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Gnoman posted:Ample access to resources certainly helped keeping the factories fed, and it meant that US designers didn't have to accept inferior substitutes for more scarce materials  Why use inferior copper when you can wire your calutrons with silver?
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Jan 20, 2019 22:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I know chat about battlefield v’s tiger campaign was months ago, but me and my partner just got it and no one mentioned the way better Tirailleur campaign. I believe the developers are from Sweden. Also I don’t think the colonial troops were erased from history by the French, I think they were at least respected for their sacrifice. It was the Americans, not the French, who demanded black/african soldiers not march in the Paris liberation parade. Edit: not to say everything was peachy between the French and their colonies FastestGunAlive fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 20, 2019 |
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Jan 20, 2019 22:59
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about this brave multinational coalition fighting hand in hand to save a country they’ve never seen from nazis. The first cutscene has your character disarmed as soon as his unit hits metropolitan soil and sent to fatigue duties.
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HEY GUNS posted:i am by no means saying they were bad, i'm saying there were like twelve of them This conversation feels familiar 
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Jan 20, 2019 23:53
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Platystemon posted:
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Jan 20, 2019 23:54
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Platystemon posted:
The calutrons were designed to use copper but silver had to be substituted, as copper was needed for the war effort while the treasury had a large silver stockpile.
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Jan 21, 2019 01:10
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I know. The example simultaneously demonstrates that America didn’t actually have unlimited copper, but that with the way they were able to requisition fourteen thousand seven‐hundred tons of silver, they sure had more resources than Germany.
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Jan 21, 2019 01:53
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Squalid posted:We can make comparisons to other countries which also had abundant resources like Australia or Canada, and ask why they couldn't produce the same level of output? Comparing either to the United States in the period is a sucker's game IMO. I mean, isn't it true that at the end of WW2, America was 50% of global GDP output? No shortages, a free public education system that worked, acknowledged as the world's best nation in mass production, an industrial base that covers everything from primary inputs to leading edge aerospace manufacturing. And America had shitloads of oil. I won't speak for Australia or New Zealand, but I imagine they were much closer to Canada economically than the US. There was manufacturing in many parts of the country, but it was an economic shrimp between two economic whales, the USA and Britain. Most of the nation's economy was producing primary economic inputs: agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing. So the capital base could only be expanded so much, especially as suddenly the economy would have to source many more things internally. From reading that oral history I keep posting, I know English Canada had the highest percentage of people serving in the military of any of the western combatants, so that was probably one of the major resources coming from Canada, right there. I think the Official British milhist of the Second World War credits mass production of trucks as Canada's single greatest contribution, though I suspect that "~25% of the RAF being Canadian by war's end" might be a big thing as well.         
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Jan 21, 2019 02:34
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Comrade Gorbash posted:This conversation feels familiar they'd've put that poo poo on etsy if they could
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Jan 21, 2019 02:37
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I doubt the US had any more silver than the Nazis had access to. Los Alamos was raiding the national treasury, and the Germans minted a number of silver coins, plus they had stuff plundered from all over Europe.
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Jan 21, 2019 02:39
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Platystemon posted:I know. The best part was that since the War Department promised Treasury that all the silver would be returned, the tight process controls implemented in the casting plants recovered so much additional silver that they returned 1.5 million more pounds than they actually borrowed. There was basically just 1.5 million pounds of silver laying around as scrap and debris in the facilities.
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Jan 21, 2019 04:15
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Nebakenezzer posted:Comparing either to the United States in the period is a sucker's game IMO. I mean, isn't it true that at the end of WW2, America was 50% of global GDP output? No shortages, a free public education system that worked, acknowledged as the world's best nation in mass production, an industrial base that covers everything from primary inputs to leading edge aerospace manufacturing. And America had shitloads of oil. yeah that was the point I was trying to make. Even though Canada and Australia also had a wealth of natural resources, it would be absurd to expect they could come anywhere close to matching American industrial might because they had like less than 10 million people each compared to 130 million in the USA. Simply accounting for population might be enough to explain the relative dominance of American industrial output compared to places like Canada, but if you look more broadly at the other ex-colonial states of the Americas, American industrial share is even more disproportionate. You can't just explain the differences in 1940 industrial output between the USA and Brazil based on natural resources and population. You have to start introducing other variables. "Industrial expertise," sometimes referred to as human capital, is another extremely important variable in explaining differences in economies. All those tank and airplane factories that sprouted up in mid-western corn fields didn't spring forth from the ether. They had to be built by engineers, carpenters, plumbers, and architects. You can't just brute force these problems by throwing extra iron ore at them. There's also many other variables that explain differences in economies, but we should underestimate knowledge and expertise. One interesting theory I've heard on why many innovations in mass production and the assembly line occurred in the United States is that they were actually driven by perennial labor scarcity. American factories from the 19th century forward struggled to retain adequate work-forces in the face of high labor mobility and workers who often preferred to try their luck heading west to look for land. The result was constant pressure to develop less labor intensive processes and increase productivity. I'm not sure, but this also might explain some of the more wtf practices of early American factories. For example the Homestead Steel Works in 1892 required workers to take one 24 hour shift a week. I don't know how someone could be useful after 16 hours of work in a steel mill but that kind of practice was commonplace.
