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That was Molotov whose wife was Jewish. Molotov I always found kinda interesting since he was a viewpoint character in Worldwar; Turtledove wrote him to be the only sane man/straight man and he ended up in charge of the Soviet's atomic bomb project instead of Beria. He got a raw deal after the war, though probably better then if Stalin had lived a little longer.
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Aug 23, 2019 03:35
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A Samurai Warrior slicing an arrow in flight into clean halves, colourized.
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Aug 23, 2019 14:54
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Some things were also a little better in the USSR than in the Russian Empire previously to it; and lets not forget that Israel's support in its founding mostly actually came from the USSR, iirc they were only able to acquire weapons from the Eastern bloc, not from the West. Things probably could have gone very differently for want of a nail and positions easily could have swapped. Israel also did some interesting foreign policy themselves, iirc, they actually had sought out to partner up with China and Iran as fellow pariah states during the Cold War.
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Aug 23, 2019 15:50
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Speaking of the T-44, I wanna 3D print one. Anyone happen to have any 3D models on hand for some more obscure WWII stuff? I looked on Thingiverse and Bergman's and TigerAce's profiles and didn't find the T-44  Also I am looking for 3D models of small arms to 3D print models to decorate my desk with. Particularly the DP-27; my favourite LMG from Call of Duty. I've googled but what I have found costs money. I'd just make my own model in that case but I figured I'd check here, and in the historicals thread.
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Aug 25, 2019 02:32
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Arquinsiel posted:I have the Zvezda kit, but that's basically no use to you if you really want the printing experience. It's a nice kit though, as all of their 15mm kits have been. Oh you mean you have the real one you buy from a store? Yeah I just want to print all of my models. 
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Aug 25, 2019 02:42
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SeanBeansShako posted:Man if I had a 3D printer I would print so much models.... The detail is also shockingly good for current consumer PLA printers.  (Pictured: My camera refusing to focus on what's in front of it) I think this is a T-54 with a 1953 turret, or the T-54 with the 1951 turret? The pack I downloaded had like 5 different variations for the T-54 and this is before I even get to the T-55/T-62. I'm working my way through the Soviet tanks, then will move on to German and American tanks; it'd be nice if there were Japanese tanks but I'm forlorn on my chances. After that I'll start MASS PRODUCTION to build legal sized point armies for the different tabletop wargames even though I HAVE NO ONE TO PLAY THEM WITH.
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Aug 25, 2019 04:06
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Nessus posted:Are these things 3-D printing the entire tank or are they just printing out like a sheet of parts you then glue together, like an on-demand Gunpla kit, possibly with less wasted spruing? It's the whole tank in two parts, the turret and the hull are whole, the hull has like a hole in it that is kinda accurate to the width of the turret ring and the turret slots into it and you can rotate the turret pretty okay, sometimes you might have to sand a protrusion. If I wanted to bump up the quality I could probably slice up the tank into separate parts and then glue them together like Gunpla but that seems like way too much effort when I already get a model that's like 90% pretty alright.
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Aug 25, 2019 05:11
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I am going to 3D-print so many warships once I have a good selection of parts to work with for my game. I also want to do this too!! How many hulls do you have? I'd love to print the Yamato.
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Aug 25, 2019 05:25
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LatwPIAT posted:I have a theory that the idea the Sherman was called the 'Ronson' comes not from any reputation of them lighting up all the time, but simply conflating the regular Sherman with 'Ronson' flamethrower tank, a Sherman fitted with the Canadian 'Ronson' flamethrower, so named because of the lighter. Once you have a specific version of the Sherman - one that's not even easily identifiable as special unless you know what you're looking for - named 'Ronson', it's easy to think that nickname applies to all Shermans. I think it's more to do with the post-war Wehrmacht mythologicalizing and cherry picking bad Sherman stats helps sell the idea of absurdly high German kill ratios.
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Aug 26, 2019 14:27
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PittTheElder posted:The AN-94 is goofy as gently caress but I love it to death ever since BF3 introduced me to it. If I was going to own a rifle, and it was anywhere near legal for me to have, it would be that over-engineered son of a bitch. The An-94 is the Commie Space Magic gun right?
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Aug 26, 2019 18:05
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I liked the battleship movie. I appreciate the attempts at a tactically intense battle and the variety of weapons used in the attempt to convey a flexible command response to events.
