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The Lone Badger posted:I think the US replaced it at some point, then decided the replacement was poo poo and went back to the M2. The M2 has been joined by other weapons serving in the same role (or in similar roles, Mk19, GAU-19, etc,) but has been in continual US service since the thirties. There have been a few attempts at replacing it, particularly in the tripod-mounted role, but none have gotten past initial trials.
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Jul 12, 2021 05:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:The H&K G11 was a dead-end, but it's an interesting look at an attempt to fundamentally change how rifles work. It’s my understanding that the G11 was extremely close to production and issuance, and was only stopped by the financial requirements and change of priorities brought on by reunification. It’s a super-interesting what-if. Would W. Germany have stood alone with their space-magic rifle, or would it have influenced other NATO designs?
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Jul 12, 2021 18:17
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:This happened to me somewhere around 2014 when I was visiting my grandparents. Tbh it was badass to just randomly see a B-17 flying around when I didn't expect it. It's like if you were driving on the highway and a running King Tiger plowed past you. My parents house is less than two miles from the departure end of the runway at FXE, and growing up warbirds were a pretty common thing, both touring history groups and the restoration shops at the field, and aircraft being imported and exported. Dad would frequently hear round engines, throw me in the car, and drive over to the airport to see if we could go see whatever just showed up.
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Jul 18, 2021 14:03
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MRC48B posted:Post wwi warbirds typically stopped using total loss lube systems, so an engine designed in the 30s or later won't be a total mess. It’s right here. Many (not all) WWI engines were rotary radial, in which the back of the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe, and the entire engine spins around the crankshaft with the propeller solidly bolted to the front. This essentially requires a total-loss lubrication system, which used castor oil.
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Jul 18, 2021 19:39
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Cessna posted:Some high performance engines just - leak. They're designed to be sealed when the engine is running hot; heat leads to expansion which closes gaps - but when they're cool they drip. See also: Literally anything with a Pratt & Whitney logo on it.
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Jul 19, 2021 16:47
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:heated shot is for fires not explosions, usually with the explosion being a secondary result of the fire you have set We tried to use heated shot, and ended up with fire ships. 
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Jul 22, 2021 23:19
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A very early muzzleloading artillery piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrott_rifle
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Jul 23, 2021 17:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:It's an early rifled muzzle loading artillery piece, I think you meant to say. Fair point.
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Jul 23, 2021 17:12
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I had typed something out to this effect, but in walks Cyrano with something several orders of magnitude more eloquent than my own fumblings. 
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Aug 3, 2021 17:13
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bewbies posted:You can argue that Lee was culturally or socially American or whatever, but if we're using "American" as synonymous for "United States" then depending on your views of the legality of secession before the war, he was either: This is one of the most pedantic arguments in a forum full of horrible pedants.
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Aug 3, 2021 22:12
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TerraCat posted:Not sure I'm buying the line that the newest American medium bomber can outrun most pursuit fighters. This is a pretty common thing you see in pre-war sales material and propaganda on both sides. It might even be true when you look at overall fleets of pursuit planes. For every fast, modern fighter in service, there’s still a ton of near-obsolete biplane fighters.
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Aug 4, 2021 02:43
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Randarkman posted:To add to things, I do think I've seen too much has often been made of the "elite nature" of the Kwantung army in some of the arguments I've seen that the atomic bombings were irrelevant next to the Soviet declaration of war and invasion. As far as I'm aware the Kwantung army was never elite. It was unruly, troublesome and autonomous and supplemented with locally recruited forces, towards the end of the war it was intact and had largely not been involved in large-scale combat, but I've never seen anything to suggest it had equipment or personnel priority over the forces actually engaged in combat in China, South-East Asia and the Pacific. The Kwantung army was at one point a veteran force, if not maybe “elite.” However, large parts of it were parceled out as reinforcements or as garrison units for the pacific theater. By mid 1945, it was no longer capable of providing more than token resistance against the Soviets. Though to be fair, the Red Army of mid-late 1945 may have been the most experienced, thoroughly trained, equipped, and led land army in the history of the world. It was an enormous overmatch.
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Aug 9, 2021 13:52
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Oberndorf posted:In a live fire situation, how reliable would SMS messages be? I can’t imagine the cell network would survive more than trivial shelling. What was the alternative means of distributing coordinates? Plenty reliable. Ask the Ukrainians how well using their cell phones worked out for them though.
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Aug 15, 2021 13:33
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Nenonen posted:How about Apache Longbows against Napoleonic army? Can the armor on an Apache stop a 9lb cannonball?
