And since when have I suggested that the US summon shipgirls to accelerate their offensive schedule? The only thing I've said in the past few pages is that summoning some DD's might help with the current U-Boat predation, and that the flood of flattops is still a year off.
If you do want to know what I think, it's that shipgirls won't accelerate the US counterattack. If the US had lost a significant number of oilers or even scrapped them, then things might be different, but I think the US is only down like 2 at this point. Instead, they'd make the inevitable counterattack far stronger. Guadalcanal would be easier with a nigh-invincible walking artillery battery.
I'm picturing shipgirl California with night battle training in Ironbottom Sound and it is glorious. Not to mention smashing up those 15cm and 10cm artillery guns that gave the Marines considerable grief.
I'm picturing shipgirl California with night battle training in Ironbottom Sound and it is glorious. Not to mention smashing up those 15cm and 10cm artillery guns that gave the Marines considerable grief.
Except... very few of the things he knows, outside of concepts, are going to be useful from a technological perspective, and few of those. He can write all those down in a notebook, and go back to being at sea.
Something about how reactor cooling system durability is the most important safety part after auto-shutdown reactor types would be quite useful.
Also, he can tell them that the implosion bomb is far more efficient and WILL WORK. He can talk about how submarine hull forms evolved (since torpedoes are already programmed to turn after leaving the tube, why NOT put a big sonar dome in the bow and just calibrate the two torpedo banks differently???)
He can also talk about doped silicon with boron or aluminium and arsenic.
Then there's the combined arms:
Tank destroyer doctrine is at its heart pretty faulty (there were just about jobs a Chaffee had to do that a Hellcat couldn't do, which means Hellcats might have done better being doctrined as light tank role too, for fewer models and less maintenance complexity).
Armoured Personnel Carriers are just getting STARTED right about now. Even an M113-like box-on-tracks (i.e. take M3/M4 hull, move engine to front to the right of driver, eliminating the bow machine gun, and use the whole wide spacious back for infantry, maybe slap a couple machine guns operable by hatches in the top on top, with gun shields) would VASTLY improve the US Army's losses. If you keep a turret, consider this turret instead of the old Lee turret: Howitzer Motor Carriage M8 - Wikipedia That's better support than every other army for your mechanized infantry.
He can also emphasize the utility of self-propelled artillery... and maybe convince the M4 Sherman designers of the need for a squatter hull with more highly sloped armour. Preferably without the crankshaft diagonal through the fighting compartment (lowering it like the Hellcat is NOT that hard! Or maybe even use a frontal engine and rear turret to even the weight distribution out better!)
*You can tell I'm a rear turret enthusiast.
There are many, MANY things a modern person takes for granted in their Deep Memory (to borrow a term from Civ:BE) that were not obvious or well-known to be "good idea to pursue" at the time. Let alone someone who'd been through military school.
The advances that lead to the modern world are very much matters of details, details that Thompson will be woefully ignorant of. For instance, how do you make the steels that allow a modern jet engine to run reliably for hundreds to thousands of hours? What is the blade geometry and internal structure of an active-cooled natural gas turbine blade for 1900C firing temperatures? What alloys are those blades made of, and how do you manufacture them? That's just two examples.
Well, Frank Whittle has already got a prototype jet to fly in 1941. He got Rolls-Royce to make turbine engines that ran well and long enough for his purposes in 1943. So the knowledge is already out there. General Electric, Allison and Pratt and Whitney aren't all that far behind.
And it's going to be a real cat-and-mouse game with the "Rat Transport" supply runs of the IJN 2nd Destroyer Squadron, led by the previous commander of the IJN Surface Torpedo School, Raizo Tanaka.
Ship Girls vs Destroyer crews taught and led by the foremost expert on employing Type 93 torpedoes? That's going to be interesting!
That's my point. Thompson lacks the specialized knowledge to meaningfully accelerate technological development. All he has is conceptual knowledge, and the concepts are already out there. Thompson is in 1941, not 1841.
Something about how reactor cooling system durability is the most important safety part after auto-shutdown reactor types would be quite useful.
Also, he can tell them that the implosion bomb is far more efficient and WILL WORK. He can talk about how submarine hull forms evolved (since torpedoes are already programmed to turn after leaving the tube, why NOT put a big sonar dome in the bow and just calibrate the two torpedo banks differently???)
He can also talk about doped silicon with boron or aluminium and arsenic.
By how much? How much of a safety factor is required in reactor cooling systems? How long do they need to be able to run after shutdown to bring the reactor down to a safe temperature? It's all very well to say "cooling system durability is important". That and a dollar will get you a candy bar at your local grocery store. Maybe some chuckles if you're in the room with the reactor designers.
