The Toledo force was much larger, better supplies, had actual air forces and a good amount of territory, plus they were on land. The island force is one division trapped on a bunch of islands that can pretty much be covered entirely by our artillery. There is no equipment the Russians can send that will seriously change their situation, and anything they do send we should be able to destroy or seize. Additionally, if Russians decide to send planes under Vic flags, they risk getting shot down; if they send them with russian flags, that's a serious official show of allegiance and not something they are likely to do over one trapped division. There's basically no reasonable way for them to reinforce or relieve this force that won't cost them a lot more than they can gain.
The Pelee island is the largest of them and it's about 5 km wide, and 2.5 km should be well within range for our naval artillery. Trees don't provide that much cover.
It's not about range, but size. The Victorians will have had nothing to do for the past weeks/months except dig so they'll at least have some sort of trenches, and we don't have the ammunition to saturate the entire island. I doubt we'd even try, if we're putting the island under siege.
Yeah on second thought i blatantly lied about pelee, sorry. i haven't looked at any of my erie islands stuff in a while because I've been working on other things, and the presence of Lake Henry (which is actually a bay) plus a bit of conflation with the other big island made me think there was a lot more water around there. I still feel that the Victorians could probably drag out the siege long enough to be really annoying.World map, satellite view // Earth map online service
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I'm not seeing any inland lakes. Two very small bodies of water on the southwest side, but dignifying those with lake is questionable.
Are we sure we don't have the ammunition? There is no indication anywhere in the story that we might run out.
A couple words got deleted from that sentence and I tried to edit them back in as fast as I could. I specifically meant 'for saturating the whole island, levelling the (already pretty flat) ground and destroying the Victorians without landing a boot.' It's been mentioned throughout that we only have (i just woke up so this might not all be right) about a battery of 155mm per division + some 105s and our gunboats because we don't have the shell production to support anything else, and saturating an entire island would be a lot more expensive shellwise than what we did with them during the main campaign. At least in my opinion. We can certainly siege them out, but it would take a long time. Especially since they'll probably choose starving to death to a man over surrender.
The option claims the siege would take "weeks" (presumably the estimation of our commanders, who should know their shit), and then "landing only once all activity has either ceased or been thoroughly suppressed". And Poptart is lawful, of course, so we can consequently expect our characters to behave like sensible people and not actually spend all our shells to saturation-bomb every square meter of Pelee island, but rather, as the text says, suppress them unti they can't mount an organized resistance, and then land and mop up, instead of landing asap as in the "assault" version.
So here's what I'm trying to get across.
One, that's with a small IFV that can spall, two if an AFV is dented it's going to have issues, three it's an aluminum chassis that is explicitly terrible at taking HE. The example does not work at all. In terms of actual naval shell performance, the rule of thumb is Okun Resource - World War II Naval Gun Armor Penetration Tables - NavWeaps or, for modern ductile armor, the penetration of a HE shell is .2x its width.
Yeah, you'll try.
