NS Military Realism Consultancy Thread Mk X Purps Safe Space

[Volkite Hegemony]

Destroying enemy weapons is a good way to keep them out of the hands of the enemy, yes.

Who cares once the enemy is defeated? The German army of WW2 wasn't equipped via the second hand luger market.

[Gallia-]

Destroying enemy weapons is a good way to keep them out of the hands of the enemy, yes.

Who cares once the enemy is defeated? The German army of WW2 wasn't equipped via the second hand luger market.

Except there's no reason to have a second-hand Luger market, unless you're the United States and think gun ownership is a human right, which is wholly subjective. It's not like the United States is bringing back a boatload of rusty AKs and Sten guns from Iraq these days, though. They get shredded or burned in huge pyres.

The latter is generally more practical because it directly denies your enemies, both extant and potential, from having arms.

Bringing back a firearm for keepsake's purposes is generally very different from bringing back a firearm for actual selling purposes. The latter encourages development of a black market in firearms, or at least eases the ability of seditious elements to arm themselves with ordnance for no particularly good reason. Most war trophies in WW2, for example, where kept by their owners and used for display or hunting.

If they were just souvenirs, you could probably destroy them by filling the chambers with molten metal or staking them and possibly destroying the firing pin. I'm not really sure what goes into demilitarization, though.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Who cares once the enemy is defeated? The German army of WW2 wasn't equipped via the second hand luger market.

unless you're the United States and think gun ownership is a human right

Who needs an armed (and most of the time one that harbours very questionable loyalties) citizenry when you have levée en masse

[Gallia-]

unless you're the United States and think gun ownership is a human right

Who needs an armed (and most of the time one that harbours very questionable loyalties) citizenry when you have levée en masse

ikr

:18th century bad memes: i guess

they didnt even realize they needed a standing army to beat the british!

[NeuPolska]

Is there any benefit to specifically pick out unmarried young men if conscription is put into effect?

It seems to me like unmarried young men have a lot less to lose than married ones, and it's not like they're helping society by helping in creating more future soldiers or workers. I personally am a young unmarried man but I wouldn't hesitate getting married to my loyal girlfriend, especially if I meant not getting thrown into the meatgrinder. However the point I'm trying to get at is that if I didn't have a particular love interest I'd be a lot more willing to fight in a war.

[Crookfur]

Is there any benefit to specifically pick out unmarried young men if conscription is put into effect?

It seems to me like unmarried young men have a lot less to lose than married ones, and it's not like they're helping society by helping in creating more future soldiers or workers. I personally am a young unmarried man but I wouldn't hesitate getting married to my loyal girlfriend, especially if I meant not getting thrown into the meatgrinder. However the point I'm trying to get at is that if I didn't have a particular love interest I'd be a lot more willing to fight in a war.

Well it would certainly cut down the number of dear John letters the forces post office would have to deal with.

IIRC most conscription systems have been pretty blind to marital status even when they have otherwise taken consideration of dependents.

Keskinen: missed that bit and went straight to the 35,000lb service number however the max bomb load (let alone your slightly expanded one) never going to be the most common load mainly because it limits the fuel load and hurts the range. With the max load victors might have been able to hit France and maybe mine some French Atlantic ports but with a circa 20,000lb load Moscow and further into Russia is doable. 35,000lb would probably be the limit for reaching eastern europe.

As for the training pipeline, yup that would be right.

[Consular]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask really.

I've been thinking about making a MIRV capable Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile.

Would there be one MaRV which carries, targets and deploys multiple warheads? Or would each warhead have its own MaRV?

I'm not sure the former would work, as the ships are moving and the warheads might need to make last minute adjustments.

But the latter requires a larger missile, and some way for the multiple MaRVs to coordinate their action?

[Crysuko]

Given PMT level technology, what do you guys think the largest projectile a ship mounted railgun could practically fire?

[-Celibrae-]

I've been Inspired by Air Force 2025, particularly the hypersonic missile: I'm envisioning a system similar to the X-51, which uses a rocket booster to accelerate to Mach 4-5, but instead of cruising the scramjet then sustains that speed in a climb. Then, a stealthy supersonic/hypersonic vehicle detaches and glides towards the target, with perhaps a range of 300 nautical miles if launched at 50,000 feet at subsonic speed. Longer range if launched by a higher-flying, faster aircraft.

