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mllaneza posted:Your PC isn't trying to sail a submarine? That seems to be easier to rig sails on. Incidentally, I have seen some epically, amusingly awful AI-served slop as 'illustrations' of this story on clickbaity garbage facebook accounts. Like, modern SSNs sprouting sailing rigs off an 18th-century First Rate kinda thing. And some slightly better/less worse ones where the submarine becomes some mutant hybrid of a WW2 Type VII U-boat and a Cold War GUPPY boat wearing multiple lateen-rig sails like a weird felucca.
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Jan 17, 2026 17:11
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BalloonFish posted:Although the situation on the Carpathia (the Titanic rescue ship) is a complete myth, there are plenty of verified cases of ships pushing their machinery hard in emergencies in return for the engines needing repairs or rebuilds when the situation had passed. The version of the Carpathia story I'm most familiar with is this tumblr post; it's completely untrue?
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Jan 18, 2026 00:41
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I saw an actual museum account arguing in favour of AI "enhanced" photos. The example they gave was of a Sherman photo where the suspension morphed into an absolutely nonsensical array of bits and bobs that looked nothing like the real deal.
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Jan 18, 2026 00:41
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Anshu posted:The version of the Carpathia story I'm most familiar with is this tumblr post; it's completely untrue? my understanding is that post is largely based on the account of the Carpathia's captain, who has been accused of exaggerating. it's still a heroic story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Carpathia#Sinking_of_RMS_Titanic_and_Carpathia%27s_rescue_of_survivors part of the confusion seems to be that Titanic's position was misreported by her crew and Carpathia thought they were further away than they actually were thatbastardken fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jan 18, 2026 |
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Jan 18, 2026 00:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:I saw an actual museum account arguing in favour of AI "enhanced" photos. The example they gave was of a Sherman photo where the suspension morphed into an absolutely nonsensical array of bits and bobs that looked nothing like the real deal. Yeah, gently caress that noise. I'd look crosseyed at them if they just added an AI "enhanced" background, but an AI main subject is beyond the Pale. If they start actually doing it, name and shame.
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Jan 18, 2026 01:19
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Anshu posted:The version of the Carpathia story I'm most familiar with is this tumblr post; it's completely untrue? The bit about pushing the engines 'into the red' and cracking 17 knots, beyond the ship's design speed is untrue. There are other versions of the myth out there that say that Carpathia was permanently damaged in some way by her headlong rush to the rescue of the Titanic . Other tellings portray the Carpathia as a small, old ship. Or even a tramp steamer. It makes a good underdog hero story. It's not true though. Carpathia was nine years in service at the time, and was a Cunarder - part of Britain's premier shipping line and a Royal Mail Steamer (like the Titanic). She was three times the size of a typical merchant ship of the age. While she was one of Cunard's smaller ships and was on the Mediterranean run rather than the more glamorous North Atlantic route, she wasn't much of an underdog. Captain Rostron's skillful night-time dash into the ice field, the dodging of bergs, his ordering of shutting down things like the steam heating and hot water and his thorough preparations for readying his ship, crew and passengers is true - let nothing take away from that. But his ship did not to 17 knots. She did 15 knots - one knots above her designed service speed. Exactly what you'd expect from a ship being driven hard (but not dangerously so) in a sea that was glassy calm with not a breath of wind. We know she did 15knts because we know pretty well where Carpathia was when she received the distress message, we now know exactly where Titanic was, and we know how long the Cunarder took to get from one to the other. The 17 knots myth comes because it's based on Titanic's erroneous reported position, 13 miles further west. That extra 13 miles makes the basis for Carpathia screaming along at 17 knots. Rostron must have known that it was incorrect and that his ship had not done that speed that night. But as well as being a fine seaman and leader he also had a knack for publicity. He did nothing to damp down the dramatic press stories.
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Jan 18, 2026 01:47
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I was about to ask how we can be sure Rostron must have known he didn't reach 17kn, if Titanic had already sunk by the time he got to the area to verify her actual location, but then I remembered the post earlier about how a ship's motion through still air would have create an apparent wind, and that speed they could have measured directly.
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Jan 18, 2026 05:25
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Let's not forget that sustaining a whole knot above design speed for a couple of hours is pretty impressive for a ship with quadruple-expansion engines. I just checked up on her and Carpathia was sunk by a U-boat in WW1,  .
