#Anti-Gunners

[dropoutconfessions]

ASO wasn't that good. I mean, it was fine. It had a lot of good moments. But honestly I kept getting bored watching it. I would put it on and then get distracted, only to tune in halfway through the episode SO confused and thinking "ugh I have to watch a bunch of it *again*????

-

[chopshajen]

My brain ran off while driving home so now I’m considering making a big change to Nico and Gunner’s story bc I’m feeling the aro vibes

(For anyone reading this, Nico (any pronouns, nb) and Gunner (he/him, nb) are two of my oldest OCs)

It would basically be that not only is Gunner in love with Nico, but Nico herself was already originally (before she ran away) in an uncomfortable relationship with someone who didn’t really understand her, as Gunner pined from afar

What there is to understand about her is: aromanticism!

Whoever the partner was, they held an important position in the old world’s hierarchy (like a prince or something, making Nico something like a…concubine? he was definitely not this person’s only partner). And they genuinely did like him. But they held too many expectations of their relationship for Nico to deal with, as he barely understood why he was chosen for that relationship in the first place, much less why he should behave a certain way in it

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"RUSS INFANTRY AMBUSH SOLID WALL OF TANKS DESTROY 71 WITH FIRE," Toronto Star. May 20, 1942. Page 1. ---- Timoshenko's Army Reports Important New Gains in Kharkov Battle - Germans Drive to South to Ease Soviet Pressure ---- SOVIET A.A. GUNNER KULIER AND 8TH VICTIM --- Moscow, May 20 - Thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of men fought in an infernal cauldron of destruction before Kharkov today. The German high command was throwing new masses of machines and men into the battle in a vain attempt to stop the Russian advance. Tank fought tank and man fought man in such a tangle that planes, engaged in a war of their own over the smoke-clouded front, could not intervene. The Moscow radio said Hitler had hurled every available tank in the battle which blazed into new fury at strategic points along the whole 1,800-mile Russian front. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's German forces were reported "in flight" along the 100-mile front before Kharkov. In one sector German tanks attacked in a solid wall against the Russian centre and flanks, Russian infantrymen, holding their fire, took the shock of the attack and, from a thousand foxholes, leaped out with hand grenades.

[deanmott]

MY SHEILASSSss

[ashen--dreams]

my god im so close to going on a proper rant on peoples hypocrisy regarding the second amendment

[papirouge]

someone : makes a lighthearted jokes about yeehaw gun loving country are bad at shooting

US burgers : screaming crying throwing up

the united states coming dead last in shooting is so funny to me idk

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

While on military training during World War Two, Gilbert Bradley was in love. He exchanged hundreds of letters with his sweetheart - who merely signed with the initial "G". But more than 70 years later, it was discovered that G stood for Gordon, and Gilbert had been in love with a man. Information gleaned from the letters indicate Mr Bradley was a reluctant soldier. He did not want to be in the Army, and even pretended to have epilepsy to avoid it. His ruse did not work, though, and in 1939 he was stationed at Park Hall Camp in Oswestry, Shropshire, to train as an anti-aircraft gunner. He was already in love with Gordon Bowsher. The pair had met on a houseboat holiday in Devon in 1938 when Mr Bowsher was in a relationship with Mr Bradley's nephew. Mr Bowsher was from a well-to-do family. His father ran a shipping company, and the Bowshers also owned tea plantations. When war broke out a year later he trained as an infantryman and was stationed at locations across the country. At one point, Mr Bradley was sent to Scotland on a mission to defend the Forth Bridge. He met and fell in love with two other men. Rather surprisingly, he wrote and told Mr Bowsher all about his romances north of the border. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Mr Bowsher took it all in his stride, writing that he "understood why they fell in love with you. After all, so did I". Although the couple wrote throughout the war, the letters stopped in 1945. Mr Bradley moved to Brighton and died in 2008. A house clearance company found the letters and sold them to a dealer specialising in military mail. Perhaps most poignantly, one of the letters contains the lines: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are." (Full article)

[that-house]

December 3rd, 2031 – Sixty degrees, clear skies, and a nice southeasterly breeze. It was a beautiful day to lay siege to Dallas. It was a good thing the weather was nice, because everything else about the operation looked rough. Marian couldn’t wait.

