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> The reality is the roman heavy infantry was a machine.

The beginning of the 1999 film "Titus" ( an Anthony Hopkins starring adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" ) has a Roman square in maneuvers in a ... soundstage? not an exterior sequence anyway.

It's one thing to read it and another to actually see it.

Scarcely. This may be true in the most childlike pedestrian sense, but it holds zero water in terms of even the most basic understanding of New World archaeology and anthropology. There simply is no schemata in which we view the mesoamerican civilizations as having anything whatsoever to do with your South American cultures.

They are totally and completely unrelated and while I think they probably did have a notion of one another, it would have been very dim and mitigated through a long and unreliable trading chain of goods that rarely reached one or the other, and for which we have nearly zero archaeological evidence.

The Destroyer of Worlds goes much more in depth into the Oppenheimer/Truman dynamic (And its free for the time being!)

https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/

I believe that was in Vegetius “Epitome of Military science”

Good book on the Roman strategy if you’ve not read it

Turns out it was a Greek writing about Elba:

Off the city of Tyrrhenia known as Poplonium there is an island which men call Aethaleia.​ It is about one hundred stades* distant from the coast and received the name it bears from the smoke (aithalos) which lies so thick about it. For the island possesses a great amount of iron-rock, which they quarry in order to melt and cast and thus to secure the iron, and they possess a great abundance of this ore. For those who are engaged in the working of this ore crush the rock and burn the lumps which have thus been broken in certain ingenious furnaces; and in these they smelt the lumps by means of a great fire and form them into pieces of moderate size which are in their appearance like large sponges.

1 stade = 150–210 metres

Yeah, with 8 round magazines that will happen. Little less likely with 30 round mags and a 210 round personal load.

Hmm interesting. That’s not the one I saw but that’s interesting nonetheless.

My father was an infantry man in WWII. From what he told me it was pretty easy for guys to blow through the clip on an M1 too

There is an old Roman proverb that was said when Greeks were making fun of the length of their swords. Romans replied it only needed to be long enough to reach your heart.

You could just say you don't have them, it's fine. As far as I'm aware, they're basically nonexistent anyway, hence my conjecture.

I dont have them immediately on hand and I don't care enough to dig them up for you.

How far would you agree that Henry VIII's marriages are over-discussed in comparison to other aspects of his reign?

The closest I could find is in Strabo 3.2.8 about silver in Spain, where a little loosely: "and they are making the silver furnaces tall, so that the fiery smoke from the lumps to be lifted up in the air; cause it's heavy and destructive"

Do you have sources for that? I know they were instructed to use primarily semi-auto, due to ammunition supply issues, but I can't find anything about what they actually did in said circumstances.

Thank you for the detailed response!

Yeah, sounds like it. Morodor but with wine and olives.

I agree. They were unusually focused on practical advancement.

this. prior to pearl harbor roosevelt’s lend lease program kept everyone’s head above water.

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A fascinating post. I'm always interested in anything related to the Industrial revolution.

Indeed dirt cheap, when I started as a management trainee in my company they spend about 70k on me in half a year in training

Not sure how South American civilizations would be related to North America (and or Central America) Mayas.