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Fearless posted:I have personally spoken with an ex-RAF Lancaster pilot who attested to Canadians cutting gun ports in the bellies of their Halifaxes to poke out a .50 as a nasty surprise for any night fighters with naughty ideas, and in one particularly spectacular case, an RCAF air crew that had swapped out the quad .303s in the tail of their Lanc for a jury rigged twin 20mm mount after they got sick and tired of having to learn the name of yet another new tail gunner. I can only imagine the impression that left on trailing fighters... Cool! I've read about that before; apparently that particular mod happened a fair bit. First it was a single .50 in a downward mount. This made total sense as the "jazz" attacks with vertical mounts was the favorite attack profile for German Night Fighters. Lancasters especially had fuel tanks mounted on the inboard wing, and these exploded real good when some rounds went through them. According to Wikipedia, the Lanc had been initially designed with provisions for a ventral turret, but this was deleted almost immediately as dead weight. So the DIY types had something to start with...though, haha, the H2S bombing radar also used this space.  This field surgery became so common that soon actual field turrets started appearing, for some reason called "Preston Green" turrets.      So this is good stuff, though the weird thing is the the brass at the very top was all for increasing gunner firepower for night bombers. Late model mid-upper turrets (Mk. VII and Mk. X on the Lanc) got mounted further forward so they could take 2 .50 cals. According to wikipedia, the top brass in 1942 (!) was all for swapping out .50 cals. There was some sort of top level meeting in January 1943 where everybody was all "yes, let's get new turrets inside of a year." So for those that don't know, power turrets in WW2 aircraft were pretty much their own subsystem, and were usually built by aircraft makers. For example, that .303 mid-upper turret mentioned was the FN-150, made by Nash & Thompson, and the .50 mount was the American Martin 250 CE 23A. Nash & Thompson was contracted to engineer the new tail turret, but things went so slowly that 'Bomber' Harris got a very small firm named Rose Brothers to design their own .50 Lancaster tail turret. The Rose Brothers managed design and engineer it, but their production was very much hipster artisnal handcrafted. They managed to get 400 improved turrets in bombers before the War's end. Also for some goddamn reason Nash & Thompson was even slower, so their turret design never saw combat.
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Jun 10, 2021 01:35
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Flights of Fancy - Episode 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRTj9p9due4 Got the next video up, talking about the Soviet Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1. Its interesting to see just how close this got to being on the frontlines, but instead we got the Me-163.
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Jun 10, 2021 01:50
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Ice Fist posted:You mean heavy tanks. (I don't know if this strategy is still viable in HOI4 and even if it is I am very bad at that game but I recall holding off the German breakthrough for around 2 years and inflicted millions of casualties) IIRC the Char was a very solid heavy tank for its time. Slow as balls but just fine on the defence, and the few the french had did pretty well.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:08
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Gort posted:Was that unreliable? It sounds unreliable. i wonder if some dude in the spirit of the age of enlightenment ever calculated how reliable it was?
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Jun 10, 2021 06:12
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Gort posted:I play a lot of Hearts of Iron 4. [...] The game only has heavy tank models for 1934 and 1941, with the 1934 one being big garbage. I guess the KV tank just doesn't exist in the Hearts of Iron alt-history. There's the 1943 heavy tank model as well.
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Jun 10, 2021 06:30
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ChubbyChecker posted:i wonder if some dude in the spirit of the age of enlightenment ever calculated how reliable it was? 100% effectiveness, no one ever complained.
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Jun 10, 2021 07:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:i wonder if some dude in the spirit of the age of enlightenment ever calculated how reliable it was? Up to 1 in 5 were duds, according to this article about a man who died in 2008 while trying to clean a naval shell from the Civil War. Civil War cannon shells had an innovation called a Bormann fuse. The cannonball was filled with gunpowder and shrapnel, and plugged with a metal disk. This disk contained gunpowder that burned at a predictable rate, with the burn time on it, so the artillerymen would use an awl to punch a hole and set the fuse to explode in 1 to 5 seconds. The cannonball could explode in front of enemy soldiers and effectively become grapeshot, which was much deadlier than a single heavy iron ball.
