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That's because I was stupid and didn't actually sanity check the numbers I was getting. The source I was looking at used ' but obviously should have used ".
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May 2, 2024 23:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:, but both Luger and MP-18s with drum mags were popular with German assault troops during WW1 for basically the same reasons. Were these smgs? Were automatic firing smgs even a thing in wwi? Obviously machine guns were a thing, but were there reliable automatic weapons that were brought on assault along with rifles/trench guns?
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May 2, 2024 23:22
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The MP18 was the first SMG, entering service in 1918. Before that assault troops used long-barreled Luger semiautomatic pistols with drum magazines for extra close-in firepower.
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May 2, 2024 23:25
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It's worth pointing out that magazine issues were a major source of failures for early SMGs. A SMG magazine has to shove rounds into the mechanism and keep up with the rate of fire, or it will jam. The MP18 had the drum mounted above the barrel, so it had a bit of help from gravity. The "Artillery Luger" was meant for semi-auto fire only.
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May 2, 2024 23:47
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all this talk is making me want to play Battlefield 1 again.
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May 3, 2024 00:39
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Re: Drum chat, back when I was a teenager I had the chance to handle a reenactor's M1928 Thompson at an airshow, and reloading the drum mag was an absolute pain in the rear end. Just to get it out of the gun you had to hold the bolt back, hold the mag release, and slide the drum out sideways, a task that felt optimized for people with three hands. Also, going back to this post: Chamale posted:Was there any battle ever where two closely-matched sides fought, and the side with slower-firing guns won because their enemy ran out of bullets? It seems like an absurd scenario. I guess an early-20th-century general without the benefit of hindsight might argue that an army with slowly-firing guns is just as good as one with repeaters, and it's easier to keep it supplied. There's no specific battle where you'll find historians shaking their head and going "If only they hadn't used faster-firing guns and wasted all their bullets!" but RoF concerns were certainly an issue up to and including the 20th and 21st centuries. In Vietnam, for instance, an issue with the M16 was that troops would fire their weapons on full-auto and waste a huge amount of ammunition, which was one of the reasons why the M16A2 swapped the full-auto capability for a limited 3-round burst. Even today, most soldiers are trained to only use semi-auto fire outside of specific circumstances.
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May 3, 2024 00:51
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How did innovations in guns and such disseminate, in the 19th-early 20th centuries? French invention of smokeless powder was mentioned a bit ago -- wouldn't that kind of massive breakthrough be the kind of thing they'd want to keep a state secret? Was it all too much of an interconnected/interdependent world to let that happen?
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May 3, 2024 03:04
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Koramei posted:How did innovations in guns and such disseminate, in the 19th-early 20th centuries? French invention of smokeless powder was mentioned a bit ago -- wouldn't that kind of massive breakthrough be the kind of thing they'd want to keep a state secret? Was it all too much of an interconnected/interdependent world to let that happen? With the powder specifically, there was no way to keep it quiet for very long that the French had it, and a lot of people were working on the problem. Within three years of French introduction there was more than one competing propellant on the market. For the rest of it, a lot of the modern rifle concepts were already being trialed in blackpowder guns, and enough companies were trying to get major military contracts with those that keeping things secret was not happening. That's why the French Lebel is infamously not a very good rifle and the accompanying round is not a very good round. The French basically rushed it into service as soon as the powder was ready in the hopes of gaining an advantage, but the state of the art in rifle making quickly passed beyond it. It might be easiest to think of rifles in the 1870-1910 period as bascially the same setup airplanes found themselves in from 1910-1950 or computers in the 1960-2000 period. An endless sea of new improvements that rapidly obsoleted what came before.
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May 3, 2024 03:17
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Fangz posted:It's worth pointing out that magazine issues were a major source of failures for early SMGs. A SMG magazine has to shove rounds into the mechanism and keep up with the rate of fire, or it will jam. The MP18 had the drum mounted above the barrel, so it had a bit of help from gravity. The "Artillery Luger" was meant for semi-auto fire only. Are burst fire weapons harder to make? It seems that a good way to solve that issue would be to just toss three to five bullets at a time no?
