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

[4WheelSword]

thread policy Discussion of politics that does not directly relate to the Quest or to Quest votes are banned from hereon out. This thread policy will be enforced by the Moderation team. Do not ignore it.

 

[Arcus]

Honestly looking at it while airships have a cool factor the investment required to build them could just be thrown into rebuilding road and rail networks instead.

 

[me.me.here]

So I'm not fussing about it.
A patron/couple of patrons will show up. Or we die bloodily.

Click to shrink...

I'd like a better plan for avoiding our polity's bloody death than "pray an angel (investor) generously sprinkles cash, resources, and guns on our heads for years on end", please and thank you.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

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.

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.

Click to shrink...

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.

Click to shrink...

…

Airship lift is not a function of technology. It is a function of how big your gas bag is. You have no helium. The Strategic Helium Reserve is gone. Any airship you build, you build with hydrogen. Thus my comparison to the Hindenburg (and, as a side note, the spectacular political problem you trip into if you try to go that route). And, thus, there is a limit to how much lift you can cram in there without making the Hindenburg look like a marvel of modesty and good fiscal sense. To really amp up the lift without making the heart of your foreign trade network a quartet of fuel-air bombs nobody will willingly host would require hybrid designs...which burn significantly more fuel (witness this proposal, which would burn 50 tons of fuel for 160 tons of cargo). Furthermore, if you intend to use them to transport hundreds of tons of cargo, you need to build all of the fancy receiving infrastructure airships are nominally supposed to cut out of the equation anyway, because you cannot unload and process hundreds of tons of cargo in an empty field. At which point you are investing a lot in building megaships for marginal gains at best, assuming the wildest optimistic fantasies of hybrid airship possibilities, and doing so completely from scratch since nobody else in the wider world has elected to utterly waste their time on this.

No airships!

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.

Click to shrink...

The Russians don't want access to Utah mines, particularly, and aren't really interested in making Cali's job easier in projecting into the hinterlands. It in fact advantages them immensely if Cali has to fight the logistics harder than it does the locals.

Like, Utah is not a threat. Russia doesn't care. What it does care about is rendering vast swathes of the American continent inaccessible to the wider world.

 

[ThatGazzer]

The Strategic Helium Reserve is gone.

Click to shrink...

Well, clearly we need to GO TO THE SUN AND TAKE THE HELIUM!

 

[Alexander Sturnn]

No airships!

Click to shrink...

TTS!Rogal Dorn-Voice: I am now sad.

 

[Starship Trooper]

Actually, if a First World nation had the money to spare, and the inclination to fuck with everyone in the Russosphere?

The path it would take would be to pay California to build and ship weapons or industrial equipment to the Midwest.

California's currency being weak means that you get more bang for your buck by buying from them and paying in euros or rinminbi or Australian dollars, and you simultaneously support their economy, strengthen the Commonwealth, and buy diplomatic favor with both nations.

While fucking over both Japan and Russia with the same move.

Click to shrink...

off discord how Russian's Hegemony is more tenuous than they like summary: The Bear is not meant for swimming

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

But in this kinda geopolitical environment, heavy trade is probably over

@Corripere That is the sort of thing that is finally starting to shift again, but yes, that happened.

Russia could cut it off anytime though

@Corripere They do not quite have unlimited freedom of action. If you get a non-Victorian line of supply, Russia can't do very much to bluntly cut you off that others won't absolutely counter. Hard to blockade Louisiana when your enemies are blockading Istanbul and the Danish Belts.

[11:55]

The days of Alexander being able to point his finger at a country and make it go bang with nobody daring to object are solidly over.

[12:01]

Now of course nobody is going to attack Russia on your behalf unless they were already planning to anyway. But if Russia is so clumsy as to actually blockade you, it will find that blockade and its naval dominance elsewhere instantly challenged. They'll pay for that blockade in other powers going, "Oh, are we no longer pretending to have norms? Very well, then."

Corripere15.10.2020

The issue is risk—if they start shifting things to us, then it's much easier to fuck with their supply chains

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

Well, yeah, but that is the case with literally all sorts of trade, and it's recovering anyway.

