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JcDent posted:I hope the site is good because I'm bookmarking it! The other thing I'd say about top-loading light machine guns is that if you load from the bottom then you can't generally use more than a 20 round magazine before you're unable to lie down with the gun on a bipod. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted: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 16:36
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GotLag posted:Did the Germans ever use a heavy machine gun on the ground in WW2?  If anyone has definitive sources one way or the other on the MG131s in ground service please do share them. FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 23, 2019 17:35
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Milo and POTUS posted:I assume the grenade launchers are the under barrel variety? What's the difference between a SAW and a general purpose MG? I just assumed that the former was the latter for all tactical intents and purposes The differences between the SAW and GPMG are contained within the names, the SAW is intended entirely for squads but the GPMG is general-purpose and can be mounted to a tripod as a sustained-fire weapon as part of platoon or company weapons team. Generally speaking a SAW will fire the same bullets as the squad's assault rifles, in this case 5.56mm NATO, and the GPMG will fire full-size rifle bullets, in this case 7.62mm NATO. Geisla is also right that these are nebulous definitions and you will always be able to find someone who will tell you you are wrong.
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Sep 23, 2019 22:35
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JcDent posted:Curioualy enough, the nice TOE website linked earlier states that the newest Brit configuration ditches the SAW, so the squad has to tote around a GPMG. The Disposable Recoilless Rifle is cool, but not as cool as the 94mm LAW-80 that was operated in the late 1980s and early 1990s which was a disposable anti-tank weapon with an inbuilt spotting rifle. 
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Sep 24, 2019 09:13
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Elyv posted:The Admiral Kuznetsov is going to retaliate by polluting the world super hard so that all walruses will die Except for all the lead paint I guess.
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Sep 26, 2019 01:19
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Randarkman posted:AT guns derived from AA guns typically were not fielded with their AA mounts, they were typically of the wheeled and towed variety.
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Sep 26, 2019 10:44
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SimonCat posted:Why not just 2 3 gun turrets?
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Sep 27, 2019 08:29
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JcDent posted:Unarmed fast bomber was originally a German idea.
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Sep 27, 2019 12:02
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Phanatic posted:Even as late as the 1950s the B-36 had better capability at altitude than the fighters that would have intercepted it. Most interceptors couldn't even get up to 50000', and the ones that could would be perpetually on the edge of a stall and couldn't turn worth a drat up there. To successfully intercept one would take very good timing and coordination with controllers.
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Sep 27, 2019 16:27
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Clarence posted:Edit: just googled him - didn't know exactly who it was at first! If he served in France he must have transferred units. (My forceswarrecords subscription is lapsed at the moment, otherwise I'd look him up in more detail.)
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Sep 28, 2019 20:29
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GotLag posted:On a related note, how much of a hazard was falling shrapnel from AA shells and cartridge cases or bullets from aircraft to civilians beneath who weren't being directly targeted? Better than entire shells coming back down though.
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Sep 30, 2019 14:56
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Jobbo_Fett posted:5. A gross misunderstanding of the public's potential reaction to city bombing and a nation's desire to fight under those conditions. I don't know if I have a point here, it's just a thing.
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Sep 30, 2019 19:40
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Polyakov posted:Iran-Iraq, 1984
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Oct 1, 2019 19:25
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The Lone Badger posted:Looks like it would trap a decent amount of air too. He might actually survive.
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Oct 3, 2019 10:56
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Polyakov posted:What is referred to as "hygiene masks", so i presume something like this actually rather than surgical masks. Against the nerve agents you're going to vomit into the mask and die instead of vomiting onto the ground and dying.