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May 3, 2024 03:47
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Defenestrategy posted:Are burst fire weapons harder to make? It seems that a good way to solve that issue would be to just toss three to five bullets at a time no? Yeah. Making a gun full auto is pretty trivial. There are fewer things as dead rear end simple as a blowback SMG. Making a gun semi-auto is a bit more difficult, especially if it’s firing from a locked bolt. Having a gun rip off a burst if the trigger stays down and not just keep chugging is its own whole thing.
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May 3, 2024 04:45
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Think of it like this: the gun wants to be firing all the time. Look at the part labeled 1544. That's the sear. Its job is to hold the bolt open and keep the gun from firing. When you pull the trigger, all that happens is the sear pivots on its fulcrum and moves out of the little notch that is cut into the bolt. The bolt is attached to a spring so as soon as the sear is not blocking it the bolt will slam forward, pick up a cartridge, chamber it, and fire. Then the recoil sends the bolt flying back. If the trigger is still depressed, the sear is still out of the way, so eventually that spring is fully compressed and it pushes the bolt forward again to repeat the cycle. That'll just keep happening until you release the trigger or the magazine is empty. You have to add more complexity to this machine to make it only fire once.
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May 3, 2024 05:04
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PFC James McGinty posted:91 y/o Korean War Veteran. His slides and photos from Korea should be digitized soon. Mostly just pictures of cargo planes and battleships but that kind of rules. Also Jesus it is difficult to digitize slides. Literally had to spend like a buck fifty per since you can’t just scan them. Ugly In The Morning fucked around with this message at 08:52 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 08:43
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:Think of it like this: the gun wants to be firing all the time. To add to this: it's totally doable for someone who is moderately handy to make a crude open bolt SMG in their garage with hand tools and poo poo they bought from home depot. Will it be a good SMG? Hell no, but it will be a fully automatic SMG that shoots a real deal pistol cartridge like .380 or 9mm. If you can salvage the barrel off of another gun (say a pistol) then it moves from being a pretty crappy SMG to an actually fairly functional one. Doing the same with a semi-auto rifle gets a lot more complex, especially if you are trying to make it fire from a closed bolt. A lot of the simplest, cheapest, and earliest semi-auto designs were open bolt and basically the same as an SMG only there was something to force the sear back up after each shot. Note that making a gun like this is illegal now in the US because the are utterly, completely, totally dogshit simple to convert to full auto, because ultimately as Gagarin said, that kind of gun wants to be full auto all the time.
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May 3, 2024 13:11
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Isn't the problem with fullauto conversions like that the fact that you have disabled the gun's ability to stop shooting? Any time you pull the trigger it will run until it depletes the magazine or jams.
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May 3, 2024 13:27
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The Lone Badger posted:Isn't the problem with fullauto conversions like that the fact that you have disabled the gun's ability to stop shooting? Any time you pull the trigger it will run until it depletes the magazine or jams. Depends on the conversion and how crude it is. Converting an open bolt semi auto to full auto? Nope. It will work just like a factory made SMG. Where you get into trouble is converting closed bolt semis to full, as if you're not putting in an autosear and just deleting things like the hammer disconnect then congrats you just created a runaway slam fire machine.
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May 3, 2024 13:36
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"Keep on firing" ("going cyclic") is a problem even purpose built macnhieguns can have if they get hot enough or worn out. It's - exciting. You just keep it pointed downrange and lat it run out of rounds.
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May 3, 2024 15:54
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I got to fire a few vintage machine guns last year from a Vickers gun to an MG-42 rechambered after the war for a NATO round. All of those guns did something fun when they got hot. They would either misfire or jam (I think the Sten spent more time being worked on than firing) or like Cessna said just run away and empty their magazines (which is why none of the belts were longer than 20 rounds or so). Obviously they were in worse conditions than they were 80-100 years ago but it's one thing to make a gun that shoots one magazine in full auto and another to make a gun that shoots thousands or tens of thousands in various conditions. Also you'd think that the Vickers would be immune to issues on account of the cooling jacket but the jacket only covers the barrel and it ended up jammed due to a torn casing and had to be taken out of action for the day.
