security in Vietnam is a shambles. Now he's criticizing the USAF for not being ready for not being ready for North Vietnamese air raids. The reason why the USAF was not prepared for this is because the North Vietnamese lacked this capability and it never happened
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Aug 16, 2020 16:55
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The thesis statement is such a lovely square hole though, who wouldn't want to jam all the round pegs of history into it
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Aug 16, 2020 17:07
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VK 30.02 (DB) and other Panther ancestors Queue: RSO tank destroyer, Sd.Kfz. 10/4, Czech anti-tank rifles in German service, Hotchkiss H 39/Pz.Kpfw.38H(f) in German service, Flakpanzer 38(t), Grille series, Jagdpanther, Boys and PIAT, Heavy Tank T26E5, History of German diesel engines for tanks, King Tiger trials in the USSR, T-44 prototypes, T-44 prototypes second round, Black Prince, PT-76, M4A3E2 Jumbo Sherman, M4A2 Sherman in the Red Army, T-54, T-44 prototypes, T-44 prototypes second round, T-44 production, Soviet HEAT anti-tank grenades, T-34-85M, Myths of Soviet tank building: interbellum tanks, Light Tank M24, German anti-tank rifles, PT-76 modernizations, ISU-122 front line impressions, German additional tank protection (zimmerit, schurzen, track links), Winter and swamp tracks, Paper light tank destroyers, Allied intel on the Maus , Summary of French interbellum tank development, Medium Tank T20, Medium Tank T23, Myths of Soviet tank building, GMC M10, Tiger II predecessors, Pz.Kpfw.IV Ausf.H-J,IS-6, SU-101/SU-102/Uralmash-1, Centurion Mk.I, SU-100 front line impressions, IS-2 front line impressions, Myths of Soviet tank building: early Great Patriotic War, Influence of the T-34 on German tank building, Medium Tank T25, Heavy Tank T26/T26E1/T26E3, Career of Harry Knox, GMC M36, Geschützwagen Tiger für 17cm K72 (Sf), Early Early Soviet tank development (MS-1, AN Teplokhod), Career of Semyon Aleksandrovich Ginzburg, AT-1, Object 140, SU-76 frontline impressions, Creation of the IS-3, IS-6, SU-5, Myths of Soviet tank building: 1943-44, IS-2 post-war modifications, Myths of Soviet tank building: end of the Great Patriotic War, Medium Tank T6, RPG-1, Lahti L-39 Available for request (others' articles):  T-60 tanks in combat SU-76M modernizations Shashmurin's career ISU-152 Soviet post-war tank building plans  HMC M7 Priest GMC M12 GMC M40/M43  15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf) Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles German tanks for 1946  AMR 35 ZT
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Aug 16, 2020 17:22
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Nebakenezzer posted:
I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them.
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Aug 16, 2020 17:28
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How illegitimate was Vichy France as a state?
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Aug 16, 2020 17:45
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Grenrow posted:I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them. I see this a lot, usually in "mythbusting" articles. "Heh, you might think that X tank was a good tank, but actually the fighting compartment was full of fumes and it had to go through maintenance often! It also had to interact closely with infantry to be successful in battle!" Yeah, no poo poo, you just described every tank ever.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:23
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Grenrow posted:I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them. We used to do FOD walks of the flight lines. Maybe I'm wrong, but keeping runways free of things that could damage the engines seems like standard runway maintenance.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:26
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Ensign Expendable posted:I see this a lot, usually in "mythbusting" articles. "Heh, you might think that X tank was a good tank, but actually the fighting compartment was full of fumes and it had to go through maintenance often! It also had to interact closely with infantry to be successful in battle!" Yeah, no poo poo, you just described every tank ever. I think people who haven't been in the military or haven't looked at the logistics side of armies don't understand how much maintenance helicopters, tanks, and planes require just on a routine basis. So when they first look into it for a particular thing, they see "X hours of maintenance were required for every hour of operational use" and take it as unique to that army or system, because that seems so inefficient. What they don't realize is that all armies are massively inefficient beasts no matter what era, culture, or technology level.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:53
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Grenrow posted:I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them. Regarding the fighter jets specifically, the Russians came up with a interesting concept for the MiG-29: the big intakes on the bottom of the aircraft can be closed completely, with air drawn through slats on the top instead to avoid ingesting runway debris. Is that better or worse than doing debris inspections every day? 