[13:30]

Never fear, you will not be locked into autarky by virtue of other powers fearing Russia's dominance of the seas. For one thing, Russia does not actually have dominance of the seas. Oh, they certainly contest for it, but even given the premise of this quest, you can only really make Russia so good at Navy things. 

VoidTemplar200015.10.2020

It hits me that Russia still doesn't have their treasured uncontested warm-water port

[13:35]

The Baltic is vulnerable to having an EU fleet parked in the Danish Belts. Crimea is vulnerable to the EU just bribing their way into Turkey and putting some serious fortifications on the Bosporus. And so on

KhazintheDark15.10.2020

Even the Med is vulnerable to the Suez & Gibraltar/Morroco

VoidTemplar200015.10.2020

Yes.

[13:49]

I've been banging on about that the EU should really try and pull Egypt into their sphere

[13:49]

Because without the Suez or Gibraltar, the Bosporus is worthless

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

Like, Russia is fundamentally fucked on trying to be the dominant world naval power. To project power from Vladivostok, they must get past Japan; here they have, but at the cost of giving that to Japan anyway. To project power from Archangelsk, they must deal with Arctic ice, which isn't tenable. To project from Crimea, they must secure the Black Sea, the Bosporus Strait, the Mediterranean, and at least one, preferably both, of the Suez/Red Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. To project power from St. Petersburg, but must get through the Baltic, past the Danish belts, out into the North Sea, and then past Britain and Ireland.

[13:53]

And they can't choose just one of these, either; at minimum, all represent ports of immense strategic value — aside from Archangelsk — and thus, before Russia does anything else, it must ensure that these far-flung ports, incapable of supporting one another, can all be defended from attack by the sea.

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

@PoptartProdigy Carriers can't use Arkangelsk, St Petersburg means transiting all the coastlines to get to the North Atlantic which is doable but makes tracking extremely easy and given the number of chokepoints makes some russian captains extremely nervous about Rando the vengeance fuelled polish speedboat. In the event of a war in Europe Russia isn't getting carriers out of the Baltic if it gets declared while they're there.

The Black Sea depends on who controls the three chokepoints, Turkey and Egypt are toss-ups, Gibraltar/Morocco is probably EU aligned but that's still more of a risk to ships that are essentially a dick waving contest due to geological formations.

@KhazintheDark I was saying that Russia does not build with contesting the Pacific in mind, not anything in particular about carriers.

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

Japan covers the Pacific. Alexander builds ships for the Baltic, the Med, and the Atlantic.

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

The fact that they can contest as much as they do is basically entirely down to the IJN and Indian Navy covering duties in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

[13:57]

Alex does push for naval strength; however, he definitely recognizes that he's not going to rule the waves any time soon.

[13:57]

Naval dominance in this timeline is very much an ongoing and undecided contest.

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

Even Archangelsk you want to have something to watch the approaches.

[13:55]

Conclusion: The Bear is not meant for swimming

@VoidTemplar2000 Indeed not, because even addressing the disadvantages I've covered here doesn't get into the fact that all of this only gets to happen after Russia has addressed the primary strategic concern of securing their longest border in the world.

Edit: bonus

PoptartProdigy
Alexander does not at all care about women in or out of the workplace on a personal basis. Societally, he's intensely pro-natalist and regularly passes legislation encouraging mothers to be unemployed homemakers. That said, he doesn't explicitly legislate against female participation in the military or workforce, and if he finds talent he can make personal use of, he makes personal use of it.

Kiaraeli går kl. 00:37
Lol, I bet native Russian population growth is like .6
[00:38]
Kids per family
[00:38]
Because the only natalist policies that work are STRONK social support nets
[00:39]
And forcing all your women into the home is like, an utter kneecapping

[00:39]
Russian would have been overrun by like Mongolia

PoptartProdigyi går kl. 00:39
This interpretation of Russia is, "What if I gave the right everything they claim to want." I never said that it would work out for them.

 

[10ebbor10]

which burn significantly more fuel (witness this proposal, which would burn 50 tons of fuel for 160 tons of cargo).

