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We also have more advanced solutions for launching and retrieving scout aircraft these days.  The ScanEagle basically flies into a taut string with the end of a wing, then the string slides down the curved wing to the end, where it enters basically a carabiner, and spins around the string to lose momentum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7bbasMvXZJo#t=104
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Nov 10, 2014 23:29
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Ludacris posted:It's time to saddle up the Tontos cause I'm the Lone Ranger 
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Jan 18, 2015 08:53
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Nicotine is indeed an effective nootropic drug and has been proven in numerous studies to improve reaction time, driving performance, overnight memory and attention etc. Tobacco is harder to study since the method of delivery is usually smoking and there are many additives used, with different amount and varieties from brand to brand (and of course the source tobacco leaves and methods of processing also vary).quote:Whether those claims were actually true to any extent or just bunk delivered by opportunistic big tobacco hoping to recruit the recruits is another question. This is actually two questions, and the answer is yes.
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Mar 19, 2015 05:09
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hard counter posted:e: this article explains things more clearly than I can. What a shame then, that it is $38 to read  On the bright side, I found some of those WWI ads you mentioned.   
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Mar 19, 2015 10:36
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Kanine posted:If you had a time machine that could only travel back in time and return once, and you could only observe and not interact: what is the one time and place you would want to go back to? You guys are missing the point. If you could really do this, the real thing to do would be to try to break the machine and learn about time. The most obvious thing I can think of is to turn the machine to the earliest time it can go and see what happens. xthetenth posted:Part of the reason I want to go back to try to pick up pre-Columbian linguistics is because it'd be something incredibly lucrative but also because it'd be something that'd pretty quickly show that it worked and back itself up. Any idea on how not to become another theory on the subject even if you're right? Trivial, just find their graveyards and trash dumps and mark them down on a map, then talk to some geologists to see where that volume of dirt is now. If nothing else you greatly increase your credibility. Of course, I think that simply presenting recordings of speech to linguists specializing in the current dead and dying languages of the continent would be sufficient in your case. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 04:45
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Handsome Ralph posted:Pages back, but figured I'd mention, the Ask Historians subreddit has been overwhelmingly good, most of the time. Please, all the real history happens on /r/polandball.  Regarding future military history, what have recent city defenses looked like? Where do you deploy troops in a city under threat, how do you supply the city, what do you do with all of the people in it? Where do the defenses actually take place? I know that, for example, in NYC while there are several military facilities within the city, all of the fortifications therein are aimed at protecting from terrorists and vandals; things like bronze-plated dragon's teeth in Wall Street, the reinforced base of NWTC. But any actual defence of the city from some threat would have to be almost entirely naval (as Washington's failure to defend the city from the British demonstrates). Is the same true for most of our coastal cities? What about landlocked cities which have been at risk? What sort of defensive structures do Israeli city planners build?
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Apr 7, 2015 23:43
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bewbies posted:This is kind of an interesting question. Basically, the answer is "the city is the defense": cities have a ton of inherent advantages for defenders. In the US at least we're assuming that a large portion of any future operation is going to take place in cities and that poo poo is going to be ug-ly. I was quite fascinated with Wikipedia's account of the New York/ New Jersey campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Even 300 years apart, with the city almost unrecognizable, the fact that people fought over the future of a nation in the same places I had lived, was just striking and increased the confidence of some of my guesses; especially that, even in the late 1700s it was impossible to defend New York City without at least naval parity. Let's get away from the United States for the moment though; it's difficult to discuss, unless someone has documents of say, plans to defend San Francisco or similar from invasion (and surely they were drawn up). Are there any excellent (English or Russian preferred) resources on the Siege of Sarajevo? Or perhaps the period of twenty years before and after Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah? Surely with the ongoing military operations therein someone has translated some of Saddam Hussein's plans and assessments for defense into English. Another question for the professional historians in this thread, how long are things like said plans and assessments (both ones made by the spied upon and the spying party) usually kept secret for? Ten years? Thirty? Forever? How often are these documents lost, what happens to the regular reports (AARs etc ) that soldiers and officers write during operations? Are they usually destroyed immediately, kept in a bureaucratic organization (when is it military and when is it civic?) for a time and then destroyed, or kept and then released? I know we have access to documents like that from WWII, but I have had a very hard time finding them in any language I can read with regards to stuff that happened in the last thirty years. There's plenty of memoirs but I would prefer the original reports, emails, powerpoints, recordings of radio communications (encrypted or clear), dossiers that were given to people with some kind of task to do in such military actions, or accounts that those people gave after. There's plenty of "human story" information but I am more interested in the way modern military forces turn individual experiences into doctrine.
