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Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Ensign Expendable posted:

It can! If your armour is overmatched by the projectile, it will shatter the plate rather than making a nice neat hole. This is affected by hardness of the armour, hardenability of the alloy, and other factors. Typically if the plate experience brittle failure it can no longer be repaired. It's usually pretty noticeable by inspection, the hole will be jagged and much larger than the caliber of the shell that made it rather than nice and round. Here's an example.



The patch was indeed a piece cut from some other armour plate and welded on. Here are some examples of circular and rectangular patches.




Torsion bars are the most noticeable thing, you can tell when a tank burned out because they visibly sag. Sufficiently hot fires can compromise the hardening of the armour as well. If the fire is small enough, then you can scoop out the internals and replace them, salvaging the hull.

Fools, didn't they know that if the tank remains operable even after penetration, you strengthen the parts that were not hit.

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SerthVarnee
Mar 13, 2011

It has been two zero days since last incident.
Big Super Slapstick Hunk

BlueBull posted:

Thanks Tias, much appreciated. Do you have any recommendations on books for example that focus on these units?

I've come across some info on units in the 5th Gebirgs Division previously (no focus on Pioniere) and am under the impression that it was composed of Austrian troops. Is that correct?

this might help you widen your search:

http://www.niehorster.org/000_admin/000oob.htm

It contains a lot of detailed unit breakdowns for a lot of relevant nations during the WWII period.

SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Feb 6, 2021

ChubbyChecker
Mar 25, 2018

Nenonen posted:

Fools, didn't they know that if the tank remains operable even after penetration, you strengthen the parts that were not hit.

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Tias posted:

Pionier-Bataillon 233 (divisional pioneer unit)
Heeres-Pionier-Bataillon 73 (Corps pioneer unit)

Should I be inferring something about these units from where they are attached? I'm fuzzy on German army organization.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Nebakenezzer posted:

Should I be inferring something about these units from where they are attached? I'm fuzzy on German army organization.

Warning: Hazy, 15-year-old memories ahead

As I remember, attachment of units tells you where they would be going if that larger formation is mobilized someday. E. g. Bataillon 233 would go to the division it is nominally a part of, but Bataillon 73 would instead be attached to the corps it belongs to. So if someone wants to order unit 233 to do something, they'd be forced to go over the general commanding that particular division, while unit 73 gets its orders straight from the general commanding the corps.

Source: I was part of EloKa Bataillon 912, and we were nominally part of something called "Streitkräftebasis", which had its own general and everything. But as a support unit, we were also attached to a local division and corps, and if those formations would have ever called up and mobilized (for a large-scale exercise, for example), Bataillon 912 would have been attached to one of them.

Later I heard that the only other electronic warfare Bataillon in the whole Bundeswehr was demobilized (it was stationed down below in Bavaria) and nowadays this would probably mean unit 912 would need to be attached to at least corps-level, as it contains nearly 100% of all e-war assets of the Bundeswehr of today

Hyrax Attack!
Jan 13, 2009

We demand to be taken seriously

Reading Guns at Last Light about Normandy battles. A Canadian Firefly took out five Panthers in a day. That’s gotta be close to the record.

Related question, was it Allied tank doctrine if their shells weren’t penetrating to start aiming for tracks to get a mission kill?

Also, if the Allies overran a battery of like ten 88 guns and got them intact with lots of ammo, would they ever haul them along to use? Or would they just be spiked?

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug

Hyrax Attack! posted:

Reading Guns at Last Light about Normandy battles. A Canadian Firefly took out five Panthers in a day. That’s gotta be close to the record.

Related question, was it Allied tank doctrine if their shells weren’t penetrating to start aiming for tracks to get a mission kill?

Also, if the Allies overran a battery of like ten 88 guns and got them intact with lots of ammo, would they ever haul them along to use? Or would they just be spiked?

Reusing captured guns was definitely a thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ycPDDRE80Y

Timmy Age 6
Jul 23, 2011

Lobster says "mrow?"

Ramrod XTreme
Thinking about the early days of NATO, when they integrated the West Germans, how was that received? My only knowledge of the topic comes from Tom Lehrer's bit about the Multilateral Force plan for nuclear sharing which is hardly, um, the most contextualized source. If an exercise slotted a German unit in next to a British or an American one, was there a lot of side-eying in case of Dr. Strangelove-like saluting reflexes, or did those exercises take place enough years after the fact that there weren't as many worries about grudges coming into play?

