Voting is open
@PoptartProdigy, can any Victorian stuck on the island convenable be a good enough long-distance swimmer to swim across the lake to the shores, perhaps taking breaks by resting on immediate islands and recharging with ration packs they are bringing along? I'm not 100% sure on the scale of the geography here - I mean it must be large for naval battles and fleets to fit and be needed, but I'm not sure how large we are talking about.
 
@PoptartProdigy, can any Victorian stuck on the island convenable be a good enough long-distance swimmer to swim across the lake to the shores, perhaps taking breaks by resting on immediate islands and recharging with ration packs they are bringing along? I'm not 100% sure on the scale of the geography here - I mean it must be large for naval battles and fleets to fit and be needed, but I'm not sure how large we are talking about.

The largest long distance swim without flippers was over 139 miles. So yes, if they have marathon swimmers it's possible . Said Victoria would still be stuck hundreds of miles from home, with no gear, alone, surrounded by people who hate him. I am not worried about the Victorians swimming away.
 
I am sure that SOME Victorians will be able to kitbash SOMETHING together in order to escape. I mean give even me a keg or something and some food and I think I could swim quite far, especially since the water is potable. That sort of thing always happens in situations like this.

I just don't see it being strategically significant, not even at the scale of a small unit slipping away with a semi-submerged barge.
 
I concur. The issue isn't really the individual soldiers left behind escaping- it's them staying, and setting up/holding a forward base that's the issue. Hell, if they want to swim, let them; they'll have to leave behind all of their heavy equipment, and most of their gear. Swimming isn't too hard- swimming with even a few extra pound of metal is much more difficult.
 
@PoptartProdigy, can any Victorian stuck on the island convenable be a good enough long-distance swimmer to swim across the lake to the shores, perhaps taking breaks by resting on immediate islands and recharging with ration packs they are bringing along? I'm not 100% sure on the scale of the geography here - I mean it must be large for naval battles and fleets to fit and be needed, but I'm not sure how large we are talking about.
It is theoretically possible. But its early spring. The lake will we fucking cold. Its not really an option.

They are more likely to try to raft it, but again, good luck.

They might have a few of their ~1000 troops escape those islands.
 
It is theoretically possible. But its early spring. The lake will we fucking cold. Its not really an option.

They are more likely to try to raft it, but again, good luck.

They might have a few of their ~1000 troops escape those islands.
Correction: it's a full division, I think, so more like 10k troops there. We can expect... perhaps dozens of them slipping through our fleet, with little to no gear or supplies, far, far away from home. Perhaps a few will make it all the way back home, if they are extremely lucky. Still not significant by any measure.
 
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.
1)I've heard of Okun before in SB's War Room.
It bears pointing out that it's a useful resource, but is describing material not in use in modern shipbuilding.
For better or worse.

2)I'm not a soldier, and the anecdote is not mine.
No idea if spalling was the issue, or if was just straight up penetrated. But it sounds plausible.
Javelins are also top attack, and their 8 kilo warhead will penetrate the roof of a proper tank, despite being several times smaller than a 120's explosive filler.
 
1)I've heard of Okun before in SB's War Room.
It bears pointing out that it's a useful resource, but is describing material not in use in modern shipbuilding.
For better or worse.

2)I'm not a soldier, and the anecdote is not mine.
No idea if spalling was the issue, or if was just straight up penetrated. But it sounds plausible.
Javelins are also top attack, and their 8 kilo warhead will penetrate the roof of a proper tank, despite being several times smaller than a 120's explosive filler.

Not a good comparison, an ATM is shaped charge of some sort or another, mortars don't really do that, they are HE, so they will perform far worse than a dedicated atm, and due to a mortar's inherent accuracy? unless you have something guided? a shaped charge sounds like an insane mortar idea.

Anyway given we are talking about deck armor, by and large, we can have layers, and have a deck, space, deck armor, machinery spaces and so on and so forth.
We also don't need to armor the whole thing, just machinery spaces and magazines (and turrets), anything else is nice to have, but not necessarily critical.

Still 20 kn speed? jeez, what are we using? triple expansion steam plants?
 
Not a good comparison, an ATM is shaped charge of some sort or another, mortars don't really do that, they are HE, so they will perform far worse than a dedicated atm, and due to a mortar's inherent accuracy? unless you have something guided? a shaped charge sounds like an insane mortar idea.

