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Spacewolf posted:Random uniform question: When did name tags/strips/things on military uniforms become a thing? Do you mean name tapes like "John Q. Dickface" on modern uniforms or do you mean like other forms of unit identification?
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Aug 22, 2019 16:56
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Nenonen posted:This is an old German invention! this is why i asked my question - these are unit identifiers, not John Q Dickface identifiers edit: and unit identifiers on uniforms go waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back
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Aug 22, 2019 17:25
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Stalin didn't go nuts about Jews (in particular) until after the war. Jews were protected by the Soviet state from things like antisemitism and were well represented in bureaucracy, academia, the Army, etc - provided they were secularized. Jews were killed in the purges but not at higher rates. In 1939 it was very clear that Nazi Germany was a massive threat to Jews in particular in a way that the Soviet Union was not.
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Aug 22, 2019 21:30
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can i ask why Euros were so insistent that Elephants required wine to live?
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Aug 22, 2019 21:43
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Spacewolf posted:the former For the US Army, name tapes were introduced on the Class A dress uniform in 1954
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Aug 23, 2019 02:16
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bewbies posted:Yeah its this, just basically designing the ship so big chunks of it can be taken out and replaced as new and better stuff, such as railguns, lasers, and larger railguns, become available, not at all like the "mission tailoring" thing. Does this requirement manifest in something similar to StanFlex or is it less interchangeable and more design-for-serviceability-and-upgradeability?
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Aug 23, 2019 18:24
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zonohedron posted:So the discussion of elephants reminded me: on Twitter I saw that apparently the King of Siam offered to give(? lend? sell?) President Lincoln war elephants for use in the Civil War. Assuming they'd survived the trip and the Americans weren't assigning them a gallon of wine as their rations... what would elephants have... done? How do you use an elephant at Gettysburg (or... or any of the other major battles that I don't know because I grew up in a state that wasn't a state yet during said kinetic military action)? considering that the 3" rifle and the 2.9 parrott were supposedly in the 1-2 MOA range, and the whitworth supposedly was sub-0.5 MOA, it's probable that trying to employ an elephant on a battlefield would cause the elephant to be very quickly shot. however they might be useful dragging 10" parrott guns and other superheavy siege artillery around, i think
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Aug 23, 2019 18:30
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The US deployed more human beings to ETO and North Africa and also eurocentricism probably edit: not to be too flip about the last thing - people cared/care about and recognize places like Paris and Amsterdam and Copenhagen and Oslo and Warsaw in ways that they do/did not care about Guadalcanal, Rabaul, New Guinea, Java, and the Philippines
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Sep 3, 2019 03:03
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Vasilevsky and Patton respectively. macarthur, surely
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Sep 3, 2019 16:32
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Hunt11 posted:Don't forget World War I. Italy's performance in WWI was not great but they were heavily constrained by geography and it wasn't uniquely bad other than Cadorna. Cadorna was terrible, obviously, but he wasn't around to lead the lads in '39.
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Sep 4, 2019 19:22
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an early 30s war would have been interesting all surplus FTs and tankettes and high power biplane fighters
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Sep 4, 2019 22:04
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Fangz posted:People know that the water for pasta thing was made up by a board game designer, right? yes that is why people keep referencing it because it is a joke
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Sep 5, 2019 13:59
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Nenonen posted:When the Brits first came under fire fire from the Breda 30, they thought it was a machinegun! doesn't this work better as "they thought it was two guys with carcanos"
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Sep 5, 2019 14:00
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blackmongoose posted:Sometime between the end of the Great Turkish War and the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_K%C3%BC%C3%A7%C3%BCk_Kaynarca, everyone has their own favorite point at which they feel the Ottomans were officially in decline but most of the choices are in that range. hot take: the ottomans are essentially western europeans
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Sep 7, 2019 17:11
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Fangz posted:Wasn't the Russian far east forces protected from the worst of the purges? Balitsky (NKVD head), Blyukher (Marshal, head of Far Eastern Military District), and Lapin (head of the Air Forces for the Far Eastern Military District) were all killed in the purges.
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Sep 12, 2019 18:53
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bewbies posted:I'm reading Master and Commander, and of course a lot of the book revolves around HMS Sophie's guns. Her main battery are 4 pounders. This seems almost...uselessly small to me? Contemporary ships of the line had a mix of 18 and 36 pounders, and even land-based guns during the Civil War were most commonly 12 pounders. 4 pound grasshopper guns were arguably useful as field artillery
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Sep 13, 2019 17:26
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It's significantly different. Swingfire is a SACLOS missile. Brimstone is fire-and-forget and will be fired indirectly, possibly with the aid of UAV spotting though not required.
