Because The United Kingdom?

[Adam_S]

Back to bows v muskets for a minute, there's something that you can do with a musket that you definitely can't do with a bow - stick a pointy thing on the end and try and poke it into somebody. It's easy to focus on the firepower aspect of muskets but the ability to use them as shock weapons too was just as important.

Edited November 23, 2015 by Adam_S

[TonyE]

Don`t forget Stu, they don`t like it up`em. By the age of Marlborough various versions of the socket bayonet had replaced (atleast from 1690s and onwards) the earlier plug types.

[swerve]

Its even more puzzling in the English civil war. Most of the main fighting weapons there were pikes. They did have musketmen, but matchlocks were not particularly numerous, or such is my impression.

I think they had as many muskets as they could afford. The initial aim seems to have been to emulate the Dutch System of at least as many musketeers as pikemen in intermingled blocks so that the muskets could break enemy formations while the pikes presented a hedge against cavalry charges. Quite a few officers & professional soldiers had experience of that. They were supplemented by men with experience of newer Swedish tactics, e.g. Rupert who improved Royalist cavalry tactics, dropping the caracole (OK against pikes, not when they were backed by muskets).

[Panzermann]

From british civil war back to the important things in life.

 

British flavours of crisps:

http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2013/04/british-crisps/

 

 

the whole "anglophenia" series is a trove of britishness: www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/

[Marek Tucan]

Back to bows v muskets for a minute, there's something that you can do with a musket that you definitely can't do with a bow - stick a pointy thing on the end and try and poke it into somebody. It's easy to focus on the firepower aspect of muskets but the ability to use them as shock weapons too was just as important.

 

Or you can swing it around and use the butt. While with the longbow you ave a pretty long quarterstaff when all is said and done, you should knock it about too much.

 

Well, true, but its not like Archers didnt have 'Bollock' daggers anyway. Which basically meant when all those French knights were down in the mud, a lightly armed archer has a distinct CQB advantage. Why is why they racked up cricket scores at Agincourt I suspect.

 

Its worth remembering, screw bayonets took time to develop. I gather in Marlborough's time (and I guess this includes the '45 rebellion) bayonets were plugs that fitted into the musket barrel. So as soon as you went to bayonet, you effectively lost the main advantages of a musket.

 

Its even more puzzling in the English civil war. Most of the main fighting weapons there were pikes. They did have musketmen, but matchlocks were not particularly numerous, or such is my impression.

 

 

I guess what im saying is, its perfectly understandable why the Army went with muskets over archery. What is puzzling is how quickly archery completely died out. In fact, im not even sure they were using crossbows to any great degree after the the Elizabethan period. Unless they were using them on the Continent?

 

The plug bayonet was still improving the standing compared to longbow. Archer cannot defend against cavalry - musketeer with plug bayonet can. And even with screw bayonets, 1-2 front ranks usually did not fire in square (or fired just first salvo and did not reload), they just kept the bayonets at the ready. Even with the screw bayonets, their use severely limited rate of fire as the bayonet got in the way (the really experienced troops were observed sometimes to remove bayonet, load, mount it again).

[Marek Tucan]

Im not quite sure I buy that Marek, at Agincourt (and to and to an extent at Crecy) they did just that. Admittedly it took sharpened staves to help ward them off, but that when you get down to it is little more sophisticated than a brown bess with a bayonet at the end. Admittedly towards the end of the war in France cavalry had a resurgence and had some success against Longbow. But again, in England it proved to be successful even up to the Tudor period, particulalry during the War of the Roses.

Not to my understanding, at Crecy the obstacles were more elaborate, and at Agincourt the cavalry was rather underrepresented. Moreover with musket and bayonet (or earlier musket and pike) you can create such an obstacle immediately, anywhere, without any additional preparation. That allowes the infantry to be far more mobile even in the face of cavalry (see the Light Division fighting retreat at Fuentes de Onoro).

 

Cavalry had success against longbow as long as they remembered not to attack longbowmen directly and in places where either terrain or preparation were favoring defense.

 

I suppose if one is honest, archers belonged to a feudal society, and muskets can be seen as the leading edge of a more technological, occasionally (though perhaps not in Britain for some time!) a more scientific approach to warfare, that was more quantifiable and easier to predict. You could have a Napoleon after the age of musketry, but probably not in the feudal society that preceeded it for example. It was easier to train, easier to equip, easier to keep supplied a battalion equipped with muskets than it was archers. But all said and done, I would face down a battalion of musketmen with a battalion of archers any day of the week, and probably win.