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Sep 3, 2019 17:37
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P-Mack posted:The weirdest thing about that movie is that they made a plot point of the aliens not being inherently hostile and the whole thing being a misunderstanding then didn't do anything with it. IIRC they are hostile, but they happened to have a fairly well developed rules of engagement. They absolutely struck first at military stuff and we're clearly preparing for an invasion, but might have not been like war crimey about it.
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Sep 3, 2019 18:00
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wdarkk posted:I think there's supposed to be some parallels to the US forces and the aliens, and this is one of them. The aliens also do a dramatic "rescue captured buddy" raid too. Also the foghorn exchange thing. Makes me wonder if the whole movie was meant to be a stealth reference to the Millennium Challenge.
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Sep 3, 2019 19:34
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zoux posted:Not in a million years, so tell me what the movie says a ship lain down in 1940 brings to the fight that a modern carrier group can't You haven't seen the movie so I mean, the plot is basically about justifying that cool set piece moment. It's pretty much all they got on hand basically and its main purpose is to shell the alien comms site.
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Sep 3, 2019 22:16
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Sharpe finally got made a full Colonel... In the Dutch Army.... e: I think a nice thing was I think in some other book by Benard Cornwell, not really explicitly part of the Sharpe series/universe during the US Civil War, Sharpe's son I think is a French officer observing the Civil War.
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Sep 4, 2019 23:46
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I understand that the Italian mountaineer troops were decently good, as was their special forces, their frogmen disabled a British cruiser in the Alexandria harbor did they not? The Italian navy's cipher also wasn't yet broken by the enigma and let the Italian navy act decently as a fleet in being that acted half decently as a check on the British naval forces in the Med until the Germans forced them to use the enigma and it screwed them. Early in the war it did seem like the Italian navy was performing fairly well based on what I remember reading.
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Sep 5, 2019 14:57
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bewbies posted:I bet if you told an IJN admiral this was going to happen back in 1940 he would have challenged you to a sword duel right then and there. Wasn't this not really a thing in Japan. The Government stamped down hard on the Samurai class during modernization.
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Sep 5, 2019 15:44
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xthetenth posted:Decisive battle conceptualized in strategy. There's a case to be made that in aggregate the campaigns of 1942, both the Guadalcanal fighting and the combination of Coral Sea, Midway, Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz formed a 'decisive campaign' in terms of both sides wearing their forces down in the sense that a decisive battle would do, but that in itself wasn't even decisive because both sides got worn down rather than one getting locked in a lanchestrian death spiral. Right, but I was speaking regarding sword duels. Not that officers wouldn't resort to violence to resolve doctrinal or policy disputes. Like I don't think people in Japan's government would be pulling out katana's for samurai showdown style duels in the rain under a cherry blossom tree type deal. I'd imagine at most if you did have a duel it'd be with fencing swords in a European/Western fashion. Though I do believe lots of officers did train sword martial arts and archery but I don't think they were meant to be used as a means of resolving disputes or avenging mah honour.
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Sep 5, 2019 16:22
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zoux posted:Wasn't there somebody who figured out how to get past the Italian Alps with heavy matériel From what I remember this is trickier than it seems. Because Roman Martial culture seemed to really value the offense and taking the fight to the enemy and a weak center is almost too tempting to pass up; if you pass on it, it might kill your career, label you a coward etc maybe? All battles are sets of circumstances as well too, so even if you are willing and able to not try to push into the center, then wouldn't the Carthaginian commander react to that? If holding your position and outwaiting the Carthaginians is not an option I'd assume your option as a certified armchair general is to strengthen one of your flanks and try to beat one of their flanks in since their center is weakened you only need to worry about the other flank? Like in that battle of was it Thebes (Corinth?) vs Sparta? Where they figured out how to beat the Spartans?
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Sep 5, 2019 16:39
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zoux posted:
I'm still bummed that Stuart Slade and his friends were such chuds because "The US uses superior firepower to take out Satan's armies and then marches to the gates of heaven and besieges god" was really interesting and made me on some visceral level appreciate Clancy style airport fiction.
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Sep 5, 2019 19:36
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Siivola posted:Do you have any idea how difficult it is to google for any kind of historical info on Japanese swordsmen that aren't Miyamoto Musashi? Probably about as difficult as googling Imperial Japanese warships without bringing up anime girls. Speaking of which, I have stumbled upon a hilarious game by going to my various coworkers and testing the google algorithm to figure out which of my coworkers are secretly into anime or not. Basically going to their computer and googling "akagi" or similar and seeing what comes up.
