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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 10:56:47 GMT -6
I suspect the bulk of the tail for a naval vessel is the bureaucracy of the navy - the clerks, the training institutions, the general planning staff, and so on. (And don't forget the manufacturing of ammo/spare parts/similar.) 4:1 doesn't strike me as outlandish. Oh absolutely if you include all the trail of personnel dedicated to the needed paperwork, handling of logistics, on top of the workers themselves, etc. Then again it's more complex than that, because all that personnel linked to the warship do no work for it in the pretty lenghty periods it's away from base. The same guy who's working on the Ordinance Bureau forwarding paperwork related with the operation of a given warship will do it today, tomorrow he'll be working on paperwork coming from a completely different vessel. It's more or less a "shared pool" of manpower all ships in the navy share, so can't be adjudicated to a single warship and say "this ship needs this ammount of people working" - because they work for all warships when it's needed, not just on a single one. that "4:1" might be true when the ship is in the middle of a big overhaul in a drydock... but it's not when the ship is in operations, sailing in the middle of the ocean. And comissioned ships spend a lot more time out of the drydock and shipyards, than inside them. Besides, that kind of "administrative" manpower is also needed for a bomber group. Ground crews and pilots only take care of the direct operations of a given bomber group- but there's a lot of extra hands needed outside of the bomber group involved with logistics, administrative tasks, paperwork, bureaucracy, which exists in an airforce that the Bomber Group also needs in order to operate, and is a very similar case: that manpower is kind of a "global pool" for all the air force, and they don't work just for one unit or formation, but with each as needed. So if we count the manpower needed to keep a ship operational, out of the ship's own crew, then to do a comparison with the bomber, we also need to account for the manpower needed to keep a bomber group operational, out of the bomber group's own manpower. What can't be is to say "the ship needs that", but ignore bombers also need that. So, what makes for a much more direct comparison is to account for the ammount of manpower that works 24/7 with a given squadron, or a given ship, and make the comparison there. A ship's crew includes engineers ,maintenaince crews, repair crews, clerks and logistics officers that are dedicated to keep that ship operational. Meanwhile a Bomber Group ground crews include engineers, mainteinance crews, repair crews, clews and logistics officers who are dedicated to keep that bomber group going, and each individual bomber operational. In order to make a proper comparison of how much it costs to keep both a bomber and a ship operational, the 24/7 crew comes first, and the bomber needs A LOT more than a ship. Then there'll be more personnel work needed outside of the ship/squadron to keep them operational, that comes from a common navy/airforce pool of workmen who aren't dedicated to a single ship/Squadron and, as a result, their cost is hard to quantify, for that kind of personnel would be needed anyway if a given ship/bomber squadron didn't exist... but that extra personnel is needed BOTH for the ship and the bomber. Can't say "a ship needs more than it's established crew" when the bomber does too.
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Post by alexbrunius on Jun 10, 2019 10:57:06 GMT -6
Which game are you using as a base of calculations, and how did you came with that number?. Because from my point of view that's absolutely ludicrous and beyond any realistic scope. A shipyard like the one in Mare Island peaked at 50.000 workers during World War II, for instance, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard peaked at 75000 in 1944. I have not a single time mentioned shipyard workers, so I'm not sure why you bring those up. Shipyard/Dockyard workers in fact was generally speaking NOT employed by the navy ( and as such excluded from my calculation ) unlike airforce mechanics, so if anything factoring in them is going to make ships more expensive to maintain relative airplanes. What I wrote was that comparing total employed in the Navy broken down by "per ship-tonnage" is a good way to compare to similar numbers for the airforce breaking down total employed by the airforce broken down per plane. When I ran those numbers I got roughly 20-40 per plane and a bit over 10000 for an Iowa class Battleship. How large an organization need to be is IMHO a good proxy/basis to argue about roughly where the maintenance costs should be relative to another similar organization.
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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 11:11:10 GMT -6
You still haven't mentioned the game. Which is kinda important, because basing whatever calculations on a game and then making a point about history or real life is kinda...problematic. So, which game it was?.