If that was so, archers would be kept with the King - but the closer to the seat of power, the faster the actual fighting troops got the firearms. If it was a matter of expense (on training etc.), King would be the best one to have it (and rich nobility), but these people (and rich cities) led the gunpowder forward... It simply had to have better tactical value even fairly early on.

 

The battalion of musketeers vs. same of archers would be fairly dependant on tactical situation, but all things being equal, musketeers are less weather sensitive, more concentrated and thus probably more able to punch a hole.

[Panzermann]

All that said, Its not that im surprised the Archer, and particularly longbows died out. It was clearly inevitable. Im just surprised quite how quickly it happened, with narry a backward step. And in this period there were plenty of backward steps, the RN staying with sail quite some time after others had moved to steam. Staying with Muskets when rifles were clearly superior. Rocket troops which offered nothing artillery couldnt do better. And latterly the British Army introducing Lancers after the Napoleonic war was over, when everyone else seemed to start to withdraw theirs.

Now you are putting it all in a stew, Stew-art. (badum tish, okay okay, a pound in the bad pun piggy bank).

 

Armies stayed with muskets for ease of production and speed of loading. Rifled barrels had been long in use for hunting and target guns, but production is difficult and costs accordingly if the right tooling is not yet invented. Alos for a long time many gun smiths had not really understood what makes rifling useful and they cut crazy profiles into barrels like concentric rings so they could sell "rifles" to clueless customers. A straight tube is much easier to manufacture.

 

RN staying with sails, I chalk that up to "we always did it this way". After WW2 Many stayed with steam although Diesel was superior. Though oil firing muddled the equation.

 

Rocket troops were an oddity in the 18/19th centuries. But maybe its effect was over estimated then.

 

Reintroduction of Lancers I think the British Army had been too fast to withdraw them. They had proven still useful. Heck some units were kept into WW1 by some armies.

[R011]

 

Reintroduction of Lancers I think the British Army had been too fast to withdraw them. They had proven still useful. Heck some units were kept into WW1 by some armies.

 

 

BY the late 19th century, all British cavalry except the Household Cavalry were lancers regardless of the unit title. They didn't withdraw them until WWI.

Edited December 6, 2015 by R011

[swerve]

And in this period there were plenty of backward steps, the RN staying with sail quite some time after others had moved to steam. Staying with Muskets when rifles were clearly superior. Rocket troops which offered nothing artillery couldnt do better. And latterly the British Army introducing Lancers after the Napoleonic war was over, when everyone else seemed to start to withdraw theirs.

 

The RN converted sail ships of the line to steam en masse from the end of the 1840s, plus building new steamships, starting just after the French. They'd both had smaller steamships for a while. Much the same with rifles: the British army adopted the Baker rifle early on as a weapon for a small number of specialists, & as soon as the French were kind enough to invent the Minie bullet, converted smoothbore muskets to rifled en masse from 1851, leading to British infantry in the Crimea having a huge advantage over the almost entirely smoothbore-armed Russians. When the French built steam-powered armoured floating batteries (used in the Crimea), so did we - like the USA & the Confederacy did several years later, by which time the RN had ocean-going ironclads, yet again, just behind the French. The RN beat the French to turret ships, though.

[Anixtu]

The ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror that took part in the Sir John Franklin expedition also had steam plants, in that case converted steam locomotives from the LNWR IIRC. So yes, we were using steam. But there was perhaps a traditional reluctance in the RN to be first, largely because they could take the lead and avoid others mistakes. We did the same with the second HMS Dreadnought as well when you think about it.

 

Compare HMS Warrior to Gloire. Laid down about a year apart, with the French first. But Warrior was 150% of Gloire's size, carried a partially breech loading armament (an apparent technological advance, but in fact an immature technology), entirely iron construction, etc. The RN was not first, but Gloire was not sufficiently advanced for the RN to have learnt from her mistakes and they simply procured a much more advanced design. However, it was a time of experimentation, and concurrently with HMS Warrior a series of other often retrograde or inferior (but usually cheaper) designs were produced.

Edited December 7, 2015 by Anixtu

[sunday]

Main difference between Gloire and HMS Warrior was that, despite both being iron-armored ships, the former had a wooden hull and the later a iron one.

[swerve]

 

 

And in this period there were plenty of backward steps, the RN staying with sail quite some time after others had moved to steam. Staying with Muskets when rifles were clearly superior. Rocket troops which offered nothing artillery couldnt do better. And latterly the British Army introducing Lancers after the Napoleonic war was over, when everyone else seemed to start to withdraw theirs.