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Jan 18, 2026 05:41
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Anshu posted:I was about to ask how we can be sure Rostron must have known he didn't reach 17kn, if Titanic had already sunk by the time he got to the area to verify her actual location, but then I remembered the post earlier about how a ship's motion through still air would have create an apparent wind, and that speed they could have measured directly. There's much older, more reliable ways of measuring speed through water than trying to work out the difference between apparent wind and true wind. Why are ships' speed measured in knots? Meet the chip log. Take a weighted piece of wood (in older times literally just a log) and tie a string on it. At regular intervals, tie a knot in the string. Get a time measuring device (traditionally an hourglass), and set it to a specific time, and start it once you throw the log into the water, letting the string play out on a reel. Grab the string and halt it once time is up, and count how many knots have passed through the string, thus giving you your nautical miles per hour, or "knots." Mind you, this only measures speed through water and doesn't account for currents - if you're going against the current you may record your speed through water as going gangbusters while in terms of speed over ground you're barely getting anywhere, but it's still a very old and fairly reliable way of measuring your speed. There may have been fancier ways of measuring speed by the time of the Titanic but the tech was already there. Plus, celestial navigation, particularly on a clear night where the stars are visible can be pretty accurate, so if you wanted to know what your actual speed over ground was you'd take measurements when you got the distress call (which you'd want to record in the ship's log) and then another measurement when you actually get to your destination which again would be recorded in the log. Once you have two locations and the times you were actually at the locations it's trivial to work out how fast you must have been going on average.
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Jan 18, 2026 06:22
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Anshu posted:I was about to ask how we can be sure Rostron must have known he didn't reach 17kn, if Titanic had already sunk by the time he got to the area to verify her actual location, but then I remembered the post earlier about how a ship's motion through still air would have create an apparent wind, and that speed they could have measured directly. We can be fairly sure that Rostron knew that Carpathia wasn't capable of 17 knots (three knots above her service speed, and this on a liner, not even a warship with a lot of spare power). Both her engines combined produced slightly more than half of one of Titanic's main engines, and that ship had a turbine as well. As for how they knew their speed - they had no 'live' means of seeing it. They didn't have a speedometer. There aren't speed limits on the ocean and there weren't any in harbours or fairways in 1912. For navigation and timekeeping ships were more concerned with 'distance run', usually worked out between noon positions worked out by a combination of astronav, dead reckoning and the log. In 1912 the log wasn't the classic reel of knotted-string tied to a wooden plank as described by Tomn - often called a 'chip log". By the 1910s most large ships used Walker's Patent Log, where a brass torpedo-like device with a propeller was towed behind the ship. As it moved through the water the propeller twisted the line, which turned clockwork in a mechanism mounted on the deck. Since the number of turns of the log's propeller represented a fixed distance through the water, the log could display the distance run in nautical miles. (On the Titanic, there was a quartermaster posted on the docking bridge at the ship's stern at all times of the day and night. As well as being a lookout and general watchman, his main role was to look after the log (it was mounted on the docking bridge) and report its reading to the bridge at regular intervals or when so requested. When the ship encountered the iceberg, the QM on the docking bridge's main concern was reeling in the log so that the line didn't get fouled in the propellers as the ship went astern.) Steamships could back this up by counting the number of revolutions turned by the engines, since this also represented a fixed distance the ship was driven through the water by its screws (plus allowance for slip - the inevitable but variable difference between theory and reality). Sun and star sightings, the distance recorded by the patent log and the turns reported by the engine room would all be combined to give a distance run.
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Jan 18, 2026 11:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:I saw an actual museum account arguing in favour of AI "enhanced" photos. The example they gave was of a Sherman photo where the suspension morphed into an absolutely nonsensical array of bits and bobs that looked nothing like the real deal. i'm starting to think that ai loving people have been dropped on their heads when they were babies
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Jan 18, 2026 21:54
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Ensign Expendable posted:I saw an actual museum account arguing in favour of AI "enhanced" photos. The example they gave was of a Sherman photo where the suspension morphed into an absolutely nonsensical array of bits and bobs that looked nothing like the real deal. There's a certain flavor of museum weenie who have no real friends, no principles, and only a superficial interest in museums, despite being employed by one and in a position with decision-making power. This means they are disconnected from what actually draws the museum's audience, and will endlessly chase fads unless stopped by sufficiently upset guest comments or, rarely, someone above them who has a better idea of what's going on. Before Chat GPT it was downloading an app specifically for that museum, and before that it was sticking QR codes on everything.