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Sep 5, 2019 20:06
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zoux posted:Are the Slade books worth reading, I mean I can get into a Clancy book even knowing that he's full of poo poo and a facist So Slade was/is IIRC, a nuke analyst. And that's his big claim to fame in his books is that he has super detailed knowledge as to US (non-class) nuclear policies and thus could write compelling technothrillers the way Clancy does; however that's only half of it; the other half of it is that he was also a regular poster on Stardestroyer.net. So In the case of his Earth is invaded by Hell series actually also worked various other forums posters as guest insert characters into his story and likewise much like how Something Awful has various threads maintained by people who are experts in their fields, Slade would get input and advice on various fields and use that to write something that could come across as more plausible given that it's still basically science fiction. So you have the Clancy technothriller compelling narrative thing and they were quite popular. However he also mainly wrote them on the fanfic board of Stardestroyer, usually posting an advance chapter on his own personal forums with the intent of later self publishing them (Oh man if he had access to Patreon back then...). Which isn't unreasonable as this is also what he did with his previous series which he did self-publish series called "The Big One" which was an alt-hist science fiction series where because England was knocked out of the war, the US stockpiled a LOT of nukes and just carpet nuked Nazi occupied Europe and the series basically picked up from to follow the post-war new order of a world divided in a USA-USSR alliance vs a World Wide Islamic Wahhabist Caliphate and their remnant German advisors, and their Japanese allies who fully occupy China. Highlights: -South African soldiers running over Obama's dad before Obama was born. Why? Just Because It Could Happen. -Slade engage in an almost Dante like obsession with hating Robert McNamara for his "Treason" of not liking bombers and preferring ICBMs over the glorious bomber. -Islamophobia. Slade tried to hem and haw about this, but at one point when an Muslim forums poster critiqued Slades interpretation of how a world wide sharia caliphate "would actually be like" Slade on Stardestroyed hemmed and hawed about how it wasn't supposed to be taken as "real" but as  deconstruction of wishful fulfillment and how it fucks everyone over to get what they want (while still maintaining that a Wahabbist Caliphate is what muslims actually want) but then on his personal forums which are private unless you happened to be a member of both forums (cough), bad mouthed him as like, a islamist jihadist mole.Slade would later go on to have a meltdown when some Ukrainian poster posted the pdf of his written works up until that point on a torrent site and then left stardestroyer in a huff when the forums refused to ban that poster; and honestly I don't really remember the details but I think Slades stardom with Stardestroyer was on very shakey ground as Slade's honestly batshit conservativism had finally run its course and the forums user base at large got more and more familiar with the people he was friends with; like the guy he made a moderator of his website that honestly wanted 600 million "liberals" to be killed off. So, are his End Times books worth reading, hrm; I mean back when he was a regular they were fairly popular if a bit controversial and there's cool things about them but he's turned out to be such a shithead in the end that I don't think so. They were fun at the time especially in the way he interacted with the community and people look forward to new chapters; and he was much more restrained in leaving out his assholery when writing; but at one point he wanted to have a chapter where they discovered that aborted fetuses went to hell and there were eaten by demons and continued to live in pain and agony as malformed lumps of sentient flesh. He also had a chapter where a woman who had died of old age successfully sued to have her will revoked and kept he estate instead of giving it to her now adult kids and their family who were in debt; our of pure boomer selfishness because he had to work in hatred of millennials in I guess. And McNamara is in the 9th circle of hell alongside Brutus and the other famous traitors of history. I'm not sure but there might be something interesting in reading a community interested writing project headed by a conservative broken by 9/11 but not completely driven yet to insanity by having a black man in the white house and thus operated under some modicum of restraint when writing. Like Kliment Voroshilov sets up a new peoples republic populated by all of the souls of everyone who died in the USSR and is one of the protagonists along with Julius Caesar who has a Republic of his own after Hell is liberated. So you have weird and interesting things occasionally interspersed by what the gently caress.
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Sep 5, 2019 20:41
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zoux posted:If they had "checked on humanity" would they have, what, started infernal DARPA? Imagine military procurement in Hell. IIRC The Demons are for their credit decently quick to react and adapt to the situation they find themselves in. IIRC they adapt very rapidly through centuries of organizational and tactical evolution to adapt to the humans they're facing. If they had realized it isn't a far stretch to imagine they would have tried various far more damaging means of striking at humanity. Also Slade thought Gen. Patraeus was the greatest modern US General to Ever Live and made him a 5-Star General/Supreme Commander of UN & US forces. You can imagine the huge smile on my face when the news broke about him leaking classified docs to his reporter mistress canning his career.
