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What I'd like to know is what our national plan for earning the cash we'll spending internationally is. We've effectively committed at this point to buying a modern-ish navy and a modern-ish armor force from overseas, but running our anti-Victorian war machine purely off of foreign aid is incredibly dubious - and then there's all the non-military stuff we want to buy like infrastructure expansion (Russian money covers our existing stuff only), assorted civilian electronics, or improvements to our minimalistic pharm industry.
Agriculture. Iron ore out of Michigan and Minnesota, which are the major US deposits. Nickel out of Michigan.
Quarrying stone and gravel. Maybe some coal, if it's still a chemical substrate. And of course, some judicious borrowing.
That's in addition to foreign aid and aid from the diaspora of course.
When we get a little more investment going, should get our cement production back online; the Great Lakes area was a significant source of both portland and masonry cement. Maybe hydrogen exports, if that renewable power grid shapes up.
There's a pretty steep limit on what we can pay for off of the proceeds of transhipment fees on stuff moving through the Seaway and our relatively anemic consumer economy, so taking the time to spitball ideas of how to expand how much of our shopping list we can actually afford to buy is much more useful than patting each other on the back for concluding we'd be better off buying [insert item here] than making it ourselves.
I am under no illusions that we are going to fight the majority of the next war from our own resources. It's just not possible.
North Vietnam did not win the Vietnam War off their native defense industry or pay for all the SAMs they had equipped off their profitable imports. The US War of Independence was not fought out of pocket; all the combatants ran up large debts, with the French debt in particular eventually leading to the French Revolution..
So I'm not fussing about it.
A patron/couple of patrons will show up. Or we die bloodily.
But yeah, short term this just amplifies the ways in which it's better for us to develop an armored car or light infantry fighting vehicle infrastructure that runs off heavy truck engines (we need a factory that makes trucks, badly, Stalin was not wrong about how critical giant truck factories are to economic development). We then rely on guided missiles (light and easy to import) to make this force reasonably effective against enemy armor until such time as we can afford to meet them head-to-head.
-Never been any doubt that the Vics would outnumber us in tanks.
Two to one is me being optimistic, and I don't actually expect the Commonwealth to have more than a thousand tanks or so in service at best.
Enough to equip 2 armored divisions and four to six mechanized divisions, with everyone else being motorized.
The rest are going to have to be lighter,cheaper vehicles.
-This is a Boxer wheeled IFV configured as a tank destroyer, with the passenger compartment replaced with an eightpack of Brimstone missiles:
We're going to need a strong frontline of tanks, but almost as essential are going to be fire support vehicles with guided missiles and more.
-I've emphasized our domestic missile industry for a long time as the most critical part of our rearmament process.
From striking enemy airfields at a distance to kill their aircraft on the ground and equalize the numbers in the air, to bombarding enemy formations with MLRS rocket artillery, to arming aircraft and drones with air to surface munitions, to guided missile .
Some missiles we wont be able to build domestically at all, or we'll have to import parts too complex for us to make domestically, like seekers.
But much of the rest should be feasible with some help.
As for trucks, off SB:
IXJac said:
I think it bears to remember however that it is now the 21st century, not the middle of the 20th, and motor transport capacity is orders of magnitude greater these days. Where military demands were a serious burden for WWII trucks which often required trains to make up the shortfall, this would not be the case for any modern nation with a healthy transportation sector.
For example, the Soviet military in 1941 had about 270,000 trucks with a total lift capacity of about 540,000 tons. The civilian economy had another 220,000 trucks of similar capacity which the army drafted into service once the war began, at a time when the army was grabbing anything and everything that might suit its needs. Total transport capacity of trucks in the civilian economy is unknown, but it is unlikely to have greatly exceeded that of the military. We do know that trucks had only a tiny fraction the capacity of rail. Only about 2% of Soviet freight was carried by truck in 1940, compared to 85% by rail.
In contrast, the United States Army alone has about 250,000 trucks with a total lift of somewhere north of 4 million tons. To this the US civilian economy has nearly two million semi tractors, which usually haul about 40 tons each for at least 80 million tons of capacity - and that's just semi tractors.
Each year the US trucking industry hauls 10-15 billion tons of goods, compared to about 1.5 to 2 billion tons hauled by rail. A US heavy division in the 1990s consumed about 3-5,000 tons of supply a day in combat - most of this fuel - which is ten time the consumption of a WWII division, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the massive capacity of the modern US trucking industry, which moves about 40 million tons of goods every day. That means the US domestic trucking industry moves tonnage each day equal to the supplies required for the entire active US Army to fight for three+ years of continual combat!
A nation with a well developed modern trucking industry would have no problems supporting its military forces entirely by road.
Oh, sure. It's from John Stone's "The Tank Debate, Armour and the Anglo-American Military Tradition," page 161:
"During the final years of the Second World War, a US armoured division (equipped with the M-4 medium tank) required something between 600 and 700 tons of supplies per day during offensive operations. By the mid-1980s an Abrams-equipped heavy division required more than 2,700 tons per day under similar conditions, the inflated figure being in large part a consequence of the vast quantities of fuel required by the Abrams tank [Stone in the endnotes gives this as about 1,700 tons of fuel]. Indeed, it is accepted that an Abrams-equipped division might consume 1.5 million gallons [approximately 4,700 tons] during the first day of a 'moderate-intensity' offensive - more than four times the daily fuel requirement of Patton's entire Third Army during August 1944."
I rounded it out to a range of 3,000 - 5,000 tons. Could go up to 6000 tons for an upper limit if you like.
The numbers make sense. VII Corps Logistic Base Echo in the '91 Gulf War stockpiled some 60 million gallons of fuel to support five heavy divisions for about a week of combat. There wouldn't have been a need to go too far over what the Corps would be expected to consume in the first few days of operations (a healthy margin sure, but no need stockpile for weeks of operations), because after the Iraqi trenches were overrun the plan was for VII Corps to be supplied from Logistics Base Nellingen which would be constructed north of the old Iraqi defensive lines, so as to provide more direct supply to the forward divisions. As it turned out the Coalition moved so swiftly that Nellingen wasn't yet fully operational when VII Corps defeated the Republican Guard, but it should give you an idea of the scale of fuel consumption Coalition logistics planned to supply.
It's funny, the more I think about this thread, it reminds me a lot about this video. Except, translate pack animals into trucks and wagon carts into trains, then you would probably make the statement that the more things change the more things stay the same. I suppose it would be an...
forums.spacebattles.com
Trucks(and cargo boats) are frankly the most critical portion of our rearmament process, if only for their sheer logistic value in peacetime and at war.
The fact that it's possible to essentially build military vehicles using heavy duty truck chassis and engines is just cherry on the cake.
Whether diesel-electric that we have to fuel with fossil fuels, or purely electric so they can be charged off the nascent power grid, we're going to need to proliferate them.
POSTSCRIPT
As an aside, the vast majority of fuel consumed by a US division?
Actually isn't due to the tanks, which are fuel-hungry, but which have limits to how much fuel they can consume.
Look to the division's helicopter brigade, with it's >130 helicopters.