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Aug 16, 2020 19:08
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Tree Bucket posted:From the Mechanical Turk to the Mechanical Jannissary Every now and then I peek in here and find these things
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Aug 16, 2020 19:15
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Grenrow posted:I think people who haven't been in the military or haven't looked at the logistics side of armies don't understand how much maintenance helicopters, tanks, and planes require just on a routine basis. So when they first look into it for a particular thing, they see "X hours of maintenance were required for every hour of operational use" and take it as unique to that army or system, because that seems so inefficient. What they don't realize is that all armies are massively inefficient beasts no matter what era, culture, or technology level. Most peoples' experience with heavy equipment is their car, which usually requires maintenance every 3-6 months or so. So hearing that a military vehicle requires several orders of magnitude more maintenance effort sounds unreasonable. If cars were less reliable, then military vehicles wouldn't sound as bad.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:20
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Most peoples' experience with heavy equipment is their car, which usually requires maintenance every 3-6 months or so. So hearing that a military vehicle requires several orders of magnitude more maintenance effort sounds unreasonable. If cars were less reliable, then military vehicles wouldn't sound as bad. I mean, wouldn't a better analogy be something like a racing car? It's not just that tanks or planes or whatever require more raw maintenance and are put into harder tasks than the average car, it's also that if my car fucks up it's annoying but it just means I'm gonna be late ; when a tank or a plane fucks up, it's gonna break real bad.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:How illegitimate was Vichy France as a state? This is actually a pretty interesting question and one that has been batted around by historians quite a bit over the last 75 years. In 1940 the French Third Republic ceased to be. In the aftermath of their defeat to the Germans, they signed full powers over to Petain, who declared a "French State." This was the official name of the thing that we all call "Vichy France." This happened about a month after the armistice was signed with the Germans. At the time this was as legitimate a transfer of power as any other. The French military had been defeated in a war, they signed a peace treaty with the victorious power, and then changed their government to recognize the post-war reality. Of course, some French people didn't accept that defeat, although there were many fewer of them in 1940 than the post-war mythologizing would imply (and, uncomfortably, a great many of them were French Communists). You had France's wartime allies still fighting against the Germans, and some members of the French military went into exile to continue the fight with them. Among them were some officers who, in discussions with the Allies, began to represent themselves as the French government. De Gaul & co. This is. . . . problematic, to say the least. As we all know the Allies won WW2 so the dudes who kept fighting got to basically dictate that they were now the French government. But, they certainly didn't represent the majority of the French people during the war. A whole hell of a lot of French soldiers who were in allied territories when the surrender happened (lots of French Navy in British ports, for example), chose to be repatriated back to France after the surrender. The idea that a country can say "we've had enough," lay down arms, and agree to terms is pretty crucial in international diplomacy. The notion that a subset of the people in that country can say no in the face of the legitimate government's surrender is awkward at best. There have been other cases where those kinds of people just kind of hung around because their country was never re-conquered. Think Chang Kai Shek demanding in the 60s that he was the true ruler of China. The general consensus today (See Paxton for probably the best single volume work on Vichy France) is that the Vichy regime was as legitimate as any other European government during WW2, and that it was the victory of the Allies that made it illegitimate in the eyes of many after the fact. To think of this another way: Was the government of Weimar Germany legitimate? Were the East and West German governments legitimate? What about the government of Communist Poland? Or the government of Soviet Russia in 1925? Note that this doesn't mean it was a good government. It collaborated with the Nazis on tons of poo poo, including the Holocaust. But then, so did the Hungarian government, which wasn't illegitimate in any real sense either. Compare that to, say, the General Government in Poland with was unilaterally decreed by the Nazis on the basis that it was what was left of Poland after their annexation decree. We can sit around and talk about how much of a free vote it really was when the French Parliament handed over control of the country to Petain with Germans stationed in Paris, but Petain at the time was a revered war hero of the last war. You can say a lot of things about him, but I don't think that you can question that he as a patriotic Frenchman. The Polish General Government, on the other hand, was a totally German creation run by a German. It's also worth noting that the Vichy government was the internationally recognized government of France as far as most neutral countries were concerned (although that isn't an iron clad defense of it - international politics comes into play, just look at how long it took a lot of places to recognize Mao's government), while the General Government was never recognized by anyone who wasn't a Nazi ally.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:35
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Nebakenezzer posted:
Technowar feels like one critique of Westmoreland and the Johnson white house taken to absurd lengths the more I think about it. Just, as someone said before, a beautiful looking square hole to shove round pegs against.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:49
