Military-historical jokes. Part 2

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the previous "Hochma" I casually touched upon the topic of "antique" artillery - throwing siege machines, catapults, ballistae and others. But after a close look at this topic, the most interesting, one might say, juicy details! Here's a curious thing: ancient sources are full of drawings and engravings, wretched and primitive, depicting cannons and gunners at work. Perspective, posture, composition - all are worthless, but at least the guns are recognizable. More or less. But, there are no such weak, children's drawings of ballistae and catapults! If it is a catapult, then the laws of proportion are strictly observed, the muscles on the arms and backs of the legionnaires, twisting the "loading gate", bulge in relief and anatomically correctly, horses are terrifyingly rearing up, etc., etc.

Why is that?

The answer of the "knights" KVI - Canonical Version of History - ready: the Roman Empire fell under the blows of the nomads, Europe plunged into the darkness of the early Middle Ages, after which the Europeans had to re-learn to read, write and do their natural needs … Including drawing, of course. Therefore, in the books of our historians, wonderful pictures depicting ancient "stone throwers" quite legitimately coexist with primitive sketches of medieval artillerymen.

Okay, let's go from the other end. Where are the archaeologically reliable remains? "Antique" (as well as medieval!) Stone throwing machines? They are not observed. Exactly, as in the case of the triremes, whose decks were allegedly decorated with those ballistas.

That's interesting: archaeologists have scrapers and cutters of the Paleolithic in the arsenal, archaeologists have harpoons and spears of the Neolithic, they also have swords-daggers of the Bronze Age. Even the fossilized excrement of the Silurian trilobite is there. But, relatively recent stone throwers are not - as cut off. If there is such a combat vehicle somewhere, I am sure: remake … Moreover, unfit for action.

Yu. Shokarev (“The history of weapons. Artillery"), describing the "catapult" period in the history of artillery, he suddenly remarks with bewilderment that with archaeological evidence on this topic, the situation is, to put it mildly, problematic. Like, once a message flashed about the alleged discovery of the remains of an ancient ballista, but, upon closer examination, they turned out to be so dubious that it was decided, out of sin, not to consider them closely. And even better - do not look at all and pretend that they did not find anything.

Or you can go from the third end. If there is no direct evidence left, perhaps there are indirect? Oddly enough, they stayed. This - those same walls, against which, in fact, all the so-called stone throwers were mastering.

We will not understand anything if we do not consider the history of fortification in dynamics. There is a very clear boundary: the 15th century, the second half. From that time on, the fortifications began to "sink into the ground" rather quickly and "spread out in breadth". Tall stone or brick walls turn into low thick earthen ramparts, towers - into tetrahedral bastions-bastions, also low, thick-walled, earthen. Finally, the fortress wall, as a means of housing and covering the riflemen, ordered to live a long time.

Since the end of the 19th century, the fortress, the fort is a system of small (visually small, because inside it is full of concrete, weapons and complex life support systems, sometimes built in two or three tiers; - I saw it myself), extremely drowned in the ground and superbly camouflaged fortifications, equipped with machine guns and rapid-fire caponier cannons. From caponier to caponier there is no continuous chain of fighters along the escarp or rampart. The shaft itself with the moat is just a means to delay the attacking enemy infantry for the seconds that the machine gun flanking the moat will need to cut it off. The high stone wall has been replaced by an invisible wall of bullets and cannon shot. Of course, in combination with earthworks and barbed wire. Especially if the wire is reinforced by the "know-how" of General Karbyshev: fishing hooks on steel leashes. A very unpleasant thing, you know.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about siege firearms.

Before his appearance, the engineers-fortifiers, as it were, did not even know about the existence of any other long-range weapon. All these "antique" and "medieval" walls are purely anti-personnel structures. Roughly speaking, the higher the fence, the harder it is to climb. Of course, it is easy to stick a cobblestone from a stone thrower into a tall "fence". For some reason, however, fortifiers do not care at all, unlike their descendants, who had to build fortifications against cannons. They know that it is impossible to break their walls, and therefore they pile them up both five and ten meters high - excellent targets for "ancient artillery". And the thickness of those walls is determined solely by the requirements of stability: the higher the building, the larger the area of its base should be.

