336 replies to this topic

[EnsignExpendable]

I don't think radiomen as a dedicated crew member have existed any time recently.

[Xlucine]

Shows how long the argument's been going on

[Zinegata]

 blurr91, on Feb 07 2013 - 20:20, said:

Hey man, do not mock Gundams.  Mobile suit is the most effective and sophisticated warmachine ever envisioned.  An 18 meter tall humanoid like robot flying in the sky and armed with a giant assault rifle, a light sabre, and a shield strapped to its back is a force of nature to be reckoned with.

Yes but Gundams need Minovsky physics to work    (Yes, I know my Gundam too)

Edited by Zinegata, Feb 08 2013 - 02:12.

[Toxn]

 blurr91, on Feb 07 2013 - 20:20, said:

Hey man, do not mock Gundams.  Mobile suit is the most effective and sophisticated warmachine ever envisioned.  An 18 meter tall humanoid like robot flying in the sky and armed with a giant assault rifle, a light sabre, and a shield strapped to its back is a force of nature to be reckoned with.

Just a pity that its also an 18m-tall target.
Magella ftw, basically

[Toxn]

Just to completely derail the thread, is there anyone else who gets a kick out of playing Battletech (or an equivalent) using only conventional armor?
Wrecking an atlas or two with 20th-century combined arms tactics is a beautiful way to troll other players...

[Toxn]

 Zinegata, on Feb 08 2013 - 02:11, said:

Yes but Gundams need Minovsky physics to work    (Yes, I know my Gundam too)

I love that Minovsky particles were such a blatant fudge to favour giant mechs, but that they didn't go the way of most magic physics solutions and turn into all-purpose plot-hole fillers.

[Rhomer]

 Toxn, on Feb 08 2013 - 10:45, said:

I love that Minovsky particles were such a blatant fudge to favour giant mechs, but that they didn't go the way of most magic physics solutions and turn into all-purpose plot-hole fillers.

In the original UC series. the rest of them were full of crap like that. Remember the magical GN pixie dust that had a newly discovered use or ability every other episode?

[Toxn]

 Rhomer, on Feb 08 2013 - 12:39, said:

In the original UC series. the rest of them were full of crap like that. Remember the magical GN pixie dust that had a newly discovered use or ability every other episode?

True, but for canon purposes its almost always best to tune your nostalgia filters to the original series of any given property.
New star wars, anyone?

[Antosha_]

Quote

Look at the ‘famous’  or ‘successful’ medium tanks of WW2:
The Sherman: generally hated for a lack of protection- scorned by the Germans for the ease with which the ammunition could be set on fire. Cue ‘tommy cooker’ or ‘ronson’ moniker. Made in huge numbers and lost in large quantities too.
The T-34: a badly made, crude tank with relatively poor armour benefitting from the surprise that it even existed but quickly knocked out. Made in enormous numbers and burned in equally large numbers too.
The Panther: when it worked it was a powerful design but with seriously poor side armour so when it is flanked was knocked out easily. So mechanically unreliable it was never able to be used to its full potential. Made in modest numbers and neither reliable enough to be useful or armoured enough to survive a coordinated enemy.
Were any of them really successful as a tank design? Or was their success in the case of the Sherman or T-34 not just due to the numbers used?

Basically I read this as
"Yes I realize "MTs" were by far the most produced tanks in WW2, but they were all terrible and here is why..."


I loled pretty hard at this. He tries to casually and with a few sentences totally discount the most important AFVs in the war (missed one btw, the Pz IV).
Why did all the main combatants of WW2 focus on the production of said "medium tank" when they were all capable of fielding (and did, to varying degrees) heavier designs?

This forum General apparently knows better than the command staffs and governments of the people who actually fought the damn war.

Did not read the rest of the thread, will not read any responses , ciao

[Rhomer]

 Toxn, on Feb 08 2013 - 13:08, said:

True, but for canon purposes its almost always best to tune your nostalgia filters to the original series of any given property.
New star wars, anyone?

Very true. The later you get into the UC universe, the goofier stuff becomes for some reason. 0083 for example features the plot surrounding an intensely specialized mobile suit designed to launch a weapon that by treaty nobody should even have...and then actually ARMING it with said weapon during its test trials...this despite the fact that nuclear devices within the series arent even large enough to warrant something as expensive or large as a MS to be its delivery system.

Thats when the whole series jumped the space shark

[CPLTrevoga]

 Vollketten, on Dec 26 2012 - 18:01, said:

in a production war of WW2 where large numbers of reasonably reliable vehicles were more important than a few heavy tanks meant tanks like the Sherman and T-34 which could be produced in massive numbers had an automatic preference to armies and politicians over heavier vehicles. The problem was that they lacked protection.

The  costs was always concern in wars.  Always.  


Even heaviest tanks could be destroyed by artillery and air.  Basically, there is no perfect protection.

 Vollketten, on Dec 26 2012 - 18:01, said:

Crews knew that if they met an enemy tank their weaker armour and weaker gun would mean they were at a disadvantage and their casualty rates were dreadful. For some armies though men’s lives were cheaper than vehicles. The apparent success of the medium tank in WW2 then comes due to:
1) an unnecessary cost in human lives – ‘we have a huge manpower pool, they do not so we can use it to our advantage’
2) the need for mass production- ‘we can produce 10 tanks for each one they make’ and standardization of a poor design makes repairs easier
3) they won the war-well in fairness the Germans were pretty screwed from the start and the overproduction of medium tanks did not necessarily make their defeat any more inevitable.

Numbers win the wars.  Your problem is that you are looking at this like a game of football.  Technology of Germany wasn't that superior to really stand up to numerical inferiority.  Germans did not lack the capacity to mass produce stuff.  They just chose not to.