 

The RN converted sail ships of the line to steam en masse from the end of the 1840s, plus building new steamships, starting just after the French. They'd both had smaller steamships for a while. Much the same with rifles: the British army adopted the Baker rifle early on as a weapon for a small number of specialists, & as soon as the French were kind enough to invent the Minie bullet, converted smoothbore muskets to rifled en masse from 1851, leading to British infantry in the Crimea having a huge advantage over the almost entirely smoothbore-armed Russians. When the French built steam-powered armoured floating batteries (used in the Crimea), so did we - like the USA & the Confederacy did several years later, by which time the RN had ocean-going ironclads, yet again, just behind the French. The RN beat the French to turret ships, though.

 

Indeed, but many of them were not very successful conversions. I seem to recall they found the remains of one of them lying in the Thames where it had been broken up, and found one of the points where the ribs had shown clear damage from the weight of the steam plant up on it. When they looked the records up they found it had been a veteran of the Crimean war, I forget which.

 

The ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror that took part in the Sir John Franklin expedition also had steam plants, in that case converted steam locomotives from the LNWR IIRC. So yes, we were using steam. But there was perhaps a traditional reluctance in the RN to be first, largely because they could take the lead and avoid others mistakes. We did the same with the second HMS Dreadnought as well when you think about it.

 

Think the Indians were using rifles before we were IIRC?

 

Not all the conversions were successful, but they didn't have to last long. It was very soon obvious that the traditional sail ship of the line was obsolete & warships were going to be very different in the future, & in the meantime Something Had To Be Done before Johnny Foreigner rendered all our sailing ships useless. Starting just after the French, we rapidly got a much larger fleet of steam ships of the line into service, meaning we still had by far the most powerful fleet & had a breathing space to work on what came next - starting with Warrior & Black Prince, either of which could have sunk the combined fleets of the rest of the world with impunity, given enough ammunition & coal.

 

We used rifles from the 18th century, but in small numbers because of the expense & slow loading. Until the Minie bullet, all muzzle-loading rifles were problematic because of ROF, & breech-loading rifles were rubbish (expensive & horribly unreliable) until the Kammerlader. The Americans had the Hall breech-loading rifle early on, but it didn't replace muskets because of its problems. The only reports I've found of rifles being used by Indian states refer to small numbers, similar to jägers, caçadores, etc. - i.e. what the British army did with the 95th. The Sikh army is said to have used rifles like that in the early 19th century - made under the supervision of a Frenchman.

 

I sometimes wonder why the Norwegian kammerlader wasn't more widely adopted. NIH? It doesn't seem to have matched the Dreyse needle gun for ROF, but it was faster than a musket, & longer-range & more accurate than the needle gun, with all the reloading advantages a breech loader gave, & doesn't seem to have suffered much gas leakage from what I can find out. It was in service when other armies were beginning to adopt rifled muskets.

 

HMS Captain was a disaster because Coles was a pig-headed idiot who knew bugger-all about ship design & wouldn't listen to the advice of those who understood far more than him about hydrodynamics & physics. He had one good idea - the turret - & got a lot of support because it was a very good idea. He & his supporters successfully (& with some justice) portrayed the Admiralty as excessively cautious & stuck in the past, & that got him given a free hand to build a ship - hence the unsafe, unstable, Captain. The more conservative Monarch, with Coles turrets but incorporating the recommendations of the Admiralty's ship designers, worked fine.

Edited December 7, 2015 by swerve

[DB]

Did any other nations have an equivalent to Froude?

[Nikolas93TS]

[Panzermann]

Now I want to film a new music video for the old Sex Pistols song. No tea, skipping the queue...

 

 

edit: sex! sex! not six

Edited December 7, 2015 by Panzermann

[DB]

Indeed, the correct response in the negative, is "No, thank you." A chap who is clearly of the proper sort (wearing a bow tie) would never fail to be polite, and the host would be graciously accepting of his eccentricity.

 

The decline of politeness in society is a sign of the End of Times, I tell you.

[Panzermann]

The decline of politeness in society is a sign of the End of Times, I tell you.

More politness again would be nice. But with self-optimisation, greed and self-centred filter bubbles and all that running the show, there is less and less room for proper behaviour anymore. A symptom of change for the worse. Everybody living in his own small solipsist world.

 

edited to add: yes I.know you meant it as a joke, but I think you hit there on something.

