The success condition was characterized as an end to Victoria's ability to militarily threaten the CFC. While this was originally envisioned as establishing a stable defensive strategy Victoria could not overcome, the complete annihilation of the Victoria Army as an institution was also found to qualify.
This is apropos of nothing on a reread, but
@PoptartProdigy , may I just say that I
love your sense of understatement?
So where do we get all our equipment from? Did we build and rebuild factories in the ruins of Chicago?
Apart from the Old World Equipment, which has been salvaged and carefully maintained, yeah. Chicago was making its own guns long before Hellfire Burns showed up, the air force was made up of an anti-pirate air patrol the city was able to keep flightworthy, and there was a brown water navy in service. During the war with Victoria, the concern wasn't running out of shells, it was running out of copper to make new shell casings with, since using steel casings would cause more wear on the barrels.
To add a bit more nuance to this...
1) Victorians tended to wreck any kind of
large scale industry they aren't personally benefiting from, but strictly practical concerns mean they can't wreck all the light industry, machine shops, and single-artisan operations in a country with a population in the hundreds of millions. They only had so many roving
warlord bands divisions, and a lot of ground to cover. So for the roughly thirty years of periodic Vick occupation, that informed the kind of industry and economy that existed.
2) Victorians also, for ideological reasons (residual fondness for armed "Christian" (read: white, patriarchal, etc.) rural populations, combined again with sheer practicality, probably never managed to stamp out widespread small arms stockpiling and gunsmithing in America. Consequently, Chicago (or the 'greater Chicago area' that became the Commonwealth) was able to maintain small scale small arms production. There were a wide variety of armed militias in the Commonwealth area. Note that until Burns got to work on the place,
our ground forces did not have standardized small arms calibers. It was that bad, the supply situation was that catch-as-catch can. Ammunition availability was also spotty, which chains into the brass crisis you allude to and that I will have more to say about shortly.
3) As per (1), Chicago had a few fairly
specific industries it kept. Coal mining in the Illinois region seems to have remained active, for instance, probably because Victorians were burning it. And a certain amount of light-to-medium industry necessary to service lake shipping and maintain connections to the Mississippi river network- because Victoria
used those connections to access the continental interior. However, those industries were sharply limited.
4) For example,
our sole domestic aircraft production run is an inferior
DC-3 knockoff running on handbuilt prototype lightweight aviation diesels. It struggles to match the power-to-weight ratio of a 1930s-era aircraft.
We call the airplane the Garbage Bird. Partly because the aluminum fuselage is made from recycled soda cans dug out of 20th century landfills, because
we have no domestic aluminum production capability worth mentioning.
5) Likewise,
we had no domestic oil production worth mentioning, to the extent that our navy consisted of
coal-fired gunboats that would not look very out of place in the colonial militaries of an early 20th century colonial power, chugging around some river network in Africa or southern Asia and shelling tribesmen. Which chains into...
6) While we're at it,
that shell crisis. There is little or no domestic copper production, and probably only limited zinc production within the Commonwealth's immediate borders, so making brass for ammunition is... problematic. It seemed logical for me to suppose that this led to something of a crunch when we went to war mobilization while under an embargo from most of our trading partners (thanks, Victoria!).
7) Note the
size of the military we were struggling to supply fully for extended military operations, too. We were operating three infantry divisions with (mostly, as I understand it) automatic rifles and machine guns, and the entirety of our artillery arm,
land AND sea-based, consisted of... lemme count... (11*2) + (at most 12-18*3) = 76 artillery tubes
for our entire military, plus mortars that use a lot less brass/steel per shot (and can use captured Vick ammo probably). By the standards of, say, a World War era military, being unable to supply this force with all the ammunition it could
ever need is
pathetic.
...
In all probability, 1939-era Poland could crush our entire military in a matter of weeks,
yes I said Poland. Numbers of troops sustainable in the field would be
badly against us, we wouldn't enjoy all that much of an equipment advantage in practice, and the Poles would have known how to react to artillery fire as the Victorians very much did not.
But we
do have industrial capacity, some of it recently built up in the three years or so since the Vicks lost their ability to sabotage stuff around us, and some of it older and Vick-tolerated either because it was too dispersed to be easily targeted or because they were directly benefiting from it.
