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Post by Airy W on Oct 23, 2018 5:35:43 GMT -6
3) France would resume the construction of large, fast, heavily-armed and armored CAs for commerce-raiding. I thought that France decided that submarines were the future not heavy cruisers? Or was that post naval treaty? Who would they use the cruisers against? With the US and UK submarines are more affordable. The German fleet is very small. Against Italy or the Soviet Union they would want sea control and geography means the threat of enemy raiders isn't huge. Japan maybe? Was France worried about conflict with Japan? The South American navies were so old and slow that I would think light cruisers would work as well as heavy ones.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 22, 2018 14:17:15 GMT -6
I would like to ask a question to move this in a slightly different direction. I think that Mahan has a very interesting discussion of lines of communication vs. raider warfare. Mahan famously comes down on the side of lines of communication. What would be the best naval strategist writer to present the opposing view to Mahan?
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Post by Airy W on Oct 21, 2018 20:30:50 GMT -6
The production method for the Type XXI and Type XXIII U-boats was not unique. Henry J. Kaiser used the same method to build Liberty ships. That’s why he was able to produce as many as he did. Speer was using the same methods as car manufacturers were using and Kaiser steel was involved in supplying car manufacturers with steel and aluminum. Speer and Kaiser didn't use the same methods. For starters, Kaiser insisted that the hulls be waterproof.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 21, 2018 19:49:12 GMT -6
I like the narrow focus because it makes the game very good at what it does.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 21, 2018 17:00:29 GMT -6
Pre and post 1950 is a clean break compared to say pre and post Washington Naval Treaty. The transition to guided munitions and electronic warfare did away with all the tradeoffs that characterized battleships and cruisers.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 20, 2018 19:41:58 GMT -6
Personally, I'd be more inclined to call them semidreadnought battleships with an abnormally-heavy intermediate battery than dreadnought battleships; the dreadnought standard is all-big-gun uniform-caliber, but the Brandenburg class is more of an all-big-gun mixed-caliber design, even if not in quite the same way as the typical semidreadnought battleship whose main and intermediate batteries differ in bore caliber rather than (or in addition to) barrel length caliber. You besmirch the honor of the semi-dreadnoughts calling something with only six big guns by that name. The Dantons and Satsumas had a 6 gun secondary battery on each side in addition to the main four guns and the Radetzkys had four.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 20, 2018 19:23:31 GMT -6
A minimal refit of a battleship will remove the (O) status and probably save you more then it costs.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 20, 2018 19:21:10 GMT -6
I have the impression that not having enough ships makes a rebellion more likely to happen and too succeed. Adding more ships past the limit doesn't have any effect AFAIK.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 13, 2018 15:31:33 GMT -6
For heaven's sake, she was laid down after Dreadnought was commissioned, so what on earth is their excuse? I'd like to hear your thoughts on why you like semi-dreadnoughts in RTW, because I've been doing some thinking about them lately. So in 1906 Dreadnoughts just aren't very good. Accuracy is poor and fire is slow so the short range means it's hard to keep a gun duel going with enemy evasive maneuvers and the need to not present an easy target for torpedoes.) The whole ladder volley is great in theory but the conditions to put it into practice are incredibly fleeting. Battles are really inconclusive. Yes Tsushima was decisive but the Japanese had a lot of advantages, the range was really short and the Russians had to be rather obligingly willing to give battle for that situation to happen. 10 years later at Jutland we dont see an attempt to put the grand battle into action and it is not a repeat of Tsushima. We can debate Jutland until the cows come home but I think we can all agree that neither side lost it's fleet that day. A large secondary battery is effective in these indecisive conditions. Throwing more shells at the enemy increases your chance of slowing them with flooding or knocking out their steering. These things won't give you a decisive victory but might let you pick up a capital ship or two. On the flip side they'll also protect you from attrition. Suppose you have a battleship that is slowed to 15 knots and has a turret out of action. If all it has is another 2 or 4 12 inch guns for protection it's extremely vulnerable to attack by cruisers. If it's got a battery of 9 or 10 inch guns I would be delighted to see those cruisers get close. If it's got 9 or 10 inch guns the enemy battleships are going to be under fire which will throw off their aim. And if you start losing the secondaries you can maybe turn your other side to the enemy. Just keep fighting and you could get friendly reinforcements or a storm or nightfall or their ammo runs out or repairs get completed. Die by inches and kill by inches. Now over time these conditions will start to change. Accuracy will improve. Shells will start penetrating at more then point blank range. These things will help the first generation dreadnought a lot more then the semi-dreadnought. But at the same time that the first generation dreadnought is getting better, it's also getting obsolete. It's always going to be slow. It's armor is always going to be inferior. It's turret layout is always going to be wrong. These are true of the semi-dreadnought as well but at least that had some good years where it was the bane of cruisers. And you can even think about giving up some secondaries and giving it more engines. Then it's the terror of cruisers all over again. I wouldn't plan to do that but occasionally the stars align and I would rather wait to start on the next capital ship but the semi-dread is the right age. The Konig class had fore-and-aft superfiring pairs and a midships centerline turret like the British Orion-, King George V-, and Iron Duke-class battleships. Did you perhaps mean the Kaiser-class battleships, which had an aft superfiring pair, a pair of wing turrets en echelon, and a forward turret on the centerline like the British Neptune and Colossus classes? Yeah I probably mixed those up.