Click to shrink...

I don't think this claim is correct.

The 747-400 ERF carries 124 tonnes of cargo, for a maximum range of 9230 km (less than the 10 000 for the airship), utilizing it's fuel capacity of 204,360 Liters to do so.
That is nearly 150 tonnes of fuel, assuming I screwed up no calculations.

The A330-200F carries 70 tonnes of cargo for a maximum range of 7400 kg, utilizing it's fuel capacity of 97530 liters.
So, 75 tonnes of fuel for less than half the cargo and 75% of the distance.

Similarly, concerns about explosions are also heavily overstated due to highly published nature of the Hindenburg crash. Airships were more often lost due to bad weather, being smashed into terrain or simply torn apart.

The big problem is that an airship is not something we're going to be able to create domestically. Unless there exists an international market where we can buy some cheap second hand airships, it's a death-end. Our society is too small for a domestically build airship project to be commercially viable. Heck, we don't even have the talent to do it.

 

[Starship Trooper]

also off discord how poor are we apparently living of mussels and algae poor that's how

Spoiler: the common diet of a great laker

Look, at least you have Established.

You have almost literally nothing else, but you have that.

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
we have fresh water ><

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
By virtue of the Lakes and decades of pollution filering out, yes.

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
there's a decent chance it's almost dead from being full of fucking zebra mussels and algae blooms

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
Well, then, there you go. You also have the second-best infrastructural position in North Maerica that isn't Panama.

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
but it's a fresh water basin
what a low bar to clear

hYGP14.10.2020
it could still be worse
we could be kansas

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
this is true
one shudders at the thought of having to exist in kansas

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
I'm sorry that you don't get to dominate Pacific-Atlantic trade you'll just have to settle for owning the natural locus for every ounce of product that needs to move to or from the interior of the continent.(redigeret)

hYGP14.10.2020
i believe the proper response is
what trade?

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
The trade y'all just opened up, that's what trade.
Anyway
regarding the zebra mussels
and the algae
nobody eats those in the modern day because they're usually not worth the energy investment when you can just go to the supermarket/farm. But in a world with no more supermarkets, and where large-scale agriculture has catastrophically collapsed

MerryGold14.10.2020
hey that means we and the vics have a healthy musseling industry on the lakes right?

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
people eat or they starve.

MerryGold14.10.2020
plus sides and all

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
Algae and mussels will have suffered particularly hard because they aren't fish. They don't evade. If you're desperate, you can go the lakeshore and spend the day scraping things off of rocks before spending the evening cooking.
It is a pathetic calorie intake
but, just barely
it beats starving.
And there were a lot of truly desperate people.
So you at least don't have to worry about that.
Honestly the mussel and algae issues have likely receded a fair bit.

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
yay the lakes are only deeply unhealthy instead of dead

Matilda (ScottishMongol)14.10.2020
next time someone writes a scene where someone's eating a meal, slip in a platter of mussels

PoptartProdigy14.10.2020
Ayup ayup if y'all actually integrate into the international environmentalist movement to any extent more than, "Fuck you, pay me to industrialize greenly," you're probably gonna have tons of folks coming to run reintroduction programs and lobbying for you to make protected species lists.

yuuki hamasaki14.10.2020
cries trying to clear the lakes of Asian carp

Corripere14.10.2020
^ every developing country

MerryGold14.10.2020
we'll protect them by creating seperate protected coves and farm the creatures letting some slip out into the lakes to repair lake stock but sell them like we are at a chinese wet market

Matilda (ScottishMongol)14.10.2020
hungry dudes in the south are finding many uses for kudzu, I bet

MerryGold14.10.2020
and drink environmentalist tears as we do what they want us on the stricted technicalities

Corripere14.10.2020
Truly Poptart has given us empathy
For what developing countries currently think

 

[Ikacprzak]

So from what I've seen, how about in the short term we focus on mission killing tanks with things like mines, RPG's and depleted uranium shells?

 

[uju32]

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.

Click to shrink...

