I'm mostly worried that the characters in universe are getting confused by rayon's similarities to silk.
Valkyria Chronicles: Drums of War
- Thread starter Ithillid
- Start date
Here's the project blurb:
So, no, procurement is not confused by rayon's similarities to silk. It gives what it promises to give; good protection, at a low weight, and not too high a cost, but it does have the problem of requiring replacement more often than was desired and also needs the entire production chain stood up from scratch, with limited if any ability to tap existing production and supply chains for said production.
If we over invest in the roll out we can probably tap that production for whatever succeeds the Elutherian pattern relatively cheaply, and if we do end up in a war we are going to need every gambeson we can get our hands on.
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Our people seem pretty responsible, so even without Ithillid's post, I'd figure that they really did test the mechanical properties of the rayon gambesons rather than just glance at it, grunt, and go "looks like silk must be OK."
One notable point of divergency from being in Valkyria Chronicles is that viable infantry body armor exists anachronistically early. That's just... a thing. So we're going to see some materials that outperform their real-life counterparts, and shouldn't be shocked by that.
My own concern (which seems to me more plausible) is that rayon will be strong but not rugged and so will not bear up well under abuse- under getting sweaty and muddy and strained by lots of strenuous physical activity. Because that is the kind of thing you could miss in a lab.
The problem is that Phase 2 is a 700-point Light Industry project. Given that we'd be lucky to get more than 6 dice in Light Industry for the foreseeable future, that's about three turns of doing nothing but that one project, and that presents opportunity costs. Light Industry is also where all our munitions plants go, for instance, and probably some of our future chemical industry projects go.
I want to wait on not just laboratory testing, but field experience (if not necessarily combat experience) with the rayon body armor before we even think about committing something like 14 dice to an extra project to mass-produce the stuff. Because it's very plausible that in mass deployment the feedback will be "this stuff's strong but it comes apart too easily after it gets wet, please go bakc to the drawing board."
Last edited:
I feel like normal fabric would be just as effective, if not more so than rayon, because at this point in time rayon is basically paper. Like it's actually made from the same stuff as paper, just chemically treated and turned into thread.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Wolfy, I don't know if you're reading my posts, but I'll repeat this:
Our people seem pretty responsible, so even without Ithillid's post, I'd figure that they really did test the mechanical properties of the rayon gambesons rather than just glance at it, grunt, and go "looks like silk must be OK."
One notable point of divergency from being in Valkyria Chronicles is that viable infantry body armor exists anachronistically early. That's just... a thing. So we're going to see some materials that outperform their real-life counterparts, and shouldn't be shocked by that.
That's fair enough. At this point I'm gonna chalk it up to the trees having ragnite in them or something.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'd call it "proprietary ragnite-doped chemical bath for the fibers."
I have to assume that our testing people are competent enough to check to see if the armor stops working when it gets wet. The concern is that we don't know how well the armor holds up over time when exposed to combat conditions. We probably won't know that until we're in the midst of a mass military deployment.
Of course, the circumstances that would necessitate a mass military deployment would almost certainly interfere with a total rework of our armor supply system. Another phase of armor fabrication to make up for the greater than expected wear and tear is a more realistic option.
That being said, 14 dice is rather rich for my blood as well. Fortunately, we don't need to pay the full amount. Armor Foundry Phase 2 is a pretty good candidate in that regard. A decent partnership die roll could drop that requirement to 7 dice. That's a lot more manageable. Or we could go the heavy contracting route, which would reduce the dice requirement as well, albeit likely at a significantly greater cost.
Just to be clear, I'm nervous about rayon armor as well. I know this is rather cliche, but we've made our bed, so now we must lie in it. Elutherian Chemical Company won the bid, and even bad armor is a whole hell of a lot better than no armor at all.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
With some of the posts just makes me think stats wise in a game Vinland troops would have something like a faster speed or carrying more of something due to lower weight armor or something.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It being the year 1901, the testing people are actually doing well if they bother to test how well the armor performs when wet.
They'd be performing extraordinarily well, for a pure testing phase like this one, if they test it through repeated exposure to heavy weather and field conditions to the point of destruction or other unsuitability.
It's a truism that "the regulations are written in blood," and a lot of our standards and conception of how military procurement works, how it's supposed to work every time, are written in blood shed during the World Wars. In-game, we're still on the low end of that learning curve.
Even as a reduced-scale project, I would be hesitant to pursue it because seven dice is still quite a lot (e.g. it is about the total amount we sank into our two machine gun factories).
I'm not actually sure that will turn out to be true, or rather, I'm not sure that the additional potentially-bad armor from Phase 2 will turn out to be enough better than no armor at all to justify the loss of other things (such as more artillery shells) that won't get made because of all the Progress we spent on the body armor.
I may become convinced that it will be, but I'd really, really like to see how the troops feel after a year or two of trying to do exercises in armor made at the Phase 1 production facililties first.
I'm all for us developing heavy body armor if we can find armor we trust to work well. The problem is, uh, doing that. I'd rather not invest too much (i.e. a lot more than seven dice modified by possible partnerships and contractors) investing in a type of armor that we hope will work out but is probably just a prototype of what we really need and may turn out to be very disappointing.
