It's not about efficiency.
It's about not aggravating people to the point where they go out of their way to spite you on principle. About not shocking the complacent neutrals out of their complacency and into active opposition. Where your allies and minions don't start looking for excuses to avoid being associated with you. And where your enemies don't decide that it's now open season on using chemical weapons against your own forces.
And it's about not drawing suspicions about responsibility for the WMD already used in North America towards yourself and your puppets.
Yeah.
As a good illustration of this, a lot more foreign aid started going to the Syrian rebels opposed to Assad
AFTER he started using poison gas on demonstrators and on civilians in rebel cities. The same strategic calculation applies here.
That's a good idea potentially - do you mean you think that it would be useful for the Commonwealth to peruse a chemical weapons program for military targets? It could be worth it.
Oh hell no.
Firstly, ethics.
Secondly, chemical weapons aren't nearly as effective against prepared military targets, and it wouldn't be
that hard for the Victorians to train and equip soldiers of their New Model Army with chemical warfare protection.
Thirdly, once you're regularly using chemical weapons on the battlefield, the temptation to use them on civilian targets gets harder to resist.
Fourthly... Well, even if one is deeply immoral and OH HELL NO WE ARE NOT, anyway, even if one is being evil... the problem is that with our primitive technological base and our rivals having a willing supplier of modernish weapons, we are heavily dependent on foreign goodwill. Doing anything that makes it look like the Victorians and Commonwealthers are identical monsters will hurt us a lot more than it hurts them.
Makes me wonder if we should also invest in flamethrowers or fear the Vicks doing the same.
Flamethrowers are a pretty low-margin weapon. Outside of very specific situations, having or not having them doesn't make a lot of difference.
All right, my ruling is that Victoria does not use chemical weapons. Alexander won't give them over, and the damn things are as dangerous to their own troops as to any enemies.
The Victorians COULD make their own, it would be possible for them, but given a general lack of technology experience in the society, and the lack of well-equipped rear area units to deal with chemical warfare and make sure the troops have protective gear, they wouldn't be able to use the stuff safely and effectively in the field.
They might but I don't think so, they would need the material ready now, that is to say sufficient quantities produced of their poison of choice, that takes time, they need, as I mentioned above people trained to make, handle and dispose of the material, do they have that? and how many, where? and so on and so forth.
I could see a terror attack, a sucide bomber with some anthrax or sarin or whatever, but again a terror attack doesn't need too much of and just needs somebody stupid enough and zealous enough to go to a high concentration of people...
doesn't even need a big bodycount, just fear and that would be more than enough
To be clear, I'm imagining something like "in 2058, the Victorians began Operation Brimstone, a campaign in which chemical weapon canisters were airdropped on villages of the notoriously fractious and resistant hillfolk of Vermont and parts of upstate New York. Several communities suffered devastating civilian casualties before sniper attacks on Victorian troop columns and tax collectors passing through the area began to subside."
Something like that.
The point is, a
crudely improvised chemical warfare program is something a nation like Victoria could
plausibly have, but it would be using them against extremely isolated and poorly armed opponents, particularly in hill country and other rugged terrain that would make hunting them down with soldiers difficult.
And operating on that level would be, I'm trying to say, probably within their capabilities- but such attacks would be far more difficult against us because our air defenses aren't so hopeless as those of a small town in a little mountain valley that defends itself entirely with rifles and Molotov cocktails would be.
I just can't see enabling your puppet state to used chemical warfare will be the tipping point or even contribute meaningfully towards people turning against Alex, because in the real world where international laws and free trade are relevant factors, unlike the post-Collapse world Syria's chemical attacks didn't significantly increase the pressure or opposition Russia was already under from the global stage. Sure everyone gave their condemnations and there was a bombing of the airbase they thought the missiles came from but nothing of significance has really changed as a result.
That is, as I understand it, in large part because Assad was using chemical weapons well before the Russians showed up, and the bad consequences of this for his regime had already been "priced in" in the form of outside governments aiding some of the rebels, and also refusing to support him against ISIS. By the time the Russians were settled in, that had already happened.
