I understand that ships used an Engine Order Telegraph to communicate between the bridge and the engine room - but all of the ones I have seen only have a few set speeds - "half ahead," "full ahead" and so on. When ships with various top speeds were traveling together (or when ships were traveling through speed-limited navigation channels), did they have to continually alter the EOT position? Or was there a way to set a certain speed? How did that work?

My next question - how did the ship engineer control the speed, himself? Did steamships have a steam throttle (like a steam car), or was speed increased simply by generating more steam? If there was a steam throttle, why didn't they just run the controls up to the bridge and give the helmsman direct control? If speed was increased just by increasing steam pressure, did the engineer have tabled that told him how much speed would increase at a given steam pressure, or did they just rely on gut knowledge?

I am very pleased to announce that the ranks of the Ask Historians mod team have increased! We welcome the ascendance of:

/u/gothwalk, chief of the history of Irish food

/u/hillsonghoods, divine in the art of twentieth century pop and the history of psychology

/u/lukeintheskywith, high priest of drug use in the nineteenth century and the Sunday Digest

/u/miles_sine_castrum, patron saint of knights, feudalism, and High Medieval France

With the addition of this holy quartet, the mod pantheon will be quicker to respond to your reports prayers and to rain down removals with righteous vengeance. Praise Mods!

In the Penguin Classics 2014 edition of the Iliad there are repeated references to "curved spears". What weapon is this referring to? Does "curved" refer to the haft or the point?

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I assume this is an open question and not a factual one, and I'm interested in what attempts have been made at defining when the Gladius morphed into some intermediate sword type before the Oakeshott Type X sword, and for how long (after the Fall of Western Rome to the germanic tribes) soldiers and officers still called themselves SPQR Romans (not to be confused with later "Holy Romans" which were the proto-german empire IIRC).

I have searched for this in this subforum and did not find an identical question.

TLDR: For how long did Western Roman survivors keep identifying with the latin language, the SPQR legion mythos and their accessories/tactics, and the name "roman", before they changed?

On the twelfth of September 1943 Otto Skorzeny along with 26 Waffen-SS commandos and 82 Fallschirmjäger landed on Gran Sasso by gliders in a daring raid to free Benito Mussolini who had been placed under arrest by his fellow countrymen. Only a small and light aircraft could land and take off from the massif and the plan was for only Mussolini himself to get on the one plane that landed there. In the event Skorzeny squeezed in with the former dictator and they took off, landing in Rome.

Having read a lot on the operation itself, no account i know of has ever mentioned the fate of the hundred or so German soldiers left on the mountain. Did they fight their way back to their own lines? Were they taken prisoner?

The last Greenland ship reached Iceland in the early 1400s. It had been settled for at least 4 centuries. Why didn't the Norwegians explore further south. I know about vinland etc but would curiosity not have compelled them to go further? They were fine sailors and this is something I've never really understood.

I've read on Wikipedia about them, but it seems brief. I was looking for something more explorative on the subject. Preferably more modern, but ancient histories would do well enough.

My daughter has been told in the class (in UK primary school) that it was common for Romans to kill their first born daughters, the reason given was that fathers preferred sons over daughters. Was that really ever a case? I have never heard of this happening in relation to Ancient Romans and couldn't find anything on internet either. Thanks!

I was reading a book review in the London Review of Books, I don't remember what book it was but the review went through the history of the revolutionary Terror, as it did they mentioned a group called the Federalists who fought against the National Assembly and thus inspired some of the laws used to enact the Terror.

Who were the Federalists and why did they fight against the National Assembly?

I'm very interested in well written books on the French Revolution both in general and specifically about the café/philosophy club culture that gave birth to a lot of, as I understand it, the ideas that inspired the revolutionaries. Any recommendations welcome! Where can I learn more about the French Revolution?

So, we're now in 2017, when did we go into AD/BC?

Did the people of that period have to change the year they were in all of a sudden? Or were years just not kept?

On the wikipedia page it says that Britain France and the United States all supported Saddam's Iraq. It just seems a little crazy to me why they would support the Iraqi invasion of Iran.

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I'd like to know about what happened, how North Korea became North Korea, ect. Thanks!

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I just watched the episode of GoT where they show "the battle of the bastards" and it got me thinking...

Were medieval battles more or less one big clusterfuck when it all got down to it? And also, did many armies often kill their own men by accident?

The messages were not encrypted. They could hear everything as well as anyone with the appropriate radio receivers could.

What was the reaction on the ground in the Soviet Union?

Did each side build half a building? Did one side build them and then concede the territory to move the border to strike right through the middle of them?