Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

open_sketch · Jul 12, 2018

Stress
0

Office Stress
0

XP
5

Matsura Asuka
Head Designer for Ohara Airworks
Age 24 (Legally 25)
Year 12 AF (After Flight)

Design Stats
Aerodynamics Engineering - +2
Structural Engineering - +2
Chemical Engineering - +1
Mechanical Engineering - +1
Ballistics Engineering - +1
Electrical Engineering - 0

Personal/Political Stats
Social Skills - 0
Politics Skills - 0
Importance - 2
Income - 1
Investments - Ohara

Resources
Power - 0
Wealth - 2

Designs
Type 1 Series - Military Variation (Designated T1M1)
Type 2 Racer (World Speed Record October 1910-April 1911, 180kph)
Model 2 Scout (Designated T1M2)
Navy Scout Prototype (Drowned Rat)
Dive Bomber B1M1 "Duck"
Machine Gun Carrier R1A "Dragonfly" (World Speed Record May-July 1911, 200kph)
~~Naval Rescue~~ Water-Landing Supply Plane NR1M0 "Dolphin" (World speed record 240kph)
~~Rhino~~ Demon Train Hunter
The world's first airliner
The world's first pulsejet airplane

Assets
Slide Rule
Computator (1 Reroll per Routine)

Languages
Albian
Gallian

Familiar Vices
Drinking
~~Prostitutes~~
Dancing

Family Life
- Engaged to Arita Yachi, formerly the leading Ace in the Imperial Army. Designated #1 Cutest ~~Army~~ Boy, he's having some serious problems with PTSD right now.
- Taking a second try at dating Mikami Kiho, ex-dockerwork from the south.

Upgrades
- 3 XP to upgrade a stat.

Ohara Airworks
Start Up, Imperial Capital, Akitsukuni

Owner
- Mr. Ohara, Rich. Aircraft Enthusiast. Business guy.

Engineers

Kibe Koume, 26, Office Manager
Tiny & angry, Kibe went to school in Albia, picking up the language, the religion, and a fuckload of swear words. Speaks Albian.
Mechanical +2, Ballistics +1
Office Manager: If Kibe is not assigned to a team, the Office Stress is reduced by 1.

Sakane Jun, 26, Second Team Leader
A soured patriot, Sakane is married and has a young child being raised gender-neutrally. His two brothers who fought in the war.
Structural +2, Aerodynamics +1
Team Leader: If there are any additional projects, Sakane will lead them.
Joinery: Sakane has training in the traditional Akitsukuni carpentry art of joinery, creating complex self-supporting joints with no fasteners or glue. When working with non-monocoque wooden spars or ribs, +1 Structural.

Tezuka Kenji, ???
A stoner with occasional flashes of insight. Nobody really knows what he does, but he's probably useful?
Aerodynamics +2, Chemical +1
Flashes of Brilliance: Each natural 10 rolled by any team Tezuka is assigned to gives +1 forward to the next research roll.

Hasegawa Morio, 26
A hopeless nerd with a photography habit, mostly on account of developing his own film, Hasegawa seems to do nothing but work and stack card houses, but somehow has an incredible attractive boyfriend. Speaks Gallian.
Chemical +2, Ballistic +1
Silent Workhorse: Hasegawa can work on two different projects at once for no cost to Office Stress, providing they use different stats.

Kawamura Yosai, 25.
Serially successful womanizer and incredibly attractive, Kawamura doesn't seem to have much of a personality outside of seducing women. Well, except for that time he seduced Asuka, which nobody talks about. Speaks Dyske.
Structural +2, Electrical +1, Social +1
Easily Distracted: If Kawamura is working on the same team as a female or non-binary employee, the team is at -1d10.

Koide Hatsu, 24.
One of the few female graduates of an Akitsukuni engineering school, Koide is brilliant and incredibly driven, but her first job at Akibara was both humiliating and exposed her to an abusive coworker. Her father is a rich businessman with factories in Joseon, and she's engaged to Ken from Castles of Steel. Speaks Joseon.
Mechanical +2, Structural +1
No Sleep: If you let her, Koide will work herself to death. She can work a second project for no Office Stress, but all her stats will be reduced to 1 for the routine.

Kobayashi Ayao, ???
Disowned heiress of the Kobayashi family, all Kobayashi wanted was a career and to be a modern woman. For her trouble, a cousin threw acid on her, scarring her face, neck, much of her torso, and her left arm. Despite appearing serene and above it all, she's actually an avowed communist activist and baseball player.
Aerodynamics +2, Social +2

Adachi Ren, 24
Adachi learned chemistry from her father, one of the most famous chemical engineers in the country, rather than through formal schooling. She's married, has a kid, and takes spirituality very seriously. Yes, you did the math right, she had Yuki when she was 17. It's 1912, folks.
Chemical +2, Electrical +1
Young Mother: Adachi will cause double Office Stress if she has to work multiple tasks.

Uyeno Sei, Ballistics Engineer, 31.
The oldest member of the crew, this is Uyeno's second career. Her first was as an officer in the Imperial Navy with specialized technical training: her very promising career was cut short by her transition. Her work in a naval arsenal on machine-guns landed her the job here. Briefly dated Satomi (the age range is a bit creepy but again, 1912), she's missing a piece of her ear and is deaf on that side, from an exploding cannon. Recently returned from Varnmark from experimental surgery, she's known for her skill navigating gendered bureaucracy.
Ballistic +3

Mi Kyung-Jae, 23
A recent graduate of the Imperial College of Heijo, Mi is from the recently annexed territory of Joseon. For those keeping track at home, that means he's a Korean national living in Imperial Japan in 1912. We haven't seen much of his personality because he's rightfully terrified of everything around him. He has a specialty in endurance engine design and modification. Speaks Joseon.
Mechanical +1, Chemical +1
Endurance Engines: Mi has an excellent understanding of metallurgy and tolerances. Any engine he works on gains +1 Reliability if a 16+ is rolled.
Pulsejet Wizard: Mi is now one of the world's leading experts on the pulsejet engine. He can be given his own project to custom-craft pulsejet engines, and he gives +1 to any pulsejet-related project.
Joseon National: Mi does not have security clearance to work on any top-secret projects.