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Oct 10, 2019 12:05
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Cythereal posted:It also hurt the RN's use of carriers that their approach to designing carriers severely limited the number of aircraft they could each carry and launch. The Japanese and especially the Americans designed carriers in different ways that allowed them to carry significantly more aircraft at the cost of being more vulnerable to damage. Royal Navy carrier doctrine made perfect sense for the war the Royal Navy ended up in. The armoured flight decks proved their worth on the carriers that had them, allowing Illustrious to survive bombing that would have entirely knocked out any other carrier in early 1941, letting Formidable absorb two 1000kg bomb hits in the Eastern Med and shrug off two Kamikazes in the Pacific which did so little damage that the carrier was operating again within hours of each hit. Victorious took two Kamikaze hits and Indefatigable one with similar results and Indomitable bounced a 500kg bomb during Pedestal. In summary, every single British AFD carrier but Implacable was protected from a hit that could have proved fatal to another ship and I am happy to claim that Illustrious, Formidable and Victorious would have been lost or written-off if they had American style hangar-deck armour. For a Navy that had ten proper fleet carriers at any point in WW2 and fewer than that at any given time the preservation of three ships is completely worth it.
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Oct 12, 2019 14:15
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VictualSquid posted:Was there any country (except for the nazis) that made their naval aviation group part of the airforce? quote:And similarly, was there any post ww1 military that left ground based aviation as part of the ground forces?
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Oct 12, 2019 15:21
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xthetenth posted:There's the open question of how many strikes were prevented by larger air wings from becoming hits. Considering how desperately needed fighters were during the early carrier battles, with scout bombers getting pressed into service before the folding wings on the F4F-4 allowed 18 plane squadrons to become 27 planes, I'm not sure I fancy trying to field a strike and run CAS with the relatively few planes the RN carriers could field. quote:It's also worth noting that the bomb hit on the Franklin was a pair of 250 kg bombs, one of which tore through two decks, including the 2.5 inch armored hangar deck. So carrier deck armor getting penetrated was hardly unknown. quote:Also, this http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-030.php alleges that the majority of the armored carriers had suffered permanent deformation in their structure from fires contained within the structure, and they were in fact written off quickly as a result. In summary, the carriers that were written off quickly had generally been in constant war service for years and now had no role in the middle of a major economic recession, of course they were paid off in the 50s. Enterprise, Ranger and Saratoga, the only three remaining American carriers of a similar vintage were paid off in 1946-47. Ranger didn't even take battle damage! Incidentally, is that the same Stuart Slade as The Big One and so forth? quote:And as far as 'could have proved fatal to another ship' and 'would have been lost or written off if they had American style hangar-deck armour', that's rather at odds to the volume of hits it took to kill the Yorktown and Hornet. Franklin burned like she did because the bombs hit in the middle of arming and fueling procedures with no warning, making it the only hit I can think of where a British style design would have had a decisive advantage by not having the same amount of kindling, though it likely would've warped the hull girder permanently. Lexington took a decisive amount of damage from torpedo hits, and the Japanese experience with submarines doesn't indicate enclosed hangars would do particularly well there.
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Oct 12, 2019 20:39
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That said, how the tech behaves in-game and how it was actually used historically are going to be drastically different. Like, armor will never go obsolete because the combat assumes you're going to get hit repeatedly during missions. A few further thoughts: - There's lots of stuff to be done with the armour scheme and different places you can put armour, the two most important schemes for your purposes being Turtleback (German heavy ships and pre-Jutland ships of all nations) and All-or-Nothing (post-Jutland ships). There's plenty more nuance to it than that and I'm not really the guy to talk about it. - You're going to really struggle to get useful stats for main battery guns above about 20" size, but I'd fill out the odd-numbered calibres between 6" and 16" size since all saw some description of service in WW2 (7.5" on Hawkins, 9.2" in land batteries, 11" on the Twins and the Deutschlands, 13" on the Dunkerques and 15" on most British battleships, Bismarck and Tirpitz and the Richelieus). - Quad turrets were fitted with 13", 14" and 15" guns historically and frankly I don't see any reason not to allow them across the board. They let you get a lot of gun on not a lot of hull but they were all desperately finicky. - Most ships with torpedo tubes didn't carry any reloads at all, so you'll have to purchase and find space for reloads before you buy an upgrade to make the reloading faster. Mind you, in an arcadey game reloading torps is about the first gameplay concession I'd make. It's no fun blowing your load and going home if you miss. - Remember that the most important sort of missile you're going to have is the anti-ship missile, it's what necessitates the CIWS and pushes naval combat ranges out beyond visual range even without aircraft carriers. It also makes the carrier more deadly, yet more vulnerable, as each aircraft now has a significantly better chance of sinking a ship and is almost guaranteed to get home okay. These missiles can take many forms, between Penguin-style low end ones:  Which are small and can be fitted to aircraft, helicopters or tiny missile boats, and huge carrier killers like the P-700 Granit:  Which can only be fired from a few large vessels and carry either an explosive charge that weighs twice as much as an entire Penguin or a nuclear weapon that can annihilate a ship and anything stupid enough to be near it. Missile combat is honestly a whole other ballgame and I would advise you to put a cutoff in your game before you get to it, because it just won't work with WW2 style systems.