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Jan 21, 2019 05:53
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so silly hats are great but have u remembered breeches
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Jan 21, 2019 06:14
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I think abundant access to natural resources was more valuable to America than industrial expertise honestly - never having t9 worry about steel production or access to rubber really helped America be able to focus on maximising output as opposed to making current production more efficient. Counterpoint: Raw materials are, by themselves, worthless. The trick is finding a way to turn them into finished goods in the fastest way possible the cheapest way possible at an acceptable level of quality, and the United States—and Detroit-based firms in particular—were drat good at it. Just look at this guy:  That's Albert Kahn, and he built Detroit. Henry Ford may have invented the Model T, but it was Albert Kahn who designed the Highland Park plant where they were built in record numbers—and then later, the crown jewel of American manufacturing, the River Rouge factory complex, an industrial titan so vast that raw iron ore mined from the Upper Peninsula would enter from one end and finished cars would come out the other, where over a hundred thousand workers toiled even at the height of the Great Depression. It was because of the experience of Kahn and other American industrial designers that the United States was able to utilize its vast natural resources so effectively, and why it could build the Willow Run Bomber Plant (8,865 B-24s produced from groundbreaking in an empty field in 1941 to May 1945) and the Chrysler Defense Arsenal (17,947 Shermans—more than every Panzer III and Panzer IV ever produced combined). CDA was so efficient that it actually wrote checks back to the government when tanks came in under cost. Even the Soviet Union benefited from American industrial engineers—the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, which was producing T-34s during the Battle of Stalingrad up to the point the Germans breached the walls, was designed by Albert Kahn and Associates. The way to think about production during World War II is this: The Germans had a decent hand, played it poorly, and produced far fewer tanks, planes, and guns than a country with their economy and resources should have. Their design and procurement processes were hideously inefficient, and a massive amount of resources and labor were simply wasted on projects that went nowhere or on factory floors not designed for true mass production. The Soviets, by contrast, had a similarly decent hand but played it well—they thought ahead in importing American industrial design expertise to create their biggest factories, and when the war came they were very smart about how they prioritized which equipment to produce and how to allocate their resources. And as for the United States? It started with a great hand, but also played it drat near perfectly.
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Jan 21, 2019 06:55
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HEY GUNS posted:so silly hats are great but have u remembered These breeches are too silly! 
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Jan 21, 2019 06:55
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Even the Soviet Union benefited from American industrial engineers—the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, which was producing T-34s during the Battle of Stalingrad up to the point the Germans breached the walls, was designed by Albert Kahn and Associates. This is a pretty important and little-known point. Kahn's company really helped jumpstart the industrialization of the Soviet Union. His firm designed some 500 factories in the USSR and trained thousands of engineers. Without which, the USSR would have been in a much worse position come WW2.
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Jan 21, 2019 08:42
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Jan 21, 2019 09:07
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Post AAV crew insanity stories, tia
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Jan 21, 2019 09:50
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I believe the Nizhny Tagil factory complex was a licensed copy of River Rouge. So there is Albert Khan again. That man was one of the most important persons for WW2 having the outcome it had.
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Jan 21, 2019 11:10
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Having just scratched Wages of Destruction (thanks for the hot tip about it being on sale), it's so interesting how both Gustav Stresemann and Hitler both saw America as the Next Big Thing To Watch Out For, but while Stresemann wanted a sort of economic union with the rest of continental Europe so that Germany would have access to a consumptive market as large as America's, Hitler instead wanted to depopulate Europe so that Germany could have access to "wide open plains" as the Americans did when they expanded westwards. And whereas Stresemann felt that Germany could thread the diplomatic needle of establishing this kind of economic competitiveness with America, Hitler knew that the only solution was war ... because America was controlled by some nefarious Jewish cabal.
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Jan 21, 2019 12:56
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I think abundant access to natural resources was more valuable to America than industrial expertise honestly - never having t9 worry about steel production or access to rubber really helped America be able to focus on maximising output as opposed to making current production more efficient. Not being bombed or blockaded on the reg helped too, of course.
