[Slaughter. Tank spotting.]

How much of the "action" that, say, AFVs saw was not even a battle, but a slaughter? Given a fixed position, or presumed hostile structure, with inadequate anti-tank defenses, wouldn't the successful tactic be to just stay at distance and heave HE until the position was pulverized? An unbalanced slaughter, is, after all, the ultimate tactical military goal.

the problem is getting a target to fire at. enemy won't offer targets as long as they don't need to. just firing from distance won't kill the enemy and you are just begging to receive arty fires and offer enemy a good chance to react to your attack (activation of reserves etc).

"blind" fire at enemy positions would most likely be used just as a feint to distract the enemy, or at best some sort of supporting overwatch, while the actual attacking force flanks and storms the positions.

you need to take those enemy positions anyway. firing from distance won't accomplish it. you need to go in.

(On a similar vein, could tanks that had radios rely on distant infantry spotters to direct their fire? I was watching yet another "Hollywood German assault"--you know, a few tanks, with a bunch of infantry running next to them, over an open field, and they get all shot up and retreat. I was thinking how unnecessary it was for the infantry to be there--except to spot for the tanks. I know the commander can be unbuttoned, and I think I recall AFVs having some sort of phone for someone riding on, or next to, the tank. But those are both hazardous ways of spotting. Did they ever have a set-up, like with indirect artillery, where infantry, in cover, in a place with good line of sight, with binoculars, radioed spotting instructions?)

infantry and tanks support each other. yes, part of the reason for infantry to be there is to act as eyes for the tanks. infantry would use things like tracers and flares to point out targets for tanks. to simplify things, tanks take care of enemy machinegun nets and other strongpoints, infantry takes care of mines and enemy close range units.

line of sight is so bad in real world that you typically need to go in before you can see what's in there. spotting from distance is not too useful. recon helps if you have time.

in the context of the first quoted paragraph, tanks would both suppress enemy (fire from distance) and help storm their positions. infantry would clear and hold those positions.

[some "unfair" Roads to Leningrad scenarios]

I'm curious what number of rounds on pre-registered targets in Army Group South's area were fired in the opening days of Barbarossa by the Russians. I mean really front line units, not the divisional MLR.

From what I understand the positions actually facing the Germans were just garrisons on the actual front line and they were bypassed and then later reduced. What kind of support do they have initially, and what causes that to change?

Also ooc, are the garrison troops on the front line literally from the division behind them?

continuing this off-topic discussion, sorry.

there were NKVD border troop regiments who, as i understand it, had only light arms. don't know if there were NKVD arty units on the border, but i'd imagine garrisons had at least some arty of their own.

the regular infantry divisions were in 1-up stance and had arty as normal. their arty did start firing about one hour after German fires ceased. there were also Soviet airstrikes soon after those. so there was Soviet arty from day one.

fire at preregistered targets is ineffective if the fire is not observed. even if the fire itself would be accurate, you don't know what preregistered point to fire at. i don't know how many shells the Soviet divisions got off. IIRC Finnish divisional arty firing blind at preregistered targets in summer 1944 got off only something like 2000-5000 shells. the fires caused minimal losses, because they were totally unobserved (Soviet fires had kicked up dust & soil cloud 200 meters high).

[some "unfair" Roads to Leningrad scenarios]

the problem with arty and maps is that maps tended to be relatively inaccurate due to various issues, part of which were inherent to production of maps. IIRC the inherent error of margin for a good 1:50 000 map was around 30 meters on average. and the map you've got might be 1:100 000 or worse, and the map (thru number of versions) might be based on Napoleonic era data. i am not exaggerating. usually maps were considered quite worthless. it was the arrival of effecitive air photography based mapping that changed things dramatically (though not what comes to elevations).

knowing your position and target position is also just one part of the needed data. you also need to know things like temperature, air pressure, shell velocity & weight and so forth, if you want to be accurate. armies produced all kinds of tools to make this stuff faster. still, due to the number of variables, and due to the relatively high accuracy required, any purely calculation based fire is going to miss the target by some hundreds of meters. small calculation errors simply add up. some of the stuff may be very hard to calculate accurately, due to differences in shells, propellants, individual gun wear and things like changing wind speeds. calculating all that stuff takes time and you have to recalculate it again every time.

