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Uncle Enzo posted:If your country really needs a donkey-portable AA system and you make one, that's not silly. Anti-Air Artillery rear end. Someone add some more A’s into it.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:05
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Wasn't the lack of qualified mule skinners (I think like teamsters but for mule trains?) a perpetual logistical problem for the US military well into WW2 or something?
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Aug 28, 2020 16:07
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Cessna posted:The USMC used a similar vehicle in Vietnam, the M274 "Mechanical Mule." I love it 
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Aug 28, 2020 16:07
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Reading through wages of destruction and the author describes Heinrich Koppenberg descending on Norway before the fighting is over to take advantage of the abundant hydro electricity and mining for aluminum smelting and it has me wondering. 1: Did the allies successfully disrupt this important source of electricity and raw materials? 2: What was stopping the nazis from taking advantage of other alternative energy sources? Because the overriding theme of this chapter is the complete collapse of European energy/oil supplies disrupting life and industry in nazi occupied Europe. Did they not attempt to build new dams and only tried to fix bombed ones? Did they have an ideological fixation on coal specifically that made it hard for them to consider alternatives? I mean my best guess is that it mostly has to do with them being completely out of dudes to do anything with since the author makes the argument they were already scraping the barrel for manpower at that point.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:44
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Reminder that the Nazis were so bad at running a railway they managed to cause s coal shortage...in Germany
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Aug 28, 2020 16:50
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Lawman 0 posted:Reading through wages of destruction and the author describes Heinrich Koppenberg descending on Norway before the fighting is over to take advantage of the abundant hydro electricity and mining for aluminum smelting and it has me wondering. I'm hardly an expert, but building dams requires shitloads of people, steel, and concrete, all of which are in short supply when you've picked a fight with every European power.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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MikeCrotch posted:Reminder that the Nazis were so bad at running a railway they managed to cause s coal shortage...in Germany Right one of the main themes of this book is that actually the nazis were incredibly incompetent at actually running an economy and basically only got away with it because they were not challenged hard enough, early enough. The other thing about those trains is that a whole bunch of them were completely broken because they switched the economic lever to "all the guns and ammo"
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Aug 28, 2020 16:55
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Just the utter insanity of even thinking the war was a good idea in the first place hits you like a deorbiting sack of bricks when you take a look at some of the figures the author spits out. Fake edit: Like even a bunch of the top ranked nazis held the opinion that it was basically impossible to effectively use the resources in the western Soviet Union anyways because of the constant fuel shortages. Lawman 0 fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 16:58
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Uncle Enzo posted:That scale could use some calibration though. The least silly stuff is your basic military supplies: rifles, ammo, artillery, uniforms. What's the silliest thing? I would put as a rule that inventions targeted at real, specific needs have a lot of silliness deducted. If your country really needs a donkey-portable AA system and you make one, that's not silly. I mean, I don't think it's possible to have an objective scale--if there's one thing that Cassa's uniform posts have taught me it's that Nazi uniforms were exceedingly silly despite being targeted at a real, specific need.
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Aug 28, 2020 17:02
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Lawman 0 posted:2: What was stopping the nazis from taking advantage of other alternative energy sources? Because the overriding theme of this chapter is the complete collapse of European energy/oil supplies disrupting life and industry in nazi occupied Europe. Did they not attempt to build new dams and only tried to fix bombed ones? Did they have an ideological fixation on coal specifically that made it hard for them to consider alternatives? I mean my best guess is that it mostly has to do with them being completely out of dudes to do anything with since the author makes the argument they were already scraping the barrel for manpower at that point. Your guess sounds correct. Building a hydroelectric plant is no quick business, first you need to plan and calculate carefully (you must also count downstream effects and the cost of relocating people and businesses from the reservoir) and this alone takes years if it's not a little stream. Then the construction itself takes time, resources and manpower. During war this is unappealing because you are already strained on manpower and concrete. A dam in the builds is also a juicy target for enemy bombers. A coal plant simply yields quicker results for your investment.
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Aug 28, 2020 17:12
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For comparison the Hoover Dam took five years to build, and nobody was trying to drop bombs on it.
