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Zinegata

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Everything posted by Zinegata

  1. Meh, that sort of automated gun system is going to be not-working at the hands of the Philippine Navy within a week. The guys who join up for the Navy really tend to not have the technical know-how, because the Navy here pays really, really badly and you're better off taking your skills elsewhere.
  2. Sadly people keep forgetting about the period after the Civil War when America decided that British/European Imperialism and racism was cool.
  3. The Admiralty was officially never integrated into the Ministry of Defense until after World War 2. The RN was in fact disconnected from the rest of the military and the government; a holdover from the time when the RN was more of a privateering force than a navy. It's a very peculiar institution as far as militaries go.
  4. It's too big for us to maintain and Japan has escort vessels already. I'm proposing skipping to a heli carrier without even any escorts.
  5. The desire for quick victory frankly permeated all of Europe's militaries before the breakout, with the obsession with mobilizations and the cult of the offensive. However, in naval matters, I would hazard that it was the dreadnought race itself which was part of the impetus for a quick victory. You had the British public lobbying for more spending on battleships before the war - "We want eight, we can't wait" was one of the chants if I recall correctly - and such impatience in getting battleships is probably going to be matched by wanting those battleships to actually win some battles. I know you're trying to find a link between the new British-French alliance and try to find a way to link it with British naval strategy, but as Keegan noted the Admiralty in fact generally did not get involved in any of the joint armed forces meetings - whose very focus was finding out how to fulfill their obligations to the French. They were, to quote his First World War history, "aloof" to what the Army and the French were doing. In fact it's worth noting that the Grand Fleet never even joined forces with the French Navy in any operation - it was only for Gallipolli that the Royal Navy engaged jointly with the French and using only old battleships. In any case, strictly speaking, the "alliance" hadn't been totally cemented from a legal perspective - hence the British needing the excuse of Belgian neutrality to get involved - and the French and British were in fact still arguing over some of the minor colonial issues that could have escalated.
  6. Lol, but when the French can make a 35 ton design that's roughly equivalent to the T-55...
  7. Stop covering for Downward because he strawmanned so hard trying to pretend this is an anti-Churchill rant when again what we were discussing was the institutional hubris that afflicted every First Lord of the Admiralty from 1890 to 1920 - including Beatty, Wilson, Churchill, and Fisher - all of which I mentioned with a particular failing attached to them. That Downward is still strawmanning pretending that a few flawed battlecruiser designs is at issue (when the only time I even mentioned them involves a procedural fault by Beatty - he kept the safety fire doors open to increase rate of fire which allowed the magazine explosions to happen. That's not a design issue, that's a leadership issue - wherein an Admiral ignores basic safety features of a ship) really goes to show who's too busy trying to shit on an actual intelligent discussion because he can't handle the damn truth. That's the only childishness that's happening here, and stop pretending I or xthetenth are at fault because we're calling out Downward's bullshit of wanting to protect ze honor of the Royal Navy/Churchill when neither of us could care less about who he fanboys for.
  8. The Royal Navy was essentially arguing with itself after sinking three German light cruisers at the battle of Heligoland Bight, mostly because they thought they hadn't massacred the Germans enough. Seriously, there was basically controversy of this sort after every battle, victorious or not. In fact the mythology reached such extremes that I'm pretty sure Coronel only happened because the British Admiral Craddock preferred committing mass suicide rather than be accused of cowardice and failing to put his ship alongside that of the enemy. It pays to never forget that the longest-ranged gunnery hit of the First World War - the gold standard of a dreadnought navy - was not even achieved by the Royal Navy. It was achieved instead by a pre-dreadnought of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, who achieved this by simply modifying their guns to fire at higher angles. The pre-dreadnought hit the modern battlecruiser Goeben and forced her to run back to port. Which should demonstrate how people really should stop pretending that the Czarist Navy is a joke just because of Tsushima. To quote another snarky poster well-versed in these matters: Never underestimate an artillery ship full of Russians. Especially ones who are given a clear purpose instead of the muddled mess of orders the Baltic Fleet got.
