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zoux posted:"Nuclear bombs are HE" are you a Soviet artillery officer That’s a funny way to spell CinC of SAC
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Sep 4, 2019 20:56
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FAUXTON posted:they should never have decommissioned the Missouri Missouri never sank an enemy ship. I"m like 99.9% sure that her guns were only ever used for shore bombardments.
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Sep 4, 2019 23:47
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FrangibleCover posted:What were the Italians going to use proper tanks for? That’s like posting a picture of the Rockies and asking why the Colorado National Guard needs tanks. The Italians were fighting, and planning to fight, in tons of good tank terrain. North Africa as an easy starting point. Creating a new Italian overseas empire was a huge thing for Mussolini. This is before you get into the fact that tanks are still useful in hilly and mountainous combat. Plenty of tank fighting happened during the long slog up the Italian peninsula itself in WW2.
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Sep 5, 2019 15:19
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Nenonen posted:Maybe 6.5mm Carcano's calibre would have been insufficient for proper sniping but it seems like they hadn't really thought this through. It’s minute of Kennedy accurate but the bullets are magic.
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Sep 5, 2019 16:59
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That place is still a head gently caress and a half today. Worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.
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Sep 9, 2019 13:42
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zoux posted:I know that there have been war crimes as long as there have been wars but when did the ideas of "war crime" and "atrocity" develop, and what were the first instances widely recognized as such? Was it prior to WW II Well, the idea of just vs unjust war goes way back. Like St Augustine in the 4th century at least in a European judo-Christian framework and probably earlier, plus whatever other people were doing in other times and places. That said, our modern system based on a nebulous idea if international law is very much a product of the mid-late 19th C.
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Sep 11, 2019 01:49
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Maybe six months back I saw (on two desperate days, so I’m pretty sure I wasn’t mistaken or hallucinating” a US Marine walking around near the DC barracks in uniform with an WW2 German armband/jacket cuff tattoo. You know the strip of fabric that would say GroßDeutschland or SS Wiking or whatever. I couldn’t get close enough to see what it said and I was too shocked to snap a pic, but it was pretty unmistakable. I’m hoping he was just an idiot who got 2nd Marines or whatever put on his arm in that style because he saw in a pic or something but yeah Then there’s that time soldiers in Afghanistan posed for pictures with an SS flag next to an American flag and tried to say later thr SS stood for “scout sniper.”
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Sep 12, 2019 11:49
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FastestGunAlive posted:The SS thing for marine scout snipers unfortunately goes back a while. I believe it was late 90s/early 00s that the community got called out for having SS tattoos. I believe they were just idiots who figured SS=scout sniper without being actual nazis, not that makes it any less wrong and it still opens up the possibility radicalization/normalization. Yeah that came up with that pic too but I’m going to call bullshit. There is no one who is A) interested enough in the military to know what a scout sniper is and B) born in the 70s-80s (ie enlistment age in the 90s-00s) who doesn’t know at least the broad strokes of what the SS were and what that the dual sig runes was their logo. Now what I WILL believe is that some idiots thought that the SS were hard core motherfuckers who were trying to hold back human waves of Soviet conscripts like a scene out of Aliens and jumped on it as part of some “warrior culture” idiocy. You know, the same crap that leads to tattoos of spartan helmets. But no, when confronted with the fact that they adopted the icons of a genocidal state that their own loving military forefathers fought and bled to topple they grasp for some lame “uh we didn’t know what SS meant” fig leaf. You see this poo poo far too often with the idiotic end of gun companies marketing to military/ex-military/walter Mitty military fetishists. Sure, Smith enterprises, that logo is just a skull and cross bones and I’m the sensitive snowflake. SURE.
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Sep 12, 2019 14:43
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xthetenth posted:Yeah, I never was expecting to see a dude with two sig runes drawn on the bill of his cap, but I have. I hope it was dumb scout sniper poo poo. I don't actually have that level of optimism. They seriously need to educate about this stuff. gently caress you could make it moto as gently caress. Spend time taking about the warrior heritage of the Army/USMC/etc or something, explain what these symbols are, and then jerk off in a group to tales of the US Military dunking on Nazis. Show some news reels of soldiers liberating camps. Like, just an hour of “SS = bad, now let’s watch old gun camera footage and cheer at Nazis eating poo poo.” This won’t solve the idiots with klan tattoos but at lest it won’t be acceptable to try to pass off literal Nazi poo poo as warrior culture crap.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:04
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zoux posted:Would you guys be in favor of a modern Germany-style ban on Nazi iconography or does that go too far (the fact that SCOTUS would overturn it aside). In general? No. It’s a useful tool for spotting idiots, an actual rear end in a top hat will use a different logo with the same meaning (see: repurposed Nordic stuff), and there are legit uses for it in art etc. No one wants to play German wolfenstein without the swastikas. Organizationally? gently caress yeah. If the army or some business wants to fire people for having that poo poo displayed good on them.