But the commander of our imaginary siege corps knows it! He must know: otherwise he simply would not have been appointed to this post. And that, with sad doom, he drags heavy colossus on bulls, the devil knows from where, and with hopeless stubbornness he puts deliberately useless stakes and stones into the walls? And a certain duke, financing the entire campaign, with his hands folded on his stomach, calmly watches as his money is literally released into the air? What an absurdity!

Let's try to approach the problem from the fourth end, namely, from the point of view of physics. Let's ask: is it really possible to create such a throwing machine at all?so that it could destroy a defensive wall of, say, the 12th century with stones and stakes?

The practice of modern engineers shows that No … Above, I have already mentioned the attempts of American engineers to create workable replicas of "stone throwers" commissioned by film producers. It didn't work out. Reason - did not have at the disposal of medieval and "antique" masters of materials suitable for this purpose … I had to reluctantly design "ballistas" and other gibberish using rubber bands, elastic elements made of modern steel and synthetic materials.

From book to book wanders a ballad about the dedication of certain women, residents of a certain besieged city, who, in a fit of patriotism, donated their hair to the defenders, allegedly for the "maintenance" of stone throwers. This feat is attributed either to the townspeople of Carthage, or to the ladies of Montsegur, or to someone else. Moreover, it always follows from the context that the aforementioned hair went exactly to the equipment of some kind of "ballista". Meanwhile, it is well known that female hair is very good for making bowstrings. I don’t know, voluntarily or not, but the ladies had their hair cut just for archers and nothing else …

Or maybe the "ancient Greeks" had nylon fiber?

Everything is fine! - KVIs tell us. They knew such special ways, either to soak or dry all sorts of such bovine veins, or intestines, then weave them with women's hair and rawhide belts, then attach pieces of ox horns and almost a whalebone, in general, all them worked as it should! And then, historians sigh sadly, the secret was hopelessly lost …

This notorious The Saga of the Lost Secret (SUS) has already stuck it in my teeth so much that it is comparable, perhaps, only with the Ballad of the Unknown Nomad (see above). Sometimes you are amazed at the complete lack of elementary erudition among people who, by definition, must be erudites, at least at the top. Well, you don’t have to go into the intricacies of technological processes, at least figure it out with their results! So many things were not driven into the SUS category - Damascus steel and Zlatoust damask steel, Inca jewelry art and an iron column in Delhi.

And the goofs are unaware, really, you can't pick up another word that a semi-literate medieval blacksmith-empiricist could not know more than a whole metallurgical research institute, and it does not occur to them to look into that research institute for an hour, to catch some MNS in the smoking-room and a little bit of it ask. And I would have explained to them the aforementioned MNS that the manufacturing technology of, say, "Damascus" steel is, in principle, simple, but devilishly time consuming and consumes a lot of time, if you wish, you can bungle, but it will cost such a pretty penny, it will take so much time that it is easier to order a knife, say, from a file. We will make it ten times faster and ten times cheaper, and the quality of the blade will be even higher. It's just that a damask blade is more beautiful, its polished surface seems to be "wavy", that's all. And I would tell you about the Delhi pillar. And the Zlatoust bulat did not even think to disappear anywhere; to this day, officer daggers and ceremonial broadswords are forged from it in the same Zlatoust. I had such a dagger. Steel is a miracle, even if you cut glass.

Anyway, stakes and stones began to fly at some point … But how to fly? It is not enough to throw a projectile to the target. It is necessary that at the end of the trajectory it retains enough energy to break through or at least damage the obstacle. In our case, it is a medieval ("antique") fortress wall. Such a wall consists of two walls made of stone blocks or bricks, with a thickness of a meter or more, with cross-braces and caisson compartments filled with densely compacted soil.

Kinetic energy of the projectile is defined as half of the product of its mass by the square of its velocity at the moment of collision with an obstacle. So, the shells of cinematic catapults do not have such energy!

