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Well I can tell you that everyone on the Web is attributing it to Lenin. But they’re not citing any particular work, which is very sus.
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Dec 9, 2020 09:25
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The real utterer of that remark appears to be Andrei Zhelyabov, the context being the 1881 assassination of Alexander II. Tracing it to a contemporary source is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Dec 9, 2020 09:37
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Tulip posted:Labor in the Ming dynasty had significant seasonal qualities to it, and there tended to be massive surpluses of labor during the summer, so pulling a bunch of people into a megaproject was a useful way of keeping them busy aka not plotting to overthrow the government. How were people not plotting to overthrow the government while toiling on the wall?
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Dec 11, 2020 11:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:They also funnel people. Useful for both pointing trade towards those handy holes in the wall (aka “gates”) where you can tax if and funneling invaders towards areas you prefer to fight them. India’s Great Hedge comes to mind.
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Dec 12, 2020 04:55
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GotLag posted:If a nuke is just a really big, really expensive bomb that's never been tested in combat and isn't perceived by the world at large as being a war-ender, does anyone go to the trouble and expense of building a lot of them, especially after the big war has just finished? Yes. RDS-1 would have happened one way or the other. bewbies posted:remember during iteration 54 of the atomic attacks debate when some guy was arguing they should used bombers to drop food instead of bombs? that was cool I always roll my eyes at the suggestion that “they should have dropped the bomb over the ocean and let Japanese leadership watch with binoculars.
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Dec 13, 2020 06:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:Not commenting as to whether that was a good idea or not, but wasn't that actually one of the suggested plans at the time? It was a contemporary idea with some prominent voices behind it, yes.
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Dec 13, 2020 06:34
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Alchenar posted:I think (provided we are willing to set aside the 'moral atrocity' element of the discussion for a moment) there's a really interesting dimension to the strategic bombing argument in WW2. The reason at the time proponents argued for the creation of these vast bomber fleets at enormous expense was that they were a way to carry the war to Germany in the years before the Allies could undertake serious ground operations. Yet its only in February 1945 (the month of Dresden and the commencement of low level firebombing of Japan) that strategic bombing goes from being something that has a noticeable but non-critical impact to having the kind of effects that might be war winning on their own if continued. That's after Allied armies are already advancing on German soil and the US Navy is launching the penultimate set of island hopping invasions before eyeing up the Japanese mainland. Looking at the relatively short time between the bombing of Dresden and V‐E day and concluding that bombing was worthless is a bit like looking at the timing between the atomic bombings and the Japanese surrender and concluding that America could have just waited six days and not needed the bombs. The timeline we are looking at is one in which the Allies did build and use vast bomber fleets. People look at Nazi materiel production numbers and say “see! They go up even as the bombing is ongoing!” Who’s to say that the numbers wouldn’t have risen significantly more rapidly without the bombing pressure? Who’s to say the collapse would still have started in February of 1945 and not months later? How many people would have died in the death camps in the interim? How many more civilians in occupied Western Europe and the Soviet Union would have been gripped by hunger that year if the war had dragged into summer? What would a delay in Europe mean for East Asia where many thousands of civilians were dying daily in the so‐called Greater East Asia Co‐Prosperity Sphere? A minuscule shift in the end date of the war was worth the expenditure of vast amounts of resources.
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Dec 15, 2020 14:32
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Nenonen posted:And this is the best design of post-war era I want stats on that drill so I can work out the lock time.
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Dec 15, 2020 15:29
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The use of gliders in WWII is so weird form a modern perspective.
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Dec 16, 2020 16:00
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 My people need me.
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Dec 16, 2020 16:09
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FuturePastNow posted:HMCS Sackville Fuckers took my china. Can’t have poo poo in the Shire!
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Dec 18, 2020 08:06
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I’ve always seen stuff like that as part of the “horse race” tendency that pop culture loves. It’s just no fun to admit that the South was in an objectively worse position in nearly every way.
