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HEY GUNS posted:Unlimbering and getting into line is much more complex than you probably assume. You're right, I do not. I just know it takes a full turn to do in wargames. I could not find any you tube demonstration of it either. (And I did make it a point to make it an Olympic level sport! )
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Dec 23, 2020 12:01
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It would probably be an okay crossfit exercise.
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Dec 23, 2020 12:03
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Nenonen posted:It would probably be an okay crossfit exercise.
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Dec 23, 2020 13:06
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Comstar posted:You're right, I do not. I just know it takes a full turn to do in wargames. I could not find any you tube demonstration of it either. I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZUM5wm0BA - is that roughly what you're after?
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Dec 23, 2020 14:40
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Nothingtoseehere posted:With black powder cannons having that much energy... how modern a tank would you need to be able to shrug off a direct hit from a black powder cannon - say a Napoleonic one? Depends on the quality of the shot, if it's just cast iron it will probably shatter on impact and not do much damage to anything with more than bulletproof armour.
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Dec 23, 2020 15:05
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Until the nineties in the UK at least the armed forces had a sort of physical fitness drill tournament against each other which did have soldiers setting up and moving traditional artillery pieces.
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Dec 23, 2020 15:30
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SeanBeansShako posted:Until the nineties in the UK at least the armed forces had a sort of physical fitness drill tournament against each other which did have soldiers setting up and moving traditional artillery pieces. The Field Gun Competition is still around, but only as a long-standing private competition between various RN teams. The 'official' RN Command version, which included having to get the disassembled gun and crew across a chasm and over a couple of walls, hasn't been run since 1999, but a couple of civilian teams still do it. The gun is an 8cwt 12-pounder, complete with carriage, wheels, limber, ammunition and (in the Command version) a pair of spars and lifting tackle to get it over the chasm.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:25
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SeanBeansShako posted:Until the nineties in the UK at least the armed forces had a sort of physical fitness drill tournament against each other which did have soldiers setting up and moving traditional artillery pieces. I've done this. There's little springing involved.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:30
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I’d read that as “spring to action” as in get to it ASAP. Not a description of the physical act but an emphasis upon how important it is to get the gun back to its firing position as soon as the recoil stops. That’s a big deal for maintaining a high RoF.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:33
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Cyrano4747 posted:I’d read that as “spring to action” as in get to it ASAP.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:33
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HEY GUNS posted:possible is really carrying a lot of weight there. How about "reasonably practical" then? ASARP.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:36
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BalloonFish posted:The Field Gun Competition is still around, but only as a long-standing private competition between various RN teams. 
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Dec 23, 2020 16:40
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Pikehead posted:I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZUM5wm0BA - is that roughly what you're after? 3 minutes to get them ready...but those aren't muzzle loaders. HUGE amounts of smoke though- would Napoleonic or ACW guns have more or less smoke?
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Dec 23, 2020 16:51
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Those look like absolutely tiny charges, Napoleonic would probably be more smoke. The video of those guys shooting ACW cannons at that APC also includes shots from behind the crews, you can see how much smoke is being generated by single guns firing at a leisurely pace on a windy day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL1DkrYL70s&t=183s PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 17:04
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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It's not a very good demonstration or comparable for ACW/Napoleonics work because it's guards on parade with very different weapons. In addition to being breech-loading with a contained cartridge, they also have a recoil device. A lot of the work in a Napoleonic piece is repositioning the gun after it recoils - a recoil device eliminates the need to do this. Those are saluting charges so I imagine they are pretty lightweight.
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Dec 23, 2020 17:39
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HEY GUNS posted:if the people who were doing it were anything similar to the people I was with 20 years ago they would have told the spectators to cover their ears and open their mouths. were you not listening? Why do you open your mouth?
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Dec 23, 2020 18:21
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Patrick Spens posted:Why do you open your mouth? so the air has an exit path when it’s knocked out of your lungs by the pressure wave
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Dec 23, 2020 18:24
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I will play agaisnt you once if you will play against me at ASL 8,000 times. You do have opponents out there, you know, if you ask.
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Dec 23, 2020 18:29
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Patrick Spens posted:Why do you open your mouth? WHAT I CANNOT HEAR YOU MWAP MWAP WHAT IS THAT RINGING SOUND? NEVERMIND, I CANNOT HEAR A THING NOW
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Dec 23, 2020 18:32
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I've started read BH Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War the past few nights. It's fine so far, but what's his reputation as a historian vs. strategist? Wikipedia says he was a 'clean wehrmacht' kind of guy. He also quotes from Churchill's 'The Second World War alot too-I presume that's worth reading as well? They both have a breezy, decidedly not academic tone that's sort of refreshing after slogging through a book about the HRE.
