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HEY GUNS posted:yes their military history is 95% pure failure Now I'm curious, is the Meissen Sword made from porcelain?
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Sep 7, 2019 18:41
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Randarkman posted:Well, modern German dress uniforms essentially look like evolved versions of the type of uniform they wore during WW2, so I wouldn't say that the trend it represented went out of fashion. And there's also what I said above about both East and West Germany keeping the WW2-style uniforms and developing them over the years. Man, I'm just glad I don't have to wear those anymore. It's been 10+ years and we only needed to wear full Dressuniform like 2 times I can remember, but I still hated them. I felt like a clown when marching around in them.
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Sep 21, 2019 22:46
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:phasing in isn't the same thing as every rifleman with a magnifying optic, though Our unit was already 100% G36 in 2004-2006 (my time in the army), and we weren't exactly KSK-material. We still had some G3 in storage reputedly, but I never saw them personally and we never trained with them. zoux posted:At what range are non-specialized infantry usually trained to fire. 50-300m, depending on weapon. We were supposed to use pistols at closer ranges. I remember one time we were told what to do if ranges are above the ~400m range but I could never quite get my head around it, as I was always atrocious at math and calculating wind speed in my head was a bit above my ability. LingcodKilla posted:My army IT buddy is saying he was never tested past three hundred but he got training on 400 at unit level. Can confirm, we did the same poo poo (testing/training in shooting exercises up to a max. of ca. 200m and a single 300-400m company-level exercise I was on). Randarkman posted:I can't say for sure but at least in Christian Europe it was considered extremely important to baptize a newborn as soon as possible precisely because so many died in infancy. Because a priest often was not available on short notice, the Church ruled that a priest was not strictly necessary to carry out a baptism, midwives specifically were pointed out when it came to performing baptisms. A priest was necessary for confirmation, which confirmed a child's membership in the Christian community (and typically was carried out as soon as a priest was available), but confirmaton wasn't a necessity for salvation. Holy poo poo, I never thought about this, but that must be where the Catholic tradition of Konfirmation comes from in Germany. (No idea if that kind of celebration of a kid getting "confirmed" into Catholicism is practiced in other countries, so I'm going with the German name.) P-Mack posted:Per Catholic rules you don't even need to be a Christian to baptize someone, if the emergency is severe enough. This by the way caused a later rule to be made that states that an emergency baptism doesn't work against someones will, so if someone gets baptized by some random Catholic, you can just go to the next real priest and he'll confirm you're still going to hell if you want to. 
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Oct 19, 2019 22:03
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Solaris 2.0 posted:What alternative strategic options did the Germans have summer of 1943 if they cancel Citadel? They can try this unconditional surrender thing two years early
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Oct 28, 2019 11:31
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zoux posted:I sent 15000 men on a death march towards an entrenched position as a joke. Don't forget Cold Harbor, where Lee massacred tons of Union soldiers assaulting his entrenched positions. He really "helped" the Union there to their graves.
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Nov 9, 2019 14:28
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Is that a DIY-handcannon? 
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Nov 14, 2019 11:14
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golden bubble posted:There's going to be a new board game about diplomacy at the end of the 30-years-war. It looks fun, but they cut Saxony from the playable factions because you can't sell a board game that requires exactly seven players. No sell if none of the factions is Denmark
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Nov 14, 2019 20:30
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HEY GUNS posted:dude denmark was so loving dumb in that war they helped save my hometown, so they'll forever be my heroes also I'm like super-dumb when playing strategy games, so Denmark is my avatar
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Nov 14, 2019 21:54
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:They resisted about as well as they could, which was not very well. I don't think it was about morale breaking, moreso that Soviet tanks were running over the trenches and vaporizing the entire frontline before anybody even considered running. Denmark, of course. Denmark was as important to the 30-Years-War as Saxony.