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Jan 19, 2026 01:10
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:The better quality stuff of the era was cast hollow in bronze then bored out. Because of the variability of bore size in both methods, the gun maker is disincentivized from boring more than needed due to the double expense of paying for extra labor and paying for the recycling of scrap. Additionally, excessive boring might reveal a void in the casting that otherwise may have passed unnoticed. This means that unless you either have a method of forcing the manufacturers to do it to spec and eating the loss, or can pay them to do it, you cannot get uniform bores. It's not until the 18th century that you really see solid-cast cannon that is fully bored, which *does* allow for more uniformity. To expand on this, the boring of solid cannon required a new style of horizontal lathe not developed until the 3rd quarter of the 18th century. Prior to that the hollow-cast cannon would be lowered on to the boring head. You can imagine the problems that earlier style created for uniformity. I've attached some images, one from Isaac Landman's notes from the 1790s and another from Jan or Pieter Verbruggen's watercolor paintings of the Royal Foundry at Woolwich. Jan, in his position as Master Founder at Woolwich, introduced the new technology, and the watercolors are wonderfully detailed and drawn with a mechanic's eye, showing real working details absent from genre paintings or prints. Both can be found in The Art of Gunfounding, Ed. Carel de Beer  
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Jan 19, 2026 14:32
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:To expand on this, the boring of solid cannon required a new style of horizontal lathe not developed until the 3rd quarter of the 18th century. Prior to that the hollow-cast cannon would be lowered on to the boring head. You can imagine the problems that earlier style created for uniformity. I've attached some images, one from Isaac Landman's notes from the 1790s and another from Jan or Pieter Verbruggen's watercolor paintings of the Royal Foundry at Woolwich. Jan, in his position as Master Founder at Woolwich, introduced the new technology, and the watercolors are wonderfully detailed and drawn with a mechanic's eye, showing real working details absent from genre paintings or prints. Both can be found in The Art of Gunfounding, Ed. Carel de Beer Good stuff, thank you for posting it.
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Jan 19, 2026 18:35
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Question regarding Napoleonic columns. French line formations were typically three men deep for exchanging fire, yes? How many ranks deep did they get when they were forming up for attack columns to smash through enemy lines?
Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 19, 2026 |
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Jan 19, 2026 20:19
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The purpose of attack columns wasnt to smash enemy lines, the purpose was maneuver
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Jan 19, 2026 20:33
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vuk83 posted:The purpose of attack columns wasnt to smash enemy lines, the purpose was maneuver So they'd march in columns for maneuvering and then deploy into line just before engaging? I'll admit I haven't read much on the topic and most of what I know is from videos and Sharpe novels and episodes where he mentions French columns going straight into a bayonet charge to punch through a narrow British line. Is that based on historical accounts or is it an exagerration for narrative drama?
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Jan 19, 2026 20:57
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The thing the Sharpe films leave out is that the French attack column would be preceded by a large formation of skirmishers (and the French really went in on skirmishing, often far moreso than their opponents) and only after the enemy line was disrupted by the skirmishers and starting to waver would the attack column push on in. The reason Cornwell makes Sharpe a rifleman is to give his protagonist a magic weapon that lets him win every skirmish fight and this also conveniently lets him set up a French failure. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jan 19, 2026 |
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Jan 19, 2026 22:45
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I don't know about the Napoleonic French specifically, but when I did line infantry re-enacting, we had a move called "form fours" that could be done from line or column. You move into groups four abreast, shoulder-to-shoulder with your three buddies, but with a lot more space between each other forwards or backwards, or side to side beyond those three friends, than a line or column. There was a proper drill movement for it we practiced, but it would be far easier to move into with little training than most drills, and relatively easier to either rush ahead, fire in small units that might not have a leader, or reform a line in. That's how I picture the untrained assault column.
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Jan 19, 2026 23:17
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Arc Hammer posted:So they'd march in columns for maneuvering and then deploy into line just before engaging? Wellington complained of it repeatedly, and Oman latched onto that. But Wellington was also smarter than the average bear re: tactical ambiguity, and didn't see significant command on the continent until relatively late in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars. There's a more recent line of thought that the French preferred to maneuver in column very close to combat, perhaps fifty yards away, before performing on-the-fly deployment into lines; and that some combination of being caught by surprise in those particular engagements and decaying quality of French drill and low command as the meat-grinder trundled on simply meant that the deployments were no longer quick enough to complete before contact.
