NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

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

Please find useful employment elsewhere.

[New Vihenia]

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.

Yess... this will justify my 100K+ tonne battleship.

[The New California Republic]

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

Lolwhat.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

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.

Yess... this will justify my 100K+ tonne battleship.

What is a battleship?
*thinking*

[New Vihenia]

What is a battleship?
*thinking*

This further justify additonal 40K tonne ASW Carrier.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

What is a battleship?
*thinking*

This further justify additonal 40K tonne ASW Carrier.

If it doesn't have a nuclear reactor or two I'll go home.

[The New California Republic]

What is a battleship?
*thinking*

This further justify additonal 40K tonne ASW Carrier.

Lol. Been playing Cold Waters recently. When facing a few destroyers there are usually just a couple of Ka-25s to avoid, but when facing a Moskva and its escorts there are usually around 8+ Ka-25s sweeping the area trying to find me. *shudders*

Usually in that situation I fire a couple of MOSS MK70 torpedoes to either side of the location of the ships, and that decoys the Ka-25s and destroyers away from me.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

How much would it cost me to let the French have their way and retcon the CATOBAR CVF I have into a CVN?
I need motivation for a Bong CGN obviously.

[New Vihenia]

ah quick question... so the size of a runaway may determine what kind of aircrafts an airbase can host. I'm curious however if there is a relationship between airbase's occupied area and the amount of fighter aircrafts it can host.

E.g Airbase as big as Nellis can host 1000 fighters, but smaller airbase can only hold like 100.

[Gallia-]

How much would it cost me to let the French have their way and retcon the CATOBAR CVF I have into a CVN?
I need motivation for a Bong CGN obviously.

too much ):

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

How much would it cost me to let the French have their way and retcon the CATOBAR CVF I have into a CVN?
I need motivation for a Bong CGN obviously.

too much ):

F

[Velkanika]

I just want to begin with noting that my intention with that rant about rail gun battle ships was more to get people to talk about the thread topic rather than "Magical Realming" the thread.

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

Yeah, I figured they'd "work" like that.

Lasers show immense promise as

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

That's a fair criticism of maritime laser tech, they've been discussed as an emerging technology since at least 1980. I think they're going somewhere this time given that one has already been tested at sea by the US Navy and China is making a serious effort at directly competing with us for control of the sea. That, and lasers are far more common now so the technology is considerably more mature and is now getting a lot more attention from Congress.

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

Computer analysis of information streams is going to be an area of heavy investment for the next few decades. There's already so much intelligence being gathered that the US military and intelligence agencies are close to information saturation without either a massive influx of manpower or better software to take off some of the work load.

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

Good points, but the US Navy is generally trending toward higher displacements on everything and has been since the 1960s. This is mostly visible in the destroyer lineage, with the displacement bloat on the Arleigh Burke-class across its flights being particularly noteworthy. That extra displacement has been mainly to add new systems from what I've read. So, the current top of the line surface combatant for the US Navy ATM are Flight III Burke at 10,000 tons or carriers at 100,000 tons, plus the LCS's being retrofitted with ASCMs (finally making them useful outside of Hormuz and the South China Sea). The proposed follow-on to the Burkes is supposed to displace 15,000-25,000 tons, which can't all be fuel given that a Burke already meets the rage requirements for Pacific operations. These tonnage increases can't be all for endurance, the increases are too high.

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

12,000 tons is pretty big for the last 30 years of ship building and the missile age of naval warfare in general. For specifically missile age surface combatants, smaller combatants have been far more popular among the major maritime nations. The fact that we're seeing a push for large surface ships that are not aircraft carriers is fairly historic, not because it hasn't happened before but because it demonstrates a shift in the analysis somewhere, or maybe just a new school of naval architecture just came into style. I honestly don't know, and unfortunately won't know unless I literally ask someone who works somewhere that deals with that stuff.

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

The US Navy secretly loves Dakka, so if rail guns take off as a serious compliment or replacement to guided missiles in the emerging naval paradigm I wouldn't put it past them to build something that vaguely resembles a battleship. I was mainly invested in the whole "rail gun battleship" argument as one direction the tech could push things if you can't make them particularly small or if the big ones are really, really good or something.