Also, Shipyard/Dockyard workers were INDEED employed by the navy, as Navy Yards were military bases owned by the US Navy, and their personnel wages came from the Navy Budget. Of course there also were private shipyards and nowadays those are the ones that do most of the work. In fact some of them are the only ones that can do certain works (like building supercarriers, only one yard can do it and that one is Newport News, which is a privately owned and run company).
But 1950 wasn't nowadays: by far and large the biggest navy yards of WWII were owned by the US Navy and their cost paid by the US Navy. Places like Long Beach, Mare Island, Brooklyn yard, Pearl harbor yard, Norfolk yard, etc, all were owned and run by the Navy, and their workers ,paid by the Navy (many of those are nowadays closed and haven't operated for more than 40 decades, but when they were operational, they were US Navy assets, and their costs run accordingly).
as for the rest - read avobe. If you're going to count the shipyard and logistics land-based manpower needed to run a battleship, you have to do it with bombers too, as without a lot of work from people outside of the bomber groups themselves, those bomber groups would've ended up being grounded without bombs, fuel, spare parts, air trafic control, etc.
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Post by alexbrunius on Jun 10, 2019 11:15:31 GMT -6
Also, Shipyard/Dockyard workers were INDEED employed by the navy For the yards building Battleships and fleet Carriers perhaps. Those did not build anywhere near the majority of the warship tonnage however. That was done by private yards spitting out LSTs, Escort Carriers and Smaller warships such as the massive Kaiser Shipyards en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Shipyards"Henry Kaiser was known for developing new methods of ship building, which allowed his yards to outproduce other similar facilities and build 1,490 ships, 27 percent of the total Maritime Commission construction" You still haven't mentioned the game. Which is kinda important, because basing whatever calculations on a game and then making a point about history or real life is kinda...problematic. So, which game it was?. I made the calculation to figure out what the numbers should be in the game. The calculation was 100% based on historical real life figures. I dug it up but the gist of it is that the US navy fielded roughly 16 million tons of warship tonnage and employed roughly 4 million men during WW2, giving us 1 man per 4 ton ratio. An Iowa class battleship at 52k tons ends up at 13000 men in the Navy. You might be able to find better numbers and I would be happy to be proven wrong. Now that calculation assumes all types of warships had equal maintenance cost, but I think it's probably likely that battleships would be more expensive per ton to maintain than say amphibious assault ships or smaller / slower support ships, so if anything we could assume closer to 20000 men is closer to reality.
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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 11:26:01 GMT -6
I dug it up but the gist of it is that the US navy fielded roughly 16 million tons of warship tonnage and employed roughly 4 million men during WW2, giving us 1 man per 4 ton ratio. An Iowa class battleship at 52k tons ends up at 13000 men in the Navy. You might be able to find better numbers and I would be happy to be proven wrong. Well, that's kinda problematic, because the US navy numbers include those who served in the US Marine Corps, which means a good chunk of manpower which was dedicated to fielding a rifle in a Marine Division, or keeping the guys fielding the rifles in operative status. That's a very large number of people. Yet those weren't around to operate or maintaining warships. And they still are counted within that 4 million men you mention. The US Navy also operated two different quasi inter-independent air organizations (Us Navy and USMC) which operated both from carriers and land bases, and meant a lot of manpower which was dedicated to fly those planes, or keeping those planes fliable in operation. Not to operate on maintaining warships.That's a very large number of people. Yet those weren't around to operate or maintaining warships. And they still are counted within that 4 million men you mention. The US Navy had intelligence and cypher departments (code&intelligence work)...those weren't by far as large as the avobe mentioned services, but they didn't work on ships either...and they also are counted within that 4 million men you mention. And THEN....they had ships. And people who operated and maintained them. Those are the ones that matter here, but those weren't (obviously) 4 million men. So, the US Navy had Land divisions (Marines), air forces (Navy air forces and USMC air forces), and an exclusive intelligence branch. THat accounts for a very large chunk of men out of the total 4 million men that served in the Navy in WWII. Meanwhile the USAAF was dedicated to one thing, and one thing only: operating planes. They didn't have infantry divisions, they didn't have ships, and their intel came from the US Army (as they were part of it), they didn't have their propietary intelligence branch. So, you're starting with a hugely inflated manpower pool to make your calculations from. Substract everyone who didn't work for the US Marine Corps, or who was completely unrelated with the operation of the Navy's own air forces, substract anyone who worked for intelligence and cypher decriptions, and then we have a base to make that calculation from. But trust me, that starting number will be FAR smaller than the 4 million you're beginning with. Specially because that 4 million you're beginning with I don't know where you got from, as not even in 1945 the USMC and US Navy together had reached that number.