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Oct 12, 2019 22:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:None of the guns in-game will be "desperately finicky"; they'll all work exactly as advertised. I suppose I could ding the multi-gun turrets on their accuracy or firing rate a bit, but I'm not sure they need a downside beyond being heavier. That's a question for playtesting. Another thing worth talking about is belt length, the closer together you can put everything in a ship the shorter your belt needs to be to cover all the vitals and therefore you can either have a lighter ship or a thicker belt. You want to cover the propulsion spaces (boilers/engines) and the magazines, so if you have fewer turrets then you don't need as long a belt which saves you weight again and then if you put all of your guns at one end of the ship you can get an even shorter belt. The Dunkerques and Richelieus are the ultimate expression of this concept, while the KGVs have quad turrets more because the original plan of 3x3 14" made the ship unacceptably unstable, so 2x4 14" + 1x2 14" got pretty close while keeping metacentric height down. quote:I think you could make a fun game about modern naval warfare, but it'd be a very different kind of game from the one I'm making. You'd almost certainly have to do it at the strategic layer, controlling entire fleets plus aircraft, satellites, and ground-based radar systems. At the single-ship scale, it'd be a long cat-and-mouse game followed by one or both ships dying in a single shot.
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Oct 12, 2019 23:38
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GotLag posted:How would it be worse than any other carrier?  This was about as desperate as it looks. The smoke and heat from the stacks made the approach difficult and then one had to crab the aircraft sideways onto the deck. The first guy to do it died five days later in another landing attempt.  She then got redecked into this brilliantly half-assed configuration, in which she took part in the first ever carrier raid, before finally being turned into the flush-deck design we all know and tolerate after the war.
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Oct 13, 2019 08:57
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Milo and POTUS posted:Are those cables in the second picture supposed to catch the plane?!   This typically damages the aircraft, but less than hitting the ocean and sinking would. Additionally on through-deck carriers and with Furious' particular hybrid setup it prevents the aircraft from hitting whatever is forward of the barrier, usually a large number of parked aircraft.
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Oct 13, 2019 10:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Following onto the tech tree post from yesterday and like fifty pages' worth of discussion, here's the ship classes I'm considering being playable. For British cruisers I'm going to go very controversial and say Abdiel - late C-class - Town/Edinburgh - County. Abdiels are going to be very weird, with immense 39 knot speed and destroyer-tier armament along with the capacious mine storage which can essentially be used like mission space for whatever you like. The late Cs are pretty middle of the road late WW1 CLs which can optionally be converted into a fairly creditable CLAA. Edinburgh gets you Belfast which is really the British cruiser and the Counties round out the line as the RN's famous workhorse CAs. If you want purely CAs, Hawkins - York - London - Tiger. I know Tiger isn't a CA but that's the RN's only Missile Cruiser option. For the American battleships, Colorado beats all of your other Tier 1 options easily and NorCal beats all of your Tier 2s and SoDak beats all of your Tier 3s. Iowa beats all of your Tier 4s but that's frankly okay. I'd go for Pennsylvania - Colorado - NorCal - Iowa, you keep the iconic Iowa and one of the ships from Second Guadalcanal but you gain Arizona. Deutschlands and Hippers should be swapped, the Hippers are newer but the Deutschlands are CAs so large and heavily armed that they start to edge into the Battlecruiser class. Everything else I'm fairly unfamiliar with honestly, so I'll leave it to others.
