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Memento posted:Have improvements in missile technology basically made battleships and their insane guns obsolete now? There's a number of issues with battleships, but the short answer is that pretty much everything they can do, aircraft carriers can do better. They're really expensive for what utility they provide: it takes a lot of fuel to move a 50kton ship, and a lot of people to man it. In exchange you get guns that can shoot over the horizon but not a whole lot beyond that. They can really pummel that area, sure, but to get into range to do that, you pretty much need air superiority, because otherwise enemy bombers will mission-kill you by wrecking your unarmored superstructure. Your engines, gun magazines, etc. may be OK but you won't be able to do any damage until you get extensive repairs. But if you have control of the skies, why not just send your planes in to do the job instead? Planes give your weapons ranges of hundreds of miles, and if one plane gets shot down it's no big deal compared to losing a battleship. EDIT: towards the end of WW2 you saw battleships, and cruisers, being relegated largely to "big surface area to stick AA guns on", the better to protect the aircraft carriers they were escorting. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 02:12
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Zorak of Michigan posted:It's impossible to armor a ship against torpedoes and mines and nearly impossible to armor one against missiles. Modern torpedoes, sure, I can see how armor would provide minimal assistance against having your back broken (at best some amount of stiffening, but nowhere near enough). Mines I don't really have a feel for, but I'd guess that the same defenses that were used in WW2 against contemporary torpedoes (i.e. torpedo bulges) would have some effectiveness against mines. Which is to say, not a lot, but potentially enough to salvage your ship instead of seeing it get sunk. Missiles...how are they significantly different from a shell strike, in terms of how they deal their damage? WW2-era armor was heavy, which made it both expensive to build and expensive to run the ship (more weight -> bigger engines and more fuel needed). Modern ships as I understand it operate on the assumption that the best defense is to not get shot at, and your backup defense is active because no passive defense is adequate against every threat anyway. But I don't feel like it necessarily follows that armor would be totally ineffective against all the munitions that might be thrown at a modern ship.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:34
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bewbies posted:Mid-century steel armor was very effective, and still would be against a variety of threats. Every WWII-era battleship would absolutely laugh off the USN's current anti-ship missile (except maybe Bismarck's amusingly thin deck armor? It'd probably still be fine). Those are good points re: shaped charges and scaling up ASMs. Interesting to hear about the Iowa's underwater protections too. I'm curious now what would happen if it ate a Mk48...we're never going to see that test happen of course. A note regarding earlier discussion on German fleet building: it's worth remembering that the ships they did build became a minor obsession of the Royal Navy, who dedicated a fair force to keeping them pinned down in harbor. The term for this is "fleet in being" -- they're a potential threat that you need to keep resources handy to combat, but they don't actually have to do anything (except not get so badly damaged by your planes or midget subs that you cease to be worried about them). Once the Tirpitz (German WW2 battleship) was built, its best use was almost certainly to just stay in harbor and look big and imposing. Was that worth the cost of building it? I don't have numbers, but it seems unlikely. Also regarding midget subs, one of my favorite WW2 stories is the Raid on Alexandria, where several Italian midget subs managed to sneak into a British-controlled harbor and mine several of their warships. Unfortunately for them, the harbor was so shallow that the ships only sunk a few feet after the mines went off. And all of the sub operators were captured, so nobody was able to get word back to their commanders. So it was actually rather hard to tell from plane reconnaissance that the ships were damaged! The Royal Navy quietly refloated the ships and effected repairs, and so far as I'm aware, the Italians were none the wiser. Thus a badly-damaged fleet was still able to serve as a fleet in being!
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Dec 7, 2020 15:48
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ChubbyChecker posted:These: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_mortar ? How much range could you expect to get out of something like that? I feel like a grenade atlatl would probably be at least as effective and a lot safer.
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Dec 10, 2020 20:22
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Thanks for those photos, they're really interesting. Why does the canteen come with a cup? Can't you just drink straight from the canteen? Or is the cup for if you need to boil the water or something?
