Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
pretty neat documentary on how the mafia helped the allies during WW2 (note that mobile game ad is front-loaded, video starts at 2:40) that I liked and thought I'd share: https://youtu.be/JWqE1eUgA0E
Just listened to a diary of an American journalist who was stationed in Germany/Austria between 1934-1940. It’s an interesting peek at how much was already known about the human atrocities going on, even if the journalist didn’t go into detail out of fear that the Gestapo mind find out.
It ends at December of 1940, when the fortunes of the Nazi army was at its highest, having conquered most of Europe. (Germany has not invaded Russia yet)
He mentions that while there are rations, the German populace is still eating well. The main concern is that there isn’t enough material to make clothing, as most of the cotton is imported in, and Germany is technically blockaded. Even the army is having trouble getting coats for their recruits.
It makes a good point in that the total war series treats archers like ww2 era bolt action rifles where either the projectile is fully lethal or is a puff of dirt on the ground.
Which if it ever was remotely true it was probably just in the earliest ancient era fighting before decent armor was available. Certainly by the time of the greco-persian wars armored hoplite infantry is described in the sources as being very robust against foot archers and would probably need to be at relatively close range to be in much danger.
The other thing he doesn’t address in that specific article but that plays into it is how popular mixed infantry was over the years which is something that the total war games totally don’t show well at all. Mixed infantry is where you’d have a couple of rows of spears in front of an archer formation. The spear guys would kneel or spread out or otherwise get out of the way while the archers/musketmen shot, then if a threat showed up the spears would close in to protect the missile troops. This is most famously used in pike and shot style armies (during that era mixed infantry basically replaced everything else other than specialty troops) but was actually common throughout history, especially also in the ancient era in the middle east. The reason it was popular to have spearmen/heavier infantry in formation with missile troops was because ranges were often quite short relatively, and things like cavalry or infantry charges could happen without time to intercept them with a different formation.
Horse archers he’s absolutely right on as well. For the most part horse archers didn’t fight by using their mobility to stand off at 100 yards and pepper infantry until they ran out of ammo. Instead they would basically charge in and try to fake out infantry or even draw a charge. If the infantry didn’t brace they had the option of charging, if they did they would fire at closer range for a bit until it looked like the enemy was reacting and then retreat. If the enemy infantry or slower cavalry tried to follow they would shoot them while retreating, and they always had the option of turning and charging the now disordered and unbraced infantry.
Its interesting because while the Total War series “feels” really good its easy to fall into the trap of thinking thats how things were, when often they aren’t really that accurate as far as best practices back then, both because of generals not having omniscient battlefield views and instant communication with subordinates, and because the actual physics of things often worked differently in real life.
Jealous Deva on
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Yes the last episode of that series was june 2021.
To be fair, even with his particular informal style, these episodes are clocking in at 5 hours plus. That's is a lot of material and basically a short book on a specialized topic. So I can forgive the pace of release. I just can't believe that it is all that profitable for Dan.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I agree, I’m happy he’s doing it but it’s fun to poke at the release schedule.
There is the side show he has as well, and that does get way more frequent releases.
There is some great stuff in the addendum series. There’s also occasional forays into weirdness like hearing Elon Musk blather on about stuff he clearly isn’t an expert at.
I understand the slow nature of releases on the main series because they are very long, but its still a bit hilarious that the current show is a follow up to a show that came out like 10 years ago.
In November of 1952, Royce Williams was on patrol over the Yalu river in his Grumman F9F-5 Panther along with three wingmen, when they encountered and were engaged by seven Soviet MiG-15s.
The other U.S. planes were soon scattered by engine trouble and enemy fire, and Williams found himself in the dogfight alone. He shot down at least four of them before escaping to a U.S. aircraft carrier.
“A lot of it was awareness of where they were and how I had to maneuver to avoid them,” he told the Union-Tribune in an interview last year. “They were taking turns. I decided if I concentrated on shooting them down, then I’d become an easy target. So my initial goal was to look for defensive opportunities when they made mistakes.”
When he landed, he counted 263 holes in his plane. He was uninjured.
Worried about drawing the Soviets into the Korean War, U.S. military commanders hushed any public mention of the battle. Williams got pats on the back — and shared a cocktail with President-elect Dwight Eisenhower — but was ordered not to tell anyone, not even his wife.
