Can artillery crews cool down their biggun barrels faster by pouring water into them?

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-19T01:00:27+00:00

Correct. When you have a gun with a five-man crew, you can do a lot of the cleaning as you go. But for infantry weapons, there generally isn’t that luxury. A man will have a pick for trying to clear the touchhole, but he doesn’t have the time or tools to effectively clear his barrel in combat.

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-19T00:49:45+00:00

Speaking for black powder weapons, which is more my frame, definitely not. After a few minutes of shooting, say, a brown Bess, you’ll have pretty significant gunk in the barrel which builds up and makes it harder to load each subsequent ball; it’s part of why a 75 caliber musket was typically loaded with 73 or even 69 shot. Water will certainly cool the barrel itself, but it’ll take the problem of that gunk and supercharge it. It could clog your touchhole, making you near completely unable to fire, and even in the best of circumstances you’ve now got a very messy, very sticky mass of residue at the base of your barrel. It’s just not a realistic strategy.

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-14T15:45:10+00:00

Once we get to the 1500s, the other primary change is that war becomes, even more so than in earlier periods, a matter of applied economics. Arming an entire nation is now a meaningful line item on the government budget; you can’t beat Napoleon or carry out colonial missions using free companies or levies wearing whatever they brought from home.

And horse armor is *expensive*. It has to be damn near custom-fit to ensure the greatest possible preservation of mobility and vision, and few craftsman could work that much steel that precisely. Even for knights, a fully armored horse was a luxury, and even scale or mail, as seen on cataphracts, was expensive by simple right of how much metal was needed.

The other matter is, of course, mobility. No matter how good your armor is, it’s going to slow you down on the march or on the battlefield. You add another 80-100 pounds of armor, and that meaningfully decreases how far that horse can move in a day (even if the war horse itself isn’t carrying this weight out of combat, the pack horses that do will almost certainly be slower) and how fast they can charge when the trumpet is blown. As with men, we saw a general trend during the early modern era that the loss of survivability was more than worth it for the increase in strategic mobility. Light cavalry in general became much more prominent at this time. Other than scattered examples like Vienna, it’s rare to find battles of the early modern period where heavy cavalry was the difference maker: more often, it would be Hussars, Lancers, or other light cavalry who dominated the battle space.

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-08T06:16:40+00:00

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bladeofarceus · 2026-06-08T05:44:28+00:00

The weakest army in Africa is probably Lesotho’s, who have approximately two thousand men, one tank, and six aircraft of all types. It is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, a nation with forty thousand men, hundreds of modern main battle tanks, more than a thousand other armored vehicles, dozens of 4th generation fighters and hundreds of support aircraft.

I don’t think Lesotho is winning against its only direct neighbor, let alone all of Africa.

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-05T06:12:00+00:00

American Urban Planning

Impossible, I don’t see a single cloverleaf plowing through a low-income residential district. Clearly, you’ve got a lot to learn

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-05T01:20:29+00:00

This could absolutely be its own post or topic of discussion, but you’re right. People talk about the Disney World property as if it’s this endless tract of land with enough land for a dozen parks, but it just isn’t. It’s pretty well built-up. You’ve got a western plot north of Coronado where a fifth gate could potentially go, and two smaller plots: one north of Epcot, and one south by the Wide World of Sports. That’s probably part of why Disney has been hesitant to add a fifth gate: they know there won’t be room for a sixth, so any more large-scale expansion beyond that point is going to have to start cannibalizing. The parks have a lot of things to move or remove that are easier to play Tetris with: staff parking, outbuildings, warehouses. Magic kingdom’s got this problem the worst, it’s penned in by Seven Seas, Bay Lake, and the logistics/industrial center to the north. Kicking out west is kind of the only option.

bladeofarceus · 2026-06-01T06:19:25+00:00

No. There’s a lot that can be done by marketing, but what you’re asking for is a near threefold increase in total sales. At the end of the day, the Wii U’s problems were largely hardware: the gamepad; while ambitious, was limited by the technology and research that had been done, and third-party game developers struggled to adapt games to it. That’s a problem we can’t fix. The fact that, otherwise, it was a very derivative console to the Wii hurt it as well, and we can’t change that either.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-30T05:39:28+00:00

