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Post by tortugapower on Jun 7, 2019 13:05:37 GMT -6
I was recently reading up on Billy Mitchell and Project B. He's obviously very pro-aviation versus dreadnought, but he claims that 1,000 airplanes can be built for the cost of a dreadnought.
I don't know what the in-game aircraft building numbers are: we only see hits to our budget, and not a report (although some numbers and in-game reports on this would be nice).
However, we do see in-game maintenance. If I recall correctly, it's 8 for single engines, 12 (50% more) for medium bombers and flying boats. Dreadnought maintenance is... let me ballpark around 600. That's a ratio of 60:1.
I expect the cost of aircraft maintenance is proportionally higher than their build cost, but I also notice at the end of the game that you have to do a lot of micro-management of airbases and squads in order to keep aircraft costs down.
Is it possible aircraft maintenance is too high? I'd be happy to learn the real numbers.
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Post by ramjb on Jun 7, 2019 13:20:03 GMT -6
Well, post-war the USAF also claimed they could build 500 B-36s for the cost of one "United States" supercarrier. It was later shown as completely false, of course (the number actually being around 200 at best, and that was only the cost of purchasing them, not operating them).
I'm not fully aware of the costs of planes vs ships in the mid-20s when Mitchell was doing his propaganda stunts, but they were for the most that, PR. Not that he didn't have a point about air power changing things dramatically, which he did (and bigtime); he just painted too much of a rosy scenario about planes, and at too early a time at that. The way he handled his "demonstration tests" only underscores up to which point he would manipulate things so they ended up showing him right.
I strongly suspect his claim was as true as the post-war USAF one about the B-36s...meaning, pure propaganda and not really based on actual costs.
At any rate, maintenaince doesn't look too high from my point of view. To maintain an aircraft you're not only paying for the fuel and spare parts, you're also paying the air crews and their training. On top of that you're paying for the ground crews too, a plane is no good without a good number of mechanics working on it and keeping it properly maintained and handled.
I'm sure that someone with better access to source information than what I have will be able to give you precise numbers, but again, from my point of view plane maintenaince is not overdone at all.
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Post by hmssophia on Jun 7, 2019 13:31:13 GMT -6
Mitchell was a big liar who loves bombers and lies. Aircraft were not that cheap, certainly not the types that he wanted, and they could not do the things he wanted in the numbers he would have been able to afford either. The maintenance for aircraft is probably about right tbh. That cost doesn't just count the aircraft - it's flight crew, maintenance, fitters, spares and other costs as well.
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Post by alsadius on Jun 7, 2019 13:40:23 GMT -6
The Iowa class cost about $100m per BB, according to Wikipedia. The P-51 Mustang was roughly contemporaneous, and had a unit cost of $50,985 in 1945, which would imply a ratio of 2000:1 for fighters. However, that implies some really staggering economies of scale (over 15,000 P-51s built, vs 4 Iowas, and of course wartime deranges a lot of economics). Costs rose pretty quickly thereafter - an F-86 was $220k, only a few years later. And for larger planes, the costs were also much higher - a B-17 was $240k, and a B-29 was $640k. So you could get about 150 super-heavy bombers for a battleship, or about 400 smaller heavy bombers. However, purchase costs are different from maintenance costs - I wouldn't be surprised at all if planes were more maintenance-intensive, relative to ships.
The 1920s are a tough time for this comparison, though, because few new ships were built in the treaty era. But planes were cheaper then, due to the far lower tech levels (BBs occasionally used disposable aircraft in WW1, because they were so cheap that you could throw them away if you wanted to), so Mitchell's numbers strike me as plausible.
However, for the purposes of the game, I think those numbers sound about right.
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Post by dorn on Jun 7, 2019 14:21:12 GMT -6
I have already thought about it but quicky conclusion was that decreasing maintenance would put game more off-balance.
But if somebody knows maintenance costs for comparison it could be interesting.
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Post by tortugapower on Jun 7, 2019 15:37:20 GMT -6
<snip> At any rate, maintenaince doesn't look too high from my point of view. To maintain an aircraft you're not only paying for the fuel and spare parts, you're also paying the air crews and their training. On top of that you're paying for the ground crews too, a plane is no good without a good number of mechanics working on it and keeping it properly maintained and handled. <snip> Yes, I agree. As I said, "I expect the cost of aircraft maintenance is proportionally higher than their build cost". Hopefully our gut feelings are reflected by actual numbers. The Iowa class cost about $100m per BB, according to Wikipedia. The P-51 Mustang was roughly contemporaneous, and had a unit cost of $50,985 in 1945, which would imply a ratio of 2000:1 for fighters. However, that implies some really staggering economies of scale (over 15,000 P-51s built, vs 4 Iowas, and of course wartime deranges a lot of economics). Costs rose pretty quickly thereafter - an F-86 was $220k, only a few years later. And for larger planes, the costs were also much higher - a B-17 was $240k, and a B-29 was $640k. So you could get about 150 super-heavy bombers for a battleship, or about 400 smaller heavy bombers. However, purchase costs are different from maintenance costs - I wouldn't be surprised at all if planes were more maintenance-intensive, relative to ships. The 1920s are a tough time for this comparison, though, because few new ships were built in the treaty era. But planes were cheaper then, due to the far lower tech levels (BBs occasionally used disposable aircraft in WW1, because they were so cheap that you could throw them away if you wanted to), so Mitchell's numbers strike me as plausible. However, for the purposes of the game, I think those numbers sound about right. Awesome to get some insight, although somehow this only seems to prove Mitchell's point. 2000:1 Mustangs to Iowas, or 417:1 B-17s to Iowas. (Also, $100M is pretty cheap for the battleships I find myself building!) But we don't see plane purchase costs, so if the question is about maintenance, is a bomber 7x more expensive to maintain compared to its purchase cost than a naval ship is?