to the surprise of some, post-war OR studies found out that such precalculated fires were so inaccurate still in 1944-45 that less than one in ten had been effective.

thus, to make fires faster and more accurate, you would have a forward observer guide the fires (spotting rounds or not) to the target.

for most nations the FO would acctually have to report the changes in relation of the firing unit to the target (not in relation of forward observer himself and the target). so he needs to know the position of the battery and he needs to imagine a line from the battery to the target. he then needs to be able to report the needed changes from the viewpoint of the battery, on both two axis, as degress (minutes) and range. so instead of saying "left 200 meters, drop 150 meters", he would be saying something like "zero minus 14 degress 50 minutes, 5950 meters". not rocket science but often not as easy as one would think when you add other practical difficulties into it.

there were other types of fires as well of course. preregistered targets and such. and there were exceptions, especially across nations.

[Any news?]

waiting for the release as well.

[some "unfair" Roads to Leningrad scenarios]

cool ideas. have to try some of these.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

Whilst the question of "best design" is a natural one surely the problem is finding the right scale on which to answer it? Should the answer be based on pure physical attributes of the machine? Considered alongside crew skill, experience and training? Or how the machine is intergrated and utilised within a military system? In the consideration of industrial capabilities, operational mobility and other factors you seem to have adopted a more global approach. So perhaps the question should address the design ethos and how the machines delivered were INTENDED to operate. Then the battlefield performance can be considered with respect to the intended and actual results.

Then the Panzer Mk II will come out on top!

if you look at battles like Arracourt in 1944, i think Panzer IIs would have done just as well.

i agree about the scale thing. the context in this thread appears to be post-Kursk battles of 1943. i guess one could evaluate Panther vs IV on at least a couple of different levels:

1) performance of panzer regiments which either had or did not have Panthers

2) performance of Panther battalions vs Panzer IV battalions

what comes to the intended use, i think it's safe to say that Panthers did not perform as intended in 1943. too many teething problems.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

Comet 250km operational range

33.53 tonnes

Sherman 193kms operational range

30.30 tonnes

that 193 km (120 miles) figure for Sherman originates most likely from this:

APPENDIX "G" to AFV MIDDLE EAST LIAISON LETTER NO. 8 January 1943

(e) CIRCUIT OF ACTION - SHERMAN TANKS

Petrol Engine.

Good Going 90 miles

Bad Going 56 miles

Diesel Engine.

Good Going 120 miles

Bad Going 90 miles

as seen, 193 km figure is the upper margin for diesels.

of all the over 50 000 Shermans built, only some 8000 (A2 and A6) were diesels.

what comes to the petrols, 56 miles is 90 km and 90 miles is 145 km.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

indeed. T-34 certainly has a significant reliability advantage over Panther what comes to long range marches on tracks. probably it exists at ranges somewhere between 100 and 300 km.

what comes to Panzer IV J and T-34 i don't think there's really any difference what comes to road marches on tracks.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

.

To my mind the PzIVJ has many good qualities but it lacks the cross country ability and strategic mobility of tanks such as the T-34. The Panther is pretty good but being so heavy and complex again it lacks tactical and strategic mobility, so my money now is on the original Panther prototype.

what kind of stuff do you have in mind exactly what comes to higher strategic mobility of T-34? i'm not really questioning the point, just interested.

simplistic operational ranges of some tanks:

T-34 early - 100 / 300 km (off road / road)

Panzer IV early - 100 / 200 km (off road / road)

T-34 M1942 - 400 km (increase created by external fuel tanks)

Panzer IV J - 300 km (increase created by internal tanks)

T-34/85 - 300 km (decrease created by added weight)

Panther - 100 / 250 km (off road / road)

IS-2 - 250 km

weights:

T-34 - 26 t

T-34 M42 - 28.5 t

T-34 M43 - 30.9 t

T-34 / 85 - 32 t

Pz IV D - 20 t

Pz IV G - 23.5 t

Pz IV H/J - 25 t

IS-2 - 46 t

Panther D - 43 t

Panther G - 45.5 t

(yeah, including IS-2 is slightly OT, but at least i dind't post less than flattering numbers for e.g. Sherman)

[Xenophobic Irony]

war is not necessarily negative even if your GROUP does lose. it creates a pressure for changes which leads to adaptions in the society. these adaptions keep your higher clan of societies competitive against other higher clans.

even for those who die in battle the war may be a good thing. after all your personal genes are not as important as those of your sibling gene tree. and those are not as important as the whole genetic pool of your society. and so forth.

it applies as much to genes as it does to economics, science, society or memes.

the only exception is a war of total annihilation. then it will suck if you lose. and that's why you need those smaller wars, so that you keep competitive. a multimillenia dynasty of umparalled wealth, science & peace is worth nothing when the white devils arrive with their cannons & opium. "i'm in your base, breaking your vases."

