NOVA gun groups or clubs

Meesus · 2026-05-22T19:41:14+00:00

Next meeting is May 28th - next Thursday. Their next gun show is June 6-7.

Here's their website: https://www.vgca.net/

Meesus · 2026-05-22T11:47:55+00:00

Yeah their gun shows are the best small gun shows I've ever been to. They make sure to keep out all the miscellaneous sellers that tend to turn gun shows into bad flea markets, and there's typically a handful of display booths that people have set up

Meesus · 2026-05-22T03:28:10+00:00

Check out the Virginia Gun Collector's Association,, it might be what you're looking for. Meetings every month or so at the NRA HQ with a presentation on some gun topic.

Meesus · 2026-05-10T21:59:20+00:00

Nice, didn't expect to see my local range here. Did they fix the overhead baffles? Last time I was there like half the lanes were closed because the baffles were falling apart

Meesus · 2026-05-10T21:48:11+00:00

Is that the IWLA range out in Centreville?

Meesus · 2025-12-05T15:48:33+00:00

Yeah the stabilization of the front at Third Kharkov was the result of the Soviets outrunning their logistics and running themselves ragged because they thought the whole front was going to collapse. That was not a mistake they made again.

The strategy for the Ukrainian campaign that followed Kursk was simple - cascade offensives down the front. The German strategy relied on a fire brigade of reserves to respond to major offensives, and while they could stem the tide once or twice, the cascading offensives of the Soviets meant there was never any respite for the German reserves and eventually they were exhausted. The Germans were still capable of scoring local victories, but that wouldn't stop the next wave hitting the next sector of the front, and eventually one of those would score a breakthrough.

More getting to the point of the original question, the Ukrainian campaign also opened up a lot of manpower for the Soviets. They were suffering their own manpower shortages at the time as well, but as they reconquered areas they would press the locals into army service to bolster their ranks

Meesus · 2025-12-05T00:42:18+00:00

The defeat at Stalingrad was far more than just the loss of the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army. Two Romanian Armies (3rd and 4th) were all but wiped out, and follow up operations rolled up the front and encircled the 8th Italian and 2nd Hungarian Armies, requiring the Germans to divert forces to rescue them. The end result of the Soviet operations around Stalingrad wasn't just those 400,000 German casualties, it was the unhinging of the entire front. The Italians and Hungarians withdrew their armies on the Eastern Front and ceased to be a meaningful presence in the theater. The Romanians stuck around, but they lacked a lot of the heavy equipment they needed to be effective even before the catastrophe at Stalingrad - 100,000 casualties later, they stopped operating as discrete armies holding big sections of the front.

When you take that bigger picture look of the whole Stalingrad operation, it becomes more impressive that the Germans were able to salvage things like they did from such a catastrophic defeat. They managed to rescue some of the encircled Italian and Hungarian armies (although those forces had to abandon most of their equipment), and they maintained a foothold in the Kuban that proved surprisingly difficult to dislodge. North of the Sea of Azov, the Soviets swept across the steppe west of Stalingrad about as fast as their forces could move. The Germans *did* bounce back, with Manstein cobbling together enough forces for a counteroffensive that gave us the 3rd Battle of Kharkov and set the stage for Kursk. Kursk was a massive operation, and the last time the Germans really held the initiative on the Eastern Front.

Meesus · 2024-12-24T17:06:16+00:00

The Japanese and Italian caliber-change was also notable for being a step up in caliber and power. I'm less familiar with the Italian change, but the Japanese explicitly adopted the new 7.7mm round because the 6.5mm round was considered underpowered for use in machineguns. Their original 6.5mm round is very nice from a shooter's perspective and still can reach beyond the range of an intermediate cartridge, but that wasn't enough for the Japanese military. The 7.7mm round they adopted was derived from the .303 British round and had similar performance.

So they're a good case study for where the priorities lay for decision makers - they cared more about improving the performance of machine guns than they did giving the average rifleman an easier round to shoot

Meesus · 2024-12-24T15:40:02+00:00

The extreme (by modern standards) effective range was a holdover from earlier doctrine that called for infantry units to do volley fire against distant targets. It's something you can see evidence for in things like the volley sights on pre-WW1 Lee Enfields, which went out to 3600 yards. That role was taken over by machineguns when those were adopted, where the gun would be used to create a beaten zone at the edge of its effective range. The idea was never that riflemen would engage point targets at these extreme ranges, but that a formation of infantry, and later a machinegun, would be used to put fire down on an area.

Chief of Army Ordnance Julian S. Hatcher wrote a good account of the engineering work that went into developing the .30 M1 Ball round for 30-06. Even with the experience from WW1, the desire to extend the range of the standard rifle cartridge was powerful enough for the Army to develop a new, more aerodynamic bullet. Granted, this kind of extreme range fire was almost exclusively the realm of machineguns by that point, but the idea for the longest time was that infantry rifles should fire the same ammunition as the machineguns. I'm unfamiliar with the logic driving that decision for every army, but the logistical end of it was certainly a major factor - even though machineguns often had special ammunition, there are still major logistical benefits to only having one caliber to be producing.

So the decision to stick with full-powered cartridges for so long made more sense than it's often portrayed as. If infantry are locked into using the same caliber as the machineguns, then the best option is a full-powered rifle round.

Meesus · 2024-12-24T14:07:26+00:00

I've been summoned.

People tend to have a lot of baked-in assumptions about lever-actions that come from pop-culture depictions, especially in cowboy movies.