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?

No, but his articles are usually fun reads.

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

The Maya looks pretty good, not gonna lie. Also, please God, no more Burkes, I can't help but be reminded of the overweight Frankenstein monsters in the Russian navy per-Tsushima. I hate to say it, but taking away the Navy's ability to set its own shipbuilding program was probably the best thing that could have been done given that they have literally been stuck in a rut building the same hulls over and over again.

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

This is why you should pack MANPADS with your kids box lunches when you send them off with the Osa school

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.

Yess... this will justify my 100K+ tonne battleship.

Fun fact: Battleships were replaced by aircraft carriers because aircraft could deliver a 1,000 lbs bomb ten times as far. The dominant warship in surface warfare has always been the ship that could effectively deliver massive firepower at the longest standoff range. If you can come up with a weapon system that needs a platform that size which can hit targets at sea better than a carrier air wing could, or alternatively in a way they can't, then you're a good chunk of the way to your "realism" justification.

[The New California Republic]

ah quick question... so the size of a runaway may determine what kind of aircrafts an airbase can host. I'm curious however if there is a relationship between airbase's occupied area and the amount of fighter aircrafts it can host.

E.g Airbase as big as Nellis can host 1000 fighters, but smaller airbase can only hold like 100.

If you pack aircraft into every square inch of space then it's a case of "how long is a piece of string" in terms of the number of aircraft an airbase can host, but that's a very bad idea for a number of reasons. First is that the aircraft would be very vulnerable sat in tight rows on the concrete, second is that the support facilities will only be able to keep a certain number of the aircraft operating, and third is that the number of runways will limit the rate that the aircraft can be put in the air.

[Velkanika]

ah quick question... so the size of a runaway may determine what kind of aircrafts an airbase can host. I'm curious however if there is a relationship between airbase's occupied area and the amount of fighter aircrafts it can host.

E.g Airbase as big as Nellis can host 1000 fighters, but smaller airbase can only hold like 100.

Sort of. Larger airbases have more space for aircraft shelters to sprawl out along the taxiways, which helps with dispersing combat aircraft. You want to disperse your aircraft in as many places as possible to prevent them all from being cut off on the ground in an air strike. A key part of modern air operations is to ground an enemy air force where destroying it is significantly easier, which functionally means cratering runway access points and other key traffic points to prevent aircraft from being able to take off, then bombing every shelter you have munitions for. Aircraft parked on the tarmac are extremely easy to destroy with cluster munitions or even strafing runs, so you absolutely must keep them in shelters if you want them to be survivable.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

What's a 3 km manpad going to do against a volley of Sea Skuas 10 km's away?

[The New California Republic]

What's a 3 km manpad going to do against a volley of Sea Skuas 10 km's away?

Same as a ZSU-23-4 will do against an aircraft at 10,000 feet: nothing.

[New Vihenia]

If you pack aircraft into every square inch of space then it's a case of "how long is a piece of string" in terms of the number of aircraft an airbase can host, but that's a very bad idea for a number of reasons. First is that the aircraft would be very vulnerable sat in tight rows on the concrete, second is that the support facilities will only be able to keep a certain number of the aircraft operating, and third is that the number of runways will limit the rate that the aircraft can be put in the air.

I am asking does any relationship exist ?

This is not a question of whether i can jam pack aircraft in airbase.. but How many can actually be accommodated and whether bigger airbase can host and accommodate more. Logically bigger base could host and support more and may put more on air. The question is.. how many and whether a relationship could be made with the base's size.

[The New California Republic]

If you pack aircraft into every square inch of space then it's a case of "how long is a piece of string" in terms of the number of aircraft an airbase can host, but that's a very bad idea for a number of reasons. First is that the aircraft would be very vulnerable sat in tight rows on the concrete, second is that the support facilities will only be able to keep a certain number of the aircraft operating, and third is that the number of runways will limit the rate that the aircraft can be put in the air.

I am asking does any relationship exist ?