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Sep 13, 2019 19:40
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JcDent posted:Seriously, what's with all the clerk violence? Clerk refers to any of what we would consider probably white collar jobs. It's all of the intellectual jobs that required literacy and potentially numeracy, so that includes of course students, but also includes scribes, accountants, archivists, librarians, etc.
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Sep 16, 2019 13:05
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JcDent posted:To be fair, it's an easier explanation that explaining why scribes and librarians ambush people to kill or go on a shooting spree (with a bow). scribes and librarians do that today, and those jobs had money and downtime to get hosed up in towns where a lot of crimes occur
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Sep 16, 2019 14:12
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:It's a joke, but the F-22 really is unbuildable now for lack of parts and manufacturers. Modern mil tech is such a weird landscape nowadays, I wish there air superiority fighter-making guilds with bespoke airframes instead. It would be possible to restart the line but it would be incredibly expensive and would be basically starting over from scratch. It's not that we can't build F-22s, we can't build them economically.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:20
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Tab8715 posted:Is there such a thing as military without a county? Can you rephrase this question? It doesn't really make sense. We usually refer to the armed forces of a state as the state's military. No state, no military.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:51
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Tab8715 posted:The background is the Houthi’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure. Reading about it, I think it’s the most effective military operation since much in the allied commando raid on the Nazis Uranium Research Facility. a lot going on here and i would like to help you sort of organize it better 0) I presume regarding the commando raids you are talking about the counter-heavy-water operations but if not please do clarify. 1) what, in your mind, determines the "effectiveness" of a military operation? why is the operation you cite considered effective? why do you consider the Houthi attack effective? 2) what do you think differentiates a "military operation" from a "terrorist operation"? does the distinction matter? 3) why do you consider the Houthis a military and AQ not a military?
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Sep 17, 2019 17:33
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I don't consider Iraq to be an intelligence failure because people were actively lying to bring about an outcome they wanted.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:07
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I'm not convinced Jutland was decisive. The Germans did not have freedom of movement before Jutland, and they didn't gain it afterwards. The losses were not meaningful to either side. Midway was decisive. Manila and Santiago were pretty decisive, is that too early for you?
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Sep 17, 2019 22:55
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feedmegin posted:Funnily enough it wouldn't be the first time I've seen an American projection of World War 3 that only really seemed to care about nukes on American soil. Europe is better Dead than Red I guess? shockingly countries put their own immediate interests above those of their allies
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Sep 17, 2019 22:55
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Schadenboner posted:Once you're dusting London and Paris and Berlin is the exchange really tactical anymore (unless "tactical" means "not hitting American cities", obvs.?) It's tactical because you're popping say, Charles de Gaulle airport with a 15kt weapon rather than aiming one 15Mt weapon at les Invalides,
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Sep 17, 2019 23:04
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you are not supposed to fire a rifle grenade from the shoulder, what the gently caress? the French V-B had a max range of just about 200 meters when fired from the ground. it was one of the kind that could be fired using ordinary ammunition. they're plenty effective, just not very accurate. designed so that the infantry can bring along their own indirect fire support that can reach out further than you can throw a grenade. not as good as a mortar, of course, but a lot lighter.
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Sep 19, 2019 02:14
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ChubbyChecker posted:I wonder how the platoon's light mortars would have compared to rifle grenades? I've understood that Germans stopped using light mortars after Barbarossa. their own light mortar was an overcomplicated piece of teutonic nonsense (telescopic sight, etc) but they used a bunch of captured soviet and french 50mms those 50mms are more along the lines of a grenade discharger than an actual mortar. basically a better way of delivering rifle grenades. everyone loved these things in the interwar years, the poles also had one and the Japanese "knee mortar" is probably the most famous. the launchers were man-portable at about 10-15 lbs. they usually had fixed angles for launch and used a kind of dial-the-range system on the shell itself. the Japanese system was pretty clever in that you just screwed a charge in to the base of a frag grenade, so you didn't need to carry totally separate shells - just the bases.
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Sep 19, 2019 13:15
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turkey is a european country mate
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Sep 19, 2019 16:54
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Argas posted:Good old "better than nothing" but now we have something better than nothing. yeah, i'd argue they were really quite useful until they were superseded by a better version of the same thing. they're more of a crew-served weapon in the sense that a contemporaneous LMG is a crew-served weapon and certainly don't have the same crew requirements as an actual mortar. i think Panzeh is significantly overestimating the crew requirement.