The battle wasn't publicly known until the early 2000s when Korean war records were declassified, at which point a push was began to upgrade his silver star to a Medal of Honor. They got closer just recently with the approval to grant him the Navy Cross, one step away.
It's been verified by a Russian historian, and likely that he caused two of the three surviving MiGs to go down also.
A 2014 book by a Russian military historian mentions the encounter. It said that seven MiGs left a base in Vladivostik that morning, and only one returned. Four were shot down by a single U.S. aircraft, another was shot up and crashed, and the seventh plane was never found.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Pretty wild shit, considering public concrete proof of the Soviet unit directly engaging US forces in Korea could've changed the course of everything that happened afterwards. Soviet Union had atomic weapons at that point, but ICBMs were several years off so all nuclear strikes would've been short-ranged or carried by plane. And it would be decades before the Soviet Union was really fortified against invasion, plus the Soviet Union was still recovering from WWII while the US would've been even stronger than when it went in to that war. Would the war have broken up into full military conflict? Would anybody in Europe be at all willing to fight the USSR so soon after WWII?
I doubt the war would've seen fewer dead civilians in the USSR versus what happened during the peace, particularly given that Stalin all but certainty would've deployed their (then tiny) atomic arsenal if he was pushed. But would the war have lasted enough for Stalin to die before committing the country to nuclear war? Would he have died even sooner from the stress of the conflict?
I can definitely understand why they welded the lid down on that particular secret. The variables were enormous, the world was still patching itself up from WWII, and the truth of that little dogfight could've had consequences that would've made WWII look like boot camp.
I got into the Space Race recently and had never examined it previously other than like knowing some of the key milestones (Sputnik, Laika, Gagarin, Glenn, Apollo, etc) and so never grok’d how it was an extension of the ballistic missile race, which was an extension of the rapidly and dangerously evolving nuclear doctrines, which were in response to the bomb race
After Korea, the Army started preparing for war on irradiated battlefields, while the Air Force was investing huge in long range bombers to allow for Massive Retaliation as U.S. nuclear doctrine, which they abandoned rather quickly when they learned what Putin is finding out now about the downsides of threatening disproportionate second strikes undermining everything else you say and your negotiating position in any conflict
Also in half the time some of us have been on this forum, the US went from reaching space for the first time to putting people on the moon and bringing them back
There was some crazy shit around that time and yeah space and the nuclear race were entertwined.
The US actually designed a nuclear armed space battleship in the 60s which was technically very feasible to build at the time and was basically a death star. It would have been launched by an orion drive and carried something like 500 20 megaton nuclear weapons, Casaba howitzers (which were dual purpose nuclear shaped charges that could be used for propulsion or as weapons), and had some naval guns and autocannons for good measure. There was also a proposal for a variant with a 4 gigaton suicide fusion bomb included internally just in case all that other shit didn’t work. It would have been a literal planet killer.
It was, of course, never actually built, and was probably conceived more as an answer to “what could we do with 60s technology if we found out an alien warfleet was going to invade with 60s technology and 10 years of warning” than anything anyone intended as a serious proposal, but still…
Also I guess I’m now realizing too that the giant buildup of b52s to support the fast-abandoned Massive Retaliation posture basically dictated our Vietnam strategy of “bomb them into submission” (or Stone Age, which the commander of Strategic Air Command demanded, and was basically ousted over because LBJs admin wasn’t bombing enough….Kissinger of course would run with this in the next administration)
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Ballistic missiles and the space race were tied together by more than just technology. The persistent gnawing threat was that, at some point, either the US or the USSR would "own" space and thus have the ultimate high ground from which they could attack with impunity. Once you've got a military foothold on orbit, there's virtually no way for another power to bootstrap its way into a competing position; anything they send up is expensive to launch in a lot of ways and slow, anything sent down to intercept is relatively cheap and can be moving at several times the speed of sound in a short time frame. So both sides had to build better rockets to do more in space which meant also building better missiles which meant more threat and building better rockets to get further ahead in space which meant etc etc. Yeah, there was the treaty that no nation could claim territory in space but that never would've held if one side or the other had managed a solid military foothold in space.
On the upside, it did mean pushing humanity forward into exploring space (even if we have lapsed badly since then) and the economic stress of the Space Race on the Soviet Union (combined with other major factors, of course) helped assure a winding down of the Cold War instead of it blowing up. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if nations started deciding the outcomes of conflicts with more stupid science races instead of the traditional inflicting of mass death.
