chitoryu12 posted:

It depends on the motivation and whether the people leading the revolution think that killing the people in charge is not only okay, but necessary. The American Revolution took place an ocean away from the main government they were fighting against, but the Continental Congress didn't start demanding the execution of loyalists. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson weren't saying to behead the governors who didn't join their side. Seizures of property and exile, yes, but not murder. When the Crown acquiesced to independence, the war was over. British soldiers went home, 80+ million loyalists remained and became Americans. Relations even remained positive enough that both nations engaged in trade and diplomatic relations immediately after the war ended, though the War of 1812 was a rocky moment.

With the French Revolution, there was a sense that the royals and aristocrats were directly and personally responsible for everything and people like Robespierre hyped the people up into wanting heads on pikes. He glorified the idea of terrorizing the populace to keep the peace after a revolution, and the bloody revolution had created factions that were equally willing to kill for power; when you make your revolution about storming the palace and killing the people in charge, it becomes hard to stick around as a peaceful-minded group and maintain any semblance of authority. Now you have a government where all the different people vying for power are the kind who are fine with killing for it, and killing becomes the order of the day.

Nessus posted:

I never thought of it that way. Makes it sound like the Quickening when you put it that way. The cursed mantle of the kung fuhrer.

overmind2000 posted:

It's honestly insane to think of the Germans pulling off a triphibious assault in late 1943 and even more so when you consider that they not only won but held the territory gained until the end of the war. It may be the final lasting German victory aside from maybe the Battle of Garfagnana which when you think about was also the only successful Italian offensive of the entire war

feedmegin posted:

Aesthetic appreciation of war was absolutely a thing in Italian fascism from the get go and Mussolini put it into practice in Spain and Abyssinia. Trouble is he got into power earlier than the rest of them and thus reamed earlier. Meaning Italy had loads of pretty decent gear in say 1935 - that was obsolescent junk by 1939.

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.

FrangibleCover posted:

With the notable exception of the CF-18 contract in the early 80s the Canadians have hosed up every single tactical aircraft procurement since the Clunk. All of them. Ask me about one and I'll tell you why it was the wrong choice.

Polyakov posted:

This thing

HEY GUNS posted:

say what you will about protestantism, gars "got" new media.

bewbies posted:

I'm reading Master and Commander, and of course a lot of the book revolves around HMS Sophie's guns. Her main battery are 4 pounders. This seems almost...uselessly small to me? Contemporary ships of the line had a mix of 18 and 36 pounders, and even land-based guns during the Civil War were most commonly 12 pounders.

Was a 4 pound gun of any real use during that era?

FrangibleCover posted:

Makes sense, after fighting a 32-gun xebec-frigate and then getting captured you'd expect her to be quite holy.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

I don't think Pinker says much that a Marxist progressivist wouldn't tell you. Like duh, "feudalism" is unstable and one of the few anchors of a person/group's status is violence, capitalism is all about bureaucracy and money and requires a bit of humanism to justify itself. Pinker just skips the part where capitalism is supposed to dissemble into socialism, though tbf the Marxists were wrong about that. It's always easier to observe the past than to predict the future.

That's why Pinker always talks about the whole world in aggregate, because of course everything is improving in general, life was agrarian and precarious in most of the Third World 40 years ago, and now it mostly isn't. But it's really weird, dishonest even, to bring up Pinker when people want to take about specific nations in decline like the US or UK. If you leave out all the lead-brained violence of the '70s, life just slowly got worse, and average people have less and less stake in their livelihoods and politics. Acting like this is some inevitable process of balancing the world is ridiculous, the elite of those countries simply siphoned up a bigger share of their wealth, while continuing their exploitation of undeveloped foreign countries.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Catastrophic man-made climate change is gonna gently caress these metrics.

Raenir Salazar posted:

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.


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.

