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More effort than my map
East Africa 1930: An ORBAT Quest
- Thread starter 4WheelSword
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I agree on this, but I think that is better if we use QF 2 pdr Pom-Poms in place of the 75mm.
Whe can purchase it throught the Italians and the Breda company: they license-manufactured a copy of it called the Breda Modello 1931.
What do you think?
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Considering the treaty with Japan will the British even sell us pompoms?
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I'd honestly be fine with some those Breda guns mostly because my homeland sweden bought some of em together with torpedo boats either before or during the war.
But we should make our own.
And yeah the Pom-Pom would probably do a better job as medium AA and as an anti-torpedo boat gun.
Edit: since it's been brought up that the British probably won't sell us Pom-Poms why don't we just get some 40mm/62 "BI" Type 91 guns which are basically Japanese Pom-Poms from The Great War.
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I've got a soft spot for Bofors but im cool with type 91s.
Such a heavily-armed gunboat is overkill, especially given that our primary threat in the short-term is Italy and they don't have any access to it whatsoever. For comparison, when the British sent gunboats to fight on Lake Tanganyika in WWI, they were armed with individual 47 mm guns.
The Hotchkiss is substantially worse than the Browning .50; I see no reason why we'd want to do that unless we intend to pull a Sweden and adopt the 13.2 mm Browning later-on (mostly because it gets those really spicy explosive bullets).
Likewise, the pom-pom is atrocious. I'd rather we wait until the Bofors 40 mm shows up. The Japanese were cycling the Type 91s out of service by 1935 because they were considered obsolescent and the Hotchkiss 25 (yes, that, infamously bad, Hotchkiss 25) was used to replace them.
If we're building boats for the lake, an equivalent to the American PGM-1 class gunboats would be more than sufficient, IMO. Edit: Reducing the range would give us a bit more weight to play with, so we could use a longer 3" gun, we could make the hull out of steel (we have more than enough for 1-2 ships), and it's probably easier to import some high-power diesels instead of trying to build VTEs and boilers.
The Hotchkiss is substantially worse than the Browning .50; I see no reason why we'd want to do that unless we intend to pull a Sweden and adopt the 13.2 mm Browning later-on (mostly because it gets those really spicy explosive bullets).
Likewise, the pom-pom is atrocious. I'd rather we wait until the Bofors 40 mm shows up. The Japanese were cycling the Type 91s out of service by 1935 because they were considered obsolescent and the Hotchkiss 25 (yes, that, infamously bad, Hotchkiss 25) was used to replace them.
If we're building boats for the lake, an equivalent to the American PGM-1 class gunboats would be more than sufficient, IMO. Edit: Reducing the range would give us a bit more weight to play with, so we could use a longer 3" gun, we could make the hull out of steel (we have more than enough for 1-2 ships), and it's probably easier to import some high-power diesels instead of trying to build VTEs and boilers.
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1 the British armed those gunboats the way they did by necessity not by choice...especially when you take into acount the big fish the germans had the so called Graf Von Goetzen which was armed with one 105mm, one 88m, and two 37mm revolver guns.
2 the Hotchkiss gun is available right now and the Japanese are going to start production of their own version of it in 35 and whilst M2 is being produced at the moment it is going to be in service with anyone until 33 witch means it's being tested which means that for all anyone in quest knows it could be a hunk a junk while the Hotchkiss gun by 31 is already in service with the Italians and the French.
3 Wikipedia says that the Bofors gun won't be a weapon suitable for production until 33 and the first towable carriage won't be available until 35.
Honestly the Type 91s could probably have stuck round until 45 if somewhat modernised...i'd say that the guns themselves weren't any wore then the 25mm what Type 91s needed where new mounts.
4 Honestly i think i agree with you're saying about the PGM-1.
(And i think even getting the Hotchkiss gun would be stretch without help from the Japanese)
The point is that anyone who sends a ship to the lake is not going to have huge guns. It's going to be something along the lines of what's already there. The Graf von Goetzen took guns off of a cruiser, and was a large, pre-existing ship. Italy's not gonna do that, and if we go to war with Britain, we have way bigger navy issues.
We don't have the ability to do anything with HMGs until 1933 or so anyways, we have other, higher priorities like LMGs, modern rifles, mortars, logistics stuff, and the like. That's a side concern when Italy could decide they want to take a bite out of us in '36. Same applies to the Bofors 40, and when it comes time to look at it, I think a 20 mm autocannon (like the Flak 30 or Oerlikon) would be a better choice since it's light enough to be moved around without being mounted on a truck and the cartridge can also serve as an anti-tank(ette) gun. Sure, it's not as strong for AA, but it's cheaper, easier to get where we need it, and would simplify logistics.
The Type 91 was hopelessly outdated by that point, the ballistics of the pom-pom are terrible. When looking at AA guns, it goes 40 mm Bofors > 37 mm (Flak 18, M1, and 61-K all have relative pros and cons) >> 2 pdr.
So getting to this late and it looks like people are set on carcano or arisaka but why not do what most people did I think and go for 8mm Mauser. It's a proven rifle cartridge and rifle and if we want to stay around the 6.5 cartridge range why not the Swedish 6.5 it's a great caliber for shooting and since the gun industry in our country needs to be built up and kept local why not try and just step away wholesale from the carcano and Arisaka.
We after all have around a decade to replace our army's rifles and standardize what we want our police and national guard equivalent to use and we can sell off the rifles we don't want to buy more new ones. And if we want to appease our Japanese masters why instead buy up rifles that will be outdated soon and instead make bigger purchases that will stick around a lot longer like expansions to our naval industry or cannons for shore installations. Big media picture moments that would garner a lot more goodwill than any amount of rifle purchases could just for the reason that they are more photogenic for politicians to wave around
We after all have around a decade to replace our army's rifles and standardize what we want our police and national guard equivalent to use and we can sell off the rifles we don't want to buy more new ones. And if we want to appease our Japanese masters why instead buy up rifles that will be outdated soon and instead make bigger purchases that will stick around a lot longer like expansions to our naval industry or cannons for shore installations. Big media picture moments that would garner a lot more goodwill than any amount of rifle purchases could just for the reason that they are more photogenic for politicians to wave around
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Yes, at least I think, as I remember now the Anglo-British relations didn't really saur until the Seizing of Manchuria.
I agree with you.
That's another viable way.
At least in the way I see it, the Mauser is a good cartridge, but a too powerful one. Moreover, the tooling to make the Mauser or the 6.5m Swedish couldn't really be purchased easily by us. In the meantime, we can easily purchase the surplus tooling for the 6.5mm Carcano (in 1938 the Regio Esercito started switching to the 7.35mm cartridge) or, more difficulty, the 6.5mm Arisaka (in 1940 the IJA adopted the 7.7mm Arisaka, but didn't really start switching from the 6.5mm Arisaka and both the cartridge stayed in service in parallel).
That is another reason for switching to the 6.5mm Carcano for me: we don't wanna entangle ourselves with the nightmare of a logistician that was the Japanese cartridges and the 6.5mm Carcano will be more readily available, the Italians are at our border and in WW2 we will likely fight together before the British conquest us.
We will not receive any substantial ground help from the Japanese.
Moreover, user Inbred Martian proposed a way to accumulate goodwill from our Japanese overlords.
That's a good way of doing things: don't adopt things that we will be likely to replace as soon as the Japanese stop being our overlords, appease them by purchasing things that will be used in the long run.
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one of the main reasons that i would want to switch to something like 6.5 swede or 8mm mauser is because of the availability of machine guns that we could buy. After all we can buy the tooling to build our own bullets and rifles much more easily and in far greater numbers than we can for machine guns which will have to be imported for really whatever round we choose, the swedes and germans have a relative glut of good and advanced machine guns, semi autos, and automatic rifles in these calibers. Plus a major plus i see with buying swede or german is to hopefully bring in investors from those countries to set up a factory to their standards to produce locally the rifles and bullets.
plus from some light digging it looks like the swedes will even be coming out with another 6.5 rifle in a year or 2 and the germs of course will be re arming fast in the coming years and would be looking to sell their ww1 surplus for cash or barter since they need as much money as possible for their re armament program
edit: misread the date on the swede rifle but we can buy BARs, m1917 and some upcoming swedish designs for automatic rifles and machines guns
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Not a bad idea... I'd say however that I prefer to adopt the 6.5mm Swedish, together with the 8mm Swedish as a long-range cartridge, rather than the 8mm Mauser.
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So, following my previous post, here is my map of Reewiin with the territories I think the nation claims: mainly because the majority of the population of them is of the same ethnic groups as the one in our nation.
Legend:
Legend:
- DARK BLUE LINE, current borders
- RED LINE, borders of the claimed territories
-⭐Bur Gaabo, capital city
- ◼️ Kismayo, trade port
-A: Lake Turkana, western border
-B: Mount Marsabit, inactive volcano
-C: Wabi Jubba river, eastern border
-D: Tana River, south-western border
-E: Dawa River, eastern part of the northern border
-Green: Claimed Because of the Samburu People majority that inhabits the region
-Yellow: Claimed Because of the Somali and Borana Population majority in the region
The Map:
What do you think?
Legend:
Legend:
- DARK BLUE LINE, current borders
- RED LINE, borders of the claimed territories
-⭐Bur Gaabo, capital city
- ◼️ Kismayo, trade port
-A: Lake Turkana, western border
-B: Mount Marsabit, inactive volcano
-C: Wabi Jubba river, eastern border
-D: Tana River, south-western border
-E: Dawa River, eastern part of the northern border
-Green: Claimed Because of the Samburu People majority that inhabits the region
-Yellow: Claimed Because of the Somali and Borana Population majority in the region
The Map:
What do you think?
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[X] Plan: Foundations for Maneuver (Manufacturing Remix)
We need horses, we need a functioning national guard, and we need an unified caliber for our rifles. It should be a Japanese one since that's who our overlords are but the exact details don't matter that much other than us doing it in the first place. We also need those horses and better logistics. This is a solid plan to get the ball rolling.
We need horses, we need a functioning national guard, and we need an unified caliber for our rifles. It should be a Japanese one since that's who our overlords are but the exact details don't matter that much other than us doing it in the first place. We also need those horses and better logistics. This is a solid plan to get the ball rolling.
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However, any conversion of a weapon chambered in any of those cartridges from one to another should be relatively easy: we just need a magazine that reliably feeds, a new bolt with a fitting bolt face, and a new barrel chambered for the new round.
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Is there sufficient improvement to justify the effort of switching over all our 6.5 mm Arisaka guns to 6.5 mm Swedish or 6.5 mm Carcano? I'm not concerned with appeasing the Japanese, but we already have a decent number of 6.5 mm Arisaka guns in the Army, so it'd save us a bit of effort to not have to rework them to a different round.
That said, looking at the gun breakdown, reforming the carabinieri will almost certianly involve a massive procurement of new guns to replace our ancient Remington Rolling Block and Type 14 rifles. If we're making the guns domestically (and we really should - just look at the story behind the Arisaka Type I to see why we shouldn't depend on Japan) then we could presumably cherry-pick whatever features and cartridges we want for our new service rifle.
Edit: after a bit of digging (I know nothing about small calibre arms lmao) it seems like the Arisaka is the only one to have a spitzer bullet in 1930? Wouldn't that make it a naturally superior choice?
That said, looking at the gun breakdown, reforming the carabinieri will almost certianly involve a massive procurement of new guns to replace our ancient Remington Rolling Block and Type 14 rifles. If we're making the guns domestically (and we really should - just look at the story behind the Arisaka Type I to see why we shouldn't depend on Japan) then we could presumably cherry-pick whatever features and cartridges we want for our new service rifle.
Edit: after a bit of digging (I know nothing about small calibre arms lmao) it seems like the Arisaka is the only one to have a spitzer bullet in 1930? Wouldn't that make it a naturally superior choice?
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Yes, long-term gains: if we choose to adopt the 6.5mm Arisaka, I expect that we will drop the cartridge around 1945. If we adopt 6.5mm Carcano or 6.5mm Swedish I think that they can be kept until the end of the century with only minor improvement.
What do you think?
Edit: because giving a spitzer bullet to a round-nose ammunition is easier than removing a rim from a rimmed or semi-rimmed cartridge.
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So, seeing how pretty much all the votes continue to go to "Plan: Foundation for Maneuver", can I ask this:
What is wrong with my plan, "Plan: Lay The Foundation and Get Our Priorities Straight", that is so unpopular?
P.S.: sorry again for being annoying (and maybe egocentric), but I really want to know what I got wrong...
What is wrong with my plan, "Plan: Lay The Foundation and Get Our Priorities Straight", that is so unpopular?
P.S.: sorry again for being annoying (and maybe egocentric), but I really want to know what I got wrong...
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Thinking more on it I think that going 6,5 Swede for our main service rifle and (maybe) machine gun would work wonders and most importantly give us an in with purchasing weapons from Sweden before the reveal the best multipurpose cannon around, the Bofors. After all it's going on sale in 34 I believe so if we want to pick some up, which we absolutely should given their versatility, getting an in with the Swedes now is a good idea.
It helps that the 6.5 Swede is already a good bullet that shoots flat and accurate with minimal recoil compared to most rifles, a good quality to have when you are training people how to use the thing in mass
Edit: I said maybe for machine gun because I do believe that eventually we should get something a little heavier but for now streamlining our logistics should take center stage.
I honestly think we should do something along the lines of
9mm: for a pistol and smg
6.5 Swede: Rifle, lmg/saw/bar equivalent
.50 cal: heavy machine gun/light aa/aircraft armament/torpedo boat armament
Bofors 40 mm: main static AA for cities, mobile aa/apc vehicle armament/ heaviest ship born cannon weapon for lake and coastal defense
This way we streamline all our major armament projects and programs in 4 calibers meaning we only have to build 4 factories or factory types to supply our country. Things like tank cannons or artillery in general will probably have to wait till after WW2 is over to have a hope of being produced locally and have to be imported into the country in the interim. Even the Bofors will probably have to be unless we can score a deal for the Swedes to help us build a factory as a sort of Africa Bofors branch so they can focus Swedish factory time towards European customers.