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Grenrow posted:I hate when authors frame really basic concepts as mind-blowing insanity. "Fighters jets have a bunch of different parts and you need a computer to keep track of them efficiently!" No poo poo, that's why everyone uses computers to keep track of their poo poo nowadays. "The engines can't let anything get sucked up in them and you need to police the area to make sure there's no foreign objects being left around the runway!" Yes, is this not an obvious thing to do? Military and civilian planes have been downed by a bird getting sucked into the engine. Why wouldn't you maintain a policy of strict discipline about foreign objects on the runway to make sure a mechanic didn't leave a wrench behind by accident? That's not even a specific thing for military jets. I don't think you can design any kind of jet engine that's going to be okay with having random objects sucked up inside them. There was some criticism of FDF's Hornets demanding much more scrutiny and cleaning on the strip for foreign objects than preceding MiG-21 and Draken. Finland has a number of backup landing sites on some roads (straight, extra wide paved parts, there are also pre-made obstacles in the ditch that can be used to close the location from hostile airlandings) and with Hornets you must bring some serious vacuuming equipment for this to happen. I don't know what the difference between the designs is that causes this but it has to do something with the air intake design.  SlothfulCobra posted:How illegitimate was Vichy France as a state? How legitimate a state is depends on international recognition. Most allied nations actually recognized the government and had diplomatic relations, some like Australia to the end of the war. Some of this was probably due to the benefits for intelligence from having diplomats stationed in an enemy occupied country. Similarly British embassy staff in Helsinki toured Lapland in 1941 to see what the Germans were doing.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:I mean, wouldn't a better analogy be something like a racing car? It's not just that tanks or planes or whatever require more raw maintenance and are put into harder tasks than the average car, it's also that if my car fucks up it's annoying but it just means I'm gonna be late ; when a tank or a plane fucks up, it's gonna break real bad. Oh sure, it would be a better analogy, but I don't think it's the analogy most people think of. They'll draw from their personal experience, so unless they're racing fans or have an interest in other maximum-performance machinery, they'll have a wildly inappropriate basis for comparison when thinking about military equipment.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:12
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It's also interesting because there's an ongoing conversation in 1944 between Roosevelt and Churchill saying "Don't do anything to recognise De Gaulle as a legitimate French leader, we aren't invading to install him in power" and Eisenhower in particular but also the rest of SHAEF saying "we don't have the troops to fight the Germans and also occupy and assume direct governance of France and the Gaullists are the only game in town, so we're going to let him do his thing". Lessons from history that were swiftly forgotten post WW2.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:21
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Alchenar posted:It's also interesting because there's an ongoing conversation in 1944 between Roosevelt and Churchill saying "Don't do anything to recognise De Gaulle as a legitimate French leader, we aren't invading to install him in power" and Eisenhower in particular but also the rest of SHAEF saying "we don't have the troops to fight the Germans and also occupy and assume direct governance of France and the Gaullists are the only game in town, so we're going to let him do his thing". SHAEF had a real blind spot when it came to anything after the battles. They also 110% insisted that administration of captured German territory be left to them because they were afraid of having a rear-area that wasn't secure, but they were equally unwilling to talk concretely about what a German government should look like. There was a lot of buck-passing and simultaneous blocking between the Department of War and Department of State over that. A lot of poo poo was just kinda done seat of the pants and unilaterally. Adenauer is a good example of that. When the Americans took Cologne they just kinda made him Mayor again, and then a year later a British general unilaterally sacked him for behaving like the German civil administration was an equal partner of the (by that point British Sector) military administration.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:30
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 An example of a Peruvian angel with an arquebus, c. 1680.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:SHAEF had a real blind spot when it came to anything after the battles. They also 110% insisted that administration of captured German territory be left to them because they were afraid of having a rear-area that wasn't secure, but they were equally unwilling to talk concretely about what a German government should look like. There was a lot of buck-passing and simultaneous blocking between the Department of War and Department of State over that. A lot of poo poo was just kinda done seat of the pants and unilaterally. Adenauer is a good example of that. When the Americans took Cologne they just kinda made him Mayor again, and then a year later a British general unilaterally sacked him for behaving like the German civil administration was an equal partner of the (by that point British Sector) military administration. How much of this is related to the Americans (Roosevelt's?) seeming hatred of De Gaulle? I know they consistently tried to prop up various other french figures as counters to De Gaulle (Giraud, Darlan etc) but I'm not sure if the two problems were related. Also why did the Americans seem to take such a dislike to De Gaulle in the first place?
