Adventure in Academia - Art Quest
- Thread starter 4WheelSword
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
[X] The impact of the Naval Arms Race, 1900-1913
- Location
- Central Standard Time
[X] The impact of the Naval Arms Race, 1900-1913
Pt 17 - Juggernaut dawn
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Professor Utrecht stands at the head of the class again, and this time it's one you're exceptionally excited for. An entire module on early naval warfare with a special focus on the naval arms race that lead up to the Great War? You couldn't think of anything better.
"What then, the early impact of that arms race? We've seen the changes in naval design, or at least you should have if you've done any of the reading I set when you signed up to this module. The Motoko types were the most capable battleship on the sea before the Juggernaut changed the entire landscape of naval architecture. So! We will talk about three things in this module. Ship design, naval theory and geopolitical impacts."
It's amazing how different she is talking about this. Somehow she has become animated and bright eyed. Where has the anxiety gone, where has the nervous chipmunk gone?
"You should know about ship design in this period but a brief rundown will not hurt. The battleship leads to the semi-juggernaut leads to the juggernaut, throughout all of which we see the realisation that less guns are more accurate so long as you unify the battery. A unified main battery is what makes the Juggernaut such a revolution in ship design. It was expected that a few of these ships could do more harm than an entire fleet of pre-juggernaut ships."
"So why do I mention theory - the new theory must be obvious yes? To have the most Juggernauts in the right place at the right time. But that was not the case. In this period, with diminishing hull numbers coming very rapidly, we see the birth of the Junge Schule, the Mahanian doctrine and other theories that influence the development of naval warfare over the next century. But this does not explain geopolitics, no?"
"But then perhaps it does. Geopolitics is just the application of theory. War is just an extension of politics. The political doctrine of today is essentially the result of centuries of warfare and conflict which lead up to the beginning of the twentieth century where our studies lie. And what do we see in that decade and a half? We see New Alleghany, Albia, Caspia, Akitsukini, nations from all around the world develop into fully fledged and diverse naval powers. Even beyond those we see developments on other continents that lead to an impact beyond the Great War."
Where does the lecture go?
[ ] Naval architecture
[ ] Naval theory
[ ] Geopolitical implications
[ ] Tertiary nations
Admission - these are modified drawings from shipbucket, not original ones by me, hence the credit to original artists. Blame depression and how complex battleship designs are.
"What then, the early impact of that arms race? We've seen the changes in naval design, or at least you should have if you've done any of the reading I set when you signed up to this module. The Motoko types were the most capable battleship on the sea before the Juggernaut changed the entire landscape of naval architecture. So! We will talk about three things in this module. Ship design, naval theory and geopolitical impacts."
It's amazing how different she is talking about this. Somehow she has become animated and bright eyed. Where has the anxiety gone, where has the nervous chipmunk gone?
"You should know about ship design in this period but a brief rundown will not hurt. The battleship leads to the semi-juggernaut leads to the juggernaut, throughout all of which we see the realisation that less guns are more accurate so long as you unify the battery. A unified main battery is what makes the Juggernaut such a revolution in ship design. It was expected that a few of these ships could do more harm than an entire fleet of pre-juggernaut ships."
"So why do I mention theory - the new theory must be obvious yes? To have the most Juggernauts in the right place at the right time. But that was not the case. In this period, with diminishing hull numbers coming very rapidly, we see the birth of the Junge Schule, the Mahanian doctrine and other theories that influence the development of naval warfare over the next century. But this does not explain geopolitics, no?"
"But then perhaps it does. Geopolitics is just the application of theory. War is just an extension of politics. The political doctrine of today is essentially the result of centuries of warfare and conflict which lead up to the beginning of the twentieth century where our studies lie. And what do we see in that decade and a half? We see New Alleghany, Albia, Caspia, Akitsukini, nations from all around the world develop into fully fledged and diverse naval powers. Even beyond those we see developments on other continents that lead to an impact beyond the Great War."
Where does the lecture go?
[ ] Naval architecture
[ ] Naval theory
[ ] Geopolitical implications
[ ] Tertiary nations
Admission - these are modified drawings from shipbucket, not original ones by me, hence the credit to original artists. Blame depression and how complex battleship designs are.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Tertiary nations
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
[X] Tertiary nations
Pt 18 - Minors
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
"Battleships were as much a symbol of power on the world stage as the juggernauts, atomic submarines and fleet carriers that followed after them. Thus it was not only the largest nations that fielded them and dozens of the obsolescent, multi-battery ships were still in service at the outbreak of the Great War."
She pulls a map down, a hidden board sliding out with all the nations of the world as of 1910 depicted on it. A stick comes from somewhere and she begins to point out various places on it.
"Taxococo, Lusinia-Carvale, Cathay, Mzansi, the Anatole Sultanate and the Ganjay Raj are all what we consider secondary nations during the Great War, major powers in their own right and potentially able to influence the course - but none of them were part of the alliances or joined the alliances in the opening years of the war and thus are secondary to that struggle. All operated large war-fleets including considerable numbers of battleships, but they are not our focus today."
"Instead we are looking at the Tertiary nations - those that were large enough to operate battleships in at least some numbers but were too small, poor, or out of the way enough that the larger alliances could simply ignore them. Well, almost all of them."