For example, the legionnaires, groaning, laid as much as twenty-kilogram cobblestone in the catapult bucket. I take its initial speed of 50 m / s, no more, and for this reason: in the frames of films, it is perfectly visible in flight. I had a chance to shoot a lot from the GP-25 grenade launcher; the initial flight speed of his grenade is 76 m / s. The shooter - or the observer looking over his shoulder - sees the grenade for a fraction of a second, since his line of sight coincides with the throwing line of the grenade launcher. In other words, the angular displacement of the grenade relative to the shooter is zero. But it is worth shifting a little to the side and you will no longer see the grenade in flight. So - 50 m / s and no more.

We have: the kinetic energy of our imaginary cobblestone at the time of the shot 25 kj … Is it a lot or a little? There is something to compare! A similar figure for the 23-mm Shilka anti-aircraft gun - 115 kj … More than four times that. And, nevertheless, even dreaming of using such an anti-aircraft gun to break through, say, the wall of an ordinary brick "Khrushchev" - three bricks - is not necessary. I had a chance to try. You can "drill" by sticking a long burst of fifty shells into the same place, but this is with sniper accuracy, which can only be provided by a rifled automatic weapon with its high accuracy of fire! I don't even stutter about the Kremlin wall.

And it does not matter at all that the weight of a 23-mm projectile is 200 g, and the weight of a cobblestone is 20 kg: it is not the weight itself that is important, but energy … Moreover, due to its suboptimal, from the point of view of aerodynamics, shape, this cobblestone will very quickly lose speed in flight and will crash into the wall completely exhausted. And if you take a larger stone? But it will fly slower, and speed will lose faster due to the large geometric dimensions with the same unsuccessful shape. He may not reach the target at all.

Okay, what about the stakes? And even worse. The projectile, among other things, must be made of a material, the mechanical strength of which, at least not inferior to the strength of the barrier … With a piece of wood - over a stone ?! And if the end is bound with iron? And if you attach a thick, powerful knob? Don't: weight! Such an "arrow" generally flops right in front of the ballista, and even cripples one of its own.

Okay, the opponent is not appeasing, and the pots of flammable liquid? Isn't it a "flamethrower"? And with what, in fact, liquid? All modern liquid and thickened fire mixtures are made on the basis of light, flammable fuels, type of gasoline … Crude oil for this business, oddly enough, is of little use; I do not want to clutter up the presentation, so I will only say that it lights up extremely reluctantly and burns sluggishly until it heats up, and during this time it can be easily extinguished, and oh, how little it is in the pot. Any vegetable oil? But it is very expensive even now, with modern agricultural technologies, and, besides (what a shame!), It doesn’t burn by itself: we need tow, a wick that will help it warm up and evaporate. So, please show me an antique cracking column.

Well, we poured some flammable rubbish into the pitcher, loaded it into the catapult, set it on fire and pulled the trigger … Where would that fuel end up in a second? Right, on our heads … Do we need it?

Briefly speaking, it's all nonsense … Modern napalm bombs use a percussion fuse to ignite the fire mixture, an explosive charge to destroy the hull, and an igniter that instantly produces an ultra-high temperature to vaporize and ignite the mixture.

You can, of course, just throw resin torches. But, after all, they will not fly far: light, with great air resistance … Now, if only we could give them a decent aerodynamic shape! This has already been done. We build a company of archers and distribute to each a quiver of incendiary arrows. The firing range is higher than that of any heavy flamethrower. The rate of fire is immeasurably higher. And most importantly, many fires are created quickly and inexpensively. An arrow - it is small, nimble, track the fall of each - from hundreds! - it is unrealistic, and one arrow not detected in time gives a fire source. So why do we need a NON-effective remedy, if there is effective?!

Some "flamethrower pipes" stand somewhat apart in historical fabrications about ancient flamethrowing. Historians are trying to convince themselves and others that we are talking about "classical" flamethrowing, that is, a jet of flammable liquid. Of course, they saw the flamethrower in action - in military newsreels. But take, for example, V. N. Shunkova "Weapons of the Red Army" and read in it a description of the device of that flamethrower, they hardly bothered, otherwise they would not have written nonsense. An integral part of the classic flamethrower - air cylinder under a pressure of 100-200 atm … If the "Hellenes", relying on the level of the metallurgy of that time, could make a bronze tank designed for such pressure, then what would they charge it with? By hand furs? Not funny.