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Sep 12, 2019 15:18
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If you’re a white heterosexual cis male there’s an argument for ~1871 - 1913. Edit: also specific edge cases involving people who weren’t discriminated against as badly in specific cultural/historical contexts. But those are cherry picking some specific cultural differences across societies and time rather than looking at the general state of things.
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Sep 13, 2019 20:39
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Like, if I was a trans male (maybe intersex) I’d probably prefer to be a [url= https://allthatsinteresting.com/casimir-pulaski]18th century polish aristocrat from an apparently tolerant, privileged, and well connected family[/url] than a poor POC of similar identity today.
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Sep 13, 2019 20:43
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Antibiotics are a hell of a drug.
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Sep 13, 2019 22:04
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gently caress. If I was born in 1900 I would have died at least 3 times by now last count. 1) at birth. Difficult delivery finished by C-section 2) at 1 due to a infection that was cleared up with antibiotics. 3) at about 30 due to my thyroid 100% making GBS threads the bed and turning off. So yeah. Yay modern medicine. This is ignoring the fact that braces made my teeth straight and I have vaccines against poo poo like measles.
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Sep 13, 2019 22:20
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GotLag posted:It's not denial of the Rwandan genocide to suggest the US was complicit. The denialist part isn’t quibbling about the death total, it’s the part where it’s argued that removing them from the ethnic makeup as a matter of policy wasn’t genocide. The intent was to purge Bosnians from the country. That’s genocide. It’s genocide whether you kill them all or just enough to make the survivors leave the country. Edit: this isn’t even getting into some of the really ugly poo poo re: rapes.
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Sep 14, 2019 11:54
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BalloonFish posted:Isn't this a bit like saying that the Bf109 didn't make biplane fighters obsolete, it just made designing new ones pointless (unless you are Italy)? The fact that plenty of air forces were still fielding biplanes - and often very good ones- in 1939 doesn't change the fact that the air force with biplanes is going to be virtually wiped out by the one fielding modern monoplanes. Just as a battle fleet of dreadnoughts was going to rout one of pre-dreads? Obviously there was a transition period as the new design replaced the old one at sea when both types were deployed together but the worry was always that your rival would get seriously ahead in the dreadnought count. The issue is that if you have a bunch of pre-dreads (or biplanes) in an area where they have none you still have a capability advantage by default. A pre-dread works fine for station keeping on a blockade, for example. It probably doesn’t want to be around if a dread shows up, but if can tool on merchant shipping or shell an unprotected port or beachhead just fine.
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Sep 14, 2019 21:51
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Stairmaster posted:Did china ever come close to breaking apart permanently like Rome did It did, like 3 or 4 times.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:16
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zoux posted:A drama about...the F-35 Under WWII standards? Not really. gently caress, or even early cold war. The time frame between the P-36, P-38, P-39, P-40, P-47, and P-51 isn't exactly huge, not to mention how quickly some of those went from prototype to production to a B/C/D model. Those are just the production aircraft too, you've got a fair number of failed designs to account for also. Now look at how quickly we were iterating and putting new aircraft into service in the 50s and 60s. Way, way, way less than 5 years between accepted designs. Now, can you do that with a modern jet that you want all the bells and whistles on? No idea. I suspect how much money you're throwing at it and how acceptable it is to have failed designs is a big part of that equation. Obviously designing a 6th gen fighter is a bit more complex than a P-51, but there's a solid argument to be made that you don't need multiple decades to work it out. The important take away isn't necessarily the specific number of years or the breathless reporting, it's the move away from a single too-important-to-fail design that's concurrently developing a dozen new technologies and a move back towards iterative designs with an understanding that if one is a dog you learn from it and move on.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:21