Miyoshi Shigeri, 23.
A non-binary person and admirer of Asuka's work, they were in an support role in the Army before joining the company.
Structural +1, Mechanical +1, Aerodynamic +1
Mechanic: Miyoshi has some experience repairing and refurbishing aircraft. They get +1 if assigned on the clean-up phase.

Other Employees
- Ohara Satomi, 22, Mr. Ohara's niece and the company test pilot, Ohara is a general lesbian disaster. She's good at flying planes, driving cars, and kissing girls. She's bad at being patient, being respectable, and sticking to literally anyones conceptions of gender roles. Deeply in lesbians with Coralie D'Amboise.
- Fujkikawa Sotatsu, old, modelmaker. He's an old man and toymaker and we don't see much of him because he locks himself in his workshop a lot. He's friends with Kawamura?

Assets
- Engine Test Rig (Allows engine tweaking and optimization.
- Wind Tunnel (+1 Aerodynamics)
- Rapid Prototype Lab (+1 Clean Up)

Expanded Cast

Akitsukuni Industry
- Homura Mohoko: Head Engine Designer for Kobayashi. First female engineer in the country. A lot of sex appeal.
- Okumura: Head of Akibara aircraft design.
- Yamanaka Hajime: Kobayashi engineer. Young and eager.
- Igarashi Masazumi: Kobayashi engineer. Reserved and experienced.
- Admiral Akibara Toru: Imperial Navy Admiral. Maximum nepotism. Maximum douchebag.
- Lt.Cmnd Akibara Shinzo: The above's son. A hottie but very forward.

Character Families
- Matsura(?) Mizuko: Asuka's sister. Was paralyzed in an accident in Asuka's first flight. Lives Elsewhere and is married now. Can't forgive Asuka, even though she's tried.
- Adachi Motoki: Adachi's husband, an accountant. Legally blind.
- Adachi Yuki: Adachi's 7 year old daughter and wannabe pilot. Very adorable.
- Yachi's Brother: Exists.
- Sakane's Wife: Exists. Drives him a bit crazy, but he loves her.
- Yachi's Brother's Wife: Exists. Is statistically likely to be pregnant.
- Lt. Coralie D'Amboise: Gallian pilot in exile. Satomi's girlfriend. 25. Accomplished bisexual duelist. She flew in the war for a single day, and for her troubles got a hole blown in her cheek and had her left arm paralyzed.

Akisukuni Army & Ex-Army
- Lt. Torio Tanaka: Yachi's former observer as an enlisted man. Was jumped up to fly Ducks and lost a leg on his first mission. A trained painter, married to Torio Saya.
- Captain Amari Shiro: A Dragonfly pilot who ended up flying as Yachi's partner. Kind of delightfully twinky. They sorta slept together at one point, which wasn't great. He lost his previous boyfriend in the April Offensive and turned his plane into a shrine. He was shot in the gut and is still recovering.
- Major Izuhara: Logistics officer, Imperial Army, this bespectled officer stood up to the Caspian Crown Prince and accidentally kicked off the Akitsikuni-Caspian War. The guilt was so much that, after almost a year of running Army procurement, he shot himself in a phone both.
- Captain Nakai Sekien: Army scout pilot. First person to drop a bomb from an airplane, later head of the Duck Squadrons.
- Captain Teshima: A Desk pilot that fought with Yachi. Lost an arm in the process, took over for Major Izuhara after his death. Seems cheery despite it all.
- Captain Nashio: A real piece of shit dude and probably a rapist, he's also a war hero as the second-highest scoring ace on the Akitsukuni side. He was a young shitty kid in way over his head but it's no excuse.
- Lt. Kinjo: Kind of a dumb lump and Nashio's friend, one of the desk pilots. Dead at 19.
- Lt. Okazaki: Yachi's friend from before the war and pilot, he died in a spin in his dragonfly. His death probably hit Yachi the hardest.

Westerners
- Rose & Antoinette Sears: Pioneers of flight. Sisters. Black in 1910s not!America. Yikes.
- Timina Guasti: Famous aircraft designer from Otrusia. Likes big planes and green.
- Prince Protasov Vasilyevich: Crown Prince of Great Caspia. Real dick. You gotta hand it to him though, a decent flier.
- Count von Zeppelin: Invented rigid airships. Runs a successful airline business. Damned impressive.
- Bennhold: Aircraft Engineer. Experimenting with metal aircraft.
- Aileen Middlemiss: Albian reporter for the Artimis Times. Well meaning and oblivious.

Available Tech

Materials: Wood, Duralumin, Molded Wood, Wood & Silk Composite, etc
All engine mounts
All wing types
Basic reinforcement
Wing warping and ailerons
Basic water radiators
Flying Wings
Semi-Monocoque design (requires at least half the slots have frame pieces)
Valved pulsejets
Basic weapon mounts and turrets

Tech not Yet Developed

Custom engines
Monocoque construction
Cantilever Wings and associated tech
V and T tails
Tailless designs
Aluminum and titanium
Cellulose surfacing
Any kind of radar
Weapon accessability mods
Interruptor gear
Geared propellers
And Maybe Other Stuff

Akitsukuni
Island Nation

Government
Constitutional Monarchy
- The democratic portions of the government are dubiously legitimate.
- The head of state is the Empress of Akitsukuni. She gives her blessing to newly formed governments.
- The Navy and a small number of families have undue influence on politics.