I'm pretty sure Ive mentioned some of my referents before, but just in case I haven't:

1)The Lockheed Martin LMH-1, for delivery in 2023.
Semi-rigid airship, heavier than air, 80% of it's lift comes from helium, the rest from small engines
Payload of 19 passengers + 20 tons cargo, cruise speed of 60 knots, range of 1400 nautical miles.
Estimated price of 40 million dollars, letters of intent for at least 12 units, projected first flight in 2023

Spoiler: References

Up Close: Lockheed Martin’s LMH-1 Hybrid Airship | Aviation Week Network

As the era of the commercial hybrid airship dawns, we take a closer look at more features of the newly-launched Lockheed Martin LMH-1.

aviationweek.com

Hybrid Airship

Hybrid Airships make it possible to affordably deliver heavy cargo and personnel to remote locations around the world. Burning less than one tenth the fuel of a helicopter per ton, the Hybrid Airship will redefine sustainability for the future.

www.lockheedmartin.com

British firm will buy first 12 of Lockheed's new blimp-like hybrid airships

A British aviation company will be the first customer for Lockheed Martin's blimp-like hybrid airships.

www.latimes.com

No Roads? No Problem! - Wingborn Ltd

Suzanne was in desperate need of a follow-up MRI. Last time, she’d had to endure multiple flights and an all-day trip from her Nunavut village to Montreal for her scan. But today, she and her neighbours watched in awe as a massive, brilliant white hybrid airship slowly approached her village’s...

www.wingborn.com

Lockheed's project manager for the program explicitly mentions scaling up if the market exists for it, to the million pound/500 ton payload class

The company said that flying the airship will be cheaper and quieter than traditional aircraft, and the plan is to sell between 200 and 500 of them. If the LMH1 succeeds, bigger airships will follow, some the size of the Rose Bowl. "Eventually we hope to get something that maybe is as much as a million pounds of cargo, and at that scale the cost goes down, so we get significantly more competitive," said Boyd.

Click to shrink...

This airship transports Lockheed into new territory

Lockheed Martin is trying something new, developing an airship that looks to enter the commercial transport market. Here's what at stake.

www.cnbc.com

2) The Flying Whales airship LCA60T
150m long.
Payload of 60 tons cargo, speed of ~60 mph, range of up to 1000 km.
Current investors include the French and Quebecois governments, and the Chinese state-owned corporation AVIC

Spoiler: References

Flying Whales

connecting the land-locked world to the global economy

flying-whales.com

French company Flying Whales is creating an airship that can pickup and drop cargo without landing — see how

Flying Whales' LCA60T is a VTOL, which means it won't require any extra infrastructure like runways or landing platforms to operate.

www.businessinsider.com

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

The Age of the Airship May Be Dawning Again

Dirigibles ruled the skies once. Can they make a comeback?

foreignpolicy.com

The flight of the whale – is the airship making a comeback in the logistics industry? | logistik aktuell

Flying Whales. Will a French company succeed to establish the airship as a heavy-duty means of transport after all?

logistik-aktuell.com

3) Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander series.
British-based company.

The Airlander 10 has a payload capacity of 10-tons, an endurance of 5 days, a range of 4000 nautical miles, and max altitude of 20,000 feet.
The Airlander 50 has a payload of 50 tons, but is still in development. There is an Airlander 200 proposed with a payload of 200 tons, but not much information on that. Appears currently focused on offerings to defense and tourism, not cargo

Spoiler: References

HAV

At Hybrid Air Vehicles we are redefining what aircraft can do. Airlander connects the unconnected and solves modern day aviation challenges. Explore the technology here.

www.hybridairvehicles.com

The world's largest aircraft Airlander 10 just got bigger — check out the 'The Flying Bum'

The new design changes improves multiple areas of the Airlander 10, including an increase in its efficiency and functionality, according to its maker.

www.businessinsider.com

DoD requests proposal for missionised Airlander 10

Vertex Aerospace and Hybrid Air Vehicles have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense (DoD) to present a missionised Airlander 10.

www.airforce-technology.com

Those are the principal three I'm aware of.
There are other corporations out there in the same space like Solar Ship, but as far as I know none of the others are as advanced.