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May 3, 2024 16:00
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Cessna posted:"Keep on firing" ("going cyclic") is a problem even purpose built macnhieguns can have if they get hot enough or worn out. It's - exciting. You just keep it pointed downrange and lat it run out of rounds. Semi-autos can also do that if something goes wrong. Nasty grease build ups in old guns causing a free floating firing pin to get stuck forward is the most common one you'll run across. In that case it's a real pucker inducing event. Holding onto a full sized rifle sloppily made 80 years ago in the bombed out rubble of a dictator's fever dream while it goes rock and roll, trying to keep the muzzle pointed into the berm, and praying to god that an extremely expensive and hard to replace part doesn't eat poo poo while it's trying to live its best life as an ersatz LMG is not fun. I can get pretty lackadaisical with maintenance on my modern guns, but you goddamn better believe that I clean, inspect, and lube any semi-auto older than I am before range day after that.
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May 3, 2024 16:38
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Ugly In The Morning posted:His slides and photos from Korea should be digitized soon. Mostly just pictures of cargo planes and battleships but that kind of rules. From what I remember from school days, we would use blank pieces of white paper to give slides some sort of background for scanning. Would that work for you?
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May 3, 2024 17:05
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Ugly In The Morning posted:His slides and photos from Korea should be digitized soon. Mostly just pictures of cargo planes and battleships but that kind of rules. You can absolutely scan slides. I've done it for archives. If you've got a really nice flat bed with good enough DPI there are inserts that you can use to hold the slides and get a proper scan of them. Otherwise there are dedicated slide scanners that are less expensive but also have the appropriate DPI - theyr'e less expensive because the image bed is that much smaller. You can get a cheap slide scanner for ~$50-100.
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May 3, 2024 17:21
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At $1.50 per slide you can probably pick up an Epson v550 or even v600 from your local Craigslist equivalent and do it yourself.
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May 3, 2024 17:30
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Most slide scanners can also handle negatives, although to be honest I usually find the resolution lacking if it was quality film. If it was snaps taken with a brownie and you don't care about seeing the film grain they're fine, but but if it was an actual high quality camera you'll be loving shocked how much detail there is if you pull it out. I'm talking reading headlines on newspapers in peoples hands if it was a really nice, fancy camera.
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May 3, 2024 17:33
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Yeah if you really want to pay big bucks for a Plustek then you can get incredible resolutions out of even 35mm film, not to mention 120.
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May 3, 2024 17:34
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I have an old HP Envy (?) scanner that works pretty well for slides. It's got the transparency insert in the lid and all.
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May 3, 2024 18:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:You can absolutely scan slides. I've done it for archives. These are also family photos that cannot be replaced if something goes wrong.
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May 4, 2024 01:51
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Ugly In The Morning posted:These are also family photos that cannot be replaced if something goes wrong. It's basically impossible to gently caress up scanning a slide or a negative so badly you damage it. Like, you could, but in much the same way as it's probably possible for someone to injure themselves so badly they require hospitalization while wiping their rear end. Managing to do so says more about someone as a person than it does the risk of the venture. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 02:55 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 02:34
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I, uh, think OP meant that the irreplaceable family photos should be digitized ASAP, i.e. before something goes wrong and they were lost.
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May 4, 2024 02:53
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Man, I hope. But I'm now imagining someone so scared of scanning, they manage to accidentally fumble and fall into the scanner, fist-first. And then smash it to pieces with their irreplaceable photo inside.
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May 4, 2024 13:35
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I believe it was in this thread someone was asking about finding blueprints for old battleships. Well its not quite a full blueprint, but I was at a friend's house and they had some of these books. I flipped through the USS Iowa one for a bit, and god that book is incredible.
