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This deadly Texas cold snap got me to finally start reading The Wages of Destruction. I hope people don't mind me asking about stuff because I don't think I've ever tried to swallow a book this dense on my own. I'm still only in the middle of chapter 3, so there's a lot of 1934 going on. They make it sound like Hjalmar Schacht (president of the National Bank) was effectively carrying out policy for Hitler but looking him up on my own shows that "a falling out" would be an understatement. I guess it's more like two entities that just coincidentally were following a compatible path until they weren't. Like, if Hitler wasn't around, Schacht might have still done the same things. Adam Tooze put in a graph show how textiles started to get hosed around 1934 as well based on how international trade policy and emphasis on heavy industry and militarization. I wonder how much of this plays into the insanity Cessna talks about in their gear. I could see just kind of dismissing it as some German nature of intricacy crossed with the aesthetic, but I wonder now if it is more a byproduct of neglect. I've seen it plenty were you starve something out enough that they lose the resources to basically do anything more intelligently. Also, the strangling of textile related imports must have had some effect on the available materials and forced things to be made the way things were. I'm also curious what the US reaction was to the general period in 1934 when everybody just decided to default on their war debts to the US so they could use that money to make more weapons and blow each other up again.
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Feb 19, 2021 02:29
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Exactly, or how the gun stabilizer on the Sherman was disabled by many crews, who found it unreliable or unhelpful... except for those in the 3rd Armored Division and 753rd Tank Battalion, who were trained in its use and reported a high level of effectiveness with it. I scrolled through that and had a bit of a shocker: quote:Have the gyrostabilizer in operation whenever the tank is moving. This gives the gunner a relatively steady field of view. It enables him to keep himself oriented with respect to the terrain and to search the terrain for targets. Like that should be a "no duh" kind of selling point of the whole thing.
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Feb 22, 2021 20:13
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Were there many instances of American/British and Soviet aircraft accidentally getting into dogfights with each other at the end stage of the war? Seems like the skies above the Eastern Front got really confusing with all the different aircraft flying around. The big one is Nis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_battle_over_Ni%C5%A1 On the other hand, there were some stories of them helping each other elsewhere. It wasn't like joint operations but something to the effect of Soviets getting into a dogfight with Germans and then P-51s out of nowhere.
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Mar 27, 2021 17:48
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Jobbo, the series is great but I am still caught up on the very first paragraph with the "bomb the bombers" thing. Was that at a point that single-engine fighters still sucked or something?
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Apr 15, 2021 21:08
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FastestGunAlive posted:...and got rid of bridging companies. I'm kind of amused at the idea of marines landing on some beach, fighting a few miles inland, getting stuck, and yelling, "gently caress! A river! Who could have anticipated it?"
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May 11, 2021 22:26
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I wonder how much of this all was a side effect of all the US torpedoes being hot garbage too. Did even one US torpedo cause any damage at Midway?
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Jun 5, 2021 19:35
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Acebuckeye13 posted:False! One PBY managed a hit against an oil tanker, the Akebono Maru. This was the only successful American torpedo attack during the entire battle That's a pretty cool fact to have. I was running on the impression that every torpedo the US had in the battle might as well have had a flag with "BANG!" painted on it, including the submarines. Well, that still might be true, but at least there's one hit now where I thought it was a complete blank. Edit: What if the torpedo bombers did dive bombing runs with their torpedoes instead?
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Jun 5, 2021 22:49
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Wouldn't work. The whole point of a torpedo is that it hits below the waterline and causes flooding, and coming in at a dive is going to make the torpedo either hit the deck/superstructure or miss the ship completely. Oh this isn't about the torpedo doing torpedo stuff. I'm running the assumption the torpedo wasn't going to detonate anyways. I was pondering what a 2,200 pound dead weight of a useless torpedo could do falling out of the sky on top of the ship. Of course, that's considering it's strapped to a plane that wasn't really meant to dive bomb. On the flip side, the story I get (even Wikipedia is going for it) say the torpedo bomber flights distracted Japanese defenses and gave the dive bombers some breathing space, but they also showed up earlier so they could have been a distraction dropping their scrap using an approach that didn't involve them flying straight and level with a giant bullseye. Anyways the whole tangent came up when the conversation drifted to plane composition. They took the remaining Devastators off of front-line duty after Midway, and I wonder how much of it was driven by torpedo ineffectiveness instead of outright torpedo bomber ineffectiveness.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:04
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Thomamelas posted:Make one hell of a 'BONG!'. Dick Bong was a fighter pilot though.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:24
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Where does the Foreign Policy Research Institute fall on perspectives and politics? I got a video in my feed from them about alternate takes on the origins of World War I, but the panel leader who started it vomited some garbage about how younger people these days only look back 30 years when it comes to history unlike the older generations like boomers. I don't know what else he said because I slammed that tab shut.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:15
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Epicurius posted:Generally conservative and hawkish. Thanks. Fortunately, clicking on it didn't trigger the algorithm to ruin my feed so I have been spared.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:08
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Cessna posted:Yet somehow aircraft shoot stationary targets on the ground all the time, often by slowing down to shoot them.
