The unbearable lightness of heavy artillery

[JonS]

I've heard that this was so for army use for e.g. MGs.

Yes, I meant national armies

[JasonC]

The Japanese had the best torpedoes in the world in WW II. Only the late war Germans were in the same league (better homing mechanisms e.g.). But they also had better platforms for launching them, and were plain better at laying the things down, too. The surface vessels were terrors with the things in night actions, etc.

Their subs were neutered by a bad doctrine that emphasized their role supporting main fleet action (e.g. scouting and picket line roles) and hunting enemy warships (which were too fast for subs of the day, to be sound targets), or those could have been a terror, too...

[JasonC]

Michael - I liked Flat Top back in the day, and its sister game CV (Midway, same system basically). Wasn't terribly playable, but it was a good if involved simulation of a game.

The one downside was the survivability of the planes was so low (especially the Japanese planes), it had one optimum - put everything possible into one strike and pray. There likely wouldn't be enough survivors for a second...

[Michael Emrys]

Michael - I liked Flat Top back in the day, and its sister game CV (Midway, same system basically). Wasn't terribly playable, but it was a good if involved simulation of a game.

Yes. And almost impossible to play solitaire. That's why I kept hoping it would appear on computer with a competent AI opponent.

It seems like a lot of my favorite games were like that. Operation Crusader was one. I have called it the most beautiful game I will never play. Atomic Games did bring out a game by the same name and subject that looked as if they had studied the GDW game carefully. It was in a lot of ways a good effort that still failed miserably.

The one downside was the survivability of the planes was so low (especially the Japanese planes), it had one optimum - put everything possible into one strike and pray. There likely wouldn't be enough survivors for a second...

But wasn't that kind of the way the carrier battles went? A big clash with a large part of the air groups not surviving? The fleets would retire and rebuild their air groups (the US having a decisive edge in that), and then come back and do it all again. I suppose the land based air tended to have more prolonged campaigns, but even there the losses were horrendous for the Japanese.

Michael

[c3k]

Also wouldnt the streams of 50 cal casings and 20mm casings and whatnot damage things 5 miles below them?

Terminal velocity would limit any damage. Would I want to be hit on the (bare) head by a casing dropped from 1,000 feet? No. Would it kill me? No.

(Likewise, a bullet fired STRAIGHT up will stop, then fall back to ground, but it will be tumbling at that point, and its resultant terminal velocity will be far lower than its muzzle velocity. That won't kill you, either. If it has a horizontal component, then it may retain enough horizontal velocity to kill: that's why innocent bystanders get killed when idiots discharge firearms into the air in "celebration".)

[Sublime]

from 1000 ok - but what about 35.000? So then the story that dropping a penny from the Empire State building will dent cars or kill a person is a myth correct?

[YankeeDog]

But wasn't that kind of the way the carrier battles went? A big clash with a large part of the air groups not surviving? The fleets would retire and rebuild their air groups (the US having a decisive edge in that), and then come back and do it all again. I suppose the land based air tended to have more prolonged campaigns, but even there the losses were horrendous for the Japanese.

Yep. Battle of Santa Cruz is a perfect example. Tactically, it's a Japanese victory; they sink one U.S. Fleet Carrier and damage another, losing no capital ships themselves (though several Japanese capital ships were heavily damaged). But they lose so many planes and aircrew that they can't exploit the victory, and furthermore their carrier air corps, already struggling to recover from battles such as Coral Sea and Midway, never really makes good the losses. After the Battle of Santa Cruz, momentum in the battle for air superiority over and around Guadalcanal begins to shift markedly towards the Allies.

What's particularly interesting is that the Japanese lost substantially more aircrew at Santa Cruz than the U.S., even though their actual airframe losses were not all that much higher. Over the battle as a whole, the Japanese lost 99 aircraft to the U.S. 81, but they lost 148 aircrew, while the U.S. only lost 26. I think this was due to a number of reasons. First, Japanese training and doctrine encouraged aircrew to press home the attack to the point of foolhardiness. Second, early war Japanese aircraft, while often superior to Allied designs in other areas, had virtually no armor protection for the pilot or the fuel tanks. Pilots were frequently wounded by otherwise minor hits, and the unprotected, non self-sealing fuel tanks meant that a plane with what was otherwise light damage sometimes couldn't make it back to the carrier, due to loss of fuel. Finally, the Japanese did not put a lot of effort into recovering downed aircrews, while the U.S. was willing to commit substantial assets to finding downed pilots, and bringing them home.

[YankeeDog]

from 1000 ok - but what about 35.000? So then the story that dropping a penny from the Empire State building will dent cars or kill a person is a myth correct?

No difference. Small object like that is going to easily reach terminal velocity in less than 1000 ft. So it's going the same speed when it hits the ground whether it's dropped from 1,000, 10,000, or 35,000.

What would matter would be if the object were heavier, and/or had a more aerodynamic shape, and therefore a higher terminal velocity.