But the answer lies on the surface. "Trumpet Throwing Fire" - it's simple A GUN, such as the observer who is not accustomed to this sight sees her. The gunpowder of that time, being of low quality, did not have time to burn completely in the barrel, and the gun, indeed, spewed out monstrous tongues of flame. These now high quality propellants provide an almost flameless shot. And that's it: the "antique" text mentioning "flamethrower trumpets" safely left where it should be - in the Middle Ages.

There are still so many exotic ammunitionlike pots of sewage and corpses of infectious patients. It's just an ineffective weapon. Even if we donate a piece of gold to a few idiots so that they bring such a corpse to the "battery", how to throw a 70-80-kilogram dead body over the enemy wall ?! What kind of catapult is needed ?! Why, even on the other side, they are not idiots, they will realize that the matter is unclean and will call doctors and corpse-bearing orderlies. And they know what to do. Indeed, in fact, a serious danger is not the corpses of those who died from diseases, but completely alive and outwardly healthy infected people who, within the incubation period, do not even suspect that they are infected. I agree that our ancestors were not good at microbiologists, but they knew how to take quarantine measures. So this thesis does not work either.

Finally, the very term stone thrower. "Stone Throwing Device", nothing more. Catapult - the exact translation from Latin: "thrower", nothing more. And so everywhere! "Leto-bola" from Greek: "device that throws stones." Nowhere - not a hint of the use of any elastic elements. But after all, the cannonballs of the first cannons were entirely made of stone! Means?!

Let me make a small comment.… All of the above should by no means be understood as if guns appeared only in the middle of the 15th century. Of course not. It was just that by this time the qualitative growth of the power of artillery had reached such a level that it made the very existence of traditional sheer high walls impossible and unnecessary. The guns dealt with them too quickly. At this moment, again, a qualitative leap in the development of fortification architecture just happened. The guns appeared much earlier, but for gnawing "traditional" walls they took a considerable time and a monstrous expenditure of ammunition. Quite like the Anglo-French-Turkish invaders near Sevastopol in 1855-1856: history repeated itself at a qualitatively new level. And by the way, the middle of the 15th century is exactly the capture of Constantinople by Suleiman the Magnificent, in which they played a huge role siege cannons.

It was after this that the fortifiers became thoughtful: if such walls could not withstand, it means that something fundamentally new must be urgently invented. And the Italians were the first to think about it, as one of the closest candidates for the role of the object of the next Turkish onslaught (see V. V. Yakovlev. "History of Fortresses").

General conclusion on joke number 2: No "antique", no "medieval" combat vehicles, the principle of operation of which is based on the use of some kind of elastic elements, simply did not exist. There was only a bow, a crossbow … and that was all. Question: where did they come from? In the sense, in the pictures - how does it become clear now, the times of the Renaissance and later?

There is an opinion. We should take a closer look at the work of the genius artist / scientist / inventor Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

Leonardo

I subscribed, subscribed books in the publishing house "Terra" and now I was rewarded for my diligence with a "bonus" - a free book. It is called "Leonardo's World". The author (a certain Robert Wallace) did not regret sensual aspirations to paint how great and genius Leonardo was. It would be better if he did not do it, honestly. Because the result is exactly the opposite, at least if you read the book, and not just leaf through the pictures. It turns out that in 67 years of life, a genius worked as much 12 paintings … Not a lot for a classic, but it happens. However, "iron" belongs to da Vinci's brush only two of them: "La Gioconda" which has set the teeth on edge, over which "every cultured person" should enthusiastically gasp and "Baptism", which even art critics embarrassedly call "an inexplicable mistake of a great artist." The belonging of the rest of the paintings is defined as follows: This is about the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of the Duke of Sforza. The argument is, of course, irrefutable. That would have curled up an ermine into a ball and that's it, and no longer Leonardo.

The rest is even more indistinct, even more unintelligible. Yes, and "La Gioconda" … My, of course, personal opinion and I do not impose it on anyone, but point-blank I do not see anything out of the ordinary. Doubtful charm of a woman with a twisted cramping mouth. In addition, there are at least eight of them - "monza" and all are not signed. Why exactly the Louvre portrait belongs to the brush of the "great"?

