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SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe
Ugh I've just done two games in a row where I played Italy First, I conquer a bunch of poo poo, declare war on France when Germany does, and then declare war on Germany after I take most of France and the Benelux because Germany sucks and is fighting the USSR too by then. Then Germany capitulates and the peace deal happens completely without me and it's just the USSR. Then the game crashes. Kind of frustrating.

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Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

SHISHKABOB posted:

Ugh I've just done two games in a row where I played Italy First, I conquer a bunch of poo poo, declare war on France when Germany does, and then declare war on Germany after I take most of France and the Benelux because Germany sucks and is fighting the USSR too by then. Then Germany capitulates and the peace deal happens completely without me and it's just the USSR. Then the game crashes. Kind of frustrating.

Ah, I see you made the mistake of playing an Axis nation other than Germany without buffing the hell out of Germany. It's kinda sad, but the game pretty much revolves around Germany being able to last longer than 1941 in order to be fun, so you need to buff the hell out of them if they are played by AI.

Magni
Apr 29, 2009

Pvt.Scott posted:

I don’t even know anything about planes, but if you told me you wanted one chassis to cover everything from interception, escort, cas, bombing, carrier operation, vtol etc. I’d laugh my rear end off. gently caress the F35. You need specialized tools for good results under war conditions, not some flying Swiss Army knife with 30 different blades on it.

E: don’t use a steak knife when you need a stiletto

A JDAM or assorted PGM doesn't care wether its dropped from a fighter or a dedicated attacker, and the ever-increasing sophistication of PGMs means that you don't really need a dedicated mud-mover capable of carrying dozens of bombs to stand a chance for at least one of them actually landing on target. A fighter with the ability to carry a few PGMs tacked on will do the job just fine nowadays. And fighter combat nowadays is a contest of stealth, sensors and networking far moreso than actual maneuver fighting. Specialised combat planes are as a result becoming more and more obsolete the same way medium tanks, heavy tanks, and gun-armed tank destroyers steadily had their jobs usurped by the MBT in the early Cold War.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

Magni posted:

A JDAM or assorted PGM doesn't care wether its dropped from a fighter or a dedicated attacker, and the ever-increasing sophistication of PGMs means that you don't really need a dedicated mud-mover capable of carrying dozens of bombs to stand a chance for at least one of them actually landing on target. A fighter with the ability to carry a few PGMs tacked on will do the job just fine nowadays. And fighter combat nowadays is a contest of stealth, sensors and networking far moreso than actual maneuver fighting. Specialised combat planes are as a result becoming more and more obsolete the same way medium tanks, heavy tanks, and gun-armed tank destroyers steadily had their jobs usurped by the MBT in the early Cold War.

That's all true, but this type of modern combat is only sustainable at relatively low intensity. Most European nations only have enough missiles and munitions to fight for a couple weeks at full intensity. If we were to have a conventional ww3, I think war would start to look more like ww2 after the first couple years. The sheer cost and time it takes to build those munitions will make them unsustainable when you have to launch millions of them over the course of a year. Then we will be back to a10s braaaaping stuff.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

No war between nuclear powers would last longer than a day.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

MiddleOne posted:

No war between nuclear powers would last longer than a day.

- Harry Truman, six months before the Korean War

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

MiddleOne posted:

No war between nuclear powers would last longer than a day.

Speaking just about the US, there are plenty of directives in place to continue fighting after a nuclear exchange. I'm sure the Russians have similar plans. But considering how terrible that would be, you would be surprised how much conventional fighting would go on without any nukes being launched. Neither side wants to end the world over a couple skirmishes. I wouldn't be surprised that most of Europe from the French border to Ukraine would be fair game for invasion without any nuclear retaliation. Cross those borders and things get dicey though.

Dramicus fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Oct 8, 2018

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

That neither side wants it to happen is not going to stop it from happening.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer
Yeah, but some countries just aren't worth ending the world over. Russia decides to invade Estonia? Sorry pals, but Estonia isn't worth Armageddon.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

Your Estonia scenario would go one of three ways:

A: The world ending.
B: Russia getting kicked in the face by the entirety of NATO.
C: It wouldn't happen because A and B are both non-staters and this isn't Tom Clancy fantasyland. If any major power thought MAD wasn't still very real we wouldn't have proxy wars, we would just have regular wars again.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

MiddleOne posted:

Your Estonia scenario would go one of three ways:

A: The world ending.
B: Russia getting kicked in the face by the entirety of NATO.
C: It wouldn't happen because A and B are both non-staters and this isn't Tom Clancy fantasyland. If any major power thought MAD wasn't still very real we wouldn't have proxy wars, we would just have regular wars again.

