death ride

English

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /dɛθ ɹaɪd/

Noun

death ride (plural death rides)

1. A course of action, voluntarily entered into by at least the leading participant, which is (or appears) certain or very likely to result in death, failure, or defeat.

   The Prussian cavalry's death ride successfully scattered the French artillerymen, easing the pressure on the other Prussian formations.

   • 2022 August 31, Drachinifel, 32:31 from the start, in SMS Seydlitz at Jutland - How to survive being a 25,000t Piñata‎^[1], archived from the original on 1 September 2022:

     Shortly after seven o'clock in the evening, the ship had managed to sort out its course; unfortunately, that course was now heading east, towards the combined British forces, and the darkness and gloom made recognizing targets more of an ambition than an actual reality. This was, of course, the start of the infamous "death ride", buying time for Scheer to extract the High Seas Fleet from another encounter with the Grand Fleet. Over the course of the next half hour, whilst admittedly scoring the only hit on the Grand Fleet itself when one of Seydlitz's guns managed to hit HMS Colossus, Seydlitz herself would be hit no less than six times.

Verb

death ride (third-person singular simple present death rides, present participle death riding, simple past death rode, past participle death ridden)

1. To perform a death ride.
   • 2018 October 17, Drachinifel, 33:10 from the start, in Last Ride of the High Seas Fleet - Battle of Texel 1918‎^[2], archived from the original on 4 August 2022:

     One last scenario that was played in the evening we chose to excise from our overall results from the point where the Grand Fleet was sighted, and that was basically because, having kind of seen how the first six scenarios had gone, the person playing Hipper in that particular scenario decided "screw it, as soon as I see the Grand Fleet coming, the entire High Seas Fleet just turned east and death-rode straight into the 5th and 6th Battle Squadrons". Now, that, admittedly, did do an awful lot more damage (the 5th and 6th were almost completely wiped out), but the High Seas Fleet was, in turn, almost completely wiped out (in fact, basically was wiped out, to a man) by the oncoming rest of the British Grand Fleet, and it was decided by everybody that this kind of, like, suicidal, completely suicidal, charge was probably a bit out of character for Hipper, and so we didn't take that particular one into account.