Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[azmodean]

If you are doing formal marksmanship training, you fire at the same target multiple times and determine a spread, so you can factor out the inaccuracy from the gun and concentrate on your own handling technique.  I plan on adding such an action you can use to do that kind of thing and exceed the accuracy limits of your weapon at some point, but it's not a high priority right now, and the limits are chosen to let you reach very high skills with readily available gear.

[Darkmere]

There's a huge problem with those shot-per-kill numbers. There's an innate instinctive refusal in the average human mind to consciously kill another person. Most of the trench studies from WWI indicated that most of the shots fired at the start of a battle were wildly inaccurate, with the majority of soldiers settling into feeding ammunition to the handful of them that were able to intentionally kill the enemy.

Snipers are different, obviously, but they're more fringe cases than the norm by a large margin. This whole thing is a big part of the problem in modern army life, which in part explains lots of the dehumanizing WWII era propaganda, on both sides. Jews are subhuman, the Japanese are a menace that will devour everything, westerners will eat you if you surrender, because they're cannibals. Notably the unwillingness to kill has been tampered by modern technology - most bullets from a machine gun won't hit; you don't see the splattered bits of people you bombed.

In short, it's not so much that the guns were that wildly inaccurate, but that people didn't want to hit very often.

[BFEL]

There's an innate instinctive refusal in the average human mind to consciously kill another person.

I'm pretty sure that is hopeful-hippy bullshit of the highest order for several reasons. Beyond the fact there isn't really any evolutionary advantage to NOT murdering everyone you meet (other then potential mates) there's also the sheer ENORMOUS FUCKING VOLUME of human works, such as vidya games, that focus entirely on murdering everything ever.

If anything there is an instinctive FETISH in the human mind to consciously kill another person.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Simo Hayha WAS a clodhopping farmboy. IIRC he actually went back to that after the war. So, they seem to have been right on the money there.

A semi-unique clodhopping farmboy. See also Alvin York, Audie Murphy.

The problem is that not every farmboy is capable of becoming that sort of soldier.

[Fniff]

There's an innate instinctive refusal in the average human mind to consciously kill another person.

I'm pretty sure that is hopeful-hippy bullshit of the highest order for several reasons. Beyond the fact there isn't really any evolutionary advantage to NOT murdering everyone you meet (other then potential mates) there's also the sheer ENORMOUS FUCKING VOLUME of human works, such as vidya games, that focus entirely on murdering everything ever.

If anything there is an instinctive FETISH in the human mind to consciously kill another person.

Picture someone you know. An acquaintance, a friend, a family member, whatever. Would you kill them and feel no regret?
Presumably, your answer is no.
The reason for this is that back in the day, the average human only knew about 150 people in their entire lifetime. This is why our brains are wired to only picture 150 people as 'actual people' rather then a faceless crowd.
Since you know all of these people and require them to survive for both practical (More hands make light work), pragmatic (More targets means you're less likely to die), and social (People go mad without talking to others), it would be very stupid to start murdering them. In fact, if it was an advantage to kill everyone who you can't fuck, society wouldn't exist. Empathy is required for society to work.
However, now that society has ballooned at a significant rate, the numbers are different. 150 people is very, very small these days. It's a lot easier to dehumanize people these days, and the evolution of war itself is a process of distancing the soldiers from each other. It was hard for a warrior to bash his opponent's brains in with a sharp rock while his opponent screams for mercy, but the soldier of now can just squeeze a trigger at a pinprick of a target silhouetted against the horizon and feel nothing when it falls down except slight satisfaction.
And the reason why there is such a volume of works about violence is because violence is immediately satisfying. There is no delayed gratification. You punch something, they bruise. You cut them, they bleed. Murder is most satisfying when the kill is quick: the longer it takes someone to die the more unsettling the death is. This is because the gratification of the kill is delayed while you get to stew on how much pain you're causing this person.

The shorter the delay between 'effort' and 'gratification', the better. And what other action is as quick as violence?

[Baffler]

Shooting is just as much about suppression as it is about actually making kills in modern warfare. A good number of those bullets per casualty were expended keeping the enemy and his buddies' heads down. To use your WWII example, 5000 rounds is what a single active MG42 would be firing over the course of less than five minutes. And they deployed more than 400,000 of them. That's the reason the bullets/kill count is so high, I think.

[n9103]

There's no traditional machine gun in existence than can sustain a fire-rate high enough to achieve that factoid, as the barrel/chamber would melt/deform too far to function well before the 5 minutes were up.
Just 30 seconds of automatic fire is enough to put most machine guns into a cookoff hazard level.

(Source: Professionally melted a barrel via ammunition.)

[TheBronzePickle]

Shooting is just as much about suppression as it is about actually making kills in modern warfare. A good number of those bullets per casualty were expended keeping the enemy and his buddies' heads down. To use your WWII example, 5000 rounds is what a single active MG42 would be firing over the course of less than five minutes. And they deployed more than 400,000 of them. That's the reason the bullets/kill count is so high, I think.

Suppression and flanking is basically the essence of basic modern infantry doctrine. If you can get the enemy to keep their heads down, they can't see you and therefore can't react to your actions or return effective fire, and they probably can't move, either. After that, you get soldiers on their sides or rear where they have no cover, and you've got easy kills because they're not expecting it.

Modern doctrine relies on the MG to suppress while riflemen flank, which is the same as the doctrine used by the Allies (for the most part) in WW2.