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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 11:36:35 GMT -6
That was done by private yards spitting out LSTs, Escort Carriers and Smaller warships such as the massive Kaiser ShipyardsAye, and there were other independent contractors too, I already named Newport News which already was around by the time (and was a pretty big shipyard already by that time). But those did very minor work, or work unrelated with the US Navy (the Kaiser yards you mention, for the most part built mostly Liberty and Victory ships...which weren't operated by the Navy, but by the Merchant Marine, a completely different service) So, the largest portion of the shipyard work during WWII was done by Navy Yards, operated and paid for by the US Navy, which doesn't marry well with your previous assessment that: Shipyard/Dockyard workers in fact was generally speaking NOT employed by the navy When it's clear that generally speaking, they indeed were employed by the navy. Not all, and there was a sizeable percentage that was privately run - but the bulk of WWII shipyard operation was done by Navy owned Yards, so "generally speaking" they indeed were employed by the navy .
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Post by alsadius on Jun 10, 2019 11:40:17 GMT -6
The USMC was less than half a million men throughout the war. The rest of those sound like people who make the ships work, at least in the same way that the USAAF total is appropriate for the people who make the planes work - accurate or not, it's at least apples-to-apples. USN strength (ignoring USMC) peaked at 3,380,817 in 1945. Using the 2.4 million USAAF, 80k planes, and 16M tons of USN ships as exact, that means a ton of shipping took 0.2113 men, while a plane took 30, so a plane was about as many men as 142 tons of shipping. A 52kton Iowa is then the equivalent of just over 366 planes in terms of uniformed personnel required. This is a horribly simplified set of assumptions, but it'll be in the right ballpark.
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Post by chaosblade on Jun 10, 2019 11:42:14 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! Just reading it sounds like a hassle, it would be interesting if we could put squadrons in a reserve mode? (reduced size and loss of exp) or to mothball, or partially mothball an airbase
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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 11:48:16 GMT -6
The USMC was less than half a million men throughout the war. I'm afraid that no, you're not correct: the USMC already had more than that already by 1944: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_number_(United_States_Marine_Corps)if we add the service numbers alloted since Pearl Harbor to 1944 (when service number 1.000.000 was used) , the number is already avobe 650000. And that's not counting officers, just enlisted men. The rest of those sound like people who make the ships workI'm afraid not, because between the rest of those there was a very large number of people who were operating, maintaining, flying, repairing and keeping a MASSIVE air force operational; the one deployed aboard Carrier air wings, those involved in the numerous land based squadrons, the many Recon wings involved in both naval patrol and Air/Sea rescue operations, etc. None of those were people "who made ships work"... but who made planes work. Also there was Navy Intelligence. People working on Magic/Ultra (or in many other intelligence operations ran by the US Navy during WWII) weren't running around on shipyards fixing ships either...as mentioned in a previous post, their numbers where nowhere close to the massive numbers related to the USMC or the own Navy Air squadrons, but there still were quite some around. And those didn't "make the ships work" either.
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Post by stevethecat on Jun 10, 2019 12:00:06 GMT -6
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! Just reading it sounds like a hassle, it would be interesting if we could put squadrons in a reserve mode? (reduced size and loss of exp) or to mothball, or partially mothball an airbase We can currently put squadrons in reserve, it's a ball-ache thanks to having to click one at a time and then dragging one at a time back into each air base as needed. Also moving them into reserve doesn't affect their maintance cost which makes it a fairly pointless ordeal.