Anyway given we are talking about deck armor, by and large, we can have layers, and have a deck, space, deck armor, machinery spaces and so on and so forth. We also don't need to armor the whole thing, just machinery spaces and magazines (and turrets), anything else is nice to have, but not necessarily critical.

Still 20 kn speed? jeez, what are we using? triple expansion steam plants?
Shaped charge matters, yes.
But if you're unlucky enough to eat the golden BB of an unguided 120mm mortar round making a direct hit, I suspect you're fucked anyway.

These are small ships though. Smaller than WW2 destroyers, and they had no armor either(they didn't call them tincans for nothing)
There isn't that much spare tonnage to play with, and armor both increases fuel consumption and reduces actual speed, and costs payload capacity that can be used for useful shit. Besides compartmentalization, I don't really see what else you can do.

I think the standard for modern warship building is three quarters inch steel or something like that.
 
@PoptartProdigy, can any Victorian stuck on the island convenable be a good enough long-distance swimmer to swim across the lake to the shores, perhaps taking breaks by resting on immediate islands and recharging with ration packs they are bringing along? I'm not 100% sure on the scale of the geography here - I mean it must be large for naval battles and fleets to fit and be needed, but I'm not sure how large we are talking about.
Conceivably. That said, it's quite a distance. I will correct what somebody said up above; it was early spring when this campaign started, but you're about to hit June now.

However, it's not an easy swim, and they can forget bringing along heavy equipment.
 
Is that going to take nearly that long? The option says "weeks of bombardment", and we have half-year turns, so I don't imagine it'll require us to prolong mobilization that long.
If our troops are still out in the field consuming supplies and having just used up most of our stockpiles in, oh, June or July, that means we're going to continue needing a lot of industrial effort to sustain them (shipping commitment, supplies manufactured for soldiers who are performing no productive labor, plus of course continuing to manufacture munitions at a high rate to keep from running out).

It's been confirmed that the mobilization having to run on into Turn 4 was a potential consequence of voting "Siege" rather than "Assault" in our dealings with the main army. That's probably still on the table.

One more problem:
Air defense requires radar. High-powered radar has high power requirements.
I don't think you can comfortably run an ADF ship's power requirements on a coal power plant. Not while pushing the ship itself and maintaining any sort of useful range.

Something has to give.
Better consult our ship experts on that. @Artificial Girl seems to be connected.

I mean, bear in mind that Victoria does not exactly use AP shells on these. That said, if you think it's outright impossible, just submit a design without the armor requested. If you are right, that will not penalize you relative to others.
Basically the problem is that a heavy mortar shell weighs like... 30-40-50 pounds, something like that, and it's falling from a height of multiple miles in the air. It doesn't need to be designed to penetrate armor for it to crash right through any layer of deck armor you can reasonably put on a warship this size.

Deck armor is very mass intensive because you have to layer it all over an area of thousands of square feet for it to do any good, and it weighs many many pounds per square foot.

In this case, the Commonwealth is in the supremely odd industrial situation of being more capable of manufacturing SAMs with their own power supplies — think mobile SAMs that just happen to be sitting on the deck, for what this would look like — than they are of expanding oil production to supply more than one new class of warship, particularly for a warship class meant to escort river boats which realistically are hitting mothballs the second you expand oil production significantly. The Commonwealth can repurpose SAM units; it has a more difficult time retasking single-purpose and increasingly outmoded warships.
The problem for SAM batteries is that you still need a radar set, and it still needs to be very powerful... which means you need a generator. A generator powerful enough to run the radar might as well BE the engine, basically; otherwise you're just sticking hundreds of tons of redundant cargo on board.

Thus, basically all warships power their radars from electricity generated by attaching equipment to the main engine.

So here's what I'm trying to get across.

There's sort of a strand of 'our artillery can do anything' going on in the thread right now. There are people thinking that taking the islands is effortless (and it sort of is, since we won't play it out ourselves), because we can completely annihilate the Victorians using our artillery without even stepping foot on them. And we can certainly make life on the islands hellish with constant (lower-intensity) bombardment. But without high-intensity saturation fire, the kind of fire we can't sustain, that nobody except the WW2 Pacific US Navy could really sustain, completely neutralizing the Victorians and destroying their ability to fight just isn't possible through artillery alone.