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Jun 10, 2021 08:15
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Chamale posted:Up to 1 in 5 were duds, according to this article about a man who died in 2008 while trying to clean a naval shell from the Civil War. 
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Jun 10, 2021 09:23
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Arrinien posted:So if I'm getting this right, the answer to how was it supposed to work is that nobody really had any expectations of anything because none of it was really planned to begin with, the Muslim League wanted as big a state as possible and worry about the practicality later, and all the British really cared about was to GTFO without causing a war? And when the final borders more or less settled down, I guess they could treat it as a kind of weirdly land-adjacent island nation. Although now that I think about it I suppose that's exactly how Alaska works. In the most simplified way yes this hits a lot of major points. Probably better to say that Britain wanted out without getting involved in a war, they didnt want one to happen but they absolutely did not want to get involved in something like the Dutch or the French did in their decolonisations of the time (Vietnam, Indonesia). I would phrase the Muslim Leagues motives more charitably, they wanted to be able to protect as many muslims as they could rather than neccesarily seeking territory for its own sake but thats a positive reading on my part of their motives, doubtless the INC would have viewed it differently (and indeed vis versa). This is of course assigning monolithic motives to each side which all had their own motives and personalities involved which is a whole other set of problems but we wont get into that now.
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Jun 10, 2021 09:29
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Man just cutting holes into your airplane's structure like that seems like a dicy proposition
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Jun 10, 2021 13:45
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The Lone Badger posted:IIRC the Char was a very solid heavy tank for its time. Slow as balls but just fine on the defence, and the few the french had did pretty well. I assume you mean the Char B1 and/or 2C. Char basically just means 'tank' (or car/carriage/chariot).
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Jun 10, 2021 14:04
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aphid_licker posted:Man just cutting holes into your airplane's structure like that seems like a dicy proposition Presumably they would only go through skin, not the frame or stringers.
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Jun 10, 2021 15:26
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Chamale posted:Up to 1 in 5 were duds, according to this article about a man who died in 2008 while trying to clean a naval shell from the Civil War. quote:In the period 1861 to 1865, Confederate troops from the southern states and Union forces from the north blasted an estimated 1.5 million artillery pieces at each other, some on land and some on the water. I know what they mean, but what I read is that both armies in the civil war had cannons that shot cannons at the other side. Gosh the industry needed to perform such a feat as disposable artillery used as ammunition in other artillery is astonishing.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:06
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Cessna posted:Presumably they would only go through skin, not the frame or stringers. Ah, the skin wasn't, uh, stressed or what it's called, it's just covering?
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Jun 10, 2021 16:12
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aphid_licker posted:Ah, the skin wasn't, uh, stressed or what it's called, it's just covering? It depends on the plane. Some use the skin as the structure (monocoque), some don't (like early planes where there's only a fabric covering), some use a mix (semi-monocoque) where there's a frame covered by a skin that gives additional strength and rigidity. The Lancaster used semi-monocoque. The skin provided some rigidity, but most of the structural strength came from frames and stringers. If they were selective and didn't chop out a big piece of skin from a vital area it probably wouldn't be too much of a problem.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:21
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aphid_licker posted:Ah, the skin wasn't, uh, stressed or what it's called, it's just covering? Lancasters used a pretty standard semi-monocoque. Since it was designed for a ventral turret though, they almost certainly did not do away with the support structure in the fuselage when they deleted the turret, they would have just sheeted over it. Remove that panel and the turret ring would still be present.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:22
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Edited, wrong thread. Nevermind.
Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 18:08
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feedmegin posted:I assume you mean the Char B1 and/or 2C. Char basically just means 'tank' (or car/carriage/chariot). Probably yes. I am bad at tank.