…

Airship lift is not a function of technology. It is a function of how big your gas bag is. You have no helium. The Strategic Helium Reserve is gone. Any airship you build, you build with hydrogen. Thus my comparison to the Hindenburg (and, as a side note, the spectacular political problem you trip into if you try to go that route). And, thus, there is a limit to how much lift you can cram in there without making the Hindenburg look like a marvel of modesty and good fiscal sense. To really amp up the lift without making the heart of your foreign trade network a quartet of fuel-air bombs nobody will willingly host would require hybrid designs...which burn significantly more fuel (witness this proposal, which would burn 50 tons of fuel for 160 tons of cargo). Furthermore, if you intend to use them to transport hundreds of tons of cargo, you need to build all of the fancy receiving infrastructure airships are nominally supposed to cut out of the equation anyway, because you cannot unload and process hundreds of tons of cargo in an empty field. At which point you are investing a lot in building megaships for marginal gains at best, assuming the wildest optimistic fantasies of hybrid airship possibilities, and doing so completely from scratch since nobody else in the wider world has elected to utterly waste their time on this.

No airships!

Click to shrink...

1) We, as in the Commonwealth, wouldn't be building any such thing. We wouldnt have the technical capacity to build anything of the sort.
We'd be of necessity hiring existing commercial options out of South America, Africa or China, not building them.
Places with vast distances and where road options might not be viable, and where fuel efficiency has been a focus.

If they existed, you'd also see them in use in the Far East of the Russian Empire and the Arctic Conservatiate, which have similar requirements.

2)There's something seriously wonky about that design you dug up..
Im not an aeronautics engineer, but a gas bag with liquid ammonia does not resemble any airship design I've heard of before.
And it's fuel consumption figures are well off anything I've seen before.

3) Flying gas bomb?
Your average 747 has a fuel capacity of 322,650 pounds of jet fuel, amounting to 161 tons, and they overfly cities.
And I wont go into LNG tankers.

Anything capable of taking flight is by design an explosion waiting to happen, or so I understand it.
Its all about the safety engineering.

4)Ultimately, though, I'm not arguing with you on this Poptart.
You are the GM. If you choose to rule something out for whatever reason, that's it.
If you are inviting discussion, that's a different matter.

 

[10ebbor10]

Im not an aeronautics engineer, but a gas bag with liquid ammonia does not resemble any airship design I've heard of before.

Click to shrink...

Basically, the idea is to avoid a change in vehicle mass during flight.

You have an engine that simultaneously burns hydrogen and ammonia, so that the netto result is that the consumption of lifting gas is equal to the consumption of fuel mass. While that specific idea has never been used, the concept is real and was successfully used for nearly 9 years on the Graf Zeppelin, the world's most successful commercial airship (also, arguably, the only successful airship)...
They utilized blaugas (which has similar density to air) so that burning fuel did not lighten the airship. One downside of that is the fuel is the same weight as air. Any hypothetical leak would pool everywhere (unlike hydrogen, which floats up and away). Still, it never exploded.

LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[uju32]

More generally, two points:
1) The Hindenburg thing tends to be overblown. Spectacular, but overblown.
And the alleged modalities for that accident (electric spark from the metal framework) are not exactly viable on a modern composite construction anyway.

In WW1, we had airships attacked by aircraft carrying machineguns to often little or no effect.
It wasn't until the aircraft started carrying white phosporus bullets that it became possible to reliably ignite any hydrogen leaks from punching through the airship envelope.

Modern composite materials and fabrics change the picture significantly.


2) Hydrogen is supposed to be one of the fuel options for a zero-carbon emissions future.
Hydrogen-fuelled cars, hydrogen fuel energy storage in power plants, hydrogen fuel in aerial vehicles, et cetera.
Safety engineering would be something of a priority in Alexander's glorious future.


Note that I'm not arguing that we should be building hydrogen airships in-game. Not my field, and I have never paid the subject that much attention.
But some serious people are throwing money at helium airships IRL for cargo.