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Oct 13, 2019 19:56
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Cythereal posted:For the Americans, I think the Atlanta and/or Alaska class deserves to be in the cruiser list. quote:The anti-aircraft cruiser was arguably perfected by the USN during the Pacific War, and the Alaska class were virtually battlecruisers.
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Oct 13, 2019 20:58
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Gnoman posted:The (never used) US designation for "battlecruiser" was CC. The CBs were intended as cruiser hunters to counter surface raiders, with none of the capital-ship aspects of the Battlecruiser role. Also, Big Cruiser That Owns Little Cruisers is the core Battlecruiser role, they were originally intended for killing scout cruisers in the opening stages of a fleet battle and for independent operations against other cruisers. Pretending that a 35000t ship is merely an extremely heavy cruiser is disingenuous. Nebakenezzer posted:Also France and Italy should be in the mix, they had surface fleets FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 21:43
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MrYenko posted:I wasn’t expecting that one, I figured you were going to say they were locals. That would be like the Guard deploying with Thompsons.  Or the SEALs I guess. Incidentally the US would still be using the M3 Grease Gun at the time as the main personal defence weapon for armour crew. Dunno if you'd have had one Cessna? Wouldn't put it past the USMC to give everyone a rifle and it's not like there isn't room in an Amtrac. LatwPIAT posted:Yes. The British didn't have enough L85s and L86s, so some rear-line troops were issued with SLRs and Brens.
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Oct 14, 2019 16:20
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You don't want to be looking at them, those are modernish anti-submarine torpedo launchers which throw a smaller torpedo than WW2 anti-ship designs. Anti-submarine torpedoes are designed to fit two to a helicopter. You should be looking at launchers for stuff like the Mark 15, Type 93 'Long Lance', Mark VII/VIII/IX and so forth.  They mostly look like this.
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Oct 15, 2019 23:20
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Sorry, yeah, I'm not planning on having the Mk32 until any other "modern" tech starts getting unlocked. I still don't know what the scale on the launchers needs to be though. Like, in that diagram you linked, would the torpedo be the full length of the tube, or would it stop short of the spoon, or would it be even shorter? 
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Oct 15, 2019 23:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Nothing's stopping you from deciding that your Deutschland-class heavy cruiser with a maximum displacement of ~14000 tons should be stuffed to the gills with boilers and fitted with minimal armor, to enable it to achieve speeds well in excess of what the historical ship did.
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Oct 16, 2019 23:23
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Related question, could a US soldier in Vietnam (or even today) choose to use an AK or something similar, or would their officers tell them to knock that off? MP5 Submachine Gun in about three variants HK53 Carbine M16A2 Assault Rifle FN Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon FAL Para Battle Rifle G3 Battle Rifle None of which were standard issue in the Regular Army. The FAL was sort of in service as the L1A1 SLR but they were semi-automatic only and had fixed stocks, the Para version folded up and was acquired from captured Argentinian stocks. An addendum to Cessna's point about the sounds of weapons, the M16A2 is reasonably similar to the AR-18 (Armalite) favoured by the PIRA and was used on SAS operations in Northern Ireland. I'm sure that wouldn't be the only reason it was chosen but it could help. I have actually heard of some of these weapons ending up in Regular service, there's a photo out there somewhere of a soldier in Gulf 1 with a Minimi and I've heard a story about a border post in Northern Ireland ending up with an M16A2 with M203, which they kept even though they didn't have the grenades for it because it looked very cool. What your officer doesn't know can't hurt them.