"Baptism" in general, a complete nightmare, if not blasphemy. Only a homosexual could depict John the Baptist, a teacher, ascetic and ascetic, as a young playful homosexual, which the maestro, apparently, was, since he spent his whole life as a kept woman with one or another of a sexually foul-smelling magnate.

But titan wrote a certain fresco ("The Last Supper"). Well, I already wrote, so I wrote, what a sight for sore eyes! Only it immediately peeled off and crumbled. And there was nothing left but “amazing tones”. After that, the fresco was rewritten by other artists more than once. The question is, where is Leonardo? Plaster, they say, is to blame. Yes, it is not the plaster that is to blame, but the titanium, who does not know what a painter of the 3rd category must know at the end of the vocational school: where it is already possible to paint, and where else it is not, because it has not dried out and with what to prime it so that it does not fall off in five minutes.

Scattered here and there in abundance throughout the book - open dough! - direct indications that the maestro was lazy, not assembled, he did not know how to organize his work and did not want … Meanwhile, it has long been noted that genius is 1% of talent and 99% of sweat. Apparently, Leonardo had talent, but the luminary categorically did not want to work. Nevertheless, he lived widely, only in old age had to be narrowed down in requests; kept servants and horses (according to medieval concepts, an extremely expensive pleasure, a symbol of belonging to the nobility!), allowed himself various broad gestures (which always require money). The devil: he picked up a nice boy, bought him pants and jackets … The boy stole from the master whatever he got, and the master just sighed understandingly and continued to buy velvet pants… Until his very last breath.

The picture looms repulsive, but for psychiatrists and sexopathologists it is quite familiar: a pederast lives on the support of another, rich pederast, for the sake of decency he is listed as someone, imitates some kind of activity, but receives money for completely different services. "For the soul" contains a young pederastic, not demanding from him, in turn, any tangible work and forgiving him small weaknesses like kleptomania. Lives and prosper. And at the end of this elderly honored ped turns out to be of no particular use to anyone, and therefore he has to take shape with Francis I (?). Tempore, you know, mutandis.

And now it's time to take a closer look at Leonardo's personalityas a "scientist" and "inventor". We are being told (including the authors of a serious, seemingly, magazine "Technology for Youth") that Leonardo anticipated this and that, and the fifth, and the tenth … Helicopter, airplane, tank, diving equipment, etc., and etc. The basis for such statements was the pictures scattered here and there in handwritten treatises, let's take it in quotes, "Leonardo". Needless to say, the pictures are beautiful. Some of them even look like blueprints. But who looked at them ?!

As a child, I also drew diagrams of various spacecraft, submarines and six-legged tanks (praise be to the Almighty, it never occurred to anyone to embody these projects in metal). But this is not a reason to proclaim me a genius inventor ahead of my time! Again, I do not want to clutter up the presentation: any, I repeat, any invention of "Leonardo" suffers fatal flaw: it does not agree not only with the basic laws of physics, but even with the usual, everyday practical experience that any artisan possesses to one degree or another.

The genius clearly didn't understand, how power and mass, force, volume and pressure are related, and so on - across the entire SI table. The genius clearly did not hold a real arquebus in his hands when he designed its five-barreled version: where to get so much health to turn around with such a weapon ?! The luminary clearly did not imagine how much the armor and armament of his "tank" would weigh, did not know what the real forces of those four people who should set this monster in motion were, did not realize that this miracle of technology would sit in the ground along the very axis, barely rolling off the paved road. Further - everywhere! He enthusiastically sucked small technical details without solving fundamental problems, without even setting them, without even noticing! Titan fluttered in the sky of fantasy, providing "dirty work" to all Cartesian Pascals. Let's go there Torricelli understands why the Duke's fountain does not gush. Galileo, the fool, drops the cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the schoolboy. And here I am!

However, all of Leonardo's "technical wonders" very well drawn … That is, that is - it cannot be taken away. The drawings are pretty. The so-called "Renaissance" is a burst of human arrogance, perhaps the first, but, unfortunately, not the last, when people imagined that science will allow them to overcome all obstacles and will soon give the opportunity to finally triumph over nature. You just need more axles, pulleys and gears. Something does not work? So there are not enough gears.