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Jan 19, 2026 23:24
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It sounds quite racist to say 'lol french couldn't handle the concept of hiding behind a hill' but it turns out that actually happened a fair bit
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Jan 19, 2026 23:30
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"Who would voluntarily give up the range advantage or making us charge uphill at them?" is probably a fairer assessment, just, the answer turned out to be "the guy who realized that neutralizing our artillery and partaking in a turkey shoot as we try to fan out for combat is even better."
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Jan 19, 2026 23:49
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I think some of the early revolutionary armies and the late Imperial armies pressed the attack home in columns because they were heavy on very green conscripts. The doctrine was certainly to evolve in to line at close range, fire a volley or two, and press home the attack, but getting troops to perform that evolution under fire in proximity to the enemy requires discipline and repetitions. Sharpe is fun and some of the battle depictions are macro level accurate but he has plot armor and his space marine riflemen so it’s not really accurate as to how battles were fought in detail.
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Jan 20, 2026 01:08
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Mandoric posted:Wellington complained of it repeatedly, and Oman latched onto that. But Wellington was also smarter than the average bear re: tactical ambiguity, and didn't see significant command on the continent until relatively late in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars. There's a more recent line of thought that the French preferred to maneuver in column very close to combat, perhaps fifty yards away, before performing on-the-fly deployment into lines; and that some combination of being caught by surprise in those particular engagements and decaying quality of French drill and low command as the meat-grinder trundled on simply meant that the deployments were no longer quick enough to complete before contact. Thanks for the article, a really interesting read. I can definitely see how Oman was assuming tactical doctrine based off what he saw and didn't consider how attrition rates were crippling the professional drill of the French soldiers. The description of Davout's attack at Thann makes a lot more sense for hitting slopes, but that's also Davout's Corp doing a textbook as opposed to the poor state of the army in Spain. I imagine that deploying into line at point blank like that is pretty hard to do under fire. You've got maybe twenty or thirty seconds to form up after taking a volley and whatever cannon is firing at you and be ready to fight.
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Jan 20, 2026 03:03
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I feel like whenever this conversation comes up it's worth remembering that this era is known as Napoleonic combat for a reason, the French army institutionally was dominant on the continent basically until 1870.
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Jan 20, 2026 09:13
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The era is called napoleonic because of the dude. There aren’t major changes in the way France fights wars and the French position other than internal politics. The change to the way France fights wars is primarily the levee en masse, but materially combat isn’t much different from the War of Austrian Succession, and the French had been at worst first among equals since Rocroi.
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Jan 20, 2026 13:32
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Arc Hammer posted:I imagine that deploying into line at point blank like that is pretty hard to do under fire. You've got maybe twenty or thirty seconds to form up after taking a volley and whatever cannon is firing at you and be ready to fight. It's just drill. You practice and practice and practice until it becomes automatic. Sure, it wouldn't be fun to do while being shot at, but they'd also be firing while being shot at, reloading while being shot at, etc.
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Jan 20, 2026 15:40
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Cessna posted:It's just drill. You practice and practice and practice until it becomes automatic. I always thought it was interesting how there is a bell curve when it comes to communicating in combat. If the infantry aren't talking with each other, they're either completely untrained and nobody knows what they're doing, or they're so well-trained that everybody knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing and what everyone else is doing. Whether you're maneuvering in a Napoleonic column or securing an HLZ, you practice marching drills / battle drills until it becomes automatic so that you don't need to worry about communication eventually breaking down when you inevitably become mostly blind, deaf, exhausted and terrified.
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Jan 20, 2026 16:58
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Mandoric posted:Wellington complained of it repeatedly, and Oman latched onto that. But Wellington was also smarter than the average bear re: tactical ambiguity, and didn't see significant command on the continent until relatively late in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars. There's a more recent line of thought that the French preferred to maneuver in column very close to combat, perhaps fifty yards away, before performing on-the-fly deployment into lines; and that some combination of being caught by surprise in those particular engagements and decaying quality of French drill and low command as the meat-grinder trundled on simply meant that the deployments were no longer quick enough to complete before contact. Where are the french accounts of what they were trying to do?
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Jan 20, 2026 18:32
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