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Border walls don't stop people, they stop baggage trains, whether they're supplies going in or loot coming out.
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Dec 11, 2020 21:04
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Not everyone has access to US satellites. I would bet that China is more worried about a land offensive from Russia or India than from the US.
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Jan 23, 2021 19:07
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White Coke posted:Neat. Were either of these techniques used to make pre-industrial armors, like plate armor? Heat treating and carburization was a major component of plate armor production (usually in a combined operation, since you need to heat the armor for it to absorb carbon) and were skills which took a ton of experience to perform correctly with the technology of the time. Most of the European armor industry was concentrated in Italy, and high quality Italian breastplates were famous for being able to stop an armor-piercing arrow - a plate that was not properly heat-treated and carburized could not.
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Feb 14, 2021 06:03
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White Coke posted:Was there a point where they could do it well enough to have the armor be equally treated like RHA, or to deliberately create layers of differing hardness like face hardening? Or were they never that skilled before the Industrial Revolution? The books I've read haven't gone into much detail about the science behind armor making, they usually just talk rather vaguely of who was better at making it and might mention that some kind of advance was made, but not go into detail about what the metallurgical advance entailed beyond making armor better. It was an industry built on apprenticeships, incremental progress, and working by eye. To tell what temperature a piece of armor was, you looked at the color. You can roughly control the carbon content by timing how long you leave it in your carbon-rich bed (usually scrap leather, hooves, etc., cooked in a sealed container) but precise temperature and time control was simply not yet within reach. Today, you just grind your mild steel toolbit as desired and put it into a sealed container of carbon dust for 23 minutes in your electric oven. That said, these were lifelong professionals and they produced a consistent product that everyone in Europe wanted. If you wanted to live through a soldiering career, you dug into your pockets and bought yourself (and your men, if you could afford it) Italian harness.
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Feb 14, 2021 06:31
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HookedOnChthonics posted:gonna quote in full from Rockets and People, just cause There's literally no end to it, god drat. Just one horrible loving atrocity after another.
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Feb 16, 2021 07:02
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We can wrack our brains coming up with all sorts of smarter or more effective things the nazis could have done in the closing years of the war, but at the end of the day they would never do them because being crazy paranoid psycho idiots is what got them into that mess in the first place.
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Feb 17, 2021 07:23
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There are a lot of ways to tell that an armored division is in a general area, the easiest being the swathe of destruction.
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Mar 7, 2021 01:49
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Gaius Marius posted:Finally a topic I'm confident I'm more knowledgeable in compared to the rest of the MilHist thread Alas, late 1300s armor production came and went, and with it the things I sorta know.
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Mar 11, 2021 02:54
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VictualSquid posted:That "right of way line" sounds awfully physical. What happens to the deed of the line gets moved? The ROW is defined on other documents that are probably held by the county, usually in relation to USGS survey markers or freeways or some other datum.
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May 5, 2021 16:44
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iv46vi posted:Thank you all and sorry for the derail. To connect it to the military topic would you need more that 3 inches of American naval vessel to cross into Chinese territorial waters before scrambling interception jets? Please disregard super villain submarine in this scenario. I'll spot you the submarine, but only if I get to keep the remote controlled rocket powered torpedo with the drill-head.
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May 5, 2021 20:50
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There is an argument to be made that a county can't be a great power without a supply of 18 year olds who think they're immortal.
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Jun 14, 2021 21:37
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Peltast was a name for a light shield, a Greek skirmisher was known as a psiloi.
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Jul 6, 2021 04:29
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Cessna posted:I thought - and I could be wrong here - that "psiloi" was a later term, used more by the Byzantines than the Classical Greeks? The Byzantines did describe their lightest equipped combatants that way, and further reading does suggest that the modern distinction of the term might have originated with them reading Roman military manuals - though the term does come from the ancient Greek "psilos", or "bare." I'd trust CrypticFox's knowledge of the subject over mine, I'm just a dabbler.
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Jul 8, 2021 05:15
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sullat posted:Romans were all about providing job opportunities to the people of the nations they defeated. Silver miner, entertainer, and so forth. Agricultural laborer and clothier too. There's a great ACOUP series on how thread spinning and weaving were ubiquitous, but with the ease of modern machine production of clothes they have left our conciousness so much that they aren't even background events in most media.
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Jul 8, 2021 14:29
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FMguru posted:IIRC, heated shot was mostly used by forts firing at ships. In the Horatio Hornblower stories, they always knew when they were spotted because the smokestacks on the forts would start chugging. It runs all the way back to Alexander-era Greece. Ships were literally coated in pitch for a long time, fire was an incredible danger.
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Jul 23, 2021 00:25
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Thomas didn't write any memoirs and destroyed his own private papers. He didn't exactly promote himself.
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Aug 1, 2021 23:34
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I'm not sure how much of Lee's accomplishments were down to him being good at the job and how much were down to him walking away from his previous job with a significant staff corps. I'll freely admit that I've never been particularly interested in studying him, however.
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Aug 2, 2021 03:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:A good post One measure of a general is how fast their army can move, since in many opinions a general's most important job is to keep his army organized. Sherman's army could march 10 miles a day through the swamp on duckboards, and Thomas was in charge of the logistics.
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Aug 3, 2021 22:37
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The Spanish Civil War isn't a situation where "the bomber always gets through" holds true, it's a situation where one side has air supremacy. Which, I suppose, works out to the same thing for the side that owns the skies.
