This man gets it.
See? SEE!?
Remember, everybody,
sooner or later we're going to run out of flamingly idiotic opposition. It's bound to happen. We need to be ready.
I enjoy the idea of landing a force behind the Vicks to take Toledo, but I am somewhat skeptical that we'd be able to pull it off. I shall await the GM's ruling on the matter.
I think it justifies using our fleet to scout out the coastline and see if the thing can be accomplished. If it could, it opens up a lot of possibilities for closing the ring on the Victorians, especially with the remainder of their heavy armor lost by the Huron River.
That works.
Below level of abstraction, but noted.
The two big lakers are right and proper lakers. 1000-footers, just like the Niagara. While Victoria does have the capacity to build those things, said capacity is a single shipyard in Buffalo that can custom-build them once every seven years.
Aha.
Well, as noted, such ships are much much much less useful to the Victorians if they can't take control of Detroit, so I suspect they are in some very real ways
more expendable than the smaller freighters. The smaller ones aren't such total white elephants, since they can transit the Welland Canal and have more flexible port arrangements.
I still suspect that we're looking at pre-Collapse lakers renamed in Victorian service, with the question being 'which ones?'
The four smaller vessels are more typical Victorian make. They can carry about 9,000 long tons of cargo, and are the mainstay of Victoria's commercial waterway shipping. Until Burns started purging the Vick spies, these ships were regular sights even in Chicago. Your navy knows them extremely well. Thus, you are absolutely certain that these ones are running empty or close to. While you are correct that you can make no such reliable estimation for the lakers, it would be very odd to leave the smaller ships utterly toothless while stacking the lakers to blow. Perhaps a trap to sucker you in? It would put a lot of weight on you exhibiting enough paranoia to check the smaller ships, but not enough to suspect the ruse, though.
Hypothetical, putting myself in the chair of the Victorian admiral/general:
Put a bunch of armament on the smaller freighters, but no more than, oh, 450-900 tons total, enough that the cargo loading is negligible as a fraction of their capacity. These are escorts intended to delay and tie up any Chicagolander gunboats trying to board the lakers. The lakers are themselves pretty close to a
Des Plaines in top speed, to the point where it wouldn't take much interference with the gunboats' interception to allow the lakers to turn the whole affair into a stern chase- famously, a long chase, and one that might give the lakers a chance to slip past.
The lakers can be loaded with as much weaponry and explosives as any sane-ish person could want without appreciably
scratching their maximum tonnage capacity, given that they were originally designed for loads of seventy or so thousand tons of rocks.
Providing security at the grounded laker. They're pretty ready to call it secure and do other things, though. The laker itself is offshore west and south of Leamington a short ways.
The cargo vessels are currently approaching your navy; even if they were not, you know that the Victorians have surface-search radar. They cannot possibly believe that they can make a run on Detroit to re-enact Halifax. Not with your navy out with steam raised.
OK, so our gunboats aren't
directly between the mouth of the Detroit River and the oncoming ships, but they're not that far away from the line.
This is partial evidence in favor of this
not being an attack of the type I'm worried about. If they were trying for that, they'd presumably be trying to 'bull past' our gunboat fleet, with the light freighters positioned a few miles to starboard of the lakers, where they could temporarily screen against the gunboats' attempt to intercept.
One minute while I get around to some answers.
WoG, by way of our IC naval experts, is that they aren't.
Either we believe our intel, or we don't.
If our radar operators and captains are telling me that a ship with a cargo capacity of seventy thousand tons is
clearly not carrying one or two thousand tons of explosives because it's moving too fast to be that "heavily loaded," I'm honestly sorry, but I consider "unreliable narrator, our officers crit-failed a basic competence check" a more plausible hypothesis than "those freighters are significantly slower with 2000 tons of dynamite on board than with 0 tons of dynamite on board.
I'm not saying that those ships ARE necessarily giant bomb/fireships, but I refuse to dismiss the possibility under these conditions for the stated reasons.
I forgot that we chose to shell the airbase at Buffalo instead of sinking the merchant fleet. .
