Strategic Arms Quest 3/2: Armor Edition

Looking over your whiskey, you sighed to yourself. Normally, for something like this, you'd put out a request for quotes and then things would calm down for a month or two before you had to actually get back to work. The thing was, though, Ulm was a pretty busy place, and the people there tended to talk to their friends in the industry. Therefore, the fact you'd been doing an anti-air vehicle was open knowledge, and several of the industry majors had designs lined up.

Which wasn't, by itself, a bad thing! The problem was that there was a bad case of politics going around up at the High Command and some of it was dripping down on to you, specifically about the organization of anti-air guns. In exchange for some serious horse trading and favor banking and the threat of needing to eat shrimp with the Reichsmarine, the decision was made that any mobile AA that was to stay with the Mobile AA Corps which was part of the Armor Branch- versus the regular AA Corps that was under the Artillery Branch- had to be integral in all respects to it's organic prime mover. This was mostly a nothingburger to you- not like you were putting a long 8,8 on a trailer behind a traction engine- but it did make a lot of the entrants pull out ahead of time and thin out the playing field.

Which helped a lot, because holy cow the playing field was broad. Four designs from Thryssen, two from GBA, a Skoda design, something from Fenrus Kettenkrad GmbH, and even Reinhardt sneaking back in through the back door. Once you actually put out an RFQ, if you put out an RFQ, the field would only get larger.

First up, the Skoda, since that was simplest. Since the gentlemen at Baal were more than happy with rechambering down to the 40x360mm round, the folks at Skoda now had what were nominally two variants of the same vehicle, which was nominally getting billed as an SkW-3fz. After redesigning the SkW-1 into the -3 to get a larger and more stable turret ring and finally scrap the old engine compartment totally, the engineers at Skoda figured out they could standardize an SkW-3 turret to the deck turret ring diameter of a double 6,5cm power loaded naval AA mount. Skoda being Skoda, they then decided to directly plop this naval AA mount on a SkW-3 hull and send it in as the SkW-3 flakzwilling. After someone proceeded to send in the memo you might not want that much shell, though, Skoda then took the Baal long recoil gun (thankfully the 40mm version) and just did a flat replacement of the power loaded 6,5cm guns and called it the SkW-3 flakzwilling ausf. B.

Then there was Thryssen, and Thryssen's shiny new tank hull they had built for the Tank Destroyer Contest running in parallel. Working off a nine cylinder rotary sixteen liter engine built by Kontinentális and a good Field Radio Telephone Model 6, the rather tall tank had it's turret replaced with a modular turret ring that could hold any number of things- and this is where you got into the forest of variants.

The first model- MwF1- was the base chassis plus a turret containing two of the Potsdam 35mm guns in water jackets, hooked up to hydraulic training systems with a reversed feed on one of the guns so the loaders could load them from the center. Sights were a large set of double spider sights, and the guns were equipped with a turning adjuster bar to set the convergence point of the guns anywhere from one to five hundred meters away.

The MwF2 was a solid leap away from this, with Thryssen's rather surprising wholesale buy into the world of rocketry, of all things, with the turret having a Lightning Knife on the left of the body, and behind a simple tin exhaust shield a pair of sixteen-cell eight centimeter rockets. Each rocket was fitted with a time fuze head, and was spin stabilized rather aggressively. With each cell being set so that all the rockets could have their fuzes adjusted until the last second by an in-cell control wire and a simultaneous launch of the whole cell, one trigger pull could send out sixteen rockets each with about a kilo and a half of Formula E in their shrapnel warheads. For sights, the turret was equipped with a rather nifty pivoted ring sight for the rockets, a small half-meter rangefinder, and a spider sight for the Lightning Knife. The tank carried four spare rocket cells for "quick" reloads, but didn't carry extra rockets organically due to the high detonation risk if hit.