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Jun 11, 2021 02:17
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Tomn posted:If I recall correctly, the point of shells at that point was more shrapnel rather than raw HE, right? More knocking out infantry with shards of metal instead of, say, demolishing a building. A big issue during the first few years of World War 1 was a lack of heavy artillery. Most guns were light (75ish mm) and meant to rapidly fire shrapnel style shells at enemy troops in the open. The only way to kill men in trenches and clear barbed wire though was to just obliterate them in a plume of high explosives and earth. You see a huge shift towards heavy artillery firing HE as the war goes on, and the lighter guns became more or less obsolete in static warfare. Gort posted:Was that unreliable? It sounds unreliable. It is, but so is the old school way of lighting the fuze and then firing it. If the main charge fails to fire and your mortar shell doesn't launch, the thing blows up in front of you. With the newer way, occasionally the fuze can fail upon firing, which will cause the thing to just explode as you fire it. Also as late as the US Civil war many common (usually Iron) artillery pieces would explode randomly in normal use. Being in artillery must have been fun!
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Jun 11, 2021 08:40
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The cartoon cannon has a fuse sticking out of it. Was this ever used in real-life so you can light the quick-match then have time to hide behind something before the gun fires and/or explodes? Or would this have slowed the rate of fire to an unacceptable degree?
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Jun 11, 2021 09:37
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Ice Fist posted:I know what they mean, but what I read is that both armies in the civil war had cannons that shot cannons at the other side. Gosh the industry needed to perform such a feat as disposable artillery used as ammunition in other artillery is astonishing. ... This is actually not that wrong of a description of a period shrapnel shell. Unlike with HE shells, their method of operation was not so much that they blew up and spread fragments in every direction, but that there was a cast iron shell that had a little bit of gunpowder on the bottom and was filled with lead or iron balls. When the fuse ran out, the gunpowder fired the balls out of the cylinder, and they'd spread out widely before impacting. And that charge was very small -- many designs had the shell firing backwards -- this would slow the shrapnel a little bit, but the speed at which the shell was going forwards was so much greater than then speed at which the balls were fired out that it hardly mattered. (Those cast iron shells did also typically burst open when the charge went off, but that doesn't make them not cannons, it just makes them lovely cannons.)
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Jun 11, 2021 11:57
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Isn't that basically the same design as the airburst shrapnel shells enabled by radar fuses in WW2?
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Jun 11, 2021 13:00
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The Lone Badger posted:The cartoon cannon has a fuse sticking out of it. Was this ever used in real-life so you can light the quick-match then have time to hide behind something before the gun fires and/or explodes? Or would this have slowed the rate of fire to an unacceptable degree? Sort of, depending on the cannon.
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Jun 11, 2021 13:01
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Ice Fist posted:I know what they mean, but what I read is that both armies in the civil war had cannons that shot cannons at the other side. Gosh the industry needed to perform such a feat as disposable artillery used as ammunition in other artillery is astonishing. This thread is the first place I've seen the term "horse artillery" and that provoked a similar, though much more horrifying, reaction.
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Jun 11, 2021 16:54
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Wingnut Ninja posted:This thread is the first place I've seen the term "horse artillery" and that provoked a similar, though much more horrifying, reaction. Well-deserved horror. Horses are some of the most vicious and merciless gunners you'll ever meet. Never let a horse get their hooves on artillery. There's a reason we phased them out.
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Jun 11, 2021 17:02
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Poor freckles, thought of counter battery fire and died.
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Jun 11, 2021 17:05
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Here's Finnish National Library's digitized collection of WW2 propaganda flyers. A lot of them are Finnish flyers directed at Russians or Soviet flyers directed at Finns, but there is also material in Swedish, Estonian and German. https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/95872 Like for example, this German published Novoye Slovo from July 1943 which is pure propaganda, including Kelly-esque cartoons   What's more baffling is the advertisements page. There's also something that suspiciously looks like contact ads. 
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Jun 11, 2021 18:13
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Also about a third of that page are obituaries and missing persons.Wingnut Ninja posted:This thread is the first place I've seen the term "horse artillery" and that provoked a similar, though much more horrifying, reaction. Fun fact: Canadian horse artillery successfully lobbied to revoke the Horse title for Sexton units because they didn't have real horses and as such didn't deserve the honour.