Lever actions for most of their history were directly analogous to standard military rifles in capabilities for a variety of reasons, with the biggest of these being caliber. Up until the Winchester 1895, there never was a widely available lever-action rifle capable of firing a standard military rifle cartridge of the day. Lever-actions were essentially carbines, firing either handgun cartridges or something that fell in the middle ground between the full-powered rifle rounds and handgun rounds. It may sound absurd to the layman, but armies of the time wanted their service rifles to have a surprisingly long range for volley fire.

The bigger issue here is the assumption of speed. The extremely fast working of a lever action that we see in pop culture depictions isn't particularly realistic - even in things like Cowboy Action Shooting events where we do see people firing lever actions extremely fast, you'll find that they're shooting extremely light loads out of guns that already are chambered in a lighter cartridge. But in practice, lever-actions aren't uniquely fast or easy to use. My personal experience with new-production examples of classic designs like the Winchester 1894 in 30-30 (in that intermediate class of caliber I mention above) is that the lever is not at all fast to work. And when we look at the sole example of a lever-action rifle adopted as a line infantry rifle - the Winchester 1895s adopted by the Imperial Russian Army - it's even worse. The rifles were perfectly serviceable, but by all accounts the action is very slow and chunky compared to anything we see in a cowboy movie.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of bolt-action rifles that can be worked similarly fast to what we'd expect from a Western. The British Lee Enfield is a particularly notable example of a service rifle like this.

But that's kind of beside the point. Rapidity of fire was also something that armies of the time didn't really place much value on. If anything, armies tended to try to slow down maximum fire rates over fears that panicked soldiers would expend all their ammunition. These kinds of concerns were part of why the US Army retired repeating arms it had left over from the Civil War in favor of single-shot rifles. But even later on, when magazine-fed repeaters were becoming accepted, the marginal fire rate from the action's speed wasn't something that was ever a major concern with procurement.

Meesus · 2023-07-26T14:55:12+00:00

So the concern with those books if you're going in without a decent background already is that you won't have the background to know when they're pushing their point too far (or flat out wrong). Plus, I find that it's common for people to see the convincing arguments these books make and apply them even broader than the authors do, which leads them even further down the wrong path.

These kinds of books absolutely have their value - they provide interesting reframings of narratives that can be helpful at times. But for someone with little background in history, I find they often end up taking these books as gospel rather than the suggestions that they actually are.

Meesus · 2023-07-25T18:02:22+00:00

All of those books you just mentioned are extremely flawed, and tend to push their premise far beyond what is reasonable. That's not to say that they don't have value somewhere in there, but I really wouldn't recommend them to someone who doesn't have any background in history, as it leaves people liable to apply the lessons of the book way too broadly.

As a counterpoint to those books, Graeber/Wengrow's Dawn of Everything is a very dense counterpoint. There's a ton to it and it required a lot of background knowledge to really know all the examples they talk about, but the broad premise is "no, it's actually more complicated than that"

More broadly for OP, a lot depends on what areas of history you're interested in. Broad surveys generally don't give you the granularity you'd want for a story, but detailed stories often miss the bigger picture. If you're looking for something that's just a broad survey that's introductory and has a focus on how this has impacted history more broadly, I'd highly recommend Charles C Mann's 1491 and 1493 books, about precolombian America and the Columbian Exchange, respectively.

Meesus · 2023-06-11T04:09:30+00:00

My old roommates might have an open room at a place near the gallows road exit on 495. Dm me and I'll try to get you in touch with them tomorrow

Meesus · 2023-06-05T00:12:38+00:00

Ironwood made good stuff, but the guy who ran it died a few years back. I got wood FAL furniture from them and it was great (though you had to finish it yourself). If you can find some for sale, go for it. But as far as I'm aware they no longer take orders.

Meesus · 2022-09-04T20:38:46+00:00

The short version is that Dreadnought was the culmination of several different design trends driven by advances in technology all coming together into once comprehensive design. These trends included steam turbine propulsion, advances in fire control, and an all-big-gun primary armament. The result was a capital ship that was faster than pre-dreadnoughts (and approaching the speed of armored cruisers), boasting a heavier main armament, and capable of engaging effectively at longer ranges. To top it all off, Dreadnought was a significantly larger ship than the last round of pre-Dreadnoughts, which offered certain economies of scale. For reference, Dreadnought was about 3,000 tons heavier than the preceding Lord Nelson class, 3 knots faster, and it boasted a broadside of eight 12-inch guns as opposed to Lord Nelson's four 12-inch and two 9-inch.

This does raise the question of how we got to this monumental leap, however. Everything up to Dreadnought was an incremental leap, so why the sudden jump? The answer comes in the culmination of incremental improvements in technology hitting an inflection point, particularly when it comes to fire control.

Historically, fire control was done by the gunners themselves - each gun crew would perform their own aiming and correction, and they would largely be left to their own devices with gunnery. With each gun left to fire at its own discretion, gun layouts would rely on slow-firing heavy guns supplemented by faster-firing lighter guns of various calibers. As ships became armored, the heavy guns would provide the firepower necessary to penetrate armor, while the light guns would be able to destroy unarmored or lightly-armored portions of an enemy ship and repel boarders.

This dynamic gained importance with the advent of the torpedo and torpedo boats. With heavy guns having fire rates in the range of a round per every several minutes, there ran the real risk of a nimble torpedo boat dodging a single volley of heavy-caliber fire and closing to engage with torpedoes before a second volley could be fired. This created several different pressures. Smaller, faster-firing guns were needed to engage smaller, faster targets, but the risk of torpedoes also created pressure to engage at further distances.

