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fuf posted:Why is everyone posting ship names? I didn't read the first thread. They're claiming "lucky ships" - those are the ones they think will do good in this war. EDIT: On that subject, has anybody claimed the Fubuki? Gnoman fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 20:18
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What are some of the gamey strategies that you can do if you are really good at the game? Isn't it better as a JP player to not do Pearl Harbor and instead race the KB to the Philippines or something? The game starts with the PH attack, and it would be very stupid not to open with one even if you could.
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Dec 12, 2015 02:44
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Rexim posted:'Ground losses.' Did that Sub shell the port itself? If so that's cool. No. The freighter being torpedoed is a troop transport, and the torpedoes and shells fired by the sub killed and wounded some of the passengers.
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Dec 20, 2015 04:02
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My grandfather never talked about the war - it wasn't until we found his discharge papers and some other miscellaneous paperwork that we realized that he fought in every major battle of the war from Guadacanal to Iwo Jima except for a few where he was recovering from being shot, and was scheduled for the first wave of DOWNFALL.
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Jan 12, 2016 07:06
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It's so impressive that you have so much confidence in the ability of the German fleet to support an operation that Grand Admiral Raeder believed (and told Hitler) to be fundamentally impossible, and probably existed only as a smokescreen for BARBAROSSA. HERCULES was probably quite doable, but SEALION would have accomplished little more than the destruction of most of the German military.
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Jan 15, 2016 17:59
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Mans posted:Fair enough, air combat in the pacific to me is basically "Zero was god until the Americans started using bait tactics + put comically large guns super thick planes" The Zero was, at best, on par with early-war US fighters such as the F4F Wildcat (the Brewster Buffalo being the exception, as it was a pretty bad plane) - it had a serious edge in range, and a bit of a maneuvering advantage over most US types, but at the terrible cost of anemic firepower and extreme fragility. The Zero was armed with a pair of 7.7mm machine guns (close copies of the British .303) that often proved literally incapable of downing early-war Allied fighters (although they were more than adequate against the obsolete Russian biplane fighters China was using) and a pair of excellent 20mm cannon that unfortunately carried so little ammuntion that killing more than one or two aircraft was a tall order. Meanwhile, since Japan had difficulty building a decent aircraft engine, they had to compensate for very low horsepower by stripping any sort of protection (self-sealing fuel tanks, armored plates to protect the pilot, puncture-proof tires, reinforced airframes, etc.) to meet the required performance. The Zero's main early war USN opponent was the F4F Wildcat. The F4F was about 20 km/h slower than the Zero in level flight, and much less maneuverable at low speeds. However, it was quite a bit faster in a dive, was nearly as maneuverable at higher speeds (the Zero was lightly-enough built that the G-forces could easily snap the wings off if flown to the plane's full envelope near the top-end of the speed range), could take an enormous amount of punishment, and was armed with six .50 Browning Machine Guns and plenty of ammunition. While the zero required dozens of hits from their cannon to kill a Wildcat, a single bursts from the six guns of a Wildcat could shred a Zero and take it out of action. This largely negated the maneuver advantage, as a USN pilot only needed a good snapshot to win, while the IJN pilot would have to secure a sustained advantage to get a kill. That's why the Thatch Weave was so successful, as any attempt to gain advantage over one part of the mutually supporting pair opened the Zero up to a snapshot from the other. Why, then, did the Zero cause such panic and gain such a fearsome reputation? It is quite simple - the Japanese pilots had more hours in combat than most American pilots had in the air period, and the IJN was almost absurdly picky about getting only the best possible applicants for flight school.