Not before we can confirm that it's living up to expectations, anyway.
On a related note, canonically our current infantry rifle is basically a Krag-Jorgensen clone and its biggest problem is a weak, low-velocity cartridge that can't be fixed by souping up the cartridge without blowing up the rifle.
So candidly, I'm a lot more worried that our infantry will have problems caused by the inability of their service rifle to penetrate light-to-medium enemy body armor than I am about problems caused by our lack of light body armor that the enemy's service rifles will probably go right through anyway.
To stop the enemy rifle rounds (think "Mauser k98" and so on), we would need a solid breastplate over the rayon gambeson, to say the least...
Last edited:
Honestly I was mostly hoping we could replace the rayon with hemp, and keep the rest of the design. Its the most versatile plant in the world, and I kinda wanna see it used more in fiction.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hemp is gonna be there, humbly, in the background, but if woven hemp rope was a workable alternative for body armor underlayers, I'm pretty sure we'd be using it... precisely because it's such a basic, ubiquitous thing.
It's not *that* versatile. Yes, it's a reasonably tough fiber, but it's nowhere near strong enough per unit mass to make a ballistic fabric out of.
What other plant can you make a plane out of? Other than wood I guess
Also, it's the second strongest natural fiber after silk, which means it's the strongest natural plant based fiber.
It's actually about as strong as silkworm silk, if not more, which is what early bulletproof vests were made of.
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You can make a plane out of magnesium too, but aluminum isn't a great choice for body armor or we'd use it more.
Okay, so does that make it strong enough for practical high-performance body armor?
??? I said hemp, like somebody made a working aircraft out of 75% hemp
It's not particularly high performance, but it's about as good as you can get without synthetic fibers
Wait, actually no, it is high performance, people are currently researching how to make it into body armor comparable to Kevlar, so it's probably good enough to protect against shrapnel
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, I know. My point is that a material can have many virtues, and be tremendously useful, and yet not be useful for personal body armor in modern infantry combat.
Sorry, took awhile for me to put in that edit
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
All I'm saying is that while I welcome doing Phase 1 soon and if we can fit it in this plan along with a pile of munitions projects and the Chatam carbine plant, I'm for it...
...I think we should at least pause for a little while before going on to Phase 2 to get user feedback from the army as a whole.
Actually, I think we can be reasonably confident that someone did run tests of that nature, even if it was just issuing the prototypes to soldiers and seeing how it fared. Take a look at the armor fabrication project description.
Emphasis mine. We had no IC idea how rugged the Elutherian pattern armor was when we accepted the bid. Now we know that it is less rugged than we would prefer. Therefore, we can be confident that someone did tests to figure out how durable the armor is.
Said tests probably aren't up to the standards of the modern-day National Institute for Justice, but it's not like the troops you propose handing the armor to for a year or two will be performing microscopic analysis either.
What are your thoughts about just having a contractor work on it in the background instead?
In the event that we do need to add a breastplate, I don't think that the entire 1050 point net project will be going out the window. The factories may need to be refit, sure, but it sounds like the bulk of the required progress will go to training workers to work with rayon.
In general I would much rather refit an existing supply chain than try to build a new one during the middle of a war.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Contractors tend to be expensive. If we have a contractor we can afford, well and good, but once we switch a contractor on, we can't switch them off until that phase of the project is done.
Note that what I'm proposing is a modest delay, not an indefinite one. If the equivalent of World War One breaks out in 1905, then yes, we'll be caught with the means to mass-produce body armor for an expeditionary force at best part-ready, I suspect. But then, even with the best will in the world and the enormous strides we're making in other areas, if World War One breaks out in 1905, we'll be caught short in a lot of areas.
And, again, there are other things we'll need in order to prepare for war, and among them is shell production. Shell production was the biggest supply problem all the warring parties had in World War One. And it'll be even worse for us because we share an ammunition caliber with Valois. Valois will immediately lean on us to provide them with literal mountains of 75mm shells as fast as we can make them, putting us under a lot of pressure.
And shell production competes with body armor for dice.
This isn't a case where we have a simple choice of "push the button for the Phase 2 body armor factories and get the stuff, or don't and don't." Opportunity cost is a factor, and balancing the different things we do with our dice is tough. No one thing should be pursued to the exclusion of all other things.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Um...military secrets were a thing during WWI USA. They even passed a law that is still used today. I'm not actually sure if they were a thing right before though since that law is infamous in my usual cultural circles I don't know if the Constitution defining treason in part as espionage was all that explored before then.
The problem with hemp right now is that it wasn't tested as a military manufacturing material. Like it is only in the modern day that the fact that hemp fabric is only behind silk of the natural fabric when it comes to it's tensile strength was noted.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I forget if this has been pointed out by anyone, but I'd also like to remind everyone that getting more small arms than what the army is asking for does also mean we can simply sell the excess to bolster our income. Raw materials extraction isn't the only way for us to get more resources for activating our dice.