On the upside, it did mean pushing humanity forward into exploring space (even if we have lapsed badly since then) and the economic stress of the Space Race on the Soviet Union (combined with other major factors, of course) helped assure a winding down of the Cold War instead of it blowing up. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if nations started deciding the outcomes of conflicts with more stupid science races instead of the traditional inflicting of mass death.
Hard disagree there. We've certainly changed our strategy, we no longer focus on sending people in space. But our exploration of space has improved by leaps and bounds since the Cold War. Just think of the new space telescopes giving us amazing images of stars billions of light-years away. Multiple Mars rovers that are literally rolling labs exploring another freaking planet. We've seen the first close-up pictures of Pluto, and the Voyager probes just became the first man-made objects to reach the edge of the solar system and report back on what interstellar space is really like. Hell, growing up I remember reading textbooks that confidently explained how extra-solar planets are probably impossible and if they do exist they'll follow basically the same configuration as our Solar System because it's the only one that's physically possible, then the excitement at the discovery of the first-ever extra-solar planet, then the explosion of new planet discoveries as our methods became more precise and could be applied to more start, and the amazement at the incredible and unexpected diversity of planets and system configurations, and the growing dullness from the routine of these discoveries.
We are definitely not lapsing in space exploration.
"Before desegregation, did people believe that Heaven was segregated?".
"To what extent were the Dahomey a tribe of slavers, and to what extent did they fight against the institution of slavery? Were they slavers before Europeans 'showed up'? Is there room for nuance in the story of the Dahomey Amazons, or were the Dahomey the 'bad guys' of West Africa?"
"Why did Israel’s effort to revive Hebrew as a spoken language succeed, while the Republic of Ireland’s attempt to revive the Irish language mostly failed?"
"What happened to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette's surviving daughter?"
"Why did someone put a shoe in the wall of a 200 year old house?"
"John Wilkes Booth was a famous actor in his day. What plays did he perform in? Are any of them still well known today? Did he originate any roles and were any theater troupes reluctant to perform plays associated with him after the Lincoln assassination?"
""Sk8er Boi" (A. Lavigne 2002) argues that in high school dynamics, the so-called 'skaters' were low on the social pecking order. How accurately does this work represent turn-of-the-century teenage social order (at least in North American city/suburban schools)?"
"How common was misattribution of craftsmanship of textile crafts like quilts during slavery in the American South?"
"Sir Bedivere: “How do you know so much about swallows?” King Arthur: “Well, you have to know these things when you're a king.” Were medieval kings actually expected to be well-versed in ornithology?"
Armies before railroads were terrifying. Like there are records of massive demographic decline in eras with long periods of constant warfare like the 30 years war or the three kingdoms period, and they probably aren’t exaggerated.
So there is a new temporary Pharaonic Egyptian exhibit at my city's museum. Among other pieces, there is of course a funeral stone carving for two men buried together. And of course, the description explains that "the relationship between these two men is unknown - they may have been coworkers."
So there is a new temporary Pharaonic Egyptian exhibit at my city's museum. Among other pieces, there is of course a funeral stone carving for two men buried together. And of course, the description explains that "the relationship between these two men is unknown - they may have been coworkers."
Just guys hangin' out. Eternally.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
There were a number of things that bugged me about the exhibit. The explanation of BCE/CE as before and after Year 0, referring to the Pharaoh as Cheops without so much as a passing mention to his Egyptian name Khufu, the "beautiful" Queen Cleopatra, or the fact they showed a giant statue head of Hatshepsut without taking the time to point out the carved lines of the rope holding her fake Pharaoh beard that were right there in plain view. But that explanation took the cake.
One of my favorite little historical ironies is that HMS Dreadnought, the revolutionary battleship whose 1906 launch triggered a naval arms race, never fired her guns in anger at another battleship, or any ship - but she does hold the even rarer distinction of being the only battleship to have sunk a submarine.
In March 1915, Dreadnought was sailing in column with her squadron when the u-boat U-29 made an attack run on HMS Neptune ahead of her. The submarine tried to cut through the column in front of Dreadnought and escape, but the battleship ran it down and rammed it at flank speed. U-29 was cut in half and lost with all hands, including its commander, Otto Weddigen, which was itself a small irony: on September 22 1914, Weddigen had sunk three British cruisers in a single action, killing 1,459 sailors and profoundly shaking British confidence in their naval supremacy.