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

Harrison's paper i was referring to earlier is "Stalinist Industrialisation and the Test of War". quotes follow:

Less ambitious plans could have resulted in a variety of alternative outcomes characterised by industrial growth less than or equal to that actually achieved, combined with fewer social and economic tensions and higher morale of the population.

Nonetheless, might not a smaller wartime industrial base have been compensated in other directions - for example, by higher civilian morale and national unity?

Perhaps, with less harsh policies, the greater degree of loyalty in 1941 would have offset a smaller industrial base?

Morale and munitions were both required to fight the invader. There was limited scope for trading them off against each other; a more loyal population would have allowed more munitions to be supplied to the front (rather than diverted to policing the rear), and NKVD troops could have spent more time fighting the Germans, less time policing labour camps and minority nations.

ok, i'm down only some of the first pages and i already want to kill myself. i mean, seriously, WTF is the dude thinking?

Here the central, obvious, yet still startling fact is that the Soviet Union fought the war's decisive battles with a capital stock no more than two-thirds the size of that already accumulated in 1940. The gap reflects capacities lost or decommissioned as a result of the loss of territory to the invader. Thus the Soviet economy was denied access to a substantial

Stalinist Industrialisation share of the results of prewar industrial accumulation, yet still managed to sustain an outstanding wartime productive effort. Soviet industry could therefore have fought its war on the basis of a slower rate of prewar military-industrial expansion, but only on condition that its losses of capacity in the initial phase of the war could somehow have been more effectively limited than was in fact the case.

orly? perhaps captain Kirk will travel thru time and change history so that your writings can have some actual value.

Why were the capacity losses of 1941-2 so severe? The heavy impact of territorial loss is attributable to two factors. One was the traditional concentration of Soviet heavy and defence industries in the southern and western regions of the European USSR; this created a deep vulnerability to invasion from the west - one which Soviet military and economic leaders were well aware of. And this was one reason for prewar policies of dispersal of strategic industries to the interior of the country. Such policies reflected in part economic considerations - a commitment to the industrialisation of relatively backward regions, a desire to reduce the interregional transportation of industrial materials and products and economise on transport costs. They were also the result of straightforward military-economic calculations - a recognition of the vulnerability to disruption of an economy with a high degree of regional specialisation, reliant upon a limited number of regional fuel-metallurgical complexes. But the other factor which helps to explain the heavy impact of territorial loss upon Soviet defence and heavy industries in 1941-2 is that, after an initial opening up of the interior regions under the First Five-Year Plan (1928-32), this policy was scarcely implemented in the prewar years; existing regional specialisations were maintained, and much unique capacity in military engineering and metallurgy was formed in zones of future German occupation.

dude, it would help the reader to form an answer to your question if you told them the Soviets didn't believe Germans would ever reach as far as Kharkov. as a consequence Soviets were most focused about industries located in immediate danger area. unlike you, they didn't know how deep the Germans would penetrate..

Why was the prewar policy of industrial dispersal not more vigorously implemented? The simple reason is, apparently, that it was too costly.

apparently, then.

This is why the forced pace of Soviet industrialisation tended to inhibit industrial dispersal. However, it does not follow that industrial dispersal would have been any easier in combination with a slower, more relaxed pace of industrial expansion.

argh, so why do you even write about it?

Therefore, only with great difficulty could more vigorous dispersal of the country's military-industrial potential to the interior regions have been reconciled with a policy of reduced capital construction and slower, more balanced and consumer-oriented industrial growth in the prewar period.

if it's meaningless why do you keep talking about it?

Nonetheless, it seems a good bet that such a prewar policy combination would have paid off in wartime. For the Soviet people paid dearly for their leaders' prewar sin of omission in the field of industrial dispersal. They paid by having to carry dispersal out under incomparably more difficult conditions, when war had already broken out and invading forces were already deep inside Soviet territory.

a good bet or not, did you read anything you just wrote earlier in your paper?