Economy
Developing Mixed Market
- Most industry is controlled by a small number of wealthy, family-owned companies.
- The state provides most contracts to industry. Consumer good market is anemic.
- Exports are few, mostly cultural.
- Imports are raw minerals, food, oil, and expertise.
- Currently suffering an economic crash after the last war.

Politics
The Diet is currently ruled by a Constitutional Nationalist government. It has a system of nonlocal proportional representation, with representatives appointed by the party in accordance to their share of the vote.
- Constitutional Nationalists: 50%
- Purity Club: 9%
- New Independents: 26%
- Fairness Association: 11%
- United Communist League: 2%
- Monarchists: 1%
- Assorted Fringe Parties: 5%

Demographics
Akitsukuni is mostly very ethnically homogeneous. Around 5% of the population are various minorities, most from nearby countries. Roughly .1% are westerners here for business or in advisory positions.
- Population: 55 Million
- Religion: Mostly Kodo. Roughly 2% of the population follows western religions.
- Wealth: Most wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the country. Nearly 20% of the population lives in conditions indistinguishable from peasantry.
- Urbanization: Heavily urbanized for a small economy: 35% and rapidly growing.

Military
At Peace
- Imperial Akitsukuni Navy (IAN): The 6th largest in the world, and the most experienced.
- Imperial Akitsukuni Army (IAA): 150,000 highly experienced soldiers, and a considerable reserve.

Aspects
- Poor Resources: Aluminum costs +1.
- Damn Akitsukuni Engines!: Engines have -1 Reliability.

The Main Character Of This Quest Is Nonbinary And Uses They/Them Pronouns.

I Am Putting This Here Because The Next Person To Misgender Them Is Getting Yeeted Into The Trash

Also here's the Gayaverse TV Tropes page, because why not.

khang · Jul 30, 2018

Not sure how to feel about the fact Not!Vietnam is a German colony.

samdamandias · Jul 30, 2018

adsfhgjlk175 said:
We have plenty of fuel, 19.5 uses per engine when we only need 15. We are using a 13 uses per fuel tank design and have 3 fuel tanks.

I went and double checked the math.
We are hitting 180 kph using untuned Goblins, as far as I can tell. Boosting power at the expense of fuel would mean redesigning the propellors, but we'd hit a Thrust of 180, but running much closer to the margin. I could have sworn we tuned for +power -fuel, but apparently we haven't.

Also I do apologize, everybody, some of the math has changed which means my previous guestimates are a little off. Mainly in the DNE, because we have more wiggle room for wing struts and wires. (Or to slap a light MG on a ring mount, but we don't know about that IC yet)

Sturmi said:
-I bet 5 Internet headpats that we will have a dispute with New Allegheny over the Kingdom of Katuroa(fake Hawai'i).

Not taking that bet, because I'm pretty sure that right now the Navy and Army are more concerned with Cathay and Grand Caspia

Simon_Jester · Jul 30, 2018

khang said:
Not sure how to feel about the fact Not!Vietnam is a German colony.

Well, it might or might not be worse than being a French colony. The Germans could be nasty colonial overlords (ask the Herero), but they weren't extraordinarily, outstandingly nasty by colonial overlord standards. Kind of a tossup whether they'd be better or worse than the French to have dominating the place.

samdamandias said:
I went and double checked the math.
We are hitting 180 kph using untuned Goblins, as far as I can tell. Boosting power at the expense of fuel would mean redesigning the propellors, but we'd hit a Thrust of 180, but running much closer to the margin. I could have sworn we tuned for +power -fuel, but apparently we haven't.

Er, closer to the margin on what? On fuel consumption and range?

Also I do apologize, everybody, some of the math has changed which means my previous guestimates are a little off. Mainly in the DNE, because we have more wiggle room for wing struts and wires. (Or to slap a light MG on a ring mount, but we don't know about that IC yet)

Are you talking about the Type 1A/Type 3 observation plane for the Army, or for the Type 2 racer?

samdamandias · Jul 30, 2018

Simon_Jester said:
Er, closer to the margin on what? On fuel consumption and range?

Yes We'd be down to 15 fuel per engine, rather than the nineteen we currently have.

Are you talking about the Type 1A/Type 3 observation plane for the Army, or for the Type 2 racer?

The Mark 2 Scout, yes. The Racer is fully built and statted up and everything. I noticed that my numbers were off from the offical numbers, and it turns out that's because I was using an older version where a plane had four drag as base instead of 1 drag. Put it this way: Our planes can be a bit sturdier, but they likely won't be any faster

Helher · Jul 30, 2018

[x] 3 Wing Area
[x] A sesquiplane arrangement with a smaller lower wing.

Simon_Jester · Jul 30, 2018

samdamandias said:
Yes We'd be down to 15 fuel per engine, rather than the nineteen we currently have.

By the way, did our gracious QM ever specify how units of fuel translated into range/mileage/endurance? That doesn't seem to be present in the rules on the Googledoc. I know the reason for that is partly because it's a dogfighting game, but in the context of what we're doing (using the engine to generate realistic-ish aircraft), it's kind of important.

@open_sketchbook , any thoughts on this?

