Weird War ideas: Unrealistic shit that actually happened

But they actually made it a tank, the Sturmtiger was not one. (no turret)

My, my; what is that surly-faced man doing?

Is he doing something sensible, like attaching a magnetic charge to the side of the tank just like the Germans?

Good gosh no, that would be far too sensible.

Those prongs on the bottom of the cup shape thing are firing pins. The very sensitive firing pins.

As soon as they receive any pressure, any pressure, they detonate the charge.

"But user", I hear you say, "how can a shaped-charge work effectively if it detonates before it's placed perpendicular to the armour?"

Well my astute friend, the answer to that is that it doesn't.

"So this brave soul horribly kills himself and all he achieves is slightly denting the tank, at best."

Admittedly, this had a chance of succeeding and not killing the user. Unlike the tactic they employed in Burma.

So picture the scene.

You are a tank driver in Burma and as you're driving through this jungle clearing, you hear this banging sound.

Worried that it might be engine trouble, you stop the tank to investigate.

Popping out the commanders hatch, you turn to face the rear of the tank to notice that there's smoke rising from the back of the tank and, oddly, the smell of cooked meat.

Peering over the side, you see a large man-sized crater in the hole with what's left of, what you presume, was a Japanese soldier.

So yeah, they had people sit in foxholes with a hammer and an artillery shell. No, it didn't work; yes, they kept trying.

Do you want to know a secret, that makes this all worse?

The German's gave them Panzerfausts and taught them how to make them.

Panzerfausts were, by the way, the easiest and most effective anti-tank weapon to use. You point and you shoot. Even German pensioners and children used them to destroy tanks during the last months of the war.

For some reason, Japan thought "Nah, we don't need this shit".

So let's move from one retarded idea to another...

There was the SU-100y, aka the let's put a naval gun onto a land based tank en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SU-100Y_Self-Propelled_Gun
I think the Japanese also had a naval gun mounted tank,

/k/ is too busy masturbating to the latest AR-15 accessories and shitty space operas to bother discussing fun things.

Is the ball tank weird enough to qualify?

i think it is almost too weird

Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you the official competition for the nuclear bomb.

Yes...the Allies could be retarded too.

So Bat Bomb, what can I say that isn't already explained by those two simple words.

Well, the idea itself was surprisedly sound, considering that we're attaching bombs to flying rodents here.

The vast majority of Japanese structures, such as factories, homes and temples, were made soley of wood and paper.

Bats are also considered a sign of good luck in Japan, mainly due to centuries of Chinese cultural influence, and they are often encouraged to roost in homes to bring good fortune.

This may be wrong, but that's the logic they were going by.

So if one were to say, drop a bomb containing, oh I don't know, a thousand bats over a city just before dawn, they could travel a fair distance before roosting in these conveniently houses.

Then, just as they get all warm and snug for the day, they suddenly become a lot warmer and not so snug.

This, hopefully, would result in a widespread fire storm that could devastate an entire city with but a single payload.

Now as you can imagine, this has two itty-bitty, barely significant drawbacks.

Firstly, you have absolutely no control of where the bats actually go once released. So you could burn an entire city to the ground, or a large cave nearby suddenly belches out a huge gout of flame.

Secondly, as you can tell from the picture. The bombs aren't the most...subtle of things and even the most naïve of civilians is going to know something is up when this little critter comes to a rest above his front...is it a door, or would slide be better? Never mind, let's get back on track.

So why didn't America unleash cute, squeaky doom upon Japan then?

Well... one thing is that after a couple of whoopsies during testing, they had a bit of a bad press, since random acts of arson tend to upset the locals.

That and the ungodly amount of both bats and bombs required to make it practical.

That's cool, but really I think the howitzer should be bigger... maybe so big it needs a custom chassis?
And a separate vehicle to carry the ammo, now we're talking

You are like little baby.

your thread is shit

Baneblade, is that you?

Your thread is now covered in napalm and batshit.

