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Post by Airy W on Jul 15, 2018 16:22:55 GMT -6
The point about zeppelin aviation is fun to think about. If CVs are smaller ships, carrier aircraft are smaller. This reduces the ability of carrier aircraft to carry heavy weaponry. However zeppelin-carried bomber planes could be designed to be overburdened with ammunition because they dont need to gain altitude. Until radar directed CAP, all they would need would be to maintain a high altitude on the way to the target. On the actual dive they would be moving very quickly despite the weight and once they had ditched the weight, they would be much more nimble for the escape and the return to the mothership. And possibly they could be short range craft as well because a fast moving airship could get somewhat close to the target. To making this truly insane, we could even imagine tethering the zeppelin to a 1000 ton destroyer on it's way to battle and using the lift to allow the destroyer to carry additional fuel in above deck drums. The top-heaviness would be offset by the 75 tons of lift. Thus a short range destroyer would become a long range destroyer without sacrificing speed or increasing displacement. Then when the destroyer is close to the enemy, it releases the zeppelin and discards the fuel drums.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 15, 2018 8:36:24 GMT -6
It's a good thing nobody escalated after the Dickery Doctor hit. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that the Doc struck one.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 14, 2018 9:28:23 GMT -6
The war of 1907 is one of my favorite forgotten stories of history. As you can see from the route, the Germans clearly didn't understand the terrain they were invading. They tried to get a quick breakfast at Newhaven at 6 AM then take the A-26 straight north so they could go up near Boston and get back into the water. However trying to get breakfast at 6 AM was a dead giveaway that they were Germans. This made it easy for the locals to ambush them with British sausages, a weapon pioneered by Alfred the Great. Mistaking this weapon for the sausages of their homeland, the Germans ate a hearty breakfast and only realized their folly hours later when their entire expedition was brought to a halt near Cambridge by the effects of British cooking. They desperately attempted to find a foreign eatery for lunch but the British were famous at that point for stoically refusing to patronize any restaurant that allowed flavor in it's cooking. They found a lone eatery that offered a decent couscous but only had seating for 27, leading to a difficult choice of who among the 35,656 sailors of the Hochseeflotte would be saved. This drama was known as the Moroccan Crisis, followed soon after by the Runs of August.
Enduring the British sausage is no small challenge. Viking warriors prepared themselves for the struggle with lutefisk, an attempt to poison the digestive tract. This dooms the victim (known as a berserker) to death but it is by all accounts a much more pleasant way to die. The only true defense against the British sausage was developed by the American offshoot of the British, and them at great cost. In the 1770s, unsuspecting Americans were subjected to the British sausage upon the infamous HMS Jersey which reportedly killed 9 in 10 over the course of a single weekend getaway. The survivors vowed that their descendents would not know this fear and began a program of feeding Americans the least nutritious foods possible from the cradle to the grave. 87 years later, President Lincoln spoke of the success of the effort of inoculating the populace: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this." At the battlefield where he spoke, half of the dead soldiers had survived the food long enough to be killed by the enemy, a first in warfare.
This effort would finally come to it's culmination in 1918 when American "doughboys" sent over to attack Germans with empty calories were lured by German spies into the British sausage reserves which the unsuspecting Americans devoured. To the amazement of the world, the Americans were immune to the effects. As Admiral Sims boasted in his memoir, not one American was killed by the enemy on the way to France. The Germans, remembering the events of 1907, were amazed to see the arrival of the Americans and surrendered before the Americans had done much more then show up. The long history of culinary warfare had come to an end.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 13, 2018 15:13:04 GMT -6
The entire peloponnesian war sort of resembles island hopping come to think of it. The Spartans and Athenians can go both attack strongholds all over Greece but only in a brief campaign. Both sides were at risk of attack while travelling but were at least theoretically capable of reaching nearly any location. Many locations were difficult to hold but there was always at least the potential for a friendly puppel government everywhere, even Athens and Sparta themselves. So any polis can be attacked and can be a stronghold. Polis-hopping.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 11, 2018 17:02:07 GMT -6
Funny you should ask - Fredrik mentioned this recently: "...simulate this by having nations develop "Independent carrier force"...much like the development of the independent scout force."