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Oct 17, 2019 12:48
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zoux posted:Speaking of the civil war and for no other reason: who is the most overrated general in US history? Also interested in overrated generals/military leaders from other countries and eras of course.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:08
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FastestGunAlive posted:Macarthur was a huge piece of poo poo for gassing the bonus army and wanting to nuke Korea among other things. However he was also army chief of staff during the interwar period, overseeing the reorganization and the modernization of the army and integration of the CCC during the new deal. He also had a savvy understanding of what we now term information warfare- he was big on code breaking and public relations (plays nicely to his arrogant self image). Plus the fact that he has actual operational and strategic success as a commander. Horrible human being but capable General. He was a horrible human being and a useless general who got lucky once. FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 19:16
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The Lone Badger posted:Who was the first army to start issuing every common infantryman with a magnifying optic on their rifle? If you want to count the 1.5x optic on the Steyr AUG (which is weirdly made by a subdivision of Swarovski) then it's the Austrians in 1978 by some distance, but you asked about magnification in specific and I really don't like the AUG sights anyway.
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Oct 18, 2019 16:03
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LingcodKilla posted:One Saudi woman married an enlisted soldier, immigrated to the US, got bored when he got deployed again, made friends with a stripper at an on base laundry mat, became a stripper and divorced him.
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Oct 23, 2019 20:36
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FuturePastNow posted:Wargames sound boring. I can run this in CMANO and get you something that looks very much like an answer, but of course it doesn't properly take into account the human factor, the guy on 3 hours of sleep in the last 48 and a stunning amount of amphetamines mistaking inbound missiles for Count Dracula. That's what you need exercises for.
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Oct 31, 2019 10:34
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Yeah, the point of Midway was to cut off American supply routes to Australia by taking Fiji. Actual Midway Atoll doesn't matter a jot one way or the other but if the Americans are too hosed up to support Guadalcanal then things in SWPAC get interesting. Probably no overall effect on the result of the war, everything is just slower and more people die, but the scary six months turn into a scary twelve months for the Allies.
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Nov 1, 2019 00:14
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The Lone Badger posted:What is the doctrine response to an incoming Count Dracula?
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Nov 1, 2019 12:03
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Crap, doublepost.
FrangibleCover fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Nov 2, 2019 |
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Nov 2, 2019 14:19
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zoux posted:Netflix's Henriad movie is out today adn I was watching an interesting history of the life of Henry V on youtube and it made me wonder: Primary School (4-11): No discussion of the medieval period at all, smash cut from the Romans leaving Wales in 410 to Henry Tudor (a Welshman) landing in Pembrokeshire in 1485. Secondary School (11-16): One year on 1066, the Anglo-Norman Conquest of Wales, Gerald of Wales who travelled around Wales in 1188 recuiting for the Third Crusade to fight the Saracens in the Middle East and wrote a travelogue, Llewelyn ap Gryffydd. Then back to more Tudors. No or minimal discussion of Owain Glyndwr which is strange but I guess they had to hurry on so they could talk about how important Wales was in the Industrial Revolution. GCSE history was almost all 20th Century, I think because it's easiest to teach and therefore gets your school pass rates up. I've never had to memorise any lines of succession but I think I did have to memorise the order and mode of death of Henry VIII's wives. No wood panelling, no gowns apart from the deputy head who everyone thought was a cock, no recitation apart from in Mandatory Welsh. As feedmegin says there's an expectation to do complimentary subjects so I can't comment directly on history at A-Level because I did Mathsy-Sciency stuff instead, but I know people who did it and none of it was the medieval period either. I think Russia 1905-1991, America 1960-1970 and Britain 1900-1950 or something to that effect.
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Nov 2, 2019 14:30
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HEY GUNS posted:it's like half a state, you can throw a rock in a direction and hit something of archaeological interest
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Nov 2, 2019 20:52
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