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I've heard people mention Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter for that subject, although I've not read it myself.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:00
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Ok AI, I'm not sure why you're sending waves of empty landing barges to Pearl, but thanks. I think I'll have to wait until 43 to go after Bangkok from Moulemen. The number of fighters I'm seeing from there is just too much.
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Feb 20, 2018 02:22
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Woodchip posted:Ok AI, I'm not sure why you're sending waves of empty landing barges to Pearl, but thanks. In my experience the AI does this when you take out too much of its invasion shipping. The bug may be that it's trying to load units that can't fit onto individual landing barges because they fall into the pool of "transport" ships, and it has no more actual AKs or xAKLs to allocate since it has to allocate them to resource pickup and resupply operations.
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Feb 20, 2018 04:24
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   My Helens run into a wall of fighters and run away.  Flak brings down a Liberator!  The Helens get another go, and two hits!  The gunners are stepping up today!   A lot of these planes can't seem to get into the air – I'm going to withdraw a lot of them to stop losses like this.  The bombers, not the fighters.   Another day of heavy air losses on both sides.  Add one to our Rabaul crop.
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Feb 20, 2018 05:28
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I don't know poo poo about the Pacific but did the Japanese have anything in the air that could match the us planes at this point? Cause right now we're getting slaughtered.
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Feb 20, 2018 12:46
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not really, us planes go from pretty good to stupidly good, and they have a lot of them
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Feb 20, 2018 12:54
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Tiler Kiwi posted:not really, us planes go from pretty good to stupidly good, and they have a lot of them False. The Japanese had several planes that could go toe-to-toe with their US Counterparts but the problem IRL was that they never had enough planes, or enough experienced pilots.
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Feb 20, 2018 13:17
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wedgekree posted:Is it going to be worth it to evacuate planes from places like Luganville or not? I wanted to effort-post about this: When you bomb a base's airfield, you deal damage to its runway, to parked planes, and possibly to the supply depot. The runway gets repaired by Engineer units. Destroyed planes are of course destroyed, but damaged planes get repaired by Aviation Support units. If the runway is still operational, you can order any undamaged planes to "transfer" themselves to any other bases that are still in range, but any planes that are still under repair will stay there. To "suppress" a base, one would need to create a cycle wherein the runway is always so damaged that the planes can't fly out, and/or that the planes are always so damaged that they're in no condition to leave. One of the ways to initiate this cycle is to use surface bombardment, because cruisers and battleships can do nasty things to airbases if given the chance. Failing that, throwing enough bombers at a base will do it, but you need a lot of bombers to be able to maintain a day-in-day-out bombing pace, as well as the logistics and the airbases on your end to sustain and support it. One might even go far as to say that the war was, in some aspects, dictated by the model of taking bases large enough to support land-based bombers, and then taking over everything that was in its umbrella. The pivotal points of the war, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marianas Islands, Leyte Gulf, were all examples of offensives wherein one side was venture out of its own land-based umbrella and taking a chance on seizing a new base to extend it, using carriers to provide the air cover that was otherwise out-of-range. In this analogy, once the Allies had Tokyo in range of B-29s, there was very little that could change the tide of the war, since virtually the entire Pacific was now under a land-based air umbrella.
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Feb 20, 2018 13:52
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Jobbo_Fett posted:False. The Japanese had several planes that could go toe-to-toe with their US Counterparts but the problem IRL was that they never had enough planes, or enough experienced pilots. Like what? This is interesting!
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Feb 20, 2018 14:51
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The N1K was a really good plane that they couldn't build very many of or keep properly fueled.
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Feb 20, 2018 14:54
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algebra testes posted:Like what? This is interesting! The N1K George, the Ki-84 Frank, the J2M Jack, the Ki-44 Tojo and the Ki-61 Tony were all competitive Japanese fighter designs. That said, these are all mostly land-based designs, and we're still fighting on the edges of the Empire, so it may be a while before they see action.