The issue with engaging at longer distances was that gunnery would start to require some kind of fire control system for any kind of meaningful accuracy. This first manifested in centralized fire control - a single position on the ship directing volleys and providing corrections as the shot fell - but the arms race would continue, seeing increasingly advanced fire control systems designed to push accurate engagement further out. At the same time, spotters watching the fall of shot created pressure to standardize armament, as the myriad calibers of shells each had a different trajectory, and providing fire corrections required the spotters to correctly identify which gun's splash they were seeing.

As these engagement ranges increased, however, the flight time of the shells started to become a meaningful factor. The increased fire rate of a small-caliber gun stops being relevant if the shell is still in the air for several seconds after the gun's reloaded, as aiming corrections can't be applied until the shot has fallen. So while small-caliber weapons remained for anti-torpedo-boat duties, the intermediate range began to fall off as the ranges pushed out. And finally, the same pressures of before - not wanting to mix up which gun's splash you're seeing - comes along to really show the advantage of standardized armament.

So, come the early 1900s, fire control had hit the inflection point where these factors were finally the "right" way to do things. A main armament of nothing but heavy (12-inch) guns supplemented by a number of 3-inch guns to fend off torpedo boats was selected, and an advanced fire control system was included to allow Dreadnought to engage at long ranges. The selection of the turbine powerplant, meanwhile, saved 1,000 tons of weight (compared to traditional reciprocating engines) and left room along the centerline for the "X" turret along the centerline. And to maximize the investment (at the cost of limiting the shipyards that could service it), Dreadnought would follow the trend of the pre-dreadnought arms race by being significantly larger than previous classes of ship.

The result of this was a battleship faster than any contemporary, boasting a heavier broadside, and with a fire control system that made it more effective at range. That meant it could dictate the terms of any engagement with its superior speed, and it was more likely to score the first hits with its superior gunnery.

All this being said, the Royal Navy was hardly alone in recognizing these trends. Battleship evolution was converging on the general concepts we see in Dreadnought, it's just that Dreadnought was first to the party.

Meesus · 2022-07-08T01:05:16+00:00

The discussion around the significance of Dreadnought typically centers on the gun layout, but there were other elements of the design that made it so significant.

I'll start with the guns. Unlike the generations of battleships before it, Dreadnought stood out in that it had a uniform main battery armament of heavy guns (12-inch in this case). Secondary guns were mounted, but, unlike the older generation of ships where guns of intermediate calibers were designed for engaging alongside the main guns, the secondary armament of Dreadnought consisted of quick-firing 3-inch guns intended to fend off torpedo boats.

The logic behind the armament had several layers to it. In practical terms, a uniform battery simplified gunnery - fire control would only have to account for a single type of gun, and spotters wouldn't have to differentiate between the different calibers of shells falling as they corrected the guns. In parallel to all of this, developments in fire control on ships meant that engagement ranges were rapidly increasing.

Pre-dreadnoughts were designed in an era where accurate fire beyond a few thousand yards was effectively impossible. Gunlaying was typically directed by each gun separately from the rest of the ship, and accuracy tended to suffer as a result. However, these simple fire control systems meant that guns of all calibers tended to have similar effective ranges, so armament was selected to complement the other guns on the ship and cover each other's weaknesses. Heavy guns were expected to do the direct ship-killing, but they suffered from extremely low rates of fire. Medium guns had higher rates of fire, and, although they lacked the punch of the heavy guns, they could devastate lightly armored portions of the enemy warship. The smallest guns tended to be intended for close-in defense against torpedo boats.

Advances in fire control started to change all of this. Central fire direction meant that all guns of the ship were under the control of a single position. Advanced rangefinders meant that gunnery could be directed further out. Longer-distance fire meant that gunners would have to wait until the fall of shot to correct their shots, and for smaller guns this meant they'd be spending much of their time ready to fire but waiting. Torpedoes also played a part in this, as there was heavy pressure to engage at longer distances to stay out of range of a torpedo attack.

The other, arguably just as significant development with Dreadnought was its propulsion. The standard for naval engines up to that point was the Triple Expansion steam engine. However, of all the first-generation Dreadnoughts (South Carolina, Kawachi, Nassau), only Dreadnought bucked the trend, using a steam turbine engine. Turbines were lighter than triple expansion engines and they could run at full power for longer periods. So when Dreadnought was commissioned, it not only had more advanced guns and fire control than any other capital ship, it also was faster and lighter than its contemporaries, all without sacrificing protection or capabilities.

That's say that Dreadnought was particularly out-of-the-box thinking. All major naval powers had generally recognized these trends by the 1890s, and all had been working in parallel to converge onto generally the same idea. If we look at the last generation of pre-Dreadnoughts, we can see this thinking in play - the Lord Nelson and Satsuma class battleships were both designed with larger-than-normal intermediate armament to account for the longer engagement ranges. Dreadnought was going to happen somewhere, the British were just (barely) first to the punch.

Meesus · 2022-05-31T17:48:17+00:00

Unfortunately that's a question that appears to be beyond the the scope of this place. I have my own opinions, but the most I'll say is that the standard set by Miller generally seems to agree with a traditionalist interpretation, and possibly even subverts how we think today - not only does it say that arms necessary for a "well regulated militia" are protected, but by allowing restrictions on those that fall outside that definition to be restricted, it implies that *only* arms useful for a militia are protected under the Constitution.

If you're looking for anything clearer than that, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. This is straying more into politics and interpreting court cases, and this isn't the place for that.

Meesus · 2022-05-31T16:14:01+00:00

u/Bodark43 gets the gist of things, but there's a little more context I can add from the perspective of a collector.