Although it wasn't the first time a submarine had sunk a warship (U-21 had sunk HMS Hawke two weeks earlier), it was the one-sided massacre of September 22 that heralded the rise of the U-boat and the beginning of the end for battleships. As such it was oddly fitting that Weddigen would be killed by the iconic battleship.
One of my favorite little historical ironies is that HMS Dreadnought, the revolutionary battleship whose 1906 launch triggered a naval arms race, never fired her guns in anger at another battleship, or any ship - but she does hold the even rarer distinction of being the only battleship to have sunk a submarine.
In March 1915, Dreadnought was sailing in column with her squadron when the u-boat U-29 made an attack run on HMS Neptune ahead of her. The submarine tried to cut through the column in front of Dreadnought and escape, but the battleship ran it down and rammed it at flank speed. U-29 was cut in half and lost with all hands, including its commander, Otto Weddigen, which was itself a small irony: on September 22 1914, Weddigen had sunk three British cruisers in a single action, killing 1,459 sailors and profoundly shaking British confidence in their naval supremacy.
Although it wasn't the first time a submarine had sunk a warship (U-21 had sunk HMS Hawke two weeks earlier), it was the one-sided massacre of September 22 that heralded the rise of the U-boat and the beginning of the end for battleships. As such it was oddly fitting that Weddigen would be killed by the iconic battleship.
Ironic, but not weird. By 1914 the armsrace that HMS dreadnought had triggered made her so obsolete that she was only fit for escort duties.
The oldest battleships that participated on the british side in the battle for Jutland were the HMS Bellerophon and her sisterships. These were basically HMS Dreadnough look-alikes, but with much thicker armor and a higher calibre secondary battery. HMS Dreadnought herself would have been swiss-cheeesed if it had been forced into an artillery duel, as her deck armor was even thinner than that of the battlecruisers (like HMS Lion) and she had only the standard top speed of the british navy (21 knots).
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Dreadnought was in the 4th Battle Squadron at the time and would have participated in Jutland if she wasn't in drydock for refit when it occurred. It was only after Jutland, as the Royal Sovereign class came on the line, that Dreadnought was transferred to 3rd Battle Squadron, which was a coastal defense formation of pre-dreadnoughts.
Jellicoe wanted every dreadnought he could get for Jutland, and Dreadnought herself was still fit to sail in the main battle line. 21kts may have been less than the newest ships, but it was the top speed of the 4th Division of the 4th Battle Squadron which did participate in Jutland. Her armor was no longer good, but her main battery and speed were just as good as the Bellerophon class which were all present.
Considering Scheer even brought pre-dreadnoughts, of which only one was lost, and further considering that only one Grand Fleet battleship was actually hit by German fire,* she would have been fine.
Dreadnought was transferred to 3rd Battlesquadron before the battle for Jutland, as a response to the Lowestoft raid. She would never have participated in the battle for Jutland regardless.
She became the flagship of the 3rd squadron on 9th July, but she had already been on their rolls since early May, when they were transferred to Sheerness.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Dreadnought was transferred to 3rd Battlesquadron before the battle for Jutland, as a response to the Lowestoft raid. She would never have participated in the battle for Jutland regardless.
She became the flagship of the 3rd squadron on 9th July, but she had already been on their rolls since early May, when they were transferred to Sheerness.
...damn you aint wrong tho. i thought that was only decided after she came back
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I have greatly enjoyed this exchange.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
There were a number of things that bugged me about the exhibit. The explanation of BCE/CE as before and after Year 0, referring to the Pharaoh as Cheops without so much as a passing mention to his Egyptian name Khufu, the "beautiful" Queen Cleopatra, or the fact they showed a giant statue head of Hatshepsut without taking the time to point out the carved lines of the rope holding her fake Pharaoh beard that were right there in plain view. But that explanation took the cake.
I mean all contemporary sources identify Cleopatra as beautiful. I understand the aggrevation for any other pharaoh without attribution, but let's take her contemporaries at their word in this instance.
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No they kept the boat, it was chased off
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/
It ends at December of 1940, when the fortunes of the Nazi army was at its highest, having conquered most of Europe. (Germany has not invaded Russia yet)
He mentions that while there are rations, the German populace is still eating well. The main concern is that there isn’t enough material to make clothing, as most of the cotton is imported in, and Germany is technically blockaded. Even the army is having trouble getting coats for their recruits.