HEY GUNS posted:

drilling

xthetenth posted:

Blatant rerail attempt
Hmm, odd question. What we know as lorica segmentata shows up in the first century AD, and it's been described as less expensive, but some mentions of it imply it particularly shows up for soldiers/formations expecting heavier melee, but hamata overtakes segmentata. Is there much known on the why? It feels like there's a lot of possibilities, like a response to the sort of fighting seen in the civil wars at the end of the Republic, possibly both mobilization and a focus on heavy infantry fighting peers, something that made sense in those scenarios that lost its relevance in the frontier oriented armies of the early Empire, something that was displaced by changes in hamata (I remember there being bronze and iron hamata, was that change something in that period that might account for segmentata falling by the wayside), or other stuff entirely?

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/sovietvisuals/status/1174326332018298885?s=21

I love dark Soviet humor

Trin Tragula posted:

Soldiers, obviously

HEY GUNS posted:

No idea. If I had to guess i'd say it's because a batallion isn't a standard size nor a standard number of companies. Also regiments don't travel all together, they split up at least by company and probably even smaller.

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Killing the commoners postdates general capture, and that in turn postdates killing everyone, at least in an English context. It goes, in broad strokes: Kill everyone (6th-11th century), kill and/or maim people if you feel especially threatened or annoyed but otherwise ransom them (11th-14th centuries), kill the commoners maybe (12th-16th centuries), kill the nobles (14th-15th centuries), kill the rebels and your religious enemies, but wait I repeat myself (12th-16th century), prisoner exchanges, parole etc (11th-20th centuries), kill everyone again (17th-20th century), imprison some people with the aim of killing them through deprivation sometimes, also assassination of top figures (19th-21st century). It's impossible to speak about these things globally since they're really dependent on culture and context. You'll note a lot of overlap, for example. That's because the development of racism in the late medieval to early modern periods changed who was thought of as fully human! Also a large part of it was related to material conditions. The period of killing nobles especially is related to the fact that basically all of England's wars in those centuries were wars related to succession, where the other side was completely illegitimate, and customary execution of rebels was firmly entrenched by the 14th century in large part because the stakes had gotten so much higher than they had been in e.g. the 12th century. Taking a different tack, though, the Saxons, Mercians, and Vikings were remarkably straightforward in their uniform slaughter of captured enemies.

As for your second question, I don't think much of those *particular* messages can predate instantaneous media like radio and television. They also require consent of the governed as a central rationale for war. You do see that from time to time in medieval warfare (the Scottish Wars of Independence being a plausible example) but not commonly. Instead you see wars where the casus belli has a legalistic justification (the Norman Conquest, Scottish Wars again, Investiture Controversy, HYW) or just a naked power grab (the Burgundian Wars).

I'm drunk so if anyone wants to correct me on something I may or may not fight you.
Thanks,

SeanBeansShako posted:

Let me tell you about the Nock gun my friend.

SeanBeansShako posted:

Even the lightest of mortars are still crew weaponry and you got to have at least another guy to carry ammunition and help with the loading now, plus I imagine the soldiers operating would need some training. With rifle grenades I expect in theory they just need to get a volley of quick explosives out in a hurry on the fly.

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Yes, but to the best of my knowledge enslavement was for noncombatants. Crusade warfare also had an element of enslavement, which I should have mentioned, especially because it sowed the seed for the systems of the 16th - 19th centuries which we know and love.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

their own light mortar was an overcomplicated piece of teutonic nonsense (telescopic sight, etc) but they used a bunch of captured soviet and french 50mms

those 50mms are more along the lines of a grenade discharger than an actual mortar. basically a better way of delivering rifle grenades. everyone loved these things in the interwar years, the poles also had one and the Japanese "knee mortar" is probably the most famous. the launchers were man-portable at about 10-15 lbs. they usually had fixed angles for launch and used a kind of dial-the-range system on the shell itself. the Japanese system was pretty clever in that you just screwed a charge in to the base of a frag grenade, so you didn't need to carry totally separate shells - just the bases.

SeanBeansShako posted:

Mandatory Gun Jesus post.

I love repeater/volley flintlocks.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The dual-purpose shovel is what we all need eh, hello bonjour

LatwPIAT posted:

The entire point of the ultralight mortar is that it's not a crew-served weapon. You can put them at platoon or even squad level, giving the platoon/squad the organic capability of long-range explosive/smoke/whatever delivery. This is a role that can also be filled by rifle grenades or UGLs, but the ultralight mortar typically has advantages in range over both and warhead size over the UGL. It also allows forces that typically wouldn't have any high-arc firepower at all to have mortar support, which is part of the reason the Polish army were getting ultralight mortars in 2017 for their commando forces.

