Discussion of Military, real or fictional

[mlooney 3,417]

[Darth Fluffy 302]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

The Russians bought a battalion worth (31 tanks) of T-34 from Laos in the mid 90's for parade use.  There are a handful of countries that still have T-34, North Korea having the most.  According to "Military Balance 2023" Guinea, Guinea-Bissau,Namibia, Vietnam,Yemen, and Congo have some still in active duty or in store.

Glad to hear there's an active aftermarket; in case I change my mind. I bet parts are hard to obtain.

 

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

I think part of Putler's problems is a serious shortage of experienced drivers and crew. I imagine the poor sod driving it was a recent conscript.

LOL, yeah,  I bet you're right.

 

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

The T-34 is still an excellent tank as long as the opposition doesn't have any of its own nor any weapons able to hurt one. I'm sure it does just fine against civilian demonstrators or striking workers.

True. I'm not sure your striking workers will be in any shape to come back to work, though. You must have been reading some history.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

2 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Glad to hear there's an active aftermarket; in case I change my mind. I bet parts are hard to obtain.

I dunno, I hear that in Ukraine you can find Russian tank parts just lying all over the landscape.

2 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

True. I'm not sure your striking workers will be in any shape to come back to work, though. You must have been reading some history.

Well, about a century ago -- I think it was in 1929 -- Winston Churchill was confronted with a mining strike. He was enthusiastically planning how to deal with it, a plan which included tanks, when he was informed that the negotiators had settled matters with strikers and that the miners were already returning to work. He got so mad that he threw his pen across the room.

This was of course absolutely in character for the man. I don't think he acknowledged the existence of any sort of problem that could not ultimately be solved by throwing tanks at it. His conflict seeking mindset might be best explicated by his quote "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed."

[Darth Fluffy 302]

15 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I dunno, I hear that in Ukraine you can find Russian tank parts just lying all over the landscape.

Well, about a century ago -- I think it was in 1929 -- Winston Churchill was confronted with a mining strike. He was enthusiastically planning how to deal with it, a plan which included tanks, when he was informed that the negotiators had settled matters with strikers and that the miners were already returning to work. He got so mad that he threw his pen across the room.

This was of course absolutely in character for the man. I don't think he acknowledged the existence of any sort of problem that could not ultimately be solved by throwing tanks at it. His conflict seeking mindset might be best explicated by his quote "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed."

Churchill was definitely a mixed bag, a man fortuitously available for dark times, contrasted with the prior appeasers, yet full of many flaws.

Thanks for the parts on the landscape tip. I don't think they've fielded T-34s yet, but that time seems to be coming.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

11 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Thanks for the parts on the landscape tip. I don't think they've fielded T-34s yet, but that time seems to be coming.

After that it will be T-27s. After which it may be time for horse cavalry armed with sabers, I guess. I am not sure this progression is really that good of an idea.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

After that it will be T-27s. After which it may be time for horse cavalry armed with sabers, I guess. I am not sure this progression is really that good of an idea.

Horses can be amazingly effective in an urban environment, although not against armor. Police in several US cities use mounts. J. Random Criminal is not going to outrun the horse.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

I should mention, I don't think this is generally a innovation, more a holdover from former days when horses were the norm. "Hey, these still work, let's keep using them."

[mlooney 3,417]

The US Space Force uses horses.  To patrol bases that are in rough terrain where wheeled vehicles would have trouble  going.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Horses can be amazingly effective in an urban environment, although not against armor. Police in several US cities use mounts. J. Random Criminal is not going to outrun the horse.

The problem is that urban warfare is a rather different animal than urban law enforcement. I am very much afraid that the proliferation of automatic weaponry, hand grenades and more modern tactics has made it a bad time to be a horse in a place like Kherson or Bakhmut. This is not even mentioning open land. Horses might still be useful for transport, I admit, but the wise rider will keep his animal away from the front lines.

18 hours ago, mlooney said:

The US Space Force uses horses.  To patrol bases that are in rough terrain where wheeled vehicles would have trouble  going.

This gives me an amazing mental image of a moon base where astronaut cavalry patrols its environs on spacesuited horses.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

The problem is that urban warfare is a rather different animal than urban law enforcement. I am very much afraid that the proliferation of automatic weaponry, hand grenades and more modern tactics has made it a bad time to be a horse in a place like Kherson or Bakhmut. This is not even mentioning open land. Horses might still be useful for transport, I admit, but the wise rider will keep his animal away from the front lines.

I very much agree. Poland used cavalry against German armor when Hitler invaded. It did not go well for them.

 

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

This gives me an amazing mental image of a moon base where astronaut cavalry patrols its environs on spacesuited horses.

In Alexei Panshin's Sci Fi novel, Rite of Passage, horses are carried on the star ship to be used as transport on colony planets they trade with. The novel posits earth-like worlds where breathing apparatus is not required.

Unless you can hack the scent stimulus system that motivates most animals and provide a surrogate, I don't think a space suit is going to work for them. I could see cats in a large space habitat, one with an internal atmosphere. Dogs you would probably want to restrict to toy breeds.

Dogs on an earth-like exoplanet, very much. But keep control of them and don't let them become a feral invasive species.

You know what? If we ever find an earth-like planet and colonize it, we're going to wreck it. It's probably a good thing that they are so damn far away.