I believe this is what authors call…Foreshadowing
WoW
Dear Satan.....
I am always as surprised as the last time when it finally does happen.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
I think the rule of thumb is it’s three months after you think one is due.
It makes a good point in that the total war series treats archers like ww2 era bolt action rifles where either the projectile is fully lethal or is a puff of dirt on the ground.
Which if it ever was remotely true it was probably just in the earliest ancient era fighting before decent armor was available. Certainly by the time of the greco-persian wars armored hoplite infantry is described in the sources as being very robust against foot archers and would probably need to be at relatively close range to be in much danger.
The other thing he doesn’t address in that specific article but that plays into it is how popular mixed infantry was over the years which is something that the total war games totally don’t show well at all. Mixed infantry is where you’d have a couple of rows of spears in front of an archer formation. The spear guys would kneel or spread out or otherwise get out of the way while the archers/musketmen shot, then if a threat showed up the spears would close in to protect the missile troops. This is most famously used in pike and shot style armies (during that era mixed infantry basically replaced everything else other than specialty troops) but was actually common throughout history, especially also in the ancient era in the middle east. The reason it was popular to have spearmen/heavier infantry in formation with missile troops was because ranges were often quite short relatively, and things like cavalry or infantry charges could happen without time to intercept them with a different formation.
Horse archers he’s absolutely right on as well. For the most part horse archers didn’t fight by using their mobility to stand off at 100 yards and pepper infantry until they ran out of ammo. Instead they would basically charge in and try to fake out infantry or even draw a charge. If the infantry didn’t brace they had the option of charging, if they did they would fire at closer range for a bit until it looked like the enemy was reacting and then retreat. If the enemy infantry or slower cavalry tried to follow they would shoot them while retreating, and they always had the option of turning and charging the now disordered and unbraced infantry.
Its interesting because while the Total War series “feels” really good its easy to fall into the trap of thinking thats how things were, when often they aren’t really that accurate as far as best practices back then, both because of generals not having omniscient battlefield views and instant communication with subordinates, and because the actual physics of things often worked differently in real life.
Yes the last episode of that series was june 2021.
To be fair, even with his particular informal style, these episodes are clocking in at 5 hours plus. That's is a lot of material and basically a short book on a specialized topic. So I can forgive the pace of release. I just can't believe that it is all that profitable for Dan.
There is the side show he has as well, and that does get way more frequent releases.
I understand the slow nature of releases on the main series because they are very long, but its still a bit hilarious that the current show is a follow up to a show that came out like 10 years ago.
The battle wasn't publicly known until the early 2000s when Korean war records were declassified, at which point a push was began to upgrade his silver star to a Medal of Honor. They got closer just recently with the approval to grant him the Navy Cross, one step away.
https://www.stripes.com/newsletters/veterans-news/2023-01-14/hero-korean-war-navy-cross-8759693.html
It's been verified by a Russian historian, and likely that he caused two of the three surviving MiGs to go down also.
I doubt the war would've seen fewer dead civilians in the USSR versus what happened during the peace, particularly given that Stalin all but certainty would've deployed their (then tiny) atomic arsenal if he was pushed. But would the war have lasted enough for Stalin to die before committing the country to nuclear war? Would he have died even sooner from the stress of the conflict?
I can definitely understand why they welded the lid down on that particular secret. The variables were enormous, the world was still patching itself up from WWII, and the truth of that little dogfight could've had consequences that would've made WWII look like boot camp.
After Korea, the Army started preparing for war on irradiated battlefields, while the Air Force was investing huge in long range bombers to allow for Massive Retaliation as U.S. nuclear doctrine, which they abandoned rather quickly when they learned what Putin is finding out now about the downsides of threatening disproportionate second strikes undermining everything else you say and your negotiating position in any conflict
Also in half the time some of us have been on this forum, the US went from reaching space for the first time to putting people on the moon and bringing them back
The US actually designed a nuclear armed space battleship in the 60s which was technically very feasible to build at the time and was basically a death star. It would have been launched by an orion drive and carried something like 500 20 megaton nuclear weapons, Casaba howitzers (which were dual purpose nuclear shaped charges that could be used for propulsion or as weapons), and had some naval guns and autocannons for good measure. There was also a proposal for a variant with a 4 gigaton suicide fusion bomb included internally just in case all that other shit didn’t work. It would have been a literal planet killer.