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Nov 15, 2019 06:30
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sullat posted:The High Seas Fleet is very well preserved in Scapa Flow. But probably only because we sunk it before the Brits could steal it
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Nov 15, 2019 22:48
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Tias posted:..I'll allow it. Nienburg. Tilly besieged the city in 1625, but because of a couple thousand of Christian's mercenaries sitting in the city at the time, he couldn't break the defenders and had to give up after three months of siege. I'm kind of amazed that Tilly even tried, considering Nienburg back then was sitting in the middle of swampy marshland and trying to put an army around the city and its castle must have been hell. But also back then, Nienburg was sitting on an important river crossing over the Weser, so Tilly probably had no choice if he wanted to sweep out the Danish sitting in Northern Germany. (1627 the Catholics were back, one of Tilly's generals renewed the siege and since Nienburg hadn't recovered yet from the first siege, it quickly fell and was occupied. The city then fell to the Swedes in the early 1630s, who continued to occupy the city until 1650.) To help visualize this, here's a map of Nienburg from 1627 (the map was made before the Catholics and later the Swedes started rebuilding and modernizing the fortifications massively):  Now imagine most of the land outside the wall as one giant swamp, and you wouldn't be far off Edit: As a bonus, here's the castle keep of Nienburg (it's still there today): 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 16, 2019 14:43
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aphid_licker posted:As long as I don't get one under my fingernail it's fine Vampires however, would just be hosed
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Nov 18, 2019 17:36
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zoux posted:What are the rules for addressing a person by their rank when their rank is unwieldy? Obviously the gold standard for this seems to be German ranks but I gather making people stop and address you as Obersturmbannführer every time was part of the Nazi's whole thing. But like for an LTC, are there rules or custom governing when are you allowed to address them as "colonel" rather than "lieutenant colonel". Would a general ever be addressed by his full rank? What about the higher NCO ranks (i.e.Mastery Gunnery Sergeant, Command Chief Master Sergeant, Command Sergeant Major)? To give a German example, while the Captain-equivalent rank in the Bundesmarine is "Kapitänsleutnant", no-one actually says that. You're supposed to call your Captain a "Kaleu".
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Nov 19, 2019 19:58
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zoux posted:Is stuff like this in a manual or is it just learned tradition I'm fairly sure it's the kind of thing you don't find in manuals, not even in German ones, but your career will be cut very short if you're not a fast learner about stuff like this. Let's go with oral tradition on this one, though with our number of Dienstvorschriften I can't really guarantee that stuff we had to learn the hard way wasn't hidden away in some obscure book. Still, remember the Bundeswehr is (or was, up to 2006 at least when I left the service) traditional enough that we still "updated" our Dienstvorschriften by manually cutting and pasting tiny pieces of paper, using advanced tools like scissors and glue, so tradition is kind of important for us anyway. We do things the old way, and we do things the slow way -and we like it.  Edit: Another thing I just remembered, lower ranks (everything below corporal-equivalent) tend to be shortened. No-one is always saying stuff like "Herr Oberstabsgefreiter, wie geht es Ihnen heute?" constantly, especially if you drop enough stripes until you end up in what I call the reasonable region of enlisted soldiers like Obergefreiter (two stripes, shortened to "OG") or Hauptgefreiter (three stripes, shortened to "HG") Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 22:02
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FuturePastNow posted:Two Exocets couldn't even sink a frigate The Kh-22 on the other hand looks like it could take out a frigate just by falling on it Can the Russian missile cruiser use these or similar missiles? If yes, that thing could probably take out a fleet of Iowas on its own
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Nov 26, 2019 09:49
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Arglebargle III posted:Not sure how many rapists will be deterred by unsafe sex. I'm carefully guessing the number is either zero or 0.
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Nov 30, 2019 03:14
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Comstar posted:
There probably was a Saxon contingent marching with Napoleon into Russia, but I have to re-read 1812 to confirm. If they were, they probably broke off with the Prussian contingents and changed sides.