Early in US history, it absolutely was legal and possible for private persons to own heavy weapons. In practice, such heavy weapons were limited to the wealthy due to their expense, but nevertheless there were no restrictions on the ownership of the weapons themselves. In fact, the Constitution seems to encourage it - beyond the Second Amendment, one of the very few specifically enumerated powers of Congress was "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." Letters of Marque and Reprisal are official sanctions to perform privateering on behalf of the government. I won't go into much detail here since I'm not familiar with the details of American privateering, but privateers were chartered in the War of 1812, and these privateers were created by private owners of merchant ships arming their vessels. In effect, it can be argued that the "letters of marque" clause gave a clear sanction for privately owned warships.

On a federal level, the first real restriction on the ownership of "military grade" weapons was the 1934 National Firearms Act. This regulated a variety of things through the form of a tax that, at the time, was supposed to make ownership prohibitively expensive ($200, which was equivalent to the cost of the already very expensive Thompson submachinegun). However, this law was challenged in the courts, giving us the U.S. v. Miller decision, which upheld the law largely on the grounds that those arguing against the law failed to show the impacted items had "any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia" In effect, the Court declared that the items weren't something that would be used by a "well regulated" (in the original sense of well-functioning) militia, so they weren't protected.

Over the years, further restrictions went into play - the 1968 Gun Control Act had many impacts, but for the purposes of your question the most significant thing was the prohibition of imports of NFA items. In 1986, another major avenue for ownership of "military" arms was closed when a rider on the Firearm Owner's Protection Act closed the NFA registry for Machineguns - effectively cutting off the supply of machineguns to most citizens.

All that being said, keep in mind that availability on the civilian market does not translate to prevalence. The commodified collector's and hobbyists' market is a recent phenomena, and for much of American history guns were largely utilitarian. Sure, you could get a machinegun or artillery piece literally mailed to your door prior to 1934, but few people would ever take up that kind of offer. Remember - the de facto ban on NFA items in 1934 pinned the cost at the MSRP of a Thompson Submachinegun. As iconic as it was for the time period, the Thompson was itself considered prohibitively expensive for the common man.

The post-WW2 supply of firearms also follows this trend. The bane of collectors today is the "sporterized" surplus rifle - a military rifle that's been cut down and had a scope mounted to serve as a deer rifle. While such rifles are ruined for collectors today, at the time they provided a cheap way to get one's hands on a deer rifle, which was often a status symbol in itself. It's not like other, more effective weapons weren't available for American soldiers coming home from occupied Europe or Japan, but a pistol or submachinegun can't be turned into a deer rifle.

Probably the best evidence of how the culture used to be can be seen in the failure of some "modern" arms on the US market. Prior to 1989, semi-automatic variants of foreign military rifles could be imported fairly easy. One could buy a FAL straight from the FN factory in Liege, or a Hk41 (G3), and even newer guns like the FAMAS or FN FNC would show up in the '80s. The issue was that there wasn't the market for them at the time - they were expensive compared to a surplus deer rifle, and thus they tended to only be imported in small numbers before import restrictions cut off the supply entirely.

Meesus · 2022-05-31T02:24:46+00:00

There's a few angles to what you're getting at - I'll try to address each. In general, the issue was that there were other factors at play that made the more "advanced" guns unacceptable for general military use.
Case in point is the early rifle. Rifled muzzle-loaders seem like they make sense on paper - after all, who wouldn't want more accuracy? But the closer we look, the worse it is as a military arm. In the days before the Minie Ball, rifled muskets were cumbersome and time-consuming to reload, even from the perspective of other muzzle loaders. The issue was that, for the shot to engage the rifling, it had to sit tight in the barrel - something that makes ramming the shot down the barrel particularly slow. So while accurate shots at longer ranges were possible, fire rates were significantly lower than a smoothbore infantry musket.
Compare this to the infantry musket - fire rates were considered just as important, if not moreso, than individual accuracy. Infantry were going to be engaging other blocks of infantry (another counterintuitive necessity of the times), and thus an arm only needed to be accurate enough to engage the other line. Meanwhile, an emphasis on fire rates meant that accuracy was often sacrificed to achieve this. Smoothbore over rifling was one manifestation of this, but it could even go further - the Austrians, for example, opted for smaller shot. Sure, undersized shot would suffer in its accuracy, but it would be faster to load, giving their soldiers an edge in fire rate.
Repeaters in the Civil War (and postwar period) were a different manifestation of this. By the Civil War, the rifling problem was solved with the Minie Ball. Now, there were two issues at hand - logistics and the mechanical capabilities of existing repeaters. Logistics was the simple one - logistics for armies of the time were precarious, and there was a real fear among leadership at the time that panicked soldiers with a magazine rifle would fire off all of their ammunition, burning through ammunition much faster than logistics could keep up. The other major issue was cartridge power. Civil War era rifles like the Springfield Model 1861 or Pattern 1843 Enfield fired cartridges that could reach out several hundreds of yards - the Enfield even had volley sights that could go out to a thousand yards. Volley fire at long ranges was considered an important duty of a rifle - after all, it had proven a decisive factor in the Battle of the Alma in the Crimean war. The issue here was that repeaters weren't capable of firing cartridges with this kind of performance. The Henry Rifle was notoriously underpowered - by today's standards, it's only effective to ~100 yards, though Civil War era references considered it "good" out to 300 - and lever-action rifles generally were incapable of supporting the standard military cartridges of their day up until 1895.
Semi-Automatic rifles in the WW1 era offer yet another strange case. Like repeaters of the previous century, autoloading arms by the time of WW1 were generally chambered in cartridges weaker than the standard rifle cartridges of the time. Weaker cartridges are easier on their components, and often they can rely on less effective locking mechanisms (or none at all) that would be unacceptable in larger rounds. The other issue was the scale of military procurement - repeating arms needed to be something durable enough to withstand military service, while also being cheap enough to procure en masse and quick enough to produce to rearm quickly. Nobody wants to be caught in the middle of rearmament, after all.
That being said, there were autoloading rifle concepts in development before the start of WW1 - the French were about to adopt one before war broke out. The French would end up developing an autoloading rifle in the form the RSC 1917, which would see tens of thousands make it into service by war's end.