[c3k]

^^^

Terminal velocity is terminal velocity. It is the velocity where the force exerted on the object by gravity (F=ma, m is mass, a is acceleration (gravity ~ 9.81m/s^2 or 32 ft/s^2), is balanced by the force of aerodynamic drag. F=1/2*rho*V^2*Cd*S. rho is air density (increases at lower altitudes); V is velocity; Cd is coefficient of drag (primarily a function of shape); S is surface area ("how much" stuff is exposing that Cd).

You can balance the equations and solve for V to determine the terminal velocity for any object of a specific mass, Cd, size, and altitude. A shell casing would have a low Velocity.

[YankeeDog]

Interesting side note about the Japanese Type 93 torpedo, sometimes referred to as the "Long Lance" (a post-war U.S. name, not a Japanese appellation):

It was indeed superior to pretty much all contemporary torpedoes in almost every respect -- longer range, faster running speed, larger warhead. Allies and also the Germans eventually came up other torpedo tech that the Japanese did not, like zig-zag, acoustic homing, high-altitude droppable, etc., but nobody else ever really came up with a design that exceeded the quality and capabilities of the Type 93 as a straight-run, unguided torpedo.

However, it had one very significant Achilles heel: The Type 93 achieved longer range and higher speed mostly by using pure oxygen rather than compressed air as an oxidizer. Pure oxygen provided more energy, but it also made the Type 93 fairly shock sensitive; the oxygen tank could detonate spontaneously as a result relatively small hits, such as shell splinters and MG rounds from strafing airplanes. If the oxygen tank went up, it usually set off the warhead as well.

And the Japanese definitely lost ships due to Type 93s detonating in their tubes. To cite a favorite example of mine, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Heavy Cruiser Chokai was probably disabled by a single 5in. shell from the Escort Carrier USS Kalinin Bay hitting her torpedo tubes and causing a catastrophic chain reaction. The Chokai was so heavily damaged by this she was immediately hors de combat, and was eventually scuttled. This gives the Kalinin Bay the interesting distinction of being the only Aircraft Carrier in history to win a gunfight with a capital ship. And she was an Escort Carrier at that.

I try to remember this incident as an example of the random fortunes of war whenever something "unfair" happens to me in CMBN -- my Tiger loses a head-to-head gunfight with a vanilla Sherman, my Company Co gets taken out by my own spotting round, etc....

[JasonC]

YD - true enough, but one optimum makes for poor wargaming as a pure strategy game thing. In Flattop and CV, when to go "all in" on a spotting report was about the only real decision you made all game. The tactics were all in coordinating the air search patterns. Which was fun if a bit fiddly, but nowhere near as interesting as other tactics decisions, in other contexts.

On Japanese plane and pilot losses, their key bottleneck was their pretty dumb pilot training practices. Basically they left experienced aircrew out in the active theater as though the war was going to be decided today by quality considerations this instant, instead of focusing on the long run flow of pilots to the theater to cover losses. Military gamblers make that mistake a lot - fighting a war as a one time stock, not an ongoing flow, affair. The Japanese actually did have enough aircraft production, and they certainly had high enough pilot quality in the early war. They just never made it a priority to transfer those skills to the next generation of pilots. They expected that to happen in theater and in action - a bad idea that exposed new aircrew to excessive losses and didn't give them time to learn.

[Michael Emrys]

In the JNAF the training establishment was dedicated to turning out a small number of extremely good pilots. They were indeed among the best in the world at the start of the war, and the ones that survived combat continued to be so. However, that system could only produce maybe a few hundred a year. When it became clear that what was needed was thousands, the training system simply could not cope, largely for the reasons Jason mentions above. The US, on the other hand, had anticipated the kind of war that would have to be fought and established a training system geared to producing the quantity of pilots who would be "good enough". By 1944 even the quality balance had shifted in the US' favor as most of the really good JNAF pilots were now dead and their replacements had not had the same degree of training, while the USN pilots—who in any case started the war as very good—got even better with the institutional acquisition of combat experience.

I don't know much at all about the JAAF in this regard, but it would not surprise me if the same conditions applied to it as well.

Michael

[JasonC]

The JAAF story was similar, with the difference that they had extensive experience in China, but against non existent opposition for a long time. When they eventually faced the small US air force in China they weren't very good. In the Burma theater they did OK for a while against the Brits, when the latter only had Hurricane Is and not many of those. After they faced modern Spitfires and Wellingtons, in numbers, they were less successful.

Another problem the JAAF has was poor aircraft for much longer than the navy. They fought in Oscars through 1942 and into 1943, and it was slow by the standards of midwar and poorly armed by any standard. When they got Tonys in 1943, the strengths of that plane were too different from what they were used to from Oscars (it was a vertical / speed fighter, not a turning dogfighter), and they were deployed far forward with poor base facilities (in New Guinea e.g., about the least developed location in the entire world at the time). They performed poorly as a result.

By the time the JAAF got a truly good fighter - the Frank - most of the good pilots were dead. Those left could do things with that aircraft, even against late war US types, and showed it late in the war. But most of the pilots sent up in them were too inexperienced to get much out of them, and the US had overwhelming air odds by then anyway. It was too late for a few good fighters to make any serious difference.