The Mark 2 Scout, yes. The Racer is fully built and statted up and everything. I noticed that my numbers were off from the offical numbers, and it turns out that's because I was using an older version where a plane had four drag as base instead of 1 drag. Put it this way: Our planes can be a bit sturdier, but they likely won't be any faster

Well, leaving a bit of wiggle room in the mass budget would be good, yes.

Rat King · Jul 30, 2018

[x] 3 Wing Area
[x] A sesquiplane arrangement with a smaller lower wing.

samdamandias · Jul 30, 2018

Simon_Jester said:
By the way, did our gracious QM ever specify how units of fuel translated into range/mileage/endurance? That doesn't seem to be present in the rules on the Googledoc. I know the reason for that is partly because it's a dogfighting game, but in the context of what we're doing (using the engine to generate realistic-ish aircraft), it's kind of important.

Well, I can tell you how long-distance flights used to work in a previous iteration, but it'd almost certainly be wrong for this, in large part because Satomi is going to be using IFR*. Just know that more fuel-per engine is good.

*I Follow Railroads

Well, leaving a bit of wiggle room in the mass budget would be good, yes.

We currently have one point of wiggle room in the mass budget, and three in the drag budget, if I'm doing my math right. That... is enough to mount a gun, but:
1) It would probably put us over budget. Turret rings or pintles are expensive, yo.
2) The Army hasn't asked for it, and unlike dual controls there's no real way for us to justify it right now
3) I have no idea if our guns are as bad as our engines.
4) I currently have no idea where we'd source the guns from.

Now, I mean, clearly at some point in the future the Army will ask us to stick a gun on a plane. Possibly multiple guns. (Not to the extent of SUPER HEDGEHOG though, that was me messing around. That thing has eight MMGs in four double turrets, each of which has full coverage. No, I don't know how the nose turret can shoot directly aft, the tail gunner can shoot dead ahead, the dorsal gunner can shoot down and the ventral turret shoot up, but they can.)

Shadows · Jul 30, 2018

samdamandias said:
Well, I can tell you how long-distance flights used to work in a previous iteration, but it'd almost certainly be wrong for this, in large part because Satomi is going to be using IFR*. Just know that more fuel-per engine is good.

*I Follow Railroads

We currently have one point of wiggle room in the mass budget, and three in the drag budget, if I'm doing my math right. That... is enough to mount a gun, but:
1) It would probably put us over budget. Turret rings or pintles are expensive, yo.
2) The Army hasn't asked for it, and unlike dual controls there's no real way for us to justify it right now
3) I have no idea if our guns are as bad as our engines.
4) I currently have no idea where we'd source the guns from.

Now, I mean, clearly at some point in the future the Army will ask us to stick a gun on a plane. Possibly multiple guns. (Not to the extent of SUPER HEDGEHOG though, that was me messing around. That thing has eight MMGs in four double turrets, each of which has full coverage. No, I don't know how the nose turret can shoot directly aft, the tail gunner can shoot dead ahead, the dorsal gunner can shoot down and the ventral turret shoot up, but they can.)

Mount the nose turret below the cockpit a la the belly turret on a B17, mount the tail gunner between twin tails and above the centerline, same config, mount the dorsal and ventral turrets actually on the sides with sufficient gun depression to shoot up and down...

TortugaGreen · Jul 30, 2018

Shadows said:
Mount the nose turret below the cockpit a la the belly turret on a B17, mount the tail gunner between twin tails and above the centerline, same config, mount the dorsal and ventral turrets actually on the sides with sufficient gun depression to shoot up and down...

Still wouldn't be able to have any turrets shoot in all directions though. One way you could get a turret that could shoot in all directions is using funky linkages to allow the gun to be swung out over the side of the turret so that if the turret was on the bottom the gun could be pointed up by moving it out to the side far enough to clear the plane's hull.

Simon_Jester · Jul 31, 2018

samdamandias said:
We currently have one point of wiggle room in the mass budget, and three in the drag budget, if I'm doing my math right. That... is enough to mount a gun, but:
1) It would probably put us over budget. Turret rings or pintles are expensive, yo.
2) The Army hasn't asked for it, and unlike dual controls there's no real way for us to justify it right now
3) I have no idea if our guns are as bad as our engines.
4) I currently have no idea where we'd source the guns from.

Now, I mean, clearly at some point in the future the Army will ask us to stick a gun on a plane. Possibly multiple guns.

Well yeah. What I mean is, leaving a unit of mass open leaves us with some options for refitting the plane easily at a later date without a high-stress redesign. It might not even be a gun we add. It might be heavier photographic equipment, or something else the army wants.

samdamandias · Jul 31, 2018

Shadows said:
Mount the nose turret below the cockpit a la the belly turret on a B17, mount the tail gunner between twin tails and above the centerline, same config, mount the dorsal and ventral turrets actually on the sides with sufficient gun depression to shoot up and down...

Ah, but then those are waist turrets, not ventral and dorsal.

More seriously, even the SUPER HEDGEHOG isn't big enough to do side-by-side crew, so waist gunners are out. And still doesn't answer how the port waist gunner can fire on stuff off the starboard beam. I just chalked it up to abstractions and crazy linkages.

Simon_Jester said:
Well yeah. What I mean is, leaving a unit of mass open leaves us with some options for refitting the plane easily at a later date without a high-stress redesign. It might not even be a gun we add. It might be heavier photographic equipment, or something else the army wants.