This is the story of the industrial evacuations, of which there were two - the big one of July-November 1941 and a much smaller one limited to the southern sector in June-September 1942. The big one involved up to one eighth of all Soviet industrial assets, including the bulk of the country's defence plant and many key enterprises of the metallurgical, chemical, engineering and electricity supply. Evacuation tasks were assigned top priority - equal to that of fighting the enemy. Huge resources of transport and construction were diverted to its implementation. The centre of gravity of the Soviet Union's industrial economy was shifted bodily from Europe to the Urals and western Siberia. In this way the results of territorial loss were mitigated, the Soviet defence capacity was saved and economic collapse averted.

hey, the guy just at least partially debunked his other paper which doesn't know why USSR didn't die in 1941.

anyway, it would have been nice if you had told the reader that the Soviets had been preplanning the evacuations since late 1920ies and actually had prepared some target areas in advance.

From a conservative standpoint it could be argued (and is in fact implied, more or less openly) that what was achieved in wartime could never have been imposed in time of peace - that the 'incomparably more difficult circumstances' generated greater effort, greater self-sacrifice, greater heroism on the part of the workers.

it would help if you understood how USSR worked. after all, you are apparently a historian and you are writing a paper about it. perhaps, just perhaps, it had nothing at all to do with self-sacrifice or heroism of the workers.

And generally it seems to be true that during the war Soviet enterprises worked with greater 'tautness', with a lower safety margin, concealed fewer reserves, and calculated their options with less self-regard than in peace time. Given this piece of hindsight it could be argued that postponement of industrial dispersal until the outbreak of war was rational and saved resources; had the same relocation of capacities been attempted in the late 1930s, it would have taken many years to complete with almost indefinite postponement of results.

eww. dude, you need a reality check. those guys who own the factory complexes, or lobby for their region on the higher political levels, don't care too much about that stuff. they just really don't like it when you try to take their stuff away. yeah, USSR was not supposed to be like that, but that's how it worked in reality. like you know, you a historian specialized on the subject, right?

In my view this defence of the prewar industrialisation pattern is unacceptable for two reasons. One is that the wartime evacuation of industry, while justly celebrated as an outstanding feat of heroic labour, was only a first step in repairing the damage caused by invasion; it certainly did not solve all the resulting problems, and even after its conclusion the economy of the interior regions still hung over the brink of a precipitous collapse in 1942. The economic crisis of that year was in many ways deeper than that of the first post-invasion months; the country's defence capacity had been saved, but its civilian economy had been reduced to the most dreadful shambles, and this in turn posed a deadly threat to the continuity of defence output. The evacuation contributed to this imbalance because of the demand piled upon demand for transport, electric power and material supplies from the thoroughly inadequate infrastructure of the remote regions in which the country's strategic enterprises had been relocated. If the cost of resolving this crisis were calculated, the result would surely show that deferment of industrial dispersal until war had broken out was an expensive choice, not a choice for dispersal 'on the cheap'.

surely it would. hey, while you are it, why not calculate it so that your paper has some validity and makes it worth reading it. and about this "choice", didn't you already previously conclude that there really wasn't much to choose from? like, uh, why are you STILL talking about this?

The other reason why prewar industrial concentration followed by wartime dispersal must be rejected as a rational policy combination is that this argument follows well-worn Stalinist tradition in making a virtue out of bitterest necessities. If there is an argument here, it is that the perestroika of the late 1980s is already half a century overdue. This is what would have supplied the conditions necessary for cost-effective war preparation - to have created in advance a peacetime economy in which enterprises and construction projects tended spontaneously to efficient capacity utilisation, without need for a safety margin as a defence against planning uncertainty, without concealment of reserves. Then the intended dispersal of new capacities of strategic significance to the interior regions would have been implemented within a reasonable planning horizon

exactly, free markets would have built the production complexes at Urals and Siberia almost automatically!

Could the war have been fought without more prewar industrial dispersal, still on the basis of a lower rate of prewar industrial accumulation and smaller initial military-industrial capital stock, by means of adoption of alternative policies when war had already broken out?

a nice question. so are you gonna tell us what these alternative policies would be like?