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Jan 16, 2016 14:31
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Night10194 posted:Don't forget the early Zeroes didn't have radios, while the US planes did. I'm not sure if they added them to the Zero eventually, but I remember listening to a Japanese ace giving an interview about how on really long flights after heavy fighting, they'd lose pilots to falling asleep in the cockpit and there was no way to radio them to wake them up. Whatever pilot you're remembering must have been flying a different aircraft - a complete radio set was part of the design requirements for the Zero from the beginning.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:05
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Unless there's a translation error in the subtitles, the man specifically says "Our planes didn't have radios at the time". It could be that, since he also states that these missions were at the very limit of the Zero's impressive range, the radios were removed to save weight (and thus improve flight time). Other interviews I've read from the very beginning of the Guadalcanal campaign (one of which includes the pilot's first encounter with an F4F, including his surprise that it kept firing after he poured "several hundred" rounds from his machine guns into it, and he had to finish it off with cannon) clearly radioed orders being sent from plane to plane.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:48
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So far as I am aware, the only combatants of WWII that developed guided weapons were the US and Germany. The US abandoned their guided torpedo projects (guided air-to-ground and bombs were successfully developed at the same time or slightly earlier than the German ones but saw little combat use due to a lack of worthwhile targets late-war) because it wasn't likely to produce a usable weapon during the current war, while the Germans made a workable but dangerous (it was very easy to have the weapon lock on to the launch craft) weapon out of it. As far as I know, the British didn't deploy homing torpedoes until after WWII, and Japan didn't develop their own until the 1980s (with the JSDF using American ones until then).
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Jan 19, 2016 12:25
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fredleander posted:These weapons weren't really "guided" - but rather self-seeking - "homing". The best known German ones are the "Falke" and "Zaunkönig" - Falcon and Elf's King. Google them..... The T-V Zaunkönig was lucky to get the results it did. It was slower than a destroyer and thus of limited use against them, while against heavily escorted merchantmen it was dangerous to use because failure to dive to 60 meters and stop moving after launch meant that there was a very good chance the torp would home in on you instead of your prey (U-972 and U-377 were lost in this manner, and there are plenty of boats that simply never came back that could have met the same fate) which not only prevents you from making additional attacks but makes you very vulnerable if the escort picked up your launch transitent or hears the incoming torpedos, each of which is an arrow pointing straight at you since you couldn't move after launch. Compounding the problem, the seekers were quite likely to position and detonate the torpedo behind the target due to the way sound propagates and the lack of decent filters on the hydrophones, and was also very vulnerable to towed decoys. It would work great against lone ships, but those were rare, and already easy meat.
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Jan 19, 2016 19:56
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...The Falke came into service in 1943, the Zaunkönig the year after. I think the Germans could have made much better use of these than they did. They were originally meant as a counter-measure against enemy escort vessels. As with many other German weapons project this was also dormant till they finally understood they needed it - too late.
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ZombieLenin posted:If I am not mistake. The Germans used the Fritz X to sink the Roma right after the Italian Armistice. Correct. The US "Bat" and "Azon" weapons were in late testing at the same time, but hadn't yet been certified for operational use. In general, Wikipedia has a lot of flaws when it comes to cutting-edge weaponry - in at least some pages it claims that the US guided weapons projects were reactions to the German weapons, but these projects predate US involvement in the war by at least a year, and the main reason they didn't get into service first is that (much like Britain's jet fighters) research was not prioritized. Similarly, both the Bazooka and Panzerschreck pages (correctly) state that the German weapon was an enlarged clone of the American one, but the High Explosive Anti-Tank Warhead article strongly suggests that the Germans had the idea first.
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Jan 21, 2016 17:23
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Fat Samurai posted:So, why are non-troop transports important? I assume sinking them either slows production or leaves ships without gas somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, but I could be completely wrong. How well do you think you could fight if your uniforms have rotted away, you're completely out of ammo, your radios have rusted away, your tanks are out of gas, and all your soldiers starved to death three weeks ago?
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Jan 24, 2016 17:42
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Yorkshire Tea posted:I know basically nothing about the Pacific theatre because the British education system is absolute dogshit if you're interested in World War history. One of the biggest reasons was the Philippines. Japan was building a potent colonial empire in Southeast Asia, and was primed to take a lot of oil rich territory from Britain (which, already stretched close to the limit fighting Hitler, would be limited in the amount of resistance they could mount), but US forces based in the Philippines would already be inside the defensive perimeter. The Japanese leadership expected that, once the Empire had conquered everything they wanted in the area, the Americans would probably abandon any plance of granting Filipino independence (which Japan probably didn't believe in anyway), and start fortifying the islands heavily in preparation for war and would be able to start hacking away at Japan's new colonies at will. The only chance to neutralize that threat was to take the islands and give themselves a formidable defensive position. To do THAT, they had to knock the United States Navy so far back that, by the time the US was in position to take the Philippines back, the defenses would be so strong that the weak-willed Westerners would be too afraid to attack.