>Greetings all.
>I thought I'd kick off the New Year by making a thread
>Now to start things off, I present to you fine fellows
>*rhetoric question*
>Well,
>Yeah...
>Oh, did I mention that
>Fun Fact
>Yep, that's right

>worst line spacing on the face of the world
>ending a question with a period
What the FUCK are you doing, man

OP here.

Is this the one your thinking of?

If it is, I will now share with everyone all the information we have for it.

Get comfortable, there's a lot:

The Kugelpanzer/Rollzeug was a reconnaissance vehicle captured by the Soviets.

It has a whopping 5mm of armour and was possibly armed with a single machine gun.

It was either captured along with the Maus, or in Manchuria.

A single two cylinder engine gave it a blazing speed of 4.9 miles an hour.

It also has a cute little training wheel at the back to keep it upright, as can be seen here:

tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2-german-prototypes/kugelpanzer/

There we go, that's it. This is all we know.

Which is great because it leaves it open for interpretation.

My personal belief is that it is a powerful Italian-designed battle Zorb that comes crashing down the mountain side to smash the weak allied troops below.

Or just to smash, it is Italian after all.

>or in Manchuria
Nigga what

yeah, its true that it may have been captured there, but we have no idea how it ended up there

What's your alternative?
The primary vulnerability was thought to be longer range artillery or mortars (as the idea was to destroy the defensive MG emplacements with naval bombardment). thus, the boats were designed to be easy to disembark and quick to move. The infantry would only be bunched and blow-up-able for a short time before the boat fucked off back to the sea.
If the ramp had hard cover at the end and a T shaped disembarkment, it would halve (or worse) the rate of egress.

What are you talking about?
The AVRE was based on the failed raid at Dieppe showcasing an extreme lack of close fire support for infantry in the British army.

>the drip rifle

The what now?

>What's your alternative?

Exactly. Simpletons like always herp about how there should have been a better way but when you ask what that better way could be, all they can do is derp some more.

Landing craft like that put ashore 100s of thousands of men in hundreds of landings from the Atlantic to the Med to the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, but somehow they're "bad".

bumping

LVT-3s? Maybe 4s, not sure when that came around. Also wonder how they would do on the English Channel.

Granted, they thought the Sherman DDs would work, but I can't imagine using modified tanks is better than a purpose built LVT-2.

>Yeah...they failed to hit a bridge. A fairly large one at that.

That's because they launch missiles.

The "miss" is in there for good reasons, my friend.

And yeah, the Germans did try to use drone tanks to augment their tank forces, but, anyone who had R/C toys during the 90s can attest that there are limits to radio control. And that's +40 years after they found that the French made an attempt and copied it.

Wait, why? Surely the Japanese knew they needed to blow up tanks.

Is this bait? Not all tanks have turrets.

It's an US American thing

>TANKS shall NEVER fight TANKS. THEY SHALL WIN BY GOING FAST
>Also storming fortified, impassable beaches with infantry is fine and dandy and manly and stop trying to push those weird funny tanks on us, you damn Jerries. Tanks WIN BY GOING FAST. WE JUST GOING TO GET THE TANKS TO GO FAST OVER THE BEACHES AND WIN THIS IS A GOOD PLAN.

Well a dug-in artillery shell and a detonator is the classic IED. It works great and with the dude in the hole, they had the smartest detonator.

It's at least going to pop the tank's track, I would assume.

Drip rifle. A rifle that would fire by having a small tin of kerosene at the bottom slowly filled with water, creating automatic, random fire when the ANZACs were evacuated from Gallipoli.

Now, as an Englishman, this next phrase pains me to no end; but we need to stop ripping on the French.

Considering the average infantry man fought with a rifle that was obsolete in the FIRST world war, they did pretty well.

Especially since the Germans managed to trick the vast majority of the French army and the British Expeditionary force into rushing to Belgium's defence and then bypassing them; effectively cutting them off from the rest of France.