Could Soviet industries have been either defended or evacuated more effectively in 1941-2? This also seems possible, although not without question.

cool.

Had Stalin not been deceived, then things would have gone better.

OMG.

How much better, it is again impossible to say, for even when Soviet military leaders were completely familiar with Hitler's plans and the requirements of strategic defence against them, the Wehrmacht was still able to storm through Soviet defences, carry out large scale encirclements and inflict further massive losses of territory.

someone please kill me so that i don't have to read this whole paper.

Perhaps the Stalinist political system's excessive centralisation and intolerance of alternative perspectives made it especially vulnerable to German deceits.

yeah, tolerate alternative perspectives of those heroic workers! after the saturday orgy they may perhaps notice the evil & gamey German deceit.

But deception and surprise were weapons of war like any other; each side designed their weapons to exploit the adversary's weaknesses, and only hindsight was fully proof against them. After all, in December 1941, it was the turn of the democratically governed United States to fall victim to a Japanese campaign of deception and surprise, in spite of many accurate forewarnings of Japanese intentions.

oh noes.

Could a more effective industrial evacuation have saved a higher proportion of Soviet initial capacities in military and supporting industries? On this question I am more sceptical.

i value your scepticism on this question.

In summary, the achieved level of Soviet industrial development was, in a broad sense, one of the keys to Soviet victory in 1941-5.

lol, in a broad sense yes kinda one of the keys. of course nothing like the heroic oppressed workers with alternative perspectives.

It may be that, from the point of view of the needs of war in 1941-5, the case for a degree of forced-march industrialisation in the prewar years cannot be entirely discounted.

maybe not entirely, yeah.

i am sorry but i am done trying to reread this paper.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

Actually this assesment is based on Soviet figures used by Russian historians and working with Western economic historians around 2001.

Accounting for war Soviet production, employment and the defence burden 1940-45 - Mark Harrison Cambridge 2002.

awgh. remember that guy. i read just a couple of months ago a paper written by him. or tried to read, as i couldn't make myself read it in full because it was like reading a college essay in which the writer is more eager to use as many words as possible to support some strage fixation of his than actually describe something of value.

the paper had to do with efficiency of Stalinist pre-war industrialization. it was full of nonsene about if only perestroika had arrived 50 years earlier, about the marvels of democratically elected governments, the value of people being very motivated if they are not forced to work hard and so forth.

for a historican who could name some modern papers about the subject (while still failing to actually quote them) he sure displayed impressive ability to not deal with some of the actual realities under which Soviet industrialization programs existed. he appeared to not understand at all how crucial politics (regional lobbying etc), self-serving interests (factories trying to suck up as much money from ministries & army as possible) and such were. no, it's about those poor Soviet citizens who don't have democracy. why do Germans manage to overrun so much of Soviet industry in 1941? because Soviet people are oppressed, because of inefficient Stalinist centralization, right? of course it can't be that Soviet military planners never thought Germans could reach as far as Kharkov, not to mention Stalingrad, that Soviets had unfound doctrine in which the defensive war is almost instantly thrown to enemy soil. after all, that's the type of stuff that most modern papers about the subject, wether written by westerners or Russians, deal with.

anyway, i'll try to reread it again, as i remember it had some stuff about agrarian societies.

i don't mean to sound like an arrogant ass, which i am, but i read a good number of papers about military history every month, and i really disliked that paper by Harrison. when you read lot's of papers you tend to get a feel for different types of writers. i prefer those who avoid extra words, actually quote their sources, clearly show the data they derive their conclusions from and avoid ideological or philosophical drivel.

if you could give some of his references, or offer some of his key points, it would of course be great.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

So there was every indication that the USSR would collapse in 1941.

it was extremely hard for intelligence to penetrate Stalinist USSR. the glorious strategic insight praised by JasonC estimated USSR would fall in just a few weeks. they based it on intelligence data they had collected and all sorts of production, logistical & such calculations. they all failed to see the full industrial & military power of USSR. they simply did not know what USSR was.