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Aug 16, 2020 20:57
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My knowledge of WWII French-American politics is pretty scant, but at least part of it might be because De Gaulle was a notorious rear end in a top hat.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:02
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Xiahou Dun posted:My knowledge of WWII French-American politics is pretty scant, but at least part of it might be because De Gaulle was a notorious rear end in a top hat. De Gaulle was a notorious rear end in a top hat but he was literally playing the hero-in-exile part that Churchill had wet dreams about being able to play so you can see why Churchill would ultimately give him a pass.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:06
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De Gaulle, whatever his merits might have been, was extremely good at being a pompous rear end who made people dislike him.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:07
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Alchenar posted:De Gaulle was a notorious rear end in a top hat but he was literally playing the hero-in-exile part that Churchill had wet dreams about being able to play so you can see why Churchill would ultimately give him a pass. O yeah, I was just pointing out that in addition to any politics that might be going on, De Gaulle was famously an insufferable prick on an interpersonal level so people not liking him makes complete sense. Dude was incapable of not being that guy.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:14
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As I think Max Hastings put it, only De Gaulle could write a military history of the French army that contained no mention of Waterloo.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:24
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IIRC De Gaulle also had some really unrealistic ideas about a) what was strategically feasible at any given time, B) what allied war goals were, and C) how strong a hand he had to play to make that poo poo happen. Also as others have said he could be difficult. In 1943 a plane he was on was sabotaged and almost crashed. MI6 never found out who did it and offiically blame was laid at the feet of the Germans, although De Gaulle privately talked about how he suspected the allies and didn't trust them any more. Note that this is a year before D-Day. So. . . . yeah. If he was right than that means he was enough of a problematic pain in the rear end for the other allies to try and kill him. If he was wrong then that means that he's the sort of guy who's going to claim his allies are trying to kill him without solid evidence. Ferrosol posted:How much of this is related to the Americans (Roosevelt's?) seeming hatred of De Gaulle? I know they consistently tried to prop up various other french figures as counters to De Gaulle (Giraud, Darlan etc) but I'm not sure if the two problems were related. I want to emphasize that these problems existed outside of the narrow question of "what do we do with France." The worst can-kicking happened with the question about what to do with a German occupation, and a lot of that can be firmly laid at the feet of everyone just kind of trying to avoid talking about it with the Soviets while the war was ongoing. There were also differences of opinion within the ranks of even the US government, but I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that it was a measure to avoid any major political differences with Stalin while he was bleeding the Germans on the eastern front.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:40
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Most peoples' experience with heavy equipment is their car, which usually requires maintenance every 3-6 months or so. So hearing that a military vehicle requires several orders of magnitude more maintenance effort sounds unreasonable. If cars were less reliable, then military vehicles wouldn't sound as bad. What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance? Is it because, since your life literally depends on it working, you want it to stay at top shape for that time you actually need it?
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Aug 16, 2020 21:44
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Greggster posted:What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance? There's a huge difference in "military vehicle" between a truck and an F/A-18. Airplanes require a loving ton of maintenance. Airplanes powered by jet engines require a metric gently caress load of maintenance. Airplanes powered by military jet engines with afterburners and poo poo require a  gently caress me gently caress load of maintenance. Airplanes powered by military jet engines with afterburners and poo poo that also have special low-radar reflectivity paint and black box avionics are basically maintainer suicide pacts. A humvee? Not as much.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:47
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Maintenance chat seems like a decent topic: How much maintenance did stuff need in particular eras? Are there any items that required surprising (for the uninitiated) amounts of attention? Cannonchat a while back mentioned greasing and grease-stripping. How much time would a medieval army spent on maintaining poo poo as opposed to foraging or other tasks?
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Aug 16, 2020 21:53
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Innocent_Bystander posted:Maintenance chat seems like a decent topic: So, I don't know about a gently caress load of eras etc. But, part of it is also dependent on how you define "maintenance." Armies used to employ dudes just to shoe horses. And hoses gotta eat. And poo poo. And occasionally gently caress to make more horses. And you need more horses to haul a 1,000 pound wagon than trucks. So in a lot of ways the move to mechanized forces is actually a lot LESS "maintenance" if we define that as the entire logistical trail. Now, it also makes you more dependent on oil, but older armies were similarly screaming for fodder for their animals.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:02
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I'd even argue that foraging was an integral part of 'maintenance' for a long time.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:07
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De Gaulle sounds like a pretty typical pretender to a throne like you find a lot of times throughout history, just with the extremely awkward position that he's pretending to the throne of something that was a democracy with no throne to pretend to. Did Vichy France have any semblance of democracy, or was it just a german-supported dictatorship?
