Military thread!

[Pekka]

get your tongue out of my butt . And if you were, you wouldn't have to salute me, because we have unwritten rule of corporals not saluting sgts... you should according the real rules, but no one does that and that's cool. I never saluted any sgts either when I was corporal.
And you shouldn't because it makes me feel uncomfortable, I never liked being saluted, for some reason I get little embarrased about it.

[Guardian]

No problem. We don't do a lot of saluting in the National Guards anyways.

[lightblue]

Originally posted by elijah


I had a bit of a run in with Bush's foreign policy think tank once...

What I always wondered about this picture was why the tanks did not change lane? Seems a fairly broad road without a lot of traffic...

I managed to avoid military service, by it being cancelled about 2 years before I became 18 (think that was partly because of Srebenica, a significant proportion of the Dutch troops at that disgrace were kids on military service). If I could've chosen where to go, I'd probably have preferred the Navy to the Army.

[Whaleboy]

Seems a fairly broad road

Its a sqaure

[Guardian]

That lead tank did try to go around the guy, but he sidestepped and kept blocking its path. He had an entire tank platoon stopped and he was even on the lead tank banging the top hatch and yelling at the men inside.

The tanks just sat there.
Then, another rebel came out and persuaded this guy to drop it. The two of them left and the tanks continued down the square...

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Guardian
Rate of Fire: Approx. 20 rounds per second
(1200 rounds per minute in theory, but in reality you just don't shoot like that!)

After about 30 seconds, if it doesn't jam first, the barrel will melt over like a spaghetti noodle.

Other than modern parts machining, and rechambering from 7.92mm Mauser to 7.62 NATO, it's essentially identical to the MG42 design.

A gun dealer about a mile from my office in San Diego has an original MG42 on display. :drool:

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Guardian
That lead tank did try to go around the guy, but he sidestepped and kept blocking its path. He had an entire tank platoon stopped and he was even on the lead tank banging the top hatch and yelling at the men inside.

The tanks just sat there.
Then, another rebel came out and persuaded this guy to drop it. The two of them left and the tanks continued down the square...

And the guy (photographed from a number of angles, so more identifiable than in these photos) was never found or heard from again, IIRC.

[Whaleboy]

Whats the difference between NATO and Mauser? Obviously bullet size, but that cant be all?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Pekka
those Leopard 2 tanks are the hot news here today.
We bought like little over 120 of those from the Germans, and just heard they sold 128 of those to Poland, only 5 times cheaper . Here we go Finland, here we go *clap* *clap* !

maybe the Poles forgot to get the engines included?

(waits for the angry Poles...)

[MichaeltheGreat]

The 7.92 mm x57 (also known as 8mm x 57) Mauser cartridge was developed in the 19th century for a number of German made and/or licensed military rifles, and it was used through the Korean war period in a number of armies. It's still made and used for a sporting weapon.

It was designed for bolt action rifles, not automatic weapons, so it's optimization is for long range accuracy and hitting power, not for recoil and ease of feed. In and before WW2, the Germans built their air and ground mounted standard machine guns around the same round issued for their rifles because it was logistically simpler to standardize on the ammo type in use, not because it was ballistically ideal.

With automatic weapons, the extra length of the round (the x 57 refers to the cartridge length) means extra travel length for the ejector and bolt assembly, more vibration, and more possibility of a misfeed in a weapon not ideally maintained. The MG34 had a lot of these problems, and was rather underperforming as a result, and it was a ***** to maintain in the field due to a bit of good ol' German overengineering. The Germans had no effective way of changing the ammo, so they took their field experience from the early war and redesigned the MG34 to make it simpler to maintain in the field, and to improve on a number of weaknesses discovered from heavy use. The result was the MG42, which was without doubt the best machine gun of WW2 and the best man-portable weapon built until that time.

After the war, when NATO was formed, one of the issues they faced was that most of the member armies used their own weapons with their own unique ammo types, which was logistics hell from a joint planning perspective. One of NATO's early projects was standardization of ammo types among the membership, while the component nations would still be free to develop and field their own national weapons.

The NATO members (including West Germany, of course) all knew about the superior performance of the MG42 with the less than ideal 7.92 Mauser round, so they wanted something with similar net performance by taking advantage of up to date powder and primer technology, but more suitable to semiautomatic rifle and medium machine gun use. The end result was the slightly smaller, slightly shorter NATO 7.62mm x 51 round which is still in massive worldwide use and production today.

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by Pekka
get your tongue out of my butt . And if you were, you wouldn't have to salute me, because we have unwritten rule of corporals not saluting sgts... you should according the real rules, but no one does that and that's cool. I never saluted any sgts either when I was corporal.
And you shouldn't because it makes me feel uncomfortable, I never liked being saluted, for some reason I get little embarrased about it.

What's this busines about NCOs saluting each other? Here we go to at ease (arms behind our backs) or parade rest for superior NCOs. We only salute the officers. Reluctantly for some

[MichaeltheGreat]

"Don't call me sir, I work for a living."

[Dinner]

Originally posted by BeBro
Let´s turn this into an "what is the best tank" thread.

We could but we already know the M1A2 would win hands down. That just goes to prove that if you throw enough money at a problem you'll come up with a winner.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Pekka
get your tongue out of my butt . And if you were, you wouldn't have to salute me, because we have unwritten rule of corporals not saluting sgts...

Unwritten rule? What sort of Army are you Finns running where Non-Coms have to salute other non-coms? I have enough problems without having to worry about saluting back to E-4s.

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
"Don't call me sir, I work for a living."

Yup