What no-one is clear about is why it survived.

in hindsight it is clear. there was simply no reason why it would not have survived.

the German strategy of taking Soviet key industrial concentrations failed. Soviet industry survived 1941. thus they could keep fighting. due to the huge reserves (unknown to others) the Red Army survived as well. Stalinist central controlling brain pulling the strings survived as well. no need to collapse.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

URD - utter nonsense.

lol, back to the normal broadcast

The Russian prewar tank fleet of early 1930s models is a hindrance not a help, and gone in weeks.

that's a ridiculous argument when we are discussing the existence of infrastructure for tank production.

let me make it more clear with yet another example:

after years of construction the Stalingrad tractor factory is finally ready in 1930 and it builds its first tractor. a decade later it has built 200 000 tractors. lot's of tractors yeah, but those are even worse match for a Panzer III than all those BT & T-26 tanks.

in mid 1941 the Germans invade. instead of tractors the very same factory now starts to build T-34s. for the rest of the 1941 it is responsible for building more than half of all the T-34s build in USSR, building almost 1000 tanks. in 6 months, including whatever it took to turn production from tractors to tanks.

compare to the Vomag case i gave earlier. this freaking tractor factory, built in 1930, is almost twice as effective as Vomag's brand new mass production facilities of 1943 if we look at just tank output. it didn't take two years to make the tractor factory spit out T-34s in 1941. it's not accidental or a coincidence. the Soviets planned it that way and they did it in 1920ies.

Most industrial output is still going to civilian purposes.

here's another fact you are going to love: Germans used a higher percentage of their production on military sectors than USSR.

The US achieves the same rapid rise in armaments output the Russians do, in even less time, without any mythical 10 year lead time supposedly pretooling for war. The reason is economic mobilization, not some great head start.

the reason is brute economic and industrial power. say, in 1940 US government officials watch panzers race thru France and tells Chrysler it needs some tanks. Chrysler builds a new factory in a year and can build more tanks than the goverment ever needs or wants.

The Germans don't order it until after the fall of Stalingrad.

nonsense. mobilization of the German economy happens already in 1930ies. there's no sudden rise after Stalingrad.

It emphatically does not plain for a long war of attrition and maximum armaments output.

it emphatically does. what you don't appear to connect to this subject is that still when Germans plan for the French campaign they plan for a WW1 type war. they don't see or fully understand a "blitzkrieg". the armaments production is not targetted for a short fast panzer blitz, it's targetted for a long trench fight type war.

May 1940, December 1940, or June 1941, are all reasonable times to have panicked and planned for a long war of attrition begining immediately. But instead they made only marginal adjustments, trying to spare civilian output, economic flexibility, and long term investment projects (not in tank factories, in things that would repay themselves only over 20-40 years). The Russians make this decision in July 1941. The Americans make it in December 1941. They are actually both ahead of the Germans in that respect, organizationally.

1940-1942, predating Stalingrad, sees heavy German investments into tank production. the high tank production figures of 1943-44 come exactly from these factories which by then have become operational.

18 months after war start they are at maximum tank output. 18 months after war start for them, the Germans are still 40 months away from their output peak. But oh gosh, guess what, that *is* 18 months after Stalingrad.

Stalingrad has nothing to do with it, get over it. it has to do with awakening to the nature of warfare after they see "blitzkrieg" live on TV in 1939-1940. as a result US wakes up for tank production in 1940. because of their economical & industrial muscle they can afford it. just the same Germans boost their tank production by starting construction of additional tank factories. Soviets are in practice the only exception - they saw it decades ago and already had it all in place for massive tank production.

Mobilization timing is the key item in total output achieved. The Germans are not first on that score, they haven't been fully mobilized since 1933 or since 1938 or 1939. They are dead last. Which is bad strategy and war planning, not physical economic constraints.

German tank production figures have nothing to do with being or not being fully or partially mobilized. they could build as many tanks in 1944 even if they had zero mobilization for war. in the big picture tank production itself doesn't eat that much resources, it's, what, some 5% of all military spending at the peak. it's building the required infrastructure that is the true bottleneck.

so, could Germans have build more tank factories before 1939? yes, they probably could have, on the expence of other things.

in hindsight it's relatively clear that especially some of the naval projects didn't really pay off (though don't say that in some forum about WW2 naval crap). but should it go into tank production, or at an attempt to do something about keeping late war air less hostile, or perhaps higher motorization of the armed forces in general or other such things? if they had built less tanks they could have built more airplanes and perhaps pushed UK out of the war after France fell. etc etc.

whatever one thinks in hindsight about what Germans should have done is irreleavant to the fact that German late war high tank production numbers are the result of long term investments into tank production made already years before Stalingrad.