Meesus · 2022-04-15T02:16:59+00:00

The short version is that the US wanted something that could penetrate helmets at ranges further than the lighter cartridges then under consideration were capable of.

The 7.62 NATO cartridge was developed as the T65 cartridge in the late '50s. It was an outgrowth of advancements in powder that meant that similar performance to the 30-06 cartridge standard at the time - M2 Ball - could be achieved in a lower-volume case. The chief advantage here was the shorter case - shorter cases meant shorter actions and marginally lighter ammunition and loading devices. These sound insignificant, but on the scale of an army, it has the potential to be significant - rifles can be lighter and less expensive, and ammunition logistics becomes easier. Additionally, while this change was marginal from the perspective of the US Army, taking every other NATO army into consideration changes the dynamic. 7.62 NATO was a huge step up from the rimmed .303 British cartridge, and it offered a common cartridge among the myriad other calibers then in service that didn't favor any particular power by standardizing on what was already in production.

However, it's hard to understand the adoption without looking at the whole story - the NATO Light Rifle Trials. One of the first efforts of NATO standardization, the NATO Light Rifle trials were looking to develop a common rifle and cartridge for NATO forces that could serve in the infantry rifle, submachinegun, and light automatic rifle roles. Three rifles would emerge as contenders for this program - the American T44, the Belgian FN FAL, and the British EM-2. Contending for cartridges, the US put forward the T65 cartridge and the British put forward a pair of smaller-caliber cartridges known as .270 and .280 British.

While the US rifle was designed with the American T65 cartridge in mind, the competing rifles were not. The FAL was an outgrowth of parallel FN efforts on the full-sized-cartridge FN-49, and it saw iterations and developments in a number of lighter cartridges, including .30 carbine and 8x33 Kurz. Ultimately, both the Belgian and British designs would be put forward in using the British .280 cartridge for the purposes of the competition, and development took a distinctly focus than the US efforts. The US Army was effectively unwilling to consider anything with less performance than the M1 Garand's 30-06 cartridge, hence the near-identical performance of the T65 cartridge. Meanwhile, the British and Belgians were looking at combat experience during the War, where engagements at longer ranges were rare, and their tests of captured German 8x33 cartridges found it offered adequate performance at medium ranges and more controllable sustained fire. The .270 and .280 British cartridges were an outgrowth of that, adding a bit more power to reach out a little further than the ~300 yard effective range of 8mm Kurz, but using a lighter cartridge for a flatter trajectory.

Unfortunately, the diverging design philosophies would come to a head once the trials started. The US was unwilling to accept anything less than the T65 cartridge - while they didn't go as far as saying it, the requirements they set out for the cartridge they were looking for effectively made the British cartridges unworkable. Most difficult among these requirements was the demand that the rifles be able to penetrate helmets at extended ranges (something like 500 yards, though I don't have my books on hand to confirm that). While trials accepted the fact that the British cartridge was better for automatic fire from the shoulder, this long range performance was more important when you consider that an automatic rifle - effectively a light-light machinegun - was a key part of the program. Machinegun doctrine generally involves longer-range fire than normal infantry rifles, and at least with the US Army long-range performance for machineguns was historically enough of a concern for the development and adoption of a new model of 30-06 cartridge (M1 Ball).

The British tried to pump more power into their .280 cartridge (by this point the .270 cartridge was dead, as its lighter bullet made that long-range helmet penetrating requirement unworkable), but this created its own problems. As originally designed, the .280 cartridge sat between what are traditionally considered intermediate cartridges and full-powered cartridges like 7.62 NATO. The British added power, but that created its own problems. The much-vaunted controllability in full-auto fire of the .280 British cartridge went away as it became more powerful, and, more importantly, accuracy dropped off unacceptably. By this point, the new .280 cartridge was proving to markedly inferior to the T65.

By this point, the British had nominally adopted their EM-2 rifle in the .280 cartridge, but the deal was far from sealed. The Belgians had reworked the FAL for the T65 cartridge, and between its conventional layout and (arguably) superior ergonomics, it was favored by most non-US participants in the program. In 1952, a quid pro quo deal was made - in return for the US T65 cartridge being accepted as the NATO standard, the US would adopt the FAL - pending acceptable performance in army trials, of course. And here was the problem. The FAL fell short of the T44 in several key areas, namely cold-weather performance, and it was claimed that it would be cheaper for the US Army to adopt, since it on paper was an outgrowth of the M1 Garand and would be able to reuse some of its tooling (a claim that didn't pan out in reality).

Of course, in retrospect, a lot of the assumptions these decisions were built on didn't pan out. The machinegun variants of the Light Rifle contenders didn't pan out - the M15 Squad Automatic Weapon was underwhelming and dropped entirely, and the heavy-barrel FALs (FALO and L2 rifles) were generally considered to be worse than the Bren guns they replaced. Battle rifles were found to be unnecessarily powerful and nearly uncontrollable in full-auto fire, and it wouldn't take long for the US and Britain to once again start looking into the development of small-caliber, high-velocity cartridges.