Do you know who deserves to have the piss taken out of them?

The Italians.

The individual soldiers may have been at least as competent as any other nation at the time, but my god did they fuck-up majorly in some areas.

For instance, their tank designs were all...meh. They could get the job done when it came to supporting infantry, but were less than effective against other tanks.

Of course, this would all be fine and dandy if they didn't send tankettes, not tanks tankettes, to do battle against Allied tanks.

Oh sure, they may have turned it into a "tank destroyer" but it still could be taken out by close-ranged machine gun fire. Which wouldn't be a problem, if their anti-tank gun worked at anything but close range.

They used these in Russia by the way. Against the KV and T series of Russian tanks. You know, the tanks that full blown panzers had trouble penetrating.

Whilst we're talking about the Italians in Russia. Did you know that the average grunt wore cardboard shoes...in the middle of Russian Winter, just because.

Then we have the North African debacle where the Italians WALKED the vast majority of their army across Libya to invade Egypt. Which was then repelled and led to a counter-invasion by a substantially smaller British force.

Hell, every Italian led offensive operation ended in disaster.

They failed to conquer Greece by themselves, so the Germans had to bail them out. They got utterly thrashed in Ethiopia.

But their invasion of France needs a special mention.

why were Italians so badly equipped? you would guess that after the infrastructure fascism brought to Italy, they would be better equipped, didn't Germans help them at least a little bit with blueprints of weapons?

Are you wrong? Yes.

>The Italians.
Still waiting on Italian tanks in WoT.

he is going on about how tanks with no turrets are motorized cannons.

>For instance, their tank designs were all...meh. They could get the job done when it came to supporting infantry, but were less than effective against other tanks.

Now hold on... their shit was on par with Panzer I and IIs, which were good enough to conquer Poland and France. They just blew their load on Ethiopia and never managed to get to Panzer III afterwards. They apparently continued to builld great aircrafts and their ships were pretty sweet, but nobody cared and they couldn't get enough up or swimming for them to matter.

>Then we have the North African debacle where the Italians WALKED the vast majority of their army across Libya to invade Egypt.

Walking worked great for the Germans.

>They got utterly thrashed in Ethiopia.

Back in 1896. They won the second one, it's just that they blew their complete load on it, with aircrafts, gas bombs and a degree of mechanization that the Germans probably never attained during their conquests... so when World War 2 broke out, they were all out of everything. Which led to paper shoes becoming a thing.

So the Italian Invasion of France.

Huh...where do I start.

Well, do you know the Maginot Line, that massive line of defensive forts that the Germans went to great pains to avoid?

The Italians attempted to march straight through that, WW1 style. Because.

As you can tell from the attached wiki photo; they did absolutely splendidly.

The French I mean, the Italians briefly thought they were Skaven and that casualties didn't matter.

To put it bluntly. In the entire invasion, the total French casualties were 250, the total Italian casualties were 6000.

250 - 6000

250 -6000

Honestly, if you want bungling Not-Nazi's in your campaign; the Italians more than make up for it.

You know what, let's talk about one of the few actually cool and effective Italian weapons of the war. The MAS.

Italy STRONK.

Who are you quoting? Military doctrine of the time was to engage enemy armor with armor. There were tanks slotted to land at Normandy. All but 2 sank in the rough tide before the reached the beaches, the two that made it were shot up and immobilized.
In fact one Destroyer captain violated orders and came in very close to shore to provide close bombardment to the infantry, using one of the stuck tanks as a spotter to target enemy positions by making note of where it was firing its main guns.

The more you know.

On one beach out of five.

On every other beach, the DD tanks worked just fine. Especially when they were combined with the rest of hobart's funnies, which the US turned down for reasons unknown to anyone with half a brain.

>But their invasion of France needs a special mention.
Damn right it does. Though you don't need to space your posts like a tard, holy shit.