[Improving the look of CM Normandy]

Give us a couple million bucks and we can create all kinds of mess with it

my point was that if you are going to include purely eye candy details, it would be cool if you could make some of those details to be related to military gear instead of just civilian environment.

That shredded PzIV in the above picture was probably knocked out by heavy bombers. How often do you think people want to see that same exact busted up PzIV?

yeah, it doesn't need to be as heavily damaged as the one in the photo. you already have all sorts of damage to vehicles in the game. perhaps allow those models to be used in the maps, with some extra editability like ability to place them partly dug in ground and such. i realize it takes development time and you most likely won't do it.

3. Debris, clutter, etc. is a result of dynamic real world activities. In a virgin battlefield you don't have combat debris and clutter, or at least it's probably minimal.

let's not get into this sort of argument. there is no virgin battlefield if there have been military units in there, with or without a previous battle, with or without prep arty or air strikes. but let's not get in this, it's not important.

We are going to do what we can, within the constraints I just mentioned, but the point of diminishing returns on atmospheric stuff happens very quickly. Therefore, keep expectations for what we can do low

i know

i am the last person to ask for more eye candy. that's not my point at all.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

Interesting posts and good background about tank design production cycles. But what I was looking for was to use "production" as one metric in comparing the "Efficiency" of German tank designs. Comparing within one country means that prices are relevant, production numbers too.

they tell something, but not as much as they are usually made to tell.

to offer a simplified example (note that this doesn't go into the real details like component flow):

Vomag built some tens of tanks per year before 1943. it was slow and inefficient. things change starting on about 1943. now they build on the level of 1000+ tanks per year and it's obviously quite efficient. are they building 10 times more because Panzer IV design was made more efficient? if not, i note they are building mainly TD variants, it's because of that surely? those fools, why didn't they builds the TD variants from the beginning, as they are obviously 10 times chearper to build!? and why didn't they streamline the Panzer IV design two years ago, if it can be made that much more efficient? why oh why didn't Speer come to rationalize that lunatic German economy already years before, as surely this miracle can only be credited to Speer!

except, uh oh, turns out that what really happened is that after two years of construction Vomag's new mass production facilities are finally ready. efficiency of production, or production numbers, had in practice nothing to do with tank design. it had to do with means of production available to them.

it doesn't make production numbers or units of cost totally irrelevant, but to make an evaluation really worth something you'd need to go check the details of the whole production flow.

You have to make some comparisons with the enemy numbers but this really just a reality check.

don't do that. it won't work.

Ease and simplicity of manufacture for series production was not a German forte which was strange given the investment in large new tank factories in Austria for mass production but that was surely what was needed. If you are a follower of Tooze then the need to reduce strategic materials would seem obvious.

you are confused about the cause & effect here. it's the other way around.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

not quite how I recall it - you considered factories converted from other sources as "not new factories" - I considered them as "new to tank production" - a difference we never bothered to resolve 'cos it didn't matter then (or now).

the difference is this:

- Soviet report states it took 3 weeks to have the factory pump out tanks

- German report states it took 2 years to build the new factory

with those numbers it takes 35 times longer to build a new factory.

that's enough of a difference to spend an army or two in delaying the enemy enough so that you can transport the facilities. BTW has anyone looked at the 1941 operations from that perspective?

and besides, it's not a coincidence than a factory like the famous one in Stalingrad, after making some 300 000 tracked tractors, can almost instantly start to make T-34s instead. it's part of the Soviet long term planning made in 1930ies.

they lost exactly 2 factories IIRC - Stalingrad and Kharkov - a list of soviet tank production by factorey & location is at http://rkkaww2.armchairgeneral.com/weapons/afv_production.htm

yes, though i'd recommend using those references i gave links to back then, because they go into greater depth.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

The Germans had the industrial capacity for it, they had longer lead time and warning time, they simply failed in the organizational and urgency task of using it properly. Were the Russians more ready in that sense, yes

cmon, Soviets have a headstart of a full decade. by the time Nazis get in power the Soviets have already begun their long term infrastructure projects for the armaments industry. by the time Nazis build their first tank the Soviets already have full strength tank fleet. nothing the Germans can do can change it.

because they had the correct grand strategy from the start and the Germans had the incorrect one (long war of attrition vs. short war of gambles).

you contradict yourself. early German armaments production is aimed for long war of attrition and that specifically eats from things like tank production. if Germans have an intitial problem, it's exactly that they plan for a too long and too large war in the beginning and that they direct way too much of their resources into armaments production. their economy is very close to collapsing because of it already before the war has even begun.