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Jan 26, 2016 16:09
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goatface posted:25 knots is a hella slow fleet carrier. Not surprising - she began life as a passenger liner, for which 25 knots is quite fast - the Queen Mary, renowned for her speed, only made 28, and the post-war United States, built expressly to set a speed record in the 50s, and still one of the fastest liners ever built, hit 32.
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Feb 18, 2016 20:30
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You lost a transport. To a 75mm mountain gun. That can't happen very often.
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Feb 22, 2016 18:41
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Pretty sure it's this one http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3696410
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Feb 25, 2016 23:56
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YodaTFK posted:It's honestly not any sillier than Hitler's plan to invade the UK without naval supremacy or even any real troop transport/supply transport capacity while invading the USSR. The evidence suggests that SEALION was never intended to go forward, and was principally a smokescreen for BARBAROSSA. According to most of the histories I've read, BARBAROSSA was intended as much to take out the UK as it was to eliminate the USSR - Hitler believed that the only thing keeping the British in the fight was the hope of rescue from the Soviets or the Americans. He dealt with the latter by issuing strict orders not to provoke hostilities even in the face of blatant acts of war (IIRC, at least one sub captain was severely disciplined for shooting at a US destroyer that was not only escorting British merchantmen but opened fire upon detection) and the former was to be crushed by swift surprise attack. Thanks to Mussolini's imbecilic Greek adventure (which delayed the assault by a critical month) and seriously bad micromanaging of the invasion by Hitler, BARBAROSSA failed to take Moscow, which very well might have caused the various "Soviet Socialist Republics" to pull a Finland and try to break free, collapsing the country into civil war. Of course, the fact that the Soviets had vastly superior weapons (once they managed to get the KV and T-34 forces supplied with ammo and spare parts) was a serious handicap.
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Apr 3, 2016 13:25
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A White Guy posted:In a day and age when you can fire an anti-ship missile from any loving thing, and have it utterly annihilate pretty much any size vessel, they don't really any more. The US Navy has been phasing out their cruisers as they get older, and is replacing them with newer ships like the Litoral patrol boats that are supposed to be almost invisible to radar. In the modern US Navy, "cruisers" are anti-air platforms while "destroyers" are anti-submarine and anti-surface platforms, with both categories being similar in size. The Navy has not been "phasing out" the cruiser, the next-gen cruiser design simply fell prey to budget cuts. The littoral combat ships aren't a "replacement" for anything - they're covering a capability cap that the USN hasn't covered in decades and will full the role of a PM or PT boat.
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Apr 4, 2016 01:26
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LostCosmonaut posted:The IJA did dabble in (much) heavier tanks; http://sturgeonshouse.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/981-japans-box-tank-o-i/ 166 Type 3 Chi-Nu tanks were built. The Chi-Nu's gun had a penetration of 90mm at point-blank range, but at combat ranges this dropped significantly, so beyond 500 meters or so a M4's 65-75mm of hull armor or 76mm of turret armor would be very hard to penetrate, particularly since that armor was sloped. In the other direction, the thickest armor on the Chi-Nu was 50mm, which the 75mm/L40 could penetrate from as far as 3,000 meters. The Chi-Nu wouldn't have stood a chance. The Chi-To (had it reached production), with a gun that could penetrate the M4 at close to a kilometer, and with armor that could keep the 75mm/L40 out at that range, would have done well - except that the more heavily armed and armored 76mm or 105mm (howitzer) armed Shermans were standard by the time it could have been ready.
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Apr 15, 2016 00:11
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Decoy Badger posted:Must be running low on airframes if you have to drag the biplanes out of storage for attack duties. 8 Jeans were still in service at Midway. Seeing one at this stage isn't all that odd.
