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East Africa 1930: An ORBAT Quest

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It's good that we have a clear indication in the importance of short range firepower. It'll hopefully synergize well with Japan's preference for infilitration tactics and short-range fighting, yet not have us trying to get our soldiers to bayonet charge machine gun nests.

As for the update, my unnecessary thoughts:
  • SMG tests are good for learning about what's available on the market and what features are truly necessary (and unnecessary) in a minimum-cost SMG. However, this isn't immediately crucial, and if we wait a bit, we might be able to see some new designs that come out. Also, we would want to domestically produce any SMG we adopt, IMO, yet the arms workshops are running at capacity right now with rifle production. Trials should include production engineers taking a look at each gun and saying what they think could be simplified as part of manufacturing.
  • We should just make our own AT rifle out of an embiggened Arisaka using a spare Hotchkiss 13.2 barrel and chamber without the cooling fins; the Swiss will price-gouge us on anything we buy from them.
  • I would say to do grenades now, except the OUG vz. 34 is introduced next year. I don't want to adopt it as our main grenade, but if we see it in testing, we could use the detonator for an anti-tank grenade/thrown satchel charge later on.
  • Why bother testing mortars? It's six months of time we can't get back, and we can clearly see the 81 mm Brandt mortar works excellently in Paraguayan hands. Doing Emergency Purchases of 81 mm Brandt mortars is my preferred choice following the glowing review. Brandt historically was open to selling it abroad, and the French seem to like us given that they sent a warship along for the machine gun trials!
  • Purchasing heavy machine guns is my second-preferred option. As for which ones, I feel like the fixed mount gives up operational mobility when our best bet for not being attacked from the air is not being seen in the same place too long; a handful of 13.2s aren't going to do much against the concentrated attack that prominent fixed mounts would bring. We should have enough advance warning of impending air attack that we can reorient the carriages. If we need something more stable and with a 360 degree arc, we can take an angle grinder to the wheel axles, unbolt the split trail, and then bolt the entire thing down into a wagon bed so it has enough space to swing around.
To explain my logic a bit more, a handful of 13.2 mm AA guns are next to useless against a concentrated air attack. Spotting a regiment out in the open prompts you to send in proper attack aircraft that can engage from above the altitude that a 13.2 mm can effectively screen (around 1 km up or so - edit: correction, the M2 Browning had an effective AA ceiling of 1.5 km). What these guns are good for is to make sure the enemy cannot attack with impunity, reducing the effectiveness of impromptu air attacks from smaller aircraft. Picking an AA gun that requires us to bolt together a platform seems worse to me than just dispersing the regiment so that an attack by a fighter or light bomber is unlikely to find a high-value target.

Edit: The weight difference is way less than I thought, the tripod mounting is a good choice.

Edit2: Here's two possible plans:

[] Plan: Combat Proven
-[] Emergency Purchase
--[] 81 mm Brandt Mle 27/31 mortars; 80 this year; 40 each year after it for a period of 4 years

[] Plan: Training Approved
-[] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[] Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines; 80 this year; 40 each year after it for a period of 4 years
 
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You'll want to note it's the single-mount version, not the double mount.

May also want to specify that we're going to refit current MGs for top-feed and move forward with top-feed as standard (unless we really wanna stay on feed strips).
 
C_Z said:
We should just make our own AT rifle out of an embiggened Arisaka using a spare Hotchkiss 13.2 barrel and chamber without the cooling fins; the Swiss will price-gouge us on anything we buy from them.
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Is that really worth the expense when we know that history doesn't look very fondly on the concept?

Plus, the germans tried this with a 13.2mm Mauser design in 1918. It had a nasty habit of breaking the shooters bones.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Is that really worth the expense when we know that history doesn't look very fondly on the concept?

Plus, the germans tried this with a 13.2mm Mauser design in 1918. It had a nasty habit of breaking the shooters bones.
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I think history looked fairly fondly on the concept, it's just that we tend to focus on the latewar period, especially in English-language sources where most of the anti-tank warfare was either in North Africa (i.e., very long sight lines) or against vehicles the Germans had already worked on to resist AT rifles. Reewiin's suited to short-range fighting where tank killer teams can lay in ambush then put a shot into the side armour, and almost nothing we're likely to encounter before the middle of the war can stop 13.2x99 (British infantry tanks being freakish exceptions...)

Yeah, we'd want to include a recoil buffer in the stock to help with the shoulder breaking, but that shouldn't be a big jump. We have familiarity with the concept from the buffer built into the stocks of the ZB vz 30s, and making something with a bit more recoil distance to reduce the force shouldn't be a problem (my 2 am thought is to have a cutout in the stock that the entire receiver can recoil back into)?

We can omit it if we want, but I think it's better than us paying out the ass for some solothurn clockwork monstrosity that isn't well suited to our needs
 
[] Plan: We Like What We've Got
-[] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[] Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Wheeled DP Mount using box magazines

I think there's a good argument to the DP mounts, I remember reading something about how a not insignificant portion of WW2 era gun AA's effectiveness was not how well it could shoot down a plane, but also that even missed shots flying close by could unnerve the pilots and make them drop their bombs/torpedoes early or inaccurately.

I think we can certainly pull that off with a large number of high caliber machine guns, especially with a DP mount meaning that every AT group could contribute to the outgoing AA fire if they feel they're in a good enough position to do so. And on top of that we could try to do something like run a higher ratio of tracer to normal bullets, to make it easier to track where the shots are going vs any aircraft and maybe make the pilots think more bullets are flying towards them than there actually are.
 
