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Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

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PoptartProdigy said:
On reflection, it seems likely to me that during those periods when Russia rents out Victorian troops, they probably furnish air assault materiel to the Victorians, since as you point out air operations would be a fairly obvious tactic for these sorts of troops. However...Victoria is poor. Air operations take huge amounts of fuel, and fuel is one of those things that's just going to cost money. They can ask Papa Alexander to make their mean big sis Cali to make them planes, and they can make (crappy) parachutes of their own, but fuel is something around which they simply cannot cheat. Nobody, not even Russia, is going to give them fuel for free, even this long after the Collapse. It's an expense that I frankly don't believe Victoria could sustain.
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That being the case, I would extrapolate that the Victorians don't bother to keep a large force of transport planes they can't afford to operate... which means they wouldn't be able to launch a major airborne offensive on short notice.

I could be wrong about that, though.
 
Simon_Jester said:
That being the case, I would extrapolate that the Victorians don't bother to keep a large force of transport planes they can't afford to operate... which means they wouldn't be able to launch a major airborne offensive on short notice.

I could be wrong about that, though.
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Given that they'd be turning all the fuel they could find over to their air force already, I can't imagine them buying more things they can't run, no.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
Fairly developed within the intelligence networks that you have. The issue is that you've yet to complete the relevant integration action, and the way I chose to represent the failed action invested, remember, was by saying that your local assets had all gone dark in light of the war going hot. You do have your domestic intelligence organization, but they haven't had to do a lot with signals intelligence in the past. They're helping as they can, it's just that this is not their wheelhouse. They do more work with human intelligence and IRS-style operations.

Now, you can still have people listening in on radio sets -- and have been doing so -- but while the Victorians don't seem to have encrypted radios, they are speaking in codes you have yet to break.
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Do we have enough in terms of working transmitters to plot the points of origin and traffic of their radio chatter? Even knowing where stuff is coming from can be useful even if you haven't cracked the code, it's part of how the Soviets were able to anticipate German actions during Operation Citadel.
 
Simon_Jester said:
"I don't know what he's saying, but I know he's over there."

[fires all of the cannons at wherever 'there' is]
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It is one of the cornerstones of signals intelligence. You don't need to know what they're saying if you know that Point A and Point B are chattering a whole lot and you know approximately where both positions are.

There was actually one method Soviet signals people developed for monitoring the German Morse code-driven comms where they figured out which divisions were which by learning what the specific patterns of the signals personnel in how they hammered out the dots and dashes. We're probably not at that level of expertise but even having some sense of traffic and direction gives nearly as much as cracking their codes.

Especially if Points A & B start moving.
 
Hey @PoptartProdigy, how are the oil fields in the dakotas and Texas? Because if we can control the Mississippi river we'd be only a stone's throw away from both which means we might actually be able to get off our dependency for coal. Which if I'm remembering right most of America's coal comes from the east coast where Victora has a much firmer grasp then us.
 
x0Nothing0x said:
Hey @PoptartProdigy, how are the oil fields in the dakotas and Texas? Because if we can control the Mississippi river we'd be only a stone's throw away from both which means we might actually be able to get off our dependency for coal. Which if I'm remembering right most of America's coal comes from the east coast where Victora has a much firmer grasp then us.
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Illinois has coal deposits- quite a lot of them. It's just uneconomical to mine them in the present day, when they face competition from lower-sulfur coal mined elsewhere, and when the people who own the land on the surface are in a good position to object to someone digging a coal mine on their property.

The Collapse has disrupted both of those conditions.
 
LHB said:
Do we have enough in terms of working transmitters to plot the points of origin and traffic of their radio chatter? Even knowing where stuff is coming from can be useful even if you haven't cracked the code, it's part of how the Soviets were able to anticipate German actions during Operation Citadel.
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With the caveat that I know nothing about how this sort of thing works, if it was possible during the Second World War, my ruling is that yes you can, and no it has not yet picked up major actions other than the Leamington landings.
x0Nothing0x said:
Hey @PoptartProdigy, how are the oil fields in the dakotas and Texas? Because if we can control the Mississippi river we'd be only a stone's throw away from both which means we might actually be able to get off our dependency for coal. Which if I'm remembering right most of America's coal comes from the east coast where Victora has a much firmer grasp then us.
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As Simon pointed out, you do have your own coal, and quite a bit of it. You actually liquify some of it to oil, although you've yet to scale that. That said, the oil fields all still exist. Local communities aware of their existence will be getting by via refining and selling black gold to anybody within arm's reach, subject to wartime disruptions (Texas in particular is bad for this).j
Simon_Jester said:
Illinois has coal deposits- quite a lot of them. It's just uneconomical to mine them in the present day, when they face competition from lower-sulfur coal mined elsewhere, and when the people who own the land on the surface are in a good position to object to someone digging a coal mine on their property.