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Aug 6, 2021 06:54
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Except for all those times they didn't have air superiority and chasing bombers was a frustrating experience, sure, I suppose. I was under the impression that the Germans and Italians put a lot of air power and other heavier footprint assets in for the fascists, and the republicans mostly got small arms support. How much air power came in on the other end?
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Aug 6, 2021 15:20
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Ensign Expendable posted:The most American thing you can do is take a bunch of off the shelf engines and stuff them in the Abrams until there's enough power to run it. That's basically what they did with the idle generator.
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Aug 17, 2021 17:32
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The Sopwith Snipes would be faster. I would imagine that the Italians attempted Genoese crossbowmen on their own aircraft. Span the crossbows while you stay in the 8 o'clock blind spot, then swoop in to attack. It's foolproof.
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Aug 18, 2021 22:29
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Xiahou Dun posted:So for complicated reasons, I went from never having heard of a "traction trebuchet" to needing to know everything I can about them. So far, I've bothered to read this astonishingly lovely wikipedia article, which wasn't helpful. (Good job, whoever edited that page : go straight into arguing about correctly applying very specific terminology without defining them.) The pulling crew aren't running, they're doing it in one big heave. If you look at some of the examples in the photos on that page, you'll see that the end of the arm with the ropes attached is much shorter than the end that's throwing the stone (or, that the pivot is quite close to the ropes.) That means that the stone end will swing much faster if you can get enough force on the rope end (since they rotate at the same rate but it has further to travel) if you can get enough force on the ropes and if the arm is strong enough to handle it. That's why you put 3 or 4 men on each rope. There could be dozens of men all hauling on those ropes and whipping that arm through its whole circle in half a second, and they can do this as fast as new stones are loaded and as long as their arms hold out, since all they have to do to reset the machine is to toss the arm back over instead of winching a weight or torsion device around.
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Aug 26, 2021 07:04
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The state department is not in the habit of letting the facts get in the way of being right.
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Sep 3, 2021 17:38
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Uncle Enzo posted:I read (past tense) a lot of lovely politics books from the 90's and every one of them brought up this photo at every opportunity. How stupid and childish he looked! Like he was playing dress-up! How silly! It's not that the helmet looked especially silly, it's that he wasn't "in" enough for the news to stop talking about how silly he looked.
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Sep 13, 2021 20:33
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Nessus posted:I don't remember much bragging about that mission, especially not after the initial aftermath. I mostly remember a bunch of criticism about it being mishandled and whether or not it was even appropriate to do some murder mission stuff like that. It certainly doesn't seem to get held up in public consciousness or anything, although I imagine it will be an interesting afternote to our histories of this period. What, like killing Yamamoto was different from how they handled all the garrisons up to that point? Were they firing feather pillows at Japanese marines?
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Sep 22, 2021 19:36
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Work so hard you give yourself ruinous excema on your hands because you have no junior officer corps.
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Sep 28, 2021 04:56
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LatwPIAT posted:
Ah, the old "never let anyone get higher than colonel" method of preventing coups.
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Dec 1, 2021 18:11
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One thing I've always wondered about is why the m2 with select fire never became more prevalent. It seems like a ready-made solution for putting an intermediate cartridge weapon in the hands of riflemen. Did the m14 just have more influential backers?
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Dec 9, 2021 17:53
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While the infantry might always like to have a tank on call, they don't get to vote when it comes to driving tanks down the streets of ostensibly friendly towns
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Dec 31, 2021 04:21
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Cessna posted:55 people. That's something like $300 a person, which isn't cheap, but definitely isn't outside the realm of possibility. Especially for soldiers.
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Jan 26, 2022 20:47
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At this point it's just how much endurance, how many missile tubes, and how nice of a radar they have.
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Feb 9, 2022 06:28
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MikeCrotch posted:I'm wondering how you can tell the quality of a very good machine gunner with a poo poo machine gun tbh. One of those military philosophy questions It mostly comes down to how fast they can reposition. One of the things the Germans did very well was move machine guns around.
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Feb 21, 2022 19:36
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To be fair to the rifle, it's also a convenient place to attach optics and grenade launchers.
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Mar 24, 2022 18:21
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The Lone Badger posted:I may be revealing my extreme ignorance and/or stupidity here, but I thought a common infantry tactic was 'fire and maneuver' where one element suppresses the enemy with mg fire and the other element uses this opportunity to move into a flanking position and kill the enemy with rifle fire? They could use rifles; they are more likely to use grenades since an enemy that is suppressed but not killed by the MG is likely in a resilient position.
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Mar 25, 2022 02:13
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The Sabre Mount, Head, Horse Mounted, Pattern V "Unicorn" was an unexpected success in its first field deployment, but like all weapons doctrine soon shifted to accommodate its presence.
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Mar 27, 2022 06:53
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Depends on whether the lamellar is case hardened or not.
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Apr 7, 2022 17:46
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Nenonen posted:How much rolled homogenous armour would it be? 3mm equivalent, about. But I'm not shitposting about case hardening, the limitation on personal armor is how large you can get the plates and whether you can heat treat them. Early steel was low carbon mild steel or simply wrought iron. Once they got large enough plates, they switched to monolithic plate armor pretty quick.
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Apr 7, 2022 19:53
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I think the effectiveness of drones and top attack ATGMs will drive tanks towards the armored crew capsule model, depending on how APS shakes out against them. It is proper and correct to drag the Armata, but there are some good ideas there.
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Apr 18, 2022 20:42
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Polyakov posted:Electro Magnetic, a rail/coil gun. There's a lot of practical problems with extremely high velocity weapons, and they get worse when you try to put conductors in them.
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Apr 23, 2022 18:08
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