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Dec 10, 2020 20:44
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My understanding is that the Maginot line worked exactly as it was supposed to, in that Germany was unwilling to attempt an invasion through it. What pretty much nobody anticipated was the blitzkrieg, and consequently Belgium folding so quickly. Did France over-allocate to the Maginot defenses? It's hard to say. Maybe if they hadn't deployed so many forces there, Germany might have invaded through that route. I don't know enough about the topic to argue counterfactuals.
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Dec 17, 2020 02:44
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The Lone Badger posted:They used a pilot made of pillows dressed in a worn-out uniform. 
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Dec 20, 2020 02:00
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:There are anecdotes I recall from the Napoleonic era (with somewhat lower muzzle velocities vs ACW per Cessna) of a glancing hit from round shot that had already bounced once or twice still tearing an arm or leg completely off. And of course the stories of soldiers seeing a bouncing cannonball "slowly" making its way toward their line, so they stick a foot out to stop it...
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Dec 23, 2020 04:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:Because of the tank gun rifling/fin chat, I have probably my dumbest question ever : There's the gyrojet gun, which uses microrockets that are spin-stabilized by having the exhaust come out at a slight angle. As I recall, it kind of worked, but was inaccurate and really expensive. On the plus side, no recoil! e:f;b
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Dec 24, 2020 04:01
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sullat posted:In ancient Greece, after one army was defeated, one survivor came back to tell everyone that their husbands were dead. The widows pulled the pins out of their dresses and stabbed him to death with them. I seem to recall this was at least in part because the survivor did not have his shield, meaning that he'd ditched it to flee the battle faster. If you've ever heard the phrase "come back with your shield, or on it", that's what it means: either die honorably in battle and be carried back on your shield by your compatriots, or at least do not run away. (As with many stories of ancient Greece, this is likely apocryphal)
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Jan 3, 2021 16:23
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As far as I'm aware, a torpedo against any oceangoing vessel is going to be a one-hit kill barring exceptional circumstances. Against ships, modern torpedoes are devastating, able to break the ship's back by exploding underneath the keel. And subs have no armor to speak of, plus explosions underwater are really nasty since water is uncompressible.
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Jan 18, 2021 02:20
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brains posted:horror from the experience of gas attacks in the Great War lead to a series of international treaties banning the use of inhumane and cruel weapons like gas or landmines, and even then some major powers, such as the US, still to this day are not signatories. I read an article that made the argument that these bans were really only possible because of the sheer impracticality of gas as a weapon of war. Conventional weapons are generally more effective (more damaging ton-for-ton, easier to manufacture/store/deploy) for dealing damage, and the problem with denying territory to your opponent (such as with gas or landmines) is that you also deny that territory to yourself, and you need to be able to maneuver just as much as they do. Signing treaties banning a weapon's use is easy when you don't ever plan to use the weapon anyway. If for some reason you do find a use for it, well, breaking the treaty is not very hard.
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Jan 18, 2021 04:13
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Jobbo_Fett posted:iirc they design with inches but use/mark sizes by metric. Right, but 107mm is 4.2" and 122mm is 4.8", so it's weird in both systems.
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Feb 5, 2021 05:53
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've been reading a couple fantasy stories, and I started wondering what kinds of tactics would an army use to fight like a non-humanoid threat. I know that there's like group hunts of boar, but what if there was a stampeding herd of like a thousand boar, or if they were a herd of giant pigs that if an army couldn't stop, they'd go destroy a city? Would like a shield wall be good? Maybe a pike square? Or would it be better for a bunch of mounted cavalry try flank and divert the herd like a bunch of cowboys? What if they were like wolves or velociraptors? My impression is that the big advantage of a shield wall is that it protects you against ranged attacks, and the big advantage of a pike square is that most animals (notably not including wild boar) don't want to impale themselves, so will turn away if able. If you have something like a stampede that you need to stop, I'm not sure that either of those is going to be very useful. You have tens or maybe hundreds of tons of animal bearing down on you. That's a lot of energy to stop, and killing the animals in front won't stop all the other ones behind them.. My intuition is that your best bet is to try to divert or deflect them using earthworks, fire, loud noises, and similar things, while you harry them with archers. Then once the force of the charge is blunted and the animals are tired, you can send in cavalry and/or infantry to try to defeat the (fundamentally disorganized) animals in detail.
