NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[The New California Republic]

Can the large caliber naval guns of World War II increase their range by adding gliders?

If you want the shell to "glide" then it'd be difficult as battleship guns were rifled, so the spin imparted on the shell would make wings for gliding worthless. Of course fast forwarding to modern tech you have the likes of the M982 Excalibur shell, but since you are asking about WW2 specifically you can't use stuff like that.

[New Vihenia]

glide extended-range projectile like Fritz X.But it was fired from battleship guns

No. Unfortunately no technology exist back in WW II for artillery projectiles to use Loft glide trajectory. Way to make more range back in WW II was bigger gun, stronger pressure or smaller shell.

[Purpelia]

Given the table we saw a few pages back I can't help but think that even if the technology were there short of making the shell guided the accuracy would be so bad that you could only really use it for bombarding city size targets.

[Kassaran]

Aight, so I'm receiving enough T-34's in 1945 to constitute a sizeable military force, but don't know exactly how much that is. About how many tanks were to a Soviet Armored Brigade in WW2, because all I keep getting from the internet was," It was the size of a part of a Armored Corps", or "It constituted of multiple Tank Battalions" which then leads to post-WW2 Soviet tanks compositions with 13 tanks apiece... If I'm using the 3-tank system, for four elements and one leader, and three companies to a battalion, I can assume that an Armored Corps is roughly 13*87 or 1,131 tanks. Does that sound about right to everyone else?

[Gallia-]

An armored corps varied in composition. Both in the actual tanks and the makeup of the subunits.

[Velkanika]

What do you mean by gliders ? Does that means fins ? or wings ?

glide extended-range projectile like Fritz X.But it was fired from battleship guns

Other posters have this pretty well covered, but gliding shells are a technical impossibility with 1940s technology. In order to make this worth something in combat, the shell has to be guided. If it has wings, it is rather susceptible to crosswinds so the shell has to be able to adjust course to make that method work, at which point it would be a complete waste of money and time if you didn't make it a smart munition to justify the added cost by improving its accuracy so you need fewer rounds overall to accomplish the same mission.

Look into rocket assisted projectiles for something that would be more feasible for the era, but again those weren't really a thing until the Cold War and even today remain a rarity in both naval and ground pounder artillery units. Naval artillery is only just now becoming relevant again due to the development of guided shells with ranges approaching or exceeding 100 nautical miles, which makes them competitive with Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles. The PRC's PLAN has been making a fair bit of headway on that tech, and the US Navy is trying to figure out if they want to dive into that or just buy more and better missiles.

Aight, so I'm receiving enough T-34's in 1945 to constitute a sizeable military force, but don't know exactly how much that is. About how many tanks were to a Soviet Armored Brigade in WW2, because all I keep getting from the internet was," It was the size of a part of a Armored Corps", or "It constituted of multiple Tank Battalions" which then leads to post-WW2 Soviet tanks compositions with 13 tanks apiece... If I'm using the 3-tank system, for four elements and one leader, and three companies to a battalion, I can assume that an Armored Corps is roughly 13*87 or 1,131 tanks. Does that sound about right to everyone else?

Tailor a Corps to the terrain it will fight in and the mission it will achieve. That's how it is/was done IRL so that's what you should be doing given the thread title.

[Gallia-]

give me an hour and ill give you a fairly detailed TO&E list of a soviet armored battalion from 1942

destroyer battalions were cool even if they were failed irl

[Velkanika]

You know what, I'm going to expand a little on my previous post in a new one because I'm gonna go off on a bit of a tangent here (and I'm pretty sure someone else will post before I'm done writing).

There is a very interesting trend in modern naval shipbuilding toward larger displacement combatants, which principally appears to be chasing two design features of large displacement warships. First, the extra displacement gives you more space to fit additional weapons for less than it would cost to put those on multiple, independent ships. This is a rather interesting trend given that existing examples of missile-age combat favor splitting your combat power across multiple ships rather than going with one big warship. More ships are harder to kill, and survivability is just as important as anything else in war. Second, a larger displacement gives you the space for a larger power plant and all those interesting new toys like lasers, rail guns, more computer processing power, and anything else that comes up in the next 30 years or so. Of that list, lasers and computers are the two I think will absolutely happen regardless of the price tags. Lasers show immense promise as point-defense weapons for dealing with both incoming munitions and swarming small boats like Iranian Boghammers and Chinese militia fishermen, and if they can be made to fit on an LCS in addition to their new missiles then the LCS fleet will be really useful in a high-end fight.

