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Nessus posted:The question is if elephantry could have broken through the pike wall. are we talkin' about, like, elephant-sized pikes?
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Aug 22, 2019 04:56
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I wonder how many times the Romans set a hog on fire and it turned around instead of running at the enemy
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Aug 22, 2019 06:23
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and the HMS Angry Scotsman
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Aug 22, 2019 18:53
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One use of PT boats I'm familiar with was in the Battle of Surigao Strait, where dozens of PTs engaged the Japanese force heading for the strait for a couple hours before the battle proper. They scored no hits and two of them were lost, but their radio reports gave the American commander the exact composition of the enemy forces heading his way. Given the quality of American torpedoes for the first 3/4 of the war, it's probably not fair to judge the effectiveness of any unit firing them
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Aug 25, 2019 00:35
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shoot the German in the face, not the helmet, got it
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Aug 25, 2019 20:02
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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). A state or Federal ban on that wouldn't get past even a liberal Supreme Court, but the military could ban the poo poo out of it if they wanted
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Sep 12, 2019 16:59
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xthetenth posted:Weight and drag are a drag, and remote turrets eventually got good. Even before missiles, planes like the featherweight B-36s show a decided trend towards being able to go higher and faster being a higher priority than any defensive guns other than rearwards. Part of that is making it harder for interceptors to make an intercept happen, part is that at higher speeds, closing shots become incredibly hard. Plus interceptors eventually got missiles and were joined by SAMs and good luck shooting down incoming missiles with your gun turret
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Sep 16, 2019 01:55
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SeanBeansShako posted:Here is a question, if you got paid for it would you totally donate your urine to make historically correct materiel's? If they feed me the liquid bread diet, they can have the resulting urine.
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Sep 22, 2019 06:28
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LingcodKilla posted:Second best next to the navy uniform hoooooooyah! 
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Sep 22, 2019 20:19
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FrangibleCover posted:One hundred and thirty thousand shaft horsepower of steam turbine and they can't find enough spare steam to get the creases out of their trousers? More like being commanders of the biggest navy in history means you've reached the career point where you don't have to give a gently caress about it.
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Sep 22, 2019 22:31
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bewbies posted:
It's a MLRT
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Sep 24, 2019 15:12
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Phanatic posted:That's some...interesting math. quote:1.5 tons quote:twice the size of a human Only in 
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Sep 25, 2019 22:18
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xthetenth posted:Another really good conversion was the USS Sable and Wolverine, which were paddle wheel ships for the great lakes that got turned into training aircraft carriers. I didn't know about the paddlewheel aircraft carriers until a couple years ago but they are cool as hell. They had no hangar deck to keep planes aboard, so every morning they'd chug out onto Lake Michigan for pilots to learn carrier landing. They qualified 35,000 pilots during the war. 
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Sep 26, 2019 16:27
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Anytime I see something weird like that on a battleship I assume it was probably due to some Washington Naval Treaty loophole. https://twitter.com/madpadre1/status/1177404522806808576
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Sep 27, 2019 06:46
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Cyrano4747 posted: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. The Boeing Model 299 (which eventually became the B-17) was also faster than almost any fighter plane in 1935.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:52
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Radio comms between the pilots of several Huey gunships covering a troop extraction in Vietnam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuuDWd8SL7A Full audio: https://soundcloud.com/andrew-garrison/task-force-alpha-full-audio From: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/41ed1p/i_found_a_47_year_old_recording_of_myself_nearly/
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Sep 29, 2019 20:31
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I've read it was more like 20-50 civilian casualties (of course casualty doesn't mean dead) in Honolulu from US Navy AA shells and fragments falling on the city. This was all officially pinned on Japanese pilots strafing the city, but those guys weren't looking for anything that wasn't battleship shaped. Had the third strike not been called off, though, I imagine it might have killed some civilians (targeting the fuel depots). FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Sep 30, 2019 |
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Sep 30, 2019 17:00
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everydayfalls posted:This actually brings a story my grandmother told of that day into perspective. Her father worked in the harbor and had just gotten off shift when the attack came in. The way she told it he crawled under cars to prevent getting strafed trying to get back. There was never any evidence of the Japanese doing that so I didn’t understand what was going on, but trying not to catch some shrapnel seems like a good reason to be under the cars. They were definitely strafing the ships and the base to suppress antiaircraft fire, and to do as much damage as they could. I'm sure it was complete chaos in and around Pearl Harbor.
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Oct 1, 2019 03:25
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Geisladisk posted:There's also the fact that statistically, most pilots would not manage to rack up enough combat time to actually develop such a feel for their ammo load - That requires you to take part in a couple dozen engagements, which most pilots didn't manage to do. Yeah I was gonna say- most pilots in most engagements weren't going to be shooting long enough to run the guns dry. That's the sort of thing you read about in stories about shooting down six planes in one battle and running out of ammo chasing the seventh. But I imagine this was more likely over the Eastern Front or near the end of the war when allied planes were just strafing the rubble for good measure.