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Feb 20, 2018 15:06
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algebra testes posted:Like what? This is interesting! It's almost always more about the pilot than the plane and the western Allies had the best training program in the world. The N1K-J was quite good, probably the best Japanese fighter of the world, but came a bit late. The Ki-84 was the best Japanese fighter that saw large-scale deployment and could hang with late-war Allied fighters at low/mid altitude. The Ki-100 was also good but did not see widespread deployment and was not quite as good a the other two. Part of the problem was the complexity of late war aircraft. The Homare radial engines that powered the N1K and Ki-84 were brilliant - compact, high output, and with a lot of advanced technological features. However, with Japan's supply of raw materials being constrained and reduction in skill of technicians in manufacturing, quality was poor, which led to poor field reliability, which led to low performance. There was also a lack of high octane avgas. (one of the very important US lend/lease contributions to the Soviets were vast quantities of octane-boosters, which allowed production and use of 100+ R+M/2 octane fuel, which is how you get 2000+ hp engines) Higher performance air frames are harder to repair in the field, and Japan had a hard time producing skilled fitters and riggers and maintenance techs. (They had a hard time producing and replacing skilled X, which was in part due to doctrine: have a short, decisive war that uses a qualitative superiority to smash the enemy and bring them to the negotiating table. Once the war stretched beyond a year or so, there was no real plan to fight a protracted war and come up with a bunch of adequate replacements Sakai's autobiography talks about his cadet class of pilots - most washed out in the prewar era, but of course by the time '44 hits the replacements he is getting are far, far worse than the guys that washed out of IJNAS training in the late 1930s. His class size in 1937 (when Japan was aggressively preparing for war - Marco Polo Bridge happens in July this year) was 70 accepted out of 1500 applicants for the year 1937. Twenty five graduated. If you had an American engine production line and fighter assembly line configured to make Ki-84s, it would have been a great fighter.
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Feb 20, 2018 15:22
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Japan's engineering always seems to get short shrift. They achieved some pretty impressive stuff considering the material restraints they were under.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:48
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  I think this one may sink guys.  The Allies decide they want to walk to Rabaul.  Our carriers are out hunting.  We bag a Liberator.  Let's see if I can't raid that landing site with my cruisers. 
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Feb 20, 2018 18:47
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20 February 1944 Across the world, a homing torpedo from U-764 blows the stern off sloop HMS Woodpecker (insert your own jokes here) southwest of Ireland. She later sinks under tow. Off Cornwall, escort destroyer HMS Warwick explodes after a torpedo hit by U-413.
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Feb 20, 2018 19:17
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Great overview Grad. I agree with staying under the air umbrella. The pacific is like ww1 with islands. I bite and hold an atoll, move the fighters up, and repeat. E: when do the Allies get a decent land based torpedo bomber? My kingdom for a Betty-equivalent. Woodchip fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 19:45
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Woodchip posted:Great overview Grad. I agree with staying under the air umbrella. The pacific is like ww1 with islands. I bite and hold an atoll, move the fighters up, and repeat. Dunno about torpedoes, but there is the B-25G/H. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_B-25_Mitchell#/media/File:B-25H.jpg
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Feb 20, 2018 20:21
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Woodchip posted:Great overview Grad. I agree with staying under the air umbrella. The pacific is like ww1 with islands. I bite and hold an atoll, move the fighters up, and repeat. It’s mid-July ‘42 in my game and I’ve found two things work okay for land-based torpedoes, although nowhere near as good as Betties: First, I’ve got a single squadron of Beauforts based in Rangoon that have been doing great against the IJN when they try to send stuff into the Bay of Bengal. I assume these came in from Aden at some point. As far as I know this is the only squadron of Beauforts anywhere in the theater. I wish I had more. Second, Catalinas set on Naval Attack instead of Naval Search will occasionally conduct a torpedo attack when they spot a ship. I’m just starting to get to the point now where I have enough Air HQs around the Coral Sea to start flying torpedo-armed Catalinas, but they sank a couple transports trying to assault Milne Bay a couple weeks ago. Land-based air other than dive bombers seems pretty worthless for attacking shipping. I assume more Marine squadrons start showing up at some point? I’d love to park a ton of dive bombers and fighters at Milne or (soon) Lunga and get the Solomon Sea under my air umbrella.
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Feb 20, 2018 20:33
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Land-based air rocks against shipping in one place: ports. Send 100 LBs in at 6000 feet and your jaw will drop
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Feb 20, 2018 22:33
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Pics or it didn't happen! Also, does "100 LBs" mean 100 level bombers or 100 lb bombs... kinda makes sense either way.