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Post by alexbrunius on Jun 10, 2019 12:14:46 GMT -6
I dug it up but the gist of it is that the US navy fielded roughly 16 million tons of warship tonnage and employed roughly 4 million men during WW2, giving us 1 man per 4 ton ratio. An Iowa class battleship at 52k tons ends up at 13000 men in the Navy. You might be able to find better numbers and I would be happy to be proven wrong. Well, that's kinda problematic, because the US navy numbers include those who served in the US Marine Corps, which means a good chunk of manpower which was dedicated to fielding a rifle in a Marine Division, or keeping the guys fielding the rifles in operative status. That's a very large number of people. Yet those weren't around to operate or maintaining warships. And they still are counted within that 4 million men you mention. The US Navy also operated two different quasi inter-independent air organizations (Us Navy and USMC) which operated both from carriers and land bases Right, your correct. I do remember that I had both the USMC as well as the aircraft taken into account when I originally ran the numbers as well actually, so it probably wasn't all the 4 million numbers. I still got a 4:1 ratio. I did some similair things for the Royal Navy as well, but wasn't able to find as good numbers, but they were not that far off. As I wrote, if you want to redo the exercise of digging up the sources and running all the numbers again your welcome to do so.
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Post by alsadius on Jun 10, 2019 12:20:55 GMT -6
The site I linked listed USN separately from USMC, so presumably it's got a count on non-USMC USN personnel. That seems like a more accurate number of the personnel in at any given time - after all, service numbers will go out of use as men become casualties and leave the service. The rest of those sound like people who make the ships workI'm afraid not, because between the rest of those there was a very large number of people who were operating, maintaining, flying, repairing and keeping a MASSIVE air force operational; the one deployed aboard Carrier air wings, those involved in the numerous land based squadrons, the many Recon wings involved in both naval patrol and Air/Sea rescue operations, etc. None of those were people "who made ships work"... but who made planes work. Also there was Navy Intelligence. People working on Magic/Ultra (or in many other intelligence operations ran by the US Navy during WWII) weren't running around on shipyards fixing ships either...as mentioned in a previous post, their numbers where nowhere close to the massive numbers related to the USMC or the own Navy Air squadrons, but there still were quite some around. And those didn't "make the ships work" either. Carriers are ships, dude. If you're manning the main battery of a capital ship, whether it's a BB or a CV, you're in the Navy, and you count as someone who makes Navy ships work. Ditto people in training installations, shore-based maintenance facilities, and so on. That's why I'm using the total number in the service, for both USN and USAF, instead of using any smaller numbers - the role of the branch is (planes/ships), so the total number of people required to make the (plane/ship) department function is a pretty hard-to-BS number for how many people are required to make the (planes/ships) work. It's not perfect, but it's a lot less prone to gimmicks than anything else I can easily find. [/quote]
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Post by ramjb on Jun 10, 2019 12:45:31 GMT -6
Carriers are ships, dude.Sure, they are, but carrier air wings are traditionally independent from carriers, not bound to them. In every navy that has operated a carrier, the air wings aredeployed temporarily aboard them, they switch from ship to ship all the time, and it wasn't rare to see them operate from a land base. Obviously it's plain to comment that ,administratively and logistically, they're completely separate from whatever ship they're based on, because they have to work as efficiently aboad carrier USS Whatever, as they have to do so aboard USS WhateverElse, or when detached and landed on a forward base to operate on their own. A battleship can't "detach" her forward turret to operate aboard a differen't battleship...nor "Deploy it" in a coastal fortification. The battleship goes, the turret goes with it. Doesn't work that way with carrier air wings, at all. Otherwise, when a carrier squadron was deployed on a carrier we should count them towards the operating cost of the carrier, but when deployed on an air base to act as land based (something the japanese did, for instance, in 1942-43 in the Rabaul area, and wich the US Navy also did on a regular basis), do they suddenly stop counting towards the operating costs of the carrier?. Doesn't make too much sense, does it? . It's normal that it does not because again, as explained, those squadrons are separated entities than those of the ships that can carry them. And that on those squadrons that operated aboard a carrier, because