Low-volume stuff such as missiles we could plausibly get air-freighted in from New York or Miami or some enclave on the Gulf Coast that's answerable to the interests of a Latin American country or something... but doing that for tanks gets a bit iffy, since few transport aircraft can carry a tank and the expense of sustaining the force and its spare parts becomes a problem.
Normally I'd just point at the way normal stuff is smuggled in bulk cargo; bury parts in grain, or ore, and noone besides the destination will ever known.But unfortunately, the Victorians have Russian intel support.
Fortunately, we can ship stuff up and down the Mississippi.
Or, assuming Cali works out, you're looking at stuff getting shipped by bulk rail from California to Salt Lake City.
Then going cross country across the Rockies to Casper, Wyoming, and then down the North Platte River to Omaha, Nebraska. Disembark, go crosscountry to Des Moines,Iowa then ship down the Mississipi to St Louis, and up the Chicago River/Canal system.
Or, downriver from Omaha to Kansas City, and from Kansas City to St Louis.
Alternatively, you just load up a couple cargo airships and fly east from Salt Lake City to Chicago.
4x 500 ton payload airships with an average speed of 100mph will do the round trip in a little over 24 hours, moving 2000 tons of cargo each time.
EDIT
Bonus:
Plasan Sandcat anti-tank variant.
Ford chassis, custom body and electronics, 4x Spike-NLOS antitank guided missiles with a range of ~25km.
Normally I'd just point at the way normal stuff is smuggled in bulk cargo; bury parts in grain, or ore, and noone besides the destination will ever known.But unfortunately, the Victorians have Russian intel support.
Well, the stuff might well get to us anyway; the Russians aren't omniscient, after all. But it does add risk, and arms smuggling that gets caught is exactly the kind of thing that would give the Victorians a pretext to start clamping down on the St. Lawrence trade, which would hurt us in other ways.
Fortunately, we can ship stuff up and down the Mississippi.
Or, assuming Cali works out, you're looking at stuff getting shipped by bulk rail from California to Salt Lake City.
Then going cross country across the Rockies to Casper, Wyoming, and then down the North Platte River to Omaha, Nebraska. Disembark, go crosscountry to Des Moines,Iowa then ship down the Mississipi to St Louis, and up the Chicago River/Canal system.
Or, downriver from Omaha to Kansas City, and from Kansas City to St Louis.
The fact that neither of those routes is in significant commercial use now suggests that considerable effort may be required to get them functional overland through the Great Plains or down the Mississippi.
By contrast, air freight of military aid supplies could conceivably begin tomorrow. We'll need the overland/riverine routes eventually, but I wanted to highlight the role of air traffic.
Or, assuming Cali works out, you're looking at stuff getting shipped by bulk rail from California to Salt Lake City.
Then going cross country across the Rockies to Casper, Wyoming, and then down the North Platte River to Omaha, Nebraska.
To weigh in here, literally none of that exists. Bulk rail? In the Rocky Mountains? During the world of the Collapse? Fantasy. And cross-country across the Rockies, after decades of avalanches and landslides with no maintenance, not to mention outright sabotage by Victorians, Californians, Russians, or just locals? Never going to happen.
If you want California to supply you, you're going to have to manually establish some way for them to get those goods to you in bulk. That's gonna take a lot of money, and a lot of time. A prohibitive amount of money, if you're going with the idea of a foreign-built war machine, at least until your economy gets...vastly...bigger.
Normally I'd just point at the way normal stuff is smuggled in bulk cargo; bury parts in grain, or ore, and noone besides the destination will ever known.But unfortunately, the Victorians have Russian intel support.
"Hey, why is this sack of grain 5 meters long, cylindrical and clatters when it moves?"
"No reason, go away."
"Why is this cargo container full of grain so fucking *heavy*? It's like it's got a giant hunk of metal in it instead of sorghum?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Hey, why are all these European nations stripping down tank components and bringing them to ports? Where are they moving them?"
"No more questions. Go back to your game of Chapayev."
In all seriousness, you're discussing the sort of methods a 1920s-era bootlegger would use to defeat customs checks and intelligence agencies decades ahead of where we are *now* technologically, on a scale wide enough to support multiple armored divisions. People are looking at the Schwarzkopf, seeing it is not a design that has featured in Jane's, and then wildly overestimating the amount of capital we have to spare and underestimating the logistical effort required for this sort of dependency on large scale imports to even work in the name of going for designs they know better from (War Thunder) research.
Get the Schwarzkopf, it's built to be modular, and if we really need gee-whiz European tech to compete with the people who think Jesus wanted tank designers to stop at the invention of the gyro-stabilized gun, supported by an autocrat constantly stamping out brushfires who could barely be fucked to have a five minute Darth Sideous hologram conversation with the guy running the place, then we might as well just do our best to re-jig the design and get aftermarket upgrades for optics and the like from European defense companies. At least with an optics kit or something we could have people carry it by hand over the border for us wearing cow shoes so the Victorians think they're dealing with a herd of escaped Guernseys.
It's been explained why this is a terrible idea. Real-world third world nations do not develop their own tanks. Many real-world first world ones don't develop their own tanks. This doesn't make them not their own nations. We do not have the time, resources, expertise, money, or infrastructure to even dream of such.
The fact that neither of those routes is in significant commercial use now suggests that considerable effort may be required to get them functional overland through the Great Plains or down the Mississippi.
By contrast, air freight of military aid supplies could conceivably begin tomorrow. We'll need the overland/riverine routes eventually, but I wanted to highlight the role of air traffic.
Today both rail and road links exist.
After forty years of non-maintenance? Iffier logistics situation.
But yes, if the air freight is available, it could start moving literally today from either NYC or California.
Airships don't even need that much of a prepared landing strip, just somewhere with cargo handling capacity. Given the idiosyncrasies of wind turbines, directly moving a wind turbine from FCNY's port facilities to the field where it's supposed to be erected is actually preferable to landing it at New York harbor, transhipping it to a smaller ship,shipping it to Chicago, offloading it, then moving it by road to a field.
Less infrastructure required, less chance of damage, more speed.
And New York harbor to Chicago is roughly 700 miles, a 7 hour trip at 100mph.
To weigh in here, literally none of that exists. Bulk rail? In the Rocky Mountains? During the world of the Collapse? Fantasy. And cross-country across the Rockies, after decades of avalanches and landslides with no maintenance, not to mention outright sabotage by Victorians, Californians, Russians, or just locals? Never going to happen.
If you want California to supply you, you're going to have to manually establish some way for them to get those goods to you in bulk. That's gonna take a lot of money, and a lot of time. A prohibitive amount of money, if you're going with the idea of a foreign-built war machine, at least until your economy gets...vastly...bigger.
I was under the impression that Utah was one of the places California was sitting on and exploiting on behalf of the Russian Empire and its affiliated megacorps. Hence bulk rail, because Utah is a mining state, and you have to get the loot out somehow.
As is Arizona, the other place I assume they are sitting on.
That's the only reason to forward base anything in Salt Lake City.
If that's not the case, just stage out of California-held territory proper; 100mph average will get you to Chicago in a day, and allowing another day for unloading and turn around, and a third for the return, you have three days for a round trip.