But it was an unforced error of strategy and economic planning in Germany, and not a lack of industrial capacity. The later achievements show that capacity was well above where they actually were when they started the fight.

the later achievements were results of earlier long term investments into building up the industrial capacity. it takes years.

Nazis get hold of power in 1933-34. five years and you have WW2.

[Improving the look of CM Normandy]

still some more, to make use of your bandwidth:

[Improving the look of CM Normandy]

with almost every game it feels like the combat troops teleport out of thin air. the civilian & natural scenery may look great, but it's almost like it and the combat troops would not exist in the same dimension. if there's eye candy, add eye candy that makes it look like those grunts have actually lived there, that the rear & support elements are around, that the area has seen warfare. make it less clean, less sterile.

just some pics after super quick googling:

[Finnish Fists Thread]

"haluatko pystyttää salon nahkakotaani?"

awgh, that's gross.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

exactly. ooh, it's satisfying to finally read this from you.

the only beef i have with any of the above is the part about German and Soviet prewar industrial capacities being equal. if we are talking about tank production, the capacities were quite unequal.

Soviets had the system ready already before the war. i discussed this with Stalin's Organist in here perhaps a year ago and i refuted every single Soviet tank factory he listed as new. they did lose some factories but all the new factories were basicly just old factories they transported to Urals. many of those factories were up and running in just weeks after arrival.

compare that to the Germans, who still keep investing in tank production infrastructure well after Barbarossa. it's slow business, construction of a factory takes years. it's these later factories capable of mass production that are the cause of the huge late war tank production numbers. without these there's just no way to build that many tanks and the production itself is far less economical.

[Panther, T-34 or Sherman - best design of the war?]

i am a great fan of OR studies and there are some that actually do go to the level of effects made by differences between tanks. Brits made some great studies about that. one good book that includes stuff about them is "Stress of Battle".

my issue is with the fundamental logic of going into production numbers of different tanks, or units of production cost, or strategic / operational loss stats and then deriving qualitative difference between different tank designs from it.

the first reason is that production numbers and units of cost are directly related to resources and means of production available. it's not as simple as just choosing to build a really economical tank, or choosing between design A and B.

the second reason is that you can't derive things like that from strategic/operational level loss statistics. on that level other things will always be more important than the differences between tanks. just look at for example Arracourt or 1941 tank battles. the superior tanks lose real bad and it's not about numbers. if you want to do it well, do it like the Brits and analyze a good number of individual small battles and try to find patterns.

if we forget about high level statistics or production numbers, i agree that looking at tank attributes can be very interesting. i still fear that differences between tanks is not going to matter. at best it's going to be the difference between a medium tank vs heavy tank, tank vs tank destroyer, AT gun vs tank destroyer and so forth.

[Trenches, foxholes, and slit trenches]

i get a feeling there is slight trend of people returning to the forum to check out about how various things are going to be different with the Normandy game. perhaps someone could keep a FAQ of some kind, officially or unofficially, so as to keep noise ratio a bit lower. i myself feel stupid, useless and lazy for asking things which have just been answered a day or two ago. that feeling may be justified in general, but in this case it would have been convinient for my interests if there had been such a FAQ post.

[Command Delay In CM:N?]

good to hear that command delays might return as a WEGO option. i realize you folks are still just thinking about it, but are you planning to make the delay system utilize the fancy chain of command system of Shock Force? so if a given platoon has a radio, it may have shorter command delays for example?

now that i am speaking, or rather typing, i want to inform the world that since 1980ies i have enjoyed tactical wargames that have strong command delay systems (as an example of one such ancient computer wargame; Panzer Strike and the command point system in which many turns could pass without you being able to adjust given orders). i get twisted satisfaction when it takes a while for my men to follow my orders as it adds another dimension to the battle. somehow it feels more realistic to me, though of course in reality it's just my highly subjective, if not almost private, obsession.