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zoux posted:So, more mission-specialized aircraft rather than the current Swiss Army Planes. Possibly? That's a giant question mark and really has more to do with the current model where a multi-decade project is underwritten on what might as well be a cost plus basis. One of the things to remember is that a huge part of the giant sticker price you see with current aircraft models is the cost of all the R&D divided by relatively small numbers of planes. The B2 is a great example of this. Everyone always points to them as costing $2Billion per aircraft, but that's including a massive R&D process that yielded only 21 aircraft. The order was slashed once the USSR fell apart. I forget what the original number of aircraft was supposed to be, but IIRC it was low three figures. During the Clinton administration there was a proposal to build an additional 20 and the fly away cost of those new aircraft would have been about $500 million each. It was still a ruinously expensive airplane, but that's a lot more in line with what modern aircraft cost. To put things in perspective, an F-15, a relatively mature design produced in large numbers by that point, cost about $25 million in the late 90s. Now, if you're getting a new design every few years does that mean R&D costs just eat everyone's budget and we get a handful of new $2 billion aircraft every 5 years, or does it mean R&D is lower and we get a trickle of cheaper, less revolutionary designs that we can afford to pull the plug on if one is a lemon? Again, giant question mark and entirely dependent on how it gets run. If you're doing a more iterative approach and not spooling up fifteen ground breaking technologies with every new airframe then R&D could be a lot less. Like, maybe your fancy off-axis targeting system is the new hotness on the 2010 model, the 2015 model adds on the new high tech radar-absorbing paint, the 2020 model has new super-cruise engines, 2025 some crazy new avionics system, and then by 2030 you're looking at upgrading the by now old targeting system to some sci fi holographic poo poo. Meanwhile tweaks are being made to airframe geometry, radar cross section, etc. the whole way down. Think more like how car design is iterative - a 1990 Honda looks nothing like a 2019 Honda, but there's no single year that just flat out changes everything. Which is a lot of words to say no one really knows, but the fact that it's being floated is more of an indictment to the way the process works currently than a solid plan for the future.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:43
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FAUXTON posted:Wondering how the early modern people cobbled together relatively coherent/disciplined field elements out of, you know, drunken dudes with pointy sticks and guns. Somewhere, Hey Guns just sat bolt upright.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's the same as the growth of cities and expansion of other professional trades, isn't it? People go off seeking opportunity and other people are looking for able bodies and have money to pay them. The development of trades as we understand them is actually super complicated and emerges out of a whole slew of old practices and regulations about who can conduct what businesses, where, etc. You've got overlapping authorities in the form of crown, city, and at times guild, and eventually universities expanding out to become their own crazy thing.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:And here I thought the loss of the old junk aesthetic was just because stuff in the new movie just wasn't made of old junk anymore. I guess they just decided to make the stuff glued onto the guns in the newer movies smoother and shinier. Which strap? If you're talking about the belly-button height belt it's to create an illusion of long legs and height.
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Sep 22, 2019 20:12
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Milo and POTUS posted:Think of how much material they could save if they only used half a tie. Or they could go all out and make the tie a disguised, inverted Y-strap with numerous hook fasteners sewn into the jacket
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Sep 22, 2019 20:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:The dangly one. That was always the part that was most confusing to me with Fullmetal Alchemist uniforms, but I know I've seen them on other fancy uniforms too. It's a neat bit of frill for a dress uniform, but I assume there was some reason at some point? Oh, that's purely decorative. It looks like a type of aiguillette maybe? They generally indicate some kind of significance as far as being an aide or something, although I'm hazy on the details. I also know there are a few foreign unit awards from way back when that incorporate stuff like that. fake edit: quick googling shows that the medal type thing is a distinctly european phenominon, although US units have been awarded them and incorporated them into their uniforms. In that case it's called a fourragère. real edit: Looks like that's the Belgian fourragère of 1940, which was created to honor military formations that distinguished themselves in WW2. The medal bit at the top is pretty distinctive. I dunno if it's still a part of the uniform of those units or if this is some WW2 throwback thing. I think one of the USMC divisions still wear one of theirs, so who knows.
