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Agua Perdido

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    Running-dog lackey of military-industrial complex

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  1. Well, that depends what you mean by "useful bomber" (and the jet-assisted B-36D went into serial production in 1949). The prop-only B-36A had a combat radius of nearly 4K miles with a nuke-sized payload. Granted, it was slow--max speed at altitude around 350 kts. All the jets did was reduce the enormous takeoff roll and add some dash speed over the target (to ~450kts, I think). Still, the prop-only version has performance comparable to a B-29 with much longer legs and payload, and the SuperFort was a "useful bomber." Well, I think you could have had a reasonable B-36A fleet by late 1945, albeit one that would be vulnerable to fighter interception (just like a B-29 fleet would be). Late-model B-29Bs had a combat radius around 1800 miles. The post-war B-29D/B-50 (renumbered to get through Congress) had a combat radius of 2200ish miles, and probably could have been ready in 1945 if the lower marks weren't cutting it. Anyhow, a Great Circle from Keflavik to Berlin is about 1500 miles. Plus, an 1800-mile ring around Keflavik reaches all the way to northern Italy and Poland, easily covering all of Germany. So, yeah, nuking Berlin from Iceland would certainly have been doable in 1945, as would nuking Berlin from North America (assuming more effort to the B-36). The bigger problem would be getting past the fighters--even the most tanked-up, late-war P-47s and P-51s had combat radii less than 1200 miles. I suppose, we can also assume a bigger push for the P-82 "Twin Mustang" (two P-51s joined by a center wing). Intended for long PTO escort missions, it's max radius was up around 1300 miles, although one flew nonstop from Hawaii to New York on a ferry flight (almost 5000 miles). Given that, one can assume the "Twin" might have been ready and able to escort missions to Berlin from Keflavik in 1945. Of course, if the Luftwaffe had enough StG44s, all bets are off. Probably not. Germany badly failed its "nuclear fission theory" die roll attempts in 1940-42, mostly because of adverse DRMs due to all the "bright heads" fleeing well before the war started. The other source of negative DRMs was that nukes were a long-term vision--why bother when you'd already "won" in 1941 (beaten France, spanking USSR)? If Germany were "winning" even more in our scenario, why would it bother with the a-bomb, especially after they screwed up the initial feasibility calculations? Keep 'Em Flying, Agua Perdido [Edited because Croda is a brainless prat.]
  2. The enormous B-36 Peacemaker strategic bomber, a mainstay of pre-B-52 U.S. Strategic Air Command in the late '40s and early 50's, grew out of an April 1941 requirement for a bomber that could hit Germany from the continental US (45K ceiling, 12,000-mile range w/5-ton payload--this requirement later scoped down slightly). The program suffered from low priority throughout the war and didn't make its first flight until 1946. But in the spirit of counterfactuals, I think it's arguable that it could have been ready at the same time as the a-bombs were, given higher priority. Given that making the a-bombs, themselves, took until mid-1945 to invent and build, that already means that they wouldn't be used until the war was "well along," irrespective of the availability of bases and heavy bombers for delivery. (And I don't think it's arguable that the Manhattan Project could possibly have gone much faster or received much higher priority than it did.) Keep Em Flying, Agua Perdido
  3. So, an SDB would be what, 200 points with rarity off? (And the air torp was the Mk.13 at the time, nice recollection.) As an aside to the "McClusky Miracle" on his attack timing, interwar USN doctrine called specifically for timing air attacks to catch enemy carriers rearming. I grant you that attacks may not have been arranged with such deliberation in practice, but it's interesting that pre-war tacticians noted the vulnerability and planned to exploit it. Agua Perdido
  4. I'll grant that point--winning Midway had the effect of ending the campaign immediately, which is certainly influential on the campaign level. But to be fair, I don't think you can say it came down to a single "battalion" action. After all, each squadron is probably equivalent to a battalion (each is commanded by a major or equivalent and would be worth on the order of 1000-3000 points in CM, assuming 100-150 pts for USN aircraft of the era--rarity off, of course). There were three squadrons of torpedo bombers getting massacred on the morning of 4 June, not just VT-8, and the subsequent dive-bomber attacks were another three squadrons, plus two of fighters. If we count another two squadrons of stragglers, that looks like a reinforced regiment or even a short division. Point being, this wasn't a small-but-crucial part of larger fighting, like a battalion fighting over a critical frontage in a corps section. The Midway air battles were the fighting (yes, I know, submarines, B-17s, blahblah--those are small-but-largely-irrelevant parts of the Midway fighting). Agua Perdido