And then there's the rail guns. Fun fact - the space requirements of a rail gun are rather comparable to those of an old 12"/50 caliber naval gun. So, if you're going to build a ship armed with rail guns you need a lot of internal space, which means it has to be big. If it's big, it has to be survivable, which means a significant armament of SAMs. If you're making it that big, then you might as well put some armor back on it because it's already huge, and armor isn't that bulky. And suddenly you're talking about something that realistically will displace 60,000 tons and is a dedicated surface combatant thanks to the rail guns, and has an external profile that screams "battleship." So, depending on the exact mixture of brilliance naval architects come up with over the next few decades and how willing Congress is to pay for things, we might see battleships make a comeback. Alternatively, the engineers working on rail guns might be able to make them fit into considerably smaller platforms like USS Zumwaldt in which case we'll start seeing them on large cruisers, or potentially an entirely new classification of warship.

give me an hour and ill give you a fairly detailed TO&E list of a soviet armored battalion from 1942

destroyer battalions were cool even if they were failed irl

I've been wondering how those things worked, I totally want to see this.

[Gallia-]

anyone who has a "military history degree" should really have already read stumbling colossus and colossus reborn but okay

[Kassaran]

I'm just a POG, my extents of military history come from FREEDOM channel (Military Channel) and How-Many-Times-Can-We-Link-It-To-Aliens Channel.

[Gallia-]

destroyer battalions were probably made by space aliens tbh

they had like zero machine guns iirc it was pretty much all AT guns and medium tanks lmao

[Velkanika]

anyone who has a "military history degree" should really have already read stumbling colossus and colossus reborn but okay

I focused on naval history, when I read that one I was more interested in the things that float.

Edit: Also, mandatory FUCKING HISTORY CHANNEL BULLSHIT FUCKING ALIENS JESUS CHRIST

The History Channel is unworthy of the name at this point, especially after last year's Amelia Earhart clusterfuck. And the Military Channel has somehow managed to turn itself into a reality TV network for AR-15 knockoffs that I lack a sufficiently cheap alcohol to waste on making it watchable, so I frankly have just given up on cable entirely.

[Gallia-]

give me another hour i need t odig through my piles of books i cant find stumbling colossus

or ill just look at libgen

also i guzzled a bottle of wine to sate my alcoholism so that might be theu iseue

e: ill have to find it tomorrow but the tl;dr is that 1,000 tanks can be too few or too many for a soviet style corps

the "soviet style" at this point in time was highly evolutionary and broadly reactive for the first 18 months of barbarossa or so while things like [tank] destroyer battalions and mechanized fronts were dissolved, reconstituted, and rebuilt from the ground up and at points the Stavka was being forced to press gang naval infantrymen into the RKKA to the stop the hitlerites

medium size countries like cze or polen would have maybe 500 tanks in their entire national arsenals and im not sure they would have the foresight to organize them along modern methods like brigade-battalion combined arms teams

tank-heavy formations comprising predominantly medium and light tanks backed by towed self propelled guns with literally no infantrymen were not only popular they were relatively common prior to ww2 because no one knew how to use tanks very well (and the people who did didnt bother investing in tanks lol) so yeah

getting a bunch of vickers 7-tons or something would be more likely for a small to medium size country, or developing your own lightish medium like sweden and czechslovakia did, but being gifted t-34s is probably unlikely unless there is somehow a glut of t-34s which wouldnt really happen until the 1950s or so wiuth the introduction of t-54 in mass in the red army

better would be a couple regiments (~100 tanks) of t-26s for the period which would not be out of the norm for anyone who is being gifted/purchasing tanks in the first place

the soviets did not employ "brigades" in a fixed formation because the red army brigade was a command post which received battalions from a regiment or division and was organized ad hoc for tasks like forward detachment operations; this would make it similar to how the us army employs battalion task forces (but bigger), which are also ad hoc task organizations

the fixed formation was the regiment which was typically 3 battalions of infantrymen and 1 battalion of mediums, sometimes with a motor battalion for transportation of the infantrymen

tanks were the reverse although like the destroyer battalions sometimes they lacked infantrymen

also brigades were typically closer to battalion size for a really long time due to shortages of men from all the einsatzgruppen liquidating villages and desertions and such