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Apr 22, 2016 18:29
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professor_curly posted:Granted, we don't hear about it much, but the B-17 was designed for this exact job in mind (long range bomber flying out into the ocean, dropping bombs on ships before they can get close to shore). Was it really that much of a waste of time? The speed of a falling WWII bomb varied by type, but call it 1000 feet per second (since that makes calculating easier). At 13,000 feet, it takes a full 13 seconds for the bomb to hit the ground. A freighter could easily be doing ten miles an hour just poking around, while a destroyer at full power could hit 40+. Hard to hit something moving that fast with that long a delay to begin with. Add in the fact that any captain that knows he's under air attack is going to be making random course corrections and speed changes to throw off the aim, and hitting one becomes a matter of luck. What, by the way, is your source on the B-17 being designed for anti-ship patrol. It was an Army aircraft, ships were primarily the Navy's problem, and every source I've ever seen states that it was built from the beginning for the strategic factory-smashing role.
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May 19, 2016 00:46
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The Tirpitz was little more than a paper threat. By that point the Reich simply couldn't spare the fuel needed for their heavy units to sortie, not when the same amount of fuel put into submarines would not only do more damage to Allied shipping but have a much lower chance of loss. Even worse, after the loss of the Bismark Hitler became adamant that the heavy ships could only be used against inferior force to avoid the prestige loss that a sunken battleship would carry - even an obsolete WWI tub like the Ramillies would be enough to prevent an engagement, and permission to set out was usually denied because proof of the lack of enemy battleships was impossible to obtain.
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May 20, 2016 03:30
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Veloxyll posted:Latewar you had a lot better chance of having a BB survive than a sub. After 43 the German subs started to have a REALLY bad time. You'd lose some subs, yes. But the fuel needed for one sortie of a battleship could put quite a few subs in the water, and you wouldn't lose them all. Sending out a German battleship by 43 generally didn't mean you might lose it, but that you would lose it - the same air forces that were tearing up the U-boats would have no trouble putting paid to a battleship, particularly when Germany didn't possess enough ships to put up a decent AA barrage and Britain could lose six to one in BBs and come out ahead.
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May 20, 2016 03:54
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NGDBSS posted:Wait, how do you make a carp "too hardcore"? Given the reputation of DF I know it's possible, but what happened in the game in this case? Besides the problem of dwarves panicking over them, falling in the water, and drowning, carp (and all fish) in 40d versions of Dwarf Fortress were overpowered for two reasons: 1. The basic bite attack was as powerful as a dwarf punch for a given amount of strength. 2. Every skill increase boosted all stats, and there was no skill cap. Fish swim constantly, and thus constantly gain Swimming skill. THis caused their strength to rise stratoscopically. More recent versions cap skill growth and restrict what stats each skill boosts.
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Jun 23, 2016 23:49
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Ardeem posted:Wiki say a pair of .303 in the wheel pants and a Vickers gun out the rear cockpit. They could also carry 4x60 pound and/or 2x500 pound bombs, IIRC. Not what they were designed for, but they could act as light bombers.
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Jun 27, 2016 04:15
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Doing some searching on the Fubuki-class destroyers and stats vary wildly on the DC armament. Everything I can find suggests that Fubuki was launched with two depth charge throwers, and two more were installed in 1942. As for the Japanese view of submarines, I can find nothing to support the "submarines are dishonorable, we shall ignore them" idea, not least because Japan entered the war with a submarine fleet to rival the US and German ones. Japan did very little during the early to mid war to protect her merchant fleet from submarines, but this was because the IJN expected nearly all submarine effort to be aimed at Japan's warships instead of commercial traffic.
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Jul 2, 2016 19:15
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Night10194 posted:Wasn't Wasp a smaller, weaker fleet carrier built to keep to treaty limits or something? Yes. Under the naval limitation treaty in place at the time, the United States Navy had 15,000 tons of unused carrier displacement after the construction of the three 19,800 tone Yorktown-class ships. The 14,700 tone Wasp was built with lower armor and speed (which allowed for lighter machinery) in order to carry the same number of aircraft as a Yorktown with 25% less displacement. Wasp was initially assigned duties of secondary danger - first to the Caribbean to keep watch on the remaining Vichy France ships, followed by a lengthy refit, followed by repairs from ramming a destroyer, followed by assignment to the potentially war-winning task of ferrying new aircraft to reinforce Malta's devastated air groups. After her second such mission (the first having failed when accurate intelligence allowed the Luftwaffe to annihilate the delivered Spitfires as soon as they landed), Coral Sea and Midway had drawn USN fleet strength in the Pacific to the critically low level of three fleet carriers, forcing Wasp to be reassigned. The Wasp's aircraft aided in the initial invasion of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and missed most of the Battle Of The Eastern Solomons before being hit by three torpedoes (out of a spread of six - one missed everything, another hit and eventually sunk the destroyer O'Brien, and the last seriously damaged the battleship North Carolina - impressive shooting) from the submarine I-19. The complete lack of torpedo protection guaranteed that any one of those torpedoes would have been fatal.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:28
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As mentioned on the Wikipedia page, a three-gun battery fired over a hundred shells during a duel with German cruisers during WWI, and it is far from unlikely that considerably more would be used against an invasion. Since these guns were used heavily on WWI-vintage warships that had virtually all been scrapped (which is were the guns came from in the first place - the warships themselves were obsolete, but the guns worked just fine), so the British had massive supplies of ammunition that they had virtually no other use for.