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Post by Airy W on Oct 13, 2018 11:43:24 GMT -6
I love the Clevelands because they have a really purposeful design and IMHO were the right ship for the time. The Gotland is impossible not to love because it's such a special mutt. The Kongos are really cool for being such a successful radical overhaul. The Flower Class (the sloop one), Buckley Class and Bogue Class are all neat for using lower performance engines effectively. The Konig class is neat for the cross-deck fire and is IMHO the only interesting German ship class. The Dantons are cool for the opposite reason as the Clevelands. People tend to diss the impure designs but I find the compromise interesting. Plus I really like building semi-dreadnoughts in RTW.
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Post by Airy W on Aug 16, 2018 11:28:05 GMT -6
Famous Leaders from WW I: Joffre, Painlevé
Oh was Painlevé involved with WWI? I thought the name was supposed to be the first in a series of names poking fun at the British over Lancaster's law. Painlevé would be the first obviously, followed by Cauchy and Hermite. After those three you could perhaps favor Fermat if you are feeling nationalist, Sylvester if your humor is humanist or Ricardo if you just want to keep poking fun at the British.
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Post by Airy W on Aug 9, 2018 12:29:14 GMT -6
Will there be an option to stop firing at a particular ship?
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Post by Airy W on Aug 2, 2018 15:35:09 GMT -6
Machine gun strafing also belongs on the list of important things. The way you'd drive a truck if you know enemy fighters are out there is very different from the way you'd drive if you know friendly fighters are out there. Putting a forward observation post on the highest hill is great if your side has air superiority, not so much if the other side will buzz you.
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Post by Airy W on Aug 1, 2018 20:41:10 GMT -6
]I am not sure of this. For example RN get 1000 tonners from USN and they thought about them quite badly unsuitable for convoy defense at all. I do not expect that this types of sloops could be useful. The British were poor judges of their own efforts until late in the war. It's difficult to see the attacks that didn't happen. If a German wolfpack hunts a convoy guarded by sloops and sinks two or three ships while escaping unscathed, that is demoralizing for the British but it's actually a substantial victory. That was a huge opportunity cost of the wolfpack because it takes a large number of submarines operating for a long period of time to lead to the conditions that allowed that attack. Finding a single convoy in the middle of the ocean and then gathering many submarines for a group attack requires many submarines spending weeks searching and finding nothing. The Germans would have been much, much better off attacking tramp steamers sailing out of convoy but because of the sloops there weren't any such targets available. So statistically we would have expected the British to have lost dozens of ships were it not for that convoy protected by sloops. Then on the offensive side of things, the German submarines operating in wolfpacks need to be using their radios more which makes them much more likely to be sunk, not by the sloops but by other ASW assets. These things aren't obvious at the time; nobody looks at a sinking ship and thinks "Well, the fact that the Germans are here should slightly increase the number of ships that safely cross the Atlantic this month!" Oh Macarthur! While the more I read about King the more he makes sense in the context (even if I probably wouldn't have him around for dinner as a person), the more I read about Macarthur the less his star shines. Unless one was rating his ability to blame others for his mistakes and take credit for others' successes. He did have some wins, but unless PR was the criterion, it's difficult to judge him well. Whatever his failings, his assessment upon arriving in the Philippines seems pretty valid to me.
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Post by Airy W on Aug 1, 2018 8:10:38 GMT -6
I know they built subs that way in the US and in Germany, so there's no way Kaiser's people invented the concept. Weren't the Germans new to the practice in 1943? The results would seem to imply that... I suspect no admiral was willing to openly say the Navy couldn't get to the Philippines in less than three years - political suicide. Well MacArthur showed up and immediately said the islands weren't fortified well enough so I dont think it was impossible to deliver bad news. If the brass had arrived at that conclusion about a year earlier, I think it's likely the Philippines would have never fallen. The Philippine division was the only regular division and even it was underequipped. If the US had put three properly equipped divisions there and backed them up with a few hundred fighter aircraft, I doubt the Japanese would have been capable of dislodging them ever, the American could have raised new Philippine regiments faster then the Japanese could have shipped in troops. The Japanese carrier force was cutting edge in 1942 but their Army was poorly equipped, their rapid success was due to facing opposition that was even less well equipped and disorganized to boot. And going by the table of troops towards the bottom of the page I dont think the Japanese could have thrown much more at the Philippines then they actually did. Any significantly larger force would need to come by giving up the invasion of Singapore and if they do that it means that the Commonwealth has freedom of movement and troops ready to launch a counter-offensive aimed at the Dutch east indies, at the very least severely disrupting oil production.
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