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Oct 19, 2021 20:45
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Thomamelas posted:I suspect another potential issue with shooting gliders down is that you need to hit something critical. But gliders lack a lot of those things. You aren't going to hit fuel lines. You won't hit engines. They tended toward being big, so blowing off a control surface is going to be hard. So you either have to kill/disable the pilot or destroy the control lines. Which is hard. What would be less hard is making holes in it that turn the cargo into salsa. How well did they hold up landing when they got banged up along the way? Are there stories about getting chewed up and still landing ok? I am just speculating on a survivorship bias. Like, part of the crashed planes are ones that would have made it if they had not been kicked around by fighters or something.
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Oct 19, 2021 21:54
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Let's say you were given a self-published book from somebody you don't immediately want to piss off, but they hope that you will read it. Let us say that it is supposed to be the first book in a historical fiction series about a Scottish "military family" that moved to the US in the 1740s, with each book following a subsequent generation's involvement in various wars and such. Let's say you got this from somebody in Texas and you fully expect that they'll be fighting for the Confederacy in one of the books. What kind of bingo card of tropes would you assemble and prepare to fill out before becoming violent with the first book? I'm going to assume one of the bingo squares would have to do with something about liberty and the King of England instead of them fleeing after cattle raiding instead. Edit: I just think there's some kind of Southern land mine here I don't really understand and somebody here probably knows a strange amount of detail about Scots-Irish obsessions in the US.
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Oct 24, 2021 07:52
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Yeah I was imagining trying to read that procedure while the world was ending all around me, but I guess I don't need to scuttle a ship at that point.
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Nov 1, 2021 02:32
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That's just defeatism.
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Nov 1, 2021 02:35
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It annoys me how I kind of thought you could take transistor technology back to WW2 as if everything was in place for it. Then I looked into it and nope. Then I forgot the details and almost had the same notion again. All I can do is shitpost about that here.
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Nov 6, 2021 08:27
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evil_bunnY posted:Wait wait parajumpers aren't trusted with opening their own chutes in TYOOL 2021? I want to put in all kinds of snark and giggles here, but I was thinking about a video I saw a while ago where a paratrooper was contrasting civilian jumps with their military jumps and the horror of it all. Then again, this might have been one of the paratroopers you could have trusted to make a proper decision about buying a car.
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Nov 10, 2021 07:12
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poo poo like Fury gets made yet not a single film about The Battle of Castle Itter.
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Dec 14, 2021 08:53
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Memento posted:Was the instrument panel that really nice light blue that Soviet aircraft used a lot? Yeah it was. Apparently the idea is your eyes don't have to adjust as much when looking between the instruments and the sky with a blue panel. It wasn't just A Soviet Thing. If you go sleuthing through color pictures of DC-3s, you'll find a few doing the same. Also, the panel liked to fall into the pilot's lap when they fired the fun too. (I looked up the color thing while watching the video a few weeks ago and was just kind of amused to see it come up here)
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Dec 30, 2021 04:16
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Cessna posted:This ad (Link) just came up in my social media feed. Normally it's silly stuff like a British redcoat's uniform rendered into a hoodie, but here we have: What if it took 20 minutes to put on and needed a dedicated tailor? I had an old classmate on Facebook post a WTF post about an ad they got for knockoffs of those signature Rhodesian short-shorts. He showed the ad because he just thought they were gross and stupid without even realizing the implication of wearing them. He didn't even know the crazy behind it and was wondering how he saw that ad. Having to explain that The Algorithm will always try to getcha at least once made me die even more inside. He does park service stuff and I'm betting the algorithm got wind of his forest boonies stuff and decided that maybe he wanted to know more about the White Race.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:Specifically about steel, American steel was judged to be useless for tanks and only good for use as structural steel.
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Jan 26, 2022 04:59
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PeterCat posted:I'm trying to find an old Cold War film I watched. It's almost like a documentary, has lots of footage shot of NATO forces in West Germany, but there is a scene where the narrator is in a bunker, looking at the camera, and speaking as if telling a bedtime story to his grandchildren about how WWIII happened, and it's something along the lines of "Then the West German General felt he wasn't getting sufficient support and was at risk of being overrun by the Reds, and then the nukes started to fly and that's why we have to live in the bunker." Do you have any other information about it? The 80s had an upsurge of WW3 nuke movies. The theory was that the way the Reagan administration was acting was scaring enough people that various filmmakers just decided to explore the consequences a little. What would help is determining where most of the "domestic" scenes were happening. Like, some particular area of the US, or the UK, or something.
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Feb 14, 2022 08:33
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Vahakyla posted:They ended up having a routine where a truck load of Egyptians would just drive over the DMZ to the Israeli side and eat at their dining facility, and he was laughing as he told how they wondered what the IDF cooks would say and how to this day he isn't sure if they ever noticed or gave a flying gently caress because they kept just shoveling food as the egyptians started rolling down the line, just smoking cigarettes and throwing food at the plates. That's an awesome story. I've already distorted it sufficiently trying to retell it to my wife.