This may not be the exact final form it takes but you get the idea...
Nice. Will carrier formations be unlocked with techs too? Like going from keeping them together for shared protection or spreading them out to minimize losses?
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Post by Airy W on Jul 11, 2018 11:07:14 GMT -6
Really love the Dev Diary! They ships are operating in a way that seems to make sense for 1925 instead of acting like it's always 1942. But will carriers succeed at increasing the distance as time progresses? An Anglo-American arms race would have been quite dangerous by virtue of geography. The Royal Navy was extremely well positioned to cut off American shipping off from Britain, a key trading partner for the Americans. Similarly the American Navy had bases extremely close to the chief ports of the United States, whose trade was just as significant for the British. I'm rather confused by this statement; the British Navy is well positioned to cut off US shipping from...Britain? Not the best joke I've ever made.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 10, 2018 22:02:41 GMT -6
It does seem very likely that the aircraft carriers wouldn't have grown large so quickly without the battlecruiser hulls. I think with carriers there is less temptation to get in an arms race over speeds. You want to be fast but a couple knots of difference matters a lot more with another battleship that you can actually see then with a carrier that is somewhere hundreds of miles away. So I could see it being plausible that aircraft carriers remain small ships and maybe naval aviation focuses on being able to operate off shorter platforms, i.e. lighter bombers.
And if a 10 kTon carrier can sink a 30 kTon dreadnought, the name becomes rather embarrassingly unfitting. I wonder if that fear would put pause to construction.
An Anglo-American arms race would have been quite dangerous by virtue of geography. The Royal Navy was extremely well positioned to cut off American shipping off from Britain, a key trading partner for the Americans. Similarly the American Navy had bases extremely close to the chief ports of the United States, whose trade was just as significant for the British.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 10, 2018 11:21:50 GMT -6
The thing about the Alaskas, Scharnhorsts, etc. is that because the naval treaties had set the world's navies back decades, they qualified as capital ships in terms of how they compared to the bulk of the ships then in active service in the world's navies, but in terms of the state of the art, what would have been a modern battleship at the time of their construction without the treaties, they were, I think, solidly in heavy cruiser territory. One can't simply extrapolate the pre-treaty era forward because the pace of growth was clearly unsustainable. The generation that came to a halt with the treaty was already grievously expensive. Over the course of the cold war, the design philosophies of the world navies seem to have converged upon some pretty middle of the road warships. Except for the lone Russian battlecruiser, most of the warships in service today could be approximately described by simply saying submarine, destroyer or carrier. Cruisers and frigates are serving mostly the same role as destroyers and battleships are gone. I think that in the absence of the treaties, there probably would have been a similar convergence. Even before radar, improved communication and scouting would have meant the disappearance of the battlelines. Hopefully RTW 2 will allow the theory of design convergence to be tested. I'd like to test out massed dive bombers backed up with AA cruisers.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 8, 2018 19:53:41 GMT -6
War lead to technological investment is one of those things that if oft spoken but seldom studied in a holistic fashion. "Folk economics" if you will. I strongly suspect that the opposite is true but the peculiar circumstances of the US economy prior to WWII distort our impression. The US was the world's largest economy and largest investor and suffered from the effects of the great depression more then any other country except perhaps France. WWII was not necessary to end the great depression but the idiosyncrasies of the New Deal coalition lead to a double dip recession in 1937. Because of that double dip recession, all of the purchases that were waiting for full employment got delayed until after the war started. And because the US was hit particularly hard, the backlog of investments was very large. So it looked like a massive wave of innovation when actually it was just a simple replenishment of the capital stock. A rapid capital accumulation looks like rapid technological progress to someone on the ground.