Basically, the idea is to avoid a change in vehicle mass during flight.

You have an engine that simultaneously burns hydrogen and ammonia, so that the netto result is that the consumption of lifting gas is equal to the consumption of fuel mass. While that specific idea has never been used, the concept is real and was successfully used for nearly 9 years on the Graf Zeppelin, the world's most successful commercial airship (also, arguably, the only successful airship)...
They utilized blaugas (which has similar density to air) so that burning fuel did not lighten the airship. One downside of that is the fuel is the same weight as air. Any hypothetical leak would pool everywhere (unlike hydrogen, which floats up and away). Still, it never exploded.

LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Click to shrink...

That's informative.Thank you.

 

[Starship Trooper]

I think uju32 makes a lot of sense there is a market for cheaper then heli postal/packet transport to places without airports like an alp village bigger if people are willing to wait longer but pay less

but like uju said it your quest poptart

 

[EBR]

I have recipes for Kudzu and Zebra Mussels if anyone needs them for world-building. No recipes for algae though, I didn't know you could eat algae blooms.

 

[Stabbtmcstabstab]

I have recipes for Kudzu and Zebra Mussels if anyone needs them for world-building. No recipes for algae though, I didn't know you could eat algae blooms.

Click to shrink...

You can eat algae just not the types that are likely to bloom on the lakes. At least not efficently enough with the level of infrastructure that people in a post-collaspe third world nation resorting to eating algae would have.

 

[EBR]

You can eat algae just not the types that are likely to bloom on the lakes. At least not efficently enough with the level of infrastructure that people in a post-collaspe third world nation resorting to eating algae would have.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, that was my understanding. Most algal blooms are cyanobacteria, and those are toxic.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

I don't think this claim is correct.

The 747-400 ERF carries 124 tonnes of cargo, for a maximum range of 9230 km (less than the 10 000 for the airship), utilizing it's fuel capacity of 204,360 Liters to do so.
That is nearly 150 tonnes of fuel, assuming I screwed up no calculations.

The A330-200F carries 70 tonnes of cargo for a maximum range of 7400 kg, utilizing it's fuel capacity of 97530 liters.
So, 75 tonnes of fuel for less than half the cargo and 75% of the distance.

Similarly, concerns about explosions are also heavily overstated due to highly published nature of the Hindenburg crash. Airships were more often lost due to bad weather, being smashed into terrain or simply torn apart.

The big problem is that an airship is not something we're going to be able to create domestically. Unless there exists an international market where we can buy some cheap second hand airships, it's a death-end. Our society is too small for a domestically build airship project to be commercially viable. Heck, we don't even have the talent to do it.

Click to shrink...

My point is that an airship's greatest supposed strength is fuel efficiency, and cranking tonnage up to usable capacity itself means you're having to use fuel. Perhaps less, but when your niche is already narrow, you can't afford a lot of measuring.

Particularly when your airships are coming apart due to bad weather, getting smashed into terrain, being torn apart, or occasionally by exploding while coming in to dock.

And also that their use case is so narrow that there's no international market for you to tap into.

1) We, as in the Commonwealth, wouldn't be building any such thing. We wouldnt have the technical capacity to build anything of the sort.
We'd be of necessity hiring existing commercial options out of South America, Africa or China, not building them.
Places with vast distances and where road options might not be viable, and where fuel efficiency has been a focus.

If they existed, you'd also see them in use in the Far East of the Russian Empire and the Arctic Conservatiate, which have similar requirements.

2)There's something seriously wonky about that design you dug up..
Im not an aeronautics engineer, but a gas bag with liquid ammonia does not resemble any airship design I've heard of before.
And it's fuel consumption figures are well off anything I've seen before.

3) Flying gas bomb?
Your average 747 has a fuel capacity of 322,650 pounds of jet fuel, amounting to 161 tons, and they overfly cities.
And I wont go into LNG tankers.

Anything capable of taking flight is by design an explosion waiting to happen, or so I understand it.
Its all about the safety engineering.