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Feb 15, 2022 20:06
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Scratch Monkey posted:"Disease or Other Causes" Ye Olde Spanish Flu?
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Feb 23, 2022 20:33
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I am trying to read those posts along to I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General and it is just not working.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:37
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That has made me very happy. And here I thought I just wanted hot dogs.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:32
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Milo and POTUS posted:Is it true that a crappy torpedo was slammed into the wall in congress to show how defefctive the detonators were That's probably in regards to the Mark XIV torpedo (Mark 14) which was a real piece of poo poo. I've heard and read a lot about them but never got anything close to a first-hand account of those protests/demonstrations to powerful people about how lovely they were. What I do know about are the tests done from a crane at Pearl Harbor. They were given a dummy load at a height that would produce a speed and force consistent to how the torpedoes would be used for a contact strike. There was something like a 70% failure rate. While that failure rate is absolute poo poo for fighting a war, it wouldn't be the kind of rate I'd go with if I were to slam it into the side of Congress, or drop it off a crane next to a passing admiral--which is the regular anecdote I see. There's still nearly a one-in-three change that I get a boomboom.
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Mar 4, 2022 08:46
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Nenonen posted:Do you drive an internal combustion car? It also runs on either liquid. A really important distinction is that we are not in the habit of shooting at each other from our cars. I say this despite living and driving in Austin, TX.
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Jun 13, 2022 18:48
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Can you really get good history from a podcast? I listen to a lot of this stuff and have to imagine I would roll off the side of the road Toonces-style if I tried to listen to something more academic. I got Decline and Fall if The Roman Empire on Audible and that's where I discovered there was room in the length field for the number of full days of listening time. That was a year and a half of yard work.
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Jun 14, 2022 18:26
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I had only heard of the bomb survivorship bias story in regards to B-17s and B-25s so I'm surprised the picture isn't either one. Was that analysis definitively extended to other planes?
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Jun 16, 2022 19:19
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Hah. I was thinking that if it was just a made-up Internet example that it was probably not even an Allied vehicle because that's what people do. Next up: US analysis on how to improve the survivability of a Panther.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:54
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Anyway, sounds like there isn't a well-accepted term for the dumb poo poo I'm doing in this game, which: fair enough. Thanks, y'all! If we're making up poo poo then I vote for "galley weapons" as an extension of the term "galley tactics" to define this kind of naval knife fighting you want to do.
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Jun 28, 2022 07:04
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Thomamelas posted:They Kramered their way into a project and tried to hijack everything. To the point of attempting to get me removed from the project.
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Jul 1, 2022 04:03
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A little late on the nuclear apocalypse chat, but I had thought the big fear came from salted nuclear weapons, and they've been showing up in fiction since the 50s when it was conceptualized.
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Sep 15, 2022 18:17
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You could subtract any kind of military or military-adjacent industry around New York City, along with the financial sector, and just about heck of anything else, and still have a pile of people that could be drafted to fight a war.
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Sep 16, 2022 08:24
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A ridge will look wildly different to different people and that part of California might have a big enough one. I guess you could have some fun with trig. Take the closest spot you are sure would get an airburst. Get your linear distance from it. Figure out what angle takes you 10,000 feet over that spot. If that angle is visible over the ridge then you'll probably eat it. I think 10,000 is a little high though. Also, hilarious basic trig problem haha.
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Sep 19, 2022 07:27
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Cessna posted:Why is it that whenever nuclear weapons come up there is a rush to one-up others with how dead you'd be? If it were a goon meet, we would be comparing our scars instead, but putting up pics of scars are all poopoo'd for "not really giving the full effect" and "being off topic." [Pre-emptive defense sentence here to stop everybody posting FN SCARs. No knockoffs either.]
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Sep 21, 2022 19:28
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Xiahou Dun posted:Well that shot it way up the To Read List. Yeah I was thinking it sounded like a non-suck Guns, Germs, and Steel and should get flung out more itt like Wages of Destruction and Shattered Sword.
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Sep 22, 2022 06:51
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Fish of hemp posted:Remind me again why did it suck? I don't think you'll get a particularly short answer because somebody with expertise in some area where Jared Diamond is stating something have something to say about it that makes it look like a real oversimplification. I think anthropologists particularly have problems with it and I wouldn't be surprised if one doesn't come smashing through the window right about now. I've also seen him criticized as trying to push something like a "racial determinism:" white Europeans were in a mindless march to superiority absent of any agency and everybody else was late to the party at best or somehow chose poorly. I don't know why this gets harped on because I recall he wasn't trying to actually make some kind of supremist statement, and was even trying to refute it. The one thing I latch on to is how he kind of put agriculture like some kind of switch instead of a whole continuum of something and a process. And in that case, letting the Europeans somehow get some edge on that early on just doesn't sound right, but I'd have to read it again to remember exactly what he was ranting about with agriculture (and I don't want to read it again).
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Sep 22, 2022 09:38
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