The MwF3 was the F2 but more. With a turret easily a quarter meter wider than the hull, the F3 had taken the double rocket cell holding mechanism, and promptly put it on both sides of the turret. To provide a gun based deterrence, there was a double 2cm gun in a centerline position, but given the bare bones ring and post sites it didn't seem liable to do much compared to the sixty four rockets stored and aimed by pivoted ring sight.

Then there was the F4, which had sacrificed the guns to go all in and haul eight cells of rockets in giant "ears" and carried a nice three quarters of a meter rangefinder, adjustable ring sight, and one lonely 13.2mm machine gun with a ring and post as a self defense weapon.

Fenrus Kettenkrad GmbH actually had something nice and sane after that bottle of schnapps (nobody in the office blamed you since they'd all joined in drinking on looking at the provided pictures and spring styles) with what looked like a double sized kettenkrad with the front wheel taken off armed with a pedestal mount holding quad 2cm guns. It was nice, it was simple, and it had a clean spider sight and a distance dial site to go with the vehicle's nice radio and twin Opel engines on an electric transmission.

GBA, meanwhile, was positively boring. They sent in one bog standard truck with a set of spades and a slightly older 46mm Baal gun with a spider sight and a radio in the cab, and another equally boring bog standard truck with a septuple 13.2mm gun mount with everything else the same.

The Reinhardt entry, meanwhile, probably took the cake in terms of interesting designs. Working off an old discarded chassis designed by MANN before they pulled out of the Tank Destroyer Competition to devote all their energy to producing light tanks, the Type 73 Anti-Aircraft Gun Carrier was an interesting hybrid platform, with a large, closed turret using a high elevation 40mm Baal gun on a power elevation and traverse, with the option to deploy up to an aditional four 13.2mm guns via the turret's large bustle and standing baskets. Gun command was entirely from the commander's coupola, and he was given a rather clever synthetic aperture sight for the main gun that was equipped with an interesting windage adjustment wheel for the floating ring system keeping the gunner/commander from having to actually change the sights out. Backup controls existed in the turret, but the only sights there were a simple reflector sight on a ring and post over the barrel.

Now the real question was to look at maybe doing an RFQ to get more entrants, or just to take what you had and go straight to testing.

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VOTES

[] Write a formal RFQ and clean up the mess of entrants
-[] Write-in plan. Specify things you want like what guns, tracks or wheels, and maybe a sight if you're feeling lucky.

[] Just go book Ulm and get to work on preliminary testing
-[] Write-in plan
--[] Write in any non-destructive testing you want to do
--[] Write in any non-gun testing you want to do

(Yes, if you go straight to a testing round you can't test the guns or do destructive testing. Ulm isn't ready yet and neither are the Luftwaffe.)

Since sights are so important, I'm gonna post some helper pics.



This is a spider sight. How it works is you center up on your gun, then you look at your target. After looking at your target, you see which way he's going to break, and start shifting your sight picture on the target so he's lined up with your bead and your first ring. As the pilot goes through his break, you shift to your bead on the second, and then third rings. This basically helps pre-calculate lead.



This is a pivoted ring sight, and works vaguely similarly. After guessing a target's speed, the correct size ring is chosen and slotted in, then you proceed to zero in on your target. Once you have your target and have him lined up on the floating ring with his nose just breaking it, you open up with the gun and correct fire by tracer from there. It's great in a suprise fire and on targets changing altitude a lot because it compensates for that, but if you're the one getting jumped and not doing the jumping it's a very unpleasant surprise, since it's accuracy and effectiveness is based on knowing the speed of the target.



This is a (rather large) stereoscopic rangefinder. How these work is that there is a prism at the center which combines the images from the left and right. The right side is located in a hinge, while the left is fixed. By sighting on the left with the fixed piece and then aadjusting the right to bring the system into focus, what is done is make a very, very large right hand triangle. With the known angle to get the focus and the known base of the rangefinder, a little pre-calculated trigonometry gets the height of the triangle, and therefore the range to the target. This is also why early fire control computers were called tables- part of their job was to construct a series of trigometric tables like this to make a composite three dimensional image that would be used as the firing solution.



There's another visual.