  9. It's very hard to take your "calling out" seriously when you're too busy playing strawman, trying to make us feel bad about poor Britain spending all the blood and treasure to beat the Germans (while ignoring the very real reality that much of British prosperity only came about because they looted India, whose economy didn't grow while under British rule even as the population exploded leading to the current poverty-stricken situation it's still trying to solve). Instead, what you fail to realize is the issue is not Churchill, but the institutional rot of the Royal Navy's leadership as a whole high among which is its utter failure to come up with a grand strategy. You sing the Royal Navy's virtues by saying they contributed a lot of vessels for D-Day, but you fail to realize that the British had to be literally dragged kicking and screaming from the utter failure that was their Mediterranean strategy before they agreed to invade Normandy. It was in fact primarily Britain's fault that the Western Allies wasted the entirety of 1943 by invading Italy - which Churchill keeps referring to as the soft underbelly of Europe without realizing that Italy is one really long chain of mountains unsuited for mechanized army operations (and both US and British Armies were fully mechanized at this point; with the US having one token mountain division in total) and that at the very top of Italy is not Germany but an obstacle called the "Fucking Alps" wherein a million Italians died in fruitless assaults on mountain passes guarded by Austrians in the First World War. That, again, is a clear failure of grand strategy. The Royal Navy had no clue what it was supposed to actually do in the war except to muddle through. They were bailed out in the First World War because Jellicoe refused to succumb to any delusions by his peers like Beatty, Fisher, Wilson, or Churchill (funny how you pick only Churchill) and had too much of a lead on the even more mind-bogglingly incompetent Germans anyway. In the Second World War, there really wasn't a clear strategy until America basically grabbed them by the neck and shoved the Victory Plan in their faces. Frankly, this is why I'd actually bet on the IJN beating the Royal Navy if the USN magically didn't get involved. As crazy as the IJN's leadership was, it at least understood that they were facing a war wherein the IJN would face numerical inferiority and had spent the inter-war years cultivating specialized skills that were meant to minimize this inferiority in specific situations (particularly night battle). The IJN had a strategy - create conditions where the defeat of the enemy fleet is probable and engage them in these conditions - even if the strategy was paired with the equivalent of national suicide. The British strategy when the actual Pacific crisis hit in December 7 was apparently... "Send a few ships to show the flag, surely that will deter Japan?" Which is again not strategy but a load of wishful thinking.
  10. The thing is, the big and flashy victories generally didn't come right at the outset. Quiberon Bay only happened midway into the Seven Years War, and Trafalgar was two years into the formal start of the Napoleonic Wars; albeit one can argue that the whole mess had begun since the French Revolution in 1792. The blockade was in fact a big factor in ensuring that the British had better odds during the naval battles precisely because the enemy fleets had been kept locked away for so long. Indeed, one of the triggers for German surrender was the High Seas Fleet mutiniying. Churchill and most of the First Lords wanted a big victory right from the start, which was why there seemed to always be pointless recrimination after every battle even if the British won. Moreover, the original British plan for WW1 never involved massive ground forces to begin with - that was a decision taken in the middle of the war when it was clear that no decisive result could be reached. And the crazy ideas for going into the Baltic pre-dated the Kitchener Divisions and the army slowly growing in relevance compared to the Navy; those started the moment Fisher got his First Lord job back.
  11. Given that the Philippine Navy is just a tripwire force whose only purpose is to die screaming for help to the USN in wartime, and to perform actual useful relief operations in the aftermath of storms in peacetime, I'm really beginning to wonder if it's viable to forgo traditional escort warships in lieue of a couple of frigates/transports whose only job is to carry a deck gun for scaring Chinese fishermen, some sort of radar, and as many helicopters that can squeezed on to the ship as possible.
  12. It's competent certainly but people keep forgetting it's a 50 ton design as opposed to the 35-tonish AMX-30 and T-55. That's about as big a weight difference as the difference between the Sherman and a Panther and it's not as though the Centurion has massively better capability.
  13. The other issue that contributed to the rapid decline of the RN was its failure to understand grand strategy; particularly what made the Royal Navy so successful in previous wars in the first place. The reality of the Royal Navy is that its big, flashy victories - Trafalgar, the Nile, etc - were merely a means to an end; which is to allow the British Navy to maintain control over the sea lanes by blockading the enemy's sea ports. Winning Trafalgar didn't cause Napoleon to give up - there is a decade long gap between Trafalgar and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. It was the long, grinding blockade that no one likes to talk about that actually defeated the French. The problem by the First World War is that the public, and to a large extent the Admiralty that wanted to remain in the public's good graces, had come to expect that they would win smashing naval victories from the outset. This was why grandiose schemes were being drawn up to invade useless pieces of North Sea rock - because they wanted to "draw out" the German battlefleet and destroy it. Jellicoe, to his credit, understood that he had to resist all of these insane ideas and limit himself to being the gaoler of the German fleet. As long as the German fleet and merchant marine was kept bottled up in its home ports, then the Royal Navy was doing its part to win the war. Really, this is a classic case of the undisciplined pursuit of the new, which was identified by Jim Collins in his business books as one of the key indicators of what destroys successful corporations. I know historians are loathe to apply business book strategy to history, but in reality Collin's conclusions were based on statistical research and focus on the evolution of institutions - of which governments and militaries are in fact not much different from corporations. Great companies in fact are often destroyed not by external competition, but rather because they fritter away resources in pursuit of pet projects that don't pan out while forgetting what made them great in the first place. When you have Churchill trying to tinker and micro-manage based on his delusional understanding of Trafalgar rather than sticking to the solid strategy that worked before, you get the same sort of embarassing rot that leads the RN from being a leading world navy to one that got badly trounced by the Japanese.