Basically, here's what I'm trying to say: if we try to siege the Victorians until they starve or completely crumple under our artillery bombardment, we'll be here all day. The siege option can certainly kill quite a few Victorians and make it very hard for them to get any sleep, but it's not going to end organized resistance on the island before our troops land. It'll suppress said resistance, sure, maybe keep them from charging suicidally into gunboat fire trying to destroy the beachhead, but it'll still be a hell of a mopping up job. Both options will have organized, bloodthirsty Victorian resistance. Both will end in said resistance being slaughtered, but 'Siege' isn't going to be bloodless.

This isn't even really about the islands, honestly, I'm just trying to pump the brakes a little on our mindset about the artillery. Artillery is pretty fucking awesome, but we shouldn't ask too much of what we currently have.
The Victorians' total incompetence at entrenchment compared to, say, World War One armies or the Pacific Theater Japanese makes artillery more effective, but I doubt you're wrong.

Not a good comparison, an ATM is shaped charge of some sort or another, mortars don't really do that, they are HE, so they will perform far worse than a dedicated atm, and due to a mortar's inherent accuracy? unless you have something guided? a shaped charge sounds like an insane mortar idea.

Anyway given we are talking about deck armor, by and large, we can have layers, and have a deck, space, deck armor, machinery spaces and so on and so forth.
We also don't need to armor the whole thing, just machinery spaces and magazines (and turrets), anything else is nice to have, but not necessarily critical.

Still 20 kn speed? jeez, what are we using? triple expansion steam plants?
High speed burns fuel a lot faster; we're prioritizing endurance over speed because our warships don't have to win a race with fast enemy ships under plausible circumstances.
 
High speed burns fuel a lot faster; we're prioritizing endurance over speed because our warships don't have to win a race with fast enemy ships under plausible circumstances.

Well, yes, but having a max speed and using the max speed are two different things.
TBH I am more concerned with using coal, because that means stoakers, and that is manpower intensive, if you want to reduce costs, getting something more liquid to burn should be in our priority
 
2)I'm not a soldier, and the anecdote is not mine.
No idea if spalling was the issue, or if was just straight up penetrated. But it sounds plausible.
Javelins are also top attack, and their 8 kilo warhead will penetrate the roof of a proper tank, despite being several times smaller than a 120's explosive filler.
The two warheads are very very different. One is a tandem heat charge made for defeating armor and leaving a small post penetration jet. The other is a metal tube filled with HE filler that is made to shrapnel. And for the latter, as long as you can armor against the shrapnel/compartmentalize, it's not going to sink the boat unless truly insane amounts are used. Which is also the reason why most ww2 era destroyers were completely unarmored.

A mortar is either made to detonate away from the target/airburst, in which case 10mm of steel makes something fully immune. Or it can contact detonate, in which case the .2x rule applies. A mortar shell cannot even go for a theoretical magazine shot, as it simply does not have the inertia or shrapnel size to pull it off on even an unarmored(5mm hull).

And quite ironically for fighting things like Javelins/why they are not used against ships or even riverboats, the entire ship would act as a big lump of spaced armor. And unless the jet can stay coherent for the 6 or so meters it takes to reach a barbette hoist. It's not going to do much but splash against the internal plating with some liquid copper.
 
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I am not a ship expert, I just play one on TV.
OK, but at least you seem to have a better idea of who to ask?

The two warheads are very very different. One is a tandem heat charge made for defeating armor and leaving a small post penetration jet. The other is a metal tube filled with HE filler that is made to shrapnel. And for the latter, as long as you can armor against the shrapnel/compartmentalize, it's not going to sink the boat unless truly insane amounts are used. Which is also the reason why most ww2 era destroyers were completely unarmored.

A mortar is either made to detonate away from the target/airburst, in which case 10mm of steel makes something fully immune. Or it can contact detonate, in which case the .2x rule applies. A mortar shell cannot even go for a theoretical magazine shot, as it simply does not have the inertia or shrapnel size to pull it off on even an unarmored(5mm hull).
I would be really surprised if the Victorians don't have contact-fuzed shells.
 