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Apr 8, 2015 21:54
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TheFluff posted:there is a classification level that sounds really silly when you describe it, because it is so secret that the very existence of the classification level itself is classified. Or at least it used to be; its existence was officially revealed in 2011, but the regulations that govern it are still classified (I hesitate to call it a law, even though I'm pretty sure it technically is one). It seems to be almost exclusively used for military intelligence. This doesn't surprise me at all. Classified information is just a formalized secret; since secret military actions are just formalized conspiracies, the conclusion is that there have been countless successful conspiracies that will never see the light of day as everyone involved is either sworn to secrecy or dead. More than likely several of these schemes have existed concurrently within the same organizations without being aware of each other.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:54
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Perestroika posted:It takes a very special kind of author to take the idea of "the protagonist should have flaws to make them believable and relatable" and decide that the best way to do that is by making him an unrepentant serial rapist. 
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Apr 29, 2015 21:48
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Eej posted:Introduce canning and the can opener. Don't you need electricity to solder cans? What is the industrial base like for 17th century? HEY GAL, do you have a ballpark estimate for Europe's steel production in any year in that century? P-Mack posted:I like stories where knowledge of rock music and basketball enables the protagonist to defeat knights in single combat. Murgos posted:Ok dude. I'll just go with you instead of my personal experience carring an M240 (effective on point targets to 800m) across Africa and manning M2s (effective range of 1850 meters, about where the eye can no longer discern individual objects). Murgos posted:
How do you do this? how much time do you spend training and how do you get that training? Speaking as a person who has an accuracy rate of 50% firing at soda cans with a pistol at 10 yards, how much time would it take for me to become 800m man size moving target proficient with an SG-43 or RPK or something, the kind of automatic weapons a normal college student can get ahold of.
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May 7, 2015 23:45
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Fo3 posted:I'm that old that no one remembers hand soldering irons? If you google image search " vintage hand soldering irons " you'll get pictures of a few. I'm a teenager, so you might not be old. Although if you went to school 30 years ago, well , that makes you 50 or something. I do a great deal of electronics work, soldering things that aren't delicate is something I never think of outside of historical curios like 19th century cans. Why not just weld it, right? Early 20th century hand tools are interesting though. I have one of these(well, a Taiwanese imitation) on my workbench:  . It's almost as good as a cordless drill on soft materials like wood, and much quieter. The adjustable chuck is really what makes it appeal to me, I think for drills too much older than this you have trouble sourcing bits.The real question is, if you are going to bring telegraph technology into the past(meaning, you provide the lines & bugs), why would you DO THAT? Teletype is clearly superior.
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May 8, 2015 07:09
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Fo3 posted:Plus electric mains and even battery drills were around. Fo3 posted:e: there's even older style hand drills, look up " hand brace drill " or "brace" or 'bit brace", invented around 16th century. For the opposite, consider the pump drill.  JosefStalinator, are you the same as the Stalinator of http://josefvstalin.com/ ? Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 19:54 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 17:23
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HEY GAL posted:i am pretty sure jauchecharly, citizen of vienna in the year of god 2015, has not gotten a job in an einsatzkommando You'd be surprised, they'll let anybody in nowadays. Kanine posted:Like how could so many people (ie soviet invaders pillaging en masse, or any of the countless German soldiers killing locals earlier in the war) inflict bodily harm on a man/child/woman right in front of them, screaming and (in another language) begging for mercy and still hurt them? People say this is dehumanization, but I mean, like, of course they would beg for mercy, why would you listen to them? You have a job to do. Its one thing to discuss murder philosophically and almost anyone who has studied ethics can draw up dozens of convincing arguments for why murder is bad, but like, who gives a gently caress when its you and the other guy, and you know you have to kill him. Tomn posted:Also, there is the fact that if the CSA had continued to exist, so would the institution of slavery and all that implies. Not to mention that even before the Civil War Southerners were actively talking about turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into slave states in order to ensure the continued health and prosperity of the slaveholding South, so it's pretty likely they'd have plumped for that as much as possible after becoming a sovereign nation. The orgin of the word "filibuster"! Although maybe I read about that earlier in this thread. It's tough to keep things straight. Rocko Bonaparte posted:Were compound bows--as in the kind with pulleys--really a modern military innovation? I would have figured with crossbows that something like that would have come about before firearms. Is it because the materials necessary to build one were all modern inventions? Not a miltiary invention at all. I present Holless Wilbur Allen's 1966 patent for “Archery bow with draw-force multiplying attachments" , recognizeable as a primitve dual-cam compound bow. To make a compound bow you need a stiff riser, which ought to be made of metal, and composite limbs (wood, fiberglass, carbon composite). And of course, the cams, which for good letoff need to be rather well made.  Cams are unneccessary in crossbows, since the crossbow requires no strength to keep drawn. I am sure you have seen the various braces and winches on crossbows and ballistae, those are just to help draw the bow to begin with, once drawn all of the force is stored in the bow and there are no forces on your hand.  my dad posted:You racist little poo poo. remove halva Please don't remove halva. In fact, bring me more halva, I only have 300g left of the bit I smuggled in from Miletopl.