  14. When you have enough yards to pump out double the number of dreadnoughts as the nearest competitor it's very hard to be eclipsed by your competitors unless you're into strategies that advocate frittering away British battleship strength on pointless missions like trying to capture a couple of German North Sea islands for fanciful landings on the North German coast. Shooting down these insane ideas in fact became a big part of Jellicoe's job. Seriously, the above insane strategy was in fact advocated by a former Sea Lord by the name of Arthur Wilson. And he didn't just advocate seizing one of the less well-defended islands (which Churchill wanted), he wanted to seize Heligoland which was the single most well-defended of the German North Sea islands and was bristling with minefields and fixed shore guns. Jellicoe's private response was "We were all and one convinced that Sir A was mad." Moreover, it's not as if the German navy was bristling with competence either. Their entire naval strategy was predicated on losing and then winning because they lost... without defining the chain of events wherein the defeat would transform into victory.
  15. Part of the problem is that the Admiralty of the 1890-1920 period itself, which was suffering from schizophrenia over wanting to be old school and true to Nelson while at the same time wanting to be on the bleeding edge of the technological race. Mix in Victorian era class snobbery and extensive politicization of the Admiralty positions, and you get an environment where merit and competence were not rewarded compared to seniority mixed with the ability to publically lobby for grandiose ideas that would be popular with the public despite being of dubious sanity to engineers. Honestly, I think of all the top RN commanders in the First World War only Jellicoe was halfway competent, which was probably why he was left with the responsibility of not losing the war in an afternoon in the first place. And look how he ended up being everyone's favorite post-war scapegoat to escape blame for their respective dumb ideas and failings.
  16. Well, when you have personalities like Lord Fisher (coastal battlecruisers!), Winston Churchill (Gallipolli could have worked!), and Beatty (Firing speed is everything! Leave the safety fire doors to the magazines open!) leading the RN and were increasingly intolerant of anyone but sycophants in their staffs it's hard to imagine any sane engineer not getting marginalized.
  17. So can the Internet finally stop pretending that the Centurion was much better than the British keep pretending it is?
  18. Like very many interwar British ideas the R-class was too ahead of its time; with the technology unable to really make a practical boat out of a concept that would later become the norm. Though personally that reflects the British tendency to keep spending on crazy ideas that sound good on paper with no regard of how it will turn out in practice.
  19. If this is another of Sturgeon's asshatery of editing other people's post because he's too fucking stupid that he actually buys Fox New's bullshit then I am gone from this forum. There is no excuse for this kind of power trip behavior. Especially when the "evidence" cited is nothing more than moronic Fox News strawman.
  20. K-class was comparatively sane compared to the M-class, which had all of the K-class's delusions and then added a 12 inch dreadnought gun to the submarine for good measure. The extra kicker? The 12 inch gun was mounted casement style so it can only shoot at stuff ahead of the sub; and it could only reload while on the surface.
  21. Running charges on foot by formation infantry is silly to begin with, and would be obvious to anyone who observes a marathon. An army is not a collection of automatons, but a collection of individual human beings with different levels of strength and endurance. In a marathon some runners finish way ahead of the pack, while others finish last. In battle, the exact same thing would happen especially in a citizen-soldier army - with the stronger soldiers reaching the enemy line first - and is therefore a recipe for piecemeal annihilation. This is in fact why Swiss Pikemen never advanced at faster than a brisk pace - so that the entire formation arrives at the enemy line at the same time instead of piece of by piece. Meanwhile the stronger pikemen in a formation were equipped with armor - the Swiss typically armoring only the first and second ranks of each pike formation - leaving the weaker soldiers unarmored so that they could still advance at the same brisk pace while ensuring that they had armor for the troops most likely to get hit by injury. It also bears remembering that most "plains" terrain is still full of little obstacles and lots of broken rocks that could bring injury to a running man - that's why people have been paving roads since they were invented. Marathon was in fact an extroardinary case partly because the battle was fought on a beach - with the sand generally not having any of the sort of rocks that could bring injury to a running man. That said, I'm kinda doubtful they really ran full-tilt at Marathon, for the simple reason that sand brings with it a whole different set of problems - sand is loose and therefore "sticky" to a runner, especially one that is wearing armor. It is therefore much more tiring to run on the sand (your feet have to deal with the added friction of the sand since your feet keeps sinking in it), and running will tend to send sand flying all over the place - particularly at the guys behind you. I suspect that if there was any "charging" at Marathon - it was over a relatively short distance, perhaps the final few meters before contact to the Persians. It is much more likely that the Greeks, for much of the battle, were simply advancing at a very brisk pace in formation. They can stay in formation thanks to the "clean" nature of the terrain, while the brisk as opposed to running pace is less tiring and doesn't throw sand into the faces of the rear ranks.