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Feb 8, 2021 02:53
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White Coke posted:But all they do is boost line of sight. And eat three wild boar in a sitting.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:28
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Greg12 posted:actually, saying a really over the top stupid and wrong thing is a good joke if it is done well, and the greatest comedic character of the last forty years, Homer Simpson, is proof. While it is possible to say horrible things and be funny, it also provides cover to the actual horrible people, who can then claim that they were just being ironic, and thereby work on normalizing the horrible poo poo they say. It's a well-established tactic, and the only way I know of to not play into their hands is to not make jokes that involve pretending to be a horrible person. Sorry! Blame the horrible people.
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Feb 13, 2021 22:43
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Uncle Enzo posted:Does anyone else get a really dark vibe from this aircraft? This has always struck me as this frightening, ugly slapped-together monstrosity that treats humans like bullets. Just shooting them up at the sky and after they finish their attack run gently caress them, their life is forfeit. I think I see what you mean, but I feel like what you're picking up on is that this is an extremely stripped-down, minimalistic war machine. That's more down to the limitations they were operating under (being unable to afford pleasantries) and the fact that it's a rocket plane (which doesn't need lifting surfaces, just control surfaces, thus the tiny wings) than it is to any particular evil on the part of the designers, I think. I feel like I'd get a similar grim brutality from pretty much any cheap-but-lethal machine, anyway. EDIT: Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize things because I used this plane in the design for one of the bosses for my game. On an unrelated note, I'd never before noticed that they just slapped some sights on the exterior of the fuselage. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 05:33
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White Coke posted:The Russians developed a fulminating bullet in the 1860s and aside from that they did I haven’t been able to find anything out about it. Can anyone explain what a fulminating bullet is, or how it works? How is it distinct, if at all, from other forms of explosives? From an extremely brief read of this wikipedia article, it sounds like the main distinction is that a fulminating bullet is designed to deal damage primarily through shrapnel. The high explosive inside the shell detonates on impact (or potentially later, during surgery, or earlier, before being fired) and shatters the shell into fragments. The contrast with an explosive shell is I guess that the explosive shell deals damage primarily through the explosive shockwave (or through spalling introduced by said explosion, I suppose). I will grant it seems like a fairly fine distinction.
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Feb 21, 2021 03:53
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Ugly In The Morning posted:E:he has an account here now and I’m trying to get a photo of him in Korea as his av.  I'm looking forward to his responses!
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Feb 21, 2021 15:54
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BalloonFish posted:I think the implied sentence is "the only time a submarine beat the royal navy's destroyer screen [that was protecting a battleship]" Yeah. Probably the U-boats would have gotten slightly more warship kills if they were focused on attacking warships, instead of shipping as they did. Not that they made the wrong choice.
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Feb 21, 2021 19:28
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White Coke posted:It was more that they were afraid Russia would soon be unstoppable As I recall, this was based on analysis of Russia's demographics and economy and then projecting its growth potential and going "holy poo poo this country could be loving huge" (edit: I see Acebuckeye responded while I was writing this, yeah). I guess this is at best milhist-adjacent, but it seems like that potential they saw either wasn't there or was not well-realized. Is there a decent summary of why that is? I can spitball a few things -- most notably, they had an absolutely ruinous WW2 and then pretty much immediately got into a military-industrial pissing match with the USA. But also the country is just huge and highly-distributed, and I gather a lot of its territory is economically marginal. But like, if we were to assume an alternate history where Russia wasn't really any worse-off than other allied powers in WW2, and somehow everyone got along so there was no Cold War, how well-developed could we expect the country to be?
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Feb 26, 2021 01:28
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zoux posted:This is an interesting question, well to me at least: how did y'all get into military history? I built fighter jet models when I was That Age. Also I was terrified of nuclear war and whenever I was scared of something as a kid I'd research it exhaustively in order to discover the One Weird Trick that would protect me from it. About 15 years ago I played a PS2 game called Warship Gunner 2, which is a highly historically accurate (  ) naval combat game. Recently I decided to make a spiritual sequel, which meant getting enough of a background on the "source material" to at least do a passable job of faking competence.It helps that WW2-era warships are really intrinsically interesting, for me anyway. Fantastically complex vessels with hundreds or thousands of people working with the most cutting-edge systems of the day, and few of the limitations that kept terrestrial war machines from getting too out-there. Like, everyone laughs at how the Ratte was an implausibly huge tank design, but at 1000 tons it would have been smaller than your average WW1-era destroyer.