Is this feasible and if so, to what extent?

[Allanea]

Bringing back a firearm for keepsake's purposes is generally very different from bringing back a firearm for actual selling purposes. The latter encourages development of a black market in firearms, or at least eases the ability of seditious elements to arm themselves with ordnance for no particularly good reason. Most war trophies in WW2, for example, where kept by their owners and used for display or hunting.

A large amount of WW2 capture Mausers have ended up on the surplus firearm market a decade or two later, however. I'm not actually sure where they were in the interim.

[Allanea]

What exactly do you mean? Do you mean soldiers looting individually as people, or looting as an organized process, like the Soviet Trophy brigades?

In general, looting from enemy civilians is to be avoided (there are perhaps some exceptions), because it has the double effect of generating discontent in the occupied population and eroding troop discipline because soldiers start being more interested in raiding the locals for collectible local carpets (as Soviet troops in Afghanistan) than actually doing boring thinbgs like guarding base camp. It also makes them easy targets for partisan violence.

As for looting enemy troops, it's almost inevitable your soldiers will either grab on to whatever is useful for them to use during the campaign (starting from small items like a well-made foreign food thermos to outright vehicles and weapons), or take small keepsakes like knives, enemy medals, and even weapons.

I was thinking along the lines of taking enemy equipment or crap with the intention of making it a keepsake, a souvenir, or selling it to museums and collectors.

As for civilian crap, I was thinking along the lines of looting food, or if they come across an abandoned farm or a house that's been hit by arty fire, they take whatever they find that might be worth taking. Obviously if living civilians are found, then the items they claim to own cannot be looted, and civilians themselves are to be left alone or instructed on how to evacuate safely if in a war-torn urban environment.

In the real world, looting may be illegal, but soldiers will likely pick up small items here and there, like a can of food, or someone's goat, or maybe even a dog. (Thre is an infamous incident where Russian soldiers stole and ate a pack of wild dogs from Chechen cops they were liaising with.)

Conversely, large amounts of food that might be of use should probably be requisitioned in an orderly manner by the logistics troops, preferably either paid for, or secured with some kind of promise of pay. In the real world, US forces in theater have small procurement chains of their own to ensure this sort of thing.

[The Akasha Colony]

Is there any benefit to specifically pick out unmarried young men if conscription is put into effect?

It seems to me like unmarried young men have a lot less to lose than married ones, and it's not like they're helping society by helping in creating more future soldiers or workers. I personally am a young unmarried man but I wouldn't hesitate getting married to my loyal girlfriend, especially if I meant not getting thrown into the meatgrinder. However the point I'm trying to get at is that if I didn't have a particular love interest I'd be a lot more willing to fight in a war.

You would suddenly have a lot of young men marrying for no reason than to avoid conscription. Lots of paper marriages, followed by lots of divorces once they pass conscription age.

[Gallia-]

Bringing back a firearm for keepsake's purposes is generally very different from bringing back a firearm for actual selling purposes. The latter encourages development of a black market in firearms, or at least eases the ability of seditious elements to arm themselves with ordnance for no particularly good reason. Most war trophies in WW2, for example, where kept by their owners and used for display or hunting.

A large amount of WW2 capture Mausers have ended up on the surplus firearm market a decade or two later, however. I'm not actually sure where they were in the interim.

Being used by soldiers to hunt deer or sitting above mantles.

Children selling their parents' keepsakes is nothing new.

I've been Inspired by Air Force 2025, particularly the hypersonic missile: I'm envisioning a system similar to the X-51, which uses a rocket booster to accelerate to Mach 4-5, but instead of cruising the scramjet then sustains that speed in a climb. Then, a stealthy supersonic/hypersonic vehicle detaches and glides towards the target, with perhaps a range of 300 nautical miles if launched at 50,000 feet at subsonic speed. Longer range if launched by a higher-flying, faster aircraft.

Is this feasible and if so, to what extent?

Basically nothing in Air Force 2025 was feasible.

They weren't counting on the fact that our ability to produce things and increase technology has stalled.

[-Celibrae-]

First on the list is a Global Information Management System (GIMS), described as a "pervasive network" of information and data collectors, processors, and analyzers. It would not only be "smart" in the sense that it "sees all and knows all," but it would also be smart enough to tailor the information at its disposal to a particular user, giving him the data he most needs, and at an appropriate level of detail. The GIMS could also provide a three-dimensional "holographic war room," summarizing instantly and in real time what it could take hours to figure out from numbers, reports, or even flat-panel images.