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Sep 23, 2019 00:17
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OK, looking more closely at the photo she's wearing the shoulder patch of the 2nd Cav. They served in basically every war we've ever fought and did a ton of ETO poo poo in WW2. Including this:quote:One of the most remarkable missions the 2nd MCG performed was at the end of the war. On 28 April, A Troop, 42nd Squadron seized the town of Hostouň in Czechoslovakia in order to liberate Allied POWs. They discovered 300 POWs, as well as 670 horses, including the famous Lipizzaner stallions. General Patton, a cavalryman himself, ordered their rescue when he learned that the Lipizzaners would fall under Soviet control. On 12 May, four days after VE Day, "Operation Cowboy" was launched to rescue the fine horses, and all were successfully herded or ridden back to American lines. This was dramatized by Walt Disney in the 1963 movie, Miracle of the White Stallions.[7] I can't find a good list of the units awarded that Belgian fourragère, but the 2nd Cav came ashore right after DDay and served in some of the heaviest poo poo that the Third Army did, so at this point I'm assuming they got it. Have no idea if it's a thing they still wear or if that's tacking on a WW2 medal for the uniform cosplay. The military doesn't seem to like tacking on bullshit medals for photo ops, though, so I'm guessing it's probably one of those things that's still technically on the books. Dunno, that's the limit of what I'm able to dig up right now.
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Sep 23, 2019 00:27
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SimonCat posted:2nd Cavalry Regiment. Whelp there goes my lazy google research. Looks like that's it. edit: in my defense the wikipedia picture of the belgian thing has the German thing on it also, and doesn't specify which is which.  
Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 23, 2019 02:13
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there was a need to lob HE up to 15000+ feet before there was a need to punch through 50+mm of rolled steel.
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Sep 26, 2019 11:42
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Milo and POTUS posted:The Enterprise Her anchor is sitting in the middle of the Washington Navy Yard at least. edit: hah, you can see the shadow of it on google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8749577,-76.9945783,73m/data=!3m1!1e3
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Sep 26, 2019 20:22
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Another data point on the bomber altitude thing is the wing area. Big rear end wings help a lot with climbing up to altitude, especially in the pre-jet era.
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Sep 27, 2019 19:21
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lllllllllllllllllll posted:In videos and images you can see puffs of smoke in the air when ships e.g. used their AA guns in WW2. What are those? Wouldn't the projectile just shoot as far as possible upwards or was it meant to explode at a certain height? If so, how was this achieved? Thanks! Hitting an aircraft is really hard, and the best solution at the time was to have the shells explode nearby. Hell, it still kind of works like this - a lot of AA missiles detonate in proximity to the target rather than skin-on-skin. A cloud of quickly moving metal fragments shotgun-blasting vital systems can be more damaging than a single through and through hole. Usually this was done with a fuse that was dialed in based on estimated height, as mentioned earlier. On most USN ships it was done via a radar proximity fuse. This was only for use on ships because everyone was freaked out what would happen if a dud landed in a field in France and the Germans reverse engineered it. Towards the very end of the war you start seeing them used on contested land. Also in the artillery. Radar proximity fuses can make airbust artillery absolutely murderous. GotLag posted:On a related note, how much of a hazard was falling shrapnel from AA shells and cartridge cases or bullets from aircraft to civilians beneath who weren't being directly targeted? You see anecdotes from that era all over the place of civilian casualties caused by it. You can also find accounts of kids picking AA shrpanal up out of the streets after raids.
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Sep 30, 2019 15:34
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Plenty of aircraft have been downed by small arms fire from the ground, all the way up to the present day. One dude with a rifle stands very little chance, but fifty guys with rifles might get lucky and even if they don’t plonking a few holes in the wings is usually enough to at least make the pilot do some moving around, not go quite as low, etc. - basically not give him all the time in the word go line up a completely uncontested attack run.
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Oct 6, 2019 19:23
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JcDent posted:You'd never think that a pilot would be happy to be hit in the drat fuel tank, but... Liquid is remarkably good at stopping bullets
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Oct 7, 2019 18:29
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I can’t speak to the presses and any improvements in manufacturing processes (streamlined factory work flows etc) but the basic composition of the cartridges was the same. A case from 1914 is more or less identical to one from 1939 as is the bullet and powder. Now, there are going to be minor differences here and there. Wartime moves to mild steel jackets for bullets, changes in powder mix, etc. [url= https://www.petersoncartridge.com/our-difference/drawing-brass/] Here is how a brass case is made today, for example. [/url] This is a fancy company making higher end brass so some of the steps could be eliminated and certainly were with bulk military stuff, but the broad strokes are informative. Nothing they’re showing there couldn’t be done with 1914 technology. Note that metallic cartridges with primers in the base of the case (ie the modern cartridge as we know it) date from the 1850s. By the time you get to the world wars the basic tech was very mature and any improvements in production speed are going to be factory process poo poo not the raw fundamentals of how they are built.