Doing that would require a redesign, but a very simple one. It's entirely possible for us to leave a point of mass and drag* open for future modifications, such as photography equipment or a gun. And now I had a crazy idea about a remotely operated mount for a camera, but that is a bit crazy and I don't know what it would actually get. (I can say how I'd do it mechanically, just grab a turret with arcs of Below, Aft, Port, Starboard and maybe Forward, and give control over it to the member of the crew in the second cockpit. This would add 3 or 4 cost, and as much as I'd like to do it, I don't see any way to justify it to the Army at the moment.)

*Because a camera good enough to get actionable intelligence from altitude, or a gun, will add at least one drag, possibly more.

Crasian01 · Jul 31, 2018

So, y'all are aware that the B-17 didn't actually do that well defending itself with its gunners, right?

Shadows · Jul 31, 2018

Crasian01 said:
So, y'all are aware that the B-17 didn't actually do that well defending itself with its gunners, right?

It did about as well as anyone hoped it would, outside of those selling it to the government. A formation of B-17s is a staggering amount of AA firepower.

Crasian01 · Jul 31, 2018

Shadows said:
It did about as well as anyone hoped it would, outside of those selling it to the government. A formation of B-17s is a staggering amount of AA firepower.

I mean, it also went down in droves without fighter escort. While admittedly I'm citing Wikipedia, the cause of much of the destruction of Allied bomber craft, particularly with regard to the Eighth Air Force and the B-17, was interception by enemy fighters without friendly cover. The most infamous examples were the First and Second Schweinfurt Raids, and I know of no military historians that consider the B-17's mutually supporting gunfire to have been effective against enemy fighters.

Unless you mean that the people using the B-17 actively expected the guns to do nothing, and instead they found that they did something more than nothing? I can't imagine that's actually what you're saying, but maybe I misunderstood.

Kir · Aug 1, 2018

Arguably war is as much a psychological thing as what is actually happening. I can imagine there'd be a massive psychological difference in having your plane not having any guns to defend itself with versus having them left right and center.

(Also, i'd like to bring to attention that 50 cals were at the time of the b17 very weak guns for a2a, planes like the thunderbolt and p51 used large amounts of them and even then their firepower was considered not outstanding)

Crusher Bob · Aug 1, 2018

Crasian01 said:
Unless you mean that the people using the B-17 actively expected the guns to do nothing, and instead they found that they did something more than nothing? I can't imagine that's actually what you're saying, but maybe I misunderstood.

They were certainly much better than nothing. But they generally just made fighters take longer (and burn more fuel) to shoot the bombers down. That is, there were places in the bomber formation that could have shot down fighters, but the fighter pilots, not wanting to get shot down, didn't go there.

Simon_Jester · Aug 1, 2018

Crusher Bob said:
They were certainly much better than nothing. But they generally just made fighters take longer (and burn more fuel) to shoot the bombers down. That is, there were places in the bomber formation that could have shot down fighters, but the fighter pilots, not wanting to get shot down, didn't go there.

Working as intended.

The intent of defensive bomber armament (not just on the B-17 but on virtually all WWII bombers) was not to make bombers immune to fighter counterattack, in the sense that an armored tank is categorically immune to rifle bullets. The intent is to impose what is called 'virtual attrition' on the enemy fighter force- to make ten enemy fighters fight with the strength of eight or six, so that they do less harm.

For example, the optimal way for a World War era interceptor to shoot down a bomber aircraft of any kind (ignoring defensive armament) is to maneuver onto the bomber's 6 o'clock and pelt it with cannon rounds until it comes apart. Since the fighter is nearly always much faster and more maneuverable than the bomber, this is easy to do- and note that this tactic works extremely well against enemy fighters if you can get into that desirable firing position for any length of time.

So why didn't everyone just do this and trivialize the bomber threat into "lol just get behind them?" That's pretty much how it works out in a lot of video games, y'know...

...

But in real life, many if not all bombers had at least a tail gunner. Even if the tail gunner had only a dinky little rifle-caliber weapon, his return fire turned any attack by a fighter loitering in the bomber's rear arc from a systematic slaughter of the bomber, into a duel. Sometimes an unequal duel (e.g. two .50 caliber machine guns against two heavy automatic cannon), but still a duel. Which meant that to survive such an attack profile the fighter had to get lucky, and they couldn't keep getting lucky over and over, which meant they couldn't just casually slaughter bombers one after another until running out of fuel.

So again, that minimum defensive armament (the tail gun) effectively forces, say, ten enemy fighters to fight with the strength of six. They can't attack the bombers as effectively, which means they score fewer kills during the fixed window of opportunity during which a fixed number of fighters are in position to engage the bomber group during its flights to and from the target.

The more defensive armament you pile on the bombers, the more carefully the fighters have to plan out their attack runs. The more they have to jockey for position before and during each attack run. The less seconds they can afford to spend actually firing on the target, and thus the less cannon rounds actually impact the bombers. Thanks to bristling with defensive guns, instead of having to endure a total of, say, 200 highly effective firing runs by enemy Messerschmitts, they have to endure 100 firing runs, each of which is less effective.

And this benefit applies even if the bombers never down a single enemy fighter with their own guns.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. A bomber with no defensive guns and gunners might be able to fly faster and higher, thus entirely evading enemy fighters that could have intercepted a more heavily burdened aircraft. More crew and ammunition means more bits of the plane that can actually be damaged by enemy fire, translating to higher casualty rates in personnel and more risk of fires breaking out aboard the aircraft. And so on.

Crasian01 · Aug 1, 2018

Simon_Jester said:
The intent of defensive bomber armament (not just on the B-17 but on virtually all WWII bombers) was not to make bombers immune to fighter counterattack, in the sense that an armored tank is categorically immune to rifle bullets. The intent is to impose what is called 'virtual attrition' on the enemy fighter force- to make ten enemy fighters fight with the strength of eight or six, so that they do less harm.