A Global Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Targeting System (GSRTS) would be a spacebased sensor and data-distribution system that could create and relay a real-time, three-dimensional image of a target or other area of interest to a ready room or gathering of decision-makers. It would be useful for command-and-control and situational awareness "at all levels."

Two other technologies which particularly caught my eye in Air Force 2025, and I'm sure piqued Galla's interest, were the GIMS and GSRTS systems. GIMS was highlighted as the most crucial of all the systems examined, and GSRTS was seen as a sort of stepping stone to GIMS.

My question is, what difficulties would one face in making these paper technologies a reality, and how soon could it be done? Before 2025, given enough investment?

Edit: Boom goes the dynamite. I'm sad now.

Edit 2: It seems to me that GIMS would require a network to link all of the sensors we have today together, and supercomputers to sort the data. But that seems to be a rather simplistic interpretation of something I probably don't understand.

[Gallia-]

My question is, what difficulties would one face in making these paper technologies a reality, and how soon could it be done?

Science is literally incapable of delivering such things.

Before 2025, given enough investment?

That's kind of the point. We pour billions of dollars into this sort of stuff and nothing happens. We've been spending billions on developing hypersonic engines, high powered combat lasers, and advanced neural networks, and nothing has really come of any it. The things predicted in Air Force 2025 were assuming that the massive technological innovations of the 1990s (which, really, was about average after several decades of sub-par growth) would continue infinitely, which was wrong.

http://81.47.175.201/flagship/attachmen ... SC2005.pdf

Unlike dumb people, people who actually know what they're talking about tend to recognize innovation as slowing down and that believing innovation in the future will look like that in the past is a bit silly since each "spurt" of innovative growth has been slower than the last since the mid-19th century. Why? Who knows. Perhaps for economic reasons (perhaps rent seekers, in financializing our capitalist system, have destroyed its ability to innovate by outsourcing, automating, and offshoring our powerful industries) or perhaps for human reasons (we're too stupid to figure out the problems) but it's not really important because no one has offered a serious solution to the matter.

It seems that the only people who are consistently capable of innovating are people who control powerful industry. The Chinese have gone from being basically ass-backwards in the 1970s to rivaling the United States in the technological arms race in the 2010s. In a scant 70-80 years, they will be superior to the technological capabilities of the United States, which implies that the lack of innovation can be traced back to economics.

If economic malaise is the case, what you'd need to do is avoid the liberalization and free trade poison pills that Western economies swallowed in the 1970s. Don't try to industrialize the "developing world". Don't offshore or outsource your most capable and innovative industries. If it means paying $50 instead of $5 to assemble an iPhone, so be it, but it will at least ensure that your ability to create new things isn't completely destroyed as is the case with the United Kingdom, Canada, and France.

Of course, loads of important and intelligent people see this happening, only 50 years after it's occurred, which is why both the European Union and United States are becoming increasingly protectionist. The question is whether or not it's too late. Certainly too late for some Western countries that once had independent industries, like the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, but maybe not for others like Germany and USA. Israel, too, is another notable example of a decent military-industrial complex (although it's smaller than you'd think since a very large majority of it is an extension of the United States [perhaps in the future, Chinese?] MIC).

The one good thing about Brexit is that the major force behind free trade and neoliberalism in the EU [Britain] is now leaving, which leaves the European Union open to consider secondary options. Germany in particular is pushing the way for antidumping measures to combat Chinese incursion. Britain will soon be owned by Indian and Chinese oligarchs, which is ultimately what the Brexiters meant by "economic freedom" or whatever.

Edit: Boom goes the dynamite. I'm sad now.

Don't worry, Air Force 2025 is literally the cancer that is killing the US military.

It's rocket belts and atomic craters for the 21st century.

Edit 2: It seems to me that GIMS would require a network to link all of the sensors we have today together, and supercomputers to sort the data. But that seems to be a rather simplistic interpretation of something I probably don't understand.

GIMS is literally the FCS Network, on a much bigger scale, with the addition of a computer brain.

If FCS didn't work, GIMS definitely won't, no matter how much money you throw into it.