It was, of course, never actually built, and was probably conceived more as an answer to “what could we do with 60s technology if we found out an alien warfleet was going to invade with 60s technology and 10 years of warning” than anything anyone intended as a serious proposal, but still…
Leaded gasoline is a hell of a thing.
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On the upside, it did mean pushing humanity forward into exploring space (even if we have lapsed badly since then) and the economic stress of the Space Race on the Soviet Union (combined with other major factors, of course) helped assure a winding down of the Cold War instead of it blowing up. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if nations started deciding the outcomes of conflicts with more stupid science races instead of the traditional inflicting of mass death.
Hard disagree there. We've certainly changed our strategy, we no longer focus on sending people in space. But our exploration of space has improved by leaps and bounds since the Cold War. Just think of the new space telescopes giving us amazing images of stars billions of light-years away. Multiple Mars rovers that are literally rolling labs exploring another freaking planet. We've seen the first close-up pictures of Pluto, and the Voyager probes just became the first man-made objects to reach the edge of the solar system and report back on what interstellar space is really like. Hell, growing up I remember reading textbooks that confidently explained how extra-solar planets are probably impossible and if they do exist they'll follow basically the same configuration as our Solar System because it's the only one that's physically possible, then the excitement at the discovery of the first-ever extra-solar planet, then the explosion of new planet discoveries as our methods became more precise and could be applied to more start, and the amazement at the incredible and unexpected diversity of planets and system configurations, and the growing dullness from the routine of these discoveries.
We are definitely not lapsing in space exploration.
Microplastics too!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10kjyy5/the_people_have_spoken_announcing_the_best_of/
Winning Q&As include:
They are some good long-ish form reads.
Armies before railroads were terrifying. Like there are records of massive demographic decline in eras with long periods of constant warfare like the 30 years war or the three kingdoms period, and they probably aren’t exaggerated.
Just guys hangin' out. Eternally.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
In March 1915, Dreadnought was sailing in column with her squadron when the u-boat U-29 made an attack run on HMS Neptune ahead of her. The submarine tried to cut through the column in front of Dreadnought and escape, but the battleship ran it down and rammed it at flank speed. U-29 was cut in half and lost with all hands, including its commander, Otto Weddigen, which was itself a small irony: on September 22 1914, Weddigen had sunk three British cruisers in a single action, killing 1,459 sailors and profoundly shaking British confidence in their naval supremacy.
Although it wasn't the first time a submarine had sunk a warship (U-21 had sunk HMS Hawke two weeks earlier), it was the one-sided massacre of September 22 that heralded the rise of the U-boat and the beginning of the end for battleships. As such it was oddly fitting that Weddigen would be killed by the iconic battleship.
Ironic, but not weird. By 1914 the armsrace that HMS dreadnought had triggered made her so obsolete that she was only fit for escort duties.
The oldest battleships that participated on the british side in the battle for Jutland were the HMS Bellerophon and her sisterships. These were basically HMS Dreadnough look-alikes, but with much thicker armor and a higher calibre secondary battery. HMS Dreadnought herself would have been swiss-cheeesed if it had been forced into an artillery duel, as her deck armor was even thinner than that of the battlecruisers (like HMS Lion) and she had only the standard top speed of the british navy (21 knots).
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Jellicoe wanted every dreadnought he could get for Jutland, and Dreadnought herself was still fit to sail in the main battle line. 21kts may have been less than the newest ships, but it was the top speed of the 4th Division of the 4th Battle Squadron which did participate in Jutland. Her armor was no longer good, but her main battery and speed were just as good as the Bellerophon class which were all present.
Considering Scheer even brought pre-dreadnoughts, of which only one was lost, and further considering that only one Grand Fleet battleship was actually hit by German fire,* she would have been fine.
*counting Beatty's squadrons separately
She became the flagship of the 3rd squadron on 9th July, but she had already been on their rolls since early May, when they were transferred to Sheerness.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
...damn you aint wrong tho. i thought that was only decided after she came back
I mean all contemporary sources identify Cleopatra as beautiful. I understand the aggrevation for any other pharaoh without attribution, but let's take her contemporaries at their word in this instance.