I mean, I can buy that this was an effect that people noticed after the fact, but I have serious doubts about whether or not this was actually the intent. The tactics used by the USAAF strongly suggest that the commanding officers thought that a well armored bomber packed with machine guns would be fine on its own. B-17s were used as if the armor and weaponry would be enough that any losses would be small. Again, the Schweinfurt Raids demonstrated that the armor and weaponry of the B-17 would not be enough on its own, even with any effects that you described in terms of constraining the enemy's attack vectors. Overall statistics demonstrate a similar story:

Wikipedia said:
The Royal Air Force's Bomber Command lost a total of 8,325 aircraft on bombing missions during the war, during a total of 364,514 sorties.[14] This represents 2.3 percent losses per mission on average. However, loss rates over Germany were significantly higher: between November 1943 and March 1944 operations over that country resulted in an average 5.1 percent loss rate.[15] The disparity in loss rates was reflected in the fact that at one point in the war Bomber Command considered making sorties over France only count as a third of an op towards the "tour" total.[16] Furthermore, the official loss rate figures never included aircraft crashing in the UK on their return (usually due to damage picked up on the operation) even if the machine was a write off and/or some or all of the crew were killed; this added at least 15 percent to the official loss figures.[17] Losses on that scale could be made good through increased production and training efforts, though at great cost. Indeed, the size of Bomber Command's offensive grew throughout the war. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey came to the same conclusion. However, Douhet's belief that a small number of bombs would be successful in forcing a country to surrender proved incorrect, and bombing alone did not cause the collapse he had expected in either Britain or Germany.

Which, to be clear, a 3%-5% loss rate on every mission is a substantial difference from 3-5% lost overall. At the scale of sorties that Bomber Command was doing, if 100 airplanes went out, 5 didn't come back. Multiplied across 10 missions, which occurs over approximately a week, means that 50 aircraft don't survive combat. This means that at minimum, production must provide 50 aircraft a week, a colossal amount for almost anyone other than the United States (even today). On top of that, the loss of parts or all of the crew means that you essentially have 50 crews out of commission at the end of every week. A B-17 is crewed by 10 people, which means that 500 personnel are either dead or disabled at the end of roughly every week. Now of course, those numbers are for the RAF, so possibly the USAAF saw lower numbers, but I find it both highly unlikely and unlikely to be relevant. Say that you drop it down to 20 aircraft lost about once every week. That's still 200 crew you have to replace, which is still a huge amount of people to get through training on a weekly basis. The percentage is small but the sheer magnitude of the numbers is not.

Again, I'm sure the extra machine guns did something, but doing 1% of something still technically counts. If the effects you describe were truly significant, the numbers we see should be lower. As it stands, I have serious doubts that you could demonstrate that a B-17 lacking extra machine guns would suddenly be even 15% less likely to come home with its crew intact enough for another mission.

It seems like much less of a reach to argue that the presence of long range escort fighters was the most important factor in improving B-17 loss rates in WW2. The armor and reinforced structure of the B-17 certainly contributed, but not as significantly as the fighters. The extra guns did not hurt, but did not help much either. If nothing else, the guns certainly were not effective enough on their own, and one genuinely wonders if it would change anything if the crews just ditched the guns and carried more, say, firefighting equipment in case a fire breaks out in the cabin.

Crusher Bob · Aug 1, 2018

One thing is that modern statistical modelling was in it's infancy at the time. One of the (probably apocryphal) stories that I got told when doing early statistics stuff goes as follows:

Bomber designers knew that adding more armor to bombers should improve their survivability, so they started looking at the most shot up bombers coming back, and adding armor to the places that were most shot up. This hardly improved loss rates at all.

It took a long time to realize that the bombers that weren't coming back were being shot elsewhere. In fact the fact that a bomber could come back with whatever bit they had been adding armor to, when it was all shot up, meant that those areas could probably do with less armor. And the bits of the bomber that the returning bombers didn't have shot up were a better place to look to add armor to, because bombers that got shot there weren't coming back.

-----------------

The B-17 was apparently quite able to soak up cannon fire, though. There's a bit in Saburo Sakai's autobiography, where he complains about it. Something like he filled the whole fuselage with cannon fire, and could see the flashes of the explosive rounds going off inside, but the B-17 just kept on going.

Simon_Jester · Aug 1, 2018

Crasian01 said:
I mean, I can buy that this was an effect that people noticed after the fact, but I have serious doubts about whether or not this was actually the intent. The tactics used by the USAAF strongly suggest that the commanding officers thought that a well armored bomber packed with machine guns would be fine on its own. B-17s were used as if the armor and weaponry would be enough that any losses would be small.

Yes, perhaps that was the theory when the procurement decision was made in the 1930s.

The fact that B-17 raids continued for an extended period of time after this theory was demonstrated, empirically, to be entirely false suggests that the USAAF generals knew damn well that B-17s would not be literally immune, or accepted this. Furthermore, the B-17 was far from the only WWII bomber equipped with defensive armament, and for some odd reason nobody just unilaterally dropped bomber defensive armament during the war, except on a handful of the highest-performance designs that could handily outrun defensive interceptors entirely or fly above their operating ceiling.

I don't think it was just because everyone on all sides was too stupid to know better. Again, think about how much easier it is to shoot down an aircraft without defensive armament, using your fighter's own guns.

Again, the Schweinfurt Raids demonstrated that the armor and weaponry of the B-17 would not be enough on its own, even with any effects that you described in terms of constraining the enemy's attack vectors. Overall statistics demonstrate a similar story:

You're missing the part of the picture I'm getting at.