Canon Omake: Hell Hath No Fury
This is unproofed, unedited, and largely written on my phone. I had no time to make sure its canon compliant, so help there would be appreciated, but damn it, it's done.


Hell Hath No Fury

Sargent Davis hated the woods.

He'd never understood all the fairy tales of children wandering deep into the woods and getting lost off the path: you couldn't go wandering off the path in the deep woods without a damn machete. Not in the swampy woods between Detroit and Toledo, anyway. The forest floor was choked with shrubs and brambles that would rip at your skin and clothes. The bugs were everywhere the moment you left the sun: literal clouds of mosquitoes being the most common and the most maddening, but he'd seen enough of the familiar bull's eye rash caused by Lyme Disease to know the ticks hiding in the undergrowth were the real danger. They didn't make a vaccine for that, and medicine was always scarse.

His squad looked as miserable as he felt, fighting his way through the thorns, mud, and fallen trees. The Vics had naturally retreated to the shelter of the woods they'd been foraging almost all of their food from when the shells started raining down, and the gunners wasted no time in proving how very little protection those woods offered. Trees had come crashing down by the dozen, their trunks shattered to splinters in the bombardment, and the Vics had desperately tried to use the fallen timber as cover until they found out the artillery could blow that up too.

The Victorian lines were broken. To stay by the Raisin, within easy range of the Commonwealth guns, was suicide. So they retreated back toward La Salle and the tangled mess of trees and brush that had once been small thickets of wood but had grown wild and strong when the humans around it had diminished. And as they retreated, the Victorians found Sargent Davis and the rest of Toledo's soldiers charging north to meet them.

The battle was already won. This was just cleanup. Victorian soldiers were fanatical, and for all their insanity, Davis had to admit they knew their way around a woods. Leave them to hide in here, they'd just pop out later and wreck havoc while they tried to go out as heroes. They weren't smart about it, but damn if they weren't persistent. He'd talked with them, even trained with them during the abortive alliance. He'd never liked them, hell, NO ONE liked Victorians...but what choice was there? Ally with Victoria, or get killed by Detroit. Or the Commonwealth if they survived Detroit. Or Victoria itself if they held off the Commonwealth. The only winning move was to make a deal with the devil, everyone could see that.

Only they'd all been wrong.

That thought was what kept him going through the brambles, over the fields of splinters, even as hundreds of whining insects swarmed for their drop of blood. It had always felt wrong, standing side by side with the damn Vics. Watching half his damn squad get put on 'reserve' because the Victorians couldn't stand the idea that a woman could shoot just as well as a man. Laughing at their jokes about any inhabitant of Toledo who wasn't obviously a white, God-fearing Christian. Pretending not to see when some of the Victorians got back late to their camps because they'd been having 'fun' with the locals.

He'd been itching to shoot them for weeks.

There were drops of blood and the occasional torn thread on the path the Victorians had hacked to force their way into this particular set of woods. The artillery had made following that path easy, but Davis knew better than to take the easy route. The scouts had spotted squads of Vics going in for days now, dragging their wounded with them, which meant they had to be somewhere. If the artillery and squads coming in from other parts of the forest hadn't gotten them first, anyway.

"This is stupid, Sarge," hissed Taylor from his right. "They've all run out the other side to go get themselves gloriously killed charging the Commonwealth. I haven't heard a shot in an hour."

"If you want to risk the next one you hear being the one that blows your head off, then be my guest and stand up," Davis hissed back. "If not, we stay low and slow. I want to see them before they see us."

As if on cue, a bird whistled ahead of them. It wasn't a bird, of course, but Adams was a hunter in her spare time and could do a perfect imitation of one when she wanted. Davis suspected she'd spent a lot of her enforced 'reserve' time taunting the Vic's foraging parties with it, but considering how little Adams talked he'd never be sure.

He crawled quickly along the ravaged ground, getting whipped in the face by a thorn branch for his trouble, until he slid beside where Adams was scouting a dozen or so yards ahead of the rest of the squad in the cover of the tangled brush. She said nothing, just pointed silently ahead.

