Things You Only Noticed On Reread

[Vorlonagent 442]

14 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Ahh, I had thought that the boats had metal hulls, but they were plywood, my mistake.

Even if the hull could take the impacts, a PT boat is simply too light a ship and Triremes are too heavy even if they're older, less efficient construction.  PT boat would tend to bounce off.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

4 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Even if the hull could take the impacts, a PT boat is simply too light a ship and Triremes are too heavy even if they're older, less efficient construction.  PT boat would tend to bounce off.

There is a rather mean trick you can pull on galleys and which experienced naval commanders did from time to time. Don't ram, just sideswipe them while they have their oars out. The effect on the oars tends to be brutal, and even worse on the hapless sods hanging on to them. But this was a risky maneuver and only to be done by the experienced. The PT boat would be better off just giving the hapless thing a good dose of lead.

[Vorlonagent 442]

51 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

There is a rather mean trick you can pull on galleys and which experienced naval commanders did from time to time. Don't ram, just sideswipe them while they have their oars out. The effect on the oars tends to be brutal, and even worse on the hapless sods hanging on to them. But this was a risky maneuver and only to be done by the experienced. The PT boat would be better off just giving the hapless thing a good dose of lead.

I'd say raking the trireme waterline with the 20mm gun would do a great job trashing the oars...

[The Old Hack 2,448]

50 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I'd say raking the trireme waterline with the 20mm gun would do a great job trashing the oars...

In order to row any sort of galley properly, you require discipline, coordination and careful timing. All three tend to get rather frayed while under machinegun fire.

[Don Edwards 548]

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

In order to row any sort of galley properly, you require discipline, coordination and careful timing. All three tend to get rather frayed while under machinegun fire.

As in, the rowers are frayed to raise their heads.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

13 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

As in, the rowers are frayed to raise their heads.

Getting several dozen 20mm bullets sent through your head is terrible for your hairdo, so who can blame them.

[mlooney 3,417]

17 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Getting several dozen 20mm bullets sent through your head is terrible for your hairdo, so who can blame them.

Shells, any thing over 15 mm is a shell, not a bullet.  All of you are missing a major point.  Modern patrol boats carry missiles that have a minimum range that is greater than ANY arrow range.  The patrol boats will sit at the horizon and blow the formation to little bitty bits, then close in to about 2 nautical miles and blow the carp out of any thing still floating.

Some exact details, from the 2014 World Wide Equipment Guide, Vol 3, page 1-13 (This is one of the most common FAC in proliferation today.)
HOUJIAN Fast Attack Craft   

Weapons: Armed with 5 C-801/YJ-1 anti-ship missiles that are known as the Strike Eagle (successor to the Styx). After it is launched, the Strike Eagle reaches an altitude of 50 meters and then descends in its approach to the target at an altitude of 20-30 meters. The terminal approach phase (when the radar seeker has acquired the target) is at an altitude of 5-7 meters. The Square Tie search radar is associated with the Strike Eagle missile:

C-801/YJ-1

Weight: 1,796 pounds

Speed: Mach 0.9

Range: 23 nautical miles (4.5 nautical miles is the minimum range)

37-mm/63 Type 76A:

Rate of fire: 180 rounds/minute

Range: 4.6 nautical miles

30 mm/65 Type 69:

Rate of fire: 500 rounds/minute

Range: 2.7 nautical miles

Just a point of information, up until about 1943 a 37mm gun was thought of as tank or anti-tank gun. Even firing solid shot, which these aren't, they would shred a wooden target.

[malloyd 23]

On ‎11‎/‎22‎/‎2016 at 11:54 AM, Drachefly said:

As for effectiveness, poking several-centimeter holes in wooden targets is OK so long as one of the holes is below the water level.

Actually not so good, small holes don't leak that fast and aren't too hard to plug enough to leak even more slowly.  Punching a few small holes in a boat (or an airplane or spaceship for that matter) isn't all that effective.  If you do kill a vehicle that way, it's because you hit something important on the other side of the hole, and triremes don't have many critical parts.  It's also *really hard* to shoot a hole below the waterline - water is 700 times denser than air and slows bullets proportionally.  A few meters of water is plenty to stop a bullet, or even most shells.  Especially if you are shooting from the surface, and hence coming it at a shallow angle, which means shooting through a lot more water than the depth you are going to hit.