Their attempts at improving under facsism were well behind the germans (who they'd started well behind anyway) - despite their collectivisation and gearing up for war they were incredibly under-developed (and using non-Italian designs probably wouldn't go down well the more nationalist-focused Italy - national identity and pride is a big part of fascism after all)

You are correct, including on Utah, the DD Shermans worked just fine where 27 of the 28 tanks launched made it.

On the contrary, 27 of the 29 tanks in the first wave on Omaha sunk due to 6ft waves from being launched too far back.
Aside from 5 lost to artillery fire, the second wave of tanks made it ashore just fine. Stop parroting British memes there was nothing wrong with the DD tanks the US was using, they were just launched far too out to sea. The two that did make it to shore made it to shore because they had sailors in the tankers who knew how to survive in a craft in rough waves.

Wasn't the problem they started well before the germans, and went into the war with the best of 1920s technology?

While not all tanks have turrets, a Sturmtiger is not a tank. It is a self propelled gun.

The difference is in role. You would not use a Sturmtiger in the role of a tank, it's just not suited for the work needed.

Sure they did, but the Italians were, y'know, Italians...

So what do you get if you strap two torpedos to a civillian racing boat and crew it with the most magnificent bastards you can find?

The MAS torpedo boat.

This little wooden boat struck fear into the heart of the Royal Navy, as it could dart wildly across the open and relatively calm waters of
the Medditeranean, close the gap with a Destroyer or Battleship, deliver a point blank torpedo blast and then piss off as fast as it came.

Because of this, they were very effective against the larger more slower cruisers.

However, being essentially built from the military equivilant of string and good intentions, they were very fragile and any damage sustained by return fire could be catasrophic.

That and you have two shots. If you miss even one of these, you are in trouble.

Thank fuck that the men who crewed these things had balls to rival imperial guardsmen, otherwise they wouldn't have been nearly as effective.

Got two of their tanks in War Thunder now. Both look very pretty but are utter shit.

Although technically, that only happened on one of the four Omaha landings. 741 lost all but two tanks to the surf, for 743 they only lost half their tanks, the remaining two tank companies landed all their tanks just fine.

When people refer to Omaha they generally refer to the hardest beach, the most brutal one with the most casualties, was, wouldn't you know it, Dog Red where all but two Shermans were lost before reaching the beach.
Fox Green, where all the tanks made it ashore, had made penetration by the time the second wave had hit and Dog Green and Dog White had both made it inside the German defensive line by that time.
Dog White in particular suffered relatively little casualties due to much more favorable terrain for the attackers.

Dog Red of course, also had the strongest natural defenses overlooking the beach. It was an unfortunate set of setbacks and issues that led to a lot of dead men.

Something like that.

Even at the time the ineffectiveness of Mussolini to improve the country's economy and industry were fairly laughable, and Italy had a lower starting point than everyone else anyway. Not to mention their attempts in Ethiopia got them sanctioned and scorned internationally.

The italians have a proud tradition of assaulting heavily fortified mountain lines and suffering grievous casualties.

Italy... basically has the North, then it has Rome and then it's a whole load of regions that hadn't moved a step beyond the 18th century.

Among the european powers, it was basically strong enough to bully Austria, which was enjoying a civil war and nazi Germany undermining its polity during the period in question.

no. most did but not all.
the MK IV just had 2 sponsons.
more recebtly the STRV 103 was a sweedish turretless MBT.

one of New Zealands attempts at a home grown tank. developed in 1940 to fill a perceived need for some local tanks able to respond quickly incase of japanese invasion. The hybrid track and wheels system could be switched between from inside the hull and allowed it a top speed of 72km/h on the wheels.

Now when most people think of Nazi, or any other enemy faction, marching. They are more than likely gong to imagine them marching to the koniggratzer marsch (see link below) or something similar.

youtube.com/watch?v=uMZDEuiq8nQ

However, you could throw in something like Funkerlied to fuck with your players expectations.

youtube.com/watch?v=w2ztJbv78Hw

That cheery little number could be a popsong from the 60's.

