V1/V2 research and production...

[Gridley]

Just reading John Keegan's book _Intelligence_in_war_. The chapter about the V-weapons was particularly interesting. Specifically, that the V1 was cheap (~150 pounds ea.), simple in it's design and manufacture, and somewhat effective in causing damage, despite being inaccurate. The V2 was revolutionary, but expensive (~15,000 pounds ea.), complicated, and not really mature (prone to failure) until well into 1945. Curiously, the British intelligence was fairly convinced that the liquid fueled rocket was impossible, despite the fact that the germans were testing their fourth generation. The intelligence failure due entirely to ignorance of what is possible.

An interesting comment therein was that if the Germans could have mass produced the V1 they could have subjected London to the equivalent of a 1000 bomber raid almost twice a week pretty early in the war. The cost and simplicity lending this weapon to mass production, but only in Germany, as the other nations were very far behind in their thinking.

Since I'm not a modder, how hard would it be to reflect this in the PDE research tree? I'd love to see this possible in a what-if scenario...

Thanks,

sg

[reiver]

You could edit the rocket units specs using the editor - so you could increase the range or power or number of strikes that the rockets could make. Unfortunately the increases in range and power are incremental, so you would need to decide what increase per tech level you wanted. I think the rocket range increment is 2 per level and hit is 1 per level.

Cheers

[Retributar]

Interesting Premis that has never crossed my mind before!. "Say-Whot!!!"...a 'NEW-IDEA' for a Hypothetical-Military-Study in the game!.

[thetwo]

Hello Gridley,

Some thoughts about the accuracy and reliabilty of the vengeance weapons. If memory serves, the V2s were decidedly complex weapon systems and were assembled using slave labor in old underground facilities. The rush to meet production quotas permitted the laborers to sabotage parts and assemblies and quality control was, if you will forgive the term, hit and miss. The underground facility also lent itself to corrosion of parts too.

Further, by that point of the war, the German's intelligence system inside in Great Britain had been partly rolled up and the remainder had be doubled. The British were using this network and falsified radio broadcasts to mislead the Germans about where each V2 landed. By doing this systematically, they were able to "walk" the German rockets out of the most populated areas. It was quite a feat.

So both actual and perceived accuracy were issues.

[Retributar]

Excellent information 'Sir-Gridley!'.

I hadn't known that the British were using misinformation to confound the German's!. I would have figured that the German's would have had their own agent's on the ground to confirm the impact sites!.

[Gridley]

With due credit to TheTwo for the previous post, I am very much in agreement - targeting and effectiveness and the changes thereof would be hard to reflect in this kind of war game, particularly considering the lack of reliable BDA, and active deception. However, to me, the 100-fold difference in price tag compared to the V2, a difference which probably would have grown greater with mass production, would be something to explore...

Can anyone think of a more appropriate game engine to "play out" this scenario?

All the best,

Sir-Gridley

[Retributar]

The V2 was especially prone to failure,...as it was being built by 'Slave-labour'!. Some Russian prisoner's were hung up from the underground cavern's cieling for urinating on delicate precision component's!...in order to render them inoperable!.

Other Prisoner's [Welder's]...would purposely not weld the frame-work or whatever-else properly in order to as-well cause the V2 to fail!.

There were many prisoner's doing their own thing, however they could, to assist in foiling the German V2-Programme'!.

As far as how to get these idea's to work in the game,...well again...get 'Hubert' to make recommendation's on that subject-matter!.