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Jun 11, 2021 18:18
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So after hearing about some of her exploits I'm reading the wiki article on Eupraxia of Kiev, and how the gently caress have the tv streaming services not made her life into a trashy rear end show yet? Russian princess, moves to Germany to marry the semi-amusingly named Henry the Long who then promptly dies, goes to live in a convent, gets noticed by Henry IV because she was apparently a smokin' hottie, and so becomes Empress. Except Henry is allegedly into some weird sect sex, forcing her to engage in orgies and maybe offering her sexually to his son by a previous marriage. On a trip to Italy she escapes from the monastery where the Imperial party is camped out, forms a bad-bitch squad with Matilda of Tuscany, allies herself with the Pope, and she travels around Europe helping to organize opposition to Henry during the investiture crisis. The crazy sex stuff might even be true! This is peak soap action, Netflix should get on it.
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Jun 11, 2021 19:24
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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It's weird they sex things up that look silly but if they hired somebody to do research and just be patient for a few minutes...
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Jun 11, 2021 20:06
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Ice Fist posted:I know what they mean, but what I read is that both armies in the civil war had cannons that shot cannons at the other side. Gosh the industry needed to perform such a feat as disposable artillery used as ammunition in other artillery is astonishing. Pieces? That seems a very high number of cannon and also a very small number of rounds
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Jun 11, 2021 21:32
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Well they are in pieces if they are Russian horse artillery at Borrodino.
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Jun 11, 2021 23:50
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Hammerstein posted:Only to a lesser extent. There might have been a tendency post war, to elevate Hitler's influence to distract from the blunders of the general staff and from the war crimes of the Wehrmacht, but the majority is probably true. Wasn't it Keitel that officially held von Blomberg's office? He was a nazi sycophant but he had the post. And had a very fun appointment with a certain hangman from Kansas for his "service."
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Jun 12, 2021 00:00
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Marshall was never in operational command of any US forces. The chain went directly from the President to each theater commander in chief iirc.
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Jun 12, 2021 01:22
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Milo and POTUS posted:a very high number of cannon and also a very small number of rounds but enough about the hapsburgs 
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Jun 12, 2021 10:17
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VostokProgram posted:Marshall was never in operational command of any US forces. The chain went directly from the President to each theater commander in chief iirc. From what I read Marshall was Chief of Staff from 39-45 and was Roosevelt's principal adviser on military matters and operations, so any order to the theater commanders would have Marshall's touch. So the Roosevelt/Marshall comparison to Hitler/Blomberg seems appropriate, stressing that a head of state, who is also his own chief of staff, does not seem like a good idea. Edgar Allen Ho posted:Wasn't it Keitel that officially held von Blomberg's office? He was a nazi sycophant but he had the post. And had a very fun appointment with a certain hangman from Kansas for his "service." This is correct, but the job was no longer the same after Blomberg was forced out. During Blomberg's time the future OKW was still the Reichswehrministerium and the top job was a ministerial position with the authority of command. After Blomberg's fall Hitler took that position for himself and the former Reichswehrministerium was abolished in 1938 and became the OKW. Keitel was in command, but the power and authority that the original job once held was now greatly diminished, especially because the other branches of service had also received direct access to Hitler. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Jun 12, 2021 |
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Jun 12, 2021 10:58
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Is anything that Victor Davis Hanson wrote good?
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Jun 12, 2021 16:04
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FPyat posted:Is anything that Victor Davis Hanson wrote good? He wrote about a book about Trump that Trump really liked, if that counts
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Jun 12, 2021 17:36
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FPyat posted:Is anything that Victor Davis Hanson wrote good? His doctoral thesis, "Warfare and Agriculture" looking at the way agricultural patterns shaped Greek warranting was pretty good, and his "The Other Greeks", about how Greek society was shaped by small farmers, was ok. As a general rule, when Hanson is talking about ancient Greek agriculture, he's generally pretty good. When he's talking about other stuff, not so much.
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Jun 12, 2021 21:31
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New Extra History episode on the 30 Years War; of particular interest to me is the talk about the debase of currency affected the economy; something I was only vaguely aware of due to Spice and Wolf and EU4.
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Jun 12, 2021 22:15
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