|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:57 |
|
|
Napoleonic muskets weren't rifled tbf it's only mid-late 19th century we start seeing rifled muskets.
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 09:52
|
|
|
With black powder cannons having that much energy... how modern a tank would you need to be able to shrug off a direct hit from a black powder cannon - say a Napoleonic one? Obviously a modern tank would ignore it, but would a T-34? A sherman? A Renault FT? Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Dec 23, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2020 10:18
|
|
|
Wars aren't fought by robots in a vaccum. A higher rate of losses could have easily made the british not consider retaking the falklands to be worth the potential risk of more losses. If you're losing frigates at a faster rate, you have more gaps open in your defences and you start reconsidering if you'll make it to the islands whatsoever.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 22:09
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:A key thing to understand about IJA war strategy is that as often as not it was driven by low ranking officers at the front who would start fights on the basis that the Government would rather double down on their actions and have a war than admit embarrassment and apologise. So, basically the same as british colonial policy in the 18th/19th century?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2021 18:03
|
|
|
Ah yes, I'm zure Iran and the USSR totally have the logistics to triple throughput on that route, and sailing to Iran from eastern US is just as easy as sailing to Vladisvokistock.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2021 00:01
|
|
|
Most HEMA manuals are for civilians - "this is how you use that shiny sword you carry around for self-defence" moreso than any military techniques. We see some later period military stuff get written down - British Napoleonic/Victorian Sabre, for examples, has manuals from military folk for the aspiring gentleman officer to teach himself/his troops how to sword. But if you're looking at 16th/17th German/Italian stuff, that's mostly the equivalent of a home defense manual. Also I bought a flintlock musket recently and was going to share pics, but the delivery company managed to snap the stock of it in transport so now I'm frantically getting some wood glue to try and repair some of the damage.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2021 21:22
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:FSFGGGSSHGHGFGHghj! I know, right, it's a tragedy. The two pieces of wood are still connected by the metal base running along the bottom of the stock (forget the proper name) so it's not totally hopeless but it's not gonna be the same.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2021 21:56
|
|
|
America joining the war is the big "what if" for WW1. Without the guarantee of American manpower, lots of stuff changes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
The allied bombing campaign easily could have shifted secondary targets or decided the target had been neutralized - coincidently around the time this plane went up. In the late war, did the Nazi's switch to distributing their fighter forces around from main airfields to prevent retaliation bombing? Because that's what this sounds like.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2021 16:35
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:Yeah, as an example, there's been a really significant shift in British thinking after the Boer War, frankly small arms training and practice is very much modern. There are field exercises with individual training and unit training that are very recognizably modern. Soldiers are expected to be in cover and engaging in relatively small groups with aimed fire, and closing in is assumed to require suppression of enemies. Hot Take: The british army was the most prepared and best out of all the european armies to fight the war of 1914. It's just that the war of 1915 onwards was not that war.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2021 19:25
|
|
|
Also, wasn't there some economic stats somewhere showing that Germany and Britain were more dependent on each other for trade prior to WW1 by value than US/China are today? It's easy to say something is "impossible", but the last year has shown that major shakeups in production may have major ripple down effects, everything doesn't collapse overnight.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2021 18:51
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:I don't think its parched, its just spring. Note the trees and shrubs don't even have buds, let alone leaves. There was probably snow/frost pretty recently. Different standards then. That place looks dry as a bone to me, but I've got the greenness of the UK for my baseline.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2021 23:51
|
|
|
When you've put the work in to get the people on side and on board, yes. But there's plenty more times when a few hundred idealistic radicals convince themself it isn't needes and the people will intrinsically know what to do.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2021 14:49
|
|
|
There's never a perfect organizational structure. Any structure will have it's benefits and problems - replication can be wasteful, but it can also lead to more innovation and experimentation.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2021 16:27
|
|
|
SubG posted:I understand what you're saying and agree that there are a bunch of factors which would tend to reduce the effects of the sort of confusion I'm talking about. Sure but the american civil war, especially the naval bits, was very much a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs slapping each other. It's not the best counterexample.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2021 11:42
|
|
|
Boat stuff is neat, matches what I'd expect.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2021 10:57