Dallas was a classic Texan fortress-city, two rings of forty foot tall concrete walls with a killing field in between, bristling with anti-aircraft cannon. The ground-facing defenses were a little less thorough, but a few machine guns would make quick work of any infantry charge and Dallas had more than a few machine guns.

“We aren’t being paid enough,” Suzy griped. She was crouching in the shade, alternatingly blowing a bubble of gum and taking swigs out of a bottle whose contents were hidden by a paper bag.

“We’re mercenaries. Get used to it.” Marian hoisted her gun onto her shoulder. “Besides, they don’t exactly expect us to succeed.”

“Oh, are we leading a suicide charge? I wasn’t paying attention to the Duke.” Suzy was never paying attention, but the benefits of having her around outweighed the drawbacks. Most days, at least.

“Pretty much.”

“Did the guys we’re with know this was a suicide charge?”

Marion looked around at the Jeep the Duke of Austin had hastily assigned the duo to. The soldiers suddenly all looked a bit green around the gills. “I’m guessing not. Chin up, boys! Auntie Marian won’t let any harm come to you.”

One of the men, a lieutenant, managed to find his voice. “Why are we here?”

“The Duke hopes that we’ll die loud enough that Dallas won’t notice his bombers taking out the emplaced guns. Doesn’t strike me as very sound tactics, but hey, he’s got manpower to make up for what he lacks in brains.”

Silence in the back of the Jeep.

Marian continued, mostly to fuck with them. “And don’t think the tanks’ll be any help. See those big fancy guns up on the wall? Those are lonestar guns. You boys seen lonestar guns?”

“Yeah.”

“So you get the idea. But hey, cheer up! It’s not every day you get to storm the best-defended city in the state!”

The man slowly came to a revelation a long time coming. “You’re insane,” he said.

“Insane was my father’s name. Please, call me Marian Typhoon.”

Suzy cackled. “That was terrible.”

The soldiers looked between the two women, now realizing they were both mad. “How are you two so calm?”

Marian didn’t answer for a moment, looking out at the slowly-approaching walls of Dallas. The lonestar guns’ targeting algorithms would start flagging the vehicles soon. “Suzy, how far out are we?”

“About a mile and a half.” Suzy busied herself checking over her rifle.

“Now, boys, I’m gonna explain two concepts very quickly, so you’d best pay attention. The KL-90 fully automatic sniper rifle, sometimes called “Le Papillon,” was something of a failure, because for some reason those glorious Frenchmen decided to make it fire 1200 rounds per minute, giving it a tendency to dump the entire mag into one poor fucker. Only six were ever made, and nowadays they’re just museum pieces. In 2026, the American military plunged into the deep end of bioweaponry and concocted a little something known as the ‘vampire virus,’ which proved pretty damn lethal in 99.99% of cases. The 0.01% that survived were problematic enough that the program shut down, and all information about it was expunged from the record.”

Marion patted Suzy affectionately on the head. “Now you might be wondering how those two disparate pieces of information might happen to overlap, and if you boys just sit pretty for a moment I reckon you’ll be able to connect the dots. Suzy?”

The last surviving vampire, Suzy Nines, slotted the magazine into her KL-90 fully automatic sniper rifle, and squinted out at the Dallas walls. She squeezed the trigger, the barrel swinging into a wild blur of motion as the sound of gunfire filled the air. “Machine gunners down. Reloading.”

Marian patted the hapless lieutenant on the shoulder. “Come along, boys. Auntie Marian’s got a city to take.”

[captain-price-unofficially]

Lieutenant Adolf Auer and his gunner in their plane. The Star of David was painted on to annoy fellow pilot Hermann Göring who made anti semitic remarks to his Jewish co-pilot Willi Rosenstein.

[sirobvious]

Finally watched Starship Troopers and I have a lot to say about it.

First of all, the idea that anyone could see this movie as not being a satirical parody of American militarism and fascism is baffling to me, then again there’s people that think Warhammer 40,000 is pro-militarism and fascism, and I guess if you watch this when you’re dumb and 15 it might go over your head.

It’s extremely dubious as to whether the bugs are actually aggressing against the Federation in the first place, and very likely that it’s something exaggerated or made up wholesale by the government to justify their own aggressive expansion.