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Dec 23, 2020 18:33
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"The Cruel Sea" by Monsarratt makes it seem that any realistic movie about naval battles will involve hours and hours of men sitting in chairs, their nerves ragged from being awake 36 hours, straining to hear anything through the hydrophone or standing at watch post with binoculars, straining to see a periscope peak above the water. Even the famous destroyer charge would take place over half an hour. The crew of the Johnston abandons ship three hours after the first sighting of the enemy. The kamikazes come three hours after that. Most of that time is men sitting at chairs at battle stations or winching 5-inch ammunition around. It's amazing in the imagination, but it would film like a morning staff meeting. Even the famous charge is just... boats going 27 miles per hour for half an hour, followed by the splash of torpedoes. We all love to hear captains telling engineers to push engines beyond design limits, but we can get that in Star Trek and The Hunt for Red October, which keep us entertained with interpersonal drama and human-scale action. e: We can even get the raggedness on a draft-era naval vessel from the Bedford Incident, along with the drama of the reporter being there to contrast with the captain. Greg12 fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 18:48
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I've started read BH Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War the past few nights. It's fine so far, but what's his reputation as a historian vs. strategist? Wikipedia says he was a 'clean wehrmacht' kind of guy. He also quotes from Churchill's 'The Second World War alot too-I presume that's worth reading as well? They both have a breezy, decidedly not academic tone that's sort of refreshing after slogging through a book about the HRE. He was pretty OK but very much a man, and a historian, of his generation. He's pretty easy to go full grad student on but really he wasn't a historian so much as he was a soldier, military theorist, and journalist. Those are the people who wrote the first books about why WW2 happened how WW2 happened, and ended up setting the ground that later historians dug into with archival research etc., but they also weren't working in the same way. It's kind of like bagging on Shirer for how hard he leaned into the Sonderweg. Certainly not the historical consensus today, but also understandable from the perspective of someone who had lived and worked in pre-war Germany and was looking around going "how in the gently caress did these people do that?" Liddell Heart was also a MASSIVE self promoter, to the point that he tried to take credit for the Germans "inventing" blitzkrieg, claiming that they were the ones smart enough to really look at the stuff he had been writing pre-war.* This also at least partially explains why he became instrumental in clean Wehrmacht poo poo. He was really chummy with a lot of old German generals and did a lot of work interviewing them. He also took a lot of poo poo that they said pretty un-critically, most notably in The German Generals Talk. It's an interesting source if you want to read about what they were thinking and doing today, but you also have to look at it through the lens of knowing they're talking a decade after the war to a Brit who has a hard on for strategic studies. Soft peddling how much you really thought that Adolf guy had the right idea makes a lot of sense. I've also gotten the impression - although it's only that, an impression, and not backed by anything like a quote or something that I can really point to - that he had a fairly upper middle class late 19th Century British schoolboy attitude towards warfare as being a giant game of sport. A brutal one, at times an ugly one, but still something undertaken by two groups of galant men playing by a certain set of rules. The kind of attitude that comes across in popular accounts of stuff like aces waggling their wings at an opponent who is out of ammo, etc. You see a lot of firm separation between the political objectives of (usually civilian) leadership and the behavior of soldiers in the field in this kind of stuff, in an almost perverse professionalism that tries to separate the activity on the battlefield from the political agendas that brought them there. I think he had a predisposition to see the defeated German generals as vanquished, honorable foes, not the military leadership that orchestrated a genocidal war for a monster. So, again, a man of his place and time. People like that tend to be fine for reading the broad strokes of a conflict, especially if it's easy to read prose. Just keep in mind that it's not some authoritative source. *scare quotes because, well, they didn't really invent all that much see the earlier conversation a few pages up-thread from here
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Dec 23, 2020 19:02
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Hypnobeard posted:You do have opponents out there, you know, if you ask. I am now a learned man
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Dec 23, 2020 19:14
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I've started read BH Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War the past few nights. It's fine so far, but what's his reputation as a historian vs. strategist? Wikipedia says he was a 'clean wehrmacht' kind of guy. He also quotes from Churchill's 'The Second World War alot too-I presume that's worth reading as well? They both have a breezy, decidedly not academic tone that's sort of refreshing after slogging through a book about the HRE. I think Churchill's The Second World War is worth reading but you have to bear in mind that it's a guy who was head of Edit: The first book, The Gathering Storm is my favorite because I'm such a weak student of non-military history. I loved Massie's Dreadnought, and he paints a picture of David Lloyd George as this firebrand who was dragging the Empire into the future. Churchill starts his writing in the 20s and talks about him as a tired old man who had lost most of his mojo. Without ever saying so, it paints a portrait of what WWI did to the people who tried to lead the Empire through it. I don't know if Churchill was prefiguring his own post-war experience or just expressing his personal disappointment, but either way, it hit home with me. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 20:23
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I think Churchill's The Second World War is worth reading but you have to bear in mind that it's a guy who was head of state writing about his own opinions and experiences. It's not objective, it's occasionally downright stupid, but it's still an entertaining history of a major decision-maker's experience of the war. Grants memoirs are way up there for similar reasons.
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Dec 23, 2020 20:26
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Liddell Hart also had a pet explanation for all of military strategy (which boiled down to "don't attack in the obvious place, dummy") that he kept trying to promote, and I always thought that a lot of his historical writing was done with an bias towards promoting his particular take on strategy.