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Aug 28, 2020 17:24
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Nenonen posted:Your guess sounds correct. Building a hydroelectric plant is no quick business, first you need to plan and calculate carefully (you must also count downstream effects and the cost of relocating people and businesses from the reservoir) and this alone takes years if it's not a little stream. Then the construction itself takes time, resources and manpower. During war this is unappealing because you are already strained on manpower and concrete. A dam in the builds is also a juicy target for enemy bombers. A coal plant simply yields quicker results for your investment. This is important to remember any time you're discussing anything Nazi related. They were in power for 12 years. That's just long enough to gently caress up a generation of kids by putting them through Nazi-oriented youth programs and schools (the classic example being the 5-year old in 1933 who becomes the 17 year old fanatic defending a bombed out apartment building in 1945) but it's not really long enough to get much in the way of major projects going. When you're talking about things outside of the territory that they held in 1933 it gets even more apparent. They occupied France for a bit over 4 years. Poland for 5-6ish. Parts of Russia? Anywhere from 3 years down to months/days. That's enough time to loot poo poo or maybe make a factory retool to build your stuff, but even the latter isn't always an option. A lot of captured factories kept making their same poo poo, which is how you get things like German aircraft with French engines or Polish pistols becoming an issued weapon. Even when comparing Nazi Germany to other dictatorships there's so much that's abnormal because of that compressed time span and how much of it was spent in a war. You never have that period of consolidation where you get to see how their policies and ideas play out like you do with, say, Franco's Spain or Ba'athist Iraq or even Mussolini's Italy. Mussolini at least had a solid almost-two-decades of peace to establish a track record of what "normal" looked like within the Italian Fascist system. It's obviously good for the world that we never found out what year 30 of the Thousand Year Reich looked like, but it makes it hard to really assess how effective poo poo like economic policy would be. Looking at the other various flavor of authoritarian or fascist dictatorships, a lot of the question isn't how effective the first, ideologically driven policies would be but what their plan B would look like when that turned out to be kinda poo poo.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:33
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The biggest thing that's sticking with me is the constant atmosphere of crisis because someone talked to Hitler and now he goes "WE NEED ALL THE GUNS" then he switches it up next month to "ALL PLANES ALL THE TIME" because he's trying to be a decisive leader. Meanwhile everything is breaking because they skimped on building actual infrastructure in the interwar years and making sure industry has proper supply chains so they keep on doing all these emergency directives with some unpronounceable German phrase to reroute like some copper wiring and gasoline they stripped from a Paris gas station to one Hitlers industry buddies. This is so they can go back to their real goal of destroying Eastern Europeans to own... Roosevelt?
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Aug 28, 2020 18:57
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Cessna posted:The USMC used a similar vehicle in Vietnam, the M274 "Mechanical Mule." Uhhhhhh is it just me or is there something is wrong with this vehicle. e: help
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Aug 28, 2020 19:00
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Rob Rockley posted:Uhhhhhh is it just me or is there something is wrong with this vehicle. I think it's supposed to have 4 wheels? 
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Aug 28, 2020 19:03
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I mean the Nazis were 100% ideologically opposed to the US as well, one of Hitlers overriding concerns was the the idea that American material wealth and culture would overwhelm traditional European values. Anyone trying to imply that the Nazis only wanted to fight the USSR is being ahistorical. Ultimately the Nazi plan for the war was one huge gamble - they were well aware that there was no way they could win a long was and so did not plan for one. When they experienced much greater success in France and the Low Countries than they expected they didn't really know what to do long term, and any plan they did have was warped around the fact they just expected to be able to kick anyone's rear end and take what they needed.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:08
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I've been listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I just finished the Songhai Empire episode. One of the battles described in it makes me wonder: what are some examples of battles where one side had firearms and the other didn't, and the side without firearms knew that they were at a disadvantage and came up with a strategy to try to overcome it? In the battle described in the episode, the Songhai military had a huge numerical advantage, but knowing that their opponents had these crazy weapons that they didn't have, the Songhai try to send a big herd of cattle at them to panic the enemy or to soak up the damage so that their heavy cavalry could come in after. The cannons frightened the cattle enough that they turned around and the whole thing backfired, but it's an interesting plan.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:10
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Read somewhere that the Aztec adapted to firearms pretty quick and started running in zig zag patterns to make themselves harder targets, while still not really having much idea what a gun actually was.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:16
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The Anglo-Zulu war comes to mind
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Aug 28, 2020 23:30
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Can I just say I love the ATV-chat of the past few pages I have a 1/72 model of Kettenkrad I show people to explain that a motorcycle half-track is a perfectly sensible quad
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Aug 29, 2020 00:44
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The Jacobite rebellions in the 18th century saw some pretty stark differences in firepower between the Government and Highland sides, which was one of the reasons for the use of the highland charge tactic.