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May 18, 2015 03:54
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:That was mostly my the point. I'm surprised it wasn't a thing until the latter half of the 20th century. Is that even something that could have been developed in a time period before firearms dominated? Would it have actually been useful? I thought I made this clear :| 1. Not without ahistorical metallurgy and precision manufacture. 2. No. Because: HEY GAL posted:would it have been better than crossbows, because we already had those before handheld firearms became a huge thing The modern compound hunting bow is a brilliant tool, because it permits people to wield heavy(60-80lb) bows without training with them all year. Accuracy is very good and power is excellent. This only matters because in most places in the world archery hunting season is separate from gun season, and crossbows are forbidden. JaucheCharly posted:I'm quite sure that the main reason why this design didn't appear earlier is the limitations of available string material. Everybody forgets the strings. I don't think you can make a compound design work with a string of natural materials like hemp or ramie. Strings of raw silk have very similar properties to Dacron though. Sinew strung into a flemish twist is probably strong enough for the job. But its not like you are going to make the rest of the bow anyways. Anyways, as I am sure most of the TFR bow thread can tell you, the advantage of a compound bow is not more power, its the let-off. Thats what the cams are for, they let you hold the bow at a high weight without tiring your arms. With a recurve bow I draw and aim at the same time, then release more or less as soon as I complete my draw. With a compound bow I can take more time to aim and stabilize. Just about any crossbow is going to be superior to a bow of the same draw weight for reasons that are obvious to any archer. bewbies posted:In America today, I think we call that personality type a "psychopath": one who acts without empathy and without remorse, who doesn't subscribe to normal ideals of right and wrong. Here's something fascinating!  Psychopathy is more like a spectrum then a mental disorder (many people convincingly argue that this is true for most mental disorders). This is not the thread for this discussion, but lets just say it is complicated and you will get different answers from a policeman, a therapist, and a psychopath.
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May 19, 2015 08:01
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JaucheCharly posted:I see this quoted pretty often, but sinew is a horrible material for strings. I know people use it and think it's historical, but whole strings weren't made of sinew. Eastern style 3 piece strings of uniform lenght sometimes use them for the knotted parts, which are usually quite short. E.g. 6-8cm in turkish and persian bows. When sinew gets wet, it stretches excessively. I can put some backstrap into water and see how much. It's between 10-20% of it's dry lenght. With a stretch like that you're looking at some serious loss of braceheight when it gets wet, which will make unstringing of the bow very much likely once you shoot. JaucheCharly posted:People buy compound bows, because they don't want to spend time to learn to shoot (I think some guy posted exactly that in the archery thread a few pages back) and have accuracy like with a rifle and then still claim that they have the skills to shoot a bow or hunt with it. Every person who can grunt past peak can shoot them relatively accurately once they got them calibrated in the shop. They're the equivalent of people who want to have muscles like a bodybuilder within a few months, but don't want to train or watch their diet. Compound bows also produce substantially faster arrow speeds. 300fps is something that you can see on well made short composite bows of around +100# that shoot super light flight arrows with zero military or hunting application. It's nothing unsual for compounds to reach such speeds. Well, I mean, if you want to take 200yd shots and hit a deer heart or at least deer lung, you need to spend the time to learn to shoot anyways, but at least you won't have to go back to the range twice a week to keep your shoulders in good shape. For this reason, compound bows are good. Do compound bows produce faster arrow speeds than Olympic Recurve of the same draw weight and length? JaucheCharly posted:What do you mean by "any crossbow is going to be superior to a bow of the same draw weight for reasons that are obvious to any archer"? That it takes even less skill and training to be used successfully? That modern crossbows are even more like a rifle? I would say without hesitation that a modern crossbow requires less skill and training than a recurve. I think its about equivalent for compound to crossbow. The advantages of the crossbow are obvious: 1. you can fit telescopic sights on it much more readily 2. there is no effort at all required in keeping the bow drawn 3. you can fire prone and from other odd positions much more easily 4. being shorter, and with the bow horizontal instead of vertical, you have many more options re: blinds and stands. Perhaps the only advantage that a modern compound bow has is that you can quickly shoot again if you miss your first shot, before the prey escapes.
