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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • I now had the time to read it again and think about your comment more thoroughly.

    The problem the stormtroopers ran into was that they would succeed at punching through lines, but they still couldn’t solve the issue that the defender had railways and prepared trenches to quickly deploy reinforcements and deliver ammunition, while the attacker’s logistics would be hampered by having to traverse the broken ground. They could secure ground, but not hold it, because the technology to back them up effectively wasn’t there yet.

    Essentially, the meme’s approach would see the knights move in under the other guy’s covering fire, butcher the defenders, then get shot by enemies arriving by car while their buddy is still running down the hallway on foot to provide more cover.


  • You mean on part of Germany? I believe the French and British were inflicting greater rates of attrition on the German front, so just in terms of manpower, they would have eventually overwhelmed the Germans… but the price in lives would have been so horrendous it was always going to come down whose political base collapses first.

    Then again, it has been a while since I read the series, and I’m by no means an expert. Maybe the benefit of hindsight and modern analysis would show ways out of that dilemma that wouldn’t have been visible to the commanders at the time – the fog of war was very thick, as far as I can tell.


  • As ever so often, if anyone is interested in the gruesome reality behind the funny meme, theres An ACOUP series on just how that situation came to be so inescapable and how WW1 technology wasn’t really in a place to break out of the hell of its own making yet.

    Summary

    Weapons had gotten really good at statically hitting targets, but weren’t mobile enough to further support an advance. All you could do was break the first line with it, but by the time you got to the second line the defenders had rallied and pushed you back. The blasted mud and craters between the frontlines hindered moving up your artillery, tanks were in development, but too slow yet, planes were unfit for anything but spotting and the war effort ate most of the resources so there was little left for the development of new technologies. The only option left was to hope that one of your charges would manage to rupture the enemy line and open up space to bring in more troops and start disrupting supply lines. That lucky break always seemed just one more hard push away…














  • Explanation:
    Both Trazyn the Infinite and the Star Wars character General Grievous are essentially robots, ripped away from their biological roots, collecting things in an obsessive manner, as the meme describes.

    For Trazyn the Infinite, a Necron, that obsession is the collection of historical artifacts, be that specific objects or entire segments of historical battles (including live combatants, eternally frozen in stasis fields).

    Grievous collects Light Sabers of defeated Jedi. He isn’t entirely robot, as he still has some fleshy bits (vital organs which he very much fails to shield or otherwise protect) and isn’t immortal, to his fatal detriment when a certain “Bold One” (Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi) manages to land a shot with an “uncivilised” but nonetheless effective weapon (a Blaster).

    It is now my headcanon that the reason Obi-Wan disappeared in A New Hope is Necron Archivist shenanigans.



  • To put a finer point on that “outside of Sparta” note:

    In Sparta, we’re talking about 15-20% free folk depending on the point in time. Even other Greek cities looked at Sparta and its 85% population of Helots and go “Okay, that’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?” Plutarch, himself belonging to the (non-Spartanian) Greek elite, at some point remarks that “in Sparta the free man is more free than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave”.

    Slavery was never rosy, but Sparta made a contest out of who could treat them worst.