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[Funk]

i mean body armour, and yes it was not bullet proof but most wounds are not by bullet but by blast and shrapnel from bomb and artillery.

Our currant vests are capable of stopping fragments and should be issued to troops that are in static defences, facing prolonged bombardment and turret gunners on crickets .

We need a flame thrower on a divebomber, just for the physiological impact of being attack by a dragon.
   

[10ebbor10]

We need a flame thrower on a divebomber, just for the physiological impact of being attack by a dragon.

This is very likely to ignite itself.

[Funk]

as long as it is not firing forwards in to the wind it should work, look up Bunge Aircraft Flamethrower.

i know that a plane mounted Flamethrower will not change the face of war, it is just a small project.

lets build the Flamethrower and mount them on 10 Shark dive bombers in the place of the HVG-40 to see if it works as a terror weapon.

[3_14159]

i mean body armour, and yes it was not bullet proof but most wounds are not by bullet but by blast and shrapnel from bomb and artillery.

Our currant vests are capable of stopping fragments and should be issued to troops that are in static defences, facing prolonged bombardment and turret gunners on crickets .

That may be a good idea.

We need a flame thrower on a divebomber, just for the physiological impact of being attack by a dragon.

I'm not sure whether this is the greatest or the worst idea ever. Actually, probably both.
While I agree that the psychological impact (and the coolness factor) would be really, really great, both range and the tendency to set the plane aflame.
The range is really, really short. Tank-mounted flamethrowers reach 100-130m of range; a plane should not find itself pointed at the ground at such altitude. For example, the Ju87 Stuka automatically pulled itself up at about 450m.
Also, flamethrowers work by shooting burning fuel in the front. Pretty bad if the plane flies through there a bit later.

as long as it is not firing forwards in to the wind it should work, look up Bunge Aircraft Flamethrower.

i know that a plane mounted Flamethrower will not change the face of war, it is just a small project.

lets build the Flamethrower and mount them on 10 Shark dive bombers in the place of the HVG-40 to see if it works as a terror weapon.

Wait, someone made that? That's crazy...

I think the vulnerability and close-ness of the weapon is not practical, and I'd rather mount incendiary, proximity detonated bombs instead for probably more efficiency and less terror.

[RAM]

It doesn't need to be beyond the maximum range of their planes, it can be well within that and still impractical for them to scout. Or launch missions against moving targets. We are talking about vehicles with phenomenal scouting ability.
 Sticking to the coast takes *MUCH* longer. Folk don't typically take a whole ship just down to the next country over. The basics of what comes from where are common knowledge, we know the straight-lines between the destinations and we know where folk will want to cut it especially close going around a peninsula or avoiding reefs. If they are travelling many hundreds of kilometres out of their way in order to avoid us then that is actually worth it. As stated earlier, airships can see a long ways, and scout flights of aeroplanes can see further. If the Bismark, loose 'somewhere in the Atlantic', was a credible threat to merchant shipping, then  so is this. Seriously, it will be able to cover a huge area. The surface fleet would consist of maybe half-a-dozen Popular Devotion ASWs and half a dozen similarly-sized boarding vessels, with maybe 200 infantry in each. Throw in a couple of light cruisers for good measure if you are feeling generous. A significant force, but not beyond our means.
Airships are fast enough to avoid some whether, and the boarding vessels should be capable at recovering personnel from the water if it comes to that. From all accounts the weather in this region is quite mild and we can afford some losses.

P.P.S.
 Maybe we could make a suit of powered armour. Probably with an external engine. Useless for most everything, but it could be handy when raiding bunkers. Or maybe a miniature tank, basically an armoured H.M.G. position, lets say a GVS-14 sticking through a 20mm armour plate with a narrow slit for aiming, on tracks with an engine. Same issues, doesn't work if it is flanked, doesn't really move fast enough for any sort of reactive operation, but can offer significant protection when walking down a corridor...

P.P.P.S.
 Hehe, flame flame aeroplane. I thought of this myself once. You could angle it at, say, 45 degrees down. You have gravity working for you so the range is probably based as much on the rate by volume of fuel released and how quickly it burns as it is on the force it is expelled with. It would be absolutely devastating against anything that couldn't protect itself, and probably horribly vulnerable to anyone with a gun. But if you ever managed to fly one of these things along a trench... They would be fantastic for burning crops, houses, forests, and basically making life miserable for all the places too insignificant to bother protecting... A massive Ethical failure, but a fun idea and actually potentially useful if you don't mind burning down lots of farmland or losing lots of planes and pilots. And the morale effect would keep anyone directly in front of it from shooting at it, as they would mostly be looking for ways to not be infront of it anymore.

That map looks rather dubious, I would want a remark from the G.M. of it's reliability. But what I see is a massive coastline with two borders that we could launch an aerial force from at any point and at any time. and that they can either wind their way through many hundreds, possibly thousands, of kilometres of extra travel distance along the coast or  go straight through a fairly narrow stretch between us and the coast.