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Dec 22, 2020 18:13
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The lone squiggle out west seems to be the California Central Railroad, incorporated April 21 1857, completed October 31 1861 between Folsom and Lincoln. Not to be confused with the California Central Railway of southern California.
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Dec 22, 2020 18:59
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Bob Stockon’s failure to replicate a built‐up gun killed two cabinet secretaries in 1844. It’s a shame that John Ericsson, who built the good gun that Stockton ineptly aped, caught flak for the incident. He would later go on to design the Monitor.
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Dec 22, 2020 19:34
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Yvonmukluk posted:So I finally got around to reading Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors (it owns, BTW), and how on earth has it not been made into a movie or miniseries yet? THE WORLD WONDERS
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Dec 23, 2020 02:46
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oXDemosthenesXo posted:Are there any reenactments that fire actual shot and not just powder charges? I really want to see this now. Hyneman and Savage et al. demonstrated it.
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Dec 23, 2020 04:45
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The hundred‐tonne guns could smoke a Maus.
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Dec 23, 2020 10:26
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I had this tab open from the other day when we were discussing advances in metallurgy applicable to cannons, and it’s a good look at one such advancement. Cool your castings from the inside and they’ll be stronger.
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Dec 23, 2020 11:07
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Patrick Spens posted:Why do you open your mouth? so the air has an exit path when it’s knocked out of your lungs by the pressure wave
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Dec 23, 2020 18:24
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There were Gyrojets. The gun is a dumb tube with a trigger and a barrel only good enough to get the projectile going in the right direction. The projectile is a small rocket that propels and spins itself.
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Dec 24, 2020 03:59
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There are some fin‐stabilised shotgun slugs, but not common, and I have to assume there’s a good reason for that. One use of fins is in stabilising rubber slugs, which makes sense because rubber bullets are fragile.The Lone Badger posted:There's this weird gimmick round that someone used to try and get around US gun laws. Yeah this was some Franklin Armory bullshit they introduced at Shotshow 2018. Didn’t work well and didn’t fool ATF.
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Dec 24, 2020 04:21
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Chamale posted:What loophole was it trying to use? I've heard stories of convicted felons being allowed to possess smoothbore black powder pistols, was this playing with the definition of "smoothbore"? It took ATF two years to issue an opinion about it, and Franklin was simultaneously more and less effective at skirting regulations than many expected. quote:During this examination, FATD determined that the straight lands and grooves incorporated into the barrel design ofthe Reformation do not impart a spin onto a projectile when fired through the barrel. Consequently, the Reformation is not a "rifle" as that term is defined in the GCA and NFA. Moreover, because the Reformation is not chambered for shotgun shells, it is not a shotgun as defined in the NFA. Given these determinations, the Reformation is classified as a shotgun that is subject only to the provisions of the GCA (i.e., it is not a weapon subject to the provisions of the NFA). The key implication of this is that by not being subject to the NFA, it can be made with a short barrel without requiring a tax stamp. The catch is that because this is now the first member of a hitherto unknown class of firearm, it runs into bureaucratic inertia that’s way worse than if it were just a short‐barrelled rifle quote:1) An FFL may lawfully sell/transfer a GCA/SBS, such as the Reformation, to the holder of an appropriate FFL (a GCA/SBS cannot be transferred to the holder of a type 06 or type 03 FFL). It’s a year later now and AFAICT, there are still no mechanisms in place. Franklin was not expecting to run into these problems. Almost no one can buy their gun. So, assuming a person holds an appropriate firearms licence (basically, “is a dealer”), they could get this gun that has functional problems, they can’t sell to the public, and can’t transport across state lines, or they could go through the legal channels to get a short‐barrelled rifle, or they could get a pistol and “arm brace” that has none of these problems. But if they did that, they wouldn’t be so eminent in virtue signalling “I HATE GUN CONTROL” . Platystemon fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Dec 24, 2020 |
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Dec 24, 2020 04:53
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Chamale posted:was this playing with the definition of "smoothbore"? You see, the straight grooves make the bore not smooth, but it’s not a rifle because the grooves do not impart spin. They successfully rules‐lawyered this bit, it’s just everything else that didn’t work out.