Now they are the sole superpower (perhaps hyperpower is the better term?) in a world where the international order and standards no longer exist? And he has already crossed the moral event horizon by purposefully starving millions of people which should have had the aggravating effect on neutrals, united his foes and distanced his allies already? This will mean even less. Just a blip on the radar.
Note that Alexander has pretty clearly been trying to dial that back down since 2050 or so, and that 20-30 years of time passing after an atrocity can be
very effective at causing third parties to forget about it and stop taking it seriously. That doesn't make
resuming the atrocities after your rivals have got their feet back under them and are ready to oppose you any less of a risk.
Just because you got away with something once under one set of conditions, doesn't mean you'll get away with it again under different conditions.
Honestly... since we are talking about cropdusters you know what would be the logical target for gas attacks?
Agriculture!
No. They cannot significantly wreck commonwealth agriculture. What they can do is hit individual farms and villages, not just the fields of crops, but they could do a real number of livestock out in the open.
What do they gain from this? Well they gain that we either try to stop it or we don't. Either way they could profit.
If the commonwealth tries to stop it then that means either sending the airforce up to find and hunt down cropdusters, and remember this is in the absence of a proper radar network. Thus forcing you to put more hours on already old airframes, as well as possibly wasting missiles. OR you distribute anti-air forces, but again you are distributing your air-defences (thus leaving less for critical areas), and spending valuable missiles on cropdusters. Plus, given the large area that needs to be covered there's just no way to defend it all.
I mean.
We probably
could establish a Chain Home-esque series of radar outposts that would let us target and shoot down individual aircraft pretty effectively. The only big challenge would be, yes, having fighters that we can afford to scramble frequently on large numbers of relatively low-stakes intercept missions.
Brilliant idea! We should use this idea to attack the Vicks - they are an agrarian state and subsistence economy after all so this will be even more crippling for them than for us, wrecking their logistics and their economy. Plus starvation could be a great way to eliminate militias or at least their will to fight if resistance will mean the crops and livestock they need to feed their families will be destroyed.
Goddammit it knock it off with the gas warfare and mass famine advocacy.
Funnily enough, we were just talking in the discord about how Lind believed a hallmark of conservatism is bland food.
...Wait what?
Wouldn't work. See what I am suggesting would not actually break the state in a physical sense, it would be an attack on Commonwealth morale. We would have to defend against it, or not, and either way deal with the damage they cause.
If we were to try to do the attempt in reverse we'd face several problems:
1. Unlike the Commonwealth the Victorians might get access to an AEW early warning system. This is something the Russians could provide with plenty of deniability, since it would not be immediately visible.
2. The Victorians can build their own airframes. While the Commonwealth is using kitbashed museum pieces. They can stomach losses much better than we can.
3. This is a terror tactic. Both Victoria and the Commonwealth will be able to handle the actual damage this causes quite well, even Victoria would have a domestic emergency aid program that'd be able to compensate any farmers hit. BUT... the Commonwealth, being a new state, has presumably not yet developed such a program.
4. Unlike the Commonwealth the Victorians have far better control over the domestic narrative. They can make it appear as if they are launching a meaningful defence, execute a few captured enemy pilots in public places, and so on. In short a relatively free society is more vulnerable to the propaganda war.
5. Victoria has much easier access to the foreign press (Russia etc), if the Commonwealth start using terror tactics it will be easier for Victoria to sell the war abroad.
1) I think the Commonwealth COULD establish an early warning system to detect incoming hostile aircraft. We do canonically have radar for tracking ships and planes, and we have an electronics industry. Since the threat we're worrying about isn't the kind of "Mach 2 jets with nukes zipping all over" stuff that makes
modern air defense rely so much on networking and centralized information control, I don't think it'd be that hard for us to do that.
2) You're not fundamentally wrong, though from one of my canonized omakes we know the Commonwealth can at least build its own (crude) transport planes. The real problem for building a primitive air defense fighter (a glorified missile truck intended to shoot down crop dusters, in effect) is probably lack of good aviation fuel, lack of a well organized pilot training establishment, and the manifest hopelessness of any such aircraft against an unsabotaged F-16V. We could counter it.