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May 19, 2015 21:59
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me Hey man, thats unfair, god dammit I shave every morning and twice in the afternoon. it turns out a katana is not a really great razor, but what am I gonna do? I paid for it, might as well use it
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May 22, 2015 23:32
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Klaus88 posted:From the social media thread, which is bringing out the idiocy in both goons and social media goers alike. Come on dude like, this is popular history. Literally all history except that done by sweaty turbonerds like us is "look at how great we were, and how poo poo everyone else was" EDIT: The disdain is justified. Does anyone have that pic from a Chinese museum at a paleolithic site with the hilarious Engrish co-option of "glorious culture"  I think I first saw it somewhere in SomethingAwful, but I can't find it now. Did find this though. http://www.drben.net/ChinaReport/Be...hicMuseum1.html Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 15:45 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 15:32
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HEY GAL posted:for instance, my subjects are almost certainly dead  That's all I really wanted to say, but since I don't want to post without content, here's a beautiful propaganda video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwoSFQb5HVk
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May 26, 2015 17:55
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Wordpress has had security issues but since you're not selling anything it'll be fine. More like, wordpress has more holes than swiss cheese. But sure for a personal blog it is very suitable. Who in Russia is responsible for keeping nuclear secrets? Is there anything there like the U.S. military/DOE dynamic?
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May 30, 2015 07:31
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Yes, let us re-rail this thread with some cool historical military dudes. Military motorcyles over time have been pretty neat. They've become less and less used over time, but there are still some sweet loving bikes out there. The Kawasaki KLR has been pretty popular with the U.S. and Japanese miltaries for its ruggedness (although most sport riders say the KLR is heavy and handles poorly{and they're right}, its still basically a suitable tool for riding around the woods/desert). Some have even been converted to simplify fuel logistics.  Mmmmm... I would kill a man for that motorcycle. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 22:34 on May 31, 2015 |
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May 31, 2015 22:31
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SeanBeansShako posted:Tim Stone of the Rock Paper Shotgun PC Gaming blog who does the Milhist, Milsim and general other simulators posted this history of the real life flight simulator I thought you'd all be interested in reading. Cool article, but the idea that there was no way to train for flying in the 1920s is largely bullshit. You flew model aircraft. They had all kinds, mostly balsa wood construction, many gliders, some with motors that would run on a timer (say, 7 seconds and then the motor would cut out and a cable would be pulled to lower the elevator for an easy landing), and some that ran until they run out of gas, but were tied to a pole, so you only had 1 axis of control (i.e. up and down, no sideways, steering via a string). Then of course there were the glider clubs. I'm impressed at the idea that people flew IFR in 1920. Thats some ballsy poo poo. I've been in fog where all I could see was grey, and the GPS was the only thing that reassured me I was going the right way. I guess you *could* do it if you just flew a heading and used your artificial horizon to keep yourself steady, but even then, what about drift? They must have had good maps and lots of last-minute corrections.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:45
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Phanatic posted:And at some point after that, one of my father's patients chopped the forestock off to turn it into a hunting rifle. Dammit. I think you mean "awesome, I have a disposable hunting rifle chambered in a versatile and readily available cartridge." Not that it would be difficult to find an original stock, or make one yourself to resemble your desired appearance. Historical gun collectors of the thread, how would you feel if I drilled and tapped a M1903? What if I put a period-accurate scope on it? Would that increase the value of the rifle by more than the cost of the scope, or reduce it? Sometimes you just gotta shoot things man. Sometimes you have less than $500 and need to transmute it into a gun that isn't utter poo poo. That's when you bust out the hundred-year-old gun.
