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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4031 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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There's this somewhat 1990s famous anime series* "Legend of Galactic Heroes". It's based on a series of Japanese military SF novels. The novels are of the kind that deal more with command, strategy and tactics rather than the actual pew-pew/aargh of SF combat.

I learned about it when someone posted a meme dissing 'lore' of some other series and well, look for yourself:. Piqued my interest.

No spoilers at any of the links here.

Haven't gotten around to watching the series - it's rather long and quality of visuals is not up to modern standards, but I'm enjoying reading the first book.

Like with Three Body Problem, there's a distinctly alien quality to the book despite it being translated and populated mostly by people descended from Europeans. It's sort of a military space opera I guess, but with a more serious tone. The books and the series is complex but not too impenetrable like certain anime. I suspect a lot of the harder to understand anime series are that way because Japanese correctly understand if you make something that makes little sense, people will still try to make sense out of it and impute deepness to it.

The first book is not bad at all. The writer has a good turn of phrase and the characters / organisational dynamics are described realistically. It's not boring or too predictable.

A flaw in the first book is that the strategic issue with the first battle were a bit ridiculous- e.g. professional soldiers in long running war making the kind of error a schoolboy wouldn't make after five games of Stellaris! Specifically they allow themselves be defeated in detail, which is just .. ugh.

*no. 11 on that list, which is mostly new stuff.

I'm not sure. E.g. the world politics asides in Ghost in the Shell were not bad. Haven't seen enough to make an opinion.

Haven't really read the LOGH books, but the political parts seem the least weak. Sure, demagogues bad, but I'm expecting at some point a recognition of the need for myths and such.

After all, war is not something that humanity can simply transcend without killing itself. The lies necessary in waging a war may be distasteful, but so is killing, and while there are some who'd prefer to be a victim rather than a killer, our blood comes from those who chose otherwise, hence there's always going to be more of those who will do the needful.

Japanese in general seem more cynical and realistic about democracy - they've had democracy imposed on them at gunpoint, and have never really started to believe the bullshit.

You might like Ryosuke Takahashi's work. Dougram in particular, and maybe some parts of VOTOMS.

Great series. Expect a fair amount of caricature-level commanders and silly politicians to be a common thread in the stories. It's not all like that first battle, but it will recur, especially for side characters.

I've only watched one season of the new series/remake (Die Neue These), but it's actually not bad. It might be a classic in its own right. It has a kind of modern-yet-glacial pace which grows on you, like an old novel.

Interesting. I've heard a lot of recommendations for LOGH, yet never watched it myself.

I read the light novels for 'Saga of Tanya the Evil' where an authoritarian capitalist HR manager gets murdered by someone he angers for firing him. He then manages to anger God by being too much of an atheist so is born as a poor orphan girl in not-Wilhelmine Germany with significant magical power, such that she's drafted for the mage-force around 12 and gets to fight in not-WW2 against a coalition manipulated behind the scenes by God.

It was interesting since I got a certain sense of the author's genuine interest in military tactics and the what-ifs of WW2. What if they march on for total victory in France, refusing to allow not-Dunkirk? What if they arm the minorities of the not-Soviet Union? Tanya gets a kampfgruppe later on, invents some combined arms warfare. There's discussion of the advantages of internal-lines of communication vs divided enemies amd various other ideas. I learnt that Soviet air defence was so amateurish that they let some random German pilot land a light aircraft in Red Square back in the real world. Thus Tanya decides to mount an air raid on Moscow, at which point not-Beria goes mad with lust upon seeing a pre-teen girl humiliating the not-Soviet Union. It's a fun story, where Tanya gets into all kinds of trouble due to misinterpreting the situation + God messing with her.

Also, there were some really unrealistically terrible generals in the real world. Fredendall for instance was comically incompetent:

Instead of using the standard military map grid-based location designators, he made up confusing codes such as "the place that begins with C." This practice was unheard-of for a general and distinguished graduate of the Command and General Staff School, who had been taught to always use standardized language and procedures to ensure clarity when transmitting orders under the stress of combat. Fredendall's informality often led to confusion among his subordinates, and precious time was lost attempting to discern his meaning.

Fredendall was given to speaking and issuing orders using his own slang, such as calling infantry units "walking boys" and artillery "popguns."

Fredendall rarely visited the front lines, and had a habit of disregarding advice from commanders who had been farther forward and had actually reconnoitered the terrain.[11] He split up units and scattered them widely,[12] and at critical defense points had positioned U.S. forces (against advice) too far apart for mutual support or effective employment of artillery, the strongest American arm.

Fredendall was barely on speaking terms with Ward, whom he had deliberately left out of operational meetings after Ward had repeatedly protested the separation of his command into weaker 'penny packet' forces distributed across various sectors of the front.

Allied forces were bereft of air support during critical attacks, and were frequently positioned by the senior command in positions where they could not support each other. Subordinates later recalled their utter confusion at being handed conflicting orders, not knowing which general to obey—Anderson or Fredendall.

Fredendall is one of those bizarre episodes of WW2 that's .. hard to believe but apparently happened.

Not that the war wasn't a clownshow in general - combat almost always is, but it's usually a way more serious and less obviously funny clownshow.

One could make a black comedy about Fredendall, the ordinary battlefield fuckups are just heartbreaking. And if they aren't, what happens to the other side is.

In the operational exercises the US Army conducted in the fall of 1941, 42 divisional, corps, and army commanders took part. General George Marshall (Army Chief of Staff) saw fit to relieve 31 of them afterwards. The next year, 20 of the Army's 27 division commanders were fired. Fredendall made it through both of these cullings.

That goes to show you how significant and severe the crisis of American military leadership was prior to the war, and gives you an indication of how someone like Eisenhower managed to go from Colonel to Supreme Allied Commander in under three years.

... I wonder how the war would have ended without someone like Marshall being in charge of the army.

The next big war is going to be a complete shitshow is my guess, because the things on reads about officer promotion boards are highly discouraging.

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