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Sep 19, 2019 20:06
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I think Panzeh is getting confused by abominations like the granatwerfer 36, which was truly stupid: it required a 3 man team to operate and was basically a real mortar, but smaller. We all agree that these were stupid. However, stuff like the Granatnik wz. 36, the 50mm m37 and the Type 89 which had a fixed barrel and used dial-a-range systems through chamber sizing or vent sizing on the round were actually useful, are very light (between 4 and 8 kilos), and do not require a crew to operate. It's more like a gunner/assistant model, where the assistant can provide support to increase the rate of fire but is not required for the operation of the weapon. These effectively give an infantry platoon some indirect fire capabilities at about 100-300 meters without burdening them with too much equipment and without taking away riflemen from the platoon strength. These were generally useful! They didn't really fall too far out of favor, they were just replaced by stuff like the M79 and the M203.
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Sep 20, 2019 16:53
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Fangz posted:Someone shooting the knee mortar on his own that guy gets a pretty good ROF going
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Sep 21, 2019 16:28
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You’re going to have to define both heavy machine gun and on the ground
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Sep 23, 2019 13:22
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I always wonder how accurate those notional TOEs are - guys are going to scavenge all kinds of poo poo that they prefer using, and it's not like they're going to give back a couple of DTs that happen to fall off the Studebaker somewhere.
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Sep 23, 2019 16:13
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this reminds me of the Lebanese civil war's various militia squads migrating to roughly: a LMG/MMG and a loader/ammo carrier with a rifle five to seven guys with RPGs a couple of other guys with rifles (incl squad leader) and rounds for the MG and RPGs the correct ratio was something like 3:1 guys with RPGs vs guys with rifles
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Sep 23, 2019 16:39
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Gort posted:Why, though? i think a couple of factors: 1 - in urban combat you're going to set up a lot of MG positions with relatively deep fields of fire, but in more close in combat it's just as easy or better to blow up a wall or a fighting position using the liberal application of high explosives. RPGs are a militia's mortars or artillery or even air support in urban fighting in addition to the standard knock holes in things uses. 2- a lot of the fighting in beirut and environs kind of turned in to semi static urban fighting with fairly fragmented but somewhat defined front lines, so there was less emphasis on kicking in doors and clearing houses and more emphasis on blowing up the enemy's positions on the other side of the boulevard. RPGs are a lot better at this than rifles. 3 - a lot of ad-hoc "doctrine" evolved to indirect fire for RPGs (again kind of supplanting mortars) which was not an original intended use 4 - they were widely available 5 - i speculate it's probably easier to teach a guy to shoot a RPG-7 than a rifle if you're doing the learning by doing. it's not a highly accurate weapon so your average Abu Hajaar equivalent can be taught to pick it up, point it in the right direction, account for the backblast, and use the fairly simple sight. plus you can see what you did. if you give a guy a rifle and he doesn't know poo poo, he probably will never turn in to a good shot without a substantial amount of marksmanship training. i could be really wrong on this, though. Saint Celestine posted:So how did these engagements usually pan out? Just RPGs flying back and forth like roman candles during the 4th? pretty much, plus a good sprinkling of machine gun fire. also a fair amount of mortar work. the riflemen were mostly there to cover the RPG guys and the machine gun team, and to kick down doors and whatnot.
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Sep 23, 2019 20:43
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they sure beat the gently caress out of a 5.45mm bullet though and it's not like your average Lebanese militia has too much better poo poo lying around circa 1980.
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Sep 23, 2019 21:21
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Plus a loud bang and just knocking a lot of dust off the far side of a wall in to a room is fairly persuasive. Keep in mind again, 1980s Lebanese militia. You make do with what you have. Yes, shooting a bunch of RPGs at a machine gun nest is a sub optimal way for a real army to handle the problem, but you’re lucky if you have a 81mm mortar in the vicinity, let alone artillery, tanks, aircraft, MCLOS atgms, larger caliber recoilless rifles, etc.
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Sep 24, 2019 03:03
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It has kind of a weird flight path. Not ballistic at short to medium ranges because it is being actively powered through its flight. They are not accurate in the best of circumstances beyond 200m, there is an initial charge to launch the grenade before the rocket motor kicks in so you can imagine some inconsistency. It has a fairly basic ladder sight as well as a lot of options for optics, night sights, etc. ladder sights are pretty easy to use provided you know the range to target. Evidently the things are kind of finnicky and turn in to crosswinds among other strange behaviors. The general idea was certainly volume over precision. For indirect fire you can crank them out to almost a kilometer.
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Sep 24, 2019 03:19
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ChubbyChecker posted:Huh, I thought that the DP's magazines were also referred to as drum magazines. It’s a pan magazine. The cartridges are radially stored within the magazine versus axially. Also, some pan magazines do not use spring followers and instead use a recoil driven cam system to rotate the magazine. This is how the Lewis gun works, not sure about the DP.
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Sep 24, 2019 11:15
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