Sad but true … Beautifully lined mechanisms "Leonardo" unworkable … Beautifully painted ballistae with catapults are obviously inoperative.

This is my opinion. The master lived at the very time when it began to form artificial version of "antiquity" and "middle ages" … And so, historians had a problem: they knew very well that guns and arquebusses appeared relatively recently. And in their version of history, a "military-technical vacuum" was formed, so to speak: what was it that replaced siege artillery by the ancients? And here some titanium flashed. I strongly suspect that Leonardo. Flashed - and the historians picked up. Flashed - and we are already the fifth century powdering brains.

I do not know who Leonardo da Vinci is and what his real name is, and whether he really lived at all. But I know that "ancient" and "medieval" throwing machines were someone just drawn on paper … Skillfully drawn, it's true. And the first candidate for authorship is the one who is called "Leonardo da Vinci" in modern historiography.

Tsar Cannon - "Russian Shotgun"

No, here's my word of honor, a respectable and seemingly sensible magazine - "Technique for Youth". But, as soon as the speech comes about "the affairs of bygone days, legends of deep antiquity", and strives to act as a nursery for date oaks. This organ spoke about the Tsar Cannon as follows. Like, yes, the kernels folded in front of her in a neat pyramid are purely decorative. Yes, indeed, an ornate iron casting machine is absolutely non-functional, and also purely decorative. But, they say, this decorative Cannon was intended for shooting, but not with cannonballs, but with "shot" - buckshot, moreover, from a wooden machine with a constant elevation angle.

Sorry, but this bullshit … Casting such a gun, deliberately excluding the possibility of aiming at the elevation angle, that is, in terms of range, is delusional in advance. This is sabotage. In the thirties of the twentieth century, a genius by the name of Tukhachevsky also hit such projects. I. V. Stalin showed truly angelic patience, explaining to the genius that even the fantasy of a marshal should have some limits, but having exhausted arguments and failed to achieve understanding, he was finally forced to say goodbye to both the genius and his protégés, Kurchevsky, Grokhovsky and others forever. with them. By the way, contrary to the current "democratic" fabrications, while the same Grokhovsky was engaged in serious business (parachutes), he lived and prospered. Brought into the jungle, - do not be offended: the Land of the Soviets is not so rich to finance your technical dislocations.

But let's return to our Cannon and take into account such a nuance: at all times, anti-assault weapons, the main task of which is to fire grapeshot at self-defense, have always had a small caliber, and the main requirement for them was a high rate of fire. Otherwise, they simply will not fulfill their combat mission. The rate of fire of the Tsar Cannon is no more than one or two shots per hour. Thus, the "shot" version disappears completely. So maybe the kernels are real after all? Maybe we have before us a really siege weapon of unheard-of power?..

No, everything is correct. The kernels are fake. And in order to understand, finally, what is the matter here, you need to put in front of you two photographs: the Tsar Cannon and some authentically large-caliber combat cannon. And everything becomes clear. The insufficient strength of the metals used for casting the barrels forced the foundry workers to make the barrel walls very thick, approximately commensurate with the actual caliber of the gun. Meanwhile, the picture of the Tsar Cannon clearly shows that the thickness of the walls of its barrel is obscenely small - no more than a quarter of the caliber. 102% guarantee: it will simply burst when you try to shoot that core. The most interesting thing is that when firing buckshot, the same thing will happen, since the mass of a buckshot charge is approximately equal to, or even exceeds the mass of a solid cannonball for the same gun - see any handbook on smoothbore artillery.

My conclusion and try to argue: before us is the memorial of the glory of Russian weapons. Wonderful, but - just a memorial and nothing more. And in this regard, it would be interesting to check two things directly, so to speak, "on the ground." First, is there a trunnion on the barrel? These are such cylindrical horizontal tides in the middle part, due to which the trunk is swinging in a vertical plane. In the picture, the place where they should be is covered with some kind of decorative stripes of the carriage. Second, is there a seed hole in the breech? This, of course, cannot be determined from a photograph either. If there is at least one thing missing, the topic is closed and is not subject to further discussion in principle, although the question is clear to me personally.

Georgy Kostylev

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