If they are coming in through other county's waters than it doesn't much matter what we do. Either we are obviously sinking ships in their waters or we aren't. You don't enforce an effective blockade without producing some exceedingly blatant statistics.

The number is a fabrication because it is ridiculous that we would send a force that small to confront their air force. If we are going to confront their airforce, then we wait until we have more of them. The idea of an unknown design with an unknown production effort and an unknown timetable and the assumption that we bundle them up into groups based upon annual production and then send them to loiter just off of the coast of a neighbouring country when they have an unknown, but presumably vast scouting range. At that point you are not really dealing with predictable values anymore.

P.S.
 I am getting into some rather contentious issues in this debate and do not have a sufficient supply of sleep to ascertain if they are indeed offensive. If any offence is felt then please accept this as an apology.

[Funk]

Range wise the fuel will spread out as it falls.
we should try to shoot the fuel at slight downwards angle from the plane, to keep the fire away.
i think rear mounting may have to do until we get a working helicopter.

we should work on a high-explosive and incendiary rounds for 14 and 25 mm .

[10ebbor10]

The number is a fabrication because it is ridiculous that we would send a force that small to confront their air force. If we are going to confront their airforce, then we wait until we have more of them. The idea of an unknown design with an unknown production effort and an unknown timetable and the assumption that we bundle them up into groups based upon annual production and then send them to loiter just off of the coast of a neighbouring country when they have an unknown, but presumably vast scouting range. At that point you are not really dealing with predictable values anymore.

Point is, that it will have a hefty production cost, and that you are not going to find enough support to get a decent warfleet ready before the end of the war.

Also, we don't want to give the enemy ideas. Last thing we need now are enemy aircraft carriers.

[3_14159]

I'm going to use the rhetorical device of picking a single of your statements:

If the Bismark, loose 'somewhere in the Atlantic', was a credible threat to merchant shipping, then  so is this.

Let's use the Bismarck as an analogue to our airship carriers. The differences would be that the Bismarck was far more armoured (and able to survive much more), while also being far harder to detect (due to it being on the sea while the airship would be in the sky, with no horizon). Speedwise, I'm not sure. The Bismarck had 60km/h speed, while our airship is fast enough that our biplane fighters (max speed 230km/h) could dock. So it's probably something between 60 and 80 km/h for the airship. Not really a decisive factor.
Now, the Bismarck was killed due to attacks by carrier-based torpedo bombers from about 120km distance.
I am assuming for now that we only need a single fighter to come very close to the airship to be able to down it. This may not be accurate, but probably will be shortly after we first use them. Hell, a pair of small bombs with contact detonation should rip the airship apart (if they detonate on fabric contact, which is not certain).
Now, for a raiding mission, we can probably expect not more than two or three airships (cover more area, and we won't devote that many resources to them). So let's say about twenty aircraft deployable.
The Morovian's twin-engined bombers range is unknown, but I would assume it to be about 300-400km combat-range (get there, fight, get back). With searching (though that can be done by other means) this means a let's say 250km corridor around their homeland where we can be pretty sure they can kill our airships by sending twenty, thirty fighters of their own there. And even if they don't manage to kill it the first time, they can refuel and resupply and come again, while the carrier's planes can't be replaced until returning.
So, to sum up, I'm pretty confident that using an airship carrier for raiding will most definitely end with said carrier destroyed with too few gains.

And I believe that while there are direct routes to trade, every merchant captain will gladly do a detour around a war zone with commercial targeting. See, for example, the routes adopted during WWII.
And, lastly, said air power could probably be reduced pretty well by installing anti-aircraft weaponry on the merchant ships. Fairly cheap, and even if they don't prevent the ship's sinking, they attrition the planes away.

[RAM]

If we start worrying about giving the enemy ideas than we will not have much fun. Unless we are engineering their ideas, in which case we should have voted in my biplane earlier, it would have been an effective fighter when it first appeared, and been ideal for a support role once we built explicit fighter craft, which would have likely relegated their new fighter model to operating only in areas of air superiority. And our enemies have yet to demonstrate the inclination to build short-runway aircraft. It should require a considerable time to adequately counter the effort.

You know, with the airship doing scouting duty, advanced air defence, and some fire support. Something with a similar role to the Bismarck would be much more effective. We would probably downsize it dramatically, we don't need to sink the Hood afterall. So long as it was fast, it could probably survive with few, but long-ranged main guns. They could probably just avoid major capital ships, or send torpedo boats against them.

The aeroplanes would not be intended to directly attack the merchant ships. Ideally there would be a light cruiser or two on hand, something fast with range. Escorts could either endure bombardment, or break from escort and pursue, which would separate them from the merchant's guns. As for the merchants, we are offering them the choice of defending against dedicated military vehicles with armed cargo vessels, or surrendering their ship and presumably being released in a neutral harbour.