Not enough for proper overland civilian bulk trade, which you'll need to resurrect the old Amtrak rail line or interstate for, especially since the costs are supposed to be significantly more expensive than moving cargo by surface ship currently.
But for transporting the armored fighting vehicle elements of an armored division?
Using US Cold War ToEs, an armored division with 2x tank brigades and 1x infantry brigade is running roughly 300 tanks + 240 IFVs, not counting trucks and light vehicles and artillery. So that's maybe 28,000 tons of payload, assuming 65 tons for the tanks and 35 tons for the IFV.
4x 500 ton cargo airships can move the bulk in 14 trips, moving 2000 tons each time.
2 trips a week would amount to roughly seven weeks. Using an estimated shipping cost of ~0.296 dollars per metric ton-mile, that's ~16 million dollars to move it all by commercial airship freight using a squadron of 4x large 500-ton capacity airships.
Of course, this assumes that those cargo airships are available for moving payload, that California doesn't have better things to do with them, and that everything goes off without a hitch. Which is a whole bunch of assumptions to make.
Forget about Doylism, it makes way more practical sense.
In no particular order:
We know in universe that the Mississipi is controlled by a constellation of microstates ranging from fragile municipal governments to literal warlords, at least some of which are almost certainly on Augusta's payroll, and unlike the St. Louis we have no treaty demanding Victoria provide clear access for cargo up the Mighty Miss. Blocking any major movement of military machinery would be trivially easy, and such a logistical effort would be noticed almost immediately because it would produce a massive spike of regular heavy cargo shipments into the interior of a nation that is, by and large, insanely dirt poor. Fuck, New Orleans might not even have the port facilities to unload cargo with any kind of speed anymore or transfer it to barges, and if they could, why would they ever let us? We have essentially nothing to offer them. We are 900 miles away, Victorian patsies are a lot closer and Alexander would probably be down with dispatching some Spetsnaz since it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than hooking Victoria up with surplus T-90s by the battalion. Speaking of which:
-Never been any doubt that the Vics would outnumber us in tanks.
Two to one is me being optimistic, and I don't actually expect the Commonwealth to have more than a thousand tanks or so in service at best.
Enough to equip 2 armored divisions and four to six mechanized divisions, with everyone else being motorized.
Where is this anticipation of Victorian hordes coming from? I know they did Enemy At The Gates mass assaults on us at the Raisin, but they managed it once and it essentially swallowed up their full-time army and an elite Crusader division. Now, the remnants of that army are engaged in a civil war and localized famine as a result of Blackwell actually mobilizing the militias. That, by the way, shows the fundamental limitations of Victoria's ability to mobilize their population: I don't care how far down the IJA tech tree they go, Blackwell will never muster the political will or Russian support to mechanize Victoria's agriculture, and since he can't do that, he is starkly limited in just how many young men he can pull off the fields to pick up a rifle for him, let alone drive tanks. This is assuming that Russia, who chewed through their old stocks of military equipment in the civil war and are now facing the risk of large-scale uprisings basically everywhere, would even be willing to part with a large chunk of its military output. As for setting up licensed production, where will Victoria pay for the materials, for the massive overhaul of their industrial base to go from the 30s to the 1980s (assuming they go for the T-72?) It makes no sense to expect some horde of tanks capable of going to-to-toe with modern MBTs. They simply do not have the capital in any sense to do that. If anyone is going to have a population advantage it will be us, what with the thousands of refugees, the rapid potential for territorial expansion and the supply of volunteers from European expats.
This also brings me back to the issue on our side, which is the foreign alternatives being put up for consideration. The one I keep seeing is the Leopard 2. What I never see brought up in this argument is a convincing explanation for who is going to give this to us and how we're going to afford it. People seem to think that Europe is fucking salivating at the prospect of giving away all these stocks of military equipment they surely have to get back at the Victorians. Europe, like Russia, just came out of continet-wide warfare and economic collapse, and are fighting several active insurgencies and still struggling to piece themselves back together. Major land warfare with Russia is more likely now than it has been in over a century. If Europe has Leopard 2s just sitting around, they are going to be A. very old, and B. in very high demand. And we are not in a political or economic position to be anywhere near the head of the queue.
Yes, people have seen Victoria do terrible things to the North American continent, but it is a rump-state confined to a part of the Eastern seaboard with virtually zero effect on the outside world directly. Europe will not ignore the very real costs of supplying us with aid just for the catharsis of smacking down a backwater hellhole that will never, ever be capable of threatening them directly when Russia is on their doorstep with a cricket bat and a steadily deteriorating mental state.
There is also the fact that we cannot pay. We can't. We are aspiring to rebuild North America, yes, and we are the most powerful state in our neighborhood, but that's rather like being the tallest Dwarf in Moria. We are poor. We don't export anything, we are still getting to the level of an industrial economy from the mid 20th century, let alone a post-industrial one from fifty years ahead of our own time. People look at our comprehensive welfare system and assume it means we are flush with cash, but what that actually represents is a system consuming a large amount of our existing capital before we finish expanding it to cover thousands of refugees and two new cities.
We do not have the money to buy these tanks without ending up horrifically in debt to foreign nations or companies, which is something that confuses me because I know damn well how afraid the thread is of that eventuality arising in another context. And we are nowhere near enough of a strategic priority for Europe to go to the trouble of excusing our total inability to pay, let alone the expense of setting up an alternative line of supply for us to get these tanks that the Vicks or Russia cannot trivially choke us off from, because, y'know, we are 900 miles from the nearest point of entry and do not even control the river these tanks would be brought in on along anything more than an infinitesimal amount of its total extent.
Oh, and one more thing about the airships: it would take seven times the total lift capacity of the Hindenburg to move one Leopard 2.
Build the Schwarzkopf, please. We are not Switzerland or South Korea. We are third-world, and we are isolated as fuck. Our best hope is leveraging our superiority in population and doctrine and working on getting domestic manufacturing to the point where we can outproduce Victoria. We are the ones who can throw bodies at this problem, and we must, because we do not have the money or the external support for anything else.
It's been explained why this is a terrible idea. Real-world third world nations do not develop their own tanks. Many real-world first world ones don't develop their own tanks. This doesn't make them not their own nations. We do not have the time, resources, expertise, money, or infrastructure to even dream of such.
The indicators that point towards this being a bad idea are axiomatically flawed.
The world as it is now is not the world of the 2070s. Nowadays Coltan ore from the Congo is shipped off across an ocean to be refined, shipped off again to a factory to be made into a component for a phone, shipped off again to be assembled, and shipped off again to reach the consumer in the span of less than a month.
More tanks in the modern day are sitting in Russian junk yards than have been lost in battle in the last 50 years. Why would a third world country in the modern day create their own tank in a world where you could buy and smuggle a junkyard T-62 out from the mothballs in Chelyabinsk?
International trade in this world no longer exists in a way we recognize. State on State conflict is a constant in this world, stocks of tanks are probably depleted from the fighting of the collapse, and considering the size of the border between countries like China and India or Russia and the EU, it seems likely that each of these actors have literally hundreds of thousands of tanks in service.