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Jun 17, 2015 01:31
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chitoryu12 posted:World War II Unertl
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Jun 17, 2015 01:51
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chitoryu12 posted:Aren't AR-15 stocks even from the 1960s still solid enough to be used to club a guy around the head? It's not exactly like in Green Berets where you just whack the gun against a tree and it shatters. They make wood stocks for the AR-15 series too. But if the debate is between a 7 lb solid piece of plastic with some steel bits, some of which are fragile in it, and a longer and more club-shaped 11lb hunk of wood with firmly bedded steel parts, obviously that wins. But even when you look at old weapons, its pretty common to damage something when using the firearm as a club. Better to just carry a club, no? Have expandable batons ever been issued to a modern force? What about wooden clubs? Is there anything in the articles of war preventing me from whittling something from a treebranch and using it to merc dudes?
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Jun 17, 2015 07:55
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FAUXTON posted:The one with the most room inside of course  
Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 20:57
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P-Mack, why did you, a person so clearly capable of eloquence, choose "rapey" instead of "rapacious"? I'm not trying to be snide, just curious.
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Jun 19, 2015 06:50
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drat, consider me schooled
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Jun 19, 2015 09:32
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the JJ posted:
There were plans to produce and drop up to 8 bombs at one point, with a third shot being prepared immediately after Nagasaki. Its a shame that all of the testimony we have about the atomic bombs from the Axis comes from mostly civilians and low-level soldiers. Perhaps in future wars we can stop killing all the top generals, and instead put them in jail and let the press visit them over the course of their natural lifetimes.  The plutonium core that was prepared for the third bomb was complete at the time, and when it became clear it was not needed, was used in testing instead. It took 2 lives in the process of said testing (mostly due to incredible disregard for safety in the tests) by way of radiation poisoning, and was, by some accounts, used in ABLE, the first postwar nuclear test. Fascinating stuff, in an era of mass-produced nukes. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 06:13
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P-Mack posted:I wish so much the Qing had done this. And also not actively destroyed every Taiping document they could find. For some odd reason stamping out any possible ember of rebellion took priority over making life easier for future historians. I thought about the logistics of holding these smart, politically dangerous people and convincing them to talk about what happened. I came to the conclusion that your best bet was a lengthy interview before the trial, the actual trial proceedings, and making a copy of their brain before death in the hopes that you could extract more information from it later. Hopefully future technology permits the reading of memories from a brain, but failing that I think just slicing the brain up and preserving it, Einstein-style, could be useful. I don't think you could keep them in detention indefinitely, as they would either convince you to release them, or escape.
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Jun 28, 2015 21:03
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:We'd even get into contemporary times, where something like an immediate post-WWII army could get obliterated practically to a man by a nuclear power of the 60's. When do militaries start getting worse again? Now? 20 years from now? 2000 years? It'll happen eventually. SquadronROE posted:I did a straw poll with my coworkers a couple of years back. We're all American software engineers or similar, so college graduates. Out of 10 people, 4 didn't know who we fought the Revolutionary war against. Nationalism is a disease.  
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Jul 2, 2015 21:27
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Chamale posted:Whenever the F-35 replaces all the United States's useful planes. This is what happens when a military absolutely dominates all of the other militaries on the planet; passing money to the friends of corrupt politicians is more important than preparing to fight a war. Of course, when you consider nuclear weapons, the U.S. of 1975 would fight the U.S. of 2015 to an apocalyptic tie because they're each equally capable of obliterating each other. What sort of historical examples do we have of something similar? I'm guessing we can at least pluck a few examples from Rome, but what else is there? The Eight Banners?
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Jul 3, 2015 00:52
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sullat posted:It's also easier to attack the future than the past. We could launch some nukes into solar orbit for a decade or two, then program them to intercept the earth in 2035 and show those smug future fuckers what for. haha I loving love it, but why wait for it to intercept the earth, when you could attack yourself NOW and be sure? When I asked the question I really meant it more to say that eventually militaries are going to get worse instead of better, at least for a while. If the overall industry and technology level drops, so will military capacity, but similarly really high levels of industry could remove all militaries, leaving only police forces... which would still surely trounce pike and shot, but might not be prepared for, say, suitcase nukes or an aircraft carrier.