[ijuin 572]

The closest thing to an “alien biosphere” that humanity has encountered to date has been Australia, with its radically different species (e.g. all mammals there were marsupials). We should probably take a lesson from what happened to it.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

What do you mean by "if"?

We found an Earth-like planet, & we destroyed it.

 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

We found an Earth-like planet, & we destroyed it.

Big talk from the Pharaoh who couldn't even put warp engines in his pyramids.

[Don Edwards 548]

5 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

What do you mean by "if"?

We found an Earth-like planet, & we destroyed it.

 

While the extent of our destruction is clearly and significantly non-zero, it is frequently exaggerated.

There are people out there under the impression that life on Earth will be severely damaged by atmospheric CO2 levels less than half of what was normal when the giant dinosaurs were at their heyday. Somehow this does not greatly concern me.

On the other hand, there is debate over whether humans are about to be a mass-extinction event, were a mass-extinction event starting a couple hundred years ago, or were a mass-extinction event starting, in North America, about 23,000 years ago (earlier on some other continents, a bit later in South America). I think at least one of those sides is probably correct, and it's past time to stop doing that.

[ijuin 572]

Life will go on, but a large fraction of the species will not. Let’s try to be one of the species that stays alive.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

On 6/3/2023 at 10:55 AM, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

What do you mean by "if"?

We found an Earth-like planet, & we destroyed it.

I wouldn't call it a done deal just yet, but we've certainly done our part to making it less Earth-like.

 

20 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

While the extent of our destruction is clearly and significantly non-zero, it is frequently exaggerated.

There are people out there under the impression that life on Earth will be severely damaged by atmospheric CO2 levels less than half of what was normal when the giant dinosaurs were at their heyday. Somehow this does not greatly concern me.

On the other hand, there is debate over whether humans are about to be a mass-extinction event, were a mass-extinction event starting a couple hundred years ago, or were a mass-extinction event starting, in North America, about 23,000 years ago (earlier on some other continents, a bit later in South America). I think at least one of those sides is probably correct, and it's past time to stop doing that.

We are clearly already a mass extinction event, perhaps from much longer ago, to the point where it wasn't even our species, but our ancestors.

Greenhouse gasses have me scared. Yes, they've been high in the past, and the earth recovered, but, first consider, the ecology changed, and massive die-offs happened. New species had to evolve to fill the voids. No doubt we will be extinct one day, whether it is via dying off or being superseded, but I'm not in any rush for that to happen within my nor my grand kids' lifetimes. We are seeing unprecedented (within our memory) die offs of infrastructural entities such as coral reefs and forests. For what advantage? Who benefits and what great value are they gaining that warrants this?

 

[Darth Fluffy 302]

Kidnapping

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

22 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Big talk from the Pharaoh who couldn't even put warp engines in his pyramids.

The Pyramids were never supposed to go anywhere.

The Sphinx, on the other paw, was . . .

Well, you know how difficult it can be getting a small cat to do what you want . . .

[Darth Fluffy 302]

This seemed relevant.

[mlooney 3,417]

[Darth Fluffy 302]

Gotta love 'Our Lady of the hand held anti tank weapons'.

Is 'Orc Army' some acronym, or is it referencing stereotypical orcs? Depending on your fantasy milieu, it seems a bit unfair to the Orcs to be compared to Russia.

Note that Kursk is considered to be a Russian victory, yet Russia lost three times as many tanks as Germany.

At the rate they are going, they could soon pass Iraq for the number one slot, unless they run out of tanks.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

28 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Note that Kursk is considered to be a Russian victory, yet Russia lost three times as many tanks as Germany.

An expensive victory can still be a victory. The Kursk offensive failed and cost Germany so much they could no longer muster a serious counteroffensive on the East Front for the rest of the war. Russia could replace its losses; Germany couldn't.

[Don Edwards 548]

"a dear bought victory; another such would have ruined us" - General Clinton, British Army, after the Battle of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution.

(Setup: Bunker Hill had a commanding view of Boston Harbor; if the rebellious Americans could put artillery there, they could deny the harbor to British ships. The land approaches to Bunker Hill, however, were similarly challenged by Breed's Hill. The American forces, then generally regarded as not amounting to much, were therefore entrenched on Breed's Hill, and the British decided that could not stand. In the end the British won, but in the process they lost nearly half of their forces in the Boston area - more than twice as many casualties as the Americans took - and 1/4 of all officers lost over the course of the entire war.)

[The Old Hack 2,448]

16 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

"a dear bought victory; another such would have ruined us" - General Clinton, British Army, after the Battle of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution.

Almost word for word what King Pyrrhus said. But this kind of too-expensive victory is sadly a constant throughout the history of warfare.

 

18 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Battle of Bunker Hill

For some reason this name gives me a terrible mental image of a defending American force led by Archie Bunker.

19 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

In the end the British won, but in the process they lost nearly half of their forces in the Boston area - more than twice as many casualties as the Americans took - and 1/4 of all officers lost over the course of the entire war.

I suspect these were the worst possible officers to lose as they were courageous ones leading their men into the teeth of terrible opposition.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

On 6/3/2023 at 2:45 PM, The Old Hack said:

Big talk from the Pharaoh who couldn't even put warp engines in his pyramids.

Why should he? He had Stargates built into them.