What's most likely is a limited conventional war being fought over Estonia, with a peace treaty to avoid things from getting unpleasant. The treaty would be signed long before either side suffered significant losses. The real punishment would come during the resulting peace with sanctions and other measures.

chairface
Oct 28, 2007

No matter what you believe, I don't believe in you.

Since mods for this game turned me onto the purestrain crazy that is Posadas:

Have you ever considered nuclear war would be a GOOD thing?! HRM!? Maybe good and bad things are actually not different at all.

Lum_
Jun 5, 2006
The old Twilight 2000 RPG postulated a years-long conflict between the Soviet bloc and NATO/China; two years into the war a limited nuclear war results in the elimination of most oil production and consequent industrial collapse - the war continues to sputter on out of inertia and a general political paralysis on both sides (the US splits into feuding military and civilian governments, the Soviets are essentially taken over by the military) until eventually famines turn the remaining surviving army divisions into armed farming communes. Never underestimate bureaucratic inertia. (I've been thinking on and off of making a grand strategic Twilight 2000 mod for HOI4... it would MOSTLY work, just make every resource and supply production insanely impossible to produce. However HOI4 doesn't handle hostile-vs-all marauder bands -- which a good part of the world's military devolve to -- very well at all.)

On the other hand, the most chilling nuclear war scenario ever written was by a nuclear disarmament negotiator - in the wake of a Cuban Missile Crisis gone slightly off kilter from our history, the US completely dominates the Soviets in a 2 day war. The results are... very, very grim. http://mrtomecko.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/9/13292665/what_if...cuban_missile_crisis.pdf

Lum_ fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Oct 8, 2018

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

chairface posted:

Since mods for this game turned me onto the purestrain crazy that is Posadas:

Have you ever considered nuclear war would be a GOOD thing?! HRM!? Maybe good and bad things are actually not different at all.

I guess it would be a good thing if you are some sort of anarchist who thinks the established powers are too established and the world needs a shake up.

chairface
Oct 28, 2007

No matter what you believe, I don't believe in you.

Dramicus posted:

I guess it would be a good thing if you are some sort of anarchist who thinks the established powers are too established and the world needs a shake up.

It's slightly loonier than that in that Posadas is a Trotskyist offshoot who views nuclear war as inevitably creating socialism, as opposed to it creating road warrior or fallout.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

chairface posted:

It's slightly loonier than that in that Posadas is a Trotskyist offshoot who views nuclear war as inevitably creating socialism, as opposed to it creating road warrior or fallout.

We need to kill off the people, for the good of the people, of course.

Lum_ posted:

On the other hand, the most chilling nuclear war scenario ever written was by a nuclear disarmament negotiator - in the wake of a Cuban Missile Crisis gone slightly off kilter from our history, the US completely dominates the Soviets in a 2 day war. The results are... very, very grim. http://mrtomecko.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/9/13292665/what_if...cuban_missile_crisis.pdf

That was a good read, not nearly as grim as I was expecting. I've seen far worse predictions of how things might play out. This was basically a clean win for the US with minimal consequences.

Dramicus fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Oct 8, 2018

Lum_
Jun 5, 2006

Dramicus posted:

This was basically a clean win for the US with minimal consequences.

~ 300 million dead might argue that point, but sure.

Lum_ fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Oct 8, 2018

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Lum_ posted:

However HOI4 doesn't handle hostile-vs-all marauder bands -- which a good part of the world's military devolve to -- very well at all.)

the inability of HOI4 to handle low-intensity, asymmetric warfare is why it's not very fun or interesting outside of the european theater of WW2 and a large part of why most historical total conversions are pretty much doomed

Magni
Apr 29, 2009

Dramicus posted:

That's all true, but this type of modern combat is only sustainable at relatively low intensity. Most European nations only have enough missiles and munitions to fight for a couple weeks at full intensity. If we were to have a conventional ww3, I think war would start to look more like ww2 after the first couple years. The sheer cost and time it takes to build those munitions will make them unsustainable when you have to launch millions of them over the course of a year. Then we will be back to a10s braaaaping stuff.

A couple of weeks at full intensity is also enough to see just about any military on the receiving end of that munitions expenditure bled white at a rate unlike anything ever seen. A conventional WW3 wouldn't last a couple years. The sheer speed and lethality of modern-day warfare means that a full-scale mechanised war between peer opponents today is going to chew through men and equipment just as fast as it does through ordnance. Like, WW2 generals wouldn't believe their eyes reading about the kind of loss rates everyone expected from a conventional NATO-PACT clash even back in the 80's, and things have only gotten faster and more lethal since. Nobody is going to be able to produce a meaningful amount of replacement equipment (let alone train new soldiers to use it) in the time it will take to decide the war one way or another. Be it ordnance, fuel, equipment or trained manpower, nobody is going to even get close to replacing any of it at the rate it's gonna be expended.

And funny thing: PGMs are actually more cost-effective than dumb munitions, simply because their vastly increased lethality means you need to expend far less weapons (and hence also send out less planes, meaning you need less fuel and less maintenance and risk less of your expensive, highly-trained pilots) to achieve the same result compared to dumb munitions. The entire idea of "cheap" low-tech ordnance is penny-wise and pound-foolish. A-10s aren't going to do poo poo in a modern peer conflict other than going down in flames. Air defense technology has changed over the last 50 years - where flying low was once the most survivable choice (and even then the entire A-10 fleet had a life expectancy of about 2 weeks if the balloon went up), it's become pure suicide in the face of modern-day SHORAD and the wide proliferation of second- and third-gen (and fourth gen now being entered into with Verba) MANPADS.

chairface
Oct 28, 2007

No matter what you believe, I don't believe in you.

Magni posted:

A couple of weeks at full intensity is also enough to see just about any military on the receiving end of that munitions expenditure bled white at a rate unlike anything ever seen. A conventional WW3 wouldn't last a couple years. The sheer speed and lethality of modern-day warfare means that a full-scale mechanised war between peer opponents today is going to chew through men and equipment just as fast as it does through ordnance. Like, WW2 generals wouldn't believe their eyes reading about the kind of loss rates everyone expected from a conventional NATO-PACT clash even back in the 80's, and things have only gotten faster and more lethal since. Nobody is going to be able to produce a meaningful amount of replacement equipment (let alone train new soldiers to use it) in the time it will take to decide the war one way or another. Be it ordnance, fuel, equipment or trained manpower, nobody is going to even get close to replacing any of it at the rate it's gonna be expended.

And funny thing: PGMs are actually more cost-effective than dumb munitions, simply because their vastly increased lethality means you need to expend far less weapons (and hence also send out less planes, meaning you need less fuel and less maintenance and risk less of your expensive, highly-trained pilots) to achieve the same result compared to dumb munitions. The entire idea of "cheap" low-tech ordnance is penny-wise and pound-foolish. A-10s aren't going to do poo poo in a modern peer conflict other than going down in flames. Air defense technology has changed over the last 50 years - where flying low was once the most survivable choice (and even then the entire A-10 fleet had a life expectancy of about 2 weeks if the balloon went up), it's become pure suicide in the face of modern-day SHORAD and the wide proliferation of second- and third-gen (and fourth gen now being entered into with Verba) MANPADS.

My favorite example of this, and one of the damnedest press conferences I've ever seen... Some US Admiral was doing a presser for (among other sources, Al-Jazeera) and was describing how the entire Libyan air defense grid was destroyed in 2 cruise missile volley launches (first achieved something laffo like 98% and the second handful were just mopping up.) Well, some journo asks if the cruise missiles were the new model tomahawks. Admiral guy straight up laughs and notes they were the old obsolete ones slated for retirement anyway; the capabilities of newer missiles wasn't required. I mean I get it's USA vs. Libya so it's gonna be pretty one sided but "Lol 1 good broadside and we didn't bother with the fancy ones" is pretty :catstare: for zulu alert'ing a whole NATION.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

Magni posted:

A couple of weeks at full intensity is also enough to see just about any military on the receiving end of that munitions expenditure bled white at a rate unlike anything ever seen. A conventional WW3 wouldn't last a couple years. The sheer speed and lethality of modern-day warfare means that a full-scale mechanised war between peer opponents today is going to chew through men and equipment just as fast as it does through ordnance. Like, WW2 generals wouldn't believe their eyes reading about the kind of loss rates everyone expected from a conventional NATO-PACT clash even back in the 80's, and things have only gotten faster and more lethal since. Nobody is going to be able to produce a meaningful amount of replacement equipment (let alone train new soldiers to use it) in the time it will take to decide the war one way or another. Be it ordnance, fuel, equipment or trained manpower, nobody is going to even get close to replacing any of it at the rate it's gonna be expended.