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Jan 21, 2019 12:56
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HEY GUNS posted:so silly hats are great but have u remembered  Random Image I scanned on friday, entitled Do Not Want  Acebuckeye13 posted:The way to think about production during World War II is this: The Germans had a decent hand, played it poorly, and produced far fewer tanks, planes, and guns than a country with their economy and resources should have. Their design and procurement processes were hideously inefficient, and a massive amount of resources and labor were simply wasted on projects that went nowhere or on factory floors not designed for true mass production. The Soviets, by contrast, had a similarly decent hand but played it well—they thought ahead in importing American industrial design expertise to create their biggest factories, and when the war came they were very smart about how they prioritized which equipment to produce and how to allocate their resources. And as for the United States? It started with a great hand, but also played it drat near perfectly. A good explanation, I may steal it in the future
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Jan 21, 2019 14:40
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Would anyone like to talk about British production, since I suspect it has the most complicated story of all the major combatants but I don't actually know anything about the topic?
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Jan 21, 2019 15:46
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HEY GUNS posted:yeah i just like making fun of italian tank ateliers Saint Celestine posted:This is a pretty important and little-known point. Kahn's company really helped jumpstart the industrialization of the Soviet Union. His firm designed some 500 factories in the USSR and trained thousands of engineers. Without which, the USSR would have been in a much worse position come WW2. Everyone except the Soviet Union and USA had tiny little tank ateliers, Brits included. 
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Jan 21, 2019 15:55
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FrangibleCover posted:Would anyone like to talk about British production, since I suspect it has the most complicated story of all the major combatants but I don't actually know anything about the topic? Yes please
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Jan 21, 2019 15:59
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkYpIzBqG6w My read is that British production processes were pretty bad but the real bottleneck was elsewhere.
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Jan 21, 2019 16:12
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Unrelatedly, paging Hegel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncM7mQQ3_WY Any thoughts on their technique? EDIT: though they seem to be more using mancatchers than pikes
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Jan 21, 2019 16:28
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Fangz posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkYpIzBqG6w They were solidly middle of the road, they outproduced Germany in tanks in 40 to 42 which was every year they were really focusing on cranking them out, they fell equivalent in 43 and behind in 44 when they made the conscious decision to shift production to railway locomotives and other heavy industrial equipment, partly for shipping to the ussr and partly for domestic use, because it was more space efficient to ship tanks from the US who were outputting them in absolute swarms at this stage than have them produce locomotives and ship those. Britain was able to really lean on US industrial power and plan their economy according to what they would get from them. A big problem (among many others) Britain had compared to the US and Russia was it was late on the welding train, welding being more efficient than riveting because (among other reasons) that the plate tolerances are wider meaning thee plates can be produced quicker along with the process itself being less problematic than riveting. As to why they remained more efficient than the Germans I think it comes down to the fact that they were focused on having Tanks Now, they did far less major remodels, kept the two pounder gun in production because they could manufacture it six times faster than the six pounder gun despite the inferiority of that gun in several areas. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jan 21, 2019 |
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Jan 21, 2019 16:55
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Fangz posted:Unrelatedly, paging Hegel I found a Japanese demonstration video, note that their mancatcher has an extra hook for tripping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPERpogSoP0&t=10s Edit: this one is better it has dos and don'ts of fighting knife-wielders with polearms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jufoCR5VtUQ GotLag fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Jan 21, 2019 |
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Jan 21, 2019 17:12
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Hogge Wild posted:Everyone except the Soviet Union and USA had tiny little tank ateliers, Brits included. Is that an actual real picture? or just something that was doctored?