My (Jewish, I should note...) grandfather was a doctor in the US Army at the base in Landstuhl for a couple years circa 1952, and liked to tell stories about how all the neighbors of the house he rented were both polite and very quick to mention that they'd only ever served on the Eastern Front. Never mind the games of chess by mail they were playing with their old PoW camp commandant back in Britain...

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Timmy Age 6 posted:

Thinking about the early days of NATO, when they integrated the West Germans, how was that received? My only knowledge of the topic comes from Tom Lehrer's bit about the Multilateral Force plan for nuclear sharing which is hardly, um, the most contextualized source. If an exercise slotted a German unit in next to a British or an American one, was there a lot of side-eying in case of Dr. Strangelove-like saluting reflexes, or did those exercises take place enough years after the fact that there weren't as many worries about grudges coming into play?

My (Jewish, I should note...) grandfather was a doctor in the US Army at the base in Landstuhl for a couple years circa 1952, and liked to tell stories about how all the neighbors of the house he rented were both polite and very quick to mention that they'd only ever served on the Eastern Front. Never mind the games of chess by mail they were playing with their old PoW camp commandant back in Britain...

Considering how many Jews died on the Eastern Front, this is some dark comedy

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
So I found the slides from my grandfather’s USO show in Korea. Is there a good way to turn those into images I can post here and archive?

Acebuckeye13
Nov 2, 2010


If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling
1-800-GAMBLER


Ultra Carp

Ugly In The Morning posted:

So I found the slides from my grandfather’s USO show in Korea. Is there a good way to turn those into images I can post here and archive?

There's specific scanners you can buy for old slides, this article seems to have a good list of different options.

Space Gopher
Jul 31, 2006

BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.
Most cities also still have a few local photo/printing labs, that will have high-end scanners and offer film/slide to digital conversion. Even Costco contracts with a company that does it. For a few dozen slides, it'll be more cost effective to just pay someone who already has the equipment instead of buying the hardware and DIYing it.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Ugly In The Morning posted:

So I found the slides from my grandfather’s USO show in Korea. Is there a good way to turn those into images I can post here and archive?

Slide scanners are 100% the best way to do it, I've had to digitize those in an archival setting and hoooooly poo poo it makes things go faster.

THAT SAID, if you're cheap and you have access to a slide projector you can do a decent job by projecting them on a white wall in a very dark room (tack a sheet to your wall if you don't have a proper projection screen) and just taking pictures of that with your phone.

If you have access to a slide scanner or there is a photo place near you that does go that route, but I've made good work of the sheet trick in very much non-archival settings where cost mattered.

It's also a dandy way to convert 8mm film to digital, but in that case you really need a stand for your phone because you're never going to hold it steady enough.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
Cool, I’ll just pay for the actual service then. I’ll post all the Korean War ones here when I have them finished! I know the USO ones are in this box but there’s some more from there in there and I have no idea what they are.

E:also trying to get some of my great uncle’s WW2 stuff digitized and I’ll drop those here too if I get em. He was a b24 copilot who missed death by being too sick to fly not once but twice.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


This acct livetweets the 70/71 war and this was kinda wow:

https://twitter.com/Krieg7071/status/1358478990093258752

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors?

What if there were some kind of giant monsters that you had to fight with infantry? How would you leverage like a hundred infantry against a dragon? (I guess, disregarding any fire-breathing, since pretty much no medieval army is optimized to deal with that, and if there is magic in the world, there'd probably be magical countermeasures available contingent on the nature of magic).

I feel like there's probably been more thought and effort and easily accessible real-world examples of what tactics a more modern army with guns would realistically do against that kind of threat, but fantasy stories all kinda just wing it without much consideration.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


The most obvious real world example is going to be elephantry, followed pretty quickly by cavalry/camelry.

In the case of elephants, well-trained infantry developed counter tactics that could be implemented pretty quickly, hence why they fade out of relevance in Europe fairly quickly (the logistics of maintaining elephantry at any distance from an area that natively produces them are brutal and massively more expensive than their countermeasures).

Stuff like a dragon is obviously much much larger, but for like an ogre or something then elephants I think kind of work.