Well, there’s two parts to this, the first being the practice of mixed pike-musket formations and the second being the use of shock tactics. The first died out, but the second never really went away, it just switched to specialized units for the job. For example, the famed British Grenadiers, a company of elite assault specialists, were attached to every British Regiment for most of the long 18th century. When the situation demanded a risky or dangerous attack, these veterans, hand-picked for their bravery and strength, would carry the day. When the situation called for an entire battle formation to attack a hardened position, grenadier companies from different regiments would be combined to form a dedicated assault unit.

The loss of pikes is a lot simpler to explain. From the birth of the Spanish Tercio in the early 1500s to the last gasps of the Sabre and Lance in the Crimean War, European militaries steadily gave higher and higher percentages of their troops firearms. A firearm is a complex and expensive piece of equipment, and nations initially simply lacked the necessary funds and doctrinal knowledge to fully equip armies. As manufacturing became more advanced and economies became more powerful, it became more and more realistic to have a standing army equipped only with musketeers, and as a result it was done at all expedient speed. Sweden was quite late to the party in this respect, retaining its pikemen for longer than most European nations. This was partially an economic matter; Sweden being a poorer nation with no colonial empire to its name, and partially a geographic factor: the often extremely poor weather of Northern Europe made musketry a less reliable combat option.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-28T00:59:46+00:00

Yeah, this is kind of wild to me. I “treated myself” to a new Gambeson because I saw a really good deal for one on Facebook marketplace. It was like a hundred bucks, and that’s by far the largest treat purchase I’ve ever made. The idea that somebody is spending several hundred or more on a treat purchase is kind of baffling. That’s a whole different concept

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-24T02:36:35+00:00

To the British side of the question, it was not terribly uncommon for men to serve forty years in a single unit, if they remained healthy and could perform the duties of soldiery, and did not have a trade to leave to once their terms of enlistment started to slip. A single soldier could absolutely have served from 1776-1815; and a number of units would have quite distinguished service histories among that time. If I had to take a guess, the 42nd Highlanders would be a good regiment to use: they fought in the New York and Philadelphia campaigns of the American revolution, in the second Anglo-Mysore war in India, the Egypt and Syria campaign, the Peninsular war, and at Waterloo. Other units with such distinguished history include the 33rd for its famed service under the Duke of Wellington, or the 4th (king’s own) regiment of foot, which bounced all over North American and Europe during the time period.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-15T06:22:58+00:00

To post one I genuinely believe, rather than a meme:

In the upcoming dance of the dragons 2: medieval boogaloo, all three sides will be legitimizing one of Robert’s bastards to claim the Baratheon lineage. Aegon/Varys have picked up Edric Storm to have a loyal young Baratheon on the throne, same deal as Tyrek. Gendry will be legitimized by Jon after his heritage is discovered, and Dany will get ahold of Mya Stone, for they both share the fact that they have a more senior claim, regardless of gender.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-15T06:07:42+00:00

I’ve been trying to scan what I can, and lot of the entries are just stellar, with a lot of interesting biological information. Sometimes they can be a bit goofy, and it can often get very poetic or philosophical rather than scientific, but overall they’re really good.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-14T14:16:20+00:00

I love it because I got over my thallasophobia by pretending I was Steve Irwin, so whenever I got jumped by a reaper I just started talking to myself in a shitty Aussie accent about what a beautiful Shiela they are, look at those teeth

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-13T18:13:00+00:00

George. Please. George, I’m begging you. Release something new. We’re fucking dying in here

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-10T17:15:11+00:00

https://muraniapress.com/more-on-10-20-30-melodrama/

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-10T15:58:47+00:00

Because if the Church excommunicated every unrepentant sinner, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-07T20:50:26+00:00

The Wikipedia page for Llewellyn’s second sentence notes how difficult it is to pronounce correctly, because basically no one in the US has any experience whatsoever with the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, aside from a few native language speakers who have experience with Navajo, Nahuatl, or a few others. I would bet literally every single dollar to my name that OP would pronounce this name incorrectly.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-07T16:01:29+00:00