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Jan 21, 2019 17:19
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Milo and POTUS posted:Is that an actual real picture? or just something that was doctored? I mean, I highly doubt it came out of an actual mediaeval brevary.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:30
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Milo and POTUS posted:Is that an actual real picture? or just something that was doctored? It's a colourized photo from MAN's tank factory in 1939.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:39
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Polyakov posted:They were solidly middle of the road, they outproduced Germany in tanks in 40 to 42 which was every year they were really focusing on cranking them out, they fell equivalent in 43 and behind in 44 when they made the conscious decision to shift production to railway locomotives and other heavy industrial equipment, partly for shipping to the ussr and partly for domestic use, because it was more space efficient to ship tanks from the US who were outputting them in absolute swarms at this stage than have them produce locomotives and ship those. Britain was able to really lean on US industrial power and plan their economy according to what they would get from them. Pretty much. British industry was nowhere near the level of America (or, via America, the USSR) in terms of implementing efficient processes, design-for-production, factory design and so on. This goes back decades pre-1939. Compared to anywhere else in the industrialised world British manufacturing was massively under-capitalised and had been since the 1870s for strange socio-economic reasons that aren't really relevant here. Most of the industrialists, planners and politicians knew that they were falling behind, especially in the inter-war period and knew that the solution was to copy the Americans but they lacked the resources (financial, geographical, professional and labour) and the drive to do it. Britain did have some good insights - for instance the major railway company works (such as the Midland works at Derby and the Great Western works at Swindon) acheived a very, very high degree of production efficiency and parts commonality by the start of the 20th century, and had things like mechanised and standardised production of railway wagons long before Henry Ford. F.G. Woollard switched the Morris Engine works from batch to flow production in 1923 and in doing so invented both lean-management and just-in-time manufacturing. The problem in both those cases was that these industries were, on a global scale, tiny and they were efficient parts of generally inefficient businesses - the railway works perfected the art of making steam locomotives en masse just as the technology became obsolete and there was too much inertia, not enough experience and not enough vision to switch to developing and building diesel locomotives which led to the British locomotive industry getting stomped by General Motors and Alco post-war. The Morris Engine plant may have been one of the most efficient factories in the world but Morris Motors as a whole was, compared to what was going on in Detroit (or with Citroen in France or Fiat in Italy) ridiculously inefficient, with 15 tiny factories scattered around the Midlands making what was, on a global scale, a puny amount of cars with (by any other national standards) scarily low capital-per-worker (or per-unit-output) levels. This was well-known and had been since the time that the US and German manufacturing sectors began challenging and then out-pacing Britain as the 'workshop of the world' in the 1890s. The Shadow Factory scheme was a largely successful attempt to achieve several things at once - increase aircraft/engine manufacturing capacity, safeguard capacity against the expected destruction of the urban centres (most of Britain's factories were in Victorian-era city centres that would be, and were, heavily damaged by bombing) and providing a 'clean sheet' to build brand new high-capacity modern factories on American lines which could be gifted to their 'shadow' owners once the war was done. British industry never stood a chance of matching the US/USSR capacity in sheer numbers. There was no way that anywhere in Britain would be able to turn out, say, an Avro Lancaster, at the rate of one per hour like Willow Run did. There was hardly anywhere practical to build a factory of that size and the entire system of British industrial infrastructure simply couldn't support it. British designers quickly got good at designing-for-production, especially with an eye for minimal resources use - we had 'Austerity' utility cars, 'Austerity' locomotives, 'Austerity' truck and buses. We had the Flower-class corvettes and the HDML. We had the DH Mosquito. The Liberty Ship was a British design. But there was no way you could get the British shipbuilding industry of 1940 to build the Liberty on the scale that the Americans did - the yards were too small, the materials and infrastructure weren't there and neither were the skills. In fact the US virtually magicked a shipbuilding industry into existence from nothing just to build Libertys. With relatively limited (and vulnerable) domestic industrial capacity the British couldn't do what the USA did and make virtually **everything** in big quantities. So Britain focussed on whatever it needed the most of at any one time, secure in the knowledge that it could lend-lease everything else so long as the line of American credit kept flowing. In the early years of the war we needed aircraft and we needed escort ships, so there was a huge drive to build Spitfires at Castle Bromwich and Avro Lancasters at the Austin Motor works in Birmingham - the decision had been made that it was a better use of capacity for the Austin works to build planes and ship production of Austin army trucks to Canada. Meanwhile all the small shipyards that usually built fishing boats, whalers, ferries and tugboats in peacetime were turned over to building Flower-class corvettes or Isles-class trawlers while all the yacht-builders were set up cranking out HDMLs. Then the immediate threat from the air and the shortage of escorts eased and we now had vaguely modern tanks to build so the national focus switched to getting tank production running along. Not that aircraft production slackened, just that the massive focus on new factories, new techniques, new management etc. was eased and the brainpower and money was put into building tanks. Then in the run-up to D-Day it was decided that we would need to be able to move an army across Europe so the focus switched back to trucks and locomotives - 1538 standardised War Department locomotives. Except that the USA managed, without breaking an industrial sweat, build 1300 USATC locos in just one year to deploy to Britain, on top of meeting the US's own needs and the lend-lease to Russia etc.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:41