We have no foreign currency reserves, we will get an uncertain amount from free trade with Victoria, and that's it. It is questionable if we could even obtain a meaningful number of tanks from the outside world let alone maintain that number during wartime. We need a tank of some sort if we are to confront Russian tanks exported to Victoria, and if we cannot consistently obtain them from the outside world the only choice is to build one ourselves.
I was under the impression that Utah was one of the places California was sitting on and exploiting on behalf of the Russian Empire and its affiliated megacorps. Hence bulk rail, because Utah is a mining state, and you have to get the loot out somehow.
As is Arizona, the other place I assume they are sitting on.
That's the only reason to forward base anything in Salt Lake City.
If that's not the case, just stage out of California-held territory proper; 100mph average will get you to Chicago in a day, and allowing another day for unloading and turn around, and a third for the return, you have three days for a round trip.
Not enough for proper overland civilian bulk trade, which you'll need to resurrect the old Amtrak rail line or interstate for, especially since the costs are supposed to be significantly more expensive than moving cargo by surface ship currently.
But for transporting the armored fighting vehicle elements of an armored division?
Using US Cold War ToEs, an armored division with 2x tank brigades and 1x infantry brigade is running roughly 300 tanks + 240 IFVs, not counting trucks and light vehicles and artillery. So that's maybe 28,000 tons of payload, assuming 65 tons for the tanks and 35 tons for the IFV.
4x 500 ton cargo airships can move the bulk in 14 trips, moving 2000 tons each time.
2 trips a week would amount to roughly seven weeks. Using an estimated shipping cost of ~0.296 dollars per metric ton-mile, that's ~16 million dollars to move it all by commercial airship freight using a squadron of 4x large 500-ton capacity airships.
Of course, this assumes that those cargo airships are available for moving payload, that California doesn't have better things to do with them, and that everything goes off without a hitch. Which is a whole bunch of assumptions to make.
I came here for an alert and got smacked between the eyes with a proposal to use multiple airships with 45 times the usable lift of the largest airship class ever built.
Anyway, Utah: no, it is not Cali's territory. It's part of the territory they wreck on Russia's behalf. The stuff on the map is what they exercise meaningful control over. You can have a look at the maps in the Status Screen for the breakdown. Regardless, suffice it to say that unless you spend...shit, I don't know where the cost would end up on a scale from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of modern US dollars...the Rockies are not traversable by mass cargo in the quest's modern day, any more than they were prior to the first railroads being built there. You are not doing 100mph in bursts, let alone as a daily average. The infrastructure's been wrecked, uju. Best find another route.
[X][FEUD] Pitch a Hail Mary and see if they'll listen to you if you try to mediate their disputes. Prompts a roll, DC 43.
[X][COMMIES] Guarantee the Commune's independence. Another friendly power on Lake Erie is hardly a bad thing to have.
[X][RIVER] Agree to the alliance. The Kingdom isn't a large problem, but it could definitely cause issues for your plans for the Mississippi. You're happy to limit their opportunities for expansion.
[X][MEDIATE] Oh, but it is. You have no immediate interest in Minnesota but whatever's going on between Bemidji and Manitoulin intrigues you, and you very much do have a medium-term interest in resolving this conflict to your west before it becomes your problem, later. You will have the option to organize this mediation.
If you're worried about the Victorian tank swarm, then with the Commonwealth's resources the answer you're seeking is not whether or not you'll be able to domestically manufacture tanks instead of importing tanks; the answer is whether or not the land mine and shell factory have been working 24 hour shifts in the run up to the war. Demining can be resolved when there isn't an existential threat about to overrun you.
A land mine field in depth will basically force the attacking force to stop even if they do the smart thing of not destroying an entire formation by running it into mines. When it's covered by machine guns, it's going to turn a stressful task for the enemy engineers into a distressing one. With artillery fire, anything that can't shrug off shrapnel is going to be busy taking cover. With ATGMs or an armored car with high velocity gun and APFSDS, any poor armored engineering vehicle is going to need a lot of covering fire and escort to do its job. And if OPFOR manages to clear a lane, so what? They literally can't maneuver because they'll die by mine and that's assuming they're willing to risk death by artillery and direct fire going down a lane in the first place. OPFOR is going to need a lot of engineering vehicles at the same place simultaneously to be able to bulldoze through a minefield covered by fire - and procuring engineering vehicles for a unsexy job of clearing mines is something that other less ideological poisoned militaries - including the US when you consider its encounters with the land mine's naval cousin - have neglected because the resources going into it can go into another tank or fancy missile system.
And if you want to add more fun complications for everybody involved you can even deliver them by artillery or by plane
That said, it has to be asked what we are building a tank for in the first place.
Firepower? A tracked IFV or armored car is just as capable of mounting a high velocity, high caliber cannon and the attendant FCS, stabilizer, ammunition, etc that makes the firepower of a MBT potent. Machine guns too. The only potential impactful complication is if the platform is too light and subsequently is hard to use because of it.
Speed? Tactically, lighter is better not only because it takes less horsepower to move a lighter vehicle, lighter also makes it less likely that something was designed and manufactured wrong which leads to the production vehicle moving slower than designed. Operationally, it's dependent on the amount of trucks you have because that is what going to be supplying the unit with supplies needed to sustain movement and fighting.
Protection? Unambiguously a MBT would be superior to its lighter counterparts in this aspect. However it also has to be asked what it's meant to be protecting against too. The answer seems to be RPG-7s and enemy tank ammunition? The former is a credible threat to be sure... if you're in range of effective small arms fire. 200 meters is already a crapshoot and less than 100 meters is the preferred range. The simple act of firing from a decent distance and regularly backing out of the fighting position to reload is already going to mitigate the damage inflicted by RPGs significantly. Enemy tank ammunition? It would not be surprising if a 800mm RHA on a HEAT-FS round is what passes as surplus these days. The latest 125mm APFSDS that can be procured from Russia would also most likely cut through any domestic design's frontal arc if HEAT-FS does not. So it is likely that in terms of protection, the only significant difference between a domestic MBT and a domestic light AFV for all that weight brought is that the former is protective against an antitank weapon with questionable accuracy beyond small arms range. Both will be penetrated and potentially catastrophically killed by enemy tank ammunition and both will be able to protect against the majority of weaponry on the battlefield such as small arms, shrapnel, heavy machineguns, and autocannons firing non-tungsten/DU kinetic penetrators. Domestic MBTs feel more like a project for the sake of prestige than addressing actual military concerns and needs to be blunt.
-No it doesn't.Nobody likes Victoria.
Even people of similar ideological suasion find them unpleasantly arrogant, as evidenced by the Unionists among us.
Noone is going to stick their necks out on their behalf here without our fucking up bigtime.