4)Ultimately, though, I'm not arguing with you on this Poptart.
You are the GM. If you choose to rule something out for whatever reason, that's it.
If you are inviting discussion, that's a different matter.

Click to shrink...

I have been quite clear that I am making a ruling, so you may feel free to drop it. Nobody is using airships in the quest's modern day anymore than they are doing so today, IRL. No airships. Particularly no miraculous 500-ton airships which wildly outstrip even the zaniest proposals of the modern day.

 

[fasquardon]

PoptartProdigy15.10.2020

Like, Russia is fundamentally fucked on trying to be the dominant world naval power. To project power from Vladivostok, they must get past Japan; here they have, but at the cost of giving that to Japan anyway. To project power from Archangelsk, they must deal with Arctic ice, which isn't tenable. To project from Crimea, they must secure the Black Sea, the Bosporus Strait, the Mediterranean, and at least one, preferably both, of the Suez/Red Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. To project power from St. Petersburg, but must get through the Baltic, past the Danish belts, out into the North Sea, and then past Britain and Ireland.

Click to shrink...

Wait, wait. Seriously? Arctic sea ice is still around? That's well beyond any sort of achievable amelioration of climate change. We can maybe keep Greenland's melting to a controllable rate and avoid too much of the Antarctic ice melting (meaning sea level rise by 2070 basically wouldn't be noticeable), but the sea ice in the Arctic after 2070 requires magic to achieve from the point at which this timeline diverted from ours.

Though that doesn't change the reality for Russia that projecting power by sea is hard. And probably not worth it for Alexander to invest in too heavily.

____________

As far as the debate over military equipment and tanks...

Firstly, exactly what we get should be calibrated to the opportunities and challenges we face. We need an effective army for round two, not a perfect paper army that might be ready too late.

For example, for our economy, we may find that the world economy is relatively good right now, meaning we can follow a debt/export-fueled growth path where we borrow money to invest in higher efficiency production allowing us to export the stuff to get the money to pay off the loans and get the military imports we want. But if the world economy can't absorb a high volume of exports we'll need to follow a more autarkic path where we borrow less money and are more focused on encouraging urbanization to achieve efficiencies with low tech and high economies of scale, buying less from abroad because we are limited to only the amount of hard currency we can get from our exports and what foreign aid we can attract. In the former case, I would imagine we could afford much more foreign military hardware, in the latter case we are likely going to need to produce more locally.

Overall, I don't see any way to avoid having a mix of local-made and imported military hardware. Also, it is worth noting that manufacturing our own weapons also helps us use those weapons better. There's some utility to be gained by having the factory and the designers close to hand allowing for evolutionary design work that can be driven by local factors and better training of maintenance crews. As has already been pointed out, we just can't afford to be good at making everything like the old US could be, but nor can we import everything. Once we know more about the world economy and the general state of weapons technology, we'll need to think about what we are best off importing and what we are best to make ourselves.

I do wonder if we want to either import or make our own tanks. We already have Burns' Abrams, and we may not actually need more armour. Or we may be better off using our limited resources buying spares and modern electronics for these old tanks even if in an ideal world we want lots and lots of modern tanks.

Likely the things we will most want to import are modern electronics. Accurate guidance, good command & control, good communications, good battlefield visualization (even for individual troops on the ground) - these are things modern electronics can bring us. And its all really useful in a fight.

After modern electronics, we'll want to look at kit for our airforce - we got amazingly lucky with the weather in our last tangle with the Vicks, and next time we won't have the advantage of Californian sabotage either. We really want an airforce strong enough to at least contest the skies with the Vicks - the difference between contested airspace and airspace where your enemy has superiority is pretty big.

After that, we need to invest appropriately in the meat and potatoes of the Commonwealth's military power - the navy, the logistical arm, the artillery and infantry equipment.

I think tanks are pretty low down our priority list. They are useful, but not vital the way other things are.