3) You're right about (3).
4) And (4).
5) And probably (5).
Once eerie is secure we need to push to get access to the mouth of the Mississippi so we can actually get some material aid from the EU. That way we can get components to build an early warning network against air attacks.
Nitpick: There are two E's in the word "Erie" as in "Lake Erie." There are three E's in the word 'eerie' as in 'way creepier than normal.' The latter is not the former.
Flamethrowers are basically worthless in modern warfare to the best of my knowledge.
Dangerous to carry, runs out too fast, doesn't kill all that many people, and is unnecessarily barbaric.
Aircraft might bother with napalm; people and ground vehicles shouldn't/
People have been making thermobarics since the 40s. Make some of those.
Getting thermobarics to work right seems to involve some tricky machining to ensure that the flammable gas is spread properly before the ignition of the weapon. It would probably be a lot
harder, in terms of man-years of research time and prototyping, to develop a good thermobaric grenade/rocket/howitzer weapon than a flamethrower; flamethrowers are extremely simple technology.
That said, flamethrowers are only effective in very specific conditions that basically reduce to "you're clearing a lot of buildings or a bunker complex, and you have control of the exterior so they can't just machine-gun your flamethrower teams on the approach." It doesn't make a big deal whether we have them or not; their existence is below the simulation level and resolution of the game, just as it doesn't make any real difference if our troops are using stick grenades or 'baseball' grenades.
The Commonwealth isn't that big atm; encompassing chunks of Illnois, Indiana and Michigan. One landbased set would cover it.
The AN/FPS-7 long range search radar entered service in 1959, and has a range on the order of 430km, and altitude of 100,000 feet. One in Chicago would provide total coverage of Commonwealth airpace as it currently exists. A second in Detroit would cover much of the Lakes and shield Toledo.
An Air Tractor cropduster puttering along at 200 or 300km an hour gets bounced by one of our shiny new F16s in short order.
Even one of our old turboprop fighters would make that sort of intercept no problem.
And retaliatory cruise missile strikes(we can make V1 caliber cruise missiles at a minimum right now) are well within our capabilities if we put our minds to pursuing the option.
I agree that it would not be infeasible for us to put up a basic air defense network IF we can get fighters that it's feasible for us to scramble on a regular basis.
With that said...
Will you knock it off with the V1 cruise missile references? They're not accurate enough to actually
hit anything other than an entire metropolitan area.
I'm not saying there will never come a day when we use cruise missiles. But references to the V1 just mislead your audience into thinking you're planning on using wildly inaccurate terror attacks agaisnt civilian populations, because that's the only thing the specific V1 weapon was good for.
So don't say V1.
The cruise missiles we
need are at least a generation or two more advanced than the V1, and whether or not we can make them is a big It Depends, one that is still entirely unanswered in terms of the game.
Actually, our air defenses just got a pretty good shot in the arm, with the capture of everything the VAF had left at the Toledo airport, which I believe included about 20 working F16Vs, who knows how many spares/downchecked ones, and probably a pretty good air-search radar set.
Those F-16Vs use sabotaged equipment. We can't use them for air defense sorties or they'll start falling out of the sky in short order. Sister Cali will be all like "so sorry, we didn't mean to fuck
you up."
Now, it IS at least possible that we can refurbish at least the
engines ourselves*, but that only takes us so far since we probably lack the equipment to manufacture high-quality spare parts, and we almost certainly can't replace all the other stuff the Californians sabotaged, which is potentially pretty much everything.
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*(IRL there's a maintenance facility at a minor air national guard base in Springfield for the F110 engines used in the F-16, F-15, and some F-14 models, and it's obscure enough that the Russians may have missed it or that the tooling could have been smuggled away somehow. This may be the reason we were able to maintain even a single squadron of F-16s of our own, along with various other jets... but it only goes so far, and it's definitely not a production facility)
en.wikipedia.org