Edit 2: thinking it over even more we might be able to get the japense to split the cost for a Bofors facotry 3 ways with us the Swedes and them due to our decent local heavy industry, for the area, and them wanting to get a good weapon at a discount or set amount going forward and of course the PR of being a good little colonial master building up their puppet and what not
It helps that the 6.5 Swede is already a good bullet that shoots flat and accurate with minimal recoil compared to most rifles, a good quality to have when you are training people how to use the thing in mass
Edit: I said maybe for machine gun because I do believe that eventually we should get something a little heavier but for now streamlining our logistics should take center stage.
I honestly think we should do something along the lines of
9mm: for a pistol and smg
6.5 Swede: Rifle, lmg/saw/bar equivalent
.50 cal: heavy machine gun/light aa/aircraft armament/torpedo boat armament
Bofors 40 mm: main static AA for cities, mobile aa/apc vehicle armament/ heaviest ship born cannon weapon for lake and coastal defense
This way we streamline all our major armament projects and programs in 4 calibers meaning we only have to build 4 factories or factory types to supply our country. Things like tank cannons or artillery in general will probably have to wait till after WW2 is over to have a hope of being produced locally and have to be imported into the country in the interim. Even the Bofors will probably have to be unless we can score a deal for the Swedes to help us build a factory as a sort of Africa Bofors branch so they can focus Swedish factory time towards European customers.
Edit 2: thinking it over even more we might be able to get the japense to split the cost for a Bofors facotry 3 ways with us the Swedes and them due to our decent local heavy industry, for the area, and them wanting to get a good weapon at a discount or set amount going forward and of course the PR of being a good little colonial master building up their puppet and what not
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I think is the case to add another cartridge:the 8mm Swede for long range machineguns and sniper rifles
Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
I still think sticking with the 6.5mm Arisaka will be the best for cost, political factors, and ease of logistics. Most of our regulars use the 6.5mm Arisaka rifle and having to either rebore our existing stock or buy entirely new rifles is going to be cost prohibitive, especially when we would rather spend that money on artillery and modern machine guns, etc. I don't have an opinion on cartridge performance, since I think the point is ultimately academic. Small arms are small arms.
(As you address) at the start of the quest, people voted for us to have a large heavy industry and steel production. Local production of relatively simple artillery (mortars, light howitzers, etc.) would play to our strengths. As well, it'll be very difficult to import stuff during WWII. Either we're on the side of the Allies, which means we've cut ties with Italy and Japan, and thus need to have entirely local production, or we're on the side of the Axis and completely cut off from foreign supply (both Italy and Japan are overwhelmed with their own issues).
While the Bofors is good, I am somewhat concerned with how cumbersome it is combined with being slightly overkill. A vehicle-mounted 40 mm is around 8-10 tons. That's a major logistical burden for the bulk of our army, which still uses human porters for resupply (and is switching to animal-based logistics, which still can't support that). Ground-based AA at the level we're looking at is mostly a deterrent to planes doing low-level CAS; 20 mm fire is about as good as 40 mm for that. We could throw them in something like the Pansarbil m/39 or Sd.Kfz. 222 (or tracked equivalent), at which point we'd be able to use them for direct fire, anti-tank work, and light armoured support with a very cheap platform. For defending cities, a 75-90 mm AA gun is IMO better since it can be fitted with time fuzed ammunition.
That said, these are all future issues, IMO? At best, we're probably going to be looking at "build a factory and select/design a rifle for it to outfit the reformed carabinieri" in the intermediate term.
That's similar to my opinion, knowing very little about the relevant guns. My only hesitancy is that we're going to have to get tens of thousands of new guns anyways and reboring the Arisakas could potentially be an easy conversion, so if there is an actual advantage, switching over when we re-equip the Carabinieri would be smart (also, when/if we switch to domestic production of the rifles, we should try and throw together the best features of a bunch of foreign designs and simplify manufacture as much as possible).
Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
With rifles, unless we do a totally native design, we'll probably be looking at some licensing costs - and licensing a foreign rifle would probably be quicker than trying to design a native one from scratch, is my main thought.
With regards to AA, I think 20mm for man-portability (or mule portability) is better for our purposes than the 40mm variants, definitely.
WRT to LMGs, the Madsen in 6.5mm might be a good choice for us. Relatively inexpensive and we can probably get the license for it.