It took him a second, but Davis quickly spotted what she was trying to point out. The forest floor ahead was covered in blankets, tarps, and canvases of every description. Most were in dull colors or had been smeared with mud to make them harder to spot at a distance. He'd seen the tent cities the Victorians erected when there weren't enough houses for them to be 'hosted' at, and sans the dull coloring as a crude attempt at camouflage, this definitely looked like what was left of one. The tents were collapsed, their occupants apparently already gone.

He made to speak, but without warning the edge of the distant camp suddenly burst into flame. The fire spread like a wave, rippling with unnatural speed from one canvas to the next until the entire thing was ablaze. He hadn't noticed all of the fallen tents were touching, but it was obvious now.

"Holy shit," he whispered to himself. He nudged Adams, and she made a cry to signal the squad to quickly move up. The Vics might have been burning their stuff to keep it from being captured (though the last thing Davis wanted was their shitty excuse for camping gear), but that just meant some of them were still here. He gestured to the left, where the inferno had begun, and his squad quickly and silently moved to surround it.

Five figures were standing there, silhouetted against the fire. They were obvious once Davis and his squad had fought through some of the brambles separating them, and they clearly weren't trying to hide.

They also weren't Victorians.

Five women stood at the edge of the burning tents, staring into the hellfire. They were obviously pale and gaunt, their skin sticking to the bones of their faces in a decidedly unhealthy manner. They wore long, woolen dresses of the style Victorians like to see: skirts that went all the way to the ground, sleeves that went all the way to the wrist, and collars that covered the neck. Modest. They even wore white caps or bonnets. In the light of the fire, Davis noticed that their clothes were flecked with the dark red stains of dried blood.

One of the women was on her knees, weeping. Another just stared into the fire as though hypnotized. She made to walk forward, into the mounting conflagration, but a woman beside her with a calm, stern face grabbed her arm and stopped her.

"Its not for you," she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. She glanced at a fourth woman, who was glancing nervously between the fire and the woods, as if she expected an army of vengeful Victorians to surge out at any second. "Get her up please. The smoke will draw attention, and we need to be gone by then."

"I dont care," said the last woman, her mouth split in a feral grin. "I want to watch those bastards burn."

Davis' eyes shot to the burning tents in horror, and he sprang into action. He stood up, rifle at the ready, and his squad emerged from cover enough to show the women they were outnumbered.

"No one move! Hands where I can see them, right now!"

The nervous woman shrieked in fear and almost jumped into the raging fire. The one staring hypnotized at the fire merely turned and cocked her head in confusion. The stern woman just sighed and glanced at his rank patch.

"We aren't Victorians, Sargent."

"That doesn't mean you aren't dangerous." He glanced at the final woman, who glared back with more fury than he'd ever seen before. "What is this place?"

"It was a Victorian field hospital," replied the stern woman, her tone one of great exhaustion. "If you could call it that."

"Where are the Victorians now?"

"Gone." She gestured vaguely northward.

"Did they take their wounded with them?"

"No."

Davis steeled himself and asked the question that had forced his hand the moment it had occured to him.

"Are there people in that fire?"

The woman look back at him and her calm voice dripped venom.

"I promise you, Sargent, there are no people in there."

Davis looked from the burning tents to the various expressions of sorrow, rage, determination, and pain on their faces...and lowered his weapon.

"Fair enough. If you'll come with us, we can take you-"

"We've had more than enough of being taken places by soldiers." She pulled off her white cap and threw it into the dying inferno. "If you really want to help, forget you even saw us. Let what happened here burn to ash with everything else."

She turned and walked off into the smoke and splinters. One by one the others followed, throwing their caps and bonnets into the fire before vanishing into the wood.
The one with the bloodthirsty smilebwas the last to go. Not content with throwing away her bonnet, she ripped off her entire dress like it was made of wriggling centipedes and hurled it as far as she could into the fire with a feral snarl.

Then they were alone.

Davis turned back to his squad gravely.

"Hand me the radio, I've got to call this in."

"Sarge?"

"We found a Vic hospital but we're too late. Bastards burned their own wounded to keep us from getting them. Gotta call that in."

"...I guess we do."

"Sounds like something those crazy Vic bastards would do, though," said Travis.

"Sure does. Crazy Vic bastards."
 