For an illustration of why capital accumulation isn't the same as technological progress, look at Mexico after the NAFTA agreement. Prior to NAFTA the Mexican economy was very unstable, making a very unfriendly climate for investment. After NAFTA, investment surged as factories famously went south of the border. This meant that Mexico rapidly modernized. This sudden change was not because NAFTA made Mexicans any more innovative or made Americans and Canadians any more willing to share their technology. Like a magic and a young protagonist, the technology was inside Mexico all along. All it needed were economic conditions that would allow more capital to accrue. So the exact same thing that happened to the US in the 40s happened to Mexico in the 90s even though there wasn't any war. Or to look at the problem for the other side, what happens if we have the war but dont have capital accumulation? That was the case with Japan in WWII. The Japanese economy was "running hot" for years before they started fighting with large inflation and deficits. Even though the government ramped up military purchases, there wasn't any missing investment to fill in. Japan is not known for their wave of innovation during the war, they are known for their innovations before the war and falling behind over the course of the war.
Overall this is a mechanic that I would suggest it's better to just not include. It can go both ways and it looks extremely random unless you make a detailed inspection with hindsight. So why not simply leave things up to the random variation and call it a day? That being said... if the devs did want to model the economic-investment cycle I could suggest a hidden mechanic or two. It's like looking at these old airplane designs; hard work for the people at the time but when you have the benefit of hindsight telling you which things will matter you can reduce it all down to a few key numbers.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 8, 2018 6:07:33 GMT -6
I should also mention that the game is set at 20% research rate. I prefer to play slower games, so this gal was probably going to be around for a long time. In that case I'm almost tempted to suggest you make another batch. However the maintenance costs are still going to be crazy.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 7, 2018 21:25:52 GMT -6
aeson - in Russia, the government changes YOU. Before the Revolution, man oppresses man. After the Revolution, the situation is reversed.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 7, 2018 20:08:27 GMT -6
You seem to have fallen victim to the same design creep that afflicted the turn of the century American navy with the invention of second class battleships. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee-class_cruiserIf a war breaks out in 1900 that ship would actually be pretty good. Accuracy is so horrible and torpedoes so short ranged that those 6 inch guns could do a lot and that is plenty of armor. You have a ship that can chase down cruisers and fight like a battleship. However within five years, torpedoes will have improved so much that you need to keep your distance and enemies will be able to penetrate you at that increased distance. Your speed will still be on the fast side but the cruisers you chase down will have teeth and you will need to run away from battleships. Keep in mind that maintenance costs are directly proportional to build costs so keeping that thing around is not going to be cheap. Upgrading the engines would be terrifically expensive compared to building a smaller cruiser of a given speed; cost per ton of engine increases with ship tonnage. So you are paying through the nose for something that is only a modest improvement over cheaper, newer ships. When battlecruisers appear, that thing is an outright liability. So I would say around 1905 you want to scrap that ship.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 5, 2018 10:56:10 GMT -6
There sure were a lot of ship explosions in history. Makes it really frustrating to see like the Assassins Creed games where they invent so many contrived conspiracies when we have actual incidents like those that are ripe for speculation.
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Post by Airy W on Jul 4, 2018 18:08:10 GMT -6
The Americans found the Japanese fleet at a far greater distance then they found the carriers. You are asking for the Japanese to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you expect their battleships to be acting as bait. On the other hand, you expect the battleships to be as well hidden as ships that were deliberately screened and operated at distance. Did the Japanese battleships ever approach within 250 miles of Midway?. If they could even make it in a single night they would be operating at great speed and wearing out their engines. The American bombers get to spend the entire day repeatedly pounding away at ships with exhausted engines and crews, either in place or in the retreat. To put things into perspective here If you want to put this in perspective then look at Henderson field. The actual historical application a naval bombardment in the face of hostile airpower is very different from what you are talking about. Ships crept in with the caution of an adulterer and committed their actions furtively at midnight so that they could be as far away as possible by the time the sun rose.
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The AI
Jul 4, 2018 12:16:22 GMT -6
Post by Airy W on Jul 4, 2018 12:16:22 GMT -6
This must be that discipline thing people are always talking about. Never been too good at it myself.
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