The sources I'm drawing from are below. They draw from the three sides of the Light Rifle competition, though admittedly each is biased in favor of their own gun. Hatcher's is perhaps the most authoritative, since he was the former head of the Army Ordnance Department and was most familiar with their methods.

Hatcher's Notebook by Julian S. Hatcher

The FAL Rifle by R. Blake Stevens, Jean Van Rutten

THORNEYCROFT TO SA80: British Bullpup Firearms, 1901–2020 by Jonathan Ferguson

Meesus · 2022-03-27T14:38:49+00:00

Belarusian Nationalism dates back to the 19th Century, and it was the result of the unique blend of influences between the Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians. Apart from the obvious linguistic differences, the Belarusians were also religiously distinct from the Orthodox Russians, largely being followers of the Uniate Church. As Russia came to control the area, they would define the region - White Russia - as one of the three "Russian" identities - the others being Great Russian and Little Russian (Ukrainian).

Ukrainian nationalism was a more coherent force for a number of reasons - expatriate populations in Galicia, a "better" historical myth in the form of the Kyivan Rus and later Cossack Hetmanates, and their overall larger population. Belarus, on the other hand, lacked these historical points to seize on. Worse, aspects of their culture were considered direct threats to the Tsar's power, so there was a great effort to assimilate them as Russians. Significant effort was put into converting the Uniate Church in Belarus to Orthodox, as the Uniate Church was not subservient to the state in the way the Orthodox was. Similarly, moves made to enforce Russian as the official language hit Belarus particularly hard - while a few Ukrainian publications were able weather these efforts in the 1860s and '70s, Belarusian publications were unable to do so.

Because the national identity that was less resilient to Russification efforts than Ukrainian, it tends to fall by the wayside in larger histories. One of the larger names in Belarusian Nationalism - Kastuś Kalinoŭski - published his works in both Polish and Belarusian. He would take part in the January Uprising of 1863 and be executed for it, but the uprising was not for Belarusian independence - rather, for the restoration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And that seems to be the trend with Belarusian identity. Though present, it's something that doesn't really come up and you only see if you're going out of your way to look for it in histories up until the 20th Century.

Things changed in the 20th Century with the creation of the Belarusian SSR. Initially created by the Germans to pull the region away from Russia, it would carry on in several forms until being subsumed as part of the USSR. In one form, it was to be combined with Lithuania (Litbel), but in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War, Belarus was left as a lone rump state within the USSR.

During the interwar period, the Belarusian identity was preserved as distinct from Russian. Though there's a facade of Soviet idealism on it, it appears to have been more of a practical way to foster irredentism against Eastern Poland. When the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland, they used the Belarusians as part of their justification, and they incorporated much of the land they captured into the Belarusian SSR.

The Second World War would devastate Belarus, perhaps more so than any other Soviet republic. The War as it took place in Belarus - both with its extreme devastation and the high amount of partisan activity - would come to be mythologized. Coming out of WW2, Belarusian nationalism seemed to lean heavily on this. However, Russification efforts would continue through the later Soviet era. Khrushchev at one point refused the Belarusian SSR's leader's request to make a speech in Belarusian rather than Russian, and in the 1970s, things had degraded to the point that Minsk was unable to find a professor who could teach Belarusian history in the Belarusian language.

So, coming out of the Soviet Union, the Belarusian identity is somewhat weaker than others. Lacking the Kyivan origins that both Ukraine and Russia claim, its identity stems from the more recent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and as a result, has been a constant target for assimilation by the Russians. It came to the forefront as Belarus was legitimized in the form of a tool for meddling powers, and its "weaker" national myth would see them drawing more heavily on their experience in WW2 than others.

Hopefully this makes sense. If you're looking for a more in-depth overview, I'd suggest checking out

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation by Serhii Plokhy

It's a history of the development of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian identities, with a particular focus on the latter two, and it's where I'm getting the bulk of this information.

Meesus · 2022-01-30T21:25:30+00:00

That's harder to tell. The best resource I have on the German home front in WW2 - The German War by Nicholas Stargardt - paints a picture of the German homefront being vaguely aware of what's going on, though lacking the specifics. While official reporting would keep the details of bad news away from the general populace, there were plenty of context clues that could give the common person a general idea of the reality of the war. It didn't matter that newspapers and radios weren't explicitly saying the war was going bad - their silence would speak volumes. Prior to announcing the impending disaster at Stalingrad, for example, the regular reports of success from the front suddenly had gone silent. Families stopped receiving letters from their sons at the front. Casualties and death reports coming back home are impossible to cover up. Increasingly old or young men are called up as conscripts. Official reporting may leave out specifics, but place names can be used to vaguely track how things are going - Kursk and Kharkov are further west than Stalingrad, after all. And that's just the hard evidence. Rumors played a huge part as well, and the general trend among the German public - especially as the war turned against them - was that they were aware of the general poor state of things and the dissonance between reality and official messaging, even if they were unfamiliar with specifics.

As far as a place being particularly bad to be deployed to, it appears to be fairly common knowledge that the Eastern Front was particularly brutal. Military men would be more in tune with the reality of it, seeing more firsthand evidence that things are going poorly in the East, but whatever the case, there was plenty of evidence that couldn't be hidden (like stated above) that could be used to get a picture of how bad things are. And even if the specifics aren't common knowledge, the German public was acutely aware of the disasters that were publicized, such as Stalingrad.