My personal favourite for this style is Unterwegs

youtube.com/watch?v=W1ifxUkxYbs

Of course the Soviets couldn't be left behind in arms race for a more marketable sound for the wider audience, so they made:

Two Maxims: youtube.com/watch?v=6MFKN-1nw7o

Rifle Song: youtube.com/watch?v=6-31RUWBdYA

If your camapign has an Eastern Setting, may I suggest Song of the Coast Artillerymen for a catchy and powerful back-drop.

youtube.com/watch?v=WnosVUfLhUI

The Soviets have some really good thematic songs, such as:

The Guard Song: youtube.com/watch?v=9KG3L-ccLLs

March of the Soviet Tankists: youtube.com/watch?v=TbvmWGRgF_E

The Ballard of a Soldier: youtube.com/watch?v=S7A1962qpwM

(Warning for the above song: the volume of the singers goes from dead quiet to deathly loud within a split second before going quiet again)

And if you want to have Not-Italians, we have this more modern song. If you don't want to chnage the lyrics, you could have this as the anthem of a re-surging Roman Empire:

Europa Nazione: youtube.com/watch?v=hZOLRAKEP8o

If, however, you just want a plain old marching song, then the Fallschirmjäger have you covered.

Grüne Teufel: youtube.com/watch?v=UsSfTwT5EMM

Hinter den Bergen strahlet die Sonne: youtube.com/watch?v=JLCoa0dx490

Auf Kreta bei Sturm und bei Regen: youtube.com/watch?v=WPXT2Ex5xNc

Oops, forgot to paste the start of the post back in. The below box has the cut content.

I understand why the anti-spam system doesn't like shortened URLs, but it would be nice if it explained the guidlines a bit better.

I honestly thought this was going to be a two or three part post due to the character limit, but thankfully, due to my glorious imcompetence with the intro, we have pulled through.

Have fun with this guys and good night.

_____________________________________

So the last thing I will leave you gentlemen with before I call it quits for the evening is something that is often over-looked when making a campaign set during war.

Marching songs.
____________________________________

>leaving out Katyusha
C'mon, user. It's so popular even the nigger bitch countries on the outer edge of the Soviet Union sing it despite hating everything to do with the Russkies.

As i can recall; there's also an occasion of a Sturmtiger destroying FOUR SHERMANS IN A SINGLE SHOT at Remagen, i think.

WW2 stuff just makes me depressed these days.
All those men died for what? For the sake of what the world has become.
It makes me fucking sick, and only wish for the entire modern world order's total collapse.

>no mention of Pigeon guidance

In the days of WW2, when computers were the size of your average appartment, they were trying to develop Precision Guided Missiles like we have today. One of those was the Bat anti-ship missile (no relation to the flying critter kind like above), which used a radar and was the precursor of the modern Air-Surface Missiles you have today. Except radars of the day were big and expensive, and whitout a computer to guide them, guidance methods relied on crude, complex and unreliable analog electronics.

The best computer in the world, to this day, is an organic brain. So the idea was to train pigeons, fucking pigeons, to peck at a picture of the target on a screen, which would send an electric signal to the bomb's fins to guide it back onto target.

youtube.com/watch?v=mnKyOfNuSoo

>you know, they didn't have enough to worry about; what with being assaulted by an SS division entirely composed of rapists, pedos and the mentally deranged and all.
You see, no matter what you write after this, I will never be able to take you seriously again.

I wonder why that is

>obsolete in the FIRST world war

wut?

This

>On the plus side, in the same battle a shell landed in between a group of stationary germans and, in the words of my people, "Fukken Rekt 'em". So there's that.
You're a fucking embarrassment, m8, this is just cringy, you write like CRP makes his videos.

>this is an M16A1
>it jams
Holy shit I was laffin

OP seems to be the ultimate r*dditor.
His entire pool of knowledge is based on “funny“ anecdotes with no context or in depth knowledge.