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Aug 16, 2020 22:16
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Greggster posted:What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance? I can speak about WWII tanks to some degree. A tank's engine is almost always going to be a big source of pain. Engines usually operate with a very small margin of power (and if not, the crew will hang poo poo on them until they do and the military will keep stacking more armour/bigger guns/etc) working at variable RPM. Things like dirt getting into the cooling system or engine compartment is going to result in overheating and damage the engine. Sadly, most of the openings in the tank are located on the engine deck, where a) your infantry will ride and leave mud and gunk, b) enemy infantry will try to chuck stuff given the chance, c) your tank is going to throw mud up on with its tracks unless it has mudguards which are usually torn off by hitting terrain and obstacles. In addition to doing all the normal engine maintenance stuff like greasing it you need to keep the cooling system clean as a whistle. This works in ideal environments, but when you're out on the front lines and have to be ready for a counterattack, you can't exactly take your tank apart to clean it, so you have to run at degraded efficiency for a while. Note that cleaning the cooling system was a quite involved task, for instance on Pershing tanks you had to pull the whole thing and steam clean it. Then there's the suspension and running gear. These parts on your car don't break often since it weighs maybe half a ton and you drive it on good quality level roads. A tank by definition is going to be driving through god knows what terrain and each wheel/suspension arm has a couple of tons of weight on it during that time. The track links and pins also carry a ton of pressure. You need to make sure that they don't wear out too much and swap them before they snap. This is a huge pain in the rear end since a track is also very heavy. Also a fun fact is that it's much easier to break a tank's suspension than to penetrate its armour, so anyone with a doorknocker is going to try and shoot at your tracks and drive sprocket. Most breakdowns of maintenance schedules I've seen have the engine, suspension, and running gear as the most problematic elements. Of course, other things in the tank break too, and every mechanism needs to be periodically inspected and adjusted. If the electrical system in a 20th century car breaks, you can't use the radio, if it breaks in the tank, you can't use the powered turret traverse, which is quite a bit more important. All of this adds time to maintenance too, to the point where you're basically checking over your tank any time it's not moving to make sure nothing is broken.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:De Gaulle sounds like a pretty typical pretender to a throne like you find a lot of times throughout history, just with the extremely awkward position that he's pretending to the throne of something that was a democracy with no throne to pretend to. Petain was put in charge of all the branches of government, so it was a dictatorship under him. That said the idea was that he would see them through the current crises caused by the ongoing war and occupation and then they would return to a democratic norm. Would that have happened? We don't know because it obviously never got to that point.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:There's a huge difference in "military vehicle" between a truck and an F/A-18. I don’t disagree that an airplane needs more maintenance than a hmmwv but would like to offer that the hmmwv is actually a great example of greggster’s question. They require lots of maintenance relative to a civilian car because most of them are very old, carrying a large amount of weight they were never meant to (uparmor), and are driven on terrible off road conditions in extreme temperatures frequently.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:41
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Greggster posted:What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance? A lot of it comes down to the fact that you are generally operating equipment in combat or on long stretches of not-combat under non-optimal conditions. You're driving your tank off-road, your helicopter is sitting outside getting sand in all the important parts while you load it up, your fighter jet is being flown as many hours as possible. In actual combat, you're going to do whatever you need to do to get the job done, maintenance guidelines be damned. It's better to burn out a machine gun barrel than it is to preserve the barrel but die because you let your position get overrun, for a simplified example. On top of anything you do while actually fighting, there's the time involved in getting from point A to point B, even if your unit is fairly static once you get there. You could never take any enemy fire or suffer casualties at all in some posts, but you might be burning out your engines if you have to constantly patrol for that period. Everything will eventually wear out if you put enough hours on it. Rifles might not get fired but still be hosed from an armorer's POV from grunts dropping them in the mud, doing stupid poo poo, etc. for years and years. Grenrow fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 22:42
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Alchenar posted:As I think Max Hastings put it, only De Gaulle could write a military history of the French army that contained no mention of Waterloo. Only the British could write a military history of the Napoleonic Wars that made the British army at Waterloo the centerpiece.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:47
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Greggster posted:What is it about military vehicles that makes it require that much more maintenance? Take your car and drive it through rough terrain at top speed for a few hours. See how much work it needs afterwards.
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Aug 16, 2020 22:51
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