The Collapse has disrupted both of those conditions.
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This is why your navy is coal-fired, of course. Unlike Retroculturists, y'all needed a reason for that severe of a downgrade. :rofl:
 
PoptartProdigy said:
On reflection, it seems likely to me that during those periods when Russia rents out Victorian troops, they probably furnish air assault materiel to the Victorians, since as you point out air operations would be a fairly obvious tactic for these sorts of troops. However...Victoria is poor. Air operations take huge amounts of fuel, and fuel is one of those things that's just going to cost money. They can ask Papa Alexander to make their mean big sis Cali to make them planes, and they can make (crappy) parachutes of their own, but fuel is something around which they simply cannot cheat. Nobody, not even Russia, is going to give them fuel for free, even this long after the Collapse. It's an expense that I frankly don't believe Victoria could sustain.

Thus, while I absolutely believe that they have paradrop-qualified troops, and a developed doctrine for those troops' use (albeit, perhaps one that assumes air superiority is just a gimme), they utterly lack the ability to actually launch airborne assaults.
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You know it would actually make an awful lot of sense for them to use airships.
Dirigible have vastly better fuel efficiency than any heavier-than-air craft. Both per-ton and per-kilometre. Helium drives cost up but given their fanatical philosophy I doubt the Vics would balk at using hydrogen. Combined with the fact that airships require virtually nothing in the way of landing facilities (even if they need vast 'dry docks' for repair) they are great for operating in the sort of conditions that post-fall america present.

Giant targets for enemy airpower of course but if you already assume air superiority…

If we assume they have been relying on Russian transport they would have had no need to construct their own airlift capability. But with papa Alexander no longer giving them toys… something to think on.
 
Of course, then we run into the problem that not even the Victorians are dumb enough to fly a zeppelin into range of a working surface to air missile battery, or any place such batteries are likely to be found.
 
Angelform said:
You know it would actually make an awful lot of sense for them to use airships.
Dirigible have vastly better fuel efficiency than any heavier-than-air craft. Both per-ton and per-kilometre. Helium drives cost up but given their fanatical philosophy I doubt the Vics would balk at using hydrogen. Combined with the fact that airships require virtually nothing in the way of landing facilities (even if they need vast 'dry docks' for repair) they are great for operating in the sort of conditions that post-fall america present.

Giant targets for enemy airpower of course but if you already assume air superiority…

If we assume they have been relying on Russian transport they would have had no need to construct their own airlift capability. But with papa Alexander no longer giving them toys… something to think on.
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Is there anything in particular that would prevent somebody with an LMG and some time to kill from mission-killing a zeppelin single-handedly?
 
PoptartProdigy said:
Is there anything in particular that would prevent somebody with an LMG and some time to kill from mission-killing a zeppelin single-handedly?
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The zeppelin can probably hover above the maximum altitude at which a ground-based light machine gun's bullets will reach. Plus, putting enough holes in the zeppelin to bring it down in a timely manner is tough. Putting 100 bullet holes in a zeppelin is a bit like putting a pinhole leak in a tire; it won't necessarily stop the guy from driving away and putting a patch in.

Historically, shooting down zeppelins reliably took fairly heavy weapons, incendiary weapons, or both. But here and now we HAVE those weapons... although a lot of the weaker warlord polities might not.

See here:

Zeppelin - Wikipedia
 
You won't be able to ignite even hydrogen-filled Zeppelin with an LMG. They had the same problem in WW1 and had to invent incendiary rounds. The problem is that you have to damage the canopy enough that the hydrogen mixes with enough oxygen to ignite.

Incendiary ammunition

Commando'ed by a Jester
 
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Simon_Jester said:
The zeppelin can probably hover above the maximum altitude at which a ground-based light machine gun's bullets will reach. Plus, putting enough holes in the zeppelin to bring it down in a timely manner is tough. Putting 100 bullet holes in a zeppelin is a bit like putting a pinhole leak in a tire; it won't necessarily stop the guy from driving away and putting a patch in.

Historically, shooting down zeppelins reliably took fairly heavy weapons, incendiary weapons, or both. But here and now we HAVE those weapons... although a lot of the weaker warlord polities might not.

See here:

Zeppelin - Wikipedia
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Seeing as they've just forced air superiority, in spite of some heavy AAA, I could see these being used for spotting purposes and some limited airborne operations outside our AAA envelope.