Edited December 7, 2015 by Panzermann

[Panzermann]

The Graying Thieves Who Nearly Got Away With a Record Heist in London (nyt)

 

[DougRichards]

Sexy Beast was another classic

 

The first paragraph (trailer if you will to the wiki article) sets the scene:

 

Ex-con and expert safe-cracker Gary "Gal" Dove (Ray Winstone) has served his time behind bars and happily retired to a Spanish villa with his beloved ex–porn star wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman). He also has the company of long-time best friend Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White). Their serene life is shattered by the arrival of an old criminal associate and sociopath Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), who is intent on enlisting Gal in a bank heist back in London. Organising the heist is Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), a powerful crime lord, who has learned about the bank's vault from Harry (James Fox), the bank's chairman whom he met at an orgy.

[BillB]

Sexy Beast was another classic

 

The first paragraph (trailer if you will to the wiki article) sets the scene:

 

Ex-con and expert safe-cracker Gary "Gal" Dove (Ray Winstone) has served his time behind bars and happily retired to a Spanish villa with his beloved ex–porn star wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman). He also has the company of long-time best friend Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White). Their serene life is shattered by the arrival of an old criminal associate and sociopath Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), who is intent on enlisting Gal in a bank heist back in London. Organising the heist is Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), a powerful crime lord, who has learned about the bank's vault from Harry (James Fox), the bank's chairman whom he met at an orgy.

Fair film pulled back by Uber Luvvie Sir Ben's unconvincing portrayal of a psychotic fruitcake gangster; for a look at how it ought to have been done see Michael Caine's performance in the original Get Carter, as pointed out by Stuart.

 

OTOH Sir Ben's performance did provide the material for Ghandi Beast, which you can find here altho there's some rather fruity language in there so prolly NSFW :

 

BillB

[Mr King]

A very good film. And again, tunneling into a vault from underground, a theme that is returned to time and again in criminal endevours in Britain. Hilariously Sir Arthur Conan Doyle predicted an attack on a bank in such a fashion in the Sherlock Holmes Story 'The Red Headed league'. Though I guess he might have copied the idea from somewhere else, ive never thought to look it up.

 

Speaking of crime films, the best one of the lot is probably this. About as good as anything Hollywood was releasing in the same period, for some reason it bombed at the box office. Its only later that its been recognised for how good it is.

The theme tune and the titles are probably among the best you will see in any film of the period.

 

One of my favorites too. Call me a heretic but I also love the Stallone remake.

[BillB]

 

A very good film. And again, tunneling into a vault from underground, a theme that is returned to time and again in criminal endevours in Britain. Hilariously Sir Arthur Conan Doyle predicted an attack on a bank in such a fashion in the Sherlock Holmes Story 'The Red Headed league'. Though I guess he might have copied the idea from somewhere else, ive never thought to look it up.

 

Speaking of crime films, the best one of the lot is probably this. About as good as anything Hollywood was releasing in the same period, for some reason it bombed at the box office. Its only later that its been recognised for how good it is.

The theme tune and the titles are probably among the best you will see in any film of the period.

 

One of my favorites too. Call me a heretic but I also love the Stallone remake.

 

You are a heretic.

 

C'mon, even the Blaxploitation version Hit Man is better than Stallone's "effort":

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Man_(film)

 

A trailer for your delectation

 

 

BillB

[BillB]

Ive never seen the Stallone remake. I kind of worried Id feel the same way I felt after seeing the Italian Job remake, ie somewhat cheated.

 

Supposedly its based on a novel from the late 60s 'Jacks Return Home' which ive never read. Supposedly the author wrote a prequal to explain why he felt a pressing need to murder everyone in the movie. As Bill says, cracking film anyway.

 

Interestingly the young woman who ends up drowned in the Sunbeam Alpine (Geraldine Moffat) apparently was the mother of the 2 creators of the Grand Theft Auto series. Which kind of explains a lot really

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

Ref the first bit, you've missed nothing mate.

 

Ref the last bit, serves her right for owning a Sunbeam Alpine, the dorrty hooer. Waste of a good Ford Zephyr by dropping Alf Roberts on it tho.

 

BillB

[Panzermann]

You are a heretic.

 

C'mon, even the Blaxploitation version Hit Man is better than Stallone's "effort":

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Man_(film)

 

A trailer for your delectation

 

 

BillB

There is a Blaxploitation version?

 

With Pam Grier?

 

 

And off I am to get it.

[Ivanhoe]

 

You are a heretic.

 

C'mon, even the Blaxploitation version Hit Man is better than Stallone's "effort":

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Man_(film)

 

A trailer for your delectation

 

 

BillB

There is a Blaxploitation version?

 

With Pam Grier?

 

 

And off I am to get it.