(NOTE BE NEW READERS: read the thread. There's a lot that's good and doesn't get threadmarked...
Strategic Arms Quest 3/2: Armor Edition
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Contest 1: Team Creation
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
(NOTE BE NEW READERS: read the thread. There's a lot that's good and doesn't get threadmarked because there's not enough information to get a threadmark)
Your name is Hauptmann Otto von Rabe, late of the 2/5 Saxe-Gotha artillery regiment of the Irmionic Empire, and you've gotten the most annoying call of your life. After someone had been calling around for veterans of the current fracas (you could hardly imagine calling the continent-wide disaster that had pitted the Werser Crowns against literally everyone except you a "fracas" except in the lightest terms) they'd found you. With a grand total of four years in the artillery and a year in the pioneers with friends in the Logistics Department, you looked like a great opportunity, especially after Oberst Mikhail von Waldersee II recommended you for your great experience in fighting the new and rather deadly war-wagons of Balkichivian.
The fact these weapons were stolen wholesale in a stunning breakthrough by some barely armed men thrown out the ass end of an airplane is beyond your pay grade though, and your artillery battery just happened to be well-supplied enough to batter the everliving snot out of them when they tried to break through the front in your sector.
Either way, you were in the hospital with a bad leg that kept you out of field command for a few months, and a large pile of money that von Walersee V owed to you in some rather cutthroat games of poker. Now his grandfather had been called in to clean the slate up and get you out of everyone's hair by sending you back to Luneburg, for your new role as head of the testing commission on developing your own breakthrough vehicles to get out of the damn stalemate fronts. There's still some fluid parts of the front off in the northeast where the Balkhs got stuck between the Irmiones and the Werser Crowns, but most of the lines were locking up into thick trench forests and mud.
While you were recovering, it was time to assemble your advisorial team. According to dispatches from Generalleutnant Siger, your new head of command chain, you were under Major Gieschalft who had been even more seriously injured than you (landmines, damn them) and was probably going to be less than useful. Still, you had six advisorial slots to choose from, before the Major finally got off his laundnum and read the paperwork you sent him to sign.
CHOOSE YOUR TEAM
[] Pyotr Falkenovichs: A Balkchivian national who emigrated after a scandal in the Werser crowns after his exile from home, this man is rumored to be an intelligence expert.
[] Magnus von Eberhart: An infantry officer from 3/7 Luneberg, Magnus has experience in assaulting trenches and holding positions.
[] Thomas Wanderer: A mechanic and motors expert, Thomas knows engines and transmissions like nobody's business.
[] Karl Adler: A weapons designer and structural engineer borrowed from Skoda Werke, Karl has been working so far on trains and train repair systems.
[] Leopold Benz: An older gentleman in the aviation industry, Leopold has untold amounts of experience in making sure things don't fall apart when they shouldn't.
[] Conrad Fenrus: A cavalry commander with the 1/4 "Schlangenesser" regiment, this officer is incredibly familiar what little exists of breakthrough tactics in this day and age on the open plains of the West Irromedes.
[] Halbricht Udst: A Seebatalion officer injured during the Raid at Dervonport, Udst has been involved in some of the thickest fighting in the war, including a short stint "volunteering" with the Weser Crown Seebatalions.
[] Mosten Gotha: A representative from Thryssen, Gotha is an industrial expert and is most likely be the person most likely to know how much of what you can build
[] Fdwbl. Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Wesser Crowns breakthrough vehicle commander, Schwarzenegger claims to be familiar with the AV-3 (the production Werser breakthrough vehicle) in all respects and matters.
[] Anne-Maria Todbringer: A wealthy socialite and widow of the late industrialist Karl Todbringer, Anne-Maria has a wealth of contacts and friends in high society.
Your name is Hauptmann Otto von Rabe, late of the 2/5 Saxe-Gotha artillery regiment of the Irmionic Empire, and you've gotten the most annoying call of your life. After someone had been calling around for veterans of the current fracas (you could hardly imagine calling the continent-wide disaster that had pitted the Werser Crowns against literally everyone except you a "fracas" except in the lightest terms) they'd found you. With a grand total of four years in the artillery and a year in the pioneers with friends in the Logistics Department, you looked like a great opportunity, especially after Oberst Mikhail von Waldersee II recommended you for your great experience in fighting the new and rather deadly war-wagons of Balkichivian.
The fact these weapons were stolen wholesale in a stunning breakthrough by some barely armed men thrown out the ass end of an airplane is beyond your pay grade though, and your artillery battery just happened to be well-supplied enough to batter the everliving snot out of them when they tried to break through the front in your sector.
Either way, you were in the hospital with a bad leg that kept you out of field command for a few months, and a large pile of money that von Walersee V owed to you in some rather cutthroat games of poker. Now his grandfather had been called in to clean the slate up and get you out of everyone's hair by sending you back to Luneburg, for your new role as head of the testing commission on developing your own breakthrough vehicles to get out of the damn stalemate fronts. There's still some fluid parts of the front off in the northeast where the Balkhs got stuck between the Irmiones and the Werser Crowns, but most of the lines were locking up into thick trench forests and mud.
While you were recovering, it was time to assemble your advisorial team. According to dispatches from Generalleutnant Siger, your new head of command chain, you were under Major Gieschalft who had been even more seriously injured than you (landmines, damn them) and was probably going to be less than useful. Still, you had six advisorial slots to choose from, before the Major finally got off his laundnum and read the paperwork you sent him to sign.
CHOOSE YOUR TEAM
[] Pyotr Falkenovichs: A Balkchivian national who emigrated after a scandal in the Werser crowns after his exile from home, this man is rumored to be an intelligence expert.
[] Magnus von Eberhart: An infantry officer from 3/7 Luneberg, Magnus has experience in assaulting trenches and holding positions.
[] Thomas Wanderer: A mechanic and motors expert, Thomas knows engines and transmissions like nobody's business.
[] Karl Adler: A weapons designer and structural engineer borrowed from Skoda Werke, Karl has been working so far on trains and train repair systems.
[] Leopold Benz: An older gentleman in the aviation industry, Leopold has untold amounts of experience in making sure things don't fall apart when they shouldn't.
[] Conrad Fenrus: A cavalry commander with the 1/4 "Schlangenesser" regiment, this officer is incredibly familiar what little exists of breakthrough tactics in this day and age on the open plains of the West Irromedes.
[] Halbricht Udst: A Seebatalion officer injured during the Raid at Dervonport, Udst has been involved in some of the thickest fighting in the war, including a short stint "volunteering" with the Weser Crown Seebatalions.
[] Mosten Gotha: A representative from Thryssen, Gotha is an industrial expert and is most likely be the person most likely to know how much of what you can build
[] Fdwbl. Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Wesser Crowns breakthrough vehicle commander, Schwarzenegger claims to be familiar with the AV-3 (the production Werser breakthrough vehicle) in all respects and matters.
[] Anne-Maria Todbringer: A wealthy socialite and widow of the late industrialist Karl Todbringer, Anne-Maria has a wealth of contacts and friends in high society.
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Tactics 1
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Current breakthrough doctrine is to suppress the everloving shit out of known MG nests, start dropping a barrage on their heads, and walk the barrage forward while you try to squat in the enemy trench lines long enough to reload and steal anything not nailed down before advancing or retreating. According to heresay, the Balkhs have been fortifying in deapth up to five or six hundred yards back from the front so if everything goes absolutely tits-up they can use volley fire to create beaten zones while the artillery gets involved.
That's what the rumor mill says, though. The hospital you're in doesn't get a lot of turnover, though.