Make sure you write in quantities as well, the procurement office does not need a little note saying "Please buy some guns" and nothing besides. Also, if you're liking the box mags remember to write in if you want your current guns converted to take them.
 
Pyrelight said:
Additionally, while trying to find info on WW2 rifle regiment organisation, I remember coming across something claiming that Soviet divisions had supporting weapons attached organically at the battalion level so that there were less opportunities for an incompetent division commander to bungle their distribution. No idea if it's true or works though.
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Well, I looked it up and april 1941 organisation includes a machine gun company a mortar company and a 45mm gun platoon per infantry battalion.
 
7th Hex said:
[] Plan: We Like What We've Got
-[] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[] Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Wheeled DP Mount using box magazines

I think there's a good argument to the DP mounts, I remember reading something about how a not insignificant portion of WW2 era gun AA's effectiveness was not how well it could shoot down a plane, but also that even missed shots flying close by could unnerve the pilots and make them drop their bombs/torpedoes early or inaccurately.

I think we can certainly pull that off with a large number of high caliber machine guns, especially with a DP mount meaning that every AT group could contribute to the outgoing AA fire if they feel they're in a good enough position to do so. And on top of that we could try to do something like run a higher ratio of tracer to normal bullets, to make it easier to track where the shots are going vs any aircraft and maybe make the pilots think more bullets are flying towards them than there actually are.
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This isn't something we'd know, but as meta commentary:
All of the automatic weapons were aimed by gunners following a stream of tracers. It was
discovered early in the Second World War that pilots generally did not see the stream heading for
them, so that the automatic guns had no deterrent effect (pilots did see the bursts from medium-calibre
shells exploding short). The pilots did see explosions when the small-calibre rounds self-destructed
at a fixed altitude. Prewar developers did not realise how important self-destruction was as a
deterrent; to pilots it was like seeing the bursts of medium-calibre shells. This conclusion seems to
have been drawn by Americans comparing the British 2pdr (which self-destructed) with their own
1.1in gun (which did not).
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(Friedman, Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery)

As for mount preferences, I originally was in the same camp of preferring the DP gun before it was pointed out to me that the difference between the AA tripod and the DP mount is only 5 kilograms, or about a 3% increase in weight. I feel like we could eventually come up with a way of attaching a pair of inexpensive removable or collapsible wheels to the tripod mount so that it can be wheelbarrow'ed around the battlefield by infantry.

[X] Plan: Combat Proven
-[X] Emergency Purchase
--[X] 240x 81 mm Brandt Mle 27/31 mortars

[X] Plan: Training Approved
-[X] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[X] 250x Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines

Numbers are scaled off of a 60k force including reserves, with 4 guns of each type per battalion. Edit: plus 10 additional guns to use to protect the defence council's conference room so that we don't get killed by an errant bomb during wartime and thus ending the quest :V
 
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[X] Plan: Combat Proven
-[X] Emergency Purchase
--[X] 81 mm Brandt Mle 27/31 mortars; 80 this year; 40 each year after it for a period of 4 years

[ ] Plan: Training Approved
-[ ] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[ ] Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines; 80 this year; 40 each year after it for a period of 4 years

If we are buying Hotchkiss M1929, do we need to produce it domestically? 240 machineguns seems a significant number (for Reewiin).

upd.
Let's go for the mortars, I'm willing to leave the machinegun-makers more time before pulling the plug.
 
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Why do you want delivery to be so slow? You can probably get 240 of either within a year even with contracting time etc. These countries aren't operating on the same industrial scale as you.
 
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[X] Plan: Combat Proven
-[X] Emergency Purchase
--[X] 81 mm Brandt Mle 27/31 mortars; 80 this year; 40 each year after it for a period of 4 years

Going for Mortars.
 
What do the arms industry representatives say about our ability to manufacture mortar shells. It might be a bit much to make the mortars right now but ammunition might be a possibility right?
 
FrangibleCover said:
Why do you want delivery to be so slow? You can probably get 240 of either within a year even with contracting time etc. These countries aren't operating on the same industrial scale as you.
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It's scaled based on an assumed reservist/active service ratio - if we have 20k soldiers in active service at any given time, that's 18 battalions with four each (rounding up to 80 guns). If roughly half of our army is entering/exiting service each year, then that means the reservist pool grows by 40 guns equivalent each year; the total limit of 240 is for a 60k personnel army. Those personnel aren't yet trained though, so we don't need the guns.

As for why not buy ahead, I was hoping to avoid sticker-shocking the government when this quarter we buy 240 heavy machine guns, next quarter we buy 240 mortars, the quarter after that we issue a design contest for ships for the Carabinavy with a plan to offer a contract to the winner, etc. If the government would prefer that we just do big lump purchases though, then we might as well buy them now before the global economy recovers and prices go up.

Edit: To be explicit, QMs, with the knowledge that we will likely be purchasing several pieces of equipment in short order, would the government's finance department prefer that we stagger deliveries or do it all at once?
 
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[X] Plan: Training Approved
-[X] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[X] 240x Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines
 
[X] Plan: Training Approved
-[X] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[X] 250x Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines
 
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FYI, people who voted for training approved, I changed it to 250 guns; the extra 10 guns being used for defending key infrastructure and/or training purposes.

Also apparently my 2 AM brain decided to call it "training approved" instead of "trials approved", blegh.
 
I think we should convert the existing guns to magazine feed.

I also think we should invest in the simpler ground fire tripod as well but that's just me.
 
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[X] Plan: Training Approved
-[X] Purchase Heavy Machine Guns
--[X] 250x Single Hotchkiss M1929 on Fixed Tripod using box magazines
 
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