For doping: how is the adulterant added to the silicon matrix? How much is added? What ratios is it used in, and how are the manufacturing chambers built? Do the tools exist to build them in useful quantities? If not, how do you make those tools?
Once again, everything you've put forward is a concept that can be written down on a notebook in an afternoon. Anything more is an enormous amount of technical details that an engineer needs at the very least a bookshelf stuffed with reference materials to explain.
Honestly the Sherman's fine. The hull's sloped enough to make the effective frontal armor the same as that thin, flat frontplate of a Tiger I. Yeah, I am not joking.
Not to mention the more sloped the armor, the less internal space you have. And crew comfort is a priority for the US Army, because a soldier who can't move effectively is a soldier who can't fight effectively.
Although I do like your idea of making the Sherman into a Namer.
And since when have I suggested that the US summon shipgirls to accelerate their offensive schedule? The only thing I've said in the past few pages is that summoning some DD's might help with the current U-Boat predation, and that the flood of flattops is still a year off.
If you do want to know what I think, it's that shipgirls won't accelerate the US counterattack. If the US had lost a significant number of oilers or even scrapped them, then things might be different, but I think the US is only down like 2 at this point. Instead, they'd make the inevitable counterattack far stronger. Guadalcanal would be easier with a nigh-invincible walking artillery battery.
For doping: how is the adulterant added to the silicon matrix? How much is added? What ratios is it used in, and how are the manufacturing chambers built? Do the tools exist to build them in useful quantities? If not, how do you make those tools?
It took the combined brain power of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, along with the resources of Bell Labs to figure it out, and invent the transistor in 1947. That was enough for the three of them to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956.
Doubt Thompson is up to that level of knowledge in Solid State Physics.
And what makes you suspect Thompson's a nuclear engineer? He captained a DDG before the War broke out and he was catapulted into the past. He never touched a reactor in his life. Not one aboard a Nimitz, not one aboard a 688 or 774, nor any on solid ground. He's also untrained in the handling of nuclear weapons, either, considering that he's never stated to have served aboard a Boomer. It's unlikely that he'd know the finer details on how nukes kill cities other than "atoms get split, city vanishes, and a whole bunch of people die horribly."
I'm quite sure an old protected cruiser can delete a merchant raider's ability to fight and inflict mortal wounds within like one minute flat at 2 kilometers.
Yeah, but the engineers/scientists would still want to have him on speed dial to check up "Hey, do you happen to have any impression on ______" would be quite useful. AFTER a couple days of prodding him for everything they can prompt him into coughing up.
Just the "gaseous diffusion works" + "plutonium implosion works" and MAYBE "highly enriched uranium implosion works" is a HUGE saving on the Manhattan Project. Also, "BEWARE THE COMMIES" and, for post-war, "BEWARE LEADED GASOLINE"...
Also, a reclined tank driver position is an easy change that's superbly useful.
Um, no.
No.
NOOOOOOOO...
I'm going to flat out tell you it's at least a foot taller than it has to be.
If you shunt the turret to the back and engine to the front beside or in front of the driver (lay engine on its side, gearbox beside it, under the cramped front portion of the glacis, you can plausibly shorten the length by a foot too. It's too wide to go through British rail tunnels regardless, so that's not as much of a concern, and width should possibly be able to stay about the same. However, those are MINOR things compared to the GODDAMNED CRANKSHAFT:
See that drive shaft? The turret could be MUCH lower. Like this is just astoundingly bad given the Hellcat simply coupled it to a floor-level crankshaft...
For track tension distribution reasons, it's best to have front drive sprocket, which means IMHO that the most efficient layout is front engine, ideally next to driver but in front is acceptable... and if the engine is on its side (i.e. not standing with crankshaft vertical) in front of the driver, it allows for extreme sloping of the glacis even without a reclined driver position. The only problem then... is how the bloody hell you're supposed to maintain the engine.
I'm reasonably sure the old St. Louis Class as seen in World of Warships can, in shipgirl form, take on any non-shipgirl ship in the Axis navies short of battlecruiser classification and win. with enough surprise she can eat any non-shipgirl vessel for lunch (no torpedoes needed as DDs would need, just stand 5m away from the waterline and blasting away at it continuously untl the target sinks.... they ain't got nothing that can do serious damage to her up that close).
Trying to drop a 500-pound bomb from a dive bomber on a human sized target you need a direct hit to kill? Well, I suppose if you believe the USAAF's claims about heavy bombers level bombing against fleets at sea...
