Dirty Hipsters said:
Speaking of aircraft though, I'm always amazed by the fact that we had jets during the Korean war. It took less than 40 years between the first Wright Brothers flight and the first jet-engine airplane. How ridiculous is that?
When you think about vehicular technology in general, the evolution from a power output perspective from the first car to the first supersonic plane (in less than 70 years AFAIK) is indeed crazy when max horsepower up until this point (for some thousands of years) was about 6...!
jademunky said:
Napoleonic War
Second Punic War
Yah, hi fivez...!
OT: Broadly speaking, all of it... the second I come across a tidbit of trivia that takes my interest (which could genuinely be anything, like I just watched the trailer for
Mary Queen of Scots (2018) (YouTube ad...), I went off to read about the Rising in the North, James VI/I, life of Henry II (of France) etc. etc. even though ostensibly, I'm not that into this period of history in northern Europe, and then before that, can't remember how I ended up reading about Alfred Dreyfus).
And hey, I play the Total War series for a multitude of reasons, wanting to the learn about the periods in question (and subsequently pointing out all the crap you can get up to in-game plus all the inaccuracies) is one of the biggest.
Those periods and places I consider myself as knowing a little more than nothing though are: Graeco-Persian Wars; campaigns of Alexander the Great; Wars of the Diadochi/Pyrrhic Wars; Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms; mid/late Roman Republic & Early Roman Empire; Sengoku Jidai (which is funny, because I know next to nothing about Zhanguo Shidai!); Enlightenment Era Europe (military history); the Revolutions of 1848/Spring of Nations; & World War I/II.
And those I consider myself as knowing enough to teach kindergarten kids the basics of are: Second Punic War (basically the life & times of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus... or better yet, the life & times of Gaius Laelius, lulz); the rise & fall of the Duchy & Kingdom of Prussia (particularly the Wars of Unification); & French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars (particularly the Peninsular War, 6th & 7th Coalitions).
And those I think I should learn more about: classical histories of Vietnam, India & Korea; Steppe history in general.