This is not a question of whether i can jam pack aircraft in airbase.. but How many can actually be accommodated and whether bigger airbase can host and accommodate more. Logically bigger base could host and support more and may put more on air. The question is.. how many and whether a relationship could be made with the base's size.

There are a lot of variables to consider, so it can't be reduced simply to area. It depends on how the base is designed, what aircraft are based there, number of technicians, number of workshops, number of storage areas for fuel and munitions, what level of compromise is willing to be made for the protection of aircraft, etc.

As a general rule of thumb yes, bigger airbases can host more aircraft, but it's difficult to devise a formula for it.

[Gallia-]

i dont have enough gin, whisky, and wine to deal with the badposting rn

What's a 3 km manpad going to do against a volley of Sea Skuas 10 km's away?

literally nothing

3"/62 can engage a helicopter with sea skua it just didnt

[Velkanika]

What's a 3 km manpad going to do against a volley of Sea Skuas 10 km's away?

Make you feel better, or if you're lucky kill some Sea Skuas. Or if everything happens perfectly, you whack the helicopter when he closes to VID you in the rain because you are not commanded by a Muppet and the missile boat swarm is dispersed and pretending to be fishermen.

i dont have enough gin, whisky, and wine to deal with the badposting rn

What's a 3 km manpad going to do against a volley of Sea Skuas 10 km's away?

literally nothing

3"/62 can engage a helicopter with sea skua it just didnt

I have long since resorted to the bad flavors of cider that are left over from a bunch of variety packs when I post here, that way I'm not wasting the good stuff.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

"I hope he closes to VID so I can fire my Strela-2 at him"
Lmfao just give up trying to fight a thalassocracy
Embrace the Ethiopian Way.

[Gallia-]

because you are not commanded by a Muppet and the missile boat swarm is dispersed and pretending to be fishermen.

Cargo cult history strikes again!

This has never happened. Ever. And it never will. The times where such events as "the big ship is sunk by small ships" are a "black swan" event. The general statistical outcome is that the big ship wins. How do we know this? Because we have thousands of models run throughout history.

Trying to fit a round peg model into a square hole reality is generally why "military science" is discredited in the West. It's less actual scientific study of things and more fraudsters and their know-nothing proteges running around writing blogs. The Soviet study of military science was less treating it as an absolute doctrinaire dogma, al a some sort of quasi-religious worshiping at the altar of computer modeling, and more a general application of boring-but-true principles to the real practical utility of solving problems related to national defense, and certainly not something to be trusted to genuinely awful snake oil salesmen like "military consultants" or whatever.

Western military science tends to approach things from a "just-so" sort of manner, trying to explain things with an all-encompassing, technocratic viewpoint by incorporating thousands of variables, quantifying things that cannot genuinely be quantified (like "troop morale" and "cultural contextual views", as well as "troop seasoning" and esprit de corps, etc.) and then tabulates this into several gigabytes of lookup tables and information taken from Jane's and open source publications to try to prove some batshit stupid idea like "torpedo boats are the death of the aircraft carrier because they might sink it while it's transiting the Suez Canal" or whatever.

Soviet military science asks the artillery cadet how many minutes of field artillery support can be expect given the range of a howitzer, the speed after displacement time taken into account, the speed of his supported column and the howitzer battery, and the distance to the frontline. With this knowledge of how many minutes you can provide fire support to a a MRC, observe the target sketch in Figs. 1 and 2, and Table 1, to determine the number of rounds HE-F, ICM, and SADARM shells needed to destroy the object to answer questions 3, 4, and 5. Use the formula you learned in today's lecture. Show your work for any credit.

One attempts to model a fake world so a dumb idea can be justified in reality. The other attempts to explain a relevant idea using historical information so it can be taught in a fake world.

Western military science has degenerated to the application of computer models to extending the employment of otherwise unemployable wastrels who wasted their lives and their (assumed) talents on useless academic "information" instead of actual bettering of understanding of military science. You can probably blame a combination of arrogance on part of the know-nothing proteges and cynical hot takes by over-the-hill academics to extend their tenure in a world where no serious military threats exist anymore.