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May 5, 2024 05:56
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When I was an idiot undergrad on work study I managed to gently caress up scanning slides (by scanning them in at like 171x200 because I was untrained and just doing things by rote; the slides themselves were unharmed)
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May 5, 2024 08:55
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I'd like to find a good book on the tank development during early decades. Bonus points if it can explain the stupider enduring ideas some nations had. Why did French built such a huge tanks with single man turrets? A turret with a room for only the commander who also has to operate the machine gun is such a stupendously idiotic concept I can't understand what kind of brainworm would cause it. Why did the Brits built tanks with dedicated AP and HE ammunition? Why did a vehicular powerhouse like US have to equip their tanks with a radial aircraft engine? On the other hand, why did the Soviets end up with so much better tank engine than anyone else with the V-2?
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May 5, 2024 14:54
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Saukkis posted:Why did the Brits built tanks with dedicated AP and HE ammunition? This bit is easy enough. The concept was you would have cruiser tanks (basically, descendants of cavalry) who fought other tanks - hence, small high velocity guns firing AP. Small makes it easier to get high velocity, but also it means shells not big enough for good HE. Meanwhile, you'd also have infantry tanks designed to do the WW1 job of breaching trenches and supporting and fighting infantry (and e.g. blockhouses) rather than fighting other tanks, that's what the cruisers are for. Slow (you are keeping up with infantry on foot), well armoured, good HE. Plus also light tanks basically doing the job of light cavalry in scouting, so, fast, at the expense of basically everything else. Turns out we weren't fighting WW1 mark 2, though, plus you tend to end up with an infantry tank fighting another tank and a cavalry tank having to fight infantry a lot of the time, whoops. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 15:23
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feedmegin posted:This bit is easy enough. The concept was you would have cruiser tanks (basically, descendants of cavalry) who fought other tanks - hence, small high velocity guns firing AP. Small makes it easier to get high velocity, but also it means shells not big enough for good HE. Meanwhile, you'd also have infantry tanks designed to do the WW1 job of breaching trenches and supporting and fighting infantry (and e.g. blockhouses) rather than fighting other tanks, that's what the cruisers are for. Slow (you are keeping up with infantry on foot), well armoured, good HE. Plus also light tanks basically doing the job of light cavalry in scouting, so, fast, at the expense of basically everything else. Noting that in the 30's gun development means you literally do have to make that choice - the Germans did it with the Pz3 and Pz4, just to a lesser extreme. Only the long 75mm gun was able to do both roles satisfiability, and everyone transitioned to that as soon as they could at basically the same time. For French tank design - in hindsight they were wrong, but if you think the next war involves a repeat of large set-piece offensives against fixed positions where the battle is planned out in advance and the main role of a tank is to cross a blasted landscape, survive anything that it being thrown at it, and support the infantry as they seize the objective, then it does actually make sense to optimise for armour and stability and the commander isn't actually going to be doing anything dynamic so you can give him the gun to operate anyway. If you have manpower concerns then a 2 person tank lets you generate a lot more mass that a 4 or 5 person tank will. e: something else to be said about the benefit of hindsight - it's worth noting that in 1941-2 the Germans and Soviets continue to invest heavily into the heavy/breakthrough tanks, and even in 1944 the Western Allies keep circling around the question of whether its worthwhile them going to the trouble of fielding a dedicated breakthrough tank. They don't, but the T28 gets to the prototype stage because the idea was taken seriously that the battlefield conditions that would require what in 1940 would be called an Infantry Tank might emerge. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:42 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 15:38