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jun 7, 2019 16:17:26 GMT -6
We went around the horn on this Tortuga to finally get a "balanced" result. Historically navies had to limit plans or even draw down to afford large air-arms, so if you can keep your navy expanding And inflate all the bases with all the aircraft you could wish then something would be off. One of our testers goes to the extremely diligent level of reducing squadrons of aircraft in peace-time to only 4 planes to save cash! I could never bring myself to do that (just because of the level of down-shift it would require in my play speed) but he can always afford larger fleets than I tend to.
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Post by ramjb on Jun 7, 2019 16:21:32 GMT -6
Well, each bomber had a crew of 10 (on average). that's 5000 guys flying the things to begin with.
WWII USAAF Bombardment Groups operated 48 bombers each. Each bombardment group had (on paper) 294 officers and 1,487 enlisted men. This includes both aircrews and ground support crews, officers, etc.
500 bombers means roughly 11 bombardment groups, hence 3334 officers and 16357 enlisted men.
USS Iowa had a (wartime) complement of 151 officers, 2,637 enlisted. To be fair here we should add the people from shipyards, etc, who worked on the ship maintenaince, overhauls, etc - but those didn't work full-time just for this ship, just did so when the ship had to go through it's regular schedule, or for repairs and equipment upgrade. One week they'd be working on her, the next one on a different ship, so it's quite a far less dedicated job and as such a much more complex thing to calculate objectively from the personnel perspective.
I mean, I'm not sure about the respective costs of spare parts, engines, fuel, weapons, etc.... but I'd say that just looking from the personnel standpoint things don't look very promising for Mitchell's claim in what regards to maintenaince and operation costs...
And considering how much fuel did 500 bombs use (a single B-17 could load around 2780 gallons of fuel before adding more fuel tanks in the bomb bays), I'd say that accounts for quite the number of Iowas aswell.
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Post by aeson on Jun 7, 2019 17:08:41 GMT -6
Ah, but what monetary unit is used within the game? US dollars? British pounds? French francs? Russian rubles? Japanese yen? Italian lira? Austro-Hungarian kronen? German marks? Euros? Roman denarii? Galactic Republic/Empire credits? Gold-pressed latinum? The traditional gaming fallback of gold coins ("gold")? If the monetary unit is for example US dollars, what year's dollars?
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Post by williammiller on Jun 7, 2019 17:20:42 GMT -6
Ah, but what monetary unit is used within the game? US dollars? British pounds? French francs? Russian rubles? Japanese yen? Italian lira? Austro-Hungarian kronen? German marks? Euros? Roman denarii? Galactic Republic/Empire credits? Gold-pressed latinum? The traditional gaming fallback of gold coins ("gold")? If the monetary unit is for example US dollars, what year's dollars? In RTW the monetary units are officially GBB (Game Balance Bucks).
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jun 7, 2019 17:22:34 GMT -6
Let's barter. I have a cart full of chickens. How much of an Iowa will you give me?
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Post by aeson on Jun 7, 2019 17:37:01 GMT -6
In RTW the monetary units are officially GBB (Game Balance Bucks).
Darn it, my money was on the AMU (Arbitrary Monetary Unit)!
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Post by tortugapower on Jun 7, 2019 17:58:41 GMT -6
We went around the horn on this Tortuga to finally get a "balanced" result. Historically navies had to limit plans or even draw down to afford large air-arms, so if you can keep your navy expanding And inflate all the bases with all the aircraft you could wish then something would be off. One of our testers goes to the extremely diligent level of reducing squadrons of aircraft in peace-time to only 4 planes to save cash! I could never bring myself to do that (just because of the level of down-shift it would require in my play speed) but he can always afford larger fleets than I tend to. I think it's a little unfortunate that the game rewards such tedium. However, I suspect it's not the intended design, just a result of a one-man dev team. After my first time playing RtW2, I already suggested that we be allowed to control templates for airbases, to reduce the tedium of adding or editing squadrons manually for each. Whoever does this manually right now must be spending seriously like 20 minutes just changing squadron numbers! Great Scott!
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jun 7, 2019 18:00:27 GMT -6
That is a note-worthy suggestion. :]
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Post by tbr on Jun 7, 2019 18:26:47 GMT -6
That is a note-worthy suggestion. :] Yes, second that. We need templates for each size air base, ideally some version where you can "mobilise" and "demobilise" across all bases by flipping a switch and do so individually per base (including multiple selected bases) by right-klick, just like with reserving and mothballing ships. The sheer tedium of changing squadron composition led mne to mod the game for less costly base-bound air forces so that I only needed to spend those 10-20 minutes 5 times (at each upgrade level), and not as part of every budget rebalnacing. I went a bit overboard and it warps game balance too much but I still prefer this to vanilla and tedium.
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