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Aug 29, 2020 00:54
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Nenonen posted:Your guess sounds correct. Building a hydroelectric plant is no quick business, first you need to plan and calculate carefully (you must also count downstream effects and the cost of relocating people and businesses from the reservoir) and this alone takes years if it's not a little stream. Then the construction itself takes time, resources and manpower. During war this is unappealing because you are already strained on manpower and concrete. A dam in the builds is also a juicy target for enemy bombers. A coal plant simply yields quicker results for your investment. Could also be a lack of suitable sites, hydroelectric wasn't new in the 40s so I would assume that most of the low hanging fruit was already being exploited by that point. Plus hydro just doesn't produce a lot of power compared to coal for the amount of capital it takes. Hoover Dam is massive it it makes about 2000MW, in comparison a modern coal turbine typically spits out about 500MW and an average size coal plant might have 4-8 of those. Most dams are much smaller, the ones nearest to me put are in the range of 2MW-50MW, you would need dozens of those to match just a single coal turbine. And those are seasonal numbers, so pretty much just in the spring. Not as much water in the summer and farmers get first dibs on that.
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Aug 29, 2020 01:56
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Schadenboner posted:Wasn't the lack of qualified mule skinners (I think like teamsters but for mule trains?) a perpetual logistical problem for the US military well into WW2 or something? I thought the whole reason they were called teamsters is because they drove teams
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Aug 29, 2020 04:24
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surf rock posted:I've been listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I just finished the Songhai Empire episode. One of the battles described in it makes me wonder: what are some examples of battles where one side had firearms and the other didn't, and the side without firearms knew that they were at a disadvantage and came up with a strategy to try to overcome it? Isandlwana is probably the classic example. The early battles between British colonists and Native American tribes were similar because contemporary firearms were inaccurate and slow to reload and the colonists didn't have enough powder to enable lots of shooting anyway.
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Aug 29, 2020 04:55
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surf rock posted:I've been listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I just finished the Songhai Empire episode. One of the battles described in it makes me wonder: what are some examples of battles where one side had firearms and the other didn't, and the side without firearms knew that they were at a disadvantage and came up with a strategy to try to overcome it? Iirc the Sengoku period had quite a few battles where the arquebuses wrecked havoc on the side that didn't have them. But I don't remember any other countertactics against them except getting your own guns.
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Aug 29, 2020 13:14
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Milo and POTUS posted:I thought the whole reason they were called teamsters is because they drove teams I think you're right, a teamster is a wagon guy (or a truck guy, or an encase Jimmy Hoffa in concrete guy). Maybe "drover"?
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Aug 29, 2020 13:23
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ChubbyChecker posted:But I don't remember any other countertactics against them except getting your own guns. I mean, historically, having more troops than your enemy has bullets is usually a hard counter.
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Aug 29, 2020 13:23
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P-Mack posted:Read somewhere that the Aztec adapted to firearms pretty quick and started running in zig zag patterns to make themselves harder targets, while still not really having much idea what a gun actually was. The Inca adapted to firearms so well, it took decades of guerilla warfare after the fall of their cities to root out the last resistance.
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Aug 29, 2020 13:28
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ChubbyChecker posted:Iirc the Sengoku period had quite a few battles where the arquebuses wrecked havoc on the side that didn't have them. But I don't remember any other countertactics against them except getting your own guns. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why the Japanese utterly wrecked the Koreans' poo poo on land during the 1590s invasion (having loads of actual, recent battle experience helped too). The Koreans had a whole lot of big gunpowder weapons for sieges and naval battles, and Japanese envoys even had gifted the Korean king with a musket before, but somehow they didn't make the leap to small arms until after they had gotten shot to pieces in several battles. Guerilla warfare plus breaking your enemies supply lines did the trick in the end however. That, and achieving total naval domination once the court stopped playing political games and let Yi Sun-si do his job without demoting/arresting/torturing him every once in a while. Also, I can't remember who it was, but big props to whoever it was who recommended Imjin War. That book was excellent.
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Aug 29, 2020 13:40
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Iirc also the Hussite Wars had many battles where the gunhavers kicked the asses of not-gunhavers.
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Aug 29, 2020 13:47
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Libluini posted:The Inca adapted to firearms so well, it took decades of guerilla warfare after the fall of their cities to root out the last resistance. Henry turtledove iirc wrote a short story about an alien invasion where the united states barely hangs on in the West with a capital in Denver as a fairly explicit analogy to the neo incan state.
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Aug 29, 2020 15:03
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What kinds of opinions are there among scholars about transcribing their work? I've finally managed to get my hands on English translations of every part of the Dongyi section of the Sanguozhi's Book of Wei. It's basically our earliest source of information on the culture and people of Manchuria, Korea, and Japan, which is the kind of thing I imagine a lot of people would be interested in reading, but currently the translations are spread among like 4 different hard to get and expensive books. Is me compiling the translations together and posting them online a bit of a dick move, or should I go for it? edit: maybe if I added some annotations and extra maps and stuff it would be more acceptable? Koramei fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 29, 2020 16:03
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Dance Officer posted:The Anglo-Zulu war comes to mind On that note: I heard some bit about how the Zulu shields, spanned with wet hides, were actually quite resistant to musket balls. Is there any truth to that, or is that more of a History Channel kinda factoid?