This is actually one case where an old protected cruiser shipgirl might succeed, considering Stier was forced to scuttle by Stephen Hopkins. However, I'd judge it as more trouble than it's worth, considering there's likely only a handful of those auxiliary cruisers left in action.
I'm reasonably sure the old St. Louis Class as seen in World of Warships can, in shipgirl form, take on any non-shipgirl ship in the Axis navies short of battlecruiser classification and win. with enough surprise she can eat any non-shipgirl vessel for lunch (no torpedoes needed as DDs would need, just stand 5m away from the waterline and blasting away at it continuously untl the target sinks.... they ain't got nothing that can do serious damage to her up that close).
Trying to drop a 500-pound bomb from a dive bomber on a human sized target you need a direct hit to kill? Well, I suppose if you believe the USAAF's claims about heavy bombers level bombing against fleets at sea...
Just the "gaseous diffusion works" + "plutonium implosion works" and MAYBE "highly enriched uranium implosion works" is a HUGE saving on the Manhattan Project. Also, "BEWARE THE COMMIES" and, for post-war, "BEWARE LEADED GASOLINE"...
Yeah, know what they're going to ask? "What membrane materials work for gaseous diffusion?""How are those manufactured?" "What viable alternatives are there to leaded gasoline?" "What data do you have showing implosion warheads work?"
The scientists at the Manhattan project are not going to risk everything on the word of a time traveling line officer without data to back it up.
You can't just lay an engine on its side like that. You have to do a major redesign of the cooling systems, the mountings, and the carbeurator (s?) at a minimum if you want a reliable engine. In the middle of a war. Without modern design tools. You also have to redesign a significant part of the tank chassis, design new production tooling, build new production tooling, rebuild your production floor, and partially retrain your labor force. Minimum timeframe:Six months.
All for very minor benefits, at the cost of the thousands of perfectly adequate (and in fact rather good, compared to what they're up against) tanks that can't be built while you're engaged in this poorly advised exercise in Internet munchkinry.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say you're designing a whole new tank, and up that time frame to a minimum of a year.
Just… how are you misconstructing my arguments? Simply knowing of a nuclear disaster does not mean one knows every intimate detail. Thompson is probably aware Chernobyl was due to negligence, yes, but because nukes aren't his thing, he's unlikely to know just how that negligence kicked off the partial meltdown that turned Pripyat into a ghost town. What part of that, and my above argument, do you not understand!?
And doctrine. Operational and tactical. Doctrine's the big one. That's what he's trained for, that's what he knows, and that's what he can explain in the properly excruciating detail.
Oh not this idiocy again. I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure this isn't fair to you since I think this is the first time you've brought it up, but it's been debunked several times.
Minimum time for the detail design plans for angled decks for the Essex class: One year. Minimum.
For better carrier planes, again, this is specialist knowledge that Thompson simply does not have. Particularly since many of the problems bringing new-generation carrier planes to the fleet were production problems, not design problems. And Thompson is going to be able to do between fuck-all and actively make things worse if he tries to intervene there.
Oh not this idiocy again. I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure this isn't fair to you since I think this is the first time you've brought it up, but it's been debunked several times.
Minimum time for the detail design plans for angled decks for the Essex class: One year. Minimum.
For better carrier planes, again, this is specialist knowledge that Thompson simply does not have. Particularly since many of the problems bringing new-generation carrier planes to the fleet were production problems, not design problems. And Thompson is going to be able to do between fuck-all and actively make things worse if he tries to intervene there.
With the angled deck, I was more thinking for the long-hull Essexes laid down after Pearl that wouldn't be delayed by the change. And the better planes doesn't need specific knowledge, just battle data, pilots' suggestions and 'can we please get something better than the worthless Devastators?'
With the angled deck, I was more thinking for the long-hull Essexes laid down after Pearl that wouldn't be delayed by the change. And the better planes doesn't need specific knowledge, just battle data, pilots' suggestions and 'can we please get something better than the worthless Devastators?'
With the angled deck, I was more thinking for the long-hull Essexes laid down after Pearl that wouldn't be delayed by the change. And the better planes doesn't need specific knowledge, just battle data, pilots' suggestions and 'can we please get something better than the worthless Devastators?'
Again, for the angled decks it's going to take a year just to finish the design changes, and the whole structure of the ship is being changed. This isn't something you can slap on at the last minute, you have to modify everything from the hangar armor up, and probably some stuff underneath the hangar deck too.
And the replacements for the Devastator are already in tbe pipeline, but there are engineering problems with production -Grumman is having difficulty with series production of the Avenger. Put simply, there is nothing that Thompson can do to accelerate deployment of the Avenger, and a lot he can do to slow it down, despite his best intentions.