Also, I am curious to see what the state of modern military electronics is. Most of the world's chip fabs are in the US, China and Taiwan. Last I checked all of the cutting edge stuff was in the US and Taiwan. All of it is heavily dependent on extremely globalized supply chains and on the scale of the modern global market. With the US and China having been pushed into collapse by Russia and with world trade being Balkanized, the world-leading semiconductor industries in the 2070s could well be Iran or Germany, putting out products that look like something out of the 80s or the 90s (I think both countries today have chip fabs that produce things with 1980s levels of production technology). Which obviously would have a big impact on what we import. It would be difficult to implement the kind of highly connected battlespace the US armed forces are today with such limited silicon.

fasquardon

 

[PoptartProdigy]

Wait, wait. Seriously? Arctic sea ice is still around? That's well beyond any sort of achievable amelioration of climate change. We can maybe keep Greenland's melting to a controllable rate and avoid too much of the Antarctic ice melting (meaning sea level rise by 2070 basically wouldn't be noticeable), but the sea ice in the Arctic after 2070 requires magic to achieve from the point at which this timeline diverted from ours.

Click to shrink...

Whatever, sure.

 

[bdun140]

Just because the north Siberian ports aren't frozen all the time doesn't mean they aren't frozen at least some of the time. Or, for that matter, at all convenient or accessible compared to the legendary Warm Water Port which Russia so desires.

 

[BelligerentGnu]

Took me a long time to getting around to reading this quest, and I wish I'd done so sooner. Thoroughly excellent, Poptart.

It's actually making meaningful sacrifices that impact your majority populations in order to make up for what the First Nations have suffered that makes you discernably less America.

Click to shrink...

That said, it's unfortunate that the final sentence in reader mode is something I disagree with so violently it almost squicks me out. Owning up to and making amends for a history of atrocities does not make our fictional nation less America, it makes us more America than the original has yet achieved.

The country has always failed to live up to its ideals, but it is the ideals that make the country, not the failures.

 

[Starship Trooper]

that's how I see it too I can understand how shifting from a 2 party to a parliamentary system, allowing communists in the government, or not using the original constitution might cost legitimacy for obvious reasons but The US has been making reparations to native tribes as late as Obama so how much sacrifice are we talking about. Citizenship? land? some kind of preferential treatment? handicapping ourselves somehow to show our sincerity? I am not an American so I might be missing something

U.S. Government To Pay $492 Million To 17 American Indian Tribes
edit CFC showed neo-nazis into their own goddam ovens I can't imaging they are not sympathetic to an oppressed people

 

[Wiadi]

That said, it's unfortunate that the final sentence in reader mode is something I disagree with so violently it almost squicks me out. Owning up to and making amends for a history of atrocities does not make our fictional nation less America, it makes us more America than the original has yet achieved.

The country has always failed to live up to its ideals, but it is the ideals that make the country, not the failures.

Click to shrink...

Legitimacy is not some sort of abstract "goodness stat," it's specifically about how we're perceived by the rest of the world in relation to the old United States. And like it or not, that sort of behavior is absolutely going to look pretty damn different from the America people are used to seeing.

 

[CatOnTheWeb]

Took me a long time to getting around to reading this quest, and I wish I'd done so sooner. Thoroughly excellent, Poptart.



That said, it's unfortunate that the final sentence in reader mode is something I disagree with so violently it almost squicks me out. Owning up to and making amends for a history of atrocities does not make our fictional nation less America, it makes us more America than the original has yet achieved.

The country has always failed to live up to its ideals, but it is the ideals that make the country, not the failures.

Click to shrink...

Legitimacy is less how much we live up to the ideals of Old America, and how much we are the legitimate successor to said state. Acting in line with the actions and politics of the old country gets us legitimacy, acting in opposition loses it. And no matter what ideals America claims to have, it has always stamped down on indigenous populations and refused to help them at its own inconvenience. Hence what Poptart was driving at when they said helping First Nations would make the CFC less American in the eyes of the world.

 

[Shinr]

This might be me going senile four decades early, but weren't there two kinds of Legitimacy?

One for comparing us against the idealized/hated view of old USA, and another for more general "Should we take this upstart nation seriously regardless of how it compares to old USA?" or something like that, but I guess the latter is already narratively measured by our size and deeds and how others view them.