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Jul 3, 2015 10:06
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Why are we still using double and triple base gunpowder in our guns? Why have we not yet seen Octogen, CL-20, or other high explosive propellants. I understand there is a significant increase in cost, but not even in sniper rifles do we see these improved propellants. Why are we, in the 21st century, killing each other with end of the 19th century technology? Similarly, why do we use lead and not tungsten in our high performance bullets? EDIT: I found some tungsten bullets. Apparently instead of looking at hunting rounds by ballistic coefficient, the way to find tungsten and other exotic material bullets is by asking your local dealer for armor piercing. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 05:46
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Arquinsiel posted:Also, y'know, softer stuff fragments more easily on impact, and fragments gently caress you right up. Yes, but if the bullet is denser, you can make it smaller, which means it will maintain supersonic speed longer, therefore increasing accuracy. Raskolnikov38 posted:Haha isn't CL-20 the one that's only stable at temperatures below 100 Fahrenheit while bonded with TNT? While people have mixed CL-20 with TNT in an attempt to make it less explosive, CL-20 will not explode unless heated to a temperature of 150 degrees C or higher, according to existing scientific literature. I do not know of it's shock resistance, but I would be willing to use a highly unstable explosive if it meant potentially doubling or tripling the range at which I could produce accurate fire. There are plenty of solutions, for example packaging that insulates from temperature or shock, or mixing your ammunition immediately prior to using it. I do not think it would be substantially harder to use than existing .50 cal sniper platforms.But what do I know, right? I'm just an amateur. EDIT: The American Physical Society has a paper in its journals that claims " No phase change (from the starting epsilon phase) was observed under hydrostatic compression up to 6.3 GPa at ambient temperature" for CL-20. For comparison to the layman, 48 GPa is the pressure at which CL-20 explodes, and diamonds melt without turning into graphite at 1.5 GPa. This is something like 1 million PSI. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 06:32
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FAUXTON posted:This is some wunderwaffe poo poo right here. You're almost certainly right. I have only ever considered the potential destructive power of a weapon as used by a single or small group of men. I've never had an army to command so I am very unfamiliar with what exactly can be accomplished by just telling some minor commander to do some objective. Oh well. A boy can dream. Do we have any people in this thread currently in a commanding role in a military? Perhaps you could enlighten us with what the experience is like. Like, a Major or Lt. Col or equivalent. We probably have at least a handful that are goons, right? Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 06:45
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feedmegin posted:I have to ask, what sort of (legitimate, non-Russian-mafia) dealer sells armour piercing bullets? the good kind   Also all laws are ineffective. In Japan, where rifles are restricted, people just build rifles chambered in shotgun cartridges and do their sniping. The law wants to regulate intent, but the actual acts are based in reality and have physical laws governing them that legal laws can't just ignore. Rent-A-Cop posted:Especially when the range at which you can produce accurate fire is already well outside the range at which your soldiers can aim. A normal .308 or 8mm battle rifle of the last century is already mechanically capable of outshooting 99% of soldiers. I know, but that 1% is more interesting. It takes a real special kind of guy to shoot at a mile or more (mostly, currently). The kind of guy who takes a graphing calculator to a gunfight(but there's no reason to be doing the calculation with our own brains other than cost). I mean, self-firing guns already have been demonstrated to exist. Supposing we offload all the aiming business to a computer? Now it becomes a mechanical issue again. I think this sort of thing is perfect for COIN warfare, since it takes all of the stress and implementation concerns away from the soldier, letting him concentrate on whether it is morally right/politically viable to make the kill or not. Cyrano4747 posted:
That's what I'm saying man, lets put RDX in our brass. I also like the potential in coilguns. You could shoot metal sabots to save weight, or steel shelled explosives if you didn't want to do that. But OK, OK, this is A/T, not TFR. Clearly there is nobody else here who wants to speculate about the potential of these weapons systems. T___A posted:Yes the best way to increase accuracy is to increase rounds fired, as the more rounds a soldier fires the more accurate he becomes. Also firing more than round per trigger pull also increases accuracy. It would increase hits, not accuracy. The more shots you fire the more likely you are to miss at least some of them ergo your accuracy goes down. The goal with such a system would be like, shoot once from far away, then move, then shoot again, with the goal of killing hundreds of their guys per man-hour without losing a single soldier. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 00:32
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Do deer wear Kevlar now?