And funny thing: PGMs are actually more cost-effective than dumb munitions, simply because their vastly increased lethality means you need to expend far less weapons (and hence also send out less planes, meaning you need less fuel and less maintenance and risk less of your expensive, highly-trained pilots) to achieve the same result compared to dumb munitions. The entire idea of "cheap" low-tech ordnance is penny-wise and pound-foolish. A-10s aren't going to do poo poo in a modern peer conflict other than going down in flames. Air defense technology has changed over the last 50 years - where flying low was once the most survivable choice (and even then the entire A-10 fleet had a life expectancy of about 2 weeks if the balloon went up), it's become pure suicide in the face of modern-day SHORAD and the wide proliferation of second- and third-gen (and fourth gen now being entered into with Verba) MANPADS.

I'm not going to overestimate the capacity of the Russians, but China probably has the endurance to last through the initial blitz even if they don't have the ability to mitigate/block any of it. This is, of course, assuming they have the morale necessary to take a hit like that and judging by what's been seen in the past, they just might. Sure, they might lose millions, but they won't be down and out like Libya or Iraq.

Lum_ posted:

~ 300 million dead might argue that point, but sure.

In that scenario the US suffered ~250,000 deaths vs ~300 million enemy deaths and America has pretty much 95% of it's infrastructure, industrial, economic and military capacity left over. Yeah, that's a clean win considering how much worse it could have gone.

Dramicus fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Oct 9, 2018

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010
Western military planners have been declaring conventional warfare obsolete since 1945. Maybe they're right this time, but given the track record, I'm not holding my breath.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
Didn't people expect WW1 to be a localized conflict lasting no longer than a year? Everyone also thought that no nation or economy could support a war of such intensity for that long? But it ended up being the case, and it was almost tragic how many hits a nation could hit before surrendering?

I know this is some extremely Hist 101 thinking and yall are gonna dogpile me with some hard evidence, but I feel like both world wars had a lot of surprises that kept made them huge awful bloody conflicts.

Like if we're cursed with experiencing WW3 in our lifetimes, sure as hell want it to be over asap. But I feel like people's and nations can endure pretty awful things for a horrifying amount of time.

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe
I mean Vietnam won a war against the United States. Wars aren't just production vs production.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

buglord posted:

Didn't people expect WW1 to be a localized conflict lasting no longer than a year? Everyone also thought that no nation or economy could support a war of such intensity for that long? But it ended up being the case, and it was almost tragic how many hits a nation could hit before surrendering?

I know this is some extremely Hist 101 thinking and yall are gonna dogpile me with some hard evidence, but I feel like both world wars had a lot of surprises that kept made them huge awful bloody conflicts.

Like if we're cursed with experiencing WW3 in our lifetimes, sure as hell want it to be over asap. But I feel like people's and nations can endure pretty awful things for a horrifying amount of time.

I think a big part of WW1 was the sunk cost fallacy involved. The worse it got the less anyone wanted to give up because then all of that bloodshed was for nothing (twist ending: it still turned out to be for nothing anyway), and this is true of basically every conflict since that point. Once war became a thing between nations instead of just between armies, every conflict is all in until the end.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord
Yeah that makes some sense. The current US prez almost said the exact thing about Afghanistan or whoever the hell we're bombing now. Can't let the dead soldiers die in vain.

Speaking of war weariness, I wish HOI4 made low War Support more punishing. Having high support certainly makes some games easier, but I don't feel like it was a problem for me.

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts

Here's a bunch of conflicts going on right now, and the majority of them look nothing like "total war" between nations.

buglord posted:

Yeah that makes some sense. The current US prez almost said the exact thing about Afghanistan or whoever the hell we're bombing now. Can't let the dead soldiers die in vain.

Speaking of war weariness, I wish HOI4 made low War Support more punishing. Having high support certainly makes some games easier, but I don't feel like it was a problem for me.

When you get strikes and draft dodging and mutinies more than a few times it really drains your political power. But I don't like that system because it's way too random.

WhiskeyWhiskers
Oct 14, 2013


"هذا ليس عادلاً."
"هذا ليس عادلاً على الإطلاق."
"كان هناك وقت الآن."
(السياق الخفي: للقراءة)

SHISHKABOB posted:

I mean Vietnam won a war against the United States. Wars aren't just production vs production.

Vietnam with significant help from the Warsaw Pact and China. They weren't just a bunch of farmers with pitchforks and hoes.

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Vietnam with significant help from the Warsaw Pact and China. They weren't just a bunch of farmers with pitchforks and hoes.