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Aug 18, 2021 15:36
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IIRC the Panther specifically suffered from an engineering freeze on the drivetrain happening before an overall project design freeze. The drivetrain was designed for a thirty ton tank using the same engine as the Tiger, but additional (hitler-mandated) equipment and armor meant that it ended up weighing an additional ~fifteen tons above design weight. Combined with decisions made in the final drive unit to simplify production (it legitimately was cheaper to build than late model Panzer IVs,) you have a recipe for a draftee to blow the final drive out of the tank when he beats on it while being shot at. An interesting what-if would be how an as-designed (or at least closer to as-designed) Panther would fare in the same war situation. Lighter, faster, even cheaper to build, significantly more reliable, and with less of a logistical tail. Basically a German T-34.
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Aug 21, 2021 15:10
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Panzeh posted:The Pacific tried to be a little bit else, though it was also much more boring. The writers, producers, director, cast, and production crew that made The Pacific were not the right people to try to sell the horror-and-hopelessness-of-war commentary that it was trying to be. It’s not awful, but it can’t help itself from continually looping back to  .Joseph Mazzello as Eugene Sledge particularly fails to really seem to be impacted by his experience through the war. He just kinda seems to need to take a poo poo the whole time. (And I think he’s a decent to above-average actor, just that this performance is not good at all.) I’ve not read Helmet for my Pillow, so I can’t comment as much on the tone of the Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester segments, but I don’t think anyone involved really got With the Old Breed. It’s like they read the words, and recreated scenes from Sledge’s memories, but completely missed the gist of what Sledge was trying to convey. (That modern war as an infantryman is a never ending pit of degradation and horror that tends to end rather abruptly and permanently.) Every time the story heads off in that direction, something happens to pull it right back to cheerleading the USMC.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:Note that the reverse also happens in smaller, peace time militaries without much room to move up. You can find some old as gently caress NCOs in the US Army and Marines in the interwar years, for example. Eisenhower spent 12 years as a Major, 4 and a half as a Lieutenant Colonel, and then went from Colonel to General of the Army in 3 years, 9 and a half months. The WWI/interwar/WWII Regular Army/Army of the United States rank system was weird.
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Aug 27, 2021 17:36
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IIRC, DoD hasn’t minted Purple Hearts since 1945, because the huge stockpile they ordered during the war still hasn’t run out. So ya, the planning wasn’t done, but it was moving along, and large portions of the military saw it as the next step towards victory over Japan. My grandfather, an assault glider pilot, was on a troop train to California when the war ended. He got his orders in July, well after the end of combat operations on Okinawa. The invasion of Kyushu almost certainly would have happened without the nuclear strikes.
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Aug 30, 2021 03:59
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Mazz posted:Considering the effort required, I wonder how much that first grapefruit of Plutonium was actually worth. Like in both actual cost and sunk manpower/material for it at that point (specific to that plutonium not all of Manhattan) As an example, during bomb development, they were testing the neutron absorption of different materials, and tested a ~10in hemisphere of gold, among many, many other materials. At some point that 10” hemisphere of solid gold became a doorstop, because the value of the plutonium also stored in the room made the gold little more than a rounding error. Richard Feynman posted:The man standing next to me said, "What's that?"
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Sep 1, 2021 13:48
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zoux posted:I thought this was made up for For All Mankind (which is insanely dope btw) No, Tom Lehrer is just amazing.
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Sep 2, 2021 16:12
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Tulip posted:So I mean, I understand the stereotypes of American intelligence as being somewhat of an oxymoron, but I'm really looking for some more firm quotes to distinguish between American analysts being fully ignorant of the internal ideological divisions of the Comintern, or if denial was the rule of the day, because that is a substantial difference in understanding the actual capabilities and motives of American foreign policy. I want you to imagine Congress or the executive branch of today making those distinctions. Yesterday was no different. Tomorrow will be more of the same.
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Sep 3, 2021 20:02
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Mycroft Holmes posted:If you enlisted as a private soldier in the British military in 1914, how high could you rise by 1918? What if you were lower class? Pretty far. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_gentlemen Surviving the entire war as an infantryman might be a big ask, though. EFB: Taerkar posted:Statistically? -6 feet. 
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Sep 4, 2021 22:16
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hypnophant posted:You can see sinister motives in american foreign policy if you want but you’re ascribing too much planning and coordination to an organization that is very much flying by the seat of its pants. American foreign policy seems inconsistent and hypocritical because it’s made up on the fly by political appointees, not because there’s some grand, malevolent, secretive intent behind it Being inside the clown car at literally any level gives you incredible insight into how ridiculous the various federal apparatus are.