It has the plot and all the trappings of a big dumb oorah go-America action movie, but reframed as a terrible tragedy.

Just about all the main characters join the military for reasons that to not involve “wanting to join the military,” but the society they live in has set it up so that for most of them it’s the only way forward in life, and in the military they’re worth less than the uniforms they’re wearing.

They’re sent to a training camp that abuses them violently, and then sent to the front lines to die. Not to fight, to die.

Analyzing this movie from a military tactics perspective, the mobile infantry isn’t meant to survive, their only job is to deliver death to the enemy’s homes by shooting those micronukes into the hives. The rifles and body armor they’re all equipped with are near useless and only exist to make them feel brave enough to go towards the enemy and shoot the micronukes.

Their squads don’t have medics, machine gunners, or anti-armor equipment. (The nuke launchers don’t count as anti-armor they’re too dangerous to shoot at anything within like 200 yards.) In the first mission, if they had had any of that, they could have held off the bug counterattack enough to get way more soldiers off-planet. It still would’ve been a losing battle but it wouldn’t have been such a massacre. Hell, it might have even spared more bug lives, because the rifles still kill bugs, but do so extremely slowly, enough that it just results in both sides dying more. But survival of the federation infantry was never an objective, they are just a delivery system for the nukes, they might as well be suicide-bombers.

In the second mission, the government knew it was a trap but sent them anyway, without telling them.

Rico is not a good commander, but keeps getting bumped up the ranks anyway because of the mass death. He doesn’t think for himself and the only order I think he actually gives in the whole movie is “kill them all,” which, yeah, great plan. If they had fallen back at that moment, more of them would’ve survived.

Once he actually starts climbing the ranks, he literally doesn’t even say anything original, he just repeats what he’s been told, quoting the Lieutenant word-for-word.

The Lieutenant, despite being a crazy fascist like everyone else, is legitimately a good leader and commander. No one would’ve made it out of that ambush if he didn’t make the calls he did when he did, but Rico, who replaces him, doesn’t have any of those command skills. He’s got all the macho bravado but none of the smarts. He’s going to be the kind of commander to lead a valiant doomed charge into enemy machine gun nests.

And then at the end when it shows all the surviving main characters in their higher-ranking positions that they only got because people ahead of them died, and it shows the subordinates even younger than the main characters were when they joined. It was sickening.

And also all the top brass are just straight up dressed like Nazis.

It was a great movie though, especially if you're an Imperial Guard player like myself.

[dontforgetukraine]

"Guardians of the Sky" by #NEIVANMADE

Nataliya Grabarchuk, a former kindergarten teacher and now an anti-aircraft gunner of the Galicia-Volyn radio engineering brigade, shot down a cruise missile from an "Igla" MANPADS. It was her first combat launch and first hit.

[gremlins-hotel]

From the notes of Capt. Alfred Jones: "Davie was a bus and the 'Flying Fortress' moniker seemed to pass her by, but it was a ship with a brave crew. The trudge of getting back to England from enemy territory is a story for another day. I miss her and sometimes I miss the boys we lost that day."

-✪- -✪- -✪-

B-17F "Dear Davie": *U.S. Army Model B-17F-65-BO Air Corps Serial No. 42-29670 Delivered Cheyenne 31/1/43; Pueblo 18/2/43; Salina 15/2/43; Brookley 19/3/43; Smoky Hill 23/3/43; Dow Field 18/4/43. Assigned to the 333rd Bomb Squadron/94th Bomb Group [TS-L] "DEAR DAVIE" 22/4/43; Missing in Action near Hamburg 25/7/43 with Alfred "Comet" Jones, **Co-Pilot: Daryl "Speed" Reed, Navigator: Richard Reed, Bombardier: Charlie Marstaller; Radio Operator: Johnathan Graves, Flight Engineer/Top Turret Gunner: Clyde "Pepsi" Ray, Ball Turret Gunner: William Ortlieb, Waist Gunner: Leslie Lipsey, Waist Gunner: Paul Rapoport, Tail Gunner: Thomas Pugh (6 Killed in Action); "DEAR DAVIE" lost to flak/anti-aircraft fire, crashing near Uetersen, 15 miles NW of Hamburg, Germany.

