Speaking of this,
@PoptartProdigy Considering the Victorians mobilized their entire army,
Navy Coastal Force, and I presume all their actual jets, why weren't the other two CMC Divisions (or at least one of them) sent out as well? I imagine there was some concern about sending away everything, but in that case, wouldn't it have been better to maybe just hold back a single Army division and send another CMC one instead?
Now, I'm quite happy they
didn't send more than one CMC division at us, but I'm curious as to their mindset and reasons for
why that was the case.
No comment.
I'm not going to lie, I find this a perplexing choice on @PoptartProdigy 's part.
The Victorian Coastal Force, in terms of what it actually does all day realistically, is pretty much incapable of anything more ambitious than harbor patrol. But harbor patrol is still a thing, and someone needs to do it.
It seems very implausible to me that they had literally zero armed ships on the Atlantic coast at the time we hit Buffalo. It's just possible to me that their response to the loss of their Lake Erie fleet was to remove all of those armed ships and put them into service on Lake Erie, but even so, that's weird. It would represent them taking our naval superiority seriously to a degree that simply has not been seen in the rest of their actions so far.
What we've seen seems (to me) much more consistent with us having totally annihilated the Victorian's Lake Erie fleet, to the point where reinforcing it with armed ships from anywhere else in their territory has been dismissed by the Victorians as pointless. The local army commanders have at least tried to arm some ships to have some hope of fending off gunboat attacks on their supply transports, but that's about it.
This outcome would actually be very consistent with the idea of the Victorians viewing a "navy" as "an army that happens to have its own boats" in the same way that they seem to view "motorized infantry" as "an army that happens to operate its own trucks." There's no standardization; if your army unit loses its armed boat element, well, tough cookies. You don't automatically get to have the armed boats that belong to the Boston garrison for harbor patrol or whatever.
...
Likewise, I can believe that the Victorians put their entire limited stockpile of air-to-ground antitank and antiship missiles into this campaign only really enough for one or two sorties, and have now expended them. It would be very hard for me to believe that they committed every flyable jet to this campaign, though.
Not that @PoptartProdigy has explicitly confirmed that this is the case, though, with respect to the air force.
Well, I do, as usual, have a reason.
The crucial part is twofold; first, a Victorian's utter disdain for a navy as a tool for
actual war, and the modern composition
of Victorian navies, one born in Rumford's historical acquisition of such.
First, the Victorians don't actually believe that a real navy is a worthwhile military investment. Rumford quite literally believed that a speedboat with a spar torpedo was a match for a destroyer on the open water with only the slightest credence paid to the notion that surprise might be necessary. He believed that a two-mast sailing ship with infantry mortars tipped over on their sides near the waterline was enough to handle even the most lackadaisically-armed of pirate vessels. A navy, to Victoria, is at best something you sail out to tell other people to fuck off with. Alternatively, you blend into civilian traffic by virtue of the fact that your ships are, in fact, civilian, and trust that your (remember, Cultural Marxist) foes will obligingly
not freeze civilian traffic in their military operations' vicinity, or blow up civilian vessels ignoring posted warnings to back off.
Second, to a true Victorian a navy is both
disposable and
scratch-built. Rumford's first navy, and the template upon which he eventually built his force, was built in a day. He observed the need for ships, he envisioned two different designs which he believed would work, and then he had them. "Production," consisted of impressing fishing trawlers and speed boats, and slapping the desired weaponry on them -- weaponry he already possessed. This produced ships which were dirt-cheap, came pre-crewed, blended in flawlessly with civilian traffic until the time came to strike, and produced absolutely no strain on his existing supply chains.
They were, and are, also worthless. However, the crucial element is that Victorians do not build
tomorrow's navy; they produce, on demand, the navy they need
right now.
When the war started, Victoria began leisurely impressing new ships and sailors into the service in order to make room for their experienced sailors to invade Detroit. By the time the pre-war coastal patrols hit the Seaway and headed inland, their replacements were already bumbling around Atlantic Victorian ports, ensuring that pirates and smugglers could not operate in broad daylight while within sight of shore without obfuscation or additional gas costs. As usual!
The actually, "experienced," crews and ships all mustered in Buffalo, as the Admiralty had a vague notion that they'd probably want numbers on hand -- although they had no idea what level of agony awaited them. And they died, ripped apart either in their berths or immediately outside them.
Victoria's response was then to impress everything with a keel they could find on Lake Erie, shuffle out randomly-chosen sailors to make room for survivors from the Buffalo Raid, tell everybody aboard that they had better fucking redeem their (for most of them) one-day-old service if they knew what's good for them, and make
that the new Lakes Navy. This was the force you sank here.
So: Victoria's current navy consists of impressed vessels and crews with less than a season of experience, if that. You destroyed their entire established navy in Buffalo. The navy they raised to come after you here was also freshly-impressed, although it did not consist of their
entire navy; the Atlantic patrols, while very small in number, survived unscathed by virtue of being completely beyond your adorable little murderbotes' reach.
The Atlantic patrols, you see...don't really
count as sailors. They've been serving for a month and a half. Some of them aren't even
armed yet. I do not count them when calculating how many sailors they have with which to rebuild their navy. They are effectively civilians.