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Dec 1, 2019 12:28
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HEY GUNS posted:the Elector was ride-or-die Napoleon, the men changed sides during the battle of leipzig itself Holding on to the losing side until your own army rebels, now that's tenacity! I wonder what the Saxon soldiers thought when they learned the Prussians were changing sides behind them and joining the Russians, while their own leader forced them to continue bravely onwards Though I'm guessing their uprising at the Battle of Leipzig answers that question
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Dec 1, 2019 15:42
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saxon milhist
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Fangz posted:Battle off Samar for the Japanese, probably. Better off, how? Brest-Litowsk was an act of utter desperation, the Russians just couldn't afford to fight anymore. Remember, the revolutionary government before the Soviets tried fighting, but the Germans just effortlessly pushed them back, as most of the Russian soldiers just wanted the war to stop -apparently many units would just give up without a fight. And one of the reasons the provisionary government fell was the fact they had promised to end the war and then didn't. This made a lot of people very angry.
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Dec 11, 2019 12:15
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Fangz posted:Well the prompt was "gently caress, looking back if we'd stayed comitted we would've won" - I count the government *not* collapsing as part of "stayed comitted". That doesn't make sense, a Kerensky-government staying comitted was what lead to their collapse in the first place. It would have worked out better for the Russians if Kerensky hadn't stayed comitted and instead ended the war like promised. Tons of people would have survived and whatever pointless treaty they'd be forced to agree to would have been nullified when the US-entry crushed Germany in the West.
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Dec 11, 2019 15:12
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Fangz posted:Well, it's not really an interesting hypothetical question otherwise because then it's a tautology - there are no conflicts that could have been won if only they stayed committed because by definition, they did not historically stay committed. If you don't change the morale situation then there's no basis to answering 'what if they chose differently' since they could not choose differently unless they had a different POV. In hindsight, the Russians would have known the Germans were hosed the moment the US entered the war no matter what they were doing. They would have stopped fighting even faster
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Dec 11, 2019 16:57
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aphid_licker posted:German history is weirdly underused in culture. You have a smattering of WW2 stuff and that's it. There was that TV series about Berlin that seemed like a step in the right direction, Babylon Berlin. You could mine Fallada and Heinrich Mann for days of feature films alone. Man, I would murder for a movie about Simplicissimus
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Dec 12, 2019 18:34
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HEY GUNS posted:Boy Meets Girl Meets Egg Creature With Demons Up Its rear end, it's box office gold No, make a movie out of the Fáfnismál: The first five minutes is Siegfried stabbing the dragon Fafnir with his sword Gram, then 60 minutes listening to Fafnir talking while his blood pours out, followed by 60 minutes listening to birds talking, then the last five minutes are Siegfried decapitating a dwarf That's box office platinum
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Dec 12, 2019 21:56
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oystertoadfish posted:
OK, I feel slightly bad about cramering into this derail just after Trin's effort post, but this makes me wonder. I've always seen a lot of Daisies with violet splotches/stripes on them, always just a tiny bit in a sea of white and I never questioned this because I knew there are pink Daisies, too. Now I'm wondering if this thing is caused by a mutation of white Daisies getting some violet from the pink variants, or a mutation on my side making my eyes slightly more UV-sensitive. Too bad I never thought of making shots of unusual Daisies to show people, ha ha
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Dec 14, 2019 17:38