  5. Maybe for a few months. Once the US started cranking out new carriers and battleships and cruisers and destroyers and submarines and airplanes, the IJN was through.</font>
  6. Four a-bombs, actually--there was one left after the two attacks on Japan and the Trinity test. And, as per my earlier post, material production was 1.5-2 bombs/month. That's after roughly 4.5 years of effort (starting with Fermi's effort to build a reactor in Chicago). It certain that Japan would have fallen without the bomb, and probably without a US invasion. It's worth noting that the invasion would likely have been very hard--Japanese deployments corresponded almost exactly to the US attack plan, and the invasion fleet would have been hit by a major typhoon. This would be small consolation to Northern Japan (Sakhalin and Hokkaido), which had been stripped to defend southern Japan--the USSR would have rolled right over them in the absence of the Japanese Navy (already destroyed by the US). Assuming a casualty rate comparable to Manchuria, that would have added another 400,000 Japanese dead. A few more months of war would have allowed the USAAF to finish destroying the Japanese railway infrastructure, all but guaranteeing that the poor rice harvest of 1945 would become a disastrous famine in 1946 (which it very nearly was anyway--the ability to shift food supplies between northern and southern Japan by rail was crucial to staving off widespread starvation in early 1946). Hundreds of thousand more deaths could have resulted from starvation and disease. The moral? The Bomb was bad, and the alternative was also bad. War sucks. Agua Perdido
  7. Not so much. The Germans made serious theoterical errors in the early going, and they were still fumbling to create a working reactor design, much less a bomb, by the war's end. Not to mention they tied their reactor designs to heavy water, and Norwegian commandos destroyed both the production facility and the stockpile of heavy water in a pair of daring raids. With more funding, their program might have done better, but it's unlikely that they would have beat the US to the bomb--their "team" had much less depth than the gang of brilliant emigres at Los Alamos. (Heck, it took the USSR--no slouches, themselves--four years to get the Bomb, and they essentially had the blueprints to everything from espionage). Agua Perdido
  8. Really that high? I seem to remember that the US ability to produce the necessary Uranium / Plutonium was very, very low at that point, but I couldn't find any ressource on that ad hoc. </font>
  9. Several years ago a disturbed veteran stole an M-60 tank and took it on the freeway near San Diego, California. He managed to rampage for half an hour before getting high-centered on the lane divider. As I recall, the county police opened the hatch with a pair of bolt cutters and shot the man dead. More recently, there was another fellow with a rather strong grudge against his entire town. He built himself a tank out of a bulldozer and bunch of concrete for armor and went on a 2mph rampage, knocking down a number of buildings. He got stuck when his uber-dozer broke through a floor and crashed into a basement, at which point he shot himself. Drive safe, kids! Agua Perdido [Edited because Croda is a brainless prat. Oh, yes, he is.]
  10. I once saw a video called "Deadly Weapons," in which guys shot all sorts of stuff to debunk Hollywood-style perceptions of guns. The demonstration on the myth of "knockdown power" was quite striking (pun unintended): a man in a heavy ballistic vest balanced on one foot while another man shot him in the chest with a FN-FAL from three feet away (the FN-FAL is a full-power .30 cal rifle, roughly on a par with an M1 in terms of "BANG!"). The target guy flinched, but didn't even wobble. He certainly didn't fall over (and remember, he was balancing on one foot). Another fun demo debunked the old "gas tank explodes when shot" canard. They got a half-full gas tank and shot it with an M-16. Nothing. They shot it with tracers. Nothing. They eventually had to put a pot of burning rags over a open trough of gasoline and shoot that to get any sort of fire, much less an explosion. Everything's easier in Hollywood. Agua Perdido
  11. I can offer a definitive answer to this particular "what-if" because I played it once in a game. I use to play a fair bit of Advanced Third Reich (a boardgame-- yes, played on hexagons on a paper map with cardboard counters and dice you had to roll yourself!). A3R is a strategic-level game of WWII in the ETO with corps-sized ground units, semi-abstract air and naval forces, and seasonal turns. A little-used optional rule was that in a three-player game (WA, USSR and Germany) that ended in Allied victory, war might continue between the WA and USSR until one side met the conditions for the highest level of victory (by controlling a certain number of "objectives"--cities printed in red on the A3R map, or marked by convenient flags in CM). Anyhow, one particularly screwy--er, historical-- game was winding up in early 1944. Germany had delayed (and eventually cancelled) Barbarossa to invade Britain, and fought up into Scotland before the Brits started pushing 'em back (the war had gone very well for the UK in the Med, so they never surrendered). Uncle Joe launched a "spoiling" attack in 1942, grabbing Rumania, Hungary and parts of Austria and Czechoslovakia. With the bulk of the Axis struggling in the East (including a turn wherein Hitler was assassinated by a special event, forcing to Germany to pass), the WA easily got ashore in Spain and France. Germany was reduced to a tiny pocket around Berchtesgaden by the end of 1943 (a special event had turned Berchtesgaden into fortress hex that had to be conquered to trigger German surrender). Now, this is so close to the real conditions at the end of WWII as to be no difference at all, proving A3R's utility as a tool of speculative historical analysis. The game went on for a couple of turns as a USSR/WA fight. The WA attacked first (they had a higher total of Basic Resource Points, granting them the initiative--again, purely historical). Over the next two turns, the combined land-air-sea encirclement took back the Balkans, Germany, and Scandanavia (except Finland, and we all know the uber-Finns can take care of themselves) and killed the entire Red Army. From there, it looked like the game would settle into a stalemate roughly along the Nazi-Soviet Pact line (Poland partitioned, the rest of E. Europe WA-controlled, and only the WA holding enough objective hexes for a major victory). This proves my point conclusively. (The point that I like telling gaming stories, that is). Keep 'Em Flying, Agua Perdido
  12. Good discussion, here. Is there another example of strategic "maneuver vs. attrition" warfare in the Pacific Theater? Japan executed a brilliant campaign up to early '42, using well-trained, technically-excellent (well, except for their army) forces to inflict loss after loss on the ABDA nations. However, in spite of their hugely successful opening series of offensives, their only shot at victory would be the Allies agreeing to let them win. Imperial Japan had no means to FORCE the Allies to recognize their victory. This keeps tickling the back of my mind in the discussions I see of inflicting "disarticulation" and "command paralysis" on a strategic level. No matter how hard you "shock" (in the psychological sense) a nation, what happens when they don't decide to surrender? When they realize that in spite of whatever "shock" you've inflicted, you haven't sunk their navy/shot down their air force/killed their army/burned down their cities, so they can still keep fighting? I suppose my question is: how common is it that the "center of gravity" that strategic maneuver warfare seeks to "shock" ISN'T the enemy army? Apologies in advance for misusing terms--I'm not so familiar with the "academic" maneuver warfare language (some parts of this thread were beginning to remind me of literary theory...). Agua Perdido (And to marginally tie back to CMBB, note that the other bale of hay shattering the Japanese spine in summer '45 was a tidal wave of Reds washing over Manchuria... I admit I'm none too familiar with that campaign, only that it went very, very badly for Japan in an extremely short time.)
  13. I play CMBB on one, and it works fine. That big screen is just GORGEOUS. (I bought mine right at the end of 2002, and was quite miffed when the new models came out a month later for less money, twice the VRAM, faster SuperDrive, airport extreme, etc--until I realized they didn't boot OS9.) I'll second the endorsement for Smalldog Electronics. Their prices are competitive, and their service is top-notch. I got my iMac from them (a factory refurb), and it had a single stuck pixel when I fired it up. They told me Apple wouldn't fix it unless it had 5 or more bad pixels, but offered to exchange it if I paid the shipping (which I did--replacement had a flawless display). I don't know if they sell internationally, but it may be worth a look. Agua Perdido
  14. Punter. Well, as the only one of those affiliated with old Joe to ever occupy the top stop on the Peng Challenge Ladder, back before someone finally stole it after Berli forget to lock his back gate when he left it out in the yard after using it to clear the SSNs out of the raingutter, allow me to insist that the MBT is not now, and never has been, a haven for cannibals. Yours truly in a white wine sauce with shallots and wild mushrooms, Agua Perdido [Edited to note that Croda is a brainless prat.] [ May 19, 2003, 01:10 PM: Message edited by: Agua Perdido ]
  15. From what I've seen, the game seems to replace all the MP-40s in a German squad/HQ/Tank hunter team with PPD/PPSh. It doesn't replace any other weapons, of course, just the SMGs. Agua Perdido [Edited to add: I'd certainly second the mention of PPD/PPSh and more SMGs per squad in early-war Sov formations as an advantage for the Allies. Close-range infantry combat can be a real bear for Axis in the early war--unless they've got a few captured PPSh's of their own.] [ December 06, 2002, 11:21 AM: Message edited by: Agua Perdido ]
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