|
|
|
Arrinien posted:I have more of a military-adjacent history question, not sure if there's a better general history thread to put it in, about West and East Pakistan. It wasn't meant to be a hostile power. I've asked around about this before, and basically while the Muslim League (which represented muslims in British India, seperately from the Indian National Congress) wanted to not be subornated under the INC and the hindu-majority, they didn't didn't envision that the parition and split would be so hostile or the states would be so seperate. They pushed for seperation from a wider British Indian state that became India, but given the rapidity of independence events ran away from them. And once Pakistan consisted of two chunks, the Pakistani chunk didn't want to let the Bangaldeshi chunk go.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2021 13:42
|
|
|
The post-war British government under Attlee wants OUT of india - both because india is a giant money pit and potential bonfire, and because it was part of their anti-colonial promises. So when the Muslim League under Jinnah demanded partition of India or chaos (and chaos is mounting reguardless), the British government is not super invested in determining exact demographics of areas - they are interested in coming up with a compromise the political actors involved agree to in under a year, before they lose the ability to even make such compromises. Does it work? No. But the British never wanted partition at all, they wanted the India Issue solved with a single federal India, so if Jinnah wants a state consisting of two regions 2000km apart, that's what he gets to shut up and stop making trouble.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2021 15:12
|
|
|
Saying that the only reason people might want to fight is that they are uneducated and that they must have had to be manipulated/coerced is hella projection of modern mindsets into the past. There's a very good reason to join up a campaign for most of history up till about the mid 19th century, and that is loot. A share of the plunder of a city, or ransom of a knight/soldier, etc, can be enough of a capital infusion to set you up for life, so you can go home, buy a plot of land and find a wife. Even the pay while you are on campaign is pretty good, if you actually get it at the end of a campaign- especially if subsistence farming on rented land or jobbing for day labour like most poor men would be. A primary driver of soldier recruitment is that promise, and that's why armies will often disintegrate or lose a bunch of strength on a defeat.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2021 10:11
|
|
|
human garbage bag posted:That is the question I started with, specifically "Why did Union soldiers fight in the American Civil War." I suspect that if they knew the true casualty rate then they wouldn't have fought. Now obviously it's good they fought, but I just don't understand why they would fight unless they didn't know how dangerous it really was. Now, that's a better question we can answer. IIRC, I remember reading some stuff that especially in the early war, it was seen as "important to sign up to defend democracy". The idea that you can't just go home and not play if the vote does'nt turn out your way. Other factors others have explained can talk about why people downplayed or underthought the risks (or, given the information available to them in 1860, probably had a decent grasp of them) but there's also patriotism and national pride as factors - just because you wouldn't go to war to Defend America or Defend Democracy in TYOOL 2021, doesn't mean others wouldn't or they didn't at the time, even fairly poor folks. Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Jun 14, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
Actually looking at the rap sheet I'm not sure this is a productive line of discussion.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2021 22:57
|
|
|
It's not like afghanistain didn't used to be able to make good muskets. I think I posed it before but I've got a beatifical old musket from there with an old EIC lock and mother-of-pearl decorations all over it. Made something in the 19th century but in which of the Anglo-Afghan wars it was taken as war loot and shipped to the UK I have no idea. Was only £250 aswell.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 00:03
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:One nuance that's often missed is that sentencing to a punishment wasn't necessarily followed by said punishment. In many cases it was deferred until after the war with the accused being given a chance to "pay for their crime in blood" in a penal unit. As Cyrano mentioned, it's up to the author to interpret these casualties as executions. Isn't this pretty common in militaries?(sentencing =! Actual punishment) I remember hearing about this with british court marshals in WW1 - sentences to death for desertion often weren't applied or were commuted
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2021 21:12
|
|
|
Boiled Water posted:It's impressive that all the great powers looked at the Russo-Japanese war and went "that's won't happen to us surely, we'll win in a lightning war" when entering into WWI. The lesson from the Russo-Japanese war for many foreign powers was "Japan still succeeded in taking trenches/making frontal assaults against fortified positions despite modern weaponry, however expect high causalities". Which is what happened, and part of why conscription machines were so massive in France/Germany. The differing factor was in the logistics capacities of Western Europe vs Russian Far East, in that the West had the manpower density and logistics networks to make breakthroughs much harder, which didn't exist in either Eastern Europe or the Russian Far East.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2021 13:50
|
|
|