But we shot up the merchant fleet at Leamington:
Consider how many ships it takes to carry fifty thousand men and their heavy equipment and supplies for two weeks of heavy fighting goes well into the tens of thousands of tons.
It takes quite a few ships, but the Victorians could easily have made multiple trips with a merchant fleet totalling something like 300 to 400 thousand tons of cargo
per trip, in terms of what they moved from Buffalo to Toledo or the lake islands before the Battle of Leamington even took place.
Given as lakers of this size are effectivelyy lostech for the Great Lakes region, even the Vics would not risk them in a combat theater if they had any alternatives, as compared to more replaceable modern ships.
Note my earlier remarks. These ships are useful
if and only if the Victorians succeed in taking Detroit. They're too big to leave Lake Erie by the east end, so with the west end closed and hostile to them, they become white elephants for most practical purposes. It would be fairly reasonable for the Victorians to have been very conservative about risking them
before the Battle of Leamington (when they thought success was assured), but very liberal about risking them afterwards (when it started becoming mission-critical to move very large masses of supplies around in a hurry, lest the entire campaign become a failure).
Note that they were not used during the initial amphibious landing at Leamington despite their cargo capacity.
Their ability to self-unload cargo quickly would be pretty limited for anything more complicated than dumping loads of crushed rock over the side with their onboard cranes. They needed to capture a BIG port before they could unload the lakers.
It's a civilian cargo ship.
Those are built for efficiency, not power; they don't have spare reserves of power.
If the GM via the mouthpiece of local experts says the ships are moving too fast to be carrying any cargo, I am willing to take them at their word.
Oh, I believe they're not fully loaded. Nor even half loaded. Nor even quarter loaded.
But 10% of the cargo capacity of a large laker is about 7000 or 7500 tons. 5% is 3500 to 3750 tons. Even that small a fraction of their cargo capacity would be enough for a Halifax-tier explosion.
And it's
very hard for me to believe that we can tell the difference between the ship being 0% loaded, 5% loaded, and 10% loaded, just by looking at how fast it's moving on the radar without even directly observing the ship from the outside.
I'm therefore highly reluctant to completely dismiss that particular possibility.
-I have no objections, I just think it's unnecessary.
And there are actually serious questions about why we shouldn't risk naval losses in order to acquire industrial bonuses like that fleet they're throwing at us.
The only real answer to that question is that the campaign isn't over and we'll have need of those gunboats tomorrow. Losing three or four gunboats, let alone the whole fleet, would still be a significant handicap to us, no matter how valuable the prize we obtained in return.
-Scouting passes up the opportunity to stack artillery maluses on the entrenched Vics.
While I'm tempted to Incheon them, we lack the firepower and equipment(and manpower) to pull it off properly.
And this is part of the point of the exercise, building naval-army experience in combined arms.
I think we actually HAVE that kind of experience; canonically the Chicago Navy spent quite a bit of time providing fire support for the Chicago Militia in the past.
It wasn't exactly a sneaky nuke. It was a big nuke, and they wouldn't have been eager to use it if they didn't need to.
It's "big" in the sense of "weighs a ton and is twelve feet long." Too big to conceal conveniently in, say, a minivan, but not too big to conceal in a ship or even a cargo container.
The good reason for them not to use that particular nuclear weapon on Detroit if they had it is because they want to go THROUGH Detroit to go to points west of it, and they'd be blowing up the bomb in the river itself, where it would create a massive, intensely radioactive crater lake right where their ships would need to pass through, along with wrecking irradiating the area they'd most want to use for basing their ships.
Actually, I think I remember WoG saying the Nuke is NOT in Victorian hands, given our boys had a gunfight with some Vicks once they finished following the trail of breadcrumbs, National Treasure style, only for both parties to discover some other third group had gotten there first.
I believe this to be the case also, yes.
But if we wanted to prepare for Victorian nuclear terrorism, which
IS in their playbook on the rare occasions when they get their hands on a nuclear weapon... Well, everything I said to
@Lailoken still applies.
