Thank you both,
@Strypgia and
@BungieONI, for your time.
Hm...I've been using 60s-70s as my benchmark for what your forces can make. The Almaz S-200, in service from 1967 and actually
designed in the '50s, is listed as firing missiles with a range of at least 150 km. While kilometers are puny compared to miles, that is considerably more than 30 miles. That said, I don't want to say that you necessarily have missiles as good as Soviet missiles, since they specialized in such things. The S-200 was also explicitly a high-value target defense asset and presumably was not indicative of the typical achievements of the era. Even though it was designed at least twenty years prior to my cutoff date.
Well
@PoptartProdigy , the thing to remember is that
Some of the earliest SAMs, such as the
Bomarc, were actually
very long ranged weapon systems, because they were effectively primitive drone aircraft designed to fly into a formation of bombers and light off a nuclear warhead that would swat out of the sky every plane within a mile or so of the detonation point, though they could track on individual targets. In any event, since that's the sort of thing you generally want occurring
very comfortably far away, this incentivized extremely long range performance.
"SAM," as in "Surface to Air Missile," can mean anything from a shoulder-fired bazooka-like unit that has a
maximum ceiling of "a few miles high" and a maximum range of "like 4-5 miles downrange" up through gigantic things that are basically drone aircraft (as noted) with a maximum ceiling of "scratch the underbelly of space" and a maximum range of "hundreds of miles." It's not so much a question of how advanced your technology is, because there isn't a linear relationship between 'better tech' and 'longer range.'
it's all a question of how big and cumbersome you want the missile to be, and how far away you foresee needing to fire at enemy planes. And also whether you're willing to sacrifice some close-in defensive performance for extreme range. A missile whose engine and flight path are optimized for attacking a jet 200 miles away probably won't be optimally effective if fired at a jet that's only five or ten miles away, for a variety of reasons.
A well-conceived air defense network can actually have multiple different kinds of missiles that cover each others' deficiencies.
...
Now, someone who knows more about the relevant details should probably be the one to try to nail down specific performance parameters, but I wanted to bring all this to your attention. It's totally reasonable for Chicago to have heavy SAMs with a nominal range of something like 50 miles or even more, it's just that missiles that big are going to be individually bulky, expensive, hard to set up, hard to transport, and require a lot of support personnel.
For a relevant low end, a relatively compact early American SAM was the MIM-23 Hawk, which first entered service in the 1959-60 region. It had an operational range of around 30 or so miles. That's probably around the level we're working with, here.
I mean yes, but no.
The MIM-23 Hawk was intentionally designed as a complement to the MIM-14 Nike-Hercules missile, which was much larger, bulkier, longer-ranged, and higher-ceiling. A competitor to the Bomarc missile I mentioned above. So the MIM-23 was range-limited (relatively speaking) in part because it was specifically intended to be the agile, portable system for shooting down tactical aircraft flying around directly over the battlefield. If you wanted a missile that could shoot down a plane flying somewhere over in the next country, you whistled up a MIM-14 battery and plunked it down to take its time setting up.
It wasn't a case of one missile being higher-tech than the other, it was a case of different roles using differently sized hardware.
The town they'reholed up in is abandoned/evacuated isn't it?
Why not just level it with artillery?
Why would they all stay in the town while we were leveling it, as opposed to spreading out over a larger area? They're crazy, not stupid.
All right, so if you're Burns ordering launchers to counter F-16s that launch standoff munitions, what are you ordering?
Order a big-ass missile with an absurdly long standoff range. Like, "we can fire from Detroit and hit a plane halfway to Buffalo."
Then grit my teeth and realize we can't actually make more than a handful of the things, and sigh and
also order a smaller missile that some of our more, ah,
boutique industrial facilities can produce, which serves as the second line and is short-ranged enough that it's meaningful to talk about an air defense "bubble" around our troops that doesn't extend all the way to Toledo by default, or for that matter all the way to Cleveland. This smaller missile may actually be small enough to fit on a
Des Plaines, too, which the big heavy SAM for "halfway to Buffalo" duties is not.
...Aaaaand that is the twenty mile missile you just referenced, with the superheavy "halfway to Buffalo" missile being a prototype we grudgingly left behind in Chicago because we'd never have enough of them to do more than surprise the
FUCK out of the Victorians on a single occasion by hitting them at ranges they thought were immune to enemy action. And they weigh several tons each and would take a semi truck to move around plus many many truckloads of other equipment to set up and fire effectively.
Assuming we are using direct copies of the Soviet munitions. I would primarily order SA-6 Kub's and use them in most units while keeping a small amount of S-125's back to provide operational theater cover. If there were helo's a small amount of SA-8 Osa's for mounting of direct front line units/going for the good old quad truck mount to provide on-point interdiction and to prevent annoying heli's from trying to play terrain games.
We are in no position to order direct copies of Soviet munitions.
So once this fight is done can we please for the love of science put a couple of AP into Libraries and Heavy Presses? Because that'd really help out a ton.
We are already spending points on
Organize Libraries and are likely to continue to do so, though our free AP budget for next turn is
really tight and we may not be able to spare one.
Old Relics (the heavy press tech) is almost certainly NOT going to be all that helpful for building surface to air missiles, because even a large SAM simply doesn't have any components too big to make some other way. Rockets tend to be made more out of giant rolled-up sheets of thin aluminum or other metals rolled into a tube.
What we
need for industry is likely to be another, entirely different action, one that didn't actually exist on Turn 3 because we hadn't yet taken
Subsidize Industry, which it is likely gated behind.
[Don't get me wrong,
Old Relics is a good thing to do eventually. But unless @Poptart has an artificially unrealistic sense of what having such presses enables us to do, it's NOT the tech that is most critically a bottleneck stopping our industrial expansion.