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Sep 5, 2019 23:14
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ChubbyChecker posted:Many people on these forums are alarmists who love to wallow in self pity and say that we're living in the "darkest timeline" etc., and some threads even have rules to keep them in check. But no, humanity is living its best time atm. Though of course there's always room for improvement. Climate change is pretty bad though and will probably collapse every bit of progress ever made and kill us all in short order once the first domino is knocked over and what is left over and survives will make every previous autocracy that has ever existed look like a liberal democracy in comparison. Fake edit: Beaten by Vincent. HEY GUNS posted:how is he alt right adjacent? Doesn't these tweets show inequality has risen in the US? If you click on the tweet and read the comments they also talk about how the rest of the world catching up may be what's prompting a populist backlash in developed countries; which is a little concerning, especially in context of a possible future neoaparthied between the global north and global south.
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Sep 14, 2019 04:11
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ChubbyChecker posted:You guys are playing with hypotheticals, not talking about history or present. Putting aside for a second that it's science based off of historical climate data, and the weather is absolutely relevant for military history; what does claiming: quote:Many people on these forums are alarmists who love to wallow in self pity and say that we're living in the "darkest timeline" etc., and some threads even have rules to keep them in check. But no, humanity is living its best time atm. Though of course there's always room for improvement. Have to do with "history or present"?
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Sep 14, 2019 14:26
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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 Soviet biplanes served a very effective asymmetrical warfare niche until the newer replacement fighters and a stable front made their monoplanes relevant again.
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Sep 14, 2019 21:32
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Xiahou Dun posted:There are two Chinas right now. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:Aside from the idea of splitting apart, it's also worth considering how the borders of what counts as "China" kinda wax and wane over time. Although present day China's done a fair amount of waxing. Well it depends, the existence of a state primarily deals with protecting its people. So if for example a particular Empire was protecting a particular minority client-state, it's decline could spell doom for that people. The decline of the Inca was probably a net negative for the people that lived there. The decline of the British/French colonial power in North America hurt the natives a lot as the USA was a whole of a lot worse.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:53
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The Expanse sets up a scenario that's fairly realistic and showcases why it wouldn't be just given over to computers anymore than fighter planes would be at any point in real life either. It's just not happening as long as rules of engagement and a desire for a flexible response exists for tensions.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:14
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/alexdrace/status/1174239857012592640?s=21 I what. How. Turkey.
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Sep 19, 2019 16:51
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:turkey is a european country mate Not going by the standards the map makers are going for. Which seems like a weird hodgepodge of ethnicity, economic development levels, cold war politics, and integration into the EEC.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:09
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I really loved Harry Turtledove's The War that Came Early series because of how easily you could try to wargame it out in Hearts of Iron 4. It's the series that basically asks, "What if the War happened in 1938 instead?" It's interesting because that's early enough for the Soviets to get all of the good rep they get from fighting fascists without all of the bad rep from occupying Poland while it's Britain and France who eat it instead for supporting Germany invade the USSR; plus it ends before Germany can even begin to contemplate the Final Solution. Also the sheer satisfaction having the Republicans win the Spanish Civil War and Franco getting shot in the face by a anti tank rifle.