What information you've gotten from your (very few) friends from the Academy that are in the cavalry is alternatively cheering or disheartening. Not many of the units involved on either side can keep a strong supply line going in the plains regions, so most units are dispersed around water sources and trying desperately to find where the enemy's supply routes are to raid them. Command has a rough plan to use this area to make an end-run flank on the enemy, but so far the results aren't prromising since they can't breach each other's actually defended strong points regularly.
The current armored cars (Raeder 9, has a HMG on it) can't really reliably get across No Man's Land, but in mobile fronts less restricted geographically they tend to do well until they run into a force with rifle grenades or a good heavy machine gun section, wherin the spalling eventually kills the engine and therfore the car.
Contest 1: RFQ
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
After developing the ability to stump around on your cane from room to room in the hospital, the dossiers caught up with you. The letters you'd sent out to your 'design team' who would help you put this all together had come back positive across the board. Now you had to deal with the mail. Christ, the mail.
First on the list, von Eberhart. He'd been in one of the Lunesburg regiments, which had generally fared okay in the war. Not a lot of big advances, but they'd been at the Saar, so they had gotten beat up by the Balkhs before. After finding your reading glasses for the cramped handwriting, the results were pretty clear: von Eberhart didn't really care what you came up with as long as it was rifle-proof. Saar had proved that machine guns that were dug in could shred the everloving shit out of infantry on the advance (his words) and more importantly that trying to advance machine guns was really hard. As long as the breakthrough vehicle could sit there and soak up fire while the infantry dragged up their MG.52s to actually hold their ground with, von Eberhart would call it good.
Wanderer was another matter entirely. After one letter fairly exploded into a list of schematics and diagrams in what you weren't quite sure wasn't a murder attempt, you got to the meat of it. Fortunately, what Wanderer doesn't know he knows he doesn't know- and what he knows are transmissions and engines. Right of the bat, the main recommendation is to avoid a wheeled vehicle and go for continuous track to handle rough conditions, and go for something with double clutches independent of each other and a main clutch, one engine (he was very insistent about this) and for maneuvering some disk… brake… things… that honestly you didn't understand and really didn't want to. The end result was you had an excellent bullshit detector, at least.
That got you down to the letters headed with the Skoda Werke symbol, and a whole nother batch of headaches that had you going for the wine. Adler might not have been as energetic as Wanderer, but he certainly had a lot of experience working on armored trains, and was uncomfortably blunt with what you could expect to get. Anything more than ten milimeters of armor in a plate was probably a scam, and whatever armor that you used would be best used on the bow, because if this wasn't an artillery target then Adler would give you his granddaughter for a week. Gun-armed sponsons would probably be where most of the firepower would be, but they'd increase weight hideously. Most importantly, Adler sent you the dimensions for standard Landwere flatbed cars, so whatever you bought could be rail transported, him being very doubtful of those newfangled internal combustion engines and suggesting going back to a hot-bulb for reliabilities sakes.
You'd finally gotten out of the hospital when Benz got up to you. While he might have been an aviator by trade, he knew quite a lot of projects and systems to get and keep an internal combustion engine running. Unfortunately, that's where his useful experience ended, which made you more than a little annoyed. At least you got lunch out of it. After handing him a business card from Wanderer, you limped back home to your new, and painfully sterile, apartment for the night.
Gotha was another set of letters and telegrams, unfortunately. While you could extract blood from a stone, it would be easier than getting this man to commit to hard numbers for a request for information prior to a contract. Numbers flexed all over the map, from engines to steel sheeting to guns to transmissions. You barely got him to cough up an amount of track they could spit out, and Thryssen corporate dodged every attempt you had to nail them down. If you had your battery with you, things would be a good bit different, but shelling an office building was frowned upon heavily in wartime.
Your meeting with Fdwbl. Schwarzenegger went much better, thankfully. The man was loud, brash, and had the worst Weser accent you'd heard in years, but his experiences were fairly valid for the purposes of gathering information. The AV-3 was a cantankerous beast, requiring a crew of nine for the two 5cm guns and four Frankengastch light machine guns to be operated. It was cramped, stank, and yelling was the only means of communication outside of battle. What little armor there was topped out at a centimeter and a half, and the machines would experience failures at the drop of a hat or shell casing. Once the guns started firing, the only reliable way to communicate was a butchered set of Morse signals to be beaten on one's shoulder, and crews lived and died in leather and chainmail armor to protect them from the vehicle itself. Practically you could only expect the vehicles to make it a few dozen meters before breaking down, at which point they would most likely be hosed with fire until dead. By the time you were done, your notepad was full of whiskey stains and scrawling, you'd exchanged addresses for future mail, and parted ways amicably.
With the meat of your advice received, it was time to write your requests for quotation. Your testing budget had a few hundred Kroner in it, thankfully, so you could get started with any ancillary research independent of Headquarters if you needed more information.
(Since this is your RFQ, voting is BY PLAN ONLY. If you need information that wouldn't be regularly available {ex: how many hours is our 8-cylinder engine good for?} you get ONE voting line to research this in from your budget. QM can invalidate any research project or autofinish it because it would be accessible knowledge.)
First on the list, von Eberhart. He'd been in one of the Lunesburg regiments, which had generally fared okay in the war. Not a lot of big advances, but they'd been at the Saar, so they had gotten beat up by the Balkhs before. After finding your reading glasses for the cramped handwriting, the results were pretty clear: von Eberhart didn't really care what you came up with as long as it was rifle-proof. Saar had proved that machine guns that were dug in could shred the everloving shit out of infantry on the advance (his words) and more importantly that trying to advance machine guns was really hard. As long as the breakthrough vehicle could sit there and soak up fire while the infantry dragged up their MG.52s to actually hold their ground with, von Eberhart would call it good.
Wanderer was another matter entirely. After one letter fairly exploded into a list of schematics and diagrams in what you weren't quite sure wasn't a murder attempt, you got to the meat of it. Fortunately, what Wanderer doesn't know he knows he doesn't know- and what he knows are transmissions and engines. Right of the bat, the main recommendation is to avoid a wheeled vehicle and go for continuous track to handle rough conditions, and go for something with double clutches independent of each other and a main clutch, one engine (he was very insistent about this) and for maneuvering some disk… brake… things… that honestly you didn't understand and really didn't want to. The end result was you had an excellent bullshit detector, at least.
That got you down to the letters headed with the Skoda Werke symbol, and a whole nother batch of headaches that had you going for the wine. Adler might not have been as energetic as Wanderer, but he certainly had a lot of experience working on armored trains, and was uncomfortably blunt with what you could expect to get. Anything more than ten milimeters of armor in a plate was probably a scam, and whatever armor that you used would be best used on the bow, because if this wasn't an artillery target then Adler would give you his granddaughter for a week. Gun-armed sponsons would probably be where most of the firepower would be, but they'd increase weight hideously. Most importantly, Adler sent you the dimensions for standard Landwere flatbed cars, so whatever you bought could be rail transported, him being very doubtful of those newfangled internal combustion engines and suggesting going back to a hot-bulb for reliabilities sakes.
You'd finally gotten out of the hospital when Benz got up to you. While he might have been an aviator by trade, he knew quite a lot of projects and systems to get and keep an internal combustion engine running. Unfortunately, that's where his useful experience ended, which made you more than a little annoyed. At least you got lunch out of it. After handing him a business card from Wanderer, you limped back home to your new, and painfully sterile, apartment for the night.
Gotha was another set of letters and telegrams, unfortunately. While you could extract blood from a stone, it would be easier than getting this man to commit to hard numbers for a request for information prior to a contract. Numbers flexed all over the map, from engines to steel sheeting to guns to transmissions. You barely got him to cough up an amount of track they could spit out, and Thryssen corporate dodged every attempt you had to nail them down. If you had your battery with you, things would be a good bit different, but shelling an office building was frowned upon heavily in wartime.
Your meeting with Fdwbl. Schwarzenegger went much better, thankfully. The man was loud, brash, and had the worst Weser accent you'd heard in years, but his experiences were fairly valid for the purposes of gathering information. The AV-3 was a cantankerous beast, requiring a crew of nine for the two 5cm guns and four Frankengastch light machine guns to be operated. It was cramped, stank, and yelling was the only means of communication outside of battle. What little armor there was topped out at a centimeter and a half, and the machines would experience failures at the drop of a hat or shell casing. Once the guns started firing, the only reliable way to communicate was a butchered set of Morse signals to be beaten on one's shoulder, and crews lived and died in leather and chainmail armor to protect them from the vehicle itself. Practically you could only expect the vehicles to make it a few dozen meters before breaking down, at which point they would most likely be hosed with fire until dead. By the time you were done, your notepad was full of whiskey stains and scrawling, you'd exchanged addresses for future mail, and parted ways amicably.
With the meat of your advice received, it was time to write your requests for quotation. Your testing budget had a few hundred Kroner in it, thankfully, so you could get started with any ancillary research independent of Headquarters if you needed more information.
(Since this is your RFQ, voting is BY PLAN ONLY. If you need information that wouldn't be regularly available {ex: how many hours is our 8-cylinder engine good for?} you get ONE voting line to research this in from your budget. QM can invalidate any research project or autofinish it because it would be accessible knowledge.)
Discord Invite Link
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Because y'all want to talk tanks, you can talk tanks in real time with real people.
Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers
Say hello to Tanks.
Last edited:
Contest 1: Current Entrants
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
After sending out your Request for Quotes, you had about two days to take it easy in your apartment and get used to Luneberg, capital of the Iriomic Empire. The food was excelent, the wine was good, and they even spoke one of the less headache-inducing varieties of Eromes for day to day use.
Then the shit hit your desk and you had to duck for cover, because whew boy it was about to start flying thick in here.
First up was the (I)AV-4; a license production model of the Werser's own AV-3 breakthrough vehicle built by Thryssen. Vaguely lozenge-shaped, it had been upgraded slightly to meet your specifications of a seperate engine compartment and increased protection to allow operators to work without their heavy protective gear. With a twelve-millimeter front plate and six-millimeter sides, it had proven itself to be resistant to rifle fire at effectively point-blank range from the bow, as well as the sides. For weapons, they carried two older 55mm guns cut down to forty calibers to meet train carrying requirements, as well as six Schneider machine guns in double mounts. It used one V8 inline internal combustion spark-fired gasoline engine, and had four 150-liter tanks for fuel mounted high in the frame to allow for gravity feed. Two were made available for independent testing.
Next was a domestic design, happily enough. The GK-1 was designed and built by Reinhardt Industries, located in the northern empire near the Wesser border. Where the (I)AV-4 was very lozenge-y, the GK-1 planned on handling trenches mostly by sheer stubbornness, having a long track base and a very rear-heavy design so half the vehicle could overhang the trench, wherin the front tracks would then pull it up. Aside from that, it's boat-ish hull seemed very likely to deflect fire, with a composite 16mm plate in the front and 8mm plates everywhere except the engine compartment, weighed down by the same plates as the bow. Reinhardt says its capable of crossing an infantry trench without issue, but the representative didn't have data on what trenches it crossed. Arms-wise, it had a short-barrel 75mm bow gun, as well as three Mg.58 machine guns in hull mounts. For propulsion, it uses a large three-cylinder hot bulb engine by Ursus, equipped with an automatic bulb-warmer to allow the engines to be in a sealed compartment. With three 200-litre tanks carrying heavy bunker oil, the designers claimed the vertible landship could run for ten hours, and idle for an indefinite time if the tanks were refilled with the engine running. One prototype with boilerplate armor was provided, as well as one preproduction model for testing.
Last up was the… radical… design proposal by Wanderer (who had no shame in shilling it to you over dinner) based around his new compression-ignition engine by some lunatics referred to only as "Rudolf and Vinny", a Iriom who'd grown up with his Kuba family over there until before the last war started between the Balkhs and Wersers started up and his rather… dynamic… helper who apparently had more muscles than even Schwarzenegger and could toss engine blocks like a shotput. The vehicle in question was supposed to be a 'vehiclette', a three-and-change ton scooter propelled by a nine-cylinder internal combustion compression fired engine. Considering it only had a crew of two lying on their stomachs, one to drive and the other to fire the Mg.58, you couldn't be surprised by the designation! Still, what it might lack in size, it made up for in armor- a fourteen millimeter bow sheet, an additional 6mm mantlet over the gun, and seven millimeter sides. More importantly, it could nigh-on stand on its tail in a trench, and climb its way out that way- and Wanderer had photographs to prove it, even if the trenches were a tad on the small side. The engines would be built by Wanderer AG, the hulls would be cast nearly whole by Thryssen, and final assembly would happen in the Daimler Panzerfahrzeug facility. Unfortunately, Wanderer didn't have much to give you for testing: 'only' four prototype models, two pre-production models with boilerplate, and one 'production' model with a hand-cast hull done by an old foundry outside of Thorn.
Once you got your legs under you from the reviews, you obviously needed to do some testing. For this, you tapped on your two military advisors.
von Eberhart had a frankly simplistic view on armored vehicle testing, one you wished you could so blithely share. Run the 'tank' (A shorthand from Schwarzenager, since it was like being in a metal tank with a hundred gnomes banging on it with hammers) until it broke, shoot the guns until they blew, and repeat in various orders and variations until you knew about how well they worked. If you had a spare one when that was done, shoot the shit out of it with whatever was handy (including other tanks) and see what happened to some sides of pork in there in various states of dress and armoring.
Schwarzenegger had a very different opinion of testing. Endurance testing was all well and good, but the tanks needed to be subjected to enemy fire, and lots of it. Machine guns, rifles, small bore artillery, large bore artillery, it didn't matter- apply bullet until the tank broke down and stop, end of story. The guns and engine could be presumed to work (more accurately, it would break down anyway) and the capabilities to be repaired with and without a repair crew needed to be evaluated. He was especially aggravated with poor track design, claiming that if you expected them not to get stolen after a failed assault then the crew themselves needed to be able to re-track the tank in less than a half-hour. Apparently, the Balkhs provincial troops thought the tank-drivers were some sort of demon, and would attack a downed tank ferociously and attempt to set it on fire, which afterwards the regular troops would tow back to Headquarters for restoration. It certainly painted an interesting picture of the front, to say the least.
Right now, though, you had to get a plan together for testing. What was your plan?
((This is a PLAN VOTE; suggested categories include [] Endurance Testing, [] Armor Testing, [] Repair Testing, [] Weapons Testing, and a few others. GM reserves right of plan refusal.))
Then the shit hit your desk and you had to duck for cover, because whew boy it was about to start flying thick in here.
First up was the (I)AV-4; a license production model of the Werser's own AV-3 breakthrough vehicle built by Thryssen. Vaguely lozenge-shaped, it had been upgraded slightly to meet your specifications of a seperate engine compartment and increased protection to allow operators to work without their heavy protective gear. With a twelve-millimeter front plate and six-millimeter sides, it had proven itself to be resistant to rifle fire at effectively point-blank range from the bow, as well as the sides. For weapons, they carried two older 55mm guns cut down to forty calibers to meet train carrying requirements, as well as six Schneider machine guns in double mounts. It used one V8 inline internal combustion spark-fired gasoline engine, and had four 150-liter tanks for fuel mounted high in the frame to allow for gravity feed. Two were made available for independent testing.
Next was a domestic design, happily enough. The GK-1 was designed and built by Reinhardt Industries, located in the northern empire near the Wesser border. Where the (I)AV-4 was very lozenge-y, the GK-1 planned on handling trenches mostly by sheer stubbornness, having a long track base and a very rear-heavy design so half the vehicle could overhang the trench, wherin the front tracks would then pull it up. Aside from that, it's boat-ish hull seemed very likely to deflect fire, with a composite 16mm plate in the front and 8mm plates everywhere except the engine compartment, weighed down by the same plates as the bow. Reinhardt says its capable of crossing an infantry trench without issue, but the representative didn't have data on what trenches it crossed. Arms-wise, it had a short-barrel 75mm bow gun, as well as three Mg.58 machine guns in hull mounts. For propulsion, it uses a large three-cylinder hot bulb engine by Ursus, equipped with an automatic bulb-warmer to allow the engines to be in a sealed compartment. With three 200-litre tanks carrying heavy bunker oil, the designers claimed the vertible landship could run for ten hours, and idle for an indefinite time if the tanks were refilled with the engine running. One prototype with boilerplate armor was provided, as well as one preproduction model for testing.
Last up was the… radical… design proposal by Wanderer (who had no shame in shilling it to you over dinner) based around his new compression-ignition engine by some lunatics referred to only as "Rudolf and Vinny", a Iriom who'd grown up with his Kuba family over there until before the last war started between the Balkhs and Wersers started up and his rather… dynamic… helper who apparently had more muscles than even Schwarzenegger and could toss engine blocks like a shotput. The vehicle in question was supposed to be a 'vehiclette', a three-and-change ton scooter propelled by a nine-cylinder internal combustion compression fired engine. Considering it only had a crew of two lying on their stomachs, one to drive and the other to fire the Mg.58, you couldn't be surprised by the designation! Still, what it might lack in size, it made up for in armor- a fourteen millimeter bow sheet, an additional 6mm mantlet over the gun, and seven millimeter sides. More importantly, it could nigh-on stand on its tail in a trench, and climb its way out that way- and Wanderer had photographs to prove it, even if the trenches were a tad on the small side. The engines would be built by Wanderer AG, the hulls would be cast nearly whole by Thryssen, and final assembly would happen in the Daimler Panzerfahrzeug facility. Unfortunately, Wanderer didn't have much to give you for testing: 'only' four prototype models, two pre-production models with boilerplate, and one 'production' model with a hand-cast hull done by an old foundry outside of Thorn.
Once you got your legs under you from the reviews, you obviously needed to do some testing. For this, you tapped on your two military advisors.
von Eberhart had a frankly simplistic view on armored vehicle testing, one you wished you could so blithely share. Run the 'tank' (A shorthand from Schwarzenager, since it was like being in a metal tank with a hundred gnomes banging on it with hammers) until it broke, shoot the guns until they blew, and repeat in various orders and variations until you knew about how well they worked. If you had a spare one when that was done, shoot the shit out of it with whatever was handy (including other tanks) and see what happened to some sides of pork in there in various states of dress and armoring.
Schwarzenegger had a very different opinion of testing. Endurance testing was all well and good, but the tanks needed to be subjected to enemy fire, and lots of it. Machine guns, rifles, small bore artillery, large bore artillery, it didn't matter- apply bullet until the tank broke down and stop, end of story. The guns and engine could be presumed to work (more accurately, it would break down anyway) and the capabilities to be repaired with and without a repair crew needed to be evaluated. He was especially aggravated with poor track design, claiming that if you expected them not to get stolen after a failed assault then the crew themselves needed to be able to re-track the tank in less than a half-hour. Apparently, the Balkhs provincial troops thought the tank-drivers were some sort of demon, and would attack a downed tank ferociously and attempt to set it on fire, which afterwards the regular troops would tow back to Headquarters for restoration. It certainly painted an interesting picture of the front, to say the least.
Right now, though, you had to get a plan together for testing. What was your plan?
((This is a PLAN VOTE; suggested categories include [] Endurance Testing, [] Armor Testing, [] Repair Testing, [] Weapons Testing, and a few others. GM reserves right of plan refusal.))
Omake: The Future Looks Bright.
Author's note: I was kicking around ideas for ways we could go off the rails with armor technology early on, and silicon carbide came up because it's useful in composite armor and could be produced in bulk by the time we are at. I mentioned that, as another missed opportunity, a primitive LED made with it was accidentally discovered in 1907, but then basically no one followed up and nothing happened. I was told to do an omake if I wanted it to turn out differently in this universe.
Carborundum Lamps: the Future Looks Bright.
It had happened by pure chance, as such things do.
The Houk Radiotelegraphy Company, specialists in ship-based radio transmitters and receivers, had been quietly approached about the possibility of developing more compact, rugged and (perhaps most importantly) indigenously produced military radio equipment. Though slightly improved replacements for existing battalion level radios were the most crucial objective, Oskar Houk liked to consider himself something of a visionary, and had immediately moved on to the applications such a radio might have in future armored cars, destroyers and other small naval vessels, and even observation planes and balloons, not to mention the possibilities for the army if it could be made small and simple enough for a single soldier to carry, deploy and operate. He had immediately tasked his research devision with attempting to make his dream a reality, a process involving quite a bit more basic research than the relatively modest radios he had actually been asked to build.
This is how Reinhard Kuhn had ended up working on improved carborundum detectors.
Houk Radiotelegraphy had, in recent years, made heavy use of carborundum crystal detectors on their receivers. Carborundum seemed to be much less susceptible to accidental misalignment than other types of crystal detector, and over the past decade they had managed to refine detectors using it into a system that could often remain usable without adjustment for long periods even in the most vibration-heavy shipboard environments, with a relatively large contact held in place by a simple spring apparatus instead of a finicky cat's whisker. The resulting system was, for their application, vastly superior to the more common galena detectors, as well as alternate approaches such as electrolytic detectors and magnetic detectors. If it was a bit less sensitive than a galena detector, that could be compensated for with good engineering and was a small price to pay for it working when it was needed.
Still, room for improvement remained, and he had been tasked with trying to turn them into reliable, sealed components with no need for adjustment in ordinary usage. The basic approach was deceptively simple: use crystals of a more or less standardized size and shape, and put them in a tube with a contact on a spring and a screw on one end for the initial adjustment. The details weren't quite as trivial, but he thought he was well on his way to a usable design, even if he wasn't quite there yet.
One day, he was testing a new contact arrangement using about 10 volts of off a set of batteries when he noticed something very unusual: a faint, greenish light from the point of contact. It had startled him so much he'd bumped the contact and it disappeared. When re-adjusting the contact didn't immediately bring it back, he'd almost thought he'd imagined it. However, he was eventually able to get the light back, then to duplicate it with a loose crystal clamped in place and a simple needle as the contact.
He began testing other crystals. Crystal after crystal failed to produce light until finally, he found one other that worked. It was a dimmer glow, and more yellow than green, but it was there none the less. Soon, he learned that some other crystals would also produce light, but only at higher voltages, and that different crystals could produce the not just yellow and green, but also orange and blue light. He couldn't even begin to venture a guess at how it worked, but whatever it was, it was fascinating.
Reinhard started showing his curious discovery to the rest of the research devision the next day. Within a week, they were trying to make sense of why different crystals performed differently, and one more theoretically minded colleague was nurturing vague suspicions that the phenomenon had something to do with the thermoelectric effect, though he couldn't really explain why. A week after that, they had found some chemists to try to analyze crystals that did and did not work to see if any impurities could be identified that might play a role, and Reinhard had constructed a version of his self-contained detector apparatus featuring a glass tube with a reflector wrapped around the back. A week after that, they managed to observe a tiny but detectable voltage from the same types of contact point when they were exposed to bright light, and attempts to get more consistent crystals from their manufacturer where just starting to bear fruit.
When Oskar Houk burst into the laboratory wondering why so little progress was being made on the compact radio project, he instead left irrationally convinced that "carborundum lamps will one day light the world!". Budgets were increased, a new team was put together to work on the project officially, and the pace of progress somehow managed to increase, all despite the fact that no one had even a vague idea of a useful purpose for their discovery.
After a key breakthrough enabled more consistent crystals to be produced that would reliably glow with the same color at low voltage, things really started to come together. It became possibly to systematically investigate the phenomenon, and to seriously consider manufacturing "carborundum lamps" in quantity if the technology developed far enough to make them useful. Though they produced only a single bright speck of colored light, it turned out that they used remarkably little power and could switch between on and off much faster than an incandescent light. The idea of using them for indicators was suggested, though they were still expensive and dim enough for it to not be especially practical.
Someone from the small team investigating vacuum tubes suggested enclosing the entire apparatus in glass, which soon turned into using a contact bent to provide its own pressure, encased with the crystal in a solid lump of glass. Getting it to work correctly took a great deal of work, but the results were worth it: something like a bead of glass with a wire coming out of either end that, when a voltage was applied in the right direction, could be made to light up with an eerie glow. Half of the bead could be silvered like a mirror to increase the visibility, but even so no one would ever read by one, but it could be made surprisingly small and low power and seemed almost indestructible.
This was when the compact radio team got involved again. The idea was that even with the finest headsets, a radio operator could have trouble in a noisy environment. Battlefields are nothing if not noisy, let alone some of Houk's more outlandish ideas about where it might eventually prove useful. However, light didn't have this problem. A carborundum lamp, recessed and shielded enough to hopefully make it visible even in sunlight, could serve as a secondary indicator to let a trained radio operator copy code even when they stand little chance of hearing it. After some tinkering, a prototype proved the concept viable, though even with a great deal of practice the operators still disliked using it.
This also brought Reinhard back into closer contact with the team that had taken over his work. Soon, the progress that had been made in the design of the lamps was being applied to more resilient and compact detectors. Since light visibility wasn't a concern, the reflective coating was dropped, crystals were chosen that didn't glow, and the contact design was reworked somewhat yet again to produce something a bit sturdier and more easy to manufacture. They could also be made even smaller than Reinhard's previous design, and required only one machined part. Even if the actual technology involved wasn't anything new, it still felt like they were in the middle of a huge step forward.
Though Reinhard still doubted Houk's prediction, he found himself wondering just how far his discovery could be developed. The future looked bright.
Carborundum Lamps: the Future Looks Bright.
It had happened by pure chance, as such things do.
The Houk Radiotelegraphy Company, specialists in ship-based radio transmitters and receivers, had been quietly approached about the possibility of developing more compact, rugged and (perhaps most importantly) indigenously produced military radio equipment. Though slightly improved replacements for existing battalion level radios were the most crucial objective, Oskar Houk liked to consider himself something of a visionary, and had immediately moved on to the applications such a radio might have in future armored cars, destroyers and other small naval vessels, and even observation planes and balloons, not to mention the possibilities for the army if it could be made small and simple enough for a single soldier to carry, deploy and operate. He had immediately tasked his research devision with attempting to make his dream a reality, a process involving quite a bit more basic research than the relatively modest radios he had actually been asked to build.
This is how Reinhard Kuhn had ended up working on improved carborundum detectors.
Houk Radiotelegraphy had, in recent years, made heavy use of carborundum crystal detectors on their receivers. Carborundum seemed to be much less susceptible to accidental misalignment than other types of crystal detector, and over the past decade they had managed to refine detectors using it into a system that could often remain usable without adjustment for long periods even in the most vibration-heavy shipboard environments, with a relatively large contact held in place by a simple spring apparatus instead of a finicky cat's whisker. The resulting system was, for their application, vastly superior to the more common galena detectors, as well as alternate approaches such as electrolytic detectors and magnetic detectors. If it was a bit less sensitive than a galena detector, that could be compensated for with good engineering and was a small price to pay for it working when it was needed.
Still, room for improvement remained, and he had been tasked with trying to turn them into reliable, sealed components with no need for adjustment in ordinary usage. The basic approach was deceptively simple: use crystals of a more or less standardized size and shape, and put them in a tube with a contact on a spring and a screw on one end for the initial adjustment. The details weren't quite as trivial, but he thought he was well on his way to a usable design, even if he wasn't quite there yet.
One day, he was testing a new contact arrangement using about 10 volts of off a set of batteries when he noticed something very unusual: a faint, greenish light from the point of contact. It had startled him so much he'd bumped the contact and it disappeared. When re-adjusting the contact didn't immediately bring it back, he'd almost thought he'd imagined it. However, he was eventually able to get the light back, then to duplicate it with a loose crystal clamped in place and a simple needle as the contact.
He began testing other crystals. Crystal after crystal failed to produce light until finally, he found one other that worked. It was a dimmer glow, and more yellow than green, but it was there none the less. Soon, he learned that some other crystals would also produce light, but only at higher voltages, and that different crystals could produce the not just yellow and green, but also orange and blue light. He couldn't even begin to venture a guess at how it worked, but whatever it was, it was fascinating.
Reinhard started showing his curious discovery to the rest of the research devision the next day. Within a week, they were trying to make sense of why different crystals performed differently, and one more theoretically minded colleague was nurturing vague suspicions that the phenomenon had something to do with the thermoelectric effect, though he couldn't really explain why. A week after that, they had found some chemists to try to analyze crystals that did and did not work to see if any impurities could be identified that might play a role, and Reinhard had constructed a version of his self-contained detector apparatus featuring a glass tube with a reflector wrapped around the back. A week after that, they managed to observe a tiny but detectable voltage from the same types of contact point when they were exposed to bright light, and attempts to get more consistent crystals from their manufacturer where just starting to bear fruit.
When Oskar Houk burst into the laboratory wondering why so little progress was being made on the compact radio project, he instead left irrationally convinced that "carborundum lamps will one day light the world!". Budgets were increased, a new team was put together to work on the project officially, and the pace of progress somehow managed to increase, all despite the fact that no one had even a vague idea of a useful purpose for their discovery.
After a key breakthrough enabled more consistent crystals to be produced that would reliably glow with the same color at low voltage, things really started to come together. It became possibly to systematically investigate the phenomenon, and to seriously consider manufacturing "carborundum lamps" in quantity if the technology developed far enough to make them useful. Though they produced only a single bright speck of colored light, it turned out that they used remarkably little power and could switch between on and off much faster than an incandescent light. The idea of using them for indicators was suggested, though they were still expensive and dim enough for it to not be especially practical.
Someone from the small team investigating vacuum tubes suggested enclosing the entire apparatus in glass, which soon turned into using a contact bent to provide its own pressure, encased with the crystal in a solid lump of glass. Getting it to work correctly took a great deal of work, but the results were worth it: something like a bead of glass with a wire coming out of either end that, when a voltage was applied in the right direction, could be made to light up with an eerie glow. Half of the bead could be silvered like a mirror to increase the visibility, but even so no one would ever read by one, but it could be made surprisingly small and low power and seemed almost indestructible.
This was when the compact radio team got involved again. The idea was that even with the finest headsets, a radio operator could have trouble in a noisy environment. Battlefields are nothing if not noisy, let alone some of Houk's more outlandish ideas about where it might eventually prove useful. However, light didn't have this problem. A carborundum lamp, recessed and shielded enough to hopefully make it visible even in sunlight, could serve as a secondary indicator to let a trained radio operator copy code even when they stand little chance of hearing it. After some tinkering, a prototype proved the concept viable, though even with a great deal of practice the operators still disliked using it.
This also brought Reinhard back into closer contact with the team that had taken over his work. Soon, the progress that had been made in the design of the lamps was being applied to more resilient and compact detectors. Since light visibility wasn't a concern, the reflective coating was dropped, crystals were chosen that didn't glow, and the contact design was reworked somewhat yet again to produce something a bit sturdier and more easy to manufacture. They could also be made even smaller than Reinhard's previous design, and required only one machined part. Even if the actual technology involved wasn't anything new, it still felt like they were in the middle of a huge step forward.
Though Reinhard still doubted Houk's prediction, he found himself wondering just how far his discovery could be developed. The future looked bright.
Last edited:
Money Examples
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
To be totally fair, these are massively expensive vehicles. Two hundred thalers, for reference, is roughly the cost to buy and outfit a good farm, and your personal salary is twelve thaler ninety kreutzer a year, plus combat pay and benefits. A conscript might get seven thalers a year, eight if he's skilled trades and gets combat pay. Its no joke to say these tanks are a massive investment, and that they're quite literally more valuable than the operators. Hell, the Werser recovery teams who have to scrape the last crew out get paid more than the actual crews for that exact reason.
Contest 1: Testing Phase 1
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
After looking over the prices for additional tanks and listening to your secretary scream about costs, you came to the rather sound decision that you'd use the existing models you had. This proved to be an excellent plan, since shipping was going to cost you an arm and a leg for three flatbed cars and one high weight bulk car. Once the prototypes were assembled at the Ulm Testing Ground, crews were drawn from the mechanically literate conscripts, and salvage crews were trained by the Werser Technical Delegation, you got to work preparing your eight acres of testing field. You had a week for testing, and happily you managed to get the use of most of the testing center staff for the event.
Once the simulated battlefield was constructed, you got to work posthaste. First up was general mobility and field testing. The results were… lackluster. After an hour of maintenance and general repair, you began the test. Each tank's trial run would last for either three hours, or twenty stopages of function. Unsurprisingly, none of the tanks came up to that lofty goal.
The AV-4 lasted forty-five minutes before it hit all its allotment of stoppages. Of them, there were four incidents where the crew asphyxiated and/or were disabled due to heatstroke, ten detracking incidents, four clutch failures, one throttle failure, and one failure in the fuel lines that doused the inside of the tank in gasoline (leading to asphyxiation incident #3 after improper cleaning). The crew repaired all the issues not related to their own incapacitation in ten to forty minutes, excepting detracking incidents #5 and #6, in which the second track snapped after the first had almost finished getting replaced. You weren't quite sure how to record that one, honestly.
Next came the GK-1; which true to form did have a running engine for the proscribed six hours. The fact the engine had to be started ten minutes prior, and ran until forty minutes after the test didn't change that, the tank in question lasting an hour before mechanical conniptions shut it down. Of the stoppages, seven were related to heatstroke, six were detracking incidents, four clutch failures, one throttle failure, one cracked support wheel tied to detracking incident #2, and rather memorably (and unfortunately) one incident where the tank detonated an unexploded 208mm mortar shell and lost most of the right track, killing three of the crew. Aside from the last incident, the crew repaired all non-crew related stopages within ten to fifty minutes, and after the impromptu track removal the tank was salvaged by the salvage team in forty-five minutes to weld a skid to the hull, and half-tow half-drive it back to the garage tents.
Finally, the W-1 was up. Due to the lightness of the design, two were used for the test at once, one prototype and one pre-production model. The prototype lasted nintey minutes before hitting the stopage limit; with its more developed companion hitting eighty-five minutes. The prototype's stopages were almost universally detracking accidents, with sixteen incidents, one case of heatstroke, and three engine malfunctions that were fixed with some well-applied spanner smacks. The preproduction model only had twelve detracking incidents, four engine incidents, three cases of heatstroke, and one memorable case where the rear sprocket wheel came off entirely. Retracking took a record eight minutes, with the engine repairs being almost as fast. You estimated the lost wheel was about fifteen minutes, having lost accurate time due to laughter and your driver nearly putting the staff car in a ditch.
When it boiled down to actual manuveres, though, that's where things changed. When presented with a standard field trench of one by two meters, all three tanks cleared it without difficulty. The more extreme trenches, such as the one by two and a half meter didn't have a strong effect, but none of the tanks cleared the Fortification Trench of two by three meters with a point seven five meter backstop with anything remotely approaching alacrity. The AV-4 practically dug its own counter-trench getting through, while the GK-1 did roughly the same thing on the opposite side of the entrenchments. The W-1, after several incidents where the driver went around the obstacle, eventually managed to clear it via the expedient maneuver of wedging itself nearly sideways in the trench, tipping itself onto its right side to bring the bow up, and then digging/sawing a path out that way. Both you and the driver needed a drink after watching that, to be honest.
Armor testing came next, and presented some small problems. Aside from the gaping hole in the side of the preproduction GK-1 and corresponding hole in the crew, you needed a way to assess damage to crew whom could not actually be in the tanks. Fortunately, the test facility had some hogs for the purpose, which were quickly conscripted, killed, and hung whole in the vehicles. The operating facility would then pour a minute's worth of continuous fire into the vehicle, they would stop, and you and the recovery teams would examine the result. After fifteen minutes of this, the crews would then attempt to get the tanks off the field without Recovery Team assistance.
This went downhill spectacularly, as far as plans went. The pigs inside the AV-4 were probably lethally shredded after two minutes, and Schwarzenegger just grinned smugly at you from under his fifteen pounds of tanker armor he'd worn to the occasion to spite you. You got revenge, naturally, by having your driver slip some vinegar into the annoying Fdwbl's canteens. After about eight minutes, the pigs were unrecognizable, and at ten minutes two of the bow plates sprang loose and a side plate shattered. At fifteen minutes, most of the side panels were shattered or shot off, the bow was unrecognizable, the fuel tanks were perforated and empty (after eight minutes you stopped attempting to look inside) and the engine was more hole than operational system. The first crewmen who attempted to climb in fell off vomiting from the smell, the second group could barely stand it, and the recovery team elected to slide a pair of skids on jacks under the damn thing to tow it out to a high-pressure fire hose.
In that vein, you got ready for the disaster of the GK-1. It took three minutes to lethally shred the bow pigs, and the driver pig lasted four. Panel perforation and shattering started at twelve minutes, and once the gore had been hosed out it turned out the aftmost fuel tank had somehow survived half-full. Once the engine had been heated up (via a lit stick held up to the bulb through a hole in the armor) the vehicle managed to limp home on one cylinder, losing both tracks repeatedly in the process and shattering three of the ground wheels. Still, it self-extricated… technically.
Last up was the W-1, and if that wasn't a show you didn't know what was. After spending the first two rounds trying to consistently find the dang things (not helped by the test crew parking them in craters) the machine gun crews quickly discovered that bullets aimed at the front had an alarming propensity to ricochet everywhere. After minute five, the pigs were ruined from side fire, and the panels shattered there at minute six. Interestingly enough, the front panels held to minute fourteen, and enough of the suspension was left so that it could be put in neutral to get towed back- without worrying about the tracks coming off, no less.
In light of the obviously ruined nature of the vehicles, large caliber and explosives testing is put off in case you need to do more testing. Leaving the vehicles at the testing center with the commanding officer's blessings, you go home back to Luneberg to get ready for further paperwork.
(Vote is BY PLAN. Adopting a tank and awarding a contract is possible at this stage, but ill-advised. Making a recommendation to change features is perfectly acceptable. Lists of parts manufacturers are available on request. If a contract is adopted, it will not end the current competition until a unit with the attached vehicles is deployed and High Command can mull your decisions over with field experience.)
Once the simulated battlefield was constructed, you got to work posthaste. First up was general mobility and field testing. The results were… lackluster. After an hour of maintenance and general repair, you began the test. Each tank's trial run would last for either three hours, or twenty stopages of function. Unsurprisingly, none of the tanks came up to that lofty goal.
The AV-4 lasted forty-five minutes before it hit all its allotment of stoppages. Of them, there were four incidents where the crew asphyxiated and/or were disabled due to heatstroke, ten detracking incidents, four clutch failures, one throttle failure, and one failure in the fuel lines that doused the inside of the tank in gasoline (leading to asphyxiation incident #3 after improper cleaning). The crew repaired all the issues not related to their own incapacitation in ten to forty minutes, excepting detracking incidents #5 and #6, in which the second track snapped after the first had almost finished getting replaced. You weren't quite sure how to record that one, honestly.
Next came the GK-1; which true to form did have a running engine for the proscribed six hours. The fact the engine had to be started ten minutes prior, and ran until forty minutes after the test didn't change that, the tank in question lasting an hour before mechanical conniptions shut it down. Of the stoppages, seven were related to heatstroke, six were detracking incidents, four clutch failures, one throttle failure, one cracked support wheel tied to detracking incident #2, and rather memorably (and unfortunately) one incident where the tank detonated an unexploded 208mm mortar shell and lost most of the right track, killing three of the crew. Aside from the last incident, the crew repaired all non-crew related stopages within ten to fifty minutes, and after the impromptu track removal the tank was salvaged by the salvage team in forty-five minutes to weld a skid to the hull, and half-tow half-drive it back to the garage tents.
Finally, the W-1 was up. Due to the lightness of the design, two were used for the test at once, one prototype and one pre-production model. The prototype lasted nintey minutes before hitting the stopage limit; with its more developed companion hitting eighty-five minutes. The prototype's stopages were almost universally detracking accidents, with sixteen incidents, one case of heatstroke, and three engine malfunctions that were fixed with some well-applied spanner smacks. The preproduction model only had twelve detracking incidents, four engine incidents, three cases of heatstroke, and one memorable case where the rear sprocket wheel came off entirely. Retracking took a record eight minutes, with the engine repairs being almost as fast. You estimated the lost wheel was about fifteen minutes, having lost accurate time due to laughter and your driver nearly putting the staff car in a ditch.
When it boiled down to actual manuveres, though, that's where things changed. When presented with a standard field trench of one by two meters, all three tanks cleared it without difficulty. The more extreme trenches, such as the one by two and a half meter didn't have a strong effect, but none of the tanks cleared the Fortification Trench of two by three meters with a point seven five meter backstop with anything remotely approaching alacrity. The AV-4 practically dug its own counter-trench getting through, while the GK-1 did roughly the same thing on the opposite side of the entrenchments. The W-1, after several incidents where the driver went around the obstacle, eventually managed to clear it via the expedient maneuver of wedging itself nearly sideways in the trench, tipping itself onto its right side to bring the bow up, and then digging/sawing a path out that way. Both you and the driver needed a drink after watching that, to be honest.
Armor testing came next, and presented some small problems. Aside from the gaping hole in the side of the preproduction GK-1 and corresponding hole in the crew, you needed a way to assess damage to crew whom could not actually be in the tanks. Fortunately, the test facility had some hogs for the purpose, which were quickly conscripted, killed, and hung whole in the vehicles. The operating facility would then pour a minute's worth of continuous fire into the vehicle, they would stop, and you and the recovery teams would examine the result. After fifteen minutes of this, the crews would then attempt to get the tanks off the field without Recovery Team assistance.
This went downhill spectacularly, as far as plans went. The pigs inside the AV-4 were probably lethally shredded after two minutes, and Schwarzenegger just grinned smugly at you from under his fifteen pounds of tanker armor he'd worn to the occasion to spite you. You got revenge, naturally, by having your driver slip some vinegar into the annoying Fdwbl's canteens. After about eight minutes, the pigs were unrecognizable, and at ten minutes two of the bow plates sprang loose and a side plate shattered. At fifteen minutes, most of the side panels were shattered or shot off, the bow was unrecognizable, the fuel tanks were perforated and empty (after eight minutes you stopped attempting to look inside) and the engine was more hole than operational system. The first crewmen who attempted to climb in fell off vomiting from the smell, the second group could barely stand it, and the recovery team elected to slide a pair of skids on jacks under the damn thing to tow it out to a high-pressure fire hose.
In that vein, you got ready for the disaster of the GK-1. It took three minutes to lethally shred the bow pigs, and the driver pig lasted four. Panel perforation and shattering started at twelve minutes, and once the gore had been hosed out it turned out the aftmost fuel tank had somehow survived half-full. Once the engine had been heated up (via a lit stick held up to the bulb through a hole in the armor) the vehicle managed to limp home on one cylinder, losing both tracks repeatedly in the process and shattering three of the ground wheels. Still, it self-extricated… technically.
Last up was the W-1, and if that wasn't a show you didn't know what was. After spending the first two rounds trying to consistently find the dang things (not helped by the test crew parking them in craters) the machine gun crews quickly discovered that bullets aimed at the front had an alarming propensity to ricochet everywhere. After minute five, the pigs were ruined from side fire, and the panels shattered there at minute six. Interestingly enough, the front panels held to minute fourteen, and enough of the suspension was left so that it could be put in neutral to get towed back- without worrying about the tracks coming off, no less.
In light of the obviously ruined nature of the vehicles, large caliber and explosives testing is put off in case you need to do more testing. Leaving the vehicles at the testing center with the commanding officer's blessings, you go home back to Luneberg to get ready for further paperwork.
(Vote is BY PLAN. Adopting a tank and awarding a contract is possible at this stage, but ill-advised. Making a recommendation to change features is perfectly acceptable. Lists of parts manufacturers are available on request. If a contract is adopted, it will not end the current competition until a unit with the attached vehicles is deployed and High Command can mull your decisions over with field experience.)
Pentagon Wars (Or: What you should expect from this quest)
Contest 1: Testing Phase 2 and Emergency Buy
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
After your week of fun in the sun and bombs at the range, you got right back into the pencil-pushing groove. First up was a list of design suggestions for Reindhart, consisting mostly of more ventilation to prevent the heatstroke cases that had been the GK-1's main point of failure, as well as some plate samples for weapons testing. The return mail a few days later was very positive, and stated that plate would be shipped out to the Ulm Testing Grounds postehaste, along with a bill of matierals and a quote for the test materials coming out to eighty five thalers, to be waived express if an order for more than twenty breakthrough vehicles were ordered.
Wanderer, as usual, cornered you for a business lunch for the results of the live fire testing. Between the apertif and salads, you discussed the majority of the improvements to the tracks and drive sockets. Aside from looking terribly embarresed, Wanderer took your suggestions to paper and quized you back on how the other entrants had done. Once the real eating was done and you were sipping coffee, you brought up the sample plates. Unfortunately, the original preproduction model casting center had been hit in a zeppelins bombing raid, and their proprietary family methodology had gone down with it. Fortunately, according to Wanderer, he'd lined up a few backup facilities and would have them send you plates for a measily thirty thalers apiece.
Then there was Thryssen. Once you'd beat past the initial walls of bullshit, accomplished by spending two days talking to the Werser military attache, you got down to the meat of it. The ventilation changes were grudgingly accepted, mostly because they'd been worked into the AV-4B model that the Wersers had been happy to collaborate with you on (their Developerbraus being as in the dark as you were) but the test plates were harder. Thryssen's own internal testing apparatus had numbers for you, thank you very much, and you spent as much time getting your plates for independent testing as the improvements through. Finally, after a net expense of a hundred and twenty thalers, your tests could go through.
The GK-1 mod. 1 erstraz took a few days to get to Ulm, but once it was put through its paces the results were much better than before, making it a full two hours of run time with only two heatstroke incidents, eight detrackings two of which were due to roadwheels shattering, six clutch failures, one throttle failure, and two Acts of God- one being the tank failing to cross a trench and flipping on its side, and the other a simultaneous throttle failure, leading to the powered clutches seizing, resulting in a sharp left turn that broke both tracks. In all other areas, it was the same as before, including crew fatality rate as one conscript was crushed by a falling portion of the engine mounting and two others suffered concussions and drowned from leaking fuel in the rollover.
The W-2 was an onsite modification of one of the boilerplate prototypes of the W-1, and was much better performing than the W-1. The test lasted an hour and forty minutes, stopping due to fuel exhaustion. The breakdowns were five detracking incidents, four cases of heatstroke, four engine or transmission failures, one case of getting bodily stuck in a crater (the original drive team having gone home), two cases of crew injury from abrupt maneuvers and not wearing their tanker armor or being belted in, one engine fire, and one UXO incident of running over a 75mm shell responsible for flipping the tank on its back and concussing the crew.
The penetration tests were a whole 'nother headache. The Thryssen plates were generally the worst under standard rifle fire, with the 6mm plate spalling at two hundred meters and shattering after forty rounds at spalling range, while penetrations were achieved at sixty meters. The 12mm plate was hardly better, suffering spallings at one hundred and fifty meters and shattering after one hundred and twelve rounds, and penetrations at forty meters. The Reinhardt plates were better, the 8mm plate spalling at one hundred sixty meters and shattering at twenty-five rounds, while penetrations were at fifty-five meters. The 16mm plate was surprisingly better, with spalling at ninety meters and shattering after seventy rounds, while penetration happened at thirty five meters. Wanderer's cast hull front (he used Thryssen plates for the sides) held up to spalling from ninety meters requiring a hundred and fifteen rounds to finally shatter, and penetration requiring an awe-inspiring twenty-five meters to finally get through it.
You couldn't be in Ulm for the weapons testing, though, or even get through the mess of ballistic-esse, because High Command had just called, and said that the Kubachin Free State had managed to commit to a naval landing at Marienburg. With the 12 Gardecorops sent in with the Landwere to contain the damage and the Kubachain were fortifying fast. While the Gardecorps might be able to dig them out alone, doing it without wrecking the city was unlikely. As such, it was time for your screwballs to get ready to roll.
((This is a SINGLE ITEM vote, and a panic buy on High Command's part. NO PLANS.))
[] 100x Wanderer 2 tanks, to be procured through Wanderer GmbH
[] 85x Großekreuzer tanks, to be procured through Reindhardt AG
[] 65x AV-4 tanks, to be procured through Thryssen AT
Wanderer, as usual, cornered you for a business lunch for the results of the live fire testing. Between the apertif and salads, you discussed the majority of the improvements to the tracks and drive sockets. Aside from looking terribly embarresed, Wanderer took your suggestions to paper and quized you back on how the other entrants had done. Once the real eating was done and you were sipping coffee, you brought up the sample plates. Unfortunately, the original preproduction model casting center had been hit in a zeppelins bombing raid, and their proprietary family methodology had gone down with it. Fortunately, according to Wanderer, he'd lined up a few backup facilities and would have them send you plates for a measily thirty thalers apiece.
Then there was Thryssen. Once you'd beat past the initial walls of bullshit, accomplished by spending two days talking to the Werser military attache, you got down to the meat of it. The ventilation changes were grudgingly accepted, mostly because they'd been worked into the AV-4B model that the Wersers had been happy to collaborate with you on (their Developerbraus being as in the dark as you were) but the test plates were harder. Thryssen's own internal testing apparatus had numbers for you, thank you very much, and you spent as much time getting your plates for independent testing as the improvements through. Finally, after a net expense of a hundred and twenty thalers, your tests could go through.
The GK-1 mod. 1 erstraz took a few days to get to Ulm, but once it was put through its paces the results were much better than before, making it a full two hours of run time with only two heatstroke incidents, eight detrackings two of which were due to roadwheels shattering, six clutch failures, one throttle failure, and two Acts of God- one being the tank failing to cross a trench and flipping on its side, and the other a simultaneous throttle failure, leading to the powered clutches seizing, resulting in a sharp left turn that broke both tracks. In all other areas, it was the same as before, including crew fatality rate as one conscript was crushed by a falling portion of the engine mounting and two others suffered concussions and drowned from leaking fuel in the rollover.
The W-2 was an onsite modification of one of the boilerplate prototypes of the W-1, and was much better performing than the W-1. The test lasted an hour and forty minutes, stopping due to fuel exhaustion. The breakdowns were five detracking incidents, four cases of heatstroke, four engine or transmission failures, one case of getting bodily stuck in a crater (the original drive team having gone home), two cases of crew injury from abrupt maneuvers and not wearing their tanker armor or being belted in, one engine fire, and one UXO incident of running over a 75mm shell responsible for flipping the tank on its back and concussing the crew.
The penetration tests were a whole 'nother headache. The Thryssen plates were generally the worst under standard rifle fire, with the 6mm plate spalling at two hundred meters and shattering after forty rounds at spalling range, while penetrations were achieved at sixty meters. The 12mm plate was hardly better, suffering spallings at one hundred and fifty meters and shattering after one hundred and twelve rounds, and penetrations at forty meters. The Reinhardt plates were better, the 8mm plate spalling at one hundred sixty meters and shattering at twenty-five rounds, while penetrations were at fifty-five meters. The 16mm plate was surprisingly better, with spalling at ninety meters and shattering after seventy rounds, while penetration happened at thirty five meters. Wanderer's cast hull front (he used Thryssen plates for the sides) held up to spalling from ninety meters requiring a hundred and fifteen rounds to finally shatter, and penetration requiring an awe-inspiring twenty-five meters to finally get through it.
You couldn't be in Ulm for the weapons testing, though, or even get through the mess of ballistic-esse, because High Command had just called, and said that the Kubachin Free State had managed to commit to a naval landing at Marienburg. With the 12 Gardecorops sent in with the Landwere to contain the damage and the Kubachain were fortifying fast. While the Gardecorps might be able to dig them out alone, doing it without wrecking the city was unlikely. As such, it was time for your screwballs to get ready to roll.
((This is a SINGLE ITEM vote, and a panic buy on High Command's part. NO PLANS.))
[] 100x Wanderer 2 tanks, to be procured through Wanderer GmbH
[] 85x Großekreuzer tanks, to be procured through Reindhardt AG
[] 65x AV-4 tanks, to be procured through Thryssen AT