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I'm a bit late to the party, but since it's Christmas Eve and all, I wanted to share some of my own childhood memories of toy wargaming.Uncle Enzo posted:Every year my little brother and I would use all our wooden blocks to build the Atlantic Wall, then use our entire shared hoard of legos into matched invasion and defense fleets to recreate the invasion of normandy. Ataxerxes posted:We had this thing with plastic soldiers where you would pick a side from the sandbox at the playground, dig some sort of trenches and place the soldiers there. You would then pitch rocks at the soldiers in turns, until all the soldiers on the other side had been buried in sand. The one with unburied ones left was the winner. A lot of kids in my neighborhood owned tons of plastic soldiers and tanks, since they were really cheap and it was easy to make your parents cave in and buy you a couple packages of them. So we'd sometimes spend a Saturday afternoon pooling our armies into those absurdly huge mammoth-forces and then fight over pavements, gardens, gardenwalls and the parking spaces in front of our parent's garages. We'd put up elaborate columns and front lines, and then later escalated by putting in toy cars as mobile cavalry and stuff like transformers and Mask-cars as super-units. We'd do stuff like make our green, grey or brown soldiers climb a garden wall, only to let them be stomped and thrown back down to their doom by Starscream. It was great fun and sometimes we played until it got dark and our parents started forcing us to clean up the giant mess we'd created by then. The Lone Badger posted:A friend and I invented miniatures wargaming with lego. We'd put all the figures and weapons in a pile and split them by point value, build a cool location with the blocks, then battle it out (a musket kills on a 4+ on 1d6 but then has to be reloaded, a cutlass kills on 4+ if you're close enough, a loaded pistol instantly wins melee, etc). Back when I had no idea things like strategy video games were a thing that exists, I would sometimes pull out 1-2 of those large 1000 piece puzzle sets and use the pieces in my own private wargame. Pieces touching other pieces were in combat, pieces turned on their grey backs were casualties. Pieces stapled like little towers simulated the garrisons of cities and fortresses, pieces carefully arranged as messy rings around the stacks simulated the besieging force. It got really elaborate and totally freeform without any written rules, until university and video games finally combined to make this seem silly, so I put/threw my unused puzzle sets away. I think the last time I tried this again (this time purely to feel nostalgic about my childhood) was in 2012, but by then I had a cat and after several attempts at playing ruined by a curious cat running through my garrison stacks I gave up and went back to commanding armies in video games.
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Dec 24, 2019 21:36
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oystertoadfish posted:the black legend of perfidious belgium Every person living in the Kongo right now finds themselves nodding, but they don't know why
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Dec 26, 2019 19:04
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Hunt11 posted:These are the points you are defending. Now let's not get hasty, if Belgium had said to Germany "Yeah sure, let's go ahead", there's no reason for Britain to get involved, therefore the nature of the entire war changes up to the point where the only possible enemy left for Belgium to fight would be France and this only if France decides Belgian neutrality is baloney after they let German troops pass through. Their situation isn't comparable to Poland in WWII at all, as there is nothing that could possible have made Hitler stop invading and killing Polish people. Belgium on the other hand, had a real choice to avoid mass death. It's just that the politicians of the time, when given the choice between mass death and unhurt sovereignty, preferred mass death.
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Dec 27, 2019 01:39
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:By referring to France pushing the border eastward you yourself are buying into post-war mythologism. Yes, Alsace spoke german, but that’s it. It was french, already had been for far longer than it would be part of MegaPrussia, and it wasn’t until after the war that France started language policing. The 1871 border was absolutely not some grand return of germans to Germany, and the germans even at the time knew it. It was a military frontier. Hell, La Marseillaise actually comes from Alsace. It got its name because folks from Marseilles were the first to sing it in Paris. No, it wasn't French. It was occupied and annexed by France for centuries, true, but it spend nearly 700 years beforehand as part of the Holy Roman Empire. After the Treaty of Meerssen in 870, the region became part of the Eastfrankian Empire and staid there while it slowly transformed into the HRE. Only after the Treaty of Chambord in 1552 began the slow process of French kings stealing German territory. And it was slow: It started with Metz (both city and diocese) in 1552, 1648 the French added some more territory from Elsass, including most of the Sundgau (still excluding Mühlhausen at the time), 1681 French troops occupied Straßburg. Later, the Treaty of Vienna from 1738 gave the Dukedom of Lothringen to France, though confusingly, the treaty where it concerns Lothringen specified a later date: France only officially took over the Dukedom in 1766. After the mess of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era was over, the Vienna Congress specified that Elsass-Lothringen were now French. That was in 1815, and the French-German War started in 1870. So Elsass-Lothringen was only really French in the Napoleonic Era and the 55 years after. That's basically nothing compared to the many centuries were both regions were kind of mixed and the even longer time were it definitely wasn't French.