 Vollketten, on Dec 26 2012 - 18:01, said:

Look at the ‘famous’  or ‘successful’ medium tanks of WW2:
The Sherman: generally hated for a lack of protection- scorned by the Germans for the ease with which the ammunition could be set on fire. Cue ‘tommy cooker’ or ‘ronson’ moniker. Made in huge numbers and lost in large quantities too.
The T-34: a badly made, crude tank with relatively poor armour benefitting from the surprise that it even existed but quickly knocked out. Made in enormous numbers and burned in equally large numbers too.
The Panther: when it worked it was a powerful design but with seriously poor side armour so when it is flanked was knocked out easily. So mechanically unreliable it was never able to be used to its full potential. Made in modest numbers and neither reliable enough to be useful or armoured enough to survive a coordinated enemy.

T-34 and Shermans have similar production numbers are similar.  Panther is not a medium tank, its has the same weight as IS-2.  It was heavy tank according to Russian specs.  By the way, during Operation Bagration and destruction of Army Group Center in 1944, most of the Russian tanks where T-34-76s.  They faced panthers and tigers, yet Germans still lost the whole Army.

 Vollketten, on Dec 26 2012 - 18:01, said:

Were any of them really successful as a tank design? Or was their success in the case of the Sherman or T-34 not just due to the numbers used?
The mythos of the medium tank is that it won WW2. Yes, Germany was beaten but it was beaten by its own corruption, incompentance and the enormnous produciton capability of the allies. Not by some flimsy and substandard tanks.

As if allies had less corrupt, incompetent leaders? Germany was't fighting alone btw.  It had most of the Europe working for them and fighting with them.  I think you are missing the bigger picture here.  Tanks did not win the war, but it was part of the success.  Allies also had great air advantage and other factors.

[Toxn]

 Rhomer, on Feb 08 2013 - 15:40, said:

Very true. The later you get into the UC universe, the goofier stuff becomes for some reason. 0083 for example features the plot surrounding an intensely specialized mobile suit designed to launch a weapon that by treaty nobody should even have...and then actually ARMING it with said weapon during its test trials...this despite the fact that nuclear devices within the series arent even large enough to warrant something as expensive or large as a MS to be its delivery system.

Thats when the whole series jumped the space shark

Yeah, and then it gets rebooted ad nauseum. Although, for some reason, I'm pretty okay with Gundam SEED.
Hmmm, this actually warrants an off-topic topic.

[Wyvern2]

on the issue of the shermans notorious tendency to brew up, apparently thats total hogwash as the sherman had a roughly on par chance of catching fire to the PzIV, its just that the brits/amis complained more apparently

[balmung60]

 Wyvern2, on Feb 17 2013 - 05:53, said:

on the issue of the shermans notorious tendency to brew up, apparently thats total hogwash as the sherman had a roughly on par chance of catching fire to the PzIV, its just that the brits/amis complained more apparently

Doesn't help that most of the Sherman-related complaints are in a language most Americans and Brits speak and the Panzer ones aren't. Also really doesn't help that the Brits had a nasty habit of stuffing Shermans full of as much ammo as they could, safe storage be damned, thus making the vehicle far more likely to catch fire.

[Zinegata]

 balmung60, on Feb 17 2013 - 06:00, said:

Doesn't help that most of the Sherman-related complaints are in a language most Americans and Brits speak and the Panzer ones aren't. Also really doesn't help that the Brits had a nasty habit of stuffing Shermans full of as much ammo as they could, safe storage be damned, thus making the vehicle far more likely to catch fire.

That, and the Brits have this nasty habit of sending their tanks lemming-like towards massed anti-tank guns and then only wondering what the hell went wrong once a couple dozen tanks were already burning.

Seriously, pretty much every major tank battle involving the Brits in ETO (Goodwood, Market-Garden) involved at least one massed tank Turkey shoot where they were on the receiving end of the punishment. By contrast, the Wermacht had to work for the few cases it was able to bag a significant number of US tanks (e.g. they had to flank and pincer a US tank battalion); at least after the initial defeats like Kasserine.

Edited by Zinegata, Feb 17 2013 - 12:24.

[Wyvern2]

The US was really not all that much better as far as adapting goes, when germans had to assault AT guns, they also got screwed over, in Russia for example, at Kursk, or during their ill fated attacks againt british AT guns. its usually hard to do much strategical attacking when you have to break through defences all the time, other then hammer it with arty and air, and close in, the brits were actually damn adaptable with all their various "Funnies". How many times did the germans actually successfully attack, or counterattack though, not all that often in 1944+.

[Zinegata]

 Wyvern2, on Feb 19 2013 - 04:36, said:

The US was really not all that much better as far as adapting goes, when germans had to assault AT guns, they also got screwed over, in Russia for example, at Kursk, or during their ill fated attacks againt british AT guns. its usually hard to do much strategical attacking when you have to break through defences all the time, other then hammer it with arty and air, and close in, the brits were actually damn adaptable with all their various "Funnies". How many times did the germans actually successfully attack, or counterattack though, not all that often in 1944+.

German counter-attacks also petered out pretty badly most of the time, but really it's the Brits (or more correctly Monty) who persisted in this idea that a sudden all-out tank rush can produce a breakthrough. He burned up a whole brigade at El Alamein trying this, but instead of learning his lesson he persisted in sending in bigger and bigger tank formations into the fire; culminating in that wonderful Market-Garden operation wherein he sent a whole Corps to attack up one bloody road.

US forces suffered badly when they got caught in an ATG trap (nobody could get around this), but at the very least most of the time only platoons or companies were mauled; not entire regiments or Divisions.

Edited by Zinegata, Feb 19 2013 - 04:44.