What I'm arguing is that for a fixed strength of German air defenses, the same bomber force, minus the guns, would take even worse casualties, do even less damage, and be attrited away to nothingness even faster.

It's like the difference between launching a frontal assault at an entrenched infantry position with a preparatory artillery bombardment, versus having no artillery at all. The preparatory barrage won't make the assault low-casualty, and probably won't make it a brilliant success... but with it, there's at least a chance. Without it, no chance at all. And that's a significant difference.

Which, to be clear, a 3%-5% loss rate on every mission is a substantial difference from 3-5% lost overall. At the scale of sorties that Bomber Command was doing, if 100 airplanes went out, 5 didn't come back. Multiplied across 10 missions, which occurs over approximately a week, means that 50 aircraft don't survive combat. This means that at minimum, production must provide 50 aircraft a week, a colossal amount for almost anyone other than the United States (even today). On top of that, the loss of parts or all of the crew means that you essentially have 50 crews out of commission at the end of every week. A B-17 is crewed by 10 people, which means that 500 personnel are either dead or disabled at the end of roughly every week. Now of course, those numbers are for the RAF, so possibly the USAAF saw lower numbers, but I find it both highly unlikely and unlikely to be relevant. Say that you drop it down to 20 aircraft lost about once every week. That's still 200 crew you have to replace, which is still a huge amount of people to get through training on a weekly basis. The percentage is small but the sheer magnitude of the numbers is not.

Yes, but on the scale of a war where the belligerent powers recruited millions of men and produced thousands of planes, NO combination of tactics and strategy will result in losses of negligible magnitude.

There is a vast difference between losing 5% of your heavy bombers every week, and losing 15%.

For example, given a fixed bomber production rate of, oh, fifty heavy bombers a week, at 5%/week losses you can sustain a bomber force of one thousand aircraft, enough to be very damaging when directed at the right targets. If you're losing planes at 15%/week, and you started with a thousand bombers, your heavy bomber corps will be worn down by attrition to around three hundred planes, then level off (assuming the rate isn't even higher at that point which it probably will be if you're still actively using your remaining bombers).

One of the realities of total war is that yes you will lose men and equipment. There is no magical perfect combination. Measures that reduce or limit casualties by reducing the effectiveness of the enemy's counterattacks still matter.

Again, I'm sure the extra machine guns did something, but doing 1% of something still technically counts. If the effects you describe were truly significant, the numbers we see should be lower.

On what grounds do you say so?

I mean, what would things look like in the counterfactual world of unarmed B-17s? Maybe the Germans would be able to kill one or more bombers per defending fighter sortie, by the simple expedient of maneuvering into the undefended tail position and shooting the bombers apart? As it was, I'm pretty sure the Germans had to sortie multiple fighters on a given day to reliably shoot down one bomber (e.g. sortie 50 aircraft, score a dozen bomber kills to fighter action).

As it stands, I have serious doubts that you could demonstrate that a B-17 lacking extra machine guns would suddenly be even 15% less likely to come home with its crew intact enough for another mission.

The obvious thing to do would be to compare the amount of time any given defending fighter actually spent firing on the bombers, and compare it to the number of seconds they would have spent firing (from more favorable angles of attack) without the defensive weapons.

It seems like much less of a reach to argue that the presence of long range escort fighters was the most important factor in improving B-17 loss rates in WW2. The armor and reinforced structure of the B-17 certainly contributed, but not as significantly as the fighters. The extra guns did not hurt, but did not help much either. If nothing else, the guns certainly were not effective enough on their own, and one genuinely wonders if it would change anything if the crews just ditched the guns and carried more, say, firefighting equipment in case a fire breaks out in the cabin.

That depends. How good are Messerschmitts at shooting down large, entirely defenseless targets that are restricted to flying in straight lines so as to avoid throwing their navigation hopelessly off?

Crasian01 · Aug 1, 2018

@Simon_Jester
I'm not totally sure what your overall response to me is, but the gist seems to be that the guns slowed down the rate of attrition? I'm not entirely sure I buy that, because you have to disentangle that effect from the armor and inherit robustness of the design of the B-17. There are plenty of pics of the B-17 flying home with ridiculous damage, and the anecdote from Saburo Sakai also suggests that the B-17 could absorb huge amounts of punishment. It seems to me that this is the far more important root cause to the survivability of the aircraft, at least compared to the number of defensive guns.

I don't find the argument that reducing the number of angles an enemy aircraft can approach from to be terribly compelling. The vulnerable parts of an aircraft are the engine, the tail, and the cockpit. The angles that you have available to you to attack those points from are numerous and not requisite of amazing skill to utilize. While it is certainly true that it probably was necessary for the Luftwaffe to send up more fighters to down a given number of bombers within a given window, compared to the same scenario with unarmed bombers, I don't see how this has any effect on the survivability of the bomber. Ultimately, the number of bombers shot downed the same, and the amount of damage done to each bomber (on average) is the same. The number of resources required to deal that damage doesn't become relevant until losses begin to inflicted on the enemy fighters. As far as I am aware, enemy fighter losses were not significant until long range fighter escort become available, with bombers killing few aircraft during an engagement.