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Dec 27, 2019 14:02
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sullat posted:Or... Germany could have attacked France in one of the not-belgium regions? Or better yet, not attacked France at all? You seem to be viewing the German attack through Belgium as some sort of historic inevitability, and therefore, all the onus is on Belgium to mitigate the damage as best it can. Yes, that's other possibilities for alternative histories, but we were talking about what would happen if Belgium complied to the ultimatum, not about what would happen if aliens suddenly land and blast everyone with ray guns Joking aside, not attacking France was probably suicide, considering the alliance between France and Russia. The only way to avoid fighting with France would be to not stumble into WWI at all Attacking through Belgium is less necessary, however. From hindsight we can look at how fast the German army destroyed the Belgian fortifications and assume that a frontal attack into the French fortress lines could have, at the very least, not be any worse then the grueling slog that WWI eventually became on the Western front. Still a high risk, though! I'm trying to imagine how the German generals would have reacted to someone arguing for a frontal attack directly into the French fortress line and it makes me smile If someone had asked me, I'd probably have tried breaking into the first lines of French forts and then just hang back and hold them until Russia is defeated, instead of that whole Belgium-business. Though no-one asked me, and here we are! Trin Tragula posted:The 1912 conventions between Britain and France had led the French navy to be deployed in the Mediterranean and committed Britain to support France with a 6-division BEF and a fleet in the North Sea in the event of war with Germany; for the French this was settled fact and it was unthinkable that anything else might happen. There was a whole lot of undignified froo-frooing around at the end of the July crisis once the Cabinet had thoughts for anywhere that wasn't Ulster, and most of it was done before they all realised quite how thoroughly their trousers had been nailed to the mast by the 1912 convention. There was a clear moral necessity to support the French, and the answer to the British question was academic as soon as the relevant people all realised it. I don't know, what I've read from the time before the outbreak of the war, it seems a lot less clear cut. What happened was that the British military hat essentially ran away with the whole Entente Cordiale, but the civilian parts of Britain were still doing catch-up. Which is why Britain was so hung up on guaranteeing Belgian neutrality: It was a good way of making the huge parts of Britain that were against a war entry see how bad those Germans were. Sure, with Belgium staying neutral, Britain may still have entered the war, but it was a real possibility that the still fragile military alliance between France and Britain instead just broke, with disastrous consequences.
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Dec 27, 2019 14:17
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Phanatic posted:The whole point of the sort-of-alliance with France is that Britain wasn't going to let Germany dominate the European mainland. Belgium staying neutral wouldn't have changed that. But Britain would have also preferred not seeing Russia or France dominating the European mainland. And in an alternate reality where Germany first smashes frontally into the French fortresses and then gets his rear end kicked by Russia, it's easy to see Britain breaking their alliance before their old enemy France could get too strong.
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Dec 27, 2019 23:15
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packetmantis posted:Making sure someone stays in one area in Siberia sounds... hard to enforce. The climate in Siberia can be interesting enough to enforce it, especially in Winter. Though even I heard stories about POWs that just one day walked off and then continued walking until they've reached Germany again after the war, so apparently escaping was a possibility. If you survived weather and wild animals, you could probably escape.
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Dec 28, 2019 12:48
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Germany “retaking” Alsace was about as legit as a french “retaking” of Wallonia would be. Or about as legit as France "retaking" Saarland.