You'd need to start from a clean slate for GIMS, instead of trying to make it backwards compatible, but that's only one problem solved (and a billion more created). Joint Tactical Radio System and FCS would be stepping stones towards a functional GIMS, but neither works in practice because the problems are too difficult to solve in a reasonably timeframe.

If you committed to a serious overhaul of your communications systems in like 1995, poured a few billion dollars into it every year, and ended up spending around $40-50bn you might have something that approaches GIMS in the abstract sense by 2025. You could also buy III US Corps with that much money.

[Ardavia]

for a unit without proper mine-clearing equipment, what could be done to clear a minefield in a reasonable hurry (during a breaching operation, so with a pretty constrained timetable)?

would artillery fire be effective at all at clearing a lane through it?

[Aldina]

for a unit without proper mine-clearing equipment, what could be done to clear a minefield in a reasonable hurry (during a breaching operation, so with a pretty constrained timetable)?

would artillery fire be effective at all at clearing a lane through it?

There's really no "easy" way to clear mines quickly without demining equipment (and indeed this is why the equipment exists in the first place), but necessity is the mother of invention. You can drive an armored vehicle through the field (though obviously this is a big no-no when anti-tank mines are involved), roll barrels of water through it, give your soldiers inflatable overshoes, or have a bunch of POWs march across the field in tight lockstep if you feel like being a dick.

[Gallia-]

SLUFAE could defeat certain forms of mines, but most are pressure hardened nowadays IIRC. A nuclear airburst could exert sufficient pressure to detonate mines, maybe? That's a bit Spizanian or 2012 Galla. It also would probably create a crater obstacle at the altitude that generates adequate psi to trigger the fuses and that would require crossing, so it might be counter-productive.

Breaching a minefield depends on how dense and large it is, ultimately. Without mine rollers, dozers, or lane clearing charges, you're probably stuck with dismounting infantry and having them poke the ground with bayonets to uncover buried anti-tank or anti-personnel mines and trying to disarm them by hand.

Honestly though, if you don't have dozer blades or mine rollers, you shouldn't be fighting a war.

[Arthurista]

Does anyone know where I can find the stats for the BAE P.1216?

[Gallia-]

*Hawker-Siddeley.

Calling it "BAE" is like calling Bradley the "BAE".

It never existed so there aren't any.

Unless you mean the physical dimensions.

I drew a picture of it in Franscale but it's only a top-view.

[Arthurista]

I just need some solid dimensional info for this:

http://iiwiki.com/wiki/Arthuristan_Dynamics_Whirlwind

As for engine output, maybe I should consult the data for the Yak-141 or P.1154?

[Gallia-]

There is a book about P.1216. Crookfur might know what engine it was supposed to use, possibly?



This is the picture I drew. The scale is 1 px:1.5 cm

You can derive every important dimension from a three view by scaling the wingspan or length to a frontal or side view, respectively.

Since P.1216 was never actually made aside from a wind tunnel test model, this is as good as it gets.

[Arthurista]

Thanks. Trying to find stats for abandoned projects is an absolute pain. Took me a while to sort out the numbers for my not-ASALM for instance.

[Ardavia]

SLUFAE could defeat certain forms of mines, but most are pressure hardened nowadays IIRC. A nuclear airburst could exert sufficient pressure to detonate mines, maybe? That's a bit Spizanian or 2012 Galla. It also would probably create a crater obstacle at the altitude that generates adequate psi to trigger the fuses and that would require crossing, so it might be counter-productive.

Breaching a minefield depends on how dense and large it is, ultimately. Without mine rollers, dozers, or lane clearing charges, you're probably stuck with dismounting infantry and having them poke the ground with bayonets to uncover buried anti-tank or anti-personnel mines and trying to disarm them by hand.

Honestly though, if you don't have dozer blades or mine rollers, you shouldn't be fighting a war.

the minefield itself is fairly thin and not particularly deep, for what it's worth

the battalion doing the breaching lacks the necessary equipment because its parent brigade was unable to raise all the equipment it should have on paper when it mobilized, which is a result of the military doing little more than glorified police operations for a decade while also being pretty neglected in terms of budget RIP
"shouldn't be fighting a war" is pretty much right tbqh

[Gallia-]

You need actual numbers.

Breaching times depend on length of minefield, density, the training of the troops, the methods used, and the number and size of lanes desired.