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Aug 16, 2016 14:36
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Jobbo_Fett posted:
[Citation Needed] The only non-German power that ever used the Panther (postwar France) immediately declared "these are poo poo, let's light the fire under our R&D teams so that we can get rid of them", and none of the major powers adopted any feature designed on it.
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Aug 28, 2016 03:35
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Said destroyer also took all of Chokai's surviving crew aboard, and was sunk by air attack with no survivors soon afterwards. Chokai was a very unlucky ship.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:10
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sullat posted:That was later; in the first engagement the Bismark had, she and her escort went toe to toe with the Hood and the Prince of Wales, I think? Can't remember exactly. No air support, 2 v 2 gun duel, like Nelson intended. It was Bismark and Prinz Eugen vs the Hood and the Prince Of Wales. It was a short engagement.
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Nov 19, 2016 15:32
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RA Rx posted:These amazing scenarios do all still rely on amazing Japanese players replacing the Japanese leadership on both a military and economic level, with no equivalent Allied boost (though the Allied player can hide their fleets); and several minor factors being biased in Japan's favor. The problem with that is the Philippines. Japan's leadership believed that a well-fortified and supplied Philippines would have been an impregnable fortress and unsinkable aircraft carrier perfectly positioned to take everything Japan wanted away at any time. The Philippines in US hands (and it is questionable when or even if the US would have granted Filipino independence with a powerful Japanese Empire right next door) was a pistol pressed against the Empire's belly, and had to go.
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Nov 23, 2016 15:22
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A loss ratio of 1:13.8 in aircraft (5:69) is a pretty bad day.
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Jan 18, 2017 18:29
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I think that it is counting the number of times a plane got damaged, and three of the Bettys got damaged twice.
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Jan 29, 2017 13:58
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TildeATH posted:What were all those big stupid battleships doing there, anyway? Dying, apparently.
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Jan 30, 2017 20:07
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Getting fighters that have actual guns instead of those 7.7mm toys does seem to be helping with the heavy bomber problem.
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Feb 5, 2017 23:33
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It is only relatively recently (last ten days or so) that he started getting decent numbers of Zeros into action there. Mostly he's been trying to shoot them down with Nates and sometimes a couple of Zeros (too few to help much).
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Feb 6, 2017 00:45
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Bip Roberts posted:Bombsights are basically way too precise for what normal atmospheric conditions are. The Norden bombsight would allow you to land a bomb in a cardboard box but only in 1 out of a 100 days in the desert with zero wind or temperature inversions ground to 10,000 ft. The true irony is that RCA wanted to build a TV-guided bomb at the start of the war. If the money (a tenth of the money) wasted on the Norden sight had been directed to that, the 8th Air Force could have been bombing Germany with PGMs.
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Feb 22, 2017 04:12
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Now that I think of it, why is the IJA still flying Nates against the USAAF and USN in 1943? By now they should have all been withdrawn (as they were historically) and replaced by Oscars armed with the significantly better (but still underwhelming) armament of 2 .50 caliber machine guns, along with better speed, mobility, and durability. The Nate had trouble fighting the Brewster Buffalo (a difficult statement to believe) when the Pacific War broke out.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:32
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Ardeem posted:Because the Japanese industry controls are even more obtuse than the ones for directing ships around. I know that much (I have played the game some), but I was under the impression that the default settings were the historical progression.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:48
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