SerthVarnee
Mar 13, 2011

It has been two zero days since last incident.
Big Super Slapstick Hunk
If i got the time to prepare for it, i'd probably set up a line of spikes behind a line of burning oil. Behind that we can place whatever poor bastards have to take out the injured stragglers that plow through. (assuming the enemy was groundbased anyways)

Other than that I suppose a fuckton of arrows volleyed at whatever swarms at my position.

A number of fishing nets tied to posts could also work to trip up the runners and have them trample each other to thin them out or funnel them into dead-end streets for a nice hail of "whatever throw-able heavy/pointy poo poo we got lying around".

I do not want to put mere humans up as a first line against anything otherworldly without some massive force multipliers that the first line men can see and expect to be able to rely on. Lines don't break from casualties taken, they break from loss of morale.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Honestly if I were fighting a dragon or something I would probably try and invent a wide angle Hwacha or organ gun and aim it st the sky.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


Da field artillery song is catchy as gently caress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJybwgtR970

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

aphid_licker posted:

Da field artillery song is catchy as gently caress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJybwgtR970

Blood on the risers is better. :colbert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayVafPHfgQ

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

SlothfulCobra posted:

I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors?

My impression is that the big advantage of a shield wall is that it protects you against ranged attacks, and the big advantage of a pike square is that most animals (notably not including wild boar) don't want to impale themselves, so will turn away if able. If you have something like a stampede that you need to stop, I'm not sure that either of those is going to be very useful. You have tens or maybe hundreds of tons of animal bearing down on you. That's a lot of energy to stop, and killing the animals in front won't stop all the other ones behind them.. My intuition is that your best bet is to try to divert or deflect them using earthworks, fire, loud noises, and similar things, while you harry them with archers. Then once the force of the charge is blunted and the animals are tired, you can send in cavalry and/or infantry to try to defeat the (fundamentally disorganized) animals in detail.

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



The documentary Princess Mononoke would seem like a good start.

I’m not just poo poo-posting, there’s a good scene of an amoral but practical way to deal with literally a giant wall of charging boars.

On a personal level, I think the best strategy is to move. As in, zip codes and professions. Just get away from boar swarm.

Richard K Morgan in one of his books had some cute ideas about fighting a dragon but not really worth the cost of admission and he’s since come out as very gross so maybe don’t hand him money.

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten
This is reminding me that a history teacher mentioned a trench or ravine at Waterloo that essentially acted as a horse juice squeezer when the French cavalry tried to charge across not realizing it was there – is that a real thing or was it made up?

SeanBeansShako
Nov 20, 2009

Now the Drums beat up again,
For all true Soldier Gentlemen.

wdarkk posted:

This is reminding me that a history teacher mentioned a trench or ravine at Waterloo that essentially acted as a horse juice squeezer when the French cavalry tried to charge across not realizing it was there – is that a real thing or was it made up?

It was more of the rise of the ridge and the edges of the nearby Farm House sort of funneling them together making it very hard to manauver or use their full mass.

Tias
May 25, 2008

Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Timmy Age 6 posted:

Thinking about the early days of NATO, when they integrated the West Germans, how was that received? My only knowledge of the topic comes from Tom Lehrer's bit about the Multilateral Force plan for nuclear sharing which is hardly, um, the most contextualized source. If an exercise slotted a German unit in next to a British or an American one, was there a lot of side-eying in case of Dr. Strangelove-like saluting reflexes, or did those exercises take place enough years after the fact that there weren't as many worries about grudges coming into play?

My (Jewish, I should note...) grandfather was a doctor in the US Army at the base in Landstuhl for a couple years circa 1952, and liked to tell stories about how all the neighbors of the house he rented were both polite and very quick to mention that they'd only ever served on the Eastern Front. Never mind the games of chess by mail they were playing with their old PoW camp commandant back in Britain...

Unbelievable amounts - well, any amount would be unbelievable in a sane world, but huge amounts - of resources were allocated to rehabilitating the Wehrmact by allied governments because they needed to court the west German bundeswehr during the cold war, to the point where Eisenhower himself signed a declaration saying that the German soldier did not lose his honour in WW2. Conveniently, blame for the massive war crimes were diverted to either the SS or sometimes nowhere at all, and the willful revisionism of (among others) US army historicans of the Wehrmact plays a large part in the 'clean wehrmact' mythos still perpetuated today.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

SlothfulCobra posted:

I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors?