[Gallia-]

give me an hour and ill give you a fairly detailed TO&E list of a soviet armored battalion from 1942

destroyer battalions were cool even if they were failed irl

I've been wondering how those things worked, I totally want to see this.

the point glantz is making in his book is that they didnt lol

but anyone who knows how barbarossa turned out know this already

Lasers show immense promise as

immense wastes of money suitable for lining the pockets of overpaid and under-utilized bureaucrats, managers, and engineers

more computer processing power, (...) in the next 30 years or so.

computers are going to stop getting more "processing power" in about 5-10 years lol

although at this point coders might be so inept that theyll simply be unable to cope with efficiently utilizing the now physically imposed restraints on hardware improvements since that's basically the only thing keeping java alive among other trash code languages

There is a very interesting trend in modern naval shipbuilding toward larger displacement combatants,

no there isnt

there was a very interesting trend in the post-ww2 era of "about half a century ago" where ship sizes remained static (relative to the larger increases between classes seen in the interwar where ships grew in displacement sometimes like 25-30%) since the emphasis was on trans-atlantic operations rather than colonial/world policing of the collective League superpowers

we are now returning to the historical baseline of "pacific war" where ships are just naturally going to be larger to accommodate greater quantities of coal/bunker oil

duh

it's only "big" because ships 40 years ago were actually just tiny lmao

relative to actual historical trends it's in line with what you saw with the last major pacific war arms race, and actually a bit weedier due to the paucity of 20-30,000 ton combatants, with the sole exception that there are a few more shinanos floating around than there were in '44

the overall average ends up being fatter at both the small (light cruiser) and large ends (yamato/shinano) of the scale whereas the interwar era was probably a wee bit less extreme with panzerschiffs and pensacolas running around but i doubt it mattered much

required range is generally the biggest driver of ship displacement ultimately since fuel requirements per knot-mile are hard to drive down even with the hyper turbines and ultra diesels of the 1990s

So, if you're going to build a ship armed with rail guns you need a lot of internal space, which means it has to be big.

12,000 tons is not "big" in the slightest sense of the word

France had followed the Duguay-Trouin's with a similar heavy cruiser, Duquesne. This two ship class, commissioned in 1928, had 8-inch guns in the same arrangement as their predecessor, but with the hull enlarged to 10,000 tons standard, 185m (606.95") LBP, to support the heavier weapons and more AA guns. Speed was 33.75 knots on 120,000 SHP (exceeded on trials). Like the light cruisers, they had no armor, just a box of 30 mm plate around each magazine. The follow-on Suffren class, commissioned starting in 1930, kept the same hull dimensions but traded off engine power for additional protection compared to the earlier class. The French also completed the Algerie in 1934 with better protection and an improved eight-inch gun.xxxvi

Italy's Fiume class, commissioned in 1931, was of 11,680 tons standard, but the government simply did not admit they had exceeded the limits. These were probably the first cruisers to cheat outright on the Treaty. They were armed like the French heavy cruisers with four twin 8-inch turrets, but much better protected.

Japan's Myoko class (1929) also exceeded Treaty limits at 10,940 standard. With her ten 8-inch guns, eight 5-inch/40 DP guns, and 34-knot top speed, these were formidable warships. The Japanese authorities were so happy with them that they refused to reduce any of their capabilities for the next class, Takao, and accordingly it exceeded the limit by even more at 11,350 tons (1932).

(...)

Then in 1929 the Germans started work on the Deutschland class, a 10,000 ton ship with 11-inch (28-cm) guns in two` triple turrets. The size and armament of this ship was limited by the Versailles Treaty, and Germany was trying to get around these limitations. Therefore, it is hard to say exactly what this ship should be called; armored cruiser seems the closest, since she was too slow at 26 knots to be a battle cruiser. The Germans used the word "panzerschiffe" which just means armored ship.

saying maya is a "big ship" might as well be saying "literally an average sized cruiser" is "big"

no, it's historically in line with what a cruiser is in terms of size lol

ships are not getting bigger at all

the biggest surface combatant afloat is half the size of an iowa and the largest USN escorts of the Bush II era would have been the size of...half an iowa

ships just got really small after ww2 because no one paid attention to china because all you had to do was sit in japan or the east coast and sail across tiny oceans lmao

this doesnt make what amounts to a return to form some resurgence of mega ships like yamato jfc lmao

And suddenly you're talking about something that realistically will displace 60,000 tons and is a dedicated surface combatant thanks to the rail guns,

cgnx was 30,000 tons at most (excluding the armed supertanker concepts)

the usn wanted to keep it under 25 and ideally less than 20

So, depending on the exact mixture of brilliance naval architects come up with over the next few decades and how willing Congress is to pay for things, we might see battleships make a comeback.

were your naval history courses taught by kyle mizokami?