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Feb 20, 2018 22:54
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Long range bombers. 100lb bombs would barely scratch a midget sub
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Feb 20, 2018 22:57
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algebra testes posted:Like what? This is interesting! gradenko_2000 posted:The N1K George, the Ki-84 Frank, the J2M Jack, the Ki-44 Tojo and the Ki-61 Tony were all competitive Japanese fighter designs. To go into more detail on the navy side, the largest problem was that the A6M's successor plane, the A7M, was hit repeatedly with massive setbacks and complications that stalled it from being ready in time. And the A6M, while an excellent plane for its time, was still an early war plane design, no matter how many modifications they made for future variants, that was competing with new Allied planes - and they additionally benefited from features and tactics specifically designed to combat Zeroes due to studying the one captured on Akutan. By the end of the war they'd only just managed to crank out 8 production variants, but it was apparently a fairly superlative design according to the test pilots.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:51
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Woodchip posted:E: when do the Allies get a decent land based torpedo bomber? My kingdom for a Betty-equivalent. Never. Ok, you can use some of the Beauforts and the USN Catalinas in the early war and you get a few Marine units that get Avengers, but you never get anything with both the range and speed of the Betty. Plus, your aerial torpedoes are much more likely to be duds than the Japanese, because America can't ever get torpedoes right. What you DO get is the B-25D-1, starting early '43. Train pilots on strafing and naval bombing skills, then send them in at 100 feet. Since they're classed as attack bombers they carry their full payload on low altitude attacks, and they're durable enough to survive increased flak at low altitude. They get an 11-hex standard range (14-hexes for extended range ops, but its rarely worth the op losses) and have enough defensive guns to ward off long range CAP without any escort. The later B-25s get even more hilarious armament but lose a little range. Fortunately it's possible to keep the D-1 in production until the war's end because one of the factories is on the map.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:52
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Gnoman posted:Those were US S-Class submarines. I was talking about the British S-class destroyer that was sunk in the last update. Random story about the S-boats that I love posting about : the tale of S-5 (SS-110). If you're looking for a more narrative tale than the wikipedia article provides, I recommend the excellent Under Pressure, by A.J. Hill.  S-5, 1920 Newly completed, S-5 was out for trials off the east coast of Delaware on the 1st of September. She was doing a series of crash dive tests (if memory serves, the second of the day), where the submarine attempts to dive as fast as possible, simulating an attempt to evade enemy attack. To do so a lot of things have to be done very quickly, including a lot of valve closings. Very important among these is to close the main air induction valve, from which air is piped from the surface to all the compartments on the boat. Procedure is to leave this valve open as long as possible, to ensure as much fresh air as possible is available before beginning a dive. On this particular occasion, the man in charge of closing this valve is distracted at the critical moment where the boat slips beneath the surface, and water begins to pour into interior of the sub. The boat is eventually made water-tight, but by then she has taken on about 80 tons of water, including complete flooding of the (now sealed) torpedo room in the bow. This water is far too much for her reserve buoyancy to sustain, and she rapidly sinks, coming to rest on the bottom, under 55 m of water. There is no way the boat can be made to float without clearing the water from the bow, and there is no way to pump the water out from the bow at this depth. The crew also has no method to signal for help, and the boat is far too deep to allow the crew to swim for safety, even if they had gear for it. Desperate measures are called for. Some clever fellow has a thought: sure they're trapped under 55 m of water, but last they checked, the boat is 70m long. All they have to do is push all the water out of the bilge spaces towards the front of the ship, and the back end should pitch right up to the surface! There are risks to this plan however; most notably that the forward compartments just so happen to hold the batteries, which, if exposed to sea water, will start off-gassing deadly chlorine gas and explosive hydrogen. All they can hope for is that there is enough time to seal the gas in once the boat begins to rise. Lacking other options, that's not such a bad deal really. After a perilous water shifting operation that involves the boat hurtling towards vertical in a positive feedback loop of buoyancy, they do manage to seal the battery room. And after checking the new angle of the boat and running some quick figures, combined with some tapping on the external hull, they determine that about 5 m of the stern is now above the surface. Now the only problem is that you can't climb out through the rear end end of a submarine. Without power, with only a few lanterns for light, and with a rapidly diminishing oxygen supply, the crew once again takes the only option available: cut through the steel pressure hull with a hand drill. The progress up to this point was actually quite rapid: S-5's stern had returned to the surface within 2 hours of the sinking. Drilling would not be so easy; to open a hole 7.5 cm in diameter took 36 hours. Enter the SS Alanthus. A wooden hulled freighter finished in 1918 as part of the WWI emergency ship building program, she was already past her prime in 1920 and making her last voyage. Bound for New Jersey, a watchman reported seeing what looked like a buoy. The captain, realizing that no buoy should be out this far, brought the ship around to investigate.  That's no buoy... Drawing close to the protruding stern, the captain offered the traditional naval hail, giving rise to this wonderful conversation: quote:"What ship?" Unfortunately, Alanthus is unable to do much to rescue the trapped crew. She has neither the tools to expand the hole in the hull nor a radio to call for help. But what she can offer is a much needed lifeline to the crew inside: fresh water, clean air piped into the hole, and rigging to ensure S-5 doesn't slip below the waves again.  S-5 and Alanthus Alanthus also has the distinct advantage of being much more visible to nearby ships, and by the evening managed to make contact by signal flag with the SS General G. W. Goethals. Goethals has a radio to notify the navy, and tools to begin enlarging the hole. Within a few hours, the hole is made large enough for the crew to start squirming through, and by 3AM on September 3rd, the last of the crew is taken off, with no loss of life or serious injuries.  The plate cut from S-5 by the crew of Goethals. It is approximately 60 cm wide, and 2 cm thick After extracting the crew, an attempt was made by USS Ohio (BB-12) to tow S-5 back to port, but rather predictably the pull of the tow line pulled the hole in the stern under the surface, causing S-5 to take on more water and rapidly sink. Several attempts were made to raise her, all unsuccessful. The wreck was precisely located in 2001, resting intact on the sea floor.  S-5 as imaged by sidescan sonar PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 00:04
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Isn't the A7M the one where they lost a ton of the design documents and early parts to an earthquake?