-✪- -✪- -✪-

[nerd things & acknowledgements below cut]

Notes on the B-17F... The B-17F was an upgrade of the previous E model, with several notable changes: A one- or two-piece plexiglas nose cone, as opposed to the ten-paneled cone of previous versions. Reinforced landing gear allowed for a greater maximum payload, from 4,200 lb (1,900 kg) of ordnance to 8,000 lb (3,600 kg). Flight and combat range of the F model was improved by 900 mi (1,400 km) with the addition of nine self-sealing rubber fuel cells in the wing root, aka, "Tokyo tanks". The F model was generally characterized by being tail-heavy - which lead to part failure - and woefully undefended from the front; the early F models had no front-facing armament, leaving a 60° blind spot to the direct front of the aircraft - a flaw which was exploited by German pilots, who held air superiority. Later F models would see a list of possible available modifications (factory and field) such as inserting two .50 caliber machine guns into the nose cone to solve the blind spot. Other modifications to later F models were bulged cheek turrets, as opposed to the window-mounted guns of earlier iterations, and the available addition of the iconic "Bendix" chin turret. The chin turret is far more common on the subsequent G "gunship" variant. ("Dear Davie" is an early F model without the nose mount, bulged cheeks, or chin turret.)

*This model production block, serial no., and fate are borrowed from real-life B-17F #42-29670, "Thundermug." "Thundermug" was an aircraft that originally served in the 333rd Bomb Squadron/94th Bomb Group alongside my great-grandfather and his usual steed, "The Gremlins Hotel." It was transferred to the 544th BS/384th BG, at which point it went Missing in Action over Hamburg from flak/aa-fire; 8 of its crew became POWs while 2 were KIA. I have had the honor to speak to descendants of both of its crews and help them research "Thundermug"; I wish to voice a mere glimpse of their stories in a unique way.

**All names of Alfred's crew are either cobbled-together family names throughout our history here or entirely fictitious - though some were inspired by real people whom I grew up with stories of. All inspirations were individuals that lived good lives post-war.

[floridacracker]

The funniest thing about the Sig drama is their claim that P320 criticism comes from anti-gunners, as though those people even know what a P320 is

[deanmott]

Oh dear GOD he looks like his daddy, gonna kill him and his entire family!

[riflebrass]

It's always funny when an anti-gunner refers to an "assault rifle" as "high powered". The most common rifle calibers used in both world wars also doubled as some of the most popular hunting cartridges for the better part of a century after the military stopped using them.

The military stopped using these big rifle calibers because they were too powerful. Assault rifles were specifically designed to be less powerful so they would be easier to use.

[pinturas-sgm-aviacion]

1942 04 Samoa, Curtiss SBC-4 Helldiver VMO-151 - Don Greer

VMO-151 would soon be deployed to Samoa in the South Pacific on April 7, 1942, along with VMF-111, a Grumman F4F Wildcat squadron, amid fears that the Japanese would strike and potentially occupy several islands including Midway, Johnston Island, Palmyra, Samoa and Fiji. Men, material and particularly aircraft were sent from all services to each of these areas as quickly as possible.The Marines found themselves on Tutuila, the largest island in the Samoan archipelago, where conditions were primitive at best. Mosquitos, humidity, and oppressive heat were their constant companions. They flew daily anti-submarine patrols, and an alert crew of six pilots and six gunners were on standby from dawn to dusk. Maintenance of the SBC-4’s was a problem, so much so that some of the patrols were flown in one of a handful of Grumman JRF-5 Ducks that had also been sent to Samoa.In the event of Japanese attack, VMO-151’s operational plan consisted of striking the enemy force as far out as possible, entailing a one-way mission in which they expected to run out of fuel over the ocean en route back to Tutuila. Once they ditched, the plan called for the commanding general’s PBY to land on the water to pick them up, then take off again mid-ocean. One of the Marine aviators on Samoa, Colonel John B. Berteling, recalled, “It certainly was not the sort of plan that inspired confidence in our survival.” VMO-151 would remain on Samoa until early 1943, when they were finally re-equipped with Douglas SBD’s.Samoa would be the final front-line service of the SBC-4. The U.S. Marine Corps would not phase it out of service completely until a full year after the Navy had retired the type. Like many other combat aircraft at the beginning of America’s war, it was pressed into service and stood in harm’s way until more modern aircraft were widely available.