What I meant was there's a lot of things that influenced the outcome of the Vietnam war that didn't have anything to do with making tanks, missiles and planes. Like the antiwar movement in the US. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia and Laos than we dropped in the entirety of WWII. It was an asymmetric conflict like most of the conflicts in the past few decades.



edit: I got the Gran Colombia achievement and it was interesting how the first part of the game was trying as fast as I could to clumsily conquer the necessary countries (Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru) before the USA did Pax Americana, and then I let the game run overnight to build the 10 carriers and battleships. When I woke up the next morning it was 1963 and I had like 60 of each.

SHISHKABOB fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Oct 9, 2018

Magni
Apr 29, 2009

Dramicus posted:

I'm not going to overestimate the capacity of the Russians, but China probably has the endurance to last through the initial blitz even if they don't have the ability to mitigate/block any of it. This is, of course, assuming they have the morale necessary to take a hit like that and judging by what's been seen in the past, they just might. Sure, they might lose millions, but they won't be down and out like Libya or Iraq.

If they lose millions, they're plain screwed because there won't be enough time to actually train and equip replacements before they get rolled over. Having a lot of people doesn't matter when the war is going to be decided in literally less time than what it takes to actually train, equip and form up a meaningful combat unit. And, of course, fuel. Fuel is the #1 bottleneck for everybody. Having 50,000 old tanks sitting in warehouses for your "everyone's modern equipment is gone due to attrition" scenario doesn't mean poo poo (even if you had 50,000 trained tank crews standing on the side to man them) when you can't fuel them, and everyone is going to be using up fuel far faster than they can produce it.

The whole endurance thing just plain doesn't work. In a peer conflict with current technology, there's only two plausible outcomes: Either one side will get the advantage and press it home and win in a matter of weeks. Or both bleed each other white to the point that the whole war peters out due to both sides being unable to keep on fighting. In both cases, the war will be fought and decided by the armies both sides have, not the ones they'd be trying to build as the war goes on.

buglord posted:

Didn't people expect WW1 to be a localized conflict lasting no longer than a year? Everyone also thought that no nation or economy could support a war of such intensity for that long? But it ended up being the case, and it was almost tragic how many hits a nation could hit before surrendering?

I know this is some extremely Hist 101 thinking and yall are gonna dogpile me with some hard evidence, but I feel like both world wars had a lot of surprises that kept made them huge awful bloody conflicts.

Like if we're cursed with experiencing WW3 in our lifetimes, sure as hell want it to be over asap. But I feel like people's and nations can endure pretty awful things for a horrifying amount of time.

The numbers just don't hold up to this. Modern AFVs (let's not even get into combat planes) aren't something you can kludge together on a converted car factory line like T-34s or Shermans. They're specialist products of a rather small, highly-specialised industry that just plain cannot be expanded quickly - neither the highly-specialised trained manpower nor the tooling are things that are avaiable on short notice. Just to put this into perspective, the Soviets in a mid-late-80's Fulda Gap scenario fully expected to lose more armored vehicles in the first week of fighting than their industry at full turnout would be able to produce in a year. Most estimates for that clusterfuck put casualties on both sides at well beyond a quarter of a million within the first two-three weeks.

And the real sticking point in all of it is fuel. The sheer logistics and stockpiles needed to keep a modern armored force operating at high tempo just aren't something anyone can keep up for more than a few weeks of full-scale fighting. You're going to run out of gas before running out of ammo or equipment or trained men under most circumstances, and at that point the whole thing becomes farcial, and having masses of old equipment becomes either meaningless or an outright detriment because the "cheap" old crap will give you a lot less actual combat power for the fuel it uses compared to state-of-the-art equipment.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Magni posted:

And, of course, fuel. Fuel is the #1 bottleneck for everybody. Having 50,000 old tanks sitting in warehouses for your "everyone's modern equipment is gone due to attrition" scenario doesn't mean poo poo (even if you had 50,000 trained tank crews standing on the side to man them) when you can't fuel them, and everyone is going to be using up fuel far faster than they can produce it.

Clearly what we need to do is train an elite mounted brigade for this scenario.