  22. One of my little historical myth buster dissertations over in the Paradox Forums... Movies tend to depict cavalry as charging in massed formations. It looks cool especially if you add some orchestral music to it: And it is especially sad when you gatling gun all the men and horses in slow motion: To an extent, the reason for this is because most paintings of cavalry depict them in such poses, such as this painting from the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Palestine_Gallery_at_the_Australian_War_Memorial_(MG_9693).jpg There's a little problem with this painting though. It was drawn during the age of photography, and as it turns out we have some actual photos of the battle: http://www.rfd.org.au/site/beersheba.asp And immediately we can go into mythbuster mode and make some key observations: There are four photographs of the Australian Light Horse in the site, three of which depict the cavalry on the march and the fourth depicts them during the charge. The fourth is particularly significant - it might be the sole photograph of an actual cavalry charge ever taken. What's striking here is that the Beersheeba painting in fact bears most resemblance to the three photographs of the cavalry on the march - meaning they were in column, riding nearly knee to knee Meanwhile, the "charge" photograph is very different - you can in fact see that rather than charging as a massed force, the cavalry had spread itself into three distinct waves - each of which is so sparsely manned that you can still make out individual riders on the most distant third wave. The spacing between each wave is also quite generous - several horse-lengths at least - at complete odds with the painting wherein the cavalry are basically charging as one huge column. Why is the charge formation so different from the painting? Why is real war so different from Tom Cruise getting machinegunned? (No matter how amusing that may be). And the answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: Cavalry charged in sparse waves for the same reason that automobile drivers maintain a minimum safe distance from the car ahead of them: In the event that the car ahead of you suddenly stopped, you want to have enough distance to either evade the car or brake yourself to a stop. Cavalry were no different. If a cavalryman in the first wave got killed, then the troopers in the second wave want plenty of space to be able to avoid his corpse and that of his horse - not for sentimental reasons, but because failing to do so would likely cause your own horse to slip and lead you crashing into the ground. The problem, as we know now from the history of cavalry paintings, is that most of these paintings were not drawn based on battlefield accounts. Instead, most of these paintings were drawn by artists witnessing parade-ground maneuvers (the famed painting "Scotland Forever" was drawn by someone who was not present at Waterloo, as an example) - hence the cavalry could safely gallop in massed columns due to the fact that it was unlikely anyone in the front was going to suddenly stop and cause the rest to pile up. Additionally, painters tended to paint cavalry from the side view - as it seems to be a more impressive vantage point that maximizes the effect of a few horses. The painting at Bersheerba and the photographs on the march in fact seemed to have come from this school of thought. Funnily, much as we want to make fun of The Last Samurai, they actually get this bit right when you look at 0:11 of this video: Although the cavalry are charging towards the left (away from the guns and the guy we're supposed to hate), the line is actually only very sparse and contains only "our" brave white man, Ken Watanabe, and a few other extras. This gives each man plenty of space to pretend dying dramatically in slow motion without resulting in any unfortunate tramplings that could cause real injury. That said, we then find out why the cavalry charged to the left and away from their intended target by 0:30 - That way we can now switch to side-view shots of the cavalry dying in slow motion, which again allows the filmmaker to maximize the impact of a handful of riders. There are perhaps just 10 guys in the scene at 0:30 - yet it seems a lot more since so much action is happening in the entire screen. So there you have it, a fun little snarky piece on why people should never, ever believe pieces of Napoleonic "art" depicting cavalry drawn by artists commissioned by governments for the glorification of their armies - artists who by and large never witnessed combat. That last sentence in fact should have already been proof enough why paintings are such bad sources of historical truth, but one can never underestimate how stubbornly some people cling to what "military history" tells them.
  23. But having an experience edge that can be eroded like that won't allow the Wermacht to march on Washington DC in 1946!
  24. There's still a bunch of demo-mods there who are still pretending that the 5:1 Sherman-Panther ratio is real but they seem to be getting steadily ground down now that the rest of the forum has realized that HOI4 need not be a "Germany can win!" narrative maker.
  25. So I dropped this new Nova Bomb on Planet P (otherwise known as Paradox Forum) and am waiting to see the reaction to the reality that even in the indie tank battalions casualties actually dropped dramatically once they got some experience.
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