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Saukkis posted:Why did a vehicular powerhouse like US have to equip their tanks with a radial aircraft engine? On the other hand, why did the Soviets end up with so much better tank engine than anyone else with the V-2? In the WW2 era the requirements for a tank engine were quite distinct from anything else. You needed 300-400hp (far more than would be found in a commercial truck or heavy goods vehicle at the time) in a package that was compact and light (thus ruling out using a large internal combustion engine from a locomotive or marine source) and which was reliable and durable (so ruling out high-tuned automotive/racing units that made the required power and were light/small enough). Without developing an entirely bespoke power unit, the best starting point turned out to be to use an aero-engine. They were powerful, light, compact and specifically designed to put out high power for long periods at constant speed. If they're de-rated, have their crankcases and output bearings beefed up to take the torsional/shock forces of land use and have a decent cooling system fitted, they can make good tank engines. British tank development only really started delivering world-class products when they began using derivatives of the R-R Merlin (the Meteor and the Meteorite) - everything before that was hobbled either in reliability or performance by underpowered/overworked drivetrains. The US had been fans of the compact, lightweight radial engine for small/medium tanks right back to the M2 Light Tank. The R975 (built in land-going form by Continental) was a variant of an under-used member of the Wright Whirlwind family - a basic design that had proven itself since the 1920s and was well-suited to mass production, yet that specific version of the Whirlwind wasn't in demand for aero use, so using it in a tank wouldn't be hindering availability for aircraft. It met the power, weight, reliability and availability requirements, so why not use it? There were projects to develop bespoke power units for the Lee and the Sherman, which led to the Chrysler Multibank unit. Even though it was built out of parts from existing Chrysler car engines, that it was such an odd design (30 cylinders in five banks of six) shows why developing tank units from scratch is often not a good ratio of effort/reward. When diesel power for the Sherman was wanted, again no existing unit met the specific limits of size, power, weight and reliability. GM was mass-producing its two-stroke diesel engine for trucks and boats, so they siamesed two units together onto one output. That unit actually originated with the British, who desperately needed better units than the adapted London bus engines or the WW1-era Liberty engine they were using at the time. Better diesel power for the M4 came about by giving the bigger Wright Cyclone radial engine to Caterpillar and having them convert it to diesel operation. There was also a Ford-built V8 gasoline unit, which also had its origins in the aviation world, being a simplified and 'rugged-ised' version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin (as being built by Ford of Britain) with four cylinders lopped off. So of the five engines used in the M4/Sherman, three of them had their origins in aircraft. And the other two were based on existing automotive engines, but used in multiple. Even when you have the industrial capacity of the 1940s USA, you don't waste effort and resources on a bespoke product if you can adapt an existing one. A huge part of why the US was the Arsenal of Democracy was because American industry was very good at seeing what existing products (and parts of products) you can keep using, and so gaining efficiency and economies of scale rather than deciding to build a bespoke power unit for the M4 and ending up with a nearly-1000cu.-capacity nine-cylinder radial engine of about 350hp which is very similar to an existing nearly-1000cu.-capacity nine-cylinder radial engine of about 350hp but entirely incompatible with it.
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May 5, 2024 15:48
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Saukkis posted:I'd like to find a good book on the tank development during early decades. Bonus points if it can explain the stupider enduring ideas some nations had. Conservatism. The French infantry liked the Renault FT so their requirements for new tanks were often "that again but bigger". Even the Char B evolved from a much smaller tank that was essentially a bigger Renault FT. Yuri Pasholok's articles on French tanks that I translated are actually very in depth. https://www.tankarchives.ca/p/lend-lease-impressions.html quote:Why did the Brits built tanks with dedicated AP and HE ammunition? 40 mm was considered too small for an effective HE shell, 57 mm was better but it needed two kinds of fuses to be effective and it was considered too complicated for a loader to manage in the heat of battle. As far as I can tell some British officers didn't even trust their loaders to not mix up HE and AP in the first place. Meanwhile the Americans made a perfectly serviceable 57 mm HE shell that the Soviets gladly used in their 6-pounders.