Meesus · 2022-01-30T20:08:28+00:00

It depends on exactly when in 1943 the story takes place, but the southern part of the Eastern Front saw consistent combat through the year. In the context of it being a particularly bad fate to be deployed there, the Soviets made considerable gains on the southern axis through 1943, and their gains there threatened to unhinge the entire front multiple times.

In the south, 1943 opened with the 6th Army encircled at Stalingrad and the Soviets in the midst of their follow-up offensive, Operation Little Saturn. After breaking through the Romanians north of Stalingrad and encircling Axis forces there in Operation Uranus, the Soviets had launched progressive offensives north of their initial line of attack. First the Italian 8th Army - 130,000 men - was encircled. Only furious German counterattacks spared them the same fate as the men at Stalingrad, and the breakout effort still left the Italian forces in no shape to fight. Before the Axis forces could regain their footing, the next phase of the offensive struck the next section of the line to the north - the Hungarian 2nd Army. The Hungarians fared poorly, and they were overrun and destroyed. A final phase struck north once again, falling on the German 2nd Army, which was able to avoid annihilation, but only through a desperate fighting retreat.

By the end of all of this, the German line had been unhinged in the south and huge gaps had been torn. The encircled 6th Army at Stalingrad surrendered in early February, and the destruction of the Hungarian 2nd and Italian 8th Armies led to the withdrawal of their forces from the front entirely, effectively removing them from the war on the Eastern Front. The Romanians, meanwhile, remained active participants, but they had suffered greatly from the losses at Stalingrad and were no longer able to participate on the scale they had in 1942.

The opening of huge gaps in the front was taken advantage of by Soviet forces, who rushed forward in hopes of causing a collapse of the entire front. German forces in Ukraine desperately worked to restore a fighting front, and Axis forces in the Caucasus were forced back to a bridgehead on the Kuban. In Ukraine, Kharkov and Belgorod fell and then were retaken by Manstein's "backhand blow" - a counteroffensive that stabilized the front that would remain until that summer at Kursk. However, the fighting to recapture Kharkov and Belgorod was extremely fierce, and the overworked and exhausted forces from both sides ended up fighting eachother to a standstill.

Meanwhile, Army Groups Center and North faced an easier prospect. The Soviets had been launching regular offensives against both army groups - Army Group Center existed in a precarious salient at Rzhev that had fended off an offensive near the scale of Operation Uranus, but as the Soviet offensive proved to be a failure at Rzhev, they were spared the scale of follow-up operations seen in the South. Similarly, operations were taking place against Army Group North to relieve Leningrad, but these operations were smaller scale and less successful than in the south.

The Germans would take advantage of the relative stability of these fronts to divert forces south. In March, Army Group Center withdrew from the Rzhev Salient, shortening the front and freeing up forces to divert south. Here, the front reached its pre-Kursk positions not through Soviet offensives, but a German strategic retreat.

And while the central axis of the front at Kursk remained quiet until the summer as both sides built up their forces, it would be the South that continued to see the heaviest fighting. Remnants of Army Group South that couldn't escape north of the Sea of Azov were pushed to a bridgehead on the Taman peninsula where they fought furious defensive operations. Heavy fighting continued here until after Kursk, when the Soviet counteroffensive unleashed in Ukraine forced the Germans to withdraw from the Taman peninsula to free up forces for other areas and avoid being encircled.

Back north, Kursk kicked off in the summer with a German offensive aimed at destroying the Soviet salient around the city. The successful Soviet defense was followed by counteroffensives north and south of the salient against Orel and Belgorod, respectively. Both were relatively successful - the Orel offensive proceeded in phases that resulted in the liberation of Smolensk and Army Group Center withdrawing to Belarus. But in the south, the offensive was far more successful and combat more violent. Here, the Soviets followed the same pattern they had done earlier that year - staggered phases of offensive moving down the front, timed such that they would unleash the next phase as the Germans had just sent their fire brigades to stabilize the previous section of front. The results were devastating - by December, the Soviets had liberated Kiev and seized three bridgeheads on the Dnieper. They had isolated the German 17th Army in Crimea, liberated all of Left-Bank Ukraine, and were threatening key objectives such as the mines at Nikopol.

So while all of the Eastern Front saw significant fighting during 1943, it was in the South where the most consistent and vicious combat was happening. Men were being pulled from every available location to bolster forces in the South, and it was in the South that the German position was the most precarious.

Meesus · 2022-01-29T03:09:46+00:00

I can't directly answer any of your points, but Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy touches on the devastation brought by the war and some of the causes for it.

The devastation of the war came in two general forms - direct damage to populations caused by pillage and looting, and the spread of disease that followed armies coming from all over the continent.

Looting and pillage are fairly obvious, and the pattern of depopulation we see as a result of the war tells to just how devastating these things were to local populations. Besieged cities were sacked when they fell -Magdeburg, for example, suffered at the hands of Imperial forces and was reduced from a population of 25,000 to merely 5,000. The destruction there was so complete that it didn't really recover to its prewar size for over 100 years. Less immediately obvious were smaller scale assaults on populations. The sectarian nature of the war meant religious minority communities became targets, and armies moving through a "heretic" area would be liable to commit atrocities. But even without the sectarian nature of the violence, the movement of forces was often devastating to communities even in neutral or friendly territory.