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Dec 23, 2020 21:26
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PittTheElder posted:Sadly there's no shooting but yeah. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lhx6Q3WuvU haha nice
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Dec 23, 2020 21:30
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Another video of the same, bit better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyTGRv4DkD0
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Dec 23, 2020 21:46
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FMguru posted:Liddell Hart also had a pet explanation for all of military strategy (which boiled down to "don't attack in the obvious place, dummy") that he kept trying to promote, and I always thought that a lot of his historical writing was done with an bias towards promoting his particular take on strategy. Of all the strategies to push, he could have done a lot worse.
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Dec 23, 2020 22:14
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Greg12 posted:"The Cruel Sea" by Monsarratt makes it seem that any realistic movie about naval battles will involve hours and hours of men sitting in chairs, their nerves ragged from being awake 36 hours, straining to hear anything through the hydrophone or standing at watch post with binoculars, straining to see a periscope peak above the water. Weird how that works, isn't it? Then you have situations like the Hood, which exploded shockingly quickly, so much so that only a few guys survived out of the entire crew. Long hours of tense boredom, then a few moments of unbelievable violence, blink and it's over and your ship is now in a dozen pieces plunging towards the sea floor along with almost all of your crewmates. That perception of time is something that lots of combat veterans mention, not just naval. Everything goes by too drat slowly until the action starts, then everything happens too drat quickly. I can't attest to it from personal experience, but that's how I understand it. On another note, I've been on a nostalgia journey through some of my old PS2 games, and in one of them I chanced to pick up a "Cast Iron Long Sword". I have to insist that my knowledge of metallurgy is extremely bad, but isn't cast iron a terrible choice for a sword? I thought I remembered a discussion about it in the last thread.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:20
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It will shatter the first time you hit anything with it. Other than that it's fine!
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Dec 24, 2020 00:30
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“gently caress-Off-Huge Letter Opener” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:33
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Cessna posted:Of all the strategies to push, he could have done a lot worse. "We will deal Al-Qaida the decisive death blow by invading... Iraq! They will be completely unprepared for it!"
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Dec 24, 2020 00:33
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Why do tanks have smoothbore guns?Cessna posted:Of all the strategies to push, he could have done a lot worse. "Humans have a preset kill limit..."
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Dec 24, 2020 00:40
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White Coke posted:Why do tanks have smoothbore guns? Because muzzle velocities have gone up so much that today's projectiles will quickly wear out or damage rifling. Instead, projectiles are spun by fins. Edit: Also, some guns, especially for the Russians, are also used to fire ATGMs. Cessna fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Dec 24, 2020 |
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Dec 24, 2020 00:44
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The British and Indian MBTs (Challenger 2 and Arjun) are rifled, but this limits your ability to use the more narrow sabot penetrators or some of the more interesting tank-launched missile systems.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:56
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Greg12 posted:"The Cruel Sea" by Monsarratt makes it seem that any realistic movie about naval battles will involve hours and hours of men sitting in chairs, their nerves ragged from being awake 36 hours, straining to hear anything through the hydrophone or standing at watch post with binoculars, straining to see a periscope peak above the water. Indeed, and I think the film of the book actually gets that across very well; at least as well could be expected for a wide-release studio war movie, anyway. I'm thinking especially of the bit where Compass Rose has to spend a quiet, calm, clear summer's night alone and adrift due to a bad propshaft bearing and the crew spend eight hours of gradually-increasing tension waiting for what seems to be the inevitable torpedo. The whole point of the scene is that nothing happens...but it could happen and it comes across very well in the way the different characters respond to it. And the later sequence when Saltash Castle spends a night and a morning off North Cape hunting for a submarine, just hours of 'mowing the lawn' back and forth. Even in the greatly-compressed way its presented in the film, the boredom and exhaustion (mental and physical) is portrayed very astutely, accompanied to the empty pinging of the Asdic...and when the echo finally returns it actually makes you jump.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:03
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Cessna posted:Because muzzle velocities have gone up so much that today's projectiles will quickly wear out or damage rifling. Instead, projectiles are spun by fins. Doesn't rifling also hurt your muzzle velocity at these energy levels?
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Dec 24, 2020 01:05
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White Coke posted:Why do tanks have smoothbore guns? There are several reasons. One as someone already pointed out is wear. The higher pressure, the faster the rifling wears out. Modern ammunition is fired at very high velocity and therefore very high pressure, and that's very hard on the rifling. Two is that HEAT jets decrease in effectiveness greatly if the projectile is spinning. There are two ways to go about correcting this, one is to make a rotating sleeve that engages with the rifling while the warhead stays still, the other is to just go smoothbore and stabilize the projectile with fins. Turns out fins are pretty good for stabilization, just as good as rifling, so kinetic penetrators also became finned. Someone else already mentioned missiles, you can put them in a special launcher on top of the tank, or just shove them down the barrel and not have to make another hole in your tank.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:15
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Patrick Spens posted:Why do you open your mouth? I didn't read the quoted part first and thought this was a curiously aggressive response to a fairly benign post
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