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Arquinsiel posted:Targets killed: 1 of 1 is 100% accuracy Cars built: 1 of 1 is 100% job completion but you can still do it well, or poorly.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:05
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 Soldiers operate under RoE, not the legal code of the occupied nation. I was referring specifically to laws which attempt to tackle a very complex issue without understanding it, making GBS threads up the legal code they belong to with something that is unenforceable and where the letter of the law does not correspond to the spirit. We see these all the time re: computers, networks, weapons, agriculture, scientific research, medicine, use of public infrastructure, attempts to regulate some moral behaviour (same-sex marriage being a prime and relevant example today).I am aware of the satire but I mean, yes, the fact that murder is illegal and it still happens tells us the law doesn't work as well as it could. There's no reason, strictly speaking, that a murder ever *needs* to happen. I don't think we'll all start getting along anytime soon though, see Ukrainian separatist thread on this very forum. The other thing is, you have to look at the intent behind the law. So we make murder illegal. That's what we've done, but what are we trying to do? Less deaths overall in our society? Prevent our own deaths specifically? Protect the innocent? Create a disincentive for some other action? If we say the goal of making murder illegal is to reduce killings, what about people killed while preventing a murder, or LEOs killed while enforcing the anti-murder law. So on ad nauseam. This is the military history thread. What are some good historical examples of military occupations which had the ultimate goal of producing some change in a given civilian populace succeeding? If we accept at face value that the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afganistan to replace their existing forms of government with democratic ones, have there been any other similar situations like that in the past? Has there been any which has succeeded, creating an independent government of some kind? That is to say, one mostly autonomous from the 3rd party but also clearly changed from its first form to some other form? Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 01:59
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Arquinsiel posted:This phrase alone makes me wonder if your understanding of the entire concept of "law" is solid enough to discuss how or why specific laws don't work as intended. Probably not, I am a complete amateur when it comes to law. My speciality is rapid prototyping software. Assume I know nothing more than what you can learn by reading lawcomic.net and similar sources casually. My interaction with laws are typically when they prevent me from doing something. I tried to build an electric bicycle recently but my local laws regarding such are vague and poorly written. Their intent is to stop bicycles from being too fast and too dangerous, a good goal, but there are problems. For example, there is a limit to the output of an electric motor that can be used on such a vehicle, but is that the output of the motor during operation, or the theoretical maximum? If I use a big motor so I can get torque to climb hills, but rate-limit it to not exceed the regulated output at any given time, is that legal? I dunno. If I do it in a way that is surely acceptable by the law, I end up with the bicycle being slower than an unpowered bike when climbing hills greater than ~30% grade. That is surely unsafe and against the intent of the law and common sense. I refuse to compromise safety and engineering integrity because of stupid regulators, therefore I am prevented from producing a significant improvement upon existing designs despite there being basically no technical obstacles. Is there some introductory reading which you would recommend? Kaal What about, like, Iraqi Special Groups? They don't follow Iraqi or Iranian law, afaik. Where do all of those paramilitaries fit in? What about the paramilitary forces the U.S. employs? Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 02:15
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chitoryu12 posted:
Reduced but not dead! These guys are like the definition of a vocal majority. According to my casual napkin math, they compose less than 0.0008% of the Japanese public, yet they manage to get into the news all the time. Arquinsiel posted:I am an almost complete amateur, with most of my practical experience in employment law. Consider that murder cannot ever be legal because it is, by definition, the illegal killing of a person. Intent may or may not be relevant depending on jurisdiction (degrees of murder in the USA etc), and some places allow killings that others will not. I guess, but, this is a giant rabbit hole. Where does Billy-Bob and the boys getting 'um back for whut them boys on the other hill done did become a legal practice? In a contested area, which government is legitimate and legal? All of them? None? When there are no legal codes in practice, clearly there is still a hand of the law (or rather, greater society) in play; international prohibitions against use of certain small arms ammo mentioned earlier, plus repercussion-based stuff like NBC weapons. What is the real difference, on the scale of a military, between a law (national or international) and repercussions that they might expect from some other party? If anything the latter is more relevant. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 02:34
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