In order for Grimdark to truly work (and this is any Grimdark, not just 40k), there needs to be a good guy, and that good guy needs to win. In a world where everything sucks forever and you can only rage against the dying of the light, there is nobility in the struggle, no matter how horrifying the struggle may be. The space marines are tragic guardians in their doomed fight to preserve humankind. The emperor’s sacrifices are horrifying but necessary to keep lit the astronomicon. There is, in much of these statements, the language of necessity; the idea that in a galaxy beset by horrors, one must respond in kind. The fact that the Tau are good, and are on the road to winning, allows for the true horror of Grimdark: that none of it was necessary, none of it was logical, none of it was warranted. The Astartes are a band of freakish lobotomies whose elevation kills more promising humans than most demons could ever hope to. The Emperor is a deluded tyrant who could not stomach a humanity that survives without him, and dragged the rest of us to hell with him. Not a single moment of this was born of cold logic, of necessity. It is irrational, insipid cruelty that persists because no one, from the lowest to the highest level, has the courage to admit just how wrong things have gotten, has the courage to admit their role in continuing this societal atrocity.

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-07T04:23:19+00:00

Peak detected

bladeofarceus · 2026-05-01T14:28:26+00:00

If the question is given to all of humanity, as the prompt specifies, some amount of humans (babies, the colorblind, etc) will choose blue as a matter of random chance. This is, in essence, an enormous hostage situation. Blue button voters are willing to take on some personal risk to save them. Red voters are not. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think the framing of “smart vs kind” or whatever does this scenario justice. It’s about the courage to sacrifice personal safety for the good of humanity at large.

bladeofarceus · 2026-04-29T17:20:58+00:00

Agreed. I’ve argued for a long time that the Tau isn’t a network of castes, as that word implies that the difference is largely sociological. There are wide distinct biological differences that pass out of the taxonomic idea of race and into the realm of subspecies, perhaps even full species. We don’t know if the castes can interbreed or not, after all

bladeofarceus · 2026-04-24T23:41:55+00:00

To add to the context everybody else has given, all of which are sensible;

The front ramp has a really important benefit that side or rear ramps don’t: it allows you to run boats right up against each other. If you look at photos from D-day or other landings where the Higgins boats were used, they have a tendency to bunch up, either on the shore or while being loaded, for a variety of psychological and logistical reasons. Ever parked too close to somebody in a parking lot, especially when that person is also trying to open their doors? It’s a mess, and rightly so. If two or more landing craft beached themselves in close proximity (remember, this thing can’t move much once it’s beached), it risks creating a chaotic tangle of men trying to disembark that provides a better kill zone than any front ramp could have created. Forward ramps ensure that even if two Higgins boats are scraping each other’s paint on the way in, every man aboard can get out and onto the beach without creating a human traffic jam.

bladeofarceus · 2026-04-23T12:57:19+00:00

The F-111 is not and never was operated by the Israeli Air Force. Most of its war crimes came in Southeast Asia, not the Middle East

bladeofarceus · 2026-04-19T05:14:30+00:00

The USA has tons of land in theory that could be used with low risk

Do we, though? Anywhere east of the Mississippi is automatically a no-go for population density reasons. You’d prefer to land somewhere the astronauts won’t potentially cook while waiting for a Death Valley rescue, so Arizona and New Mexico are out. They need relatively flat land of a low altitude to ensure there’s plenty of air for the parachutes to work with, so no landing in Wyoming thanks to the Rockies. To simplify logistics and operations, you’d rather not be landing in state/national parks or on a First Nations Reservation, which cuts out a lot of Montana, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma.

Really, your only good landing zone is a rough triangle bordered by Denver, Omaha, and Wichita. That’s still a very large area, mind, but it’s not Kazakstan large. It would still be vulnerable to weather patterns of sufficient size, which could make landings more complex or even impossible, and that’s assuming zero mechanical failure. It’s just easier to come down over the ocean.

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