• DragonTypeWyvern
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      3 months ago

      Have they considered just not using a pistol to try and take down a plane?

      • SSTF@lemmy.worldM
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        3 months ago

        Why didn’t they just use F/A-18F Super Hornet supersonic twin-engine, carrier-capable, multirole fighter aircraft in 1914? Are they stupid?

        • DragonTypeWyvern
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          3 months ago

          Based on military strategy at the time I’m going to go with yes! They were very stupid.

          • SSTF@lemmy.worldM
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            3 months ago

            Military strategy and tactics are forced to constantly play catch up to technology and context. Looking at history, it helps to take off the hindsight goggles and meme filter and look at why people did what they did, with the resources they had, with the goals they were given.

            There were many missteps and mistakes, some of them were simply bad, but WW1 is very prone to being reduced to memes that strip away any nuance and only magnify the failures.

            • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOP
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              3 months ago

              To be fair, the French military published a very brilliant and prescient paper on the nature of the coming war and the tactics it would require a handful of years before the War broke out… and the brass proceeded to completely ignore that paper in favor of ‘tried and true’ tactics.

              Pigheadedness and tunnel-vision may not be stupidity per se, but it’s close enough that few observers are going to care about the difference.

            • DragonTypeWyvern
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              3 months ago

              If there’s a single period of military history where contemporary and future experts agreed that the military leaders of the time were mostly blood thirsty and delusional morons who did not care how many people their inbred and willful idiocy got killed, it’s WW1, so that’s a pretty forgiving take for some of history’s most ineffective commanders.

      • frezik
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        3 months ago

        Tragically, John Wick was born too late to be a WWI pistol fighter ace.

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        No one’s ever considered this, they just developed more and more elaborate pistols.

      • SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You don’t need to bring down the plane, just the pilot, probably traveling at 30mph in open cockpit

        • DragonTypeWyvern
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          3 months ago

          Sure bro. That’s why the skies were an absolute bloodbath even before the invention of turret mounted and propeller synchronized machine gun mounts.