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Oct 3, 2019 16:18
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We know in hindsight that the Nazis and Japanese were never ever going to pull off an invasion of North America. But I agree with Nebakanezzer, Americans in 1940-41 saw a world that was on fire and anything was possible. Especially after France fell, I think. And you get your news from newspaper headlines, a newsreel that runs before the movie, and every once in a while the President comes on the radio. Imagine how that must have felt. You're Joe Average in the midweat, what do you know about France? You know people go sit in cafes by the Eiffel Tower. You know the women are pretty and they have a sexy accent. And you know they held the loving line for four and half bloody years the last time Germany invaded. If you got your news from the newsreels, you might have seen "France invaded!" and "France falls!" back to back. Or at least it must have felt that way. Then the British Prime Minister is giving speeches that sound like he expects they'll be invaded any minute now. Every week there's news and for a year or so, every week that news was bad. Even if you're across the ocean from that news, that's still traumatic. And then, one day, you wake up and the US Pacific fleet has been annihilated. FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Oct 11, 2019 |
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Oct 11, 2019 04:56
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Nebakenezzer posted:I read that for a second as 'F-4 Phantom II' and then got irrationally angry at USN aircraft nomenclature I was sad when the Tomcat got canceled in part because I hoped they'd circle the numbering scheme back around to F14F
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Oct 13, 2019 00:27
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HEY GUNS posted:i have also seen a relatively small gun from some minor italian statelet cast with the motto GOD HAS PUT INTO MY POWER ALL THAT I TOUCH, which i always liked If that's not the ultimate slogan for artillery, then I don't know what is.
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Oct 15, 2019 04:31
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Here's a ship I just made in the designer: ah the USS Vasa
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Oct 16, 2019 01:05
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So what I'm hearing is that if you're a terrorist and you manage to steal a B61, you pry out the plutonium and uranium and sell those to Iran and sell the electronic parts of the bomb to a Russian then take your new wad of cash and send some guys to pilot school
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Oct 16, 2019 06:23
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Phanatic posted:the peanut butter (or jalapeño cheese which really kicks the peanut butter’s rear end) my biggest takeaway from MRE eating Steve is a MRE peanut butter packet will outlive us all
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Oct 20, 2019 02:50
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Nebakenezzer posted:The fish thing is interesting, though capitalism and communism were shoulder to shoulder when it came to wasteful extraction, and in a non-trival sense it is all the fault of the UN https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 Not just fish, either.
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Oct 21, 2019 15:16
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I have an extremely dim memory of the Challenger explosion. I'm not sure how much of that memory is actually still from 1986, though. The next "world event" I remember is probably the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Oct 23, 2019 00:00
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I was in elementary school during the first Gulf War and I remember us all being made to write letters to The Troops. I most likely drew fighter jets on mine.
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Oct 23, 2019 18:12
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Cessna posted:I know this may sound a bit silly and maudlin, but we really appreciated those letters. I know the school got a nice letter back from the unit they were all sent to. It's probably still framed in the display cabinet in the hallway outside the office. I wish I could remember any more details than that.
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Oct 23, 2019 20:00
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Wargames sound boring. Now, what would happen if someone fired a hundred anti-ship missiles at an aircraft carrier? I bet that wouldn't be boring.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:14
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bewbies posted:I think its a pretty questionable assumption that hostilities would cease just because PGM magazines are depleted. Most European countries at the start of WWI were sitting on stockpiles of a few 100k artillery shells, then the war began and they were firing 30k a day. life finds a way
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Nov 6, 2019 19:46
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Cessna posted:The US Civil War? Quite a bit. If you're an unarmored steamship and you get jumped by an ironclad, I imagine trying to ram it is your best bet. Either that or running, but a side or paddle wheeler probably wasn't going to outrun anything.
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Nov 20, 2019 00:06
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Cessna posted:This is spot-on. Chrysler plant, for comparison: 
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Nov 21, 2019 00:28
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How well could a pilot bail out of a P-39 with that side door?
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Nov 24, 2019 18:06
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LostCosmonaut posted:To expand: Two Exocets couldn't even sink a frigate
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Nov 26, 2019 08:35
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https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/mothballing-the-us-navy-after-wwii-pt-1/ https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/mothballing-the-us-navy-after-wwii-pt-2/ A good article (or at least full of good photos) about how the US Navy mothballed thousands of ships after the war, how they were prepared and protected for long-term storage and the different readiness categories.
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Nov 27, 2019 09:13
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People still train at mounted archery, too. There are competitions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt7Gs2EIR-E
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Dec 5, 2019 22:59
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oystertoadfish posted:some science googling pulled up two hypotheses for why we evolved color vision in this article: I've heard that when the USAF was testing the first real stealth aircraft in the late 70s and early 80s, they discovered that a similar color was the optimal shade to paint an aircraft for invisibility against he night sky. And then painted them black anyway.
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Dec 14, 2019 16:53
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SimonCat posted:How did the US Army in WWII conduct class room training and briefings. Powerpoint has become the default tool for sharing information in a group setting in the modern army. If I were to sit down to a company level brief about an upcoming mission or if the soldiers needed a class on cold weather operations, how would it have been presented?   overhead and slide projectors, powerpoint is waaaaaaay older than computers
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Dec 15, 2019 19:11
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spiky butthole posted:Ideally pilots are tiny people weighing 110lbs (not sure about American planes) so when you are dogfighting that extra kilo of fuel you can carry instead of body weight may mean you get home. I've always thought that smaller people made better fighter pilots because your g-force tolerance improves with less distance between the brain and heart. Of course you need to be pretty fit, too.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:00
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