Of course none of that stops us from, say, scrounging up the handful of MANPADS in our inventory or even some of our more mobile flak batteries and ruining their day.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
With the caveat that I know nothing about how this sort of thing works, if it was possible during the Second World War, my ruling is that yes you can, and no it has not yet picked up major actions other than the Leamington landings.
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On the topic of SIGINT...
  • How much traffic volume are we picking up to and from Toledo, compared to the amount of traffic we're picking up to and from the force around Leamington? The idea here is to use traffic volume as a proxy for force size -- a bigger force is going to create more message traffic, even if it's just letters home, status updates, and weather reports.
  • Given that they're speaking in code over unencrypted radio -- what's the emotional tenor of their conversation? Positive? Negative?
I ask because I'm starting to wonder how many Victorians are actually in Toledo.
 
Secretariat said:
On the topic of SIGINT...
  • How much traffic volume are we picking up to and from Toledo, compared to the amount of traffic we're picking up to and from the force around Leamington? The idea here is to use traffic volume as a proxy for force size -- a bigger force is going to create more message traffic, even if it's just letters home, status updates, and weather reports.
  • Given that they're speaking in code over unencrypted radio -- what's the emotional tenor of their conversation? Positive? Negative?
I ask because I'm starting to wonder how many Victorians are actually in Toledo.
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  • More.
  • Increasingly tense with a significant undercurrent of outrage.
 
I am worried about the Airships not so much as transports as spotters. They would be potent tools to monitor troop movements from outside our AA bubble and it would give the Vicks an edge, a small one but an edge nonetheless.
 
Starwarlord said:
I am worried about the Airships not so much as transports as spotters. They would be potent tools to monitor troop movements from outside our AA bubble and it would give the Vicks an edge, a small one but an edge nonetheless.
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Well the good news is, if the Victorians start using gigantic zeppelins, we will probably notice. They're not what you call inconspicuous. :p
 
PoptartProdigy said:
  • More.
  • Increasingly tense with a significant undercurrent of outrage.
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Tense and outraged with a history of some pretty easy successes, political leadership demanding results and not much in the way of a recent history of actually dealing with serious setbacks.

I hope we've got enough sandbags ready on the southern approaches cause that sounds like someone about to do something rash.

@PoptartProdigy how about traffic volume between Leamington and Toledo? What's the tone there?
 
LHB said:
Tense and outraged with a history of some pretty easy successes, political leadership demanding results and not much in the way of a recent history of actually dealing with serious setbacks.

I hope we've got enough sandbags ready on the southern approaches cause that sounds like someone about to do something rash.
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The way I see it, either they're about to order their troops to attack the southern front (in which case either they've already dealt with the terrain issues or they're going to trip over said issues)...

Or they're going to bellow at the eastern front troops, demand that they suck it up, stop being a bunch of pansies about losing all their equipment and supplies and probably a lot of their senior officers, and walk it off.

Coin toss. I could see it either way...
 
LHB said:
Tense and outraged with a history of some pretty easy successes, political leadership demanding results and not much in the way of a recent history of actually dealing with serious setbacks.

I hope we've got enough sandbags ready on the southern approaches cause that sounds like someone about to do something rash.

@PoptartProdigy how about traffic volume between Leamington and Toledo? What's the tone there?
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About the same. No panic, if you were hoping. For all their faults, these Victorians are professionals.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The way I see it, either they're about to order their troops to attack the southern front (in which case either they've already dealt with the terrain issues or they're going to trip over said issues)...

Or they're going to bellow at the eastern front troops, demand that they suck it up, stop being a bunch of pansies about losing all their equipment and supplies and probably a lot of their senior officers, and walk it off.

Coin toss. I could see it either way...
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Or both.

Given how toxically macho the Victorians are I could see them doing something that brash with the expectation it will actually work.

The real question is how close are the southern forces to actually making contact. We might only be getting Toledo traffic because their field forces are under strict radio silence, which in theory is a good idea but if you're going to move 5+ divisions over somewhat messy ground is a good way to force some needless mistakes.
 
PoptartProdigy said:
About the same. No panic, if you were hoping. For all their faults, these Victorians are professionals.
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I don't think any of us were expecting panic. Bullies don't panic the first time you make them bleed their own blood.

LHB said:
Or both.

Given how toxically macho the Victorians are I could see them doing something that brash with the expectation it will actually work.

The real question is how close are the southern forces to actually making contact. We might only be getting Toledo traffic because their field forces are under strict radio silence, which in theory is a good idea but if you're going to move 5+ divisions over somewhat messy ground is a good way to force some needless mistakes.
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This is why I put together the write-in vote for Plan Up Periscope. To make sensible decisions about what to do next, we really, really need to know the situation on our southern front, whether the southern army is close to making contact, hacking its way through wilderness, or still sitting in Toledo.
 
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