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Mar 3, 2021 00:50
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GotLag posted:Seems legit to me: This is one of my favorite ships I've made in Warship Gunner 2:  A catamaran-hull battleship with some ludicrous maximum displacement, almost all of which is taken up by the 10 100cm cannons on its deck. There is absolutely no reason you'd ever need that kind of firepower in the game, but it lets you do it anyway!
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Mar 3, 2021 01:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:OH MY GOD THANK YOU Happy to be of service! If you have any other fever dream games you're trying to track down, might I recommend the Help Us Remember the Name of a Game thread? (btw I have a dev.log thread for the development of my game, and I'm running a closed beta on my discord) Night10194 posted:What is the stupidest warship design IRL? What is the silliest thing someone actually built in the 20th century and expected to accomplish things as a warship? There are absolutely some stinkers out there, especially if you include submarines. The French Surcouf and other "submersible monitors" rate pretty highly, as does the I-400 submersible aircraft carrier. Some brave idiot made a submarine (whose name escapes me) that ran on steam power instead of diesel-electric drives, which was A Problem when you wanted to submerge. The Novgorod was a Russian monitor with a circular hull. In general, I recommend following Dreadnought Holiday for silly naval antics.
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Mar 3, 2021 02:44
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The Lone Badger posted:Will your game allow me to make extremely nonstandard/unwise armament decisions? Like a BC armed with very-high-calibre very-low-velocity HE lobbers? Or a destroyer with a single, spinally-mounted, non-traversable battleship gun? God, stupid ship designs is at least half the point of the game! Though it's a very forgiving system, so you won't usually get punished per se. https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1337812399936610305 I don't have any ship-sized grenade launchers, but that's a neat idea and should be pretty easy to implement! Making a non-traversable gun is mostly a matter of bracketing it in with stuff on either side so it can't rotate. The damage model is also very simple: ships have HP, and weapons deal differing amounts of HP damage. As your guns get bigger, they deal more DPS and have longer range, but fire more slowly and inaccurately (which can be countered using autoloaders and fire control systems). In addition to standard cannons, torpedoes, and ASW weapons, I have a smattering of more exotic weapons, like rockets, missiles, lasers, and minelayers...I'll be adding more as development continues. Weapons are what I do when I want to work on something simple and fun. I used to have a more complicated system involving (still very simple) armor penetration rules, but it was confusing to non-botepeople, and the gameplay's too fast-paced for it to really affect your decisions in combat.
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Mar 3, 2021 04:46
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think it wasn't entirely arrogance, and provides some interesting insight in to how a lot of big complicated orgs can run. They decided to push the timetable because they had already been given a task. I don't think that most of the reasonably clever dudes in OKH sat there thinking a priori that the Soviet Union was going to be a walk. I think that at some deep level they figured out that in order to accomplish the task that was assigned, that it HAD to be a walk, or else they would be hosed. Success in France certainly helped reinforce that maybe it isn't so insane after all... so then you get guys committing to this poo poo because hey, it's the only way to win, and maybe we'll roll the dice and get lucky! Yeah, this is reminding me of my time in big tech orgs. Word would come down on high to ask everyone to look into what it would take to perform X ambitious task. Word would filter up from the grunts and analysts that X would be horribly expensive, taking years of work from large parts of the organization. Instead of saying "Okay, maybe we won't do X then", the word from on high would instead be "figure out how to do X in six months". Six months later, having made every possible compromise in the name of speed and efficiency, all the analysts would be saying "hey, it's still gonna take years of work from basically everyone in the org, plus now we've wasted a ton of work on problems that we knew were going to happen, and our project management is in a shambles from all the attempts at shortcutting, and our workers are about to revolt because we're asking them to do the impossible."