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Sep 21, 2019 23:28
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Gnoman posted:That particular series is interesting in a few ways -for one thing, it is just about the only series he's done that didn't have WWII go much worse than the historical one-, but it shares the common flaw in Turtledove that the unexplored end state is probably much more interesting than the actual story. That's kinda true for any alt-hist though unless they pull a Draka and tries to plot it out for centuries onwards resulting in weirder and weirder counterfactuals. Platystemon posted:Yeah but when Turtledove attempts to explore the end state, it goes all big-lipped alligator, like in Worldwar. I dunno, Worldwar's end state up until the FTL drive basically made sense. They build big spaceships and spent 20 years bringing them over to the Lizard homeworld in order to negotiate a proper and real peace treaty on even footing; because the Lizards have been mulling over simply eradicating Earth and sacrificing its colonists it has living on Earth for years and years, on the fence hovering their claws over the The Button; never willing to rule it out or to go through with it. Humans arriving basically pushed them into FOR REAL NOW GUYS deliberating it until the FTL ship arrived and put the final nail in the coffin of that idea forever. Basically Homeworld Bound was about tying up loose ends and resolving the "Will they or won't they?" that was left hanging at the end of Aftershocks where fighting at least one nuclear war both made the Lizard Highcommand paradoxically both more and less willing to go that far. Basically I'd say Worldwars end state was probably one of the better written ones of his alt history books; because it was from the start decidedly less about exploring a nerdy what-if, and more about actually writing an actual story following a three act structure having real themes and asking actual questions more at home with the speculative fiction genre. Thus the actual geopolitics of the Worldwar setting, merely existing as set dressing for the character arcs being developed I feel like makes it the stronger story compared to TL-191. Which followed more closely to the "And then a Thing Happened that was Kinda Like the History Thing but slightly different(tm)". The War That Came Early I notice also seemed to have... Like actual themes? I think a big one was around the idea of how you live your life to its fullest. The Soviet sergeant who gets arrested and sent to the gulag at the end because he picked a fight with the system but lived his fullest the entire time, who will probably exit the gulag in 10 years no problem with the strength of his no fucks given attitude, versus the Armenian officer who kept his mouth shut and his head down and sold out his Karelian friend and was miserable the entire time, who will probably stay miserable? A lot of contrasting character arcs throughout the series that were kinda absent in previous stories where Turtledove was like this weird bizarro George RR Martin who would randomly kill off beloved characters and yet churns out a book a month. True TWTCE probably has the more interesting end state of the two because of just how open ended it is and how different everything is while also sufficiently close enough to us that we can relate to it.
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Sep 22, 2019 02:59
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How important were roads for pre-modern warfare? Lets say between 1400 and 1650. I got into an internet argument where someone is claiming it is anachronistic to refer to roads as 'important as lines of communication and supply' for a war we had in last weeks EU4 session. I wrote an AAR claiming certain forts needed to be taken because they prevented use of certain roads for an invading army. I understand armies of the period frequently lived off the land and foraged, but that doesn't mean roads were unimportant right?
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Sep 22, 2019 04:11
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If the Iraqi's had did a major spoiler pre-emptive attack into the coalition staging areas would that have helped? Or was their best decision to have just invade Saudi Arabia the moment the US started shipping troops in?
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Oct 31, 2019 14:56
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Polyakov posted:That is a very interesting question with no clear answer. In hindsight maybe? It depends if you think that the world would have sat back and let him do it. If he does that then pretty much every Arab and Sunni is gonna hit the loving roof, Israel is going to get involved in a big way and i cant imagine the world just accepting that fait accompli. Could he have taken Saudi Arabia? Most likely a lot of the important bits, the border oil areas and the persian gulf ports, however he would run into issues getting supplies to his troops at the front as he went further, Saudi Arabia is HUGE and not terribly well equipped for mass transit. His troops would have taken an absolute pounding from the air doing so and they would be leaving much of their AA behind. He would have made a hell of a lot more of a mess of the world but i dont think that Saddam in charge of 45% of the worlds known oil is going to be allowed to stand. It might have given him a hostage so to speak to negotiate with; go big or go home as they say the moment the US decided to take an interest.
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Oct 31, 2019 15:21
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From a purely military perspective it's interesting to think about what Iraq should have done to get the best possible situation once it was committed.
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Oct 31, 2019 16:43
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bessantj posted:Saw a trailer for the Midway film directed by Roland Emmerich. In it there is a line that states if Japan win the battle the the west coast of the US will be lost. How true is this? What would the Japanese have gained control of if they had won the battle? Nope and Hell Nope
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Oct 31, 2019 22:13
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At least from Saburo Sakai's memoirs I got the sense that the IJN and their carrier naval aviation in particular might have had a greater proportion of foreign educated bushido types who saw the americans more as honourable opponents and equals so they were less predisposed to treat them poorly. Like that one IJA officer who forced his underlings to return a POW's Harvard graduation ring because he also had gone to Harvard.
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Nov 1, 2019 18:25
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feedmegin posted:It'll be this. The surface Kriegsmarine was light on war crimes too So here's something interesting, we know the KM did warcrimes in utilizing slave labour for production; did the IJN also use slave labour? My memory on the Tokyo War Crimes trials is a little vague on details beyond the Command Responsibility charges.
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Nov 1, 2019 19:38
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