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May 5, 2024 17:19
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Alchenar posted:For French tank design - in hindsight they were wrong, but if you think the next war involves a repeat of large set-piece offensives against fixed positions where the battle is planned out in advance and the main role of a tank is to cross a blasted landscape, survive anything that it being thrown at it, and support the infantry as they seize the objective, then it does actually make sense to optimise for armour and stability and the commander isn't actually going to be doing anything dynamic so you can give him the gun to operate anyway. If you have manpower concerns then a 2 person tank lets you generate a lot more mass that a 4 or 5 person tank will. The manpower thing really can't be understated, France suffered enormous casualties in WW1 and had not really fully recovered by the time WW2 kicked off. There are a couple of other reasons for their reliance on one man turrets and small crews, though. Firstly, the 2-man Renault FT had proven to be the best tank of WW1, so they decided to go with the winning formula. They kept it in service for a long time after the war, and then looked for direct replacements using the same basic plan. Secondly, the French military had huge budget problems in the interwar years. WW1 had been ruinously expensive, the interwar economy wasn't great (what with the Depression and all), and the mostly left-wing civilian governments did not trust the sometimes fashy military. It turned out that the biggest fascist danger was not an internal coup, but they had no way of knowing that at the time. The Chieftain has a good video that goes into some of this in nice detail: https://youtu.be/ZqoPZK6gyao?si=uRT_65-IADDLuEC9
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May 5, 2024 17:19
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Looking out for trouble at the British Museum's "Legion: Life in the Roman Army" exhibition:
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May 5, 2024 17:51
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Saukkis posted:I'd like to find a good book on the tank development during early decades. This guy: Ensign Expendable posted:Yuri Pasholok's articles on French tanks that I translated are actually very in depth. is too polite to directly plug his poo poo beyond pointing you to an article someone else wrote that he translated, but if you have WW2 tank-related questions or curiosity in general go poke around his blog. Seriously, it's probably the best non-video source of WW2 tank info on the internet, and I'd argue the best source, video or written, if you value things like "well researched" and "engages with archival material." Which you should. His Soviet stuff is over-all better than his non-Soviet stuff but that's not throwing any shade at all at his non-Soviet stuff. As random example, here is an article he wrote about changing Soviet tank nomenclature, including a pretty extensive chunk on what was going on pre-WW2. What constitutes a light tank vs a heavy tank and how do we anticipate using these? That might pretty directly apply to your question. Then, at a glance, he's got something like 20-25 articles on the four major pre-war German tank models, the Pz 1, Pz 2, Pz 3, and Pz 4. Probably a third of those are directly about the development of the really early stuff, not the later uses they were put to during the war. Probably some good reading in there for you if you want to know wtf about pre-war tanks. And that's just German, he's got even more Soviet, plus a fuckton of western allies. Here's a randomly selected article on the first model of British Cruiser tank, for example So, yeah, have fun digging around in there. Oh, and he's written a couple of books too. Here's the one on the development of the T-34. edit: oh, and the blog's got a gently caress ton of non-tank stuff to, despite its name. Want to know about Soviet artillery, or weird inter-war small arms? Have you ever even heard of the Kalashnikov-Petrov Carbine?? I hadn't until I started looking for a good link to throw out as an example and I'm kind of a nerd about this stuff. Goddamn what a weird rifle. It looks like a Garand and an SKS split a bottle of paint thinner and indulged in a night of ugly sin. edit: that article isn't by him, checking the by-line. Still, lots of good stuff on the blog, both original and translated. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:11 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 17:52
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FishFood posted:The manpower thing really can't be understated, France suffered enormous casualties in WW1 and had not really fully recovered by the time WW2 kicked off. I'd imagine it's not easy to sell the idea of potentially doubling the headcount in your tank battalions, either, and even if you had a solid rationale for the proposal, other branches would immediately shoot it down or demand similar increases in their personnel allotments. Also you will need to fit everyone inside the armour, which makes your design a lot bigger and heavier, or lighter armoured if you want to keep the same weight budget and engine and suspension.
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May 5, 2024 18:04
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feedmegin posted:This bit is easy enough. The concept was you would have cruiser tanks (basically, descendants of cavalry) I will note I wonder how much of this was institutional...coming out of WW1 you have a bunch of cavalry regiments who are used to riding around on actual horses wondering what they do next, and having something to do that is not *shudder* being in the infantry would probably have been attractive, and they would have had pull.
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May 5, 2024 18:29
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