Alternatively, the engineers working on rail guns might be able to make them fit into considerably smaller platforms like USS Zumwaldt in which case we'll start seeing them on large cruisers, or potentially an entirely new classification of warship.

lol

maya gets mogged by cleveland and worcester like everyone else

the biggest escort of the usn of 2050 when it might have a single railgun that works 3/5 days of the business week is going to be about 12,000 tons and probably an expanded burke hull, assuming it can even get that done properly

it'll probably be slightly bigger than a phalanx gun since it might have to replace those

I'm just a POG, my extents of military history come from FREEDOM channel (Military Channel) and How-Many-Times-Can-We-Link-It-To-Aliens Channel.

just dont get ultra bulk bodybuilder and snort creatine off ya homies abs bruh youll be ok

not everyone needs to jump out of planes

[Triplebaconation]

remember the guy on shipbucket who did the nuclear battleships with super-stealthy dome turrets

uss sunkcostfallacy defeated by valiant third sea force trawlers swarming in fog

[Gallia-]

that's like the opposite plot of arpeggio the worst anime ever

gallan ultramarine of "nothing but burkes" vs the chad houbei holo-coasters

a helicopter oh god oh fuck

the real reason navies lose is because all the chad ballers in pt boats get blown up while the lame nerds in escorts and cruisers are too weedy to sail close to the enemy and take a few missiles to the steering gear so everyone else can kill launchers with guns lmao

[Austrasien]

There is a very interesting trend in modern naval shipbuilding toward larger displacement combatants, which principally appears to be chasing two design features of large displacement warships... This is a rather interesting trend given that existing examples of missile-age combat favor splitting your combat power across multiple ships rather than going with one big warship. More ships are harder to kill, and survivability is just as important as anything else in war.

The US produced 23 Battleships in WW2 and lost only 2 (or 3 if the Utah is counted). 72 cruisers were produced and 10 lost. 377 destroyers were produced and over 70 lost. The RN experience wasn't much different. Survivability is reduced by reducing displacement generally. Small ships are the bulk of losses while large ships are rarely sunk even proportionate to their smaller number. This is a major deficit of swarming theories; models of theoretical engagements between one major surface combatant and X small boats (which almost invariably conclude the small boat swarm or missile swarm or whatever swarm will destroy the ship while losing only a fraction of the MSC's value) are not good versimillitudes of naval wars as they actually unfold.

[Austrasien]

What do you mean by gliders ? Does that means fins ? or wings ?

glide extended-range projectile like Fritz X.But it was fired from battleship guns

Replace the battleship gun with a rocket motor and its all good.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Killing 30 Osas depends merely on your ability to turn up in four fighters with 64 GBU-53's/SPEAR 3's total. Change my mind.

[Gallia-]

imagine being so historically illiterate you dont even know ratios of ship losses to production in past naval wars to fact check your own shitty computerized swarming simulations

the absolute state of mathematical models

Killing 30 Osas depends merely on your ability to turn up in four fighters with 64 GBU-53's/SPEAR 3's total. Change my mind.

who has 30 osas to use?

a major FAC flotilla would be like 8 ships which could be yeeted by a single H-60

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

glide extended-range projectile like Fritz X.But it was fired from battleship guns

Replace the battleship gun with a rocket motor and its all good.

What if we replaced the battleship itself with a plane or rocket launcher?

[Gallia-]

replace the airplane with a satellite and the bomb with an icbm

peak war

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

:missile bote:'s are the most boring meme anyway and if you haven't figured out how to put ATOMIC POWER into your ships yet in 2020 all your meme navy is going to be good for are memes.

[Gallia-]

:pgm:'s are the most boring meme anyway and if you haven't figured out how to put ATOMIC POWER into your ships yet in 2020 all your meme navy is going to be good for are memes.

strategic metals in real life:

- copper
- molybdenum
- tantalum
- chromium

strategic metals in galla:

- plutonium
- plutonium
- plutonium
- tantalum

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Do soldiers with wives considered attractive in their culture show greater bravery?