"The Empire of Ras Tekul on the Eastern coast of Ophirius was a tiny collection of city-states which had been unified some fifty years before. With three aging battleships under the command of an inexperienced admiral and barely twice that in smaller patrol ships and torpedo boats, normally they would be considered nothing to their stronger nations. That would be the case if it wasn't for the fact that Ras Tekul controlled the Western side of the Ganymede-Ganjay Canal. With the Empire on one side and the Sultanate on the other, control of the canal was not guaranteed to any Europan nation. Thus we see the slow but certain reduction of the Empire's small fleet across three battles, culminating in Ras Tekul falling to insurrection, the loss of all three 19th century warships and the occupation of the west bank by a coalition of Europan nations from 1916."
"Ras Tekul was not the only pre-war state that not only engaged major powers during the Great War, but which ceased to exist in the post-war period. Arrogonia and Aurentia, both nations in southern Meridia, engaged a joint Alleghanian and Carvale fleet in 1917 in an attempt to protect against Vespuccian aggression from the North. In a classic Mahanian decisive battle, forty modern battleships and fast juggernauts met just fifteen smaller, older ships. While they more than showed their strength, the Arrogonian fleet was decimated and Aurentia lost more than half its strength in a single day."
"The juggernaut placed its mark very firmly on the world in a few short afternoons of actions across the five years of war, and no place was this better shown than in these smaller engagements of the Great War."
"When it is said that the Great War touched all nations, it is not simply because of the main conflict itself. That conflict sparked a thousand other brushfires and revolutions which affected almost every person on the planet. It was truly, after all, the first global war."
You're getting close to six months into your course, with three new modules worth of information firmly ensconced in your brain. Of course, now comes the real problem. You've only got another six to choose a subject, refine a title from it and write fifty thousand words of a thesis. Or so. Depending on footnotes.
Topic. Topic topic topic. That was the question.
What sort of thing shall we write about?
[ ] Tanks
[ ] Planes
[ ] Ships
[ ] Politics
[ ] Write-in
She pulls a map down, a hidden board sliding out with all the nations of the world as of 1910 depicted on it. A stick comes from somewhere and she begins to point out various places on it.
"Taxococo, Lusinia-Carvale, Cathay, Mzansi, the Anatole Sultanate and the Ganjay Raj are all what we consider secondary nations during the Great War, major powers in their own right and potentially able to influence the course - but none of them were part of the alliances or joined the alliances in the opening years of the war and thus are secondary to that struggle. All operated large war-fleets including considerable numbers of battleships, but they are not our focus today."
"Instead we are looking at the Tertiary nations - those that were large enough to operate battleships in at least some numbers but were too small, poor, or out of the way enough that the larger alliances could simply ignore them. Well, almost all of them."
"The Empire of Ras Tekul on the Eastern coast of Ophirius was a tiny collection of city-states which had been unified some fifty years before. With three aging battleships under the command of an inexperienced admiral and barely twice that in smaller patrol ships and torpedo boats, normally they would be considered nothing to their stronger nations. That would be the case if it wasn't for the fact that Ras Tekul controlled the Western side of the Ganymede-Ganjay Canal. With the Empire on one side and the Sultanate on the other, control of the canal was not guaranteed to any Europan nation. Thus we see the slow but certain reduction of the Empire's small fleet across three battles, culminating in Ras Tekul falling to insurrection, the loss of all three 19th century warships and the occupation of the west bank by a coalition of Europan nations from 1916."
"Ras Tekul was not the only pre-war state that not only engaged major powers during the Great War, but which ceased to exist in the post-war period. Arrogonia and Aurentia, both nations in southern Meridia, engaged a joint Alleghanian and Carvale fleet in 1917 in an attempt to protect against Vespuccian aggression from the North. In a classic Mahanian decisive battle, forty modern battleships and fast juggernauts met just fifteen smaller, older ships. While they more than showed their strength, the Arrogonian fleet was decimated and Aurentia lost more than half its strength in a single day."
"The juggernaut placed its mark very firmly on the world in a few short afternoons of actions across the five years of war, and no place was this better shown than in these smaller engagements of the Great War."
"When it is said that the Great War touched all nations, it is not simply because of the main conflict itself. That conflict sparked a thousand other brushfires and revolutions which affected almost every person on the planet. It was truly, after all, the first global war."
You're getting close to six months into your course, with three new modules worth of information firmly ensconced in your brain. Of course, now comes the real problem. You've only got another six to choose a subject, refine a title from it and write fifty thousand words of a thesis. Or so. Depending on footnotes.
Topic. Topic topic topic. That was the question.
What sort of thing shall we write about?
[ ] Tanks
[ ] Planes
[ ] Ships
[ ] Politics
[ ] Write-in
- Location
- New England, State of Confusion
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] The Politics of Arms Development and Procurement
(Is this acceptable as a write in?)
(Is this acceptable as a write in?)
Pt 19a - First Battle of the Canal
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Nice.
I suck at RTW and am not a naval combat nerd, but to my inexpert eye it looks like Toshka managed to maintain really good positioning through most of that. That's a lot of time being able to fire everything at ships that could only hit back with forward or rear guns. On the other hand, it's not clear to me what Bellerophon was trying to do. Looks like a spot that put them in a great deal of danger to no obvious end in particular.
xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
- Location
- σ Octantis
Here's what it looks like to me:
- the two fleets rushed head on towards and through another
- the Bellopheron got hit from both sides by the Sadat and the Toshka
- The Nasser tried to cross the T of the cruisers, only to walloped by them at very short range, whilst at the same time the Goliath could shoot at it without being disturbed.
- the two fleets rushed head on towards and through another
- the Bellopheron got hit from both sides by the Sadat and the Toshka
- The Nasser tried to cross the T of the cruisers, only to walloped by them at very short range, whilst at the same time the Goliath could shoot at it without being disturbed.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] The Politics of Arms Development and Procurement