 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

11 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Shells, any thing over 15 mm is a shell, not a bullet.  All of you are missing a major point.  Modern patrol boats carry missiles that have a minimum range that is greater than ANY arrow range.  The patrol boats will sit at the horizon and blow the formation to little bitty bits, then close in to about 2 nautical miles and blow the carp out of any thing still floating.

To be fair, the original statement was '1000 triremes'. A single PT would not carry even nearly enough missiles for that, I don't think. Mind, you are right in that the missiles it did carry would probably make the poor twits think about other things than keeping formation. (If you even could make a formation to begin with with a fleet that huge, given the lack of communications at the time.)

14 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Just a point of information, up until about 1943 a 37mm gun was thought of as tank or anti-tank gun. Even firing solid shot, which these aren't, they would shred a wooden target.

Mph. I feel that this was a rather optimistic way of thinking. A 37mm would barely even bother most German tanks of around 1940 or 1941 unless you somehow got them in the rear plate. In 1943 I doubt it could kill any sort of German main line battle tank at all. Okay, it would probably work fine against Japanese 'tanks', but frankly speaking, these barely qualified for the definition.

[ijuin 572]

39 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Shells, any thing over 15 mm is a shell, not a bullet.

I was under the impression that a shell contained a payload (explosive, incendiary, or whatever), and was not a solid slug, whereas large solid slugs were still called "balls" in reference to old-style cannon balls.

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

I was under the impression that a shell contained a payload (explosive, incendiary, or whatever), and was not a solid slug, whereas large solid slugs were still called "balls" in reference to old-style cannon balls.

Modern KE rounds, APDS (or APFDDS or APFSDUDS) are great big hunking chunks of steel|titanium|depleted uranium with no explosive filler.  Called shells.

[mlooney 3,417]

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I feel that this was a rather optimistic way of thinking. A 37mm would barely even bother most German tanks of around 1940 or 1941 unless you somehow got them in the rear plate.

Ah, dude, in 1940 25% of the "German" tank force was ex-Czech tanks, Pz-38(t), which had 25mm of armor.  The first "up armored" PZ-III was the Ausf H, which had 30+30mm on the hull only.  The rest of the tank, rear include was 30mm.  The Ausf J had 30 all around on the turret and 50 on the hull.  The H came out in late 40, the J in March of 41.  The Germans didn't armor crazy until about 3 months after they started running into T-34 in numbers.

Source:Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War II (Peter Chamberlain), pages 64-66 inclusive.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

in 1940 25% of the "German" tank force was ex-Czech tanks

Thank You, Neville Chamberlain

[The Old Hack 2,448]

10 hours ago, mlooney said:

Ah, dude, in 1940 25% of the "German" tank force was ex-Czech tanks, Pz-38(t), which had 25mm of armor.  The first "up armored" PZ-III was the Ausf H, which had 30+30mm on the hull only.  The rest of the tank, rear include was 30mm.  The Ausf J had 30 all around on the turret and 50 on the hull.  The H came out in late 40, the J in March of 41.  The Germans didn't armor crazy until about 3 months after they started running into T-34 in numbers.

Source:Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War II (Peter Chamberlain), pages 64-66 inclusive.

All right, accepted, but I still think that it was a tad optimistic to refer to a 37mm as an 'anti-tank' weapon in 1943.

 

9 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Thank You, Neville Chamberlain

Chamberlain got an undeservedly raw deal in history, I feel. Yes, he was the heir of and last Prime Minister who stood for Appeasement. But he was also the man who ended it. Mobilisation started slowly and almost too late, but Chamberlain was the one who put it into gear. His policies to block Hitler may have been awkwardly crafted and executed, but he was nonetheless the one who sent an ultimatum to the Nazis and the one who declared war when they failed to meet it.

It must also be remembered that he was terrified of starting a war when the RAF was still so far from being at war footing. At the time people had a vastly exaggerated notion of the destructive power of air bombardment -- and to be fair, it would only be a few more years before the reality caught up with the belief. Chamberlain was haunted by the idea of hundreds of thousands of innocent Londoners killed in devastating Luftwaffe attacks. So he decided to give Hitler Czechoslovakia, hoping it would satisfy him and believing it would at least buy time.