A Festivus Miracle posted:The Civil War basically presaged how WW1 would be in virtually every capacity and then Europe spent the next fifty years fighting weeks to months-long wars and deciding that the whole USCW was some kind of weird aberration. lol
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2021 11:19
|
|
|
Could you describe the South suffering from Dutch Disease economically, but with slavery instead of oil?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2021 18:25
|
|
|
Honestly, I think WW1 might count? There's no way to avoid Germany getting bogged down in trench warfare in 1914, but the developments that led to fluid offensives in 1917 were mostly doctrinal and organisational rather than technogical IIRC. You could have a successful German offensive in 1915 rather than 1917, and that could turn the whole war on its head.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2021 13:52
|
|
|
Ah yes, WW1, that conflict that was famously started due to the British invading Serbia
Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Sep 22, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2021 12:48
|
|
|
Also, there's a big difference between how a reenactor or black powder enthusiast treats their weapon and how your average 18th century soldier (even the ones who want to be there) treats it. Simply dragging it around on campaign and the battlefield will cause more damage than taking it out at the range.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2021 16:23
|
|
|
Cessna posted:A marked shift in attitudes from when the British started slavery in the Colonies. it's almost like countries can change over 200 years?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2021 18:11
|
|
|
Fangz posted:I'm just disappointed no one has posted an alignment grid yet Sadly, the only one I could find with 30 seconds of effort uses nation instead of country. (A whole other debate). 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2021 22:43
|
|
|
Also, there is a ton of different englishes of varying mutual intelligibility - they just mostly get categorised as something else or are in the process of diverging now. Off the top of my head - Scots, Singlish, Nigerian Pidgin, and EU bureaucratic english are all english dialects or english influenced languages with varying degrees of intelligegabiliy with Modern American English, all of which will probably diverge further over the next century. And that's from a relatively brief period of first english conquest, then english international hegemony. English isn't any more or less able to drift apart than any other language, it just hasn't happened yet and a bunch of english speakers live in such a uniform enviromental it hasn't occurred them to them it has
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2021 11:09
|
|
|
They cared about the welfare of the executioners - they were brave patriotic germans doing what needed to be done for the motherland. The manpower sink of constant replacement of executioners due to breakdown hammered it home, but it's not like they had to go hunting for hardened immoral killers for this type of work.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2021 18:38
|
|
|
Brilliant post, very interesting. Neat that to certain extent Kimg John could trust an offical with a income sourcr like Tin mines to use to run his ships, and it mostly happened. I know later into the early modern and Napoleonic era there's big issues paying ships crews on time and payments often coming in errears, is this the case in the mediveal aswell? Also a legit "Sail me closer, I want to hit them with ny sword".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2022 10:37
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:This is actually a very real thing. I mostly know the German context but it’s going to be broadly the same in other parts of continental Europe. Is this why "Dr" is a formal title, like "Sir" or "Lord" is aswell? because the granting of a titled form of address is a mark of respect compared to the common man?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2022 12:50
|
|
|
That's clear, but also how the US didn't push more afterwards - their war machine was still a year from really ramping up, and the two lost was a near-term blow to the US.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2022 12:00
|
|
|
Hyrax Attack! posted:I’m wondering if a Black American in uniform would have been safer and had more success checking into a hotel, riding a bus, and going to a restaurant in 1938 Berlin as opposed to 1945 Mississippi. Probably? But it's not surprising that the society with a tiny amount of black people has less integrated racism against them than the one with a demographically significant minority. It's a very American viewpoint to see all issues of racism and discrimination through the white/black skin colour matrix only, and that oppression outside of those matrixes is not as bad or not racism.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2022 18:41
|
|
|
Fangz posted:The bayonet isn't *that* bad as a melee weapon. A musket is much, much heavier than an equivalent shortspear, so once you've committed to a thrust that's about it, and you've got a much smaller window of places you can deliver a thrust to because of how cumbersome it is. If you misjudge distance or get a thrust baited out against you vs someone with an actual melee weapon, you'll be cut to pieces. Of course, none of this means it isn't a deterrent against cavalry, or that not having a bayonet on your musket is better, but they are not designed to be a melee weapon. Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 27, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2022 23:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:57 |
|
|
I listened to a talk from a concentration camp survivor who was in the resistance. He got ratted out to the germans by a local women he was seeing after an argument, for example.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2022 11:24
|
|