Randarkman posted:

I'm not sure about the universality of such a practice but I think I can remember reading at one time that part of some sort of Mamluk training/education was that the conversion to Islam involved being freed. Though I can't remember where I read that and I can't say how common that was. My point more generally is that whether they were formally freed or not, was that their status as Mamluks so superceded their status as slaves or freedmen (in many slave societies, not just the Islamic world, there are alot of similarities in the status of slaves and freedmen, as you mention freedmen typically legalled remained the wards of their masters, the difference being more one of degree than much else) that they become something completely different from the rest of the slave population, and as the military (and often administrative elite) they stood above the free population as well as officers, governors, ministers and "ordinary" elite soldiers.

It's probably not a surprise to anyone in this thread that they do not have much in common with how slave soldiers are depicted in fiction and fantasy (think of the unsullied in GOT) in that for all that they are soldiers they are still expected to be servile and seem to occupy a humiliating position in society compared to free citizens. Not really so with Mamluks at all really who were aware of their status, proud of their distinct origins and typically disdainful of most others outside their own group. That's probably part of the reason Mamluks and similar soldiers ended up seizing power in, or otherwise dominating, many Islamic states, because of how they saw themselves in relation to society at large.

You touched on it a little bit, but part of the reason such soldiers were recruited to begin with a general pre-modern conception that, for a ruler, foreigners are often more loyal and reliable than a country's indigenous elites. The reasoning being that foreigners were not part of the existing networks of power within the elite and thus really had no other patron or ally than their employer, thus their loyalty was more absolute and less likely to become compromised, especially in cases of civil war and such. Thus you often see foreign mercenaries and such compose an elite core, especially household and guard troops of many rulers (this goes beyond Islamic societies, think of the Swiss guards of the Pope and the Bourbon kings for instance). That reasoning then goes a bit further in the Islamic world and arrives at the conclusion that ofcourse foreign slaves would be even more loyal than just foreigners in general.

SlothfulCobra posted:

The dangly one. That was always the part that was most confusing to me with Fullmetal Alchemist uniforms, but I know I've seen them on other fancy uniforms too. It's a neat bit of frill for a dress uniform, but I assume there was some reason at some point?

Platystemon posted:

Napoleon died before the invention of the fountain pen, which makes this story suspect. Where did he put the inkwell?

The Russians used a pencil.

C.M. Kruger posted:

The DP fires rimmed cartridges, it's harder to make magazine fed weapons that work reliably with them because the cartridge rims like to catch on each other and jam the magazine up, IIRC the Bren had issues with this and you had to be careful loading the magazines. The DP's pan magazines are extremely simple and basically have the rounds each loaded between gear teeth, as the magazine advances (using a large leaf spring in the center that is wound up) they just drop straight down into the feed area and are chambered by the gun.

Probably not the sole reason they went with pan mags over a belt feed but it's Good Enough to get you a reliable LMG in the mid 1920s.

Randarkman posted:

The DP doesn't use a drum magazine though, don't know much about the reliabiltiy of the pan magazine. PPSh with the drum magazine also had the same problem in that they were highly prone to jams when you loaded them fully up, which led to a preference among many soldiers for the box magazines and incentives to produce more of those.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

It’s a pan magazine. The cartridges are radially stored within the magazine versus axially. Also, some pan magazines do not use spring followers and instead use a recoil driven cam system to rotate the magazine. This is how the Lewis gun works, not sure about the DP.

xthetenth posted:

There's a huge variety of WWII era anti-tank and tank guns that got their start as AA guns. Turns out a gun that throws shells at high velocity is just what you need, and better yet a lot of them have good HE shells already. Some of these even go back quite a ways, like the US 3-inch gun M1918, which goes back to WWII, when tanks didn't need nearly that much to take out.

steinrokkan posted:

People laugh at you for proposing Die Ratte, until this exact thing happens.

Phanatic posted:

Want to see some tankie argue why this was a just and necessary act to further world socialism.

zoux posted: