Strategic Arms Quest 3/2: Armor Edition
- Thread starter 7734
- Start date
- Original
The Heirs
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
That's a matter of opinion. Most of your co-workers are for Louise Victoria because she's the one who's actually got experience doing field-y things. Before this whole 'modern schooling' thing came around, she was a foster child of Oberst Franz von Moltke IV, alias the Old Man of the Cavalry Branch's first son, now one of the moderates of High Command and one of the people who was fully up for the Cavalry Motorization Project. Her nickname comes from von Moltke IV's regimental standard, since his regiment at the time was the Lunesburg Second Imperial Cavalry Regiment, the Death's Head and Hands and she was nominally the standardbearer (an old administrative position to get people who needed to have TIG some TIG while not being in a position to fuck shit up) so things tended to follow from there. She's fairly level-headed, but academically doesn't tend to do well in class settings or with a lot of her peers in the Collegium.
By counterpoint, Wilhelm Viktor was very much a scholar and a 'gentleman' throughout his life. He's much less active than Louise Victoria, but the circle's he's active in are many. He's mostly made a game attempt at collegiate ambitions for the last three years, and due to his birth defect leaving his left arm a good eighteen centimeters shorter than his right and stricken with Erb's Palsy he's patently unfit for actual military service. He did however share his father's love for flying and travel, and took every chance he could to get out of the country that looked at him like a cripple. He's been all over, from Balkhchivian to Carragia on formal events, and more than a few controversial trips to Taelexi. He's even nominally a pilot recently, even if he needed a prosthetic hook for his short arm to actually reliably use it. While normally kind, Wilhelm is possessed of a mercurial temper and violent streak his classmates have shrugged off as an eccentricity befitting his otherwise-sharp mind.
NothingNow
Corpse Wrangler
- Location
- Tampa
[x] Declare for the Death's Head and Hussars; Prinzessin Louise Victoria Hohenzollern
Burning Baron
This position needs more entrenching.
- Location
- In here, not out there.
[X] Declare for the Death's Head and Hussars; Prinzessin Louise Victoria Hohenzollern
We must protect the smile of our daughter.
We must protect the smile of our daughter.
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
I'd just like to remind everyone that we don't actually know our daughter is in a relationship with the Princess. Prinzessin, whatever, fuck not!Germany. We're as close as it's possible to get to knowing without a solid 'yes' OOC, but IC we have no idea, and this is an IC decision. Please keep your knowledge and the character's knowledge separate.
[X] Declare for the Long and Short Hands of Travel and Governance; Prinz Wilhelm Viktor Hohenzollern
I'm more interested in a Kaiser more interested in the sciences and the globe than a Kaiserin who knows how to stay in power. I'm going to bank on 'normally kind' doing much more good than 'mercurial temper' does ill. Or 'level-headed', which guarantees little of what 'normally kind' does.
[X] Declare for the Long and Short Hands of Travel and Governance; Prinz Wilhelm Viktor Hohenzollern
I'm more interested in a Kaiser more interested in the sciences and the globe than a Kaiserin who knows how to stay in power. I'm going to bank on 'normally kind' doing much more good than 'mercurial temper' does ill. Or 'level-headed', which guarantees little of what 'normally kind' does.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Except once crowned the Prinzessin will have to break off all of her illicit relations with our daughter and marry a man in order to avoid a scandal. I don't think Not!ImperialGermany would react kindly to the revelation of what has been going on, and it'll be kind of impossible to keep it going when she's crowned. Unless she pulls a Queen Elizabeth and attempts to go the "Virgin Kaiserin" route.
That's just how I see the situation though.
- Location
- Belgium
You assume there is any relation between love and marriage in a royal marriage of the era? It was commonly expected that often both parties had multiple paramours.
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
At no point did he do that.
No it wasn't. It was very much frowned upon. Especially homosexual relationships. And he's correct in that it's going to be near-impossible to keep secret, especially in the early age of journalism and cameras.
Contest 8: Board Recommendations
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
After getting through the political nonsense, you got to work postehaste on querying your Board on ideas for a vehicle to move the guns around, and maybe for whether to settle for a towed carriage or an integral mounting.
Janzen was firmly in favor of a light, fast, organic truck type mounting so that you could mount the maximum amount of 'dakka' (his words) on the maximum amount of tactical maneuverability so that it could keep up with the second line support units with ease and maybe range ahead some so that it could intercept planes before they got to their attack runs. His perferered weapon for this system was the Lightning Knife rotary barrel system, based on the logic that a lot of bullet was more terrifying than an exploding shell since if you saw the shell explode then it hadn't hit you. If the truck could get in position and drop spades (Janzen hated that step and hoped a truck system didn't need spades) then it could blow through it's feed of however many bullets, hopefully splash a plane, and then take however long it needed to reload since it probably killed or scared off the plane and there wouldn't be another wave for another twenty or thirty minutes.
Mittleswesk couldn't give a flying fish for the carriage, he was just interested about the guns. His personal favorite was the Baal long recoil system, but he thought the rolling breech was too fast and that the gun really didn't need that high of a fire rate as long as it was tossing shells with reasonable precision. Based on that, he wanted a fairly exxtensive trailer mount to be plopped down around semi-fixed positions like an artillery park or HQ and equipped with a stereoscopic rangefinder and a fuze setter so it could use FG-T rounds, with possibly taking one of the Reichsmarine's experimental Gun Battery Coordination Systems and tying it to the entire network of guns. This would, theoretically, create a sort of aerial beaten zone which a plane couldn't reliably enter or press an attack through.
Lang's opinion was that Mittlewesk was a blithering moron who needed to stop sniffing glue and Janzen was a bloody pilot and his opinion was wrong by default. Air attacks would hit any place over the line, and pilots were normally savvy enough to avoid any specifically fortified points on the line and go for weaker secondary targets. Thus, Lang posited, the best solution would be a threefold method of air defense- first, in a integral lightweight system designed to closely follow the press of the armor or cavalry, probably truck mounted and kept to be as integral to one vehicle as possible. Next would be a towed system with greater range that would ideally take hints from the front end shooters to put up fire towards the enemy and beat them off the softer back-line targets. The heavier system would probably be shell-firing, had to be able to operate as lone guns, and probably would need two Kettenkrads to serve as operational tow and hauling vehicles with a third for supply. Finally, there needed to be a nominally mobile unit who would be ladled down with fancy crap like the GBCS and would protect the railroads from getting blasted into pieces. That was Very Important, keeping the light rail from getting taken out.
Volkstuppe wanted an integrally mounted heavy caliber anti-air artillery piece, but was smart enough to admit he probably wasn't going to get something like a 10,5/55 anti-air gun hooked up to a rangefinder and coffee maker on a tracked chassis though. In lieu of that, though, he bowed to Lang's expertise, and suggested using the 3,5cm autocannon on a towed modified artillery carriage as a good point-defense AA piece. One Kettenkrad could tow it, another could keep it fed, and with a good training gear it could probably move around fast enough to blast most aircraft clean out of the sky.
Adler was honestly quite neutral on the topic, but he did have several warnings about what anti-air artillery was liable to face in terms of airborne attack. There were three major Irromic projects underway, plus data about one Carragian project they'd managed to hear through a technology sharing program at Vogt-Lubeck Aircraft Corporation.
The first Irromic project was Project Erschweren, a bomb kit designed for the venerable fifty kilogram general purpose bomb. By using a drogue chute tied to six slat flaps on the back of the bomb, this would sufficiently retard the falling speed of the bomb to allow pilots to make bombing attacks as slow as their stall speeds at at altitudes of less than thirty meters- well below what your potential AA systems could likely track and engage due to the increases in angular speed from being so much closer. With this, a supression flight could come in on the nap of the earth and fast, nail a known flak site, and then pull off and escape while the flak site was doing damage control.
The second Irromic project was Project Kondensstreifen, an eight centimeter spin stabilized rocket with a twenty five kilo warhead with an impact fuze and explosive-shrapnel warhead. Here the idea was to spot the flak nest, launch rockets, and have the suppression flight fall back and gain altitude as the rockets disrupted the flak nest long enough to let the bomber pilots fly in, release weapons, and begin to fly out. Several people were pushing for incindiary warheads as an option, but that wasn't being seriously considered yet due to the low power of the proposed incendiary mixes compared to the ideal throw weight of the twenty five kilo warhead.
The final project was the weirdest, and was called Project Voller Bomben. This plan, much like Erschweren, was designed explicitly around a low and fast attack- however, this plan instead of delaying one large bomb, used one kilo bomblettes as the attack mechanism, each with a time delay fuse of five seconds with a ribbon tail to ensure a mostly straight fall. The impact of the large number of bombs would already be reasonably traumatic, and more importantly the timed fuses would make sure that if the gun crews didn't evacuate for bomb shelters they'd shortly all be killed.
The Carragian project, meanwhile, was a plan for a large, airborne bomber to carry a bomb bay full of nine centimeter rockets on time delay launches. Once dropped, the rockets would have a special slat back with an airscrew-timed fuse that would launch the rocket once it was falling at a forty five degree angle, creating a large, shotgun-like barrage of rockets down on a target area, with each rocket's large warhead being equally effective at destroying bunkers and open infantry or armor.
Now you were up to the hard part: write your RFQ now, or work on a testing aparatus?
Votes
(PLAN VOTE)
[] Work on RFQ
-[] Write-in
[] Work on Testing Apparatus?
-[] Write-in
Janzen was firmly in favor of a light, fast, organic truck type mounting so that you could mount the maximum amount of 'dakka' (his words) on the maximum amount of tactical maneuverability so that it could keep up with the second line support units with ease and maybe range ahead some so that it could intercept planes before they got to their attack runs. His perferered weapon for this system was the Lightning Knife rotary barrel system, based on the logic that a lot of bullet was more terrifying than an exploding shell since if you saw the shell explode then it hadn't hit you. If the truck could get in position and drop spades (Janzen hated that step and hoped a truck system didn't need spades) then it could blow through it's feed of however many bullets, hopefully splash a plane, and then take however long it needed to reload since it probably killed or scared off the plane and there wouldn't be another wave for another twenty or thirty minutes.
Mittleswesk couldn't give a flying fish for the carriage, he was just interested about the guns. His personal favorite was the Baal long recoil system, but he thought the rolling breech was too fast and that the gun really didn't need that high of a fire rate as long as it was tossing shells with reasonable precision. Based on that, he wanted a fairly exxtensive trailer mount to be plopped down around semi-fixed positions like an artillery park or HQ and equipped with a stereoscopic rangefinder and a fuze setter so it could use FG-T rounds, with possibly taking one of the Reichsmarine's experimental Gun Battery Coordination Systems and tying it to the entire network of guns. This would, theoretically, create a sort of aerial beaten zone which a plane couldn't reliably enter or press an attack through.
Lang's opinion was that Mittlewesk was a blithering moron who needed to stop sniffing glue and Janzen was a bloody pilot and his opinion was wrong by default. Air attacks would hit any place over the line, and pilots were normally savvy enough to avoid any specifically fortified points on the line and go for weaker secondary targets. Thus, Lang posited, the best solution would be a threefold method of air defense- first, in a integral lightweight system designed to closely follow the press of the armor or cavalry, probably truck mounted and kept to be as integral to one vehicle as possible. Next would be a towed system with greater range that would ideally take hints from the front end shooters to put up fire towards the enemy and beat them off the softer back-line targets. The heavier system would probably be shell-firing, had to be able to operate as lone guns, and probably would need two Kettenkrads to serve as operational tow and hauling vehicles with a third for supply. Finally, there needed to be a nominally mobile unit who would be ladled down with fancy crap like the GBCS and would protect the railroads from getting blasted into pieces. That was Very Important, keeping the light rail from getting taken out.
Volkstuppe wanted an integrally mounted heavy caliber anti-air artillery piece, but was smart enough to admit he probably wasn't going to get something like a 10,5/55 anti-air gun hooked up to a rangefinder and coffee maker on a tracked chassis though. In lieu of that, though, he bowed to Lang's expertise, and suggested using the 3,5cm autocannon on a towed modified artillery carriage as a good point-defense AA piece. One Kettenkrad could tow it, another could keep it fed, and with a good training gear it could probably move around fast enough to blast most aircraft clean out of the sky.
Adler was honestly quite neutral on the topic, but he did have several warnings about what anti-air artillery was liable to face in terms of airborne attack. There were three major Irromic projects underway, plus data about one Carragian project they'd managed to hear through a technology sharing program at Vogt-Lubeck Aircraft Corporation.
The first Irromic project was Project Erschweren, a bomb kit designed for the venerable fifty kilogram general purpose bomb. By using a drogue chute tied to six slat flaps on the back of the bomb, this would sufficiently retard the falling speed of the bomb to allow pilots to make bombing attacks as slow as their stall speeds at at altitudes of less than thirty meters- well below what your potential AA systems could likely track and engage due to the increases in angular speed from being so much closer. With this, a supression flight could come in on the nap of the earth and fast, nail a known flak site, and then pull off and escape while the flak site was doing damage control.
The second Irromic project was Project Kondensstreifen, an eight centimeter spin stabilized rocket with a twenty five kilo warhead with an impact fuze and explosive-shrapnel warhead. Here the idea was to spot the flak nest, launch rockets, and have the suppression flight fall back and gain altitude as the rockets disrupted the flak nest long enough to let the bomber pilots fly in, release weapons, and begin to fly out. Several people were pushing for incindiary warheads as an option, but that wasn't being seriously considered yet due to the low power of the proposed incendiary mixes compared to the ideal throw weight of the twenty five kilo warhead.
The final project was the weirdest, and was called Project Voller Bomben. This plan, much like Erschweren, was designed explicitly around a low and fast attack- however, this plan instead of delaying one large bomb, used one kilo bomblettes as the attack mechanism, each with a time delay fuse of five seconds with a ribbon tail to ensure a mostly straight fall. The impact of the large number of bombs would already be reasonably traumatic, and more importantly the timed fuses would make sure that if the gun crews didn't evacuate for bomb shelters they'd shortly all be killed.
The Carragian project, meanwhile, was a plan for a large, airborne bomber to carry a bomb bay full of nine centimeter rockets on time delay launches. Once dropped, the rockets would have a special slat back with an airscrew-timed fuse that would launch the rocket once it was falling at a forty five degree angle, creating a large, shotgun-like barrage of rockets down on a target area, with each rocket's large warhead being equally effective at destroying bunkers and open infantry or armor.
Now you were up to the hard part: write your RFQ now, or work on a testing aparatus?
Votes
(PLAN VOTE)
[] Work on RFQ
-[] Write-in
[] Work on Testing Apparatus?
-[] Write-in
Last edited:
KhazintheDark
May or may not be insane...
- Location
- Not where you are. Probably.
Pros of RFQ first: we know what we'll be testing for.
Pro of Apparatus first: we know what we'll have available for testing and how we can go about doing things. Also might let us say 'hey, we need some tow-planes on these dates to drag aerial targets so we can test tracking' far enough in advance that we could actually get some of the Luftwaffe's currently minor numbers assigned.
Pro of Apparatus first: we know what we'll have available for testing and how we can go about doing things. Also might let us say 'hey, we need some tow-planes on these dates to drag aerial targets so we can test tracking' far enough in advance that we could actually get some of the Luftwaffe's currently minor numbers assigned.
Some Luftwaffe Planes
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Not really. It's a pretty sound system, and is based around the idea that a unitary warhead and shrapnel blast isn't going to get everything really destroyed since a smart enemy is going to dig readabouts on anything holding still longer than six hours, so by sprinkling the explosives over it you make sure the entire position is pretty soundly bombarded. The big bomb, meanwhile, isn't an anti-flak weapon so much as a precision level flight bomb- there's a lot of times flying high and wide for a dive bombing run is a bad plan, so you need to go in low and tight and slam the bomb down their throats as tightly as possible. The current Luftwaffe runs about two dozen types of aircraft, and of them most of the old planes can't be used to do dive bombing and as they add Air Regiments they need to make sure these old planes are still useful.
Take this guy, a Farrier-Wolfgang 56. It can haul a bomb, but if you try to dive in it the wing will rip right off if you're not very careful. It's not much good as a fighter anymore either, since it can only haul one 13.2mm gun over the nose. Load it up with a retarded bomb, however, and it'll make very solid attack runs every time because, as a high-wing plane, it can and will work at altitudes other planes won't fly at because they can't see the ground. Then there's this guy.
He's one of your other fighters, and holds a whopping one 13.2mm and one 6.5mm gun, both synchronized throught the prop. He can haul a whopping two bombs, but there's a catch- when he's hauling two bombs, he handles like a bloody sow and can rip the mountings loose without too much effort. Load him up with Vollerbomben, though, and you can move the weight around much easier so that you don't slam the throttle forward and the stick back to rip the mountings out as an emergency bomb release.
Then there's this guy, a new design from Juniper, a brand new fast bomber. It's built to tank up with five thousand kilos of munitions, but it's only got so much room on the wings and it can't use the bomb bays and the wing mounts together without needing a runway longer than God to take off with. If they can make a low drag munition to hang on the wings, though, then they can start getting up past three thousand kilos of onboard ordy without listening to the madmen in the back asking if it's ok to strap a rocket to the back end to help the poor bird up.
You're not the only proccurement officer who's staying busy!
- Location
- his hidden lair
Mother of god, that thing can carry theoretically carry twice as much as a B17. I didn't think we had a bomber worthy of a realistic strategic bombing campaign but even at only 3 metric tons that's a potentially horrific amount of iron bombs it can drop. Combine that with a decent escort fighter and since it sounds like the Irmonic Empire is wholeheartedly embracing material costs over manpower costs and we might see a really competitive strategic bomber arm on the Luftwaffe if it doesn't wind up going the way of the He 177.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
A Flying Fortress could carry a suprisingly large ammount of munitions, with a lot of caveats- starting with engagment range and bomb size. Nominally at maximum, balls to the walls, holy fuck we're full capacity, the B-17 can haul 5,800 kg of bomb. It then didn't do this because, surprise surprise, the airframe handled like a turd and ate fuel like it was a land whale in a McDonalds. Likewise, the current Juniper bomber design isn't realistically going to launch with more than a thousand kilos of ords in it because it has abysmal range and has to reconfigure the aft bay into a fuel cell holder, the wing drag from ords is amazingly huge, and again it too handles like flying the Reichstag from the basement window. Realistically there is a true strategic bomber plan coming down the pipe somewhere, but the issue is the last attempted strategic bomber (a Gotha) happened it couldn't reliably get the job done. The Baumer plane is better, mind, but even still the nominal 4,000 kg payload is something that almost never happens because that impacts flight performance too much. If they tried to run a full Baumer through to a strategic target, it would die. It is slow, it is fat, and it will get eaten alive because aircraft side gunners are a terrible form of protection.
- Location
- his hidden lair
I suppose there was a lot of caveats that I was ignoring, but it's still seems a pretty promising start since near as I can tell it's covering a lot of the ground the He 177 did far earlier, and that they might actually learn some of what they need to to make a feasible strategic bomber sooner than later.
Now, you've commented on the Baumer's lack of defenses, but given the Irmonic has actual land bound neighbors, shouldn't making shorter trips with escort fighters without the range of something like a P-51 be feasible? I don't know how far the Carragian or Balkavian industrial heartlands are from the borders of the Irmonic Empire. And I'm pretty sure I'm butchering the majority of these names to boot.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Carragia is literally the entire breadth of the Werser Kingdoms away; you'd end up basing there and then you'd have to find the blasted arcoligies to hot them. This is hard, and in the last war you couldn't reliably find them unless High Command plugged planes out on raiser search vectors and guessed distance on bearings that planes didn't come back from. The one arcoligy you did find was besieged for a year and change before the garisons sallied, kicked the shit out of a few battalions, and at that point nobody could guess how they were feeding the city and just said fuckit and left. The Balkh (it conjugates like moose) heartland, meanwhile, is based around their southern and northern river deltas. You might be able to hit targets in the North if you can get through ETERNAL INTERCEPTOR WORKS but that's doubtful; the South is less densely guarded and also out of bomber range and generally regarded as a bad idea to attack because then you need to get the Navy to punch into the great mass of torpedo boats they have. That is very hard.
- Location
- his hidden lair
Consider me duly informed.
Winged_One²
SACQ Tablemaster
- Location
- Germany
This thread needs some votes. Just because there's no straight forwards option doesn't mean you get to leave this to me.
Then again that means I get the tanks I want.
[X] Plan Guns First
-[X]Measure muzzle velocity of all guns
-[X]Test sustained rate of fire over 30min for all guns (I think that should be enough)
-[X]Test how fast the mounts can be turned 180°
-[X]Maximum incline before the gun exerts over 50N on the traverse shaft (manual turn)/Speed against incline is halved (power traverse).
-[X]Time and rounds needed to shoot down a balloon at unknown distance and height (multiple per gun)
-[X]Test ability to hit a moving target by towing a glider behind a fast car. Car moving towards gun, gun 350m to the side of the endpoint of the towing track
-[X]Test ability of shells to fuze on thin metal sheets, canvas and wood beams
Then again that means I get the tanks I want.
[X] Plan Guns First
-[X]Measure muzzle velocity of all guns
-[X]Test sustained rate of fire over 30min for all guns (I think that should be enough)
-[X]Test how fast the mounts can be turned 180°
-[X]Maximum incline before the gun exerts over 50N on the traverse shaft (manual turn)/Speed against incline is halved (power traverse).
-[X]Time and rounds needed to shoot down a balloon at unknown distance and height (multiple per gun)
-[X]Test ability to hit a moving target by towing a glider behind a fast car. Car moving towards gun, gun 350m to the side of the endpoint of the towing track
-[X]Test ability of shells to fuze on thin metal sheets, canvas and wood beams
Maybe add in test time required to replace a warped or overheated barrel ? Then you'd get my vote.