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The two warheads are very very different. One is a tandem heat charge made for defeating armor and leaving a small post penetration jet. The other is a metal tube filled with HE filler that is made to shrapnel. And for the latter, as long as you can armor against the shrapnel/compartmentalize, it's not going to sink the boat unless truly insane amounts are used. Which is also the reason why most ww2 era destroyers were completely unarmored.

A mortar is either made to detonate away from the target/airburst, in which case 10mm of steel makes something fully immune. Or it can contact detonate, in which case the .2x rule applies. A mortar shell cannot even go for a theoretical magazine shot, as it simply does not have the inertia or shrapnel size to pull it off on even an unarmored(5mm hull).

And quite ironically for fighting things like Javelins/why they are not used against ships or even riverboats, the entire ship would act as a big lump of spaced armor. And unless the jet can stay coherent for the 6 or so meters it takes to reach a barbette hoist. It's not going to do much but splash against the internal plating with some liquid copper.
-Airburst shrapnel will get stopped by the steel construction common to warship construction, which amounts to roughly three quarters of an inch, or roughly 9.3mm of shipgrade steel.
Actual contact detonations are a different bet.

You basically can't armor enough against a significant threat. Not in the modern era.
Not even against Vics.
but he'd seen enough of the familiar bull's eye rash caused by Lyme Disease to know the ticks hiding in the undergrowth were the real danger. They didn't make a vaccine for that, and medicine was always scarse.
Only nitpick is that a vaccine for Lyme disease does exist.
It's was just withdrawn.
Brilliant work nonetheless. Bravo.
 
If our troops are still out in the field consuming supplies and having just used up most of our stockpiles in, oh, June or July, that means we're going to continue needing a lot of industrial effort to sustain them (shipping commitment, supplies manufactured for soldiers who are performing no productive labor, plus of course continuing to manufacture munitions at a high rate to keep from running out).

It's been confirmed that the mobilization having to run on into Turn 4 was a potential consequence of voting "Siege" rather than "Assault" in our dealings with the main army. That's probably still on the table.

Its directly been confirmed not to. 3rd question replied to in this post.

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

Even aside from the sheer fact of having had a war, yes. This was an unusually destructive conflict for the region’s economy. I mean, bear in mind that Victoria does not exactly use AP shells on these. That said, if you think it’s outright impossible, just submit a design without the armor...
 
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Its directly been confirmed not to. 3rd question replied to in this post.

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

Even aside from the sheer fact of having had a war, yes. This was an unusually destructive conflict for the region’s economy. I mean, bear in mind that Victoria does not exactly use AP shells on these. That said, if you think it’s outright impossible, just submit a design without the armor...
OK, I overlooked Laconic!Poptart. Sorry.
 
For the river monitors, would these help for a possible design?

Patrol Boat, Riverine


Patrol Craft Fast - "Swift Boats"
 
Javelins are also top attack, and their 8 kilo warhead will penetrate the roof of a proper tank, despite being several times smaller than a 120's explosive filler.

120mm Mortar shells specifically HE in US inventory are ~30lbs with a ~6.75 lb bursting charge, Russian and Soviet ones are about the same ballpark.

155mm shells are gonna have 8-10kg of explosives, but a not a mortar.
 
All right, at this point I would like sources cited -- from both sides -- on what it takes to armor against a six-inch HE shell. To clarify: Victorians are not going to be firing AP out of their mortars. They are certainly not going to be firing HEAT rounds out of mortars. They will be firing contact-fuzed HE or airburst -- and airburst will be something for the next brawl, really. And speaking of sources cited-
The two warheads are very very different. One is a tandem heat charge made for defeating armor and leaving a small post penetration jet. The other is a metal tube filled with HE filler that is made to shrapnel. And for the latter, as long as you can armor against the shrapnel/compartmentalize, it's not going to sink the boat unless truly insane amounts are used. Which is also the reason why most ww2 era destroyers were completely unarmored.

A mortar is either made to detonate away from the target/airburst, in which case 10mm of steel makes something fully immune. Or it can contact detonate, in which case the .2x rule applies. A mortar shell cannot even go for a theoretical magazine shot, as it simply does not have the inertia or shrapnel size to pull it off on even an unarmored(5mm hull).