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Aug 29, 2020 16:09
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Perestroika posted:On that note: I heard some bit about how the Zulu shields, spanned with wet hides, were actually quite resistant to musket balls. Is there any truth to that, or is that more of a History Channel kinda factoid? No truth at all in it. If a bullet can smash through metal armor and still kill the target, why would a shield stop it? It seems to be a common myth, and I've seen it in many sources too. Same as the myth in the Korean war about thick jackets stopping rifle bullets. Perhaps the myths started when some ricochet that had spent almost all of its energy plopped against a shield/jacket, but it wouldn't have injured the target anyway. e: another reason could be that the shooters just missed and blamed shields etc. for being bulletproof. or the shield wetting could have been a ritual, and confirmation bias of the survivors clearly proved that it worked ChubbyChecker fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 29, 2020 16:21
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Koramei posted:What kinds of opinions are there among scholars about transcribing their work?
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Aug 29, 2020 17:17
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Yeah fair, I probably shouldn't. It's frustrating there's so much amazing information that's squirreled away in all these random places most people won't have the means to ever find.
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Aug 29, 2020 17:26
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Koramei posted:What kinds of opinions are there among scholars about transcribing their work? I've finally managed to get my hands on English translations of every part of the Dongyi section of the Sanguozhi's Book of Wei. It's basically our earliest source of information on the culture and people of Manchuria, Korea, and Japan, which is the kind of thing I imagine a lot of people would be interested in reading, but currently the translations are spread among like 4 different hard to get and expensive books. Is me compiling the translations together and posting them online a bit of a dick move, or should I go for it? Couldn't you make a youtube channel where you do like a Let's Read with maps, annotations, your own analysis, critiques, and music maybe some animations as well and it'd legally be a derivative work? Like a lets play of Danganronpa before there was an English translation. That seems to me to be a way you could provide your experience with it to people without stepping on a legal landmine.
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Aug 29, 2020 17:33
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Lawman 0 posted:Henry turtledove iirc wrote a short story about an alien invasion where the united states barely hangs on in the West with a capital in Denver as a fairly explicit analogy to the neo incan state. The story itself being called Vilcabamba, so fairly explicit, yes. It's available for free on Tor's website. https://www.tor.com/2010/02/03/vilcabamba/
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Aug 29, 2020 17:41
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Raenir Salazar posted:Couldn't you make a youtube channel where you do like a Let's Read with maps, annotations, your own analysis, critiques, and music maybe some animations as well and it'd legally be a derivative work? Like a lets play of Danganronpa before there was an English translation. That seems to me to be a way you could provide your experience with it to people without stepping on a legal landmine. It depends on how much of the work is reproduced. Strictly speaking, a lot of Lets Plays are in legally murky water. Most of the industry has just chosen to kind of ignore it because they've long since recognized that it actually drives sales for them. MST3K is a good example of this. They have to pay royalties etc to the owners of the films that they're reproducing in their entirety. That's half the point of doing it with poo poo old movies - not only is making fun of them funnier than if you were to do it with Star Wars, but whoever owns the rights to some forgotten B movie from the 70s isn't going to want as much as Disney (if Disney would even permit it anyways). On the other hand, if I want to make a review video where I talk about Empire Strikes Back and use footage from it, I can. But there's a line (and it's not super well defined, legally) somewhere between me using clips inter-spaced with my own stuff and just playing the movie in its entirety while I talk over it. You can see this in action with Red Letter Media's stuff. The Star Wars prequil poo poo is all up on youtube. They use a lot of Disney's IP in making it, but it's fundamentally changed enough, and limited enough in scope, that it falls under fair use. On the other hand they also have commentary tracks for Return of the Jedi up on their bandcamp page. Their comments about the film as they watch it together are their IP that they can do with as they please, but if you want to pair it with a viewing of RotJ you need to have your own copy and fire it up to watch in parallel. With academic works you find that limit too. There's a difference between quoting a source and reproducing a huge chunk of something wholesale. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone running into problems with quoted sections of prose (you'd have to lift a LOT and then you get into just writing and scholarly problems) but if you want to include maps or images etc. your publisher will make sure they're public domain, and if they're not either tell you to get rid of them or arrange licensing. Google "annotated books" and you'll actually find a lot of what you're describing, but you'll notice that it's almost all public domain stuff like "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn."
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Aug 29, 2020 17:51
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Raenir Salazar posted:Couldn't you make a youtube channel where you do like a Let's Read with maps, annotations, your own analysis, critiques, and music maybe some animations as well and it'd legally be a derivative work? Making a 'derivative work' without permission is explicitly copyright infringement. You may have meant a 'fair use'. quote:Subject to sections 107 through 122 [exceptions including fair use], the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
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