I was only an occasional poster on Lordofthememes, so it won’t be a major loss for them XD

Directed according to the grand plan!

no so good with the title words

Yep! Exact setups vary - at Jaffa, I think they worked in pairs (loader-shooter), while other configurations are attested to elsewhere - I know some later European mercenaries worked in teams of three or four - two loaders, one shooter, and sometimes a shieldbearer.

He didn’t think his life was gonna turn out like this. I sympathize tbqh

https://www.narahaku.go.jp/english/collection/659-0.html

I love (translation: hate) that this was made as a Roman meme, but it’s so widely applicable it doesn’t have to be.

… I’m gonna go drink cheap wine to drown my conscience until some charismatic reformer comes along

@passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world

@passiveaggressivesonar@lemmy.world

Ha, I’ll take a look, but I actually don’t have a lot of interest in large bolt-throwers! Roman scorpiones are cool, but once you start getting artillery-sized my attention starts to wander. I might have a pic or two, though!

I dunno man. I feel like quadrupling the power, doubling the load rate, reducing soldier fatigue, enabling usage of the crossbow in new situations (ie literally anywhere you don’t have room to take a sit-down to span), and increasing accuracy are all major improvements. If you want to put a ‘peak’ at the crossbow, it’s probably the mid-late 15th century, when it starts to be replaced by proper firearms. Past that there’s not a lot of innovation, probably in part because most focus ends up on, well, firearms. There are some little bits and baubles, most of which end up as curiousities as the crossbow’s military significance declines; that is to say, you find most of these features on hunting crossbows and the like - all-metal construction, specialized ammunition throwers (stonebows), double-bows, flip-up sights, etc, and I think it’d be fair to call those tinkering.

But from the inception of the crossbow to its peak in the 15th century? By pre-modern standards, going from a crude little hunting utensil consisting of a tiller, a bow, and a wooden peg to keep the string back; to something recognizably modern, with separate steel limbs, shoulder stocks, triggers, basic sights, rolling-nuts with latches, loading devices, etc etc, is MAJOR innovation. It’s the Dreyse-to-AKM transformation of its day, and while ~400 years is a long time, technologically, to us, in the pre-modern period, it’s lightning-fast.

From 400 BCE to 1300 AD, infantry armor saw very few improvements; from the first millenium BCE to the 20th century AD, the bow did not have major innovations; from the time of Alexander the Great to the High Medieval period, the steel of a sword was largely of the same quality for a given class of soldier. But the crossbow went from no-one to nightmare in a handful of generations - most of that development happening from widespread adoption in the 12th century, until literal guns came about in the early 15th century and the crossbow starts to have competition.

By contrast, the AKM isn’t significantly less powerful, accurate, faster-firing, or harder to handle than modern guns. Most of the tinkering is a question of trade-offs (more ammunition, or more stopping power? The question of which is better ends up highly contextual to any given conflict or prevailing military doctrine) or minor improvements (now 17% lighter and 21% more expensive with composite materials!). Compared to the Dreyse, on the other hand, the AKM blows it out of the water on every metric. Range, power, firing rate, ergonomics, reliability, versatility, maintenance, etc etc etc etc.

I can’t think of a single situation where you’d prefer a Dreyse except maybe some convoluted time-travel scenario with limited resources and labor pools, while people regularly argue about the relative merits and disadvantages of the AKM and like platforms to more modern service rifles (though I doubt many non-fud types would declare the AKM the winner of any such matchup, I think most people would agree that it’s mostly a question of trade-offs and what you want out of a service rifle, not objective quality of design).

I mean, let me put it this way - if you have ten guys with AKMs and ten guys with XM7s, the gun is largely not going to be the deciding factor between the two. Ceteris paribus, sure, the guys with the AKM are at a disadvantage, but you’d have to be looking at a pretty damn close matchup to begin with for that to be what pushes one side or the other over the finish line. If you have ten guys with AKMs and ten guys with Dreyse Needle Guns, there is going to have to be some serious imbalance in the teams for that to be remotely competitive.

Likewise, if you have ten guys with dinky little 11th century lockbows with no stirrup, and ten guys with fast-firing 15th century composite crossbows with goatslevers or belt-and-pulley systems, and metal quarrels, it’s going to have to be professional soldiers against total amateurs to be anything but a massacre (and if any serious armor is involved, whether 11th century or 15th, low-quality or high, even that level of skill imbalance wouldn’t be any help).

… hmm.

Explanation: The bust merged into the cabbage is that of Cato the Elder, who wrote quite… effusively in praise of the culinary and medicinal properties of cabbage.

Then how do you explain this totally legitimate audio of a Ukrainian military band

^{(sadly, it’s not the actual audio)}

Explanation: Italy, due to a pre-existing treaty with the Central Powers, declared neutrality at the start of WW1. About a year into the war, they remembered that they fucking hate Austria-Hungary and wanted Austro-Hungarian territory - so they entered the war AGAINST the Central Powers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_entry_into_World_War_I

What’s there to say. Twitter’s a shithole.

Unfortunately, many people still use it to communicate and organize, some of whom do not belong in said shithole.

I’m glad we could have a reasonable conversation about this.

As to your point about rejecting campism starts at home, I think we’re in partial agreement. It is important to reject one’s own ‘camp’, as failing to do so is… well, literally just campism. And we ‘in’ a certain camp are often better poised to examine and denounce certain aspects of our own camps, and insofar as we are gifted with that perspective, we have a very strong and serious moral duty to do so.

I’m just wary of the idea that we all ‘end up’ with the duty to denounce our own camp extra hard, rather than the duty to police ourselves and ensure that the moral failings of our own ‘camp’ don’t escape our notice or our condemnation. We can’t control whether others’ condemnations are correct in target or intensity; only our own.

As a member of the Inquisition, let me enlighten you:

1. Dark Eldar

2. Dark Eldar

3. Dark Eldar

4. Eldar

Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.

But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.

When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?

And yes, you need to extra proactively reject the camp you were born in, because the default is to assume you support where you’re from out of tribalism and selfish self-interest overriding moral consistancy.

You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.

I don’t think you’d find many here overtly in Russias or China’s camps, but there are still many in the US’s in the social media primarily used by the west.

Man, even putting Lemmy, where we currently are, aside, you can still find plenty of very loud and very popular nuts in places like Reddit and Twatter who are full-throated in their support of Russia and China. I could show you posts all day long, and have depression and fatigue set in long before I ran short of examples.

Part of being against campism is speaking out against the camp you’re physically in and more expected to go rah rah for out of nationalism.

So part of being against campism is picking a camp to be extra against because you were born there.

Your immediate response to someone pointing out that campism is bad whether it’s American (pointing out Israel) or anti-American (pointing out Russia and Assad) is to go on a rant about America Bad™, including the curious inclusion of eugenics as if that wasn’t supported in most corners pre-WW2.

Not sure that’s ‘adding to the point’ so much as ‘using it as a springboard to do the exact opposite’.