>So the Italian Invasion of France.
>Huh...where do I start.
>Well, do you know the Maginot Line, that massive line of defensive forts that the Germans went to great pains to avoid?
2 unnecessary lines followed by a rhetorical question.
What the fuck are you doing? What are you being smug about?
Do you think this makes you sound smart?
Why are you redditspacing for no reason?
What
The
Fuck
Are
You
Doing?

Surprising that's not actually an exaggeration in this case.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS
Dirlewanger and his mates were a special kind f fucked up.

>this attack plan didn’t work the first 11 times, lets assault those bunkers again, surely it’ll work this time

I'd think that he wrote like a retard on purpose there if he wouldn't be so consistent.
He probably wrote his posts out beforehand, which actually makes the artificial smoothness he's trying (and failing) so badly to copy even worse.

>he doesn't know about the Dirlewangers

>battle of Remagen
>checks wikipedia
Jesus Christ why doesn't this get more coverage?

>assaulting
>occupying

>he doesn't know how to read

Dirlewangers did both, they had to re-take the AK-controlled parts of Warsaw too.

Technically beating down uprisings is part of an occupation, but that's not the point.
The problem with OP's post is that he reduces it to that, which together with the rest of the post, including the part about missiles which “fukken rekt“ some German civilians (and killed some americans, but he omits that) and refers to the civilians as “stationary Germans“
The quoted part is the start of the retardation, not its end and makes him sound like somebody who only knows history from reddit and the history channel.

Hm i guess you're right on that count.

>isn't this /k/ shit?
It's not a quest, so it's okay.

OP is a reddit

>Possibly Italian boots.jpg

Those are US M43 Paratrooper boots. I own a pair.

Not bad, but they missed a few of the classics...

Me too user, me too!

Piats and magnets - how the fook do they work?

If you want hilarious concepts wiki the Panjandrum. Its up their were russian tank dogs amd american cat bombs.

Also good for a chuckle or two, the british Petroleum Warfare Division. The mad men behind classics as the Bren Wasp and the Sherman, Churchill and Cromwell Crocodile. Aswell as a flame thrower lorry.

This is "skunk". It's used instead of pepper spray in israel, mainly on left-wing & muslim protestors/rioters.

It's most notable effect is it makes you smell really bad no matter how much you wash for several days after, making it easy for police to spot who was at a riot even if they were masked at the time.

It was recently purchased by the St. Louis police department and was used in those race riots they had last year.

Israel tried to export those stink bombs to India. They were not smelly enough to be effective.

A lot of these are in Flames of War, if that helps.

>Now when most people think of Nazi, or any other enemy faction, marching. They are more than likely gong to imagine them marching to the koniggratzer marsch (see link below) or something similar.

That's a funny way of saying "Erika".
youtube.com/watch?v=fc-DgRO1SrQ

And as a proud tankie it is my duty to say that the Civil War songs are simply superior to the Great Patriotic War songs in every way, shape, and form.

>"Oh Apple" a satirical song, mocking the hypocrisy of the White Army, while reaffirming the strength and popularity of the nascent Red Army. It is also catchy as Hell.
youtube.com/watch?v=UCfHJhMEKec
>"Red Army is the Strongest" describes the victory of the people in their struggle against the fascist Whites and their Imperialist puppet masters.
youtube.com/watch?v=zgKazTrhXmI

The best Communist song to come out of the Second World War has to either be Bella Ciao (written by Italian partisans) or "Sozialistische Weltrepublik", a song commissioned by the Soviet Union to bolster German antifascists.
youtube.com/watch?v=yqr1BnpY628

...

Their cars are still like that.

What about that planed British aircraft carrier built out of an iceberg

Yeah no. The us had radar Sensors on their artillery shells.

Thank you user, now I know I'm not alone in sensing the cringe.

>cars
>XXI century
>"nationality"