Yes, Churchill turned the war around. But he did it with an England that Chamberlain had armed and readied for war first -- imperfectly, but still. And strangely, Dowding's air defence system and radar network that proved so essential during the Battle of Britain became fully operational mere weeks before the Luftwaffe started its aerial assault.

It can still reasonably be argued that Chamberlain conceded too much at Munich and that he could have won a war against Germany with the forces available to the Allies in 1938. But it is worth remembering that even if he paid far too much, the time he purchased proved sufficient in the end -- if barely so.

[ijuin 572]

Yes, before radar, back when detecting an incoming attack meant actually hearing or seeing the enemy aircraft with human senses, intercepting a large bombing campaign would have required an utterly impractically high density of defending airbases, simply because there wasn't enough time to intercept bombers a hundred kilometers away from your airbase if the bombers were already barely two hundred kilometers away from their target (London). This problem was what led to the 1930s philosophy of "the bomber will always get through".

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

Back to the PT and triremes, I get the impression from this discussion that who wins would depend on the starting positions.  If we started the battle with the PT at a stop, surrounded by triremes, such that it couldn't move efficiently without having to plow through several rows of ships, and could be attacked from all sides at once, then the triremes might just win.

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

If we started the battle with the PT at a stop, surrounded by triremes, such that it couldn't move efficiently without having to plow through several rows of ships, and could be attacked from all sides at once, then the triremes might just win.

You did notice those 120+ rounds a minute guns on the patrol boats, right?  They would clear a way out fairly quickly.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

You did notice those 120+ rounds a minute guns on the patrol boats, right?  They would clear a way out fairly quickly.

It kind of reminds me of a situation in a game of Civ 2 that a friend of mine played. He was at war with Hannibal and was holding a fortified mountain pass with tanks and mountaineers. Hannibal elected to attack the position with elephants.

He was attacking uphill, through fortifications and minefields and spiked barricades, in the teeth of heavy armour and mountaineers armed with automatic weaponry. He threw in almost two dozen elephant units. They were all slaughtered, inflicting negligible damage. My friend said he felt positively ill imagining what the battlefield must have looked like after the end of the fight.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

You did notice those 120+ rounds a minute guns on the patrol boats, right?  They would clear a way out fairly quickly.

Suppose each trireme has ten archers.  It would take a professional archer perhaps ten to fifteen seconds to grab an arrow, light it, draw, and fire.  That's four to six arrows per minute per archer, or forty to sixty per ship, times 1000 ships.  40,000 to 60,000 flaming arrows coming down on that PT boat in the first minute alone is going to have a bit of an impact on how well they can aim that 120 rounds a minute from their guns.  That is why I said who won would depend on how the ships were initially positioned.  :-)

[mlooney 3,417]

There is a reason cross tech level combats tend to be weird.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

4 hours ago, mlooney said:

There is a reason cross tech level combats tend to be weird.

And they don't necessarily go all one way, either. Modern soldiers ill equipped and trained for a given kind of terrain can run into a LOT of trouble against local troops with strong morale. Witness the Italian Army in Abyssinia, for example, or nearly any sort of jungle combat against locals. (I am not sure if the Winter War in Finland 1939 counts. I think both sides had approximately the same level of tech.)

[mlooney 3,417]

51 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

And they don't necessarily go all one way, either.

I just said weird. I didn't say which way it was weird.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

11 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I just said weird. I didn't say which way it was weird.

I know, I was just adding detail

Mind you, in general having the better tech is usually a good idea, barring situations such as in Isaac Asimov's short story 'Superiority.'

[ijuin 572]

Likewise, modern (post-WWII) troops are generally given almost no training in using or defending against bayonets or combat knives beyond "shoot 'em before they get close enough", and thus are disadvantaged if enemies who are trained in melee fighting manage to close to within melee range where swinging a rifle barrel is difficult. Swordsman beats Rifleman if they get within sword range.

[Yzjdriel 22]

So back on topic to thread title, I just noticed that in Panel 2 of this comic Elliot blocks the fire thing's attack with a Wonder Woman pose.

And on a completely unrelated note, his face in panel 6 of this comic makes me laugh really hard every time I see it.