-Everybody along the river benefits from from international trade being accessible. That's why this :
-[ ] Seaway Clause, General: It would be truly audacious, but their control of the Seaway -- and persistent efforts in rendering the Mississippi politically unnavigable -- allows Victoria to exert unbelievably outsized influence deep into the continental interior without ever putting boots on the ground. They almost certainly will not agree without an incredibly lenient treaty otherwise, but allowing the Midwest to at last drink from the unfiltered tap of international trade, even only for a couple of years...it would be medium-term, but when Victoria decides to cut it off again, it would inspire nothing less than utter hatred. Force open the Saint Lawrence Seaway to all who wish it on good terms, restoring international trade to the American interior, allowing native economies to stabilize as they haven't in years, gaining a truly titanic PR boost, and setting Victoria up for the fall of a lifetime when they eventually renege. +50 DC.
Was such an expensive part of the peace treaty.
Fuck with it without the material superiority of pre-War Victoria and see how it turns out for your city state.
-The CFC just punched out Victoria and tipped them over into civil war.
How many city states who are explicitly sitting right there on the river where a fleet of gunboats can reach them are interested in messing with Commonwealth military traffic? Vic agents bandits, sure, but where are they moving it? You can't fence a tank.
You can't fence bulk traffic either; you can hijack it, but that requires taking it to a port and declaring to the world that this is your HQ.
If we can't secure the Mississippi, whether through diplomacy or intimidation, we're dead anyway.
So I don't really see the point of worrying about random citystates messing with our traffic.
-You are really underestimating the difficulty involved in manufacturing a credible MBT.
The industrial base required for making armor steel, for building composite NERA, for building a heavy-duty transmission, for getting the basic design trade-offs right, for building a power pack that can reliably power it, for installing an FCS and imaging sensors, building a tank cannon that will last (Iraqi T72s had a tank cannon lifespan of <150 shots, while a Rheinmetall 120mm is more than 10x that).... even the skilled workerbase in a country that hasnt been able to run a factory for four decades.
Tanks are expensive enough that fucking up and building something subpar is worse than not building a tank at all.
Witness what we did to the T-34s.
-Furthermore, there's this assumption that we can actually build a tank cheaper than people who have experience doing so.
Which is....optimistic.
In the Yom Kippur War, when the Soviets were backing the Arabs and the US was backing Israel, the combatants were throwing around literally thousands of AFVs at a time. Egypt alone fielded 1000 of it's 1700 tank total, in addition to the 1200 allegedly fielded by Syria, the roughly 1700 in Israel's tank parks, and the other co-belligerents.
This was less than a decade after they had thrown another roughly three thousand tanks at each other during the Six Day War, with around 800 on the Israeli side and 2500 with the Arab alliance.
In the war we just fought, the Vics were fielding somewhere around 300x BTRs in a CMC division and 300 T-34s in a tank division.
You do the math for what you expect them to field when they show back up for a rematch.
Assume they return with only 14x, same as last time (I'm expecting at least 20x, but let's be conservative) divisions but half of them are tank divisions.
When you have a superpower covering your bets, things can get quite silly very fast, and Victoria is backed by the current world hegemon, one whose leader has a hardon for the US and US successor states.
I do expect the materiel advantage to get adverse.
I know they did Enemy At The Gates mass assaults on us at the Raisin, but they managed it once and it essentially swallowed up their full-time army and an elite Crusader division. Now, the remnants of that army are engaged in a civil war and localized famine as a result of Blackwell actually mobilizing the militias. That, by the way, shows the fundamental limitations of Victoria's ability to mobilize their population: I don't care how far down the IJA tech tree they go, Blackwell will never muster the political will or Russian support to mechanize Victoria's agriculture, and since he can't do that, he is starkly limited in just how many young men he can pull off the fields to pick up a rifle for him, let alone drive tanks.
Look at all the exploitable resources there, from the tens of thousands of megawatts of installed power generating capacity to the mines to the sustainable forestry resources currently in the hands of Russian megacorps. Look at the contributory value of agri-forestry products, mines and hydroelectricity to it's GDP. Then add the Fundy Bay megaproject on top of that. Remove a third, for Russian profiteering.
Conclusion: Victoria is rich. Filthy rich, by our current standards.
Which stands to reason. You do not maintain an expeditionary force of a hundred and sixty thousand men and over a hundred and twenty jet fighters(plus another three hundred plus Cessna-clones) on campaign for over three decades on looting; neither small arms ammunition nor mortar rounds grows on trees.
You especially dont do it while wilfully destroying your own internal economy by implementing ideological axioms that are pants on head nonsensical. Like segregating ~15% of your population as essentially rural slaves, deliberately depopulating your cities(including tearing down Montreal) and restricting freedom of movement and thus internal commerce.
Unless the GM rules otherwise, there is enough value in the territory they control to defray their materiel costs and leave them a handy surplus.
The financial reparations we took came from somewhere.
Those same resources will pay for an arms buildup.
Human losses will take longer to replace. Expect Blackwood to resort to old tricks there from the Pacific campaign.
To wit, mercenaries.
2) The guy who just overthrew the previous government in the first military putsch in roughly thirty years, kicked off a civil war, and calmly fed hundreds of thousands of militia into a meatgrinder to discredit his internal opposition will never muster the political will? The guy who literally proposed an entire societal makeover of Victoria in order to beat the Commonwealth won't muster the political will?
Being a Hard Man Doing Hard Things While Hard is a cultural fetish for Victoria's ruling class.
You vastly underestimate what they are willing to do.
This is assuming that Russia, who chewed through their old stocks of military equipment in the civil war and are now facing the risk of large-scale uprisings basically everywhere, would even be willing to part with a large chunk of its military output.
Russia has been world hegemon for forty years.
I dont't think you are working your head around what it means when one country essentially controlled the vast bulk of accessible fossil fuels in the world for four decades. What resources are available to the man and the nation that controls that large a chunk of the world's economy.
West Germany in the Cold War was building 300-400 tanks a year at one point in the 1980s.
And it wasn't even the biggest player in NATO at the time.
This also brings me back to the issue on our side, which is the foreign alternatives being put up for consideration. The one I keep seeing is the Leopard 2. What I never see brought up in this argument is a convincing explanation for who is going to give this to us and how we're going to afford it.
France is the country who Victoria is currently sitting on their claimed sovereign territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
Then there's China. Who have a grudge.
As for how we'll afford it, Great Power politics is how poor Third World nations build up their arsenals. Military aid and occasionally low-interest loans.
How do you think Israel afforded all the military materiel it was throwing around in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s? How it afforded a nuclear program? Or indeed, how did Vietnam pay for all its stuff during the Vietnam War?
Civil strife in Russia ended back in 2022 when Alexander took power. Fifty years ago.
Russia's wars were in the Middle East to fuck over the oil producers. It little green menned its way into subverting and invading all the former ex-Soviet republics, but that's not what you are describing.
Similarly, Europe has not been engaged in continent-wide warfare.
France schismed. Civil disorder, maybe some skirmishes, no war. Italy fractured, but there is currently no actual declaration there was a civil war. Maybe, maybe not; GM has not decided. Spain lost control of some areas but regained them, and maintained continuity of government. No war. The UK is back together after falling apart, sans Northern Ireland. MAJOR civil strife, no war.
Greece is an active battleground, Kosovo and Serbia are at war, Russian Romania attempted an invasion of the rest of the Balkans and blew up, Croatia is probably on fire, Russian Bulgaria is making eyes at Northern Macedonia, who are fortifying their border.
Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium,Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus. All seem to have come through the Troubles without internal disruption or external invasion.
Economic turmoil sure, but that's a shared problem.
I came here for an alert and got smacked between the eyes with a proposal to use multiple airships with 45 times the usable lift of the largest airship class ever built.
Lockheed Martin proposal for a scaled up LMH-1 hybrid airship, actually.
They're building the LMH-1, with an initial lift of 50 tons for a launch date of 2023.
Assuming COVID doesnt have an opinion.
Anyway, Utah: no, it is not Cali's territory. It's part of the territory they wreck on Russia's behalf. The stuff on the map is what they exercise meaningful control over. You can have a look at the maps in the Status Screen for the breakdown. Regardless, suffice it to say that unless you spend...shit, I don't know where the cost would end up on a scale from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of modern US dollars...the Rockies are not traversable by mass cargo in the quest's modern day, any more than they were prior to the first railroads being built there. You are not doing 100mph in bursts, let alone as a daily average. The infrastructure's been wrecked, uju. Best find another route.
1)I didn't meant to imply Utah was their claimed territory.
Just that Russia was exploiting the area while using the Californian state as a waldo, which required extant bulk transport links.
If there is no rail or road link to SLC, there's no point even investigating whether getting through the Rockies is feasible.
2) Ah, you're misunderstanding me.
100mph is airship speed, not land speed. Nobody driving a road transport vehicle would go that fast even if they could.
My apologies for any confusion.
We can go all the way up the Missouri into Montana, terminating around Fort Benton.
But then we'd have to take the road network through Cascadia to get to California, and we have no idea what it's like there after thirty years of Japanese occupation.
Just have to kick the Japanese out of Cascadia first. Easy
3)The current plan is going to be normal shipping to the Gulf, and transport up the Missi.
But first, California has to survive it's rebellion before we even consider how much help it can lend, if at all.
If you're worried about the Victorian tank swarm, then with the Commonwealth's resources the answer you're seeking is not whether or not you'll be able to domestically manufacture tanks instead of importing tanks; the answer is whether or not the land mine and shell factory have been working 24 hour shifts in the run up to the war. Demining can be resolved when there isn't an existential threat about to overrun you.
Its the Vics. Atrocities R Us.
Do you have any doubt they'll round up civilians, or bring along a bunch of PoCs and use them to clear a path?
I have confidence in Victorian ability to descend to new depths of depravity.
For another, we're looking at Ohio and Ontario, not the Appalachians or Caucasus.
The terrain is designed for maneuver warfare. No real terrain features I can recall where mining will help you against a mechanized force that can just...... go around.
Poland: Legends will be written of Poland. The only nation to survive the Collapse, maintain governmental continuity, and actively oppose Russia's expansion. The only nation to maintain the fighting for fifty long years. The nation that utterly destroyed itself trying — and largely failing — to keep the border from moving further west. Poland fed itself into the fires of intrigue trying to stop Russia's ambitions. The best that can be said is that they slowed Russia down, when dealing with nations directly bordering Poland. They did not fall, at least, and Alexander certainly intended for them to. But they did not fall. These days they are utterly incapable of fighting anymore. They are the front of the still-cold conflict with Russia, but have no capacity to participate. They have maintained membership in the EU, and now are completely dependent on it. They gave everything, and perhaps managed to give the rest of Europe time. They try to find that adequate consolation, as Germany steps past them into a leading role in Europe.
So I made a goof and here to fess up to it. Turns out, I mixed up the T-80s and T-90s as to which was the one with the gas turbine.
Let the record show it was the T-80 that was the gas turbine powered one, and it was quickly abandoned by the Russians shortly after the dissolution of the USSR due to being a hangar queen. The USA stuck with its M1s because it can literally throw money at the problem.
To weigh in here, literally none of that exists. Bulk rail? In the Rocky Mountains? During the world of the Collapse? Fantasy. And cross-country across the Rockies, after decades of avalanches and landslides with no maintenance, not to mention outright sabotage by Victorians, Californians, Russians, or just locals? Never going to happen.
The first part, the bulk rail part, uh... Well, let's just say the Californians themselves have strong incentives to create that part of the route, and the Russians have strong incentives to let them if they want either:
1) Access to mines in Utah, or
2) California to be tied down as a source of local sepoys oppressively controlling chunks of the American West and thus making them unpopular, as you have I think alluded to having this be A Thing.
Because without a rail link, Utah is simply too far inland, over too much rough terrain, for either. There's no way to get mineral resources out of mines in Utah to benefit anyone, including Russians. And there's no realistic way to project enough power that far inland to actually control the place and stop it from turning (back) into the independent Mormon state of Deseret.
That's why I kept speculating on the existence of Deseret as an independent successor state. The Mormons picked Utah in the first place because it was at least vaguely livable, but so far away that for a long time, no one would be in a position to bother them and they could establish themselves as basically THE local population, too numerous and well organized for small military expeditions to really bother very much. In the absence of major rail and highway infrastructure, they'd be right.
If you want California to supply you, you're going to have to manually establish some way for them to get those goods to you in bulk. That's gonna take a lot of money, and a lot of time. A prohibitive amount of money, if you're going with the idea of a foreign-built war machine, at least until your economy gets...vastly...bigger.
Yeah. I was personally imagining Californian war equipment only in the context of weapon systems that are much lower-mass; think dozens of tons to move, maybe a few hundred, not thousands and thousands.
Its the Vics. Atrocities R Us.
Do you have any doubt they'll round up civilians, or bring along a bunch of PoCs and use them to clear a path?
I have confidence in Victorian ability to descend to new depths of depravity.
For another, we're looking at Ohio and Ontario, not the Appalachians or Caucasus.
The terrain is designed for maneuver warfare. No real terrain features I can recall where mining will help you against a mechanized force that can just...... go around.
Anti-tank mines don't trigger on people, they trigger on vehicles. Ditto anti-personnel of course. But to be blunt, Victorian war crimes will not materially affect how clear a minefield is unless the minefield is shockingly shallow as to be barely a minefield at all. Depth and width can be measured in hundreds of meters to entire kilometers with individual mines measured in hundreds of thousands or more. Opportunistic war crimes are not going to clear a lane and systemic depopulation, while in-character, are not conductive for enabling fact-paced maneuver warfare.
Terrain, theoretically open field, is not the end-all be-all of the viability of mines. It simply requires either supplying more material needed or concentrating resources on places critical for the front line if natural canalizing terrain is not present. This is post-collapse America though and the number of roads that sustain a tank division are easier to count than the forests and marshes that has grown over the roads marked on old maps. In other words terrain is harsh because the best quality roads are animal trails that can only fit humans and animals and the broken polities have little capacity or demand to really make an impact on the environment. "Going around" may as well be a euphemism for going nowhere because the vehicle is now stuck in a marsh or broken down trying to drive through unmanaged forest. It takes active effort to keep roads from decaying and spending labor and material on repairing roads has to be weighed against the needs of agriculture and defense that the small polities have too little of.