And quite ironically for fighting things like Javelins/why they are not used against ships or even riverboats, the entire ship would act as a big lump of spaced armor. And unless the jet can stay coherent for the 6 or so meters it takes to reach a barbette hoist. It's not going to do much but splash against the internal plating with some liquid copper.
I'm sorry, what's the .2x rule?
This is unproofed, unedited, and largely written on my phone. I had no time to make sure its canon compliant, so help there would be appreciated, but damn it, it's done.


Hell Hath No Fury

Sargent Davis hated the woods.

He'd never understood all the fairy tales of children wandering deep into the woods and getting lost off the path: you couldn't go wandering off the path in the deep woods without a damn machete. Not in the swampy woods between Detroit and Toledo, anyway. The forest floor was choked with shrubs and brambles that would rip at your skin and clothes. The bugs were everywhere the moment you left the sun: literal clouds of mosquitoes being the most common and the most maddening, but he'd seen enough of the familiar bull's eye rash caused by Lyme Disease to know the ticks hiding in the undergrowth were the real danger. They didn't make a vaccine for that, and medicine was always scarse.

His squad looked as miserable as he felt, fighting his way through the thorns, mud, and fallen trees. The Vics had naturally retreated to the shelter of the woods they'd been foraging almost all of their food from when the shells started raining down, and the gunners wasted no time in proving how very little protection those woods offered. Trees had come crashing down by the dozen, their trunks shattered to splinters in the bombardment, and the Vics had desperately tried to use the fallen timber as cover until they found out the artillery could blow that up too.

The Victorian lines were broken. To stay by the Raisin, within easy range of the Commonwealth guns, was suicide. So they retreated back toward La Salle and the tangled mess of trees and brush that had once been small thickets of wood but had grown wild and strong when the humans around it had diminished. And as they retreated, the Victorians found Sargent Davis and the rest of Toledo's soldiers charging north to meet them.

The battle was already won. This was just cleanup. Victorian soldiers were fanatical, and for all their insanity, Davis had to admit they knew their way around a woods. Leave them to hide in here, they'd just pop out later and wreck havoc while they tried to go out as heroes. They weren't smart about it, but damn if they weren't persistent. He'd talked with them, even trained with them during the abortive alliance. He'd never liked them, hell, NO ONE liked Victorians...but what choice was there? Ally with Victoria, or get killed by Detroit. Or the Commonwealth if they survived Detroit. Or Victoria itself if they held off the Commonwealth. The only winning move was to make a deal with the devil, everyone could see that.

Only they'd all been wrong.

That thought was what kept him going through the brambles, over the fields of splinters, even as hundreds of whining insects swarmed for their drop of blood. It had always felt wrong, standing side by side with the damn Vics. Watching half his damn squad get put on 'reserve' because the Victorians couldn't stand the idea that a woman could shoot just as well as a man. Laughing at their jokes about any inhabitant of Toledo who wasn't obviously a white, God-fearing Christian. Pretending not to see when some of the Victorians got back late to their camps because they'd been having 'fun' with the locals.

He'd been itching to shoot them for weeks.

There were drops of blood and the occasional torn thread on the path the Victorians had hacked to force their way into this particular set of woods. The artillery had made following that path easy, but Davis knew better than to take the easy route. The scouts had spotted squads of Vics going in for days now, dragging their wounded with them, which meant they had to be somewhere. If the artillery and squads coming in from other parts of the forest hadn't gotten them first, anyway.

"This is stupid, Sarge," hissed Taylor from his right. "They've all run out the other side to go get themselves gloriously killed charging the Commonwealth. I haven't heard a shot in an hour."

"If you want to risk the next one you hear being the one that blows your head off, then be my guest and stand up," Davis hissed back. "If not, we stay low and slow. I want to see them before they see us."

As if on cue, a bird whistled ahead of them. It wasn't a bird, of course, but Adams was a hunter in her spare time and could do a perfect imitation of one when she wanted. Davis suspected she'd spent a lot of her enforced 'reserve' time taunting the Vic's foraging parties with it, but considering how little Adams talked he'd never be sure.

He crawled quickly along the ravaged ground, getting whipped in the face by a thorn branch for his trouble, until he slid beside where Adams was scouting a dozen or so yards ahead of the rest of the squad in the cover of the tangled brush. She said nothing, just pointed silently ahead.

