saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 13hAnd suddenly at that point the answer is much more obvious I think! 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 13hWhat this suggests is that a 74 costs about 650 labour years per year of operation, while a galley is about 152. Both are mostly crew cost, and the SotL's capital cost is WAY higher but I think it comes out as more like that you could afford a fleet of 100 galleys or, like, 10-20 ships of the line. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 13hOne ship of the line (assume Vengeur) has about 600 crew so 4x the labour costs to man. It also lasts about 45 years, so its construction labour is spread over three times as long; this still means it probably takes about forty to fifty labour years per year in service to build with your figures. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 13hThat's about 1.12 skilled labour years per year per galley to build, but more like 150 labour years per year per galley to crew, or something like that. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 13hMy personal thought about this would be to ask the question of whether an equivalent fraction of a galley-based or SotL-based NAVY wins at the same amount of labour to sustain. So 100 galleys means you're building 5-10 per year on average, but crewing 100. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly has music by Stewart Copeland, the same composer as the original trilogy of Spyro games. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4suL... The game is... so buggy you can glitch complete it in under two minutes and it *regularly* freezes on the multi-minute load screens.youtube.comSpyro 4: Enter the Dragonfly [HQ] Complete Soundtrack + Unused TracksYouTube video by Adam XT 000
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I've seen it argued in the past that PGMs are basically magic by previous standards, and that is a good example of why - the First Gulf War was against a serious adversary and the main discourse was "did we, like, overdo it?" 150
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026I suppose so - consequence of the USN being very small for its economy! 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Yeah, that's why it's a weird grey area to me - the monitors act as ships of force for the blockade to counter Confederate ironclads, but it feels weird to say that "if one side doesn't build ships the other eventually wins on the sea" and call that unusual? 120
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Perhaps the tightening blockade qualifies and perhaps it doesn't - I just wanted to flag up the USN definitely didn't start from nothing and that a lot of the early expansion was take-up of civilian ships, not new build. 000
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026The ironclads get a lot of attention because they're new and flashy and cool and different, but aside from that I think the new-build stuff is basically all gunboats and sloops and it just tightens the blockade. The Union could supply naval lodgements fine without any new build. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026I'm not even sure the ACW qualifies. The pre-war US navy was small but it was certainly larger than the Confederate one and could effectively engage in sealane denial right from the start - though I'll agree the USN certainly got bigger, both from take-up of civilian ships and (some) new build. 210
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026A Roman example here is that Octavian turned his position into being the first Emperor because everyone was exhausted. The fact that Octavian brought a return to normalcy (by killing everyone else with any authority, mostly) let him dismantle the Roman *democracy*. 010
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 09/09/2026"I too love roughly 50% of the original series, exactly five seasons of TNG, DS9 and four or five Voyager episodes, like everyone else. " (From a misc post on the acoup blog) 010
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 04/09/2026The steel thing is a bit weird, because it seems like exported steel (or other raw materials) that doesn't get a buyer just vanishes into the aether IIRC? It doesn't give you any benefits as the exporter and you can't use it for yourself either. 000
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Clearly as a historian this means you must presume the existence of eight hundred divisions of Chapter Serfs that go unremarked in our sources because they are not the prestige arm. They occasionally appear when a Space Marine says he's completely alone and unsupported so he turns to his serf and- 11163
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 01/09/2026It seems like the sort of thing the canonical man in charge of the Clone Army (Dooku) would do as a little insurance... 010
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 01/09/2026Presumably if you were sitting there it would be pinion? 000
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 01/09/2026I've made a bit of a habit of that sort of joke! No Cilantro one, but I did one where the fact that Palpatine looked and sounded different by the time he was giving the order resulted in a facial ID failure and he couldn't give it, and one where the biochips had all been EMPed into non-function... 220
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026Based on this you seem to be of the opinion that Bret said that "war is good and we should do more of it, because XYZ". In fact, he has said explicitly that war is bad and we should do less of it. Slavery existed in the past; we have documentary evidence of it; it remains bad. 040
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026More to the point, though, you were claiming that he doesn't have evidence or he should publish a paper; instead, I pointed out that he cited books to the effect. To say that other books also exist is nonsense - it's moving the goalposts away from your original argument. 030
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026He also argues that modernity is good because it means that there is less violence (for which he has cited books) and explicitly says that violence isn't all there was in the past. It's just that violence, by its nature, is important in defining whether a group survives or not. 110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026That doesn't seem to be the claim that Bret actually made, though. His claim is that organized violence is part of how humans survived in prehistory and also in history, and that the resultant ways of thinking are the same ones fascism uses as a short circuit of reason. 110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026Doesn't he cite two books in the thread? I think the paper's already been written by someone else, such as Lawrence Keely. 100
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 24/08/2026And now I have the mental image of the Wholly British Empire, which is not Wholly British or really an Empire. Britain has internal self-government and there's an Electoral College which means that the next 'Emperor' after George VI's death is a Mughal. 0391