[x][FEUD] Ally with the MSR. Traverse City will cancel your basing rights. In the event of the feud going hot, Traverse City will be well-placed to interdict the Straits of Mackinac.
[x][COMMIES] Guarantee the Commune's independence. Another friendly power on Lake Erie is hardly a bad thing to have.
[x][RIVER] Agree to the alliance. The Kingdom isn't a large problem, but it could definitely cause issues for your plans for the Mississippi. You're happy to limit their opportunities for expansion.
[x][MEDIATE] Oh, but it is. You have no immediate interest in Minnesota but whatever's going on between Bemidji and Manitoulin intrigues you, and you very much do have a medium-term interest in resolving this conflict to your west before it becomes your problem, later. You will have the option to organize this mediation.
Voting is still open right? I know I'm late to the party.
If you're worried about the Victorian tank swarm, then with the Commonwealth's resources the answer you're seeking is not whether or not you'll be able to domestically manufacture tanks instead of importing tanks; the answer is whether or not the land mine and shell factory have been working 24 hour shifts in the run up to the war. Demining can be resolved when there isn't an existential threat about to overrun you.
Though seriously, the big problem there is "what happens when you need to go on the offensive," which we eventually hope to do. Did, repeatedly, in the Detroit and Buffalo campaigns.
Protection? Unambiguously a MBT would be superior to its lighter counterparts in this aspect. However it also has to be asked what it's meant to be protecting against too. The answer seems to be RPG-7s and enemy tank ammunition? The former is a credible threat to be sure... if you're in range of effective small arms fire. 200 meters is already a crapshoot and less than 100 meters is the preferred range. The simple act of firing from a decent distance and regularly backing out of the fighting position to reload is already going to mitigate the damage inflicted by RPGs significantly. Enemy tank ammunition? It would not be surprising if a 800mm RHA on a HEAT-FS round is what passes as surplus these days. The latest 125mm APFSDS that can be procured from Russia would also most likely cut through any domestic design's frontal arc if HEAT-FS does not. So it is likely that in terms of protection, the only significant difference between a domestic MBT and a domestic light AFV for all that weight brought is that the former is protective against an antitank weapon with questionable accuracy beyond small arms range. Both will be penetrated and potentially catastrophically killed by enemy tank ammunition and both will be able to protect against the majority of weaponry on the battlefield such as small arms, shrapnel, heavy machineguns, and autocannons firing non-tungsten/DU kinetic penetrators. Domestic MBTs feel more like a project for the sake of prestige than addressing actual military concerns and needs to be blunt.
"Hey, why is this sack of grain 5 meters long, cylindrical and clatters when it moves?"
"No reason, go away."
"Why is this cargo container full of grain so fucking *heavy*? It's like it's got a giant hunk of metal in it instead of sorghum?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Hey, why are all these European nations stripping down tank components and bringing them to ports? Where are they moving them?"
"No more questions. Go back to your game of Chapayev."
In all seriousness, you're discussing the sort of methods a 1920s-era bootlegger would use to defeat customs checks and intelligence agencies decades ahead of where we are *now* technologically, on a scale wide enough to support multiple armored divisions.
Point the first: arms smuggling still happens in the modern world at all. The smuggler does not have to be stupid about it. Bulk items made out of heavy iron (e.g. tanks) don't smuggle very well in large quantities, but quite a few other things do. No, it's not realistic for us to import an entire serious tank corps by smuggling, but it IS realistic for us to import, say, the seeker heads for a shitload of guided missiles that way.
People are looking at the Schwarzkopf, seeing it is not a design that has featured in Jane's, and then wildly overestimating the amount of capital we have to spare and underestimating the logistical effort required for this sort of dependency on large scale imports to even work in the name of going for designs they know better from (War Thunder) research.
The problem is that the logistical and economic effort required to build the tanks isn't necessarily more favorable than the effort required to buy the tanks, and you get an inferior product when you build your own. If we go to ridiculous expense and effort to build our own tanks, only to find that we are losing them at an unfavorable rate of exchange to Victorian T-72s that they import for far less relative effort... Well, we've just screwed ourselves over, badly.
Get the Schwarzkopf, it's built to be modular, and if we really need gee-whiz European tech to compete with the people who think Jesus wanted tank designers to stop at the invention of the gyro-stabilized gun supported by an autocrat constantly stamping out brushfires who could barely be fucked to have a five minute Darth Sideous hologram conversation with the guy running the place, then we might as well just do our best to re-jig the design and get aftermarket upgrades for optics and the like from European defense companies. At least with an optics kit or something we could have people carry it by hand over the border for us wearing cow shoes so the Victorians think they're dealing with a herd of escaped Guernseys.
Modularity is kind of an illusion in this situation.
Many of the tank's problems are fundamental to the design. It's too lightly protected to be survivable against modern antitank weapons, and you can't "modular" on enough extra armor to solve that problem. It cannot possibly designed to be easily converted to accept all modern systems, since most of those are tightly integrated into the vehicles that operate them. You can't just have the armor easily pop apart and back together like a jigsaw puzzle or an erector set, either, because that makes it fragile and means the tank is riddled with weak points.
The Schwartzkopf, as designed, is effectively a tank built to fight in the Six Day War, if that.
OK, well are you in favor of waiting until we have the population and industrial base seen in real world countries that design their own tanks? Say, a benchmark might be "eighty million people" (like Iran) and "$5000 per capita GDP" (like Iran). Except Iran's own domestic tank is heavily derivative from foreign US and Soviet tanks... with reason!
Other examples of countries that make their own tanks include Italy (a bit less populous but much richer) and India (much poorer per capita, but much more populous... and their domestic MBT keeps losing competitions to the T-90).
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth is futzing around at a population of 15-20 million and a per capita GDP that is in all probability around $1000 and $1500 per person, optimistically. We're poorer than 2020 India per person, and about one fiftieth the size. By the time we expand and develop enough to be able to afford our own domestic tank production, we'll be into the 2090s.
Especially when the several years' time required to design a tank is included in the picture.
Forget about Doylism, it makes way more practical sense.
In no particular order:
We know in universe that the Mississipi is controlled by a constellation of microstates ranging from fragile municipal governments to literal warlords, at least some of which are almost certainly on Augusta's payroll, and unlike the St. Louis we have no treaty demanding Victoria provide clear access for cargo up the Mighty Miss. Blocking any major movement of military machinery would be trivially easy...
We did make a treaty demanding that Victoria abandon many of its existing relationships with those states, and they're almost universally hated, so it's not like they'll have a lot of friends who want to resume association with them. They're in no position to prop up client states in the near future, either. The long term outlook for us turning the Mississippi into a viable import route is positive. The microstates on Augusta's payroll aren't getting paid anymore, after all; Victoria is fighting a civil war and the probable winning side just signed a treaty renouncing all their arrangements with said microstates!
So, again, our long term outlook for getting access to the Mississippi is positive.
Now, granted, maybe you're basing your arguments on the current situation.
But if so, then we should drop this whole line of discussion.