Prav
Oct 29, 2011

Magni posted:

Modern AFVs (let's not even get into combat planes) aren't something you can kludge together on a converted car factory line like T-34s or Shermans. They're specialist products of a rather small, highly-specialised industry that just plain cannot be expanded quickly - neither the highly-specialised trained manpower nor the tooling are things that are avaiable on short notice. Just to put this into perspective, the Soviets in a mid-late-80's Fulda Gap scenario fully expected to lose more armored vehicles in the first week of fighting than their industry at full turnout would be able to produce in a year. Most estimates for that clusterfuck put casualties on both sides at well beyond a quarter of a million within the first two-three weeks.

one thing that my tank nerd brain sometimes wonders is what a modern T-34/Sherman equivalent would be like. as you say, modern tanks are artisanal products expected to last for decades and be upgraded many times over. but what if the requirements were more "many, cheap, NOW" instead?

the answer, of course, is to just unwarehouse the old cold war stock. but still.

vvv the abrams is an old cold war tank :colbert:

Prav fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Oct 9, 2018

Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold
lol we have thousands of abrams sitting mothballed in the desert because congress keeps buying tanks the army doesn't need or want

Kemper Boyd
Aug 6, 2007

no kings, no gods, no masters but a comfy chair and no socks

MiddleOne posted:

Your Estonia scenario would go one of three ways:

A: The world ending.
B: Russia getting kicked in the face by the entirety of NATO.
C: It wouldn't happen because A and B are both non-staters and this isn't Tom Clancy fantasyland. If any major power thought MAD wasn't still very real we wouldn't have proxy wars, we would just have regular wars again.

This might have been true before 2017 but no longer applies.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

Magni posted:

If they lose millions, they're plain screwed because there won't be enough time to actually train and equip replacements before they get rolled over. Having a lot of people doesn't matter when the war is going to be decided in literally less time than what it takes to actually train, equip and form up a meaningful combat unit.

I'm sure that's what the Germans thought as they killed/captured 4.9 million Soviet soldiers in the opening months of the war.

Magni posted:

The numbers just don't hold up to this. Modern AFVs (let's not even get into combat planes) aren't something you can kludge together on a converted car factory line like T-34s or Shermans. They're specialist products of a rather small, highly-specialised industry that just plain cannot be expanded quickly - neither the highly-specialised trained manpower nor the tooling are things that are avaiable on short notice. Just to put this into perspective, the Soviets in a mid-late-80's Fulda Gap scenario fully expected to lose more armored vehicles in the first week of fighting than their industry at full turnout would be able to produce in a year. Most estimates for that clusterfuck put casualties on both sides at well beyond a quarter of a million within the first two-three weeks.

Also MBTs can still be killed by side shots from 50 year-old tanks. A US Armored Division recently lost a war game competition against Romanians using upgraded T-55s.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Dramicus posted:

Also MBTs can still be killed by side shots from 50 year-old tanks. A US Armored Division recently lost a war game competition against Romanians using upgraded T-55s.

This is a big thing about warfare - the stuff that killed people 50 or 100 years ago still kills them pretty dead today. It turns out it's just a harder problem to make armor that protects against a big exploding thing than it is to just make a bigger exploding thing. Offensive technology is always well ahead of defensive technology and past a certain point, defensive technology really can't ever catch up.

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

The Cheshire Cat posted:

This is a big thing about warfare - the stuff that killed people 50 or 100 years ago still kills them pretty dead today. It turns out it's just a harder problem to make armor that protects against a big exploding thing than it is to just make a bigger exploding thing. Offensive technology is always well ahead of defensive technology and past a certain point, defensive technology really can't ever catch up.

Actually it's simpler than that, the sides of pretty much every tank is relatively thinly armored and most only have composite protection on the front. A Tiger 2 could probably penetrate an Abrams from the side. I remember reading news articles about the incident and for the life of me I can't find anything that references how Romanian TR-85s "destroyed" 8 out of 11 M1A2 Abrams during a 2014 exercise in Hohenfels, Bavaria. It's like all mention of it has been wiped from the net. The only think I can find that references it is a Vietnamese news site. It's really weird.

http://soha.vn/quan-su/hau-due-cua-t-55-noc-ao-xe-tang-hien-dai-nhat-my-20140529152147646.htm

Tahirovic
Feb 25, 2009
Fun Shoe
You wont be hit into the side if you're dug in at the Fulda gap, duh!

Dramicus
Mar 26, 2010
Grimey Drawer

Tahirovic posted:

You wont be hit into the side if you're dug in at the Fulda gap, duh!

Statistically speaking, you are likely to be hit by a friendly Abrams who mistakes you for a Russian tank.

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Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

i really hope they fix the performance issues a bit next patch. 4/5 times i load my late game china game it crashes and the other 1/5th it takes forever to get going and is incredibly slow after that

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