zenosanalytic:

butchlesbianaloy:

brunhiddensmusings:

nerdgasrnz:

deeplyunfocusedguy:

foxnonny:

asspostate:

miss me with that ‘weapon accuracy’ shit. im shooting everything. im laying down cover fire. im shooting the walls. im shooting my teammates. im shooting myself. my accuracy is 100% yall just dont know what im aiming at

I didn’t even read the rest because I’m still laughing at “miss me with that ‘weapon accuracy’ shit” like I’ve never read a more perfect phrase in my life

Fun fact: during the Revolutionary War, the British HATED American soldiers’ fighting methods. Why? Because Americans aimed. We’ve all heard of the battle of Bunker Hill and how the soldiers were instructed not to shoot until they saw the whites of the enemies’ eyes, but did you know that the British military’s battle plan was essentially to spray as many musket balls as they could all over the enemy? Troops were told to just aim in the general direction of the opposing army and shoot, and the British thought that Americans aiming their weapons was a savage and uncivilized form of combat.

The British sound like me when I play Overwatch and the enemy hitscan players kill me more than once

the american army had been trained by a german guy who added the ‘aim’ in ‘ready, aim, fire’, and literally wrote a book about ‘how to be better at soldiering then the brittish who think its all about pressed uniforms and standing in neat lines’

the other side of aiming- they thought it was unfair that half the american soldiers would intentionally try and hit the brittish officers, who had distinctive uniforms and were often sitting on a horse so they were stupid easy to pick out of a crowd. quite probably the most obvious thing you could do in a fight

#how the fuck did britain conquer 97% of the world

This isn’t entirely accurate.

First it presents the practical differences in the use of muskets and rifles as a tactical choice, which it wasn’t. The British Army primarily used muskets. So did every gunpowder army. Muskets were smoothbore, and smoothbore firearms aren’t terribly accurate by modern standards. This wasn’t a big deal, of course, because war in Europe had been built around massed formations grinding away in melee combat for centuries at that point, so the “obvious” fix for inaccuracy –to march your soldiers up close and have them fire en masse into the enemy to minimize the chance of misses– was extremely obvious.

Rifles already existed and were MUCH more accurate and longer ranged, but there were a lot of problems with them, problems that were particularly dire for widespread production and use. To begin with they were MUCH more expensive to make and required specialized equipment. We take rifling for granted now, but you had to have specialized lathes to apply the rifling, you had to do it with steel soft enough to be lathed but strong&thick enough not to explode on firing(and, ideally, multiple firings) which made them heavier, and the machine tools of the time were limited, meaning there wasn’t alot of standardization, which presented problems not only for maintenance and production, but also for firing.

For a firearm to effectively fire a round(and also not explode), the barrel needs to “fit” the round tight enough not to allow too much gas from the detonating powder to flow around it, but not so tight that the round can’t escape the barrel(either jam/fouling it, or blowing it up in your face). That’s easy to do with smoothbores: you make your rounds(called “rounds” cuz they’re round) by pouring molten lead into molds, the mold gives you a standardized shape for the rounds, and you can use that shape to standardize the diameter of your barrels. With rifles it isn’t so easy because the interior is grooved and, like I said, very little standardized machine-tools. Getting the right balance is tougher, and if you thin the barrel too much during rifling, it blows up in some poor schmuck’s face.

So Rifles were not only more expensive, and slower/more difficult to load, they were also more finicky; more liable to jam, foul, or blow up in your face, especially if you were relying on some manufacturer to make them on contract in an era of zero quality control, which is what the British Army would have had to do. So it didn’t make sense -economically or tactically- for the British Empire to arm its soldiers with rifled firearms; it’d be too expensive, it be more dangerous in the massed-rank warfare of the time, and the slow rate of fire would leave those soldiers dangerously exposed on the front lines. And, given the dirty, smoky powder of the day, the added range wouldn’t matter much since you typically couldn’t see much after a volley or two.

All of this applied to the American Colonials as well. The vast majority of colonial units were also armed with smoothbore muskets, and the Brown Bess in particular(because that’s what British gunmakers made, that’s what colonial governments made easily available to citizens for purchase, and so -required to own a firearm for militia service- that’s what most colonial citizens “owned”[which is another issue]). BUT! Plenty of colonials -particularly in less developed “frontier” regions like Vermont- also did lots of hunting, and when you hunt you really need to hit what you’re shooting at the first time. Rifles were a sound investment for people who hunted.

So, when the revolution started, you had all these people(esp in the far north and along the frontier) who owned reliable rifles, knew how to maintain them in the rough, were practiced shooters, and often had some experience in sanctioned(or not) campaigns to massacre or torment the people they were stealing “America” from. These hunters were quickly organized(or in the case of “units” like the Green Mountain Boys, organized themselves) into “sharpshooter” irregulars who were INCREDIBLY effective at both harassing massed British formations from cover(which there was a lot of in the colonies) during marches, and executing British officers(who HAD to make themselves extremely visible to give commands on deafening, smoke-clogged battlefields) during formal engagements.

Obviously hunters existed in Britain too, AND plenty of colonials supported the crown, so why didn’t THEY have sharpshooter detachments? Well they did; BUT at the time they were only poorly integrated into the organization of the British army, and British commanders didn’t like to use them. Why not is a complex question. First, to put it bluntly, they thought that sort of deliberate murderousness was something you reserved for non-whites and the Irish. Second, this was a class society, and class-hierarchs tend not to encourage the idea of deliberately killing your social “betters”. Third THEY were the ones who would be getting shot at by the other side if they encouraged that sort of thing by their own troops. So the Brits didn’t really make much, or very effective, use of sharpshooters doing the American Colonial campaign(even though they had during the French and Indian War killing natives and massacring their communities).

The Colonials didn’t share or respect those qualms; they were democratic in their tactics as well as their politics, even as they shared their blase racism justifying the extermination of non-whites. So the accuracy of the colonial troops wasn’t the result of “better” training than the British that gave more attention to aim and accuracy(how could they be better trained: the Brits were professional soldiers and they were, mostly, raw volunteers) but the significant presence of, and willingness to use, sharpshooters to thin out British ranks at range and, more importantly, pick off British officers from the relative safety behind their own ranks of mass-shooters.