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Saint Celestine posted:This is a pretty important and little-known point. Kahn's company really helped jumpstart the industrialization of the Soviet Union. His firm designed some 500 factories in the USSR and trained thousands of engineers. Without which, the USSR would have been in a much worse position come WW2. The industrialization program required foreign currency to pay for it, and one of the major sources of foreign currency for the Soviet Union was the exportation of food, which was a big contributor to the Holodomor.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:46
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Tias posted:Post AAV crew insanity stories, tia It's hard to come up with specifics because over time it just becomes a constant ongoing thing that leaves you numb. It just goes on for years, and it isn't until you're looking back that it seems odd. "Hey, did you hear about how 4th platoon all got drunk on Kin Blue Beach and tried to kill those pogues from Camp Hansen with axes?" "Man, remember when they were splashing hogs into the ocean on Del Mar Beach and crushed that hum-vee? Who would think Gunny could have bailed out so fast." "Whatever happened to that maintenance guy who got wrapped around the lateral drive shaft? Didn't they cut his pay for the cost of a new set of coveralls?" "How about that time that one driver got hit with a tank barrel over in Korea? Did they ever get the blood cleaned out of the hog's TC seat?" "Who was that guy who lost half his hand when the hatch slammed on it in the surf zone?" "No, that was the guy who got half his hand blown off by the 40mm misfire, I'm talking about the hatch guy." "Did they ever find a comm-helmet that could fit that one crewman with the big head? Yeah, the one who used to bury food out behind the barracks." "Remember when that one guy tied his towel around his neck and tried to Superman his way into the Women's barracks? Man, they beat the crap out of him when he smashed through that window." "Wasn't that the same guy who lost his ID so he faked getting robbed and smashed himself in the head with a board on the railroad tracks going through the camp and almost got run over by a train? Yeah, same guy." That was all from one single UDP tour. Now imagine it going on and on and on, endlessly, for years. It just fades into a haze at some point.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:56
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How did Germany end up with an economy that was apparently pretty large and internationally competitive (?) but also apparently bad at building a lot of stuff?
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Jan 21, 2019 18:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The industrialization program required foreign currency to pay for it, and one of the major sources of foreign currency for the Soviet Union was the exportation of food, which was a big contributor to the Holodomor. True, though considering how many other atrocities Stalin committed I can't decide if that was a happy coincidence or not BalloonFish posted:Pretty much. British industry was nowhere near the level of America (or, via America, the USSR) in terms of implementing efficient processes, design-for-production, factory design and so on. This goes back decades pre-1939. Compared to anywhere else in the industrialised world British manufacturing was massively under-capitalised and had been since the 1870s for strange socio-economic reasons that aren't really relevant here. Most of the industrialists, planners and politicians knew that they were falling behind, especially in the inter-war period and knew that the solution was to copy the Americans but they lacked the resources (financial, geographical, professional and labour) and the drive to do it. A good post, thanks. I've seen some of this going on with airplanes so I will gingerly enquire about those strange socio-economic reasons, though I suspect it is complected. With Airplanes in the 1930s Britain had a policy of only buying British, but to stave off something like America has today (three manufacturers to buy warplanes from) they threw out lots of little contracts to keep a large mass of makers going. It was good I suppose that you could get lots of bidders with different takes (lookin' at you Blackburn) basically none of these firms were large enough for mass production of types. Coastal Command suffered very badly thanks to this, with pretty much all aircraft being stuff nobody else wanted, or secondhand from other services. When in the late '30s the British started to get serious, they had to place an order with Lockheed for Hudson patrol bombers, both because it was a better design and more importantly, one that could get the numbers quickly. quote:F.G. Woollard switched the Morris Engine works from batch to flow production in 1923 and in doing so invented both lean-management and just-in-time manufacturing. Say w-hat Is this like the time the British developed aerial refueling and didn't use it in WW2, or the time they developed computers during WW2 and then just threw it all away at the end because it was all "state secret" stuff
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Jan 21, 2019 18:17
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Cessna posted:That was all from one single UDP tour. 
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Jan 21, 2019 18:23
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feedmegin posted:I mean, I highly doubt it came out of an actual mediaeval brevary. No, factory workers just dress like that.
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Jan 21, 2019 18:24
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aphid_licker posted:How did Germany end up with an economy that was apparently pretty large and internationally competitive (?) but also apparently bad at building a lot of stuff? I know a few things that likely contributed to it, such as the constant infighting and competition (which was gladly stoked in a dumbass Darwinian attempt to somehow get better people by encouraging them to defeat each other and gain status and money). Things like tanks were also built individually by teams rather than an assembly line, which is much slower and requires more manpower.
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Jan 21, 2019 18:27
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German manufacturing wasn't really especially terrible by the standards of the time, US and Soviet tank production was just that good.
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Jan 21, 2019 18:30
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