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Dec 29, 2019 11:50
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HEY GUNS posted:Whatever you think of Richard III and what he died for, he is a dead human being and deserves an honourable burial. We're people, not trash. Yeah, but we're all equal people. What I'm saying is, the relatives of Richard III. are hopefully paying to keep him buried, or I expect his bones to be cremated, put into an urn and shipped to his next living kin for safekeeping.
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Dec 31, 2019 14:26
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Argas posted:Just because Civilization taught you bullshit about spears vs tanks doesn't mean obsolete technology is somehow ineffective by sheer inertia of time. Think about how funny that would be, your time-traveling rear end could give some clown in the year 8000 BC a simple tool hammer you bought at Walmart in 2020 and just by being more modern, that hammerman from ancient times would suddenly be invincible to his fellow people, just because.
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Jan 2, 2020 14:21
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Xiahou Dun posted:This idea is absolutely horrifying. Like I'm thinking about it and my reaction is to look sadly at my legs and make vague, whiney noises. Cessna posted:As has been said, this sort of thing comes up regularly in accounts of Napoleonic and US Civil War combat; the soldiers would occasionally see a cannon ball skipping or bouncing over the ground towards them. It appears - well, if not slow, visible, but it still has more then enough kinetic energy to smash bones if you're in its way. I remember reading a description of this sort of thing happening in a book about the war of 1812. A cannon ball was skipping and bouncing a few times and at the last bounce, it hang seemingly still in the air, but still spinning pretty drat fast. A curious soldier then reached out on impulse and tried touching the hovering ball. The poor moron actually managed to touch the cannon ball in the few seconds before it fell back down again and he had basically every single bone in his arm broken from the kinetic energy transferring into him.
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Jan 3, 2020 16:10
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Cessna posted:If I had to guess it was probably an optical illusion. When a fly ball (baseball) is coming your way it seems to hang in the air; the guy saw this, stuck out his arm, and - ouch. If I remember the description of the event correctly, the ball had apparently struck the ground in front of the soldiers at a really weird angle and came back up wildly spinning, but moving seemingly slow. It might have just looked like it was hovering, for like, a couple seconds before the cannon ball would have continued to move on its weird sideways parallel bounce
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Jan 3, 2020 17:00
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I don't know what a knuckleball even is
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Jan 3, 2020 17:24
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Fangz posted:Might it have been a similar situation to this? Could be.  Edit: I was morbidly curious of what would happen if someone tries to touch the bullets before they stop moving, but sadly no-one was dumb enough to try it. LingcodKilla posted:It’s a ball thrown in such a way it has no spin and flys rather erratically. Ah got it, so basically the opposite of what I was describing
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Jan 3, 2020 17:47
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oystertoadfish posted:here's a gif of an mlb knuckleball. it has nearly no spin so it flutters around, you can see the catcher struggling to locate it  If it wouldn't know better, I'd say this is a bad movie special effect
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Jan 3, 2020 17:56
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Phanatic posted:Did Germany in WWI ever try to use its U-boats to attack the RN blockade? A lot! One U-boat even made it into Scapa Flow to sink a ship. Some more ships got sunk in the channel, and that's only the two most famous incidents I can remember on the top of my head. Alas, in WWI U-boats were still a rather new weapon and that kind of thing was more of an exception, especially since everyone was prone to panic at the slightest shadow in the water and so everyone was really, really careful about protecting fleet movements from them. xthetenth posted:Kind of? U-9's sinking of Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue is more about damaging the screens for supply transport to France, but you could make the case that they were part of the blockade of German naval power, and the later sinking of Hawke was absolutely an attack on blockading forces. Notably, the reasons why they were all picked off, that they weren't zig-zagging (and that large ships tried to recover crew from sunk allies) speak to why later ships weren't picked off as easily. Warships are fast and maneuverable, and submarines, especially in WWI are slow underwater. There's a real element of luck in getting a good firing solution on an enemy that isn't already damaged, and zig-zagging means you have to get lucky enough to get exceptionally close at the right time and part of the motion. This, essentially.
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Jan 6, 2020 00:52
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