[mesor]

Well if Broods 240mm high powered artillery cannon is completed you could create an 8000 tone cruiser using it and the 120mm cannons.

With advanced guns that provide more punch at a higher rate of fire and smaller size then we could have ships 2/3 the size of enemies with more punch.

Might need to get to work on an advanced targeting system for naval cannons, and maybe a new automated loading system to increase rate of fire.
Our infantry is already the best armed and our air force is a match for the enemies and is still advancing, so a few upgrades to our navy seems to be the most important thing for us for now.

[tryrar]

You do realize that the Cod C makes for a nice naval gun already(without needing much in the way of modification) right?

[mesor]

Yes, but Broods design if it goes to plan will do more damage and being a pure naval gun is likely to come out superior for it's purpose.

[10ebbor10]

I'm going to use the rhetorical device of picking a single of your statements:

If the Bismark, loose 'somewhere in the Atlantic', was a credible threat to merchant shipping, then  so is this.

Let's use the Bismarck as an analogue to our airship carriers. The differences would be that the Bismarck was far more armoured (and able to survive much more), while also being far harder to detect (due to it being on the sea while the airship would be in the sky, with no horizon). Speedwise, I'm not sure. The Bismarck had 60km/h speed, while our airship is fast enough that our biplane fighters (max speed 230km/h) could dock. So it's probably something between 60 and 80 km/h for the airship. Not really a decisive factor.
Now, the Bismarck was killed due to attacks by carrier-based torpedo bombers from about 120km distance.
I am assuming for now that we only need a single fighter to come very close to the airship to be able to down it. This may not be accurate, but probably will be shortly after we first use them. Hell, a pair of small bombs with contact detonation should rip the airship apart (if they detonate on fabric contact, which is not certain).

As said before, a single fighter won't down the airship (Unless it goes kamikaze). However, it's almost impossible to prevent it from doing some damage. As soon as a salvo hits, the airship's time is limited. Holes can't be patched midflight, and the airship only has a limited amount of flotation gasses.
[/quote]

The aeroplanes would not be intended to directly attack the merchant ships. Ideally there would be a light cruiser or two on hand, something fast with range. Escorts could either endure bombardment, or break from escort and pursue, which would separate them from the merchant's guns. As for the merchants, we are offering them the choice of defending against dedicated military vehicles with armed cargo vessels, or surrendering their ship and presumably being released in a neutral harbour.

There's still is the problem that our ships, both raiders and captured cargo ships, need to go straight through Capia's national waters. Ie, the primary staging ground for Morovia's submarine attacks. I doubt any would make that. (Sure, we can let them move around, but I'd prefer not to send ships halfway around the world for a single mission).

Yes, but Broods design if it goes to plan will do more damage and being a pure naval gun is likely to come out superior for it's purpose.

Perfectionism is the enemy of good enough.

We have more gaping holes in our lineup. Pretty sure the Cod will serve.

Our infantry is already the best armed and our air force is a match for the enemies and is still advancing, so a few upgrades to our navy seems to be the most important thing for us for now.

Are we. We're taking rather heavy losses, as far as I can see it.

On a side note, here have some possible projects for next turn, free to take by anyone who wants them.

Generic airship improvements:
       -Dynamic helium volume (While technically anachronistic, there's no technical reason preventing us from doing this. This allows airships to reach altitudes of up to 30.000 meter*)
       -Tethered spy capsule. A small capsule lowered from the airship. This allows the airship to remain above the clouds, while the manned capsule guides them.

Harbour reinforcement:
      -In addition to laying down submarine nets, we can simply build some harbour walls around our dockyards. Torpedos can't fire around a corner. (Technically they can, but a torpedo can only make a single, continuus turning motion)

Guidance improvements:
      -Gyroscopic systems

Submarine improvements:
      -Electrolysis
      -Nuclear reactor

*A specially designed airship, that is. It's doubtfull that our designs would get higher than 10 km.

[Brood]

I'm saying no to airships right off the bat.
They are out dated and a waste of time that could be better spent on more useful projects.

Our infantry have the best guns but we're fighting on enemy territory meaning they know the land and have it fortified.
We're bound to take high losses when we are the attacking side but if our weaponry wasn't superior we'd be taking a lot more.

[RAM]

It should be possible to produce a means of repairing an airship mid-flight, possibly something involving breathing apparatus, sealing foam, and an airlock. Which reminds me, some sort of seal-sealing fuel tanks would also be handy. It should be possible for an airship to carry a supply of compressed gas to maintain its supply, of course, that too could be hit.

A heavy tank destroyer would be useful for attacking heavy fortifications, something that could just sit back and endure massive impacts while providing support fire. Of course, actual fortified positions include things like our 320mm coastal batteries, even just protecting against a single trajectory would be tough against something like that.