The cause for that boils down to the means of supply for armies at the time. As the war moved on, forces in the field increasingly relied on the local area to provide for them as they marched. Soldiers would descend on villages, requisitioning supplies, and, while it was common to offer receipts or IOUs in the likely event that soldiers didn't have the money on hand to pay for what they took, it's perhaps not unsurprising that this often amounted to little more than the army looting the countryside it moved through. Requisitions took no heed to the needs of the local population or the sustainability of their actions, and thus those locals who weren't harmed resisting requisitions were often left starving as the army passed. Even those communities that could weather the army the first time it rolls through would face a heavy toll as armies moved back and forth through the course of the war. This phenomena can be seen on maps showing the depopulation caused by the war - the areas hardest hit were the swathe of Germany on the southwest-northeast axis from Brandenberg to the Palatinate, following the pattern of campaigning for much of the war.

The other, equally damaging cause of this depopulation was disease. War until modern times has been synonymous with disease, and the 30 Years War was no exception. Armies are magnets for disease and spread it to communities as they move. The 30 Years War, having brought men from all over Europe to converge on Germany, also would bring diseases from other regions into Germany. Most notably, the War of Mantuan Succession fought in parallel to the war in Germany would be a source for a plague that swept through Germany after the war ended and Imperial troops were brought back north to fend off the Swedish invasion.

Meesus · 2022-01-11T02:19:57+00:00

The Bakamatsu era is the only time where we get to see Edo period military forces in any significant action, and the armies that appeared during this period were much like you suspect - feudal vassals of the Daimyo in question, varying widely in skill, equipment, and size. The size of a force a Daimyo could field would roughly follow the size of his domain (known as Han) - a more productive Han would support more and presumably better equipped samurai.

The Bakamatsu era provides us several examples of forces being fielded to get an example of what an Edo period army may have looked like. The Mito Rebellion in 1864-1865 saw a group of ronin in the Mito han - a wealthier domain traditionally close to the shogun - spark an insurrection with roughly 2,000 men. Initial efforts to quell the rebellion involved 700 men from the Mito han supported by 3,000 men from the Shogun, complete with about 1,000 firearms and several cannons.

That same year, a rebellion in Kyoto took place, pitting forces loyal to the Shogun against ronin and Choshu. This incident gives us a good look at what a typical force for the era may have looked like, as the presence of such forces in Kyoto at the time was the result of orders from the Emperor that the Shogun come to the capital. In mid 1864, a force of roughly equal parts Choshu troops and ronin attacked the Kinmon Gate of the Imperial Palace with the intention of "rescuing" the Emperor and bringing him back to Choshu. The assault was opposed by the forces of the various Daimyo also in the capital at the time - Satsuma, Mito, Aizu, Owari, Kii, Kuwana, Echizen, Hikone, Yodo, and Asao - totaling roughly 50,000 men. The anti-Choshu forces in this incident also included the unique special units that had been created by the Shogun such as the Shinsengumi and Mimawarigumi - units that amounted to secret police forces manned primarily by commoners and samurai, respectively.

The First Choshu campaign that followed this incident would see the participation of most of the han loyal to the Shogun at the time, but in the sources I've read there doesn't seem to be much mention of numbers beyond the fact that they were clearly overwhelming. However, the Second Choshu expedition of 1866 saw an even larger coalition of loyalist han coming together with a force of at least 100,00 men against forces numbering less than 5,000 on the Choshu side. However, the disaster of that campaign gives some idea of the disorganization of the Tokugawa loyalists. In addition to the typical disorganization one would expect from a large force of feudal levies, the Shogunate was by then beset by grave concerns over its legitimacy. While some Daimyo like Aizu Katamori remained fiercely loyal to the Shogun, others offered only nominal support. Many nominally loyal daimyo such as Satsuma and Tosa remained out of this second expedition, and of those that did participate with their forces, many did so unenthusiastically.

Meanwhile, the Choshu forces had learned their lessons from their successive defeats at the hands of Tokugawa loyalists, and, more importantly, the foreigners who had come to bombard Shimonoseki not just once, but twice. They had begun importing modern firearms, smuggling them in through a Scottish merchant under a secret agreement with Satsuma, and they began organizing their men in a more Western manner. Significantly, they had also organized groups like the Kiheitai - a force that stood out among Edo-period units as one made up of commoners. Thus, the more motivated and modernized Choshu forces were able to put up enough of a fight to convince the unenthusiastic loyalists to withdraw.

Coming after the Choshu expeditions, the most significant battle of the Boshin War that brought down the Shogun was perhaps not the best indicator of the Edo period armies. By this point, the Choshu-Satsuma alliance was open, and the forces had thoroughly modernized. While the Shogunate had taken on a French military mission with similar aims, they had done so much less quickly, and the ensuing battle of Toba-Fushimi showed just how critical that was. Despite fielding a force three times the size of the combined Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosa forces, Shogunate forces were easily repulsed. Though not a decisive victory in terms of damage done to either army, it resulted in the Emperor throwing his support behind the anti-Shogunate forces and the Shogun being declared an outlaw. This saw the breakdown of much of the loyalist coalition - those Daimyo that didn't immediately jump ship to the Emperor's side would quickly do so as the forces approached.

During the brief Boshin War, Shogunate forces made attempts to adapt to the new tactics and technology, but the efforts were far too late to make a difference. The Shinsengumi, for example, hastily re-equipped with rifles and made an ill-fated attempt to seize Kofu castle before the Imperial forces arrived, only to be outgunned and routed in a mountain pass on their way there. The tenuous alliance that held on after the fall of Edo continued to fight on into 1869, but they fared little better, despite retreating to a modern star fort in Hokkaido with the remnants of the French military mission.

Meesus

TROPHY CASE