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Oct 20, 2019 17:22
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Lead also has a lot of other uses besides bullets. It’s one of those things where you’re prioritizing what to use it for and using an acceptable of not totally optimal replacement. Fun fact: WW2 is when the US govt stopped using copper washed steel paper clips and went to naked steel. The copper wash makes them less prone to rust in storage but they figured out by eliminating it they could make some crazy number of extra jackets for bullets (and wire, and other war critical poo poo). After the war they just never started again. I THINK they eventually just moved to stainless steel for the clips to get the same low rust properties.
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Oct 20, 2019 20:05
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HEY GUNS posted:that can't be one hundred percent the case, i've seen old paperclips rust a shape into archival papers, naked steel must have been used at least sometimes before the war I know it was a US govt (federal) thing. Dunno about other sources of paperwork. Also copper washed clips will still rust. It just takes longer. They’re nowhere near as good as stainless clips when it comes to that. It came up when I was working at a Navy archive recently.
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Oct 20, 2019 21:05
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Squalid posted:
I don’t know cannon, but muskets and muzzle loaded rifles were made that way at that time and would have a series of finish reamers put through the barre to smooth the inside and remove any slight bends or deformities on the interior surface. I could imagine cannon getting a similar treatment. It’s a much easier process than boring out the bore in a solid cast.
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Nov 3, 2019 04:24
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Dance Officer posted:There were material shortages of all sorts in WW1, on all sides. But yes, with the way trench warfare developed on the western front, production of artillery shells had to be increased dramatically. Not just WW1. Pretty much every major war you care to name has some logistics officer pulling his hair out and a bunch of economics ministers making GBS threads their pants. The Germans went through a "rifle crisis" in 1941/2 where they were scraping out every single gun they could find in Europe to arm their military in the face of Barbarossa. Remember: in that case it's not just the front line troops, but the assorted rear area police units, third line reservists and security detachments, etc. Look at pictures of the sort of rear-area guys who did the rounding up for the Holocaust and you see a bewildering array of captured guns and poo poo dating from WW1. See also: the American Civil War. Setting aside the Confederacy's rather unique situation the Union was scrambling to get enough guns to arm people. Rapidly cranking up production everywhere, refurbing obsolete arms, and buying anything that wasn't nailed down in Europe. The Enfield P1853 is most famous as a gun in Confederate hands, but most of them were actually sold to the Union (yes, they were selling to both sides). Hell you even see this with the US in WW2, which is the platonic ideal of a rich country fighting a war with "gives no fucks" levels of cash and equipment. Early on there was a scramble for equipment and you see a lot of old and obsolete stuff in secondary theaters, especially the Pacific. m1903 Springfields, a gun most commonly associated with WW1, saw plenty of combat in the Pacific and N. Africa, for example.
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Nov 6, 2019 20:26
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Here's an oldie but a goodie that describes how rifles were made on an artisanal basis about a hundred years before that. This is obviously way simpler than what you're going to see at a major arsenal in the 1860s, and it's with a flintlock rather than a percussion cap system (although the latter is if anything simpler and easier to make), but it's good for the basics like how you get a sheet of steel to be a barrel and how you cut rifling. These processes would of course be done by more complex machines in the next hundred years, but it gives a good basic run down. Plus its just a fun watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTy3uQFsirk
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Nov 10, 2019 23:42
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Phanatic posted:Showing that film to POWs would be a war crime. If anyone here has ever been on a cruise or other long boat trip in the pre-internet era, they used to frequently have a on-board TV system that would just play the same movies over and over again. Think the old in-flight movie systems, just repeating the same poo poo for days or weeks on end. When I was a little kid my family went on one where the two movies, repeated constantly, were Dumb & Dumber and the Shawshank Redemption. A couple years back I was doing work that involved a lot of research on Navy ships in the 80s. The Stark Incident was tangentially related to something I was doing, so I had to read up a lot about it. In the course of that I discovered that she had one of those systems, and when she got hit the film that she was screening non-stop was Gymkata, a movie so bad it's featured on RLM's Best of the Worst. Note that Back to the Future, Spies Like Us, and Rocky IV were all released the same year as Gymkata. My only conclusion is that whoever buys movies for the military really hates the military.
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Nov 12, 2019 19:52
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aphid_licker posted:There's good eatin' in them thar circulatory system Heart can be legit tasty. edit: blood too, prepared properly. edit 2: does marrow count as circulatory system? Because it might be the tastiest part of any animal.
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Nov 12, 2019 21:39
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