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Sep 5, 2021 14:21
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Ataxerxes posted:I bought an used sausage hat and a friend modified the cables so that I can use it as a headset for my computer. The speakers in the headphones are rear end and make all music sound like it's made by robots, but the throat mike works suprisingly well. *Slav intensifies*
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Sep 15, 2021 03:51
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sullat posted:There's also Iron Coffins written by a German submariner who survived the whole war. Speaking of lucky breaks... Word of caution, there is also a novel called Iron Coffins which is also about a German submarine… (…and the captain’s love affair with a Cajun woman or something.) 
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Sep 25, 2021 14:45
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SeanBeansShako posted:Haha yeah, good fun Pretty good game, in the “oh god please make it stop this is supposed to be fun and its really harshing my buzz” kinda way.
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Sep 26, 2021 20:42
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MazelTovCocktail posted:Also very interested in anything on Beria. You really sure about that, myman? I mean really, really sure?
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Sep 27, 2021 21:29
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feedmegin posted:They'd need shaped charge tank ammo first, that's why smoothbore guns at all unless you're British. Not that that's impossible for the time ofc. As mentioned, the Germans already had HEAT ammunition for (at least) their 75×714mmR, 88x571mmR, and 88×822mmR guns; It just wasn’t as good as their other AP ammo at absolute armor penetration. You can (and most countries did,) use HEAT and HEATFS with rifled guns. Smoothbore tank guns are a direct result of the desire to focus on firing APDSFS with no compromises. Shooting a finned dart from a rifled gun results in some wobble (and thus inaccuracy) unless you use a special sabot (I think the British do this) that allows the AT dart to (not)spin independently of the (spinning)sabot. You still get some spin, but nothing like what you’d get shooting a regular APDSFS round. The disadvantage to these special sabots is the loss of a bit of velocity, and the complexities in production of the ammo. The Soviets also moved to smoothbore guns to allow them to more easily fire ATGMs down the gun tube. The US did this with the rifled 152mm M81 gun/launcher in the M60A2 and M551. To achieve this, in addition to the normal rifling required to fire “conventional” 152mm ammunition, a straight keyway was cut into the barrel which matched a key on the MGM-51 Shillelagh missile. Essentially, when firing missiles, the whole system just ignored the rifling altogether. Unfortunately, this lead to stress fractures in the gun tubes (along the keyway,) as well as all the other well-known issues with the M551 Sheridan. The entire M81 program was a bit of a clusterfuck, and it caused the US Army to step well clear of the entire idea in all future development. The Soviets designed and built a TON of gun-launched ATGMs though.
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Nov 6, 2021 18:00
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FuturePastNow posted:If you sent a working T56 back to Allison in 1939 would there be turboprop B-29s by '45? Probably not. Gearbox development was a noted complete pain in the rear end. Look at the wiki page for basically any of the turboprop powered fighters or attack aircraft from the late forties through the fifties, and they almost always end with “project cancelled due to gearbox issues.” Speaking more generally, turbine engines rely heavily on material science to work properly. If you sent 1939 Rolls Royce a 1950 Rolls Royce Avon, they would probably be able to replicate an engine of the same weight and power (maybe, probably, but not certainly,) but it would have a single-digit-hours service life. You just didn’t have the materials in 1939 to replicate the hot section, even if you lifted the internal aerodynamics wholesale.
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Nov 6, 2021 21:00
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PeterCat posted:So, how did the US blockade Cuba without a declaration of war? The blockade of Cuba wasn’t one, legally. The US government got a two-thirds vote from members of the Organization of American States. Additionally, forces from numerous other countries participated in the totally-not-a-blockade, including Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, so it wasn’t even unilateral. It had just enough diplomatic cover to kinda make the fat gently caress fly. Also, we’re not touching you. See how we’re not touching you? This is totally legal. There’s lots of reasons the whole affair is seen as such a dangerous example of brinksmanship.
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Nov 13, 2021 02:33
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Cessna posted:In 1962? A blockade traditionally means that the blockading ships do not allow shipping to pass through to ports of the target country full stop, neutral or not. The US blockade of Cuba (while still hilariously illegal) was pretty laser-focused on Soviet war material, specifically nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The USN wasn’t turning around ships full of food, manufactured goods, or raw materials, which helped give the US position just the barest whiff of legitimacy. The USSR’s blockade of West Berlin fourteen years earlier helped the US position as well.