Again, I agree that defensive guns probably did something, but I don't see how it would have had a significant impact for not being there. There are many ways to engage a B-17, even if you are avoiding the firing arc of the defensive guns. While the guns probably did force the enemy to place additional units in the air for a given kill, this doesn't become relevant until enemy aircraft are being shot down, something which didn't become significant until long range fighter escort was available. The armor and robustness of the B-17 seem to me like they have a far greater impact than the defensive guns.

samdamandias · Aug 1, 2018

So, a few points to make:
1) I don't expect the Super Hedgehog to actually get built in this quest
2) The idea for the Super Hedgehog draws on the Tu-2Sh "Fire Hedgehog" and YB-40. I am fully aware of how neither of them was actually that effective, but they still look cool.
3) The first iteration of the Super Hedgehog was made when the plane design system was vastly different than it is now, and the Super Hedgehog was much, much more effective. The only reason why I kept building it in each iteration of the design system was it sort of became "my plane" if you will.
4) Turrets in this game are a bit more effective than they were IRL. We've had this discussion before.

Crasian01 · Aug 1, 2018

samdamandias said:
Turrets in this game are a bit more effective than they were IRL. We've had this discussion before.

Oh, well, RIP me I guess. Was that in thread, or somewhere else?

Simon_Jester · Aug 1, 2018

Crasian01 said:
@Simon_Jester
I'm not totally sure what your overall response to me is, but the gist seems to be that the guns slowed down the rate of attrition? I'm not entirely sure I buy that, because you have to disentangle that effect from the armor and inherit robustness of the design of the B-17. There are plenty of pics of the B-17 flying home with ridiculous damage, and the anecdote from Saburo Sakai also suggests that the B-17 could absorb huge amounts of punishment. It seems to me that this is the far more important root cause to the survivability of the aircraft, at least compared to the number of defensive guns.

I don't find the argument that reducing the number of angles an enemy aircraft can approach from to be terribly compelling. The vulnerable parts of an aircraft are the engine, the tail, and the cockpit. The angles that you have available to you to attack those points from are numerous and not requisite of amazing skill to utilize. While it is certainly true that it probably was necessary for the Luftwaffe to send up more fighters to down a given number of bombers within a given window, compared to the same scenario with unarmed bombers, I don't see how this has any effect on the survivability of the bomber.

Ultimately, the number of bombers shot downed the same, and the amount of damage done to each bomber (on average) is the same.

No, no it is not. That's the point.

Because the Luftwaffe had a fixed number of fighters in place to throw at any given bomber raid. Each individual fighter had a fixed amount of fuel in the gas tank and could engage the bomber stream/box/swarm for a fixed amount of time before having to land.

Every second that any given fighter spends maneuvering to make another firing pass from one of those 'sweet spot' angles that minimizes the effect of the defensive fire, or every second the fighter spends dodging bullets, or every second they spend doing anything other than just maneuvering into the bomber's six o'clock and blasting away with cannon shells at point blank range...

...Is a second that the fighter does NOT spend blasting the hell out of a bomber with unending streams of cannon shells at point blank range.

The fighters will shoot from further away, so that more of their shots miss. They'll aim less precisely because tracers are flying past their cockpit. They spend time circling around to fire from angles where the defensive guns aren't, then passing over or by the bomber and having to circle around again, instead of flying in on a relatively slow trajectory that gives them good, long shots.

...

Thus, any given Luftwaffe fighter playing defense on the day of the raid will hit bombers with fewer bullets, and will have fewer opportunities to attack the bombers in a fixed amount of time, reducing the likelihood of scoring a kill, and/or the amount of damage inflicted on any bombers it managed to score hits on.

Thus, your bombers take fewer casualties and you can maintain a larger bomber force with a fixed rate of aircraft production and crew training. More of your bombers hit their target on any given day, doing more damage to the enemy. You're better off.

...

And if the Luftwaffe tries to compensate by sending more planes to attack your bombers at the resulting reduced rate of effectiveness, then that's a bunch of Luftwaffe fighters that aren't off doing something else, something like providing close air support for German troops, or shooting down Russian ground support aircraft, or stopping an entirely different bomber raid going on on the other end of Europe that day.

Decreasing the enemy's effectiveness at killing you is equivalent to killing some of the enemy before they ever get the chance to kill you in the first place. It may not reduce their numbers, but it does reduce their strength. And it means that to strike with the same amount of strength they'd desire, they have to commit more numbers to doing the job... Which in turn means they don't have the numbers available to do something else, somewhere else.

...

This is called "virtual attrition" and it plays a huge role in warfare. Like, 90% of what any armed force ever does is dedicated not to directly killing the enemy, but to reducing the enemy's strength, so that even if they still have numbers, it doesn't matter. Because they don't have supplies, or they're pinned down, or their troops are demoralized, or for some other reason they're punching below their weight.

Turning the enemy into a weakling is often easier and more effective than straight-up killing them.

The number of resources required to deal that damage doesn't become relevant until losses begin to inflicted on the enemy fighters. As far as I am aware, enemy fighter losses were not significant until long range fighter escort become available, with bombers killing few aircraft during an engagement.

Again, it isn't about how many fighters the guns kill. It's that if having the guns means that three or four enemy fighters only have as much killing power against you as one fighter would have against you without the guns, the guns are doing a great job. Because it means that if the enemy could stop you with one fighter per bomber before, now they'd need to send up three or four. Which means either they just plain don't have the fighters to stop as many bombers as they otherwise could, or they have to divert fighters from something else that they urgently need fighters for. The Germans never had enough planes to go around.

Sort of like how Germany used 1/3 of their total artillery production making flak guns to defend Germany from allied bomber raids. All that artillery and ammo would still have gotten made otherwise... and it would have been fired at someone else, somewhere, at some time. Probably to killier effect.

Now, up-armoring the planes and making them robust actually has the same virtual attrition effect, since it makes the enemy's attacks against the plane less effective too. But there's more than one way to reduce the enemy's ability to hurt you, and "shoot back" is pretty high on the list.

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