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Mar 8, 2021 03:11
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Fuligin posted:Does the original mobile suit gundam count? Inherent silliness of mechs aside, the show's framing is a blend of boys' anime conventions and milhisty futurewar, depicting a groggy love of different MS production lines, technical specs, logistics and doctrine, etc etc. I've been watching the first Gundam series lately, and I don't think it has any particular milhist relevance. I would characterize it more as "war is bad, and the schemers at the top cause a lot of suffering and death while pursuing their goals, but mostly war is bad." Core themes are the effects of war on civilians, PTSD, how the individual soldiers in your army and your enemy's army can be perfectly nice folks who are going to try to kill you tomorrow, and what happens to a teenager when you put him in charge of a high-tech war machine and he turns out to be really good at piloting it (hint: he gets a savior complex).
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Mar 11, 2021 00:20
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The specific composition of the armor also matters a lot. There's a big difference between mild steel and face-hardened steel of the same mass. I don't know how that applies at the infantry level, but for vehicles and ships (back in the day when ships were armored), you could get significant protection, or significant weight savings, by using very specific techniques when manufacturing armor plates.
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Mar 27, 2021 00:34
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Keep the water on the outside. Keep the fire away from fuel and explosives. Those are the big issues as I understand it.
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Mar 28, 2021 05:03
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Awhile back there was some discussion about how airplane cockpits used to be designed for the "average" pilot, i.e. they measured a bunch of pilots and then build a cockpit around these averages. Then someone did a more detailed analysis and determined that the average pilot statistically did not exist, i.e. everyone in the measured cohort differed significantly from the average in some respect. This lead to cockpits being made adjustable so that a much wider range of humans could use them without having to stretch or squish to fit them. Does anyone have more detail on this topic, or books to recommend? I have a friend who'd love to read more about it.
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Apr 7, 2021 22:35
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Thanks, that video at the very least confirms my dim memories of what we were talking about, and it has links to the original study data and report it was based on. The book looks neat as well. I wonder how much of its theories/axioms apply to software user interface design?
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Apr 7, 2021 23:54
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Set up a rat breeding program to sustain the snakes you set loose in the mines
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Apr 10, 2021 00:42
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Thanks for sharing that! Cool stuff. I wonder how much of the general miniaturization drive was initiated by needing to fit things into 5" shells?
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Apr 16, 2021 03:30
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HannibalBarca posted:The traditional account of Pyrrhus' death is that he got brained by a roof-tile thrown at him by some enemy soldier's angry mother. Clay roof tiles can easily weigh a pound apiece, and if you're up on the roof where a ready supply of ammo is, you have gravity on your side. Death by stoning with roof tiles wasn't a particularly unheard-of way to go in Roman times, if I recall correctly.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:43
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In addition to the pontoon being covered by warships, might its presumably shallow draft also render it de facto immune to the torpedoes of the time?
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Apr 29, 2021 15:03
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iv46vi posted:Speaking of blockade/access restriction, do modern navies still uses minefields in any capacity or did the detection become so trivial in recent history to render them obsolete? So far as I'm aware, naval mines are not considered obsolete. There's an anchored (seafloor) mine that passively detects nearby ships and then fires a torpedo at them.
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May 8, 2021 21:17
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As I understand it, for awhile there the state of the air was to station a guy with a couple of gigantic hearing aids (of the "big cone whose narrow end is next to the ears" type) to listen for incoming aircraft, then to scramble your interceptors and hope they could get high enough fast enough to make a difference.
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May 24, 2021 16:50
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If everything that isn't armored on the Yamato is out of commission, can it still fight?
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Jun 4, 2021 18:26
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Nenonen posted:What if they had orders not to damage Yamato but board and capture it intact so it can be turned into a museum/floating casino? How much would an EMP disrupt the Yamato's fighting capability? How about a giant videoscreen showing an episode of a shipgirl anime?
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Jun 4, 2021 19:18
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The Lone Badger posted:I wonder if it'd be possible to build a pure-kinetic asm? Along the lines of the Starstreak or something. Hypersonic ramjet drone, maybe? Reminds me of the Lippisch P.13a, a proposed supersonic coal-dust-powered German interceptor that would kill enemy planes by ramming into them, while counting on extensive reinforcement to keep the pilot alive.
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Jun 6, 2021 03:09
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