The Germans instead preferred the opposite: riflemen suppressed while the MG flanked. That's part of the reason the MG34 and MG42 fired so rapidly: they would flank fast and spray death on the enemy.

There's no traditional machine gun in existence than can sustain a fire-rate high enough to achieve that factoid, as the barrel/chamber would melt/deform too far to function well before the 5 minutes were up.
Just 30 seconds of automatic fire is enough to put most machine guns into a cookoff hazard level.

(Source: Professionally melted a barrel via ammunition.)

The MG42 could fire 1000-1300 rounds per minute, roughly, usually averaged out at about 1200 RPM. It was theoretically capable of shooting 5000 rounds in five minutes given a constant feed of bullets, and in certain field conditions could actually do so. Doing that would be incredibly stupid, however, since it would brutally mess up the gun, usually in the way you described. The MG42, like most modern machine guns, could swap out barrels pretty quickly, though. A professional crew might not be able to make 5000 rounds in 5 minutes, but they could get close with quick barrel-swaps.

The actual practicality of doing so in a combat setting is questionable at best, however. A lot of gunners were a lot more likely to just jam their guns than actually pull off that kind of fire rate, and most MG soldiers are taught not to hold down the trigger anyway. Quick bursts are the way to go with most guns, and even the worst ammo dumps are only supposed to be particularly long bursts of 10-20 shots with short pauses between for adjustment.

[ollobrains]

careful positioning, good boyd armor and a decent weapon i think with different ammo types maybe being cosnidered

[Darkmere]

There's an innate instinctive refusal in the average human mind to consciously kill another person.

I'm pretty sure that is hopeful-hippy bullshit of the highest order for several reasons. Beyond the fact there isn't really any evolutionary advantage to NOT murdering everyone you meet (other then potential mates) there's also the sheer ENORMOUS FUCKING VOLUME of human works, such as vidya games, that focus entirely on murdering everything ever.

If anything there is an instinctive FETISH in the human mind to consciously kill another person.

Look up the studies or don't, but don't insult my intelligence by claiming most of the human race can't differentiate between fantasy and reality while tossing out decades of behavioral research because you're "pretty sure" it's wrong. That wasn't really a constructive response.

[etgfrog]

Wasn't there also a draft for WW2? So you throw in alot of soldiers who didn't exactly want to be a soldier.

[Darkmere]

Wasn't there also a draft for WW2? So you throw in alot of soldiers who didn't exactly want to be a soldier.

That was a part of the argument, yes. But the problem still persists even with a volunteer army, just not as much as before.

[TheBronzePickle]

You'd be surprised at how capable people are at de-humanizing other people in their minds. Military uniforms especially help to blur what might be seen as distinct people you might care about into a big mess of 'they're the enemy, shoot them'. With proper propaganda and other forms of social engineering, you can make people willing to accept anything, if you don't make them outright comfortable with the idea.

With WW2 as an example again, most of the German forces, discounting the SS because of their ridiculous level of indoctrination, and most of the Allied forces fighting them had, at least to some degree, a sense of 'they're people we're fighting'. The Germans didn't feel that way about the Russians, however, and vice-versa. Both sides thought of one another as animals, if that well, and the sheer level of barbarity they committed towards one another was only really paralleled by the Japanese, who, between their isolation and national pride, were all too happy to maim, rape, and slaughter their way through anyone who wasn't Japanese, because, you know, they weren't human. The reverse also happened, with Allied soldiers brutalizing the SS, Fallschirmjäger, and Japanese soldiers right back when they got the chance.

[puke]

I'm pretty sure that is hopeful-hippy bullshit of the highest order for several reasons. . . . If anything there is an instinctive FETISH in the human mind to consciously kill another person.

Actually not hippy bullshit at all.  He is basically regurgitating information from Lt. Col. David Grossman and his books and papers "On Killing".  In the modern western world, we need to go out of our way to train people to dehumanize others to the point that we are willing to kill them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology

I'm not convinced this is universally true for the human animal.  I've seen interviews with soldiers from other cultures where things we as Americans and Europeans would consider to be war crimes are common place.  It's just part of doing business for some people, part of how they war.  Their opponents would do the same to them, so you aren't serious about winning if you're not raping and torturing and mutilating the civilian population that supports the enemy war machine.

Keep in mind that our own (western) collective cultural consciousness is based on THOUSANDS of years of international treaties and agreements designed to limit the horrors of war, as well as the economic and civilian impact of warring states.  People are reluctant to kill within their own tribe, and we have spent enormous effort extending the definition of that tribe to encompass neighboring nations, people that follow the same god, or really anyone who sort of looks vaguely like us and does not sound to funny.  Now we need to work to undo that conditioning.

So what Darkmere and Grossman are on about -- while it sounds universal -- I think is specifically relevant to western culture.  And post 1000 AD western culture at that.  Asia and Africa seem to have their own thing going on, and I'm not enough of a scholar in those areas to have an educated opinion except to say that it probably isn't fair to measure with the same stick.

Of course I'm just an armchair philosopher, if you want to read about this stuff you should pick up Grossman's books instead of talking to random nerds on the internet.

[Majestic7]

I think you ignore the fact that those other cultures have violence ingrained in them, so basically everyday living in Kabul can train you to become emotionally prepared for killing. For people from peaceful societies, such training must be done by the military, as the daily life is not already filled with violence.