the US Navy was using hundreds of land based planes by 1942 and the number skyrocketed in 1943 and afterwards. I'm not talking just about Catalinas here, Wildcats, Corsairs, Dauntlesses, TBFs, Venturas, Privateers, Harpoons, Coronado, Mariners... there are dozens of models the US Navy worked with, thousands of planes operated from land bases during WWII. Those can't be counted against "ship running costs"...well, because they weren't deployed aboard any ships (hard to run a Hudson from a carrier anyway ). Agreed on the USMC enlisted numbers, or at least I don't disagree...at any rate the link you provided separated USMC and US Navy (something most sources don't do when giving total manpower numbers per service as nominally the USMC is part of the US Navy, even while in practice as we all know they're pretty much their own branch), and even in 1945 the Navy tops at 3.200.000 enlisted men. A far cry from the 4M number I disagreed with from the get go...and that was in 1945. The Iowas had been in service since 1943 and in 1943 the US Navy is listed with 1.747.000 men. anyway even in 1945 (when the numbers were the most bloated) that 3.2M number is a number that includes a lot of Navy jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with running a warship or keeping it maintained. Like the air squadrons I mentioned avobe . So, to begin with to do the calculations in 1945 is debatable because the Iowas were all in service in 1944 (when the number was much smaller to begin with) and even if we take the sample in 1945 for whatever reason, that 3.200.000 number is not a proper one to begin calculations from, as a big chunk of it is of people who never had anything to do in running a ship to begin with...
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Post by alsadius on Jun 10, 2019 13:21:08 GMT -6
Then let's look at WW1. The RN ended the war with 415,162 men (https://www.naval-history.net/WW1NavyBritishAdmiraltyEstimates1919.htm), and while I can't find a clean tonnage number, the Washington treaty limited them to 525,000 tons of capital ships plus 135,000 tons of carriers. However, their actual fleet at the end of WW1 was much larger - it looks like they scrapped somewhere around 20 battleships at the war's end, never mind all the smaller ships. Let's assume that the actual 1918 navy was two million tons, for sake of argument? That gives us 0.2076 men per ton, near-identical to the USN 1945 value of 0.2113. I'm way less confident of this number, but it seems like it's at least plausible.
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Post by jwsmith26 on Jun 10, 2019 13:26:54 GMT -6
Here's a different way of analyzing the relative costs of ships and planes in the game and historically. Here's a quote from: American and British Carrier Development 1919-1940, Hone, Friedman and Mandeles, p. 161. "In 1931 the General Board estimated that replacing a carrier's air wing every three years would, over the carrier's lifetime, cost as much as the carrier itself."
Using this reference as a guide I decided to analyse the respective costs of a carrier and its air group in RTW2. The carrier used for this analysis was the Italian CV Aquila, laid down in 1927 and commissioned in 1929. The image below shows her design as it existed in 1932. The Aquila was the first Italian purpose built CV, so she carries the mandatory 8x8" main guns. Her complement is 74 planes and I will assume that this will remain constant through a lifespan that will extend to 20 years and see 2 major refits. RTW2 rolls the entire cost to build and maintain an air force into a single monthly cost. That is a bit strange but shouldn't negatively impact this analysis since it represents the total cost for the ship's aircraft. That monthly cost for the air group can vary depending on war status, so my assumption for this analysis is that the Italians will see 4 years of war during the ship's 20 year lifespan. That's a bit light for RTW2 but is more than most carriers would historically experience during their lifetime. The one other cost the player will pay for aircraft is when they are initially developed. For this analysis I am assuming a new model will be developed every 3 years. I am further assuming that the carrier will deploy 3 aircraft types - F, DB and TB - each of which will see their own 3 year development cycle. The cost to the player to do this is not extravagant, but over 20 years would reach above 10 million. My final assumption is that the carrier will remain in active fleet status for the entire 20 years, save for two 6 month periods undergoing refit. The ship will never be assigned to the Reserve Fleet or Mothballed. I recognize those are a lot of assumptions, but I think most are reasonable. (I'm sure I'll get plenty of arguments to the contrary.) Below are the way the figures work out, given this ship in this time frame in RTW2. They seem rather close to the rough estimate of comparable figures given in the quote above. If anything, it appears that aircraft costs might be underestimated in RTW2.
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