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026So... the Cargo Cult of the Badass, then. Doing things that they associate with being awesome, and yet the victories don't come. 221524
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 19/08/2026"Space stations as the Frontier" three-part blog post series, part 2, subsection III, heading c: "Cabin Fever"; subheading: "why everyone on a space station weeks from the rest of civilization is overwrought and loud, for reasons of social psychology" 1110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 18/08/2026So you are, in fact, basically fighting the war Britain and France planned to fight - heavily equipped divisions, dash forwards to good defensive positions, produce for a year, put the steamroller into gear. 030
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 14/08/2026Isaac Newton couldn't handle the seventeenth century university system! He famously got special treatment - exclusion from the requirement to be an ordained priest - and his crazy lectures attracted no students so he lectured to an empty room for decades. 000
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026As for airbases close to Normandy, that's Britain. Britain is the best conceivable support airbase. The crossing is also nice and short! 010
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Some of the problem with Denmark is offshore islands - starting in about the Netherlands the rest of the European coastline up to Jutland has a series of offshore bars connected to the mainland by shallow water. It's less extreme at Jutland itself but still a factor. 110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026So right from the start it was easy to blame the Republic for the loss - the "stab in the back" myth was effectively deliberately engineered in advance by the military leadership (General's Staff I think?). 170
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026My understanding is that a really serious problem was that basically the first thing the Republic did was surrender. Germany had been effectively a military dictatorship for years and the military deposed the Kaiser, then promptly formed a new Republic so the Republic ate the shame of surrender. 160
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Norway is not vital to the Axis and is heavily defended in comparison to how important/useful it is. 010
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026The basic issue with Norway is that it doesn't really get you much of anything; Italy is a large Axis state with a substantial population and a non-negligible amount of industry which will probably sort itself out if you take the pressure off and so you have to deal with it at some point. 210
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Though it's worth noting that an invasion of France in 1943 would simply have been a mistake - there wasn't the troop pipeline. The choice is Italy or wait, and of those Italy is clearly the option that hurts the Axis more. 020
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026France looks easier by comparison because of a year more experience and a year more production, and also because of all the units which were tied down in Italy and tied down as a result of the Italian campaign. 030
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Possibly, though I would argue that it wasn't possible to invade France in 1943 so if you're going to attack anywhere in 1943 it's going to be Italy; it's hard because fighting the Wehrmacht is hard, though the German army in Italy took more casualties than it inflicted, on the defensive, losing. 320
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026And yes, it costs lives. It's World War Two. Everything costs lives. The balance of benefit seems to make Italy not a clear bad idea though. 1180
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026The alternative is fighting those same German divisions elsewhere (or, more specifically, those same German divisions being available to react to Soviet offensives, probably) and more German replacement manpower because it's not on garrison in the Balkans etc. 1110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026They can't put the Greeks elsewhere for example, but in Italy they control the intensity of engagement. So the net result is that for a relatively small cost the Allies knocked millions of Italian LOC troops out of the Axis and pinned down some actually good German divisions in Italy. 1120
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 11/08/2026The thing is that the Italian campaign moves a big chunk of Axis troops out of the Axis column and then the Germans have to replace them with something; conversely the Allies can treat it as a "here's where we put our small units" theatre. 1150
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026For the Germans to have a doctrine of blowing away the enemy front line with superior artillery and only then sending in the breakthrough, they'd probably have to be a different military. British/US/French artillery was to my understanding better than either Soviet or German, by a long way. 020
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026The British interconnectedness costs them in manoeuvre - they can't exploit a momentary weakness - but if they see an enemy somewhere they did not expect they absolutely can direct the fire of the whole army group on it, very quickly (single-digit minutes). 120
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026Consequently a German kampfgruppe can't call on the artillery of an entire army group. It CAN rely on dive bombers for example (which could react fairly quickly) and it can do prepared fires, but it can't do prompt fires on an unplanned observed target. 120
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026The basic issue here is that German doctrine is focused around kampfgruppe - this means that units are quite small and tightly interconnected within themselves for maximum operational flexibility, but the cost of this is poor interconnectivity across the whole army. 120
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026Option one is to go to ground, which means the attack fails but they're no longer nearly as exposed; option two is to keep attacking, and die. 110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026It's fascinating that the German response to WW1 is to do breakthroughs better, but the British response to WW1 on a technical level is "just blow the crap out of the specific grid square the Germans are in as soon as we see them". It gives the attacking German force a stark choice. 110
saphroneth.bsky.social @saphroneth.bsky.social · 10/08/2026The early version of this is what killed the German army in Normandy, is my understanding; doctrinally they wanted to mass for decisive impact but that just got them deluged in very-rapid-response Allied artillery. 25,000 lbs of incoming shells don't care how badass you are. 110