It took him a second, but Davis quickly spotted what she was trying to point out. The forest floor ahead was covered in blankets, tarps, and canvases of every description. Most were in dull colors or had been smeared with mud to make them harder to spot at a distance. He'd seen the tent cities the Victorians erected when there weren't enough houses for them to be 'hosted' at, and sans the dull coloring as a crude attempt at camouflage, this definitely looked like what was left of one. The tents were collapsed, their occupants apparently already gone.

He made to speak, but without warning the edge of the distant camp suddenly burst into flame. The fire spread like a wave, rippling with unnatural speed from one canvas to the next until the entire thing was ablaze. He hadn't noticed all of the fallen tents were touching, but it was obvious now.

"Holy shit," he whispered to himself. He nudged Adams, and she made a cry to signal the squad to quickly move up. The Vics might have been burning their stuff to keep it from being captured (though the last thing Davis wanted was their shitty excuse for camping gear), but that just meant some of them were still here. He gestured to the left, where the inferno had begun, and his squad quickly and silently moved to surround it.

Six figures were standing there, silhouetted against the fire. They were obvious once Davis and his squad had fought through some of the brambles separating them, and they clearly weren't trying to hide.

They also weren't Victorians.

Five women stood at the edge of the burning tents, staring into the hellfire. They were obviously pale and gaunt, their skin sticking to the bones of their faces in a decidedly unhealthy manner. They wore long, woolen dresses of the style Victorians like to see: skirts that went all the way to the ground, sleeves that went all the way to the wrist, and collars that covered the neck. Modest. They even wore white caps or bonnets. In the light of the fire, Davis noticed that their clothes were flecked with the dark red stains of dried blood.

One of the women was on her knees, weeping. Another just stared into the fire as though hypnotized. She made to walk forward, into the mounting conflagration, but a woman beside her with a calm, stern face grabbed her arm and stopped her.

"Its not for you," she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. She glanced at a fourth woman, who was glancing nervously between the fire and the woods, as if she expected an army of vengeful Victorians to surge out at any second. "Get her up please. The smoke will draw attention, and we need to be gone by then."

"I dont care," said the last woman, her mouth split in a feral grin. "I want to watch those bastards burn."

Davis' eyes shot to the burning tents in horror, and he sprang into action. He stood up, rifle at the ready, and his squad emerged from cover enough to show the women they were outnumbered.

"No one move! Hands where I can see them, right now!"

The nervous woman shrieked in fear and almost jumped into the raging fire. The one staring hypnotized at the fire merely turned and cocked her head in confusion. The stern woman just sighed and glanced at his rank patch.

"We aren't Victorians, Sargent."

"That doesn't mean you aren't dangerous." He glanced at the final woman, who glared back with more fury than he'd ever seen before. "What is this place?"

"It was a Victorian field hospital," replied the stern woman, her tone one of great exhaustion. "If you could call it that."

"Where are the Victorians now?"

"Gone." She gestured vaguely northward.

"Did they take their wounded with them?"

"No."

Davis steeled himself and asked the question that had forced his hand the moment it had occured to him.

"Are there people in that fire?"

The woman look back at him and her calm voice dripped venom.

"I promise you, Sargent, there are no people in there."

Davis looked from the burning tents to the various expressions of sorrow, rage, determination, and pain on their faces...and lowered his weapon.

"Fair enough. If you'll come with us, we can take you-"

"We've had more than enough of being taken places by soldiers." She pulled off her white cap and threw it into the dying inferno. "If you really want to help, forget you even saw us. Let what happened here burn to ash with everything else."

She turned and walked off into the smoke and splinters. One by one the others followed, throwing their caps and bonnets into the fire before vanishing into the wood.
The one with the bloodthirsty smilebwas the last to go. Not content with throwing away her bonnet, she ripped off her entire dress like it was made of wriggling centipedes and hurled it as far as she could into the fire with a feral snarl.

Then they were alone.

Davis turned back to his squad gravely.

"Hand me the radio, I've got to call this in."

"Sarge?"

"We found a Vic hospital but we're too late. Bastards burned their own wounded to keep us from getting them. Gotta call that in."

"...I guess we do."

"Sounds like something those crazy Vic bastards would do, though," said Travis.

"Sure does. Crazy Vic bastards."
Pretty much, yeah. Canon. Damn. Nicely done.
 
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