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Dec 24, 2020 05:17
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HEY GUNS posted:Yes: everything I enjoy is not legally a "gun." And yet my college dorm was not friendly to this argument. HEY GUNS posted:i have engineered my life deliberately and concertedly over a period of eight years to be as 17th century as possible.
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Dec 25, 2020 05:37
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Yeah that’s the sort of thinking that has people deliberately exposing their family to a novel respiratory virus.
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Dec 25, 2020 14:40
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Cessna posted:Hell, some trucks have one. 
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Dec 28, 2020 18:36
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FMguru posted:Zero, and it greatly reduced her influence in the administration going forward. Still, it was a hell of a thing watching the UN ambassador of the US flying to Buenos Aires and saying that the US should remain neutral in this unfortunate situation, taking the side of fascist junta in a peripheral region against the US's #1 ally and the keystone of our Cold War posture in Europe. She should be a card in Twilight Struggle.
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Dec 31, 2020 10:24
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I think the most expedient way to use bombes to disrupt the camps is to use them to support your infantry advance and liberate the camps with infantry. This is what the Soviet Union actually did.
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Jan 1, 2021 05:22
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I have no specific context on those guns, but I expect they were quite effective when used as ambush weapons.
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Jan 4, 2021 05:16
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Do tankers use adjustable wrenches? Wait, are the wrenches even on the inside? I could see this one going either way. I know I’m asking the right person on this one.
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Jan 6, 2021 16:56
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Jan 18, 2021 15:45
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Huh, I always thought cross bows was Middle Ages, and part of the reason for the decline of knights being important for defense. It’s complicated. The technology existed in the time of Socrates, but there were not a great number of them on the battlefield then or in the many centuries between then and the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, China had their own relationship with the weapon.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:40
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French tanks were surprisingly decent for the early war, but they didn’t have a lot of them and they were not deployed intelligently.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:51
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AIP tanks when
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Jan 20, 2021 17:46
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The Lone Badger posted:Eventually your blast radius is going to have to deal with the curvature of the earth right? Less than you might expect because you always want to airburst, and the bigger the bomb, the higher the optimum altitude is. A bomb of twenty kilotons might be set off five hundred metres in the air to maximise the radius of heavy structural damage. A bomb of one hundred megatons would be set off at eight and a half thousand to maximise the safe effects, not far below the height of Mount Everest. At that height, the horizon is over three hundred kilometres away.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:01
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Mystic Mongol posted:So, my neighbor is a 99 year old WW2 vet from England. I don’t care if I sound mushy here: I tear up a little when I think of how few of his generation remain and how quickly we’re losing them.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:54
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Nenonen posted:The 1972 oil crisis seems to have broken some people's thinking. "Fuel shortages will force even the military to consider fuel efficiency. And what's more efficient than replacing one 50t tank with two 25t tanks! 
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Mar 3, 2021 02:55
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" Just what would the mass armies and their logistics be powered with, overall, if oil is in short supply? Horsecarts and hay? Granted, that would be a fascinating setting.
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If a deuce and a half happens to be running at the time of the pulse, or it’s parked on a hill and the air’s not too cold to push start, you could drive it right to Canada with no electrics.
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Mar 3, 2021 13:38
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White Coke posted:What viewing equipment did tanks use during WW2 and how did they differ by country/over time? The discussion about how the M48 was much better than the Panther because of all the advances in optical technology piqued my interest. The Panther in particular was extra poo poo because the gunner didn’t have a wide‐view scope, only the highly‐magnified gun sight, so target acquisition took longer.
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Mar 5, 2021 08:53
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feedmegin posted:I wouldn't want to bet on the UK in a straight RN<>IJN matchup even if it weren't for the European war. IJN wins because the RN cannot project its full strength to the Pacific and cannot stop Japan from achieving its war aims.
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Mar 9, 2021 11:13
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