Are modern planes, ships, and tanks more complicated and expensive than WWII-era ones, relative to the times?

Are modern planes, ships, and tanks more complicated and expensive than WWII-era ones, relative to the times? Because you look at WWII or interwar armies and they're way huger than modern ones, and people talk about 15 HIMARs as war-changing when WWII was fielding literally hundreds of tanks in battles no one's ever heard of.

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Machinery wise- no
    Computer/electronics wise- yes

    I mean the Pacific theater was decided between a handful of pilots

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Weapons are actually cheaper relative to the value they achieve. When you needed an entire bomber wing to disable a factory in 1940 all you need today is a handful of cruise missiles.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Depends on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to hit one building, modern weapons work better. But the supposedly vast power of the Russian military throwing everything it had at a couple of Ukrainian cities for months did less damage than a single WWII air raid would have.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        That was entirely intentional. Obviously if the Russians really were throwing everything they had at Ukraine they could've completely demolished the cities and laid claim to the rubble after everything's said and done, but why do that to the infrastructure and people they want to take over?
        I'm not trying to simp for them by the way, they can go to hell.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        But the entire premise of 'throwing everything' at the enemy to destroy them is flawed. Destroying a few city blocks does almost nothing to your enemy's capabilities. If the allies were capable of precisions strikes in ww2 they would have gone with that every time over massed bombing. Trying to destroy everything is always the worse option when only a few things in the city have actual value as targets.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >If the allies were capable of precisions strikes in ww2 they would have gone with that every time over massed bombing.
          lmao lol, even
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            And what precision weapons should have been used instead my smoothbrained friend?

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          This. Destroying civilian residential structures is a waste of munitions. You haven't done any actual damage to them since they can live in tents or on the factory floors, and you've now implied that you plan to murder everyone and so they will throw everything into their efforts to defeat you.
          People won't necessarily fight that hard against a regime change. Start destroying their shit and now it's personal. The aggressor is also destroying what they plan to capture. They might as well call off the war and build up their own nation rather than rebuild the one they just destroyed.

          We could easily crank out incendiary munitions for destroying cities, but there's just no point. Especially when you have nukes.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            The deaths of civilians was the point. They wanted to kill as many Germans as possible. There was no guarantee Germany wouldn't win in the east and if it had, then invading Europe might not actually be on the table, so they decided to kill as many Germans as possible while the war was still on.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Probably not. They wanted to destroy houses to cause a flood of refugees across Germany so the whole country would be able to see that they were losing. The Nazis could suppress news about deaths but hiding refugees is much harder.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            The Doolittle raid worked as psychological warfare and kept Japanese military resources on Honshu Island for the remainder of the war.
            The blitz and V2 rocket attacks were mostly psychological tactics to force a truce with Britain.
            Industrial destruction is key, but so is destroying morale.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >Are modern planes, ships, and tanks more complicated and expensive than WWII-era ones
      obviously
      >relative to the times?
      depends on what metric you use. Financially? no, we can afford more and better, if we reprioritised spending. Technologically? it's pretty tip-top, at least if you're not using Soviet-era junk (or derivatives thereof).
      >Because you look at WWII or interwar armies and they're way huger than modern ones
      It might surprise you as all the popular media tells us we are in the absolute pits of history, but we are in a time of relatively unprecedented peace (at least, we were, until February) and as a species we actually have come to spend far more resources on living than on killing.
      >and people talk about 15 HIMARs as war-changing
      yes, because in a fight between two cripples, you toss one a knife, the game is certainly changed
      >when WWII was fielding literally hundreds of tanks
      most of which didn't even have a radio, anon, making them literally an armoured vehicle with a big gun and nothing more
      >in battles no one's ever heard of
      don't flatter yourself.

      The number of cruise missiles available in WW2 was exactly none. That makes them priceless, actually. Your reference to the raw production price tag, or even the full R&D programme cost, is not realistic because smart cruise missiles are a culmination of decades of a whole host of R&D across multiple fields of science and technology, and the cost of all that probably does add up way more than a squadron of Lancasters.

      Depends on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to hit one building, modern weapons work better. But the supposedly vast power of the Russian military throwing everything it had at a couple of Ukrainian cities for months did less damage than a single WWII air raid would have.

      >did less damage than a single WWII air raid would have
      Mariupol looks a lot like your typical WW2 city post-blitz, actually.

      That was entirely intentional. Obviously if the Russians really were throwing everything they had at Ukraine they could've completely demolished the cities and laid claim to the rubble after everything's said and done, but why do that to the infrastructure and people they want to take over?
      I'm not trying to simp for them by the way, they can go to hell.

      >why do that to the infrastructure and people they want to take over?
      >I'm not trying to simp for them by the way
      could've fooled me, given you're repeating the same old "gloves are still on" bullshit we've been hearing for five months now.
      >cauldrooons

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Yes. The amount of advancement and understanding from that time period is absolutely insane. Why field 100,000+ men for an operation when you can strike at your enemies with surgical precision from a thousand miles away?

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    lmfao what is this larp cringe

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Palingenetic ultranationalism unavoidably leads to larping, since it by definition requires a (imagined) mythos to justify its existence and direction, ie. a narrative historical continuity of a kind which can only exist in fiction. So, it materializes via invented traditions—larping.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Observe:

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Imagine being a teuton knight from 12th century and seeing your grand-grand-grand(etc) child being some soilent looking larper

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          I bet every single German youth in that pic look much better than you

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        unironically looks and sounds like Putin's soviet cargo cult russia

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >(imagined) mythos
        its not an imagined mythos you fricking idiot they use a "myth" aka some ideal of the actual past to unify a populace.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          NTA, but you're the idiot who doesn't understand the difference between a myth (a story) and a mythos (a set of beliefs surrounding a narrative); other anon used the correct word

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Topic is kinda gay but picrel looks like actual shit. What the frick, looks like cheap superman jammies. Anyways, I'd say yes they are, since back then they built for quantity over quality. It's probably not a very controversial opinion nowadays, but every WW2 tank sucked ass, especially the Tiger and the T34.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      > every WW2 tank sucked ass
      no, but most did

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Firearms? No. More complex weapon systems. Yes, very much.
    During first half of the 20th century essentially any mid-sized country could build all of their forces domestically. Sure propper blue water navy or large bombers required a lot of research and qualified personnel but it was theoretically possible because all you needed was iron. Lots of iron and some basic chemical compounds.
    These days apart from US and China no country can do it.

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