Naturally this leads, almost inevitably, to a world where instead of asking serious questions like "what is the purpose of a surface ship of any variety in a world where submarines can routinely communicate with each other underwater and satellites can routinely monitor the littorals from orbit in real time" instead you get people seriously pondering the return of battleships with railguns and screaming about the threat of boghammars, Osas, and other ancient threats that were solved decades (or centuries) ago. Also they try to explain Eastern Thought Process with Sun Tzu and other bizarre, somewhat racist stereotypes instead of genuine knowledge. Perhaps because they lack historical perspective, perhaps because they focused on some specific niche like "supercomputer modeling" and branched out into history as a side gig, or maybe they're genuine charlatans, but it's so hard to tell that teasing out the difference is almost not worth the effort.

The last good "military science" book was probably Soviet Air Land Battle Tactics and that's only because COL Baxter genuinely knows what he's talking about and explains it in a way that makes sense to someone versed in American military thought. It seems we don't have those kind of people anymore, though. Very sad.

ah quick question... so the size of a runaway may determine what kind of aircrafts an airbase can host. I'm curious however if there is a relationship between airbase's occupied area and the amount of fighter aircrafts it can host.

E.g Airbase as big as Nellis can host 1000 fighters, but smaller airbase can only hold like 100.

Yes. It's not a serious problem for most airbases, though, since they are on land, and their size can always be increased by pouring more concrete. The general roadblock is going to be your available landing queues and ATC tower throughput, rather than actual maintenance areas or aprons, but you can always just build another runway and hire more controllers. It would be sorta weird for an airbase to have more landing capacity than apron capacity anyway. The main bottleneck usually tends to be the taxiways and runway queues ultimately, since these are the biggest land area requirements of the airbase (and they require the most engineering hours I think).

I don't know of any serious studies on the mathematical relationships between the two, though, or at least ones that have been explained, since a lot of this will depend on the actual aircraft being discussed and its maintenance man-hour and crew requirements. A B-52 base is going to be much larger in its necessary support infrastructure (and thus area) than an F-16 or MiG-21 base, for instance, but their available landing queues might be similar for both if they both have two runways and two taxiways.

I suspect most military bases tend to be oversized really, especially nowadays since air forces have constantly been shrinking even though aircraft are getting bigger, and Norway recently began expanding one of its major fighter bases since it closed down another base and transferred the F-35s from there to that one. But even in the Cold War you would probably just overbuild the heights of hangars or something just to accommodate increasingly big airplanes, simply because you could and there is no real incentive to economize on space. Bigger is usually better and most fighter bases are going to built for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere.

There are some exceptions but these are still massive installations regardless.

If you were going to economize space you can start with how a carrier goes about it, since an aircraft carrier is the only airbase where space is maximized for efficient operation in a given area. You'd need to look at maintenance hangar clear height (most hangars are tall enough for most tactical fighters, TBF, hangar height is generally the first issue for older aircraft carriers getting new planes though), apron area for staging, ammo revetments, occupancy of the airbase, required equipment storage for capabilities (will the airbase be able to self-repair? will it have a tank or infantry unit for self-defense against attack? what about surface-to-air missiles? will it maintain these objects or will they be maintained offsite? do the maintainers live on the base?), and the actual aircraft themselves and their volume requirements obviously.

The same factors that go into an aircraft carrier going to be relevant to land bases, after all, just modify the important bits like hangar height and deck space for a larger aircraft (F-15 as opposed to F-18?) or whatever.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Smolbote'ism seems to only be a thing in either desperate countries or because of insane naval officers. <.>
Even the Israeli Saar's have grown by at least a magnitude.

[Gallia-]

Ships get cheaper as they get bigger, so that's a thing, but this was poorly understood in the '70's. The assumption was similar to automobiles where serial production matters most, but given the extremely low runs of warships in general this wouldn't be the case for any major combatant class after WW2, and the raw materials cost wasn't a major factor in warship production like it was with cars (I guess if you made literally 8,000 Spruances you'd realize some major production chain gains though).

There was a great paper on this that broke down the cost with a neat pie chart, but I forgot the name so I'll find it in 3-4 years and be mad at myself.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

I hope murca starts scrapping LolCS in the next decade and put those crews in ffgx
That's all for now. :3