What if there were some kind of giant monsters that you had to fight with infantry? How would you leverage like a hundred infantry against a dragon? (I guess, disregarding any fire-breathing, since pretty much no medieval army is optimized to deal with that, and if there is magic in the world, there'd probably be magical countermeasures available contingent on the nature of magic).

I feel like there's probably been more thought and effort and easily accessible real-world examples of what tactics a more modern army with guns would realistically do against that kind of threat, but fantasy stories all kinda just wing it without much consideration.

Some authors thought about this. In one case, I remember a fantasy Roman army fighting insectoid monsters, and the monster army managed to adapt by attacking with sickle-like claws from above, which avoided the shields and hit the fantasy Romans directly in the head, with gruesome results. I think they adapted back by improving their helmets or something?

Another author went the other way and made an army of fantasy goblins and ogres to directly counter-act shield walls and knights. The fantasy goblins would attack in huge masses, all armed with bows, pinning the shieldwall into place, while the ogres were formed up in huge groups with heavy armor, to just plow through the shieldwall and open up the human army to getting swarmed. The humans would attack the ogres with heavy cavalry, but training and heavy armor made the ogres perfectly capable of slaughtering the knights. And since the tiny goblins (called Sranc here) were vulnerable to being run down by horses, that combination worked out very well. For the monsters, that is.

ChubbyChecker
Mar 25, 2018

SlothfulCobra posted:

I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors?

What if there were some kind of giant monsters that you had to fight with infantry? How would you leverage like a hundred infantry against a dragon? (I guess, disregarding any fire-breathing, since pretty much no medieval army is optimized to deal with that, and if there is magic in the world, there'd probably be magical countermeasures available contingent on the nature of magic).

I feel like there's probably been more thought and effort and easily accessible real-world examples of what tactics a more modern army with guns would realistically do against that kind of threat, but fantasy stories all kinda just wing it without much consideration.

cast lightning bolt

Tias
May 25, 2008

Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
Milhist Thread: that combination worked out very well. For the monsters, that is.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
Anyone got questions I should ask my grandfather about the Korean War when I see him this weekend?

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Anyone got questions I should ask my grandfather about the Korean War when I see him this weekend?

How many in his unit were lost to exposure to the cruelest biological weaponry, a.k.a :kimchi:?

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Nenonen posted:

How many in his unit were lost to exposure to the cruelest biological weaponry, a.k.a :kimchi:?

He still doesn’t eat kimchi because in his words, he’s still sick of it.

E:even at 91 he’ll still house a plate of kalbi though.

Ugly In The Morning fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Feb 8, 2021

Tias
May 25, 2008

Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
We're already learning that the formerly mythic state of "too much kimchi" really exists :o Fascinating!

What was the best about being there, and what was the worst? Recognizing that he might not want to answer the latter, of course.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Anyone got questions I should ask my grandfather about the Korean War when I see him this weekend?

Ask him if he's written memoirs or has personal papers because archives love that sort of thing, especially if he had a non-"tip of the spear" sort of job.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Tias posted:

We're already learning that the formerly mythic state of "too much kimchi" really exists :o Fascinating!

What was the best about being there, and what was the worst? Recognizing that he might not want to answer the latter, of course.

Worst I already know his answer to- the cold. I’ll find out what the best part was though!

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Ask him if he's written memoirs or has personal papers because archives love that sort of thing, especially if he had a non-"tip of the spear" sort of job.

He hasn’t written much down, he just started talking about this and he’s lovely about typing. Might see if he’ll record some stories and then I’ll transcribe them though.

ChubbyChecker
Mar 25, 2018

aphid_licker posted:

Da field artillery song is catchy as gently caress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJybwgtR970

nice! hadn't heard that before

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

especially if he had a non-"tip of the spear" sort of job.

He was a clerk who never really saw combat and that’s part of why he never talked about it.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Ugly In The Morning posted:

He was a clerk who never really saw combat and that’s part of why he never talked about it.

Historians care about what clerks did too. Tell him that.

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Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Historians care about what clerks did too. Tell him that.

He knows, it’s why he’s actually started talking about it in the last few months. He knows that even though he’s healthy, at 91 who knows when you’re going to cash out so you may as well tell your story even though you personally don’t think it’s exciting.

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