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Feb 21, 2018 00:06
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https://youtu.be/qqpn3eXcCck Aww yeah.
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Feb 21, 2018 00:37
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acidia posted:Pics or it didn't happen! LB's would typically stand for "Light Bombers" or pounds. 3 DONG HORSE posted:Long range bombers. 100lb bombs would barely scratch a midget sub Depth charges are 100lb bombs...
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Feb 21, 2018 01:39
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dylguy90 posted:Land-based air rocks against shipping in one place: ports. Send 100 LBs in at 6000 feet and your jaw will drop Screenshots plz
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Feb 21, 2018 01:54
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Jobbo_Fett posted:LB's would typically stand for "Light Bombers" or pounds. Honestly I was trying to make a joke and hosed it up real bad
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Feb 21, 2018 02:05
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Woodchip posted:Great overview Grad. I agree with staying under the air umbrella. The pacific is like ww1 with islands. I bite and hold an atoll, move the fighters up, and repeat. Catalinas can be decent torpedo attackers (did you know that the only successful American torpedo attack during the Battle of Midway was made by Ensign Gaylord Probst's Catalina crew from VP-44?) but there's never enough of them to be used in this manner, and you want them on search missions anyway. The real answer is that as the Allies you're going to have enough 2E- and 4E- bombers to suppress sealanes just by dropping bombs on them, even if you don't get too fancy with the low-level skip bombing. PittTheElder posted:Random story about the S-boats that I love posting about : the tale of S-5 (SS-110). If you're looking for a more narrative tale than the wikipedia article provides, I recommend the excellent Under Pressure, by A.J. Hill. This is a cool story, thanks for sharing
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Feb 21, 2018 04:57
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Woodchip posted:https://youtu.be/qqpn3eXcCck Is that Hank Hill narrating?
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Feb 21, 2018 06:01
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Night10194 posted:Isn't the A7M the one where they lost a ton of the design documents and early parts to an earthquake? From what I can quickly find, no, though I do recognize that "lost the design documents in a fire from a bombing raid" line from somewhere - might be true, might be apocryphal, or might just be a different plane. What an earthquake DID do, combined with Allied bombing raids, was cause heavy damage to the singular plant that had just started producing the brand new engine they'd finally managed to design that actually produced enough power for the plane. In Dec. 1944, for timeframe reference to Japan's situation at that time.
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Feb 21, 2018 10:08
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So wtf was a gaylord originally supposed to be? Just an unusually happy noble? Why would there be a word for that?
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Feb 21, 2018 13:11
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aphid_licker posted:So wtf was a gaylord originally supposed to be? Just an unusually happy noble? Why would there be a word for that? Gaylord is a name. It's an Anglicization of the French Gaillard, which means energetic or rowdy. Richard the Lionheart had a castle named Chateau Gaillard. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 13:18
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I just spent the last month devotely following the last six months of progress and I got to hand it to Grey Hunter, he's done incredible things in this LP (Not all positive  ).So china is basically over outside of the capital that holds over a million starving riflemen, right? Are any offensives towards Burma so prohibitive that Grey might as well not proceed? Also, honor to the Jaluit defenders for turning a small atoll into an island of marine corpses.
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Feb 21, 2018 22:29
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What are grey’s gently caress ups? I can only think of the Australian invasion off the top of my head.
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Feb 21, 2018 23:47
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Betties
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Feb 21, 2018 23:48
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the katori (or whatev)
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Feb 21, 2018 23:52
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Having the airplane pools turned off for a few months, or something. Generally missing the occasional detail like getting torpedoes on the right planes, having supplies going where they need, etc. Nothing super major though. Given the obstruseness of the UI, it's forgivable, and I think it makes for a better LP when the player isn't such an expert that they're breaking the game over their knee.
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Feb 22, 2018 00:08
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Multiple counts of defeatism.
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Feb 22, 2018 00:37
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