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Nov 13, 2021 18:49
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Nessus posted:I thought the focus on Georgia suffering under Sherman was because of Gone with the Wind making that famous; if Scarlett had lived in Charleston the story might not have been drastically different but the experience sure would be. Sherman’s March to the sea is described entirely differently by someone who grew up in the south versus someone who grew up in the north. The perspective and emotion attached to it is diametrically opposed. I think Sherman’s March is brought up so often for a couple reasons. Among them, all the sources are readily available, in English, and haven’t been destroyed or lost in wars since. Tracking down source material for say, the Franco-Prussian war requires picking through at least two languages, and much of it was lost in the wars that followed. If anything, the Franco-Prussian war was even more influential on military history than the US civil war, but linguistic and cultural chauvinism is a hell of a thing.
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Nov 16, 2021 18:44
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I would love a show that focused on a single naval ship and it's crew like the USS Enterprise. It would allow for a cohesive narrative that spans the entirety of the war years.  The progression from hanging on by the skin of your teeth in 1942 to Midway, to the Big Blue Blanket in 1945 would be a hell of a thing. Solaris 2.0 posted:Speaking of, wasn't there supposed to be a follow up WWII HBO miniseries called "The Mighty 8th"? For a few years there was all this news about it then suddenly nothing. HBO backed out, Apple TV picked it up. There’s a cast list now, and it’s expected in 2022, under the title Masters of the Air.
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Nov 16, 2021 18:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:They’re both cavalry guidons. I forget why they’re forked but there’s a milhist reason. Prussians. It’s always Prussians.
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Nov 25, 2021 18:03
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MrMojok posted:I understand the FW190D9 was the finest fighter plane of the war, and it wasn't even close. Counterpoint: A loving cloud of P-51s and P-47s.
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Nov 30, 2021 21:28
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Thomamelas posted:Who ever was managing the problem couldn't keep scope creep from happening. This isn't a uniquely German problem, anyone who has worked on a big project has encountered this. Literally any US DoD acquisition project since 1945. (And most of the ones during the war as well.)
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Dec 2, 2021 03:34
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There are ways to shoehorn bigger guns into an existing turret ring size (oscillating turrets are a big one,) but they have their own significant pros and cons. “A new tank” is generally when you’ve run out of ability to throw new gear, thicker armor, more power, or more gun on a platform, and you have engineering start from a clean sheet of paper.
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Dec 3, 2021 04:14
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The Lone Badger posted:Ultimately pressed is best isn't it? If you have a press big enough. What you’re talking about is a forging press, not the kind of sheet steel press that is normally expected when someone describes a press in a production environment. This is indeed an optimum solution, but has nearly all of the production issues of both cast and welded products put together, with some new ones to make it spicy. It’s incredibly capital intensive, since for each final part you need several dies for the different stages of forming (something as large and complex as a tank turret is not a single-pass kinda thing,) and any changes mean you’re going to need new dies. The dies have a limited lifespan, so you’re going to need really skilled diemakers continually repairing dies/cranking out new ones. (With casting, the molds are 1:1 mock-ups, used to create the actual sand-casting molds. You need a new mold for a part change, but the molds don’t really wear out.) Even after forging, there is still really a lot of finishing machine work required to produce useable parts. Oh, and the process takes up lots of time on your biggest forging presses, and the Germans were busy using pretty much all of their large forging presses in the aviation industry. A big part of the reason the USAF started the Heavy Press Program in the fifties was due to how innovative German use of large monolithic forging was in their aircraft designs. Did anyone ever actually use a monolithic-forged tank turret?
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Dec 5, 2021 13:10
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Randarkman posted:A bit late, and not that I think the claim is likely that G43s were commonly used by special ops teams, but Mauser 8mm was probably the most common type of small arms ammo in the world in the first half of 20th century, and a whole shitload of it was produced and used not just by Germans but by militaries all over the world. I'm pretty sure the Chinese had a lot of Mauser rifles for instance. Also pretty common for hunting rifles beyond the military use. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it was still easy to come by in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s. Hell, it was reasonably easy to get various kinds of surplus 8mm Mauser on the civilian market in the US in the nineties. I shot a ton of that poo poo.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:05
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1st MarDiv went ashore at Guadalcanal mostly armed with M1903s, but by the time 2nd MarDiv assaulted Tarawa, they pretty uniformly had M1s. The USMC getting army seconds was and is a real thing in peacetime, but by mid 1943 or so, production was at a level that the USMC got nearly anything it wanted. Also, six divisions worth of rifles is a great big rounding error to what the army was buying in 1943/1944. Early 1942, not so much.
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Dec 9, 2021 04:01
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