Right now, we do not have the heavy metalworking facilities to make heavy steel armor plate (let alone more modern defenses that can stop a shaped charge rocket). We do not have the transport infrastructure for 50-70 ton vehicles to even MOVE around our country. We do not have the precision machining and access to alloying materials to make high performance tank engines. We do not have the fuel production capacity, and we struggled during the war to supply our artillery with ammunition when we only had a total of something like 100 gun barrels, tops.
We are no more capable of designing and mass-producing a main battle tank, right now, than we are of flapping our arms and flying to the moon.
I mean, really, if we had that kind of capability, we'd be using it to at least maintain the Old World Equipment we already have, to eke out our supply of spare parts and keep the things from running out of usefulness within a handful of battles. We aren't, because we can't.
Any realistic discussion of us building tanks that are even vaguely relevant on a modern battlefield MUST be made in the context of a hypothetical future state of affairs, something in the neighborhood of ten years in the future, when we've built up our infrastructure far more than we have today. Not coincidentally, this is also the point in time at which our infrastructure will permit us to export goods on a larger scale- even if we're exporting iron ore or grain in exchange for modern weaponry, it is possible to do that. Many Third World nations do exactly that.
On the other hand... if we're discussing plans for ten years from now? Realistically by then Victoria will have already reneged on its treaty obligations regarding the St. Lawrence Seaway. We will already need to have an alternate route, and thus control of the Mississippi River waterway.
This is almost certain to be one of the primary focuses of our diplomacy, military, and economic efforts in the coming years. If we can't work our way down the Mississippi and turn it into a reasonably reliable route for importing foreign goods that the Victorians can't close off at will, we are already fucked. Whether or not we have, at great effort and expense, begun manufacture of our own knockoff tank that resembles a somewhat inferior version of vehicles that were becoming obsolete a literal century ago isn't going to matter.
As for setting up licensed production, where will Victoria pay for the materials, for the massive overhaul of their industrial base to go from the 30s to the 1980s (assuming they go for the T-72?) It makes no sense to expect some horde of tanks capable of going to-to-toe with modern MBTs. They simply do not have the capital in any sense to do that. If anyone is going to have a population advantage it will be us, what with the thousands of refugees, the rapid potential for territorial expansion and the supply of volunteers from European expats.
If Victoria cannot come up with modern arms from Russia or other sources, then they are already a castrated non-threat. We have already defeated them, and it is just a matter of kicking down the rotten door. If they have no viable modern tanks of their own in ten or fifteen years, we don't even need viable tanks of our own! We can make do just fine with armored cars and missile launchers and, of course, copious supplies of artillery. If they have no antitank capability of their own more significant than shoulder-fired rockets, they're screwed anyway.
So if that's the plan in which the Schwartzkopf is a functional choice for us, then we're very literally "planning to refight the last war," on the assumption that the Victorians will receive no foreign aid of note and will not modernize their military. Which they'd have to, to remain a viable threat, since as you point out they cannot mass-mobilize a much larger army than they had last time. Either they modernize, unfuck their doctrine, and adopt functional combined arms tactics, or they are incapable of opposing us meaningfully next time we fight.
Either the Schwartzkopf will be too weak to form a viable match for the foreign-sourced military hardware Victoria will move Heaven and Earth to procure, or the Schwartzkopf is needlessly expensive and poorly matched to the needs of fighting a Victoria that has no such hardware.
I came here for an alert and got smacked between the eyes with a proposal to use multiple airships with 45 times the usable lift of the largest airship class ever built.
Point of order, cargo airships are a serious proposal in real life and are very likely to be adopted as a relatively "green" way to move large cargoes by air, as an alternative to relying on jet planes that burn huge amounts of fuel and require prepared runways. Superheavy cargo airships are a technology Uju has good reason to think must logically exist in-setting, given other stated canonical facts like "Alexander IV, who runs the world hegemon, is serious about solving global warming."
I'm pretty sure they've been discussed before.
Anyway, Utah: no, it is not Cali's territory. It's part of the territory they wreck on Russia's behalf. The stuff on the map is what they exercise meaningful control over. You can have a look at the maps in the Status Screen for the breakdown.
It certainly changes the calculation all the more if California (or Russia relying on Californian mooks) is not extracting mineral wealth from the region of Utah. If they've given up on that, then yes.
On the other hand, this also makes it way harder to sustain control of Utah or to continue wrecking it effectively, because just keeping your army deployed that far inland, across hundreds of miles of inhospitable desert, is a burden. And Russia has reasons NOT to want the Californians to have TOO good of an army, or an army that is accustomed to operating out in the deep desert where it's hard for Russians to monitor everything they're doing.
The Vicks pull this kind of shit by relying on river transport and by moving around through relatively heavily populated areas that grow enough food to support armies. The Victorians can "requisition" enough food to feed one of their divisions for a week pretty much anywhere they like, and the local population will, with difficulty, bring it to them because the alternative is death. But if a Californian army unit tries the same thing in Nevada on the way to a search-and-destroy mission in Utah, they're basically going to be shouting into the void as far as food supply is concerned. There's no one there to give them the food, so they have to bring their own.
Enabling the Californians to maintain transport corridors capable of easing the task of supplying an army in Utah is thus arguably necessary, if the Californians are expected to regularly send armies to Utah, and if the Russians actually seriously intend for those armies to be capable of winning a battle when they arrive.
[Then again, the Russians may not give a shit if the Californians lose the Fourth Battle of Salt Lake City due to lack of supplies, permitting the Republic of Deseret to get back on its feet!]
Airships cannot compete with heavier-than-air craft for raw lift capacity or speed. The primary benefit of a cargo airship is its cost effectiveness, and its ability to land anywhere. From an efficiency standpoint, a cargo airship burns way less fuel per ton of cargo shipped versus a cargo airplane.
However they are most effective when the cargo shipped does not need to arrive at its destination quickly. Their rise has nothing to do with their raw lift capacity and everything to do with the industry focus on fuel efficiency. They do not go fast.
Airships cannot compete with heavier-than-air craft for raw lift capacity or speed. The primary benefit of a cargo airship is its cost effectiveness, and its ability to land anywhere. From an efficiency standpoint, a cargo airship burns way less fuel per ton of cargo shipped versus a cargo airplane.
However they are most effective when the cargo shipped does not need to arrive at its destination quickly. Their rise has nothing to do with their raw lift capacity and everything to do with the industry focus on fuel efficiency. They do not go fast.
On the other hand, I suspect this is a world where people could have gotten used certain kinds of air mail taking a day or two to cross the continent at fuel-efficient hundred mile an hour speeds.
Also, you CAN scale up a cargo airship to a pretty ridiculous size, even if this has not historically been done. Among other things, we can probably build the same gasbag with a lot more surplus lift capacity, by virtue of using lighter materials and designs than were available in 1930.
Airships sound fine and all, but where and how do you expect to get all the helium that will be needed? Unless the plan is to use hydrogen, which obviously comes with various issues.
I mean. We also don't have the manufactoring or design tech to produce modern (well 2020s or 2070s) airships on our own. So we would be limited to actual 20th century airships, which are shit and not suitible for our needs, or buying foreign ships and tools and training to use them.
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