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[10ebbor10]

It's just means that there are no industrial facilities in our country that are making it, meaning the parts have to be made by hand. It's also to heavy to mount on anything for the moment.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Edit: And, lastly, @UR: Should the 30mm gun be breechloading or an autocannon design?

Breachloading, it's meant to be our PAK37, not bofors40mm. AT gun, not AA gun

10ebbor10
Can you give specs of enemy vessels? What armament they have? Need that for creating our new naval strategy

[10ebbor10]

I can give some generic information, but no full design sheets.

The 5000 ton cruiser is heavily armored with a combination of 300, 160 and 40 mm guns. Machine guns have been used self defense against planes.
The 4000 ton cruiser is just a generic update of the Glory, no significant changes have been observed
The 2000 ton commerce raider is fast, but somewhat lightly armed for it's size. It still has quite a punch though, and appears to be quite well armored.
The 1000 ton destroyer support has no real offensive guns, but plenty of anti air and is equipped with torpedos.

[3_14159]

It's just means that there are no industrial facilities in our country that are making it, meaning the parts have to be made by hand. It's also to heavy to mount on anything for the moment.

So just an expensive prove-of-concept for now.

Edit: And, lastly, @UR: Should the 30mm gun be breechloading or an autocannon design?

Breachloading, it's meant to be our PAK37, not bofors40mm. AT gun, not AA gun

This of course means that we will not really be able to use it on planes as anti-bomber or mounted anti-tank weapons without changes.

Ships:
Naming proposal for enemy ships: Name them after the NATO alphabet. The torpedo boats are the Alfa-class, the destroyer support is the Bravo-class, the commerce raider the Charlie class, the 4000t is either the Delta or the updated Glory class, and the 5000ton cruiser the Echo. Newly discovered ships will be named consecutively, with the next one being the Foxtrot and so on.

Current analysis: We will need a high-calibre anti-shipping gun. The Echo will outrange us significantly, especially with them being five versus five of our protectors. There are only two ways for us to really attack them, which are either massed torpedo boats or bombers, with both neutralized by keeping them in company with the Bravo.
Building a heavier ship (armoured and armed) can kill them, but remains impractical until our docks are expanded enough.

The massed air attack would probably have been practical then and may be imperative to conduct next turn, or alternatively laying a trap for them.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Little analysis of our naval forces

Glory cruiser: Our only true capital ship, quite useless if you look at what kind of capital ships our enemy have. 300mm gun vs 160mm gun = bad situation
Protectors: Ships designed for offensive war used in defense, quite fragile considering that we lost three last turn without fighting enemy cruisers. Most likely roughly equal to their commerce raiders
Revolutionary torpedo boat: Convoy ship at best, too few to matter
Shark: Good for protecting our main ports from attack and we have enough of them for that role
Piranha: That should be our  main Crow's isle defenders, we have enough of them to complicate enemy landings
Hunter: This is basically a fast mine-layer\escort with decent armor. Very underarmed for it's size, pose no threat to enemy cruisers\commerce raiders and very limited treat for their destroyers, very dangerous for the fleet of enemy smaller ships as likely can  outrun them. We should be able to produce quite a lot of them. I think we should consider
Cod: Hard to sink small freighter.
Herring: Good submarine, suited both for defensive and offensive action

Naval strategy I want to propose:

Sharks: protect our home waters\shore shipping
Glory: mine Crow's island, act as a bait for the enemy cruisers. Than fight together with our coastal batteries, piranhas, aircrafts, herrings
Hunters: 50% go on offensive, Hunt lone Torpedo boats, do commerce raiding and mine enemy's territorial waters, run if attacked by enemy surface vessels, crush any aerial attacks on them with huge AA potential. 50% patrol\convoy our shipping lines and mine waters around Crow's island
Herrings: 50% go on commerce raiding enemy shipping and forcing them to divert some forces from attacking us forming convoys. 50% stay hidden near Crow island ready to intercept enemies second attempt to land on us
Protectors: In reserve to intercept enemy cruiser task force should it be damaged in combat and go on retreat (had we done that when their cruiser was crippled by cods, we might win the war already) or used for other emergency missions
Revolutionary: Patrol\convoy duty
Piranhas: 50% Guard Crow's island, be prepared to mass attack, 50% patrols
Ospreys: 50% Used as dive bombers to  annihilate landings\ nail enemy cruisers down . Those 300mm guns are scary. Don't waste them on smaller ships.... Approaching cruisers as a torpedo bomber is too  hard,  because of their destroyer supports with good AA armament, diving from high attitude is a better way to avoid AA gunners from screens. 50% to act as torpedo bombers hunting for the raiders
Seaguls: Hunting enemy raiders

In general, I am sure that we need to start a counteroffensive, mostly to force them to spread their forces and getting propaganda effect... Using a lot of naval mines is a must, too. Our new design is great for offensive mining, it is great minelayer and mines can sink even the largest ships...


On 30mm... it may be indeed better to make automatic AA\AT variant... But I think we need coastal gun more, anyway... Their tanks not really worry me, we have a lot 40mm and some 80mm to stop them + Ospreys. Even ravens should be able to punch through top armor

And I beg to not submit a tank design.... It's just a waste of design resources right now, we have no tank gun, no resource to produce them

[ICBM pilot]

 30mm gun should be an autocannon design so we can mount it on aircraft eventually

[Ukrainian Ranger]

We need high velocity AT gun and tank gun, auto 30mm is a gun of a different role, not AT at all, just very heavy auto-gun...  And 30mm auto is simply  too heavy to use as main armament for fighters

Also, Germans managed to adapt 50mm tank cannon for aircrafts, we can do the same with 30mm high velocity gun

[evilcherry]

We need high velocity AT gun and tank gun, auto 30mm is a gun of a different role, not AT at all, just very heavy auto-gun...  And 30mm auto is simply  too heavy to use as main armament for fighters

Also, Germans managed to adapt 50mm tank cannon for aircrafts, we can do the same with 30mm high velocity gun

50mm is only enough for ground attacks or as a bomber destroyer (and certainly not CAS bombers). In addition, the aircraft carrying that gun would probably be large enough to be a target of such guns.

I would prefer rockets there.

[10ebbor10]

Pro-tip: Make sure everyone knows what your suggestion is. "The same thing I suggested an indefinite amount of turns before" is not the best description.

((Especially because I haven't indexed turn posts.))

[Ukrainian Ranger]

What I dislike in sparrow design is that it has too few guns, because we have no light machinegun to mount in wings...

At least machinegunless wings should let engineers to concentrate on durability and aerodynamics of the wing
What is important: we should have no wing hardpoints either, as that will require different kind of wings to support bombs. Only one hardpoint, under the fuselage

And again... 7.6 gun on mobile mount just for strafing.... I call that complicating design for almost no gain when we need them cheap and as nimble(read aerodynamic) as possible.

Air superiority fighters, are air-superiority fighters, attempting to design it to  be better for strafing is just a huge waste... Ideally they should never attack ground targets, if you don't count dropping small bombs from high attitude
__________________
On heavy guns on aircrafts, me410, twin engined German fighter, carried one and was quite effective in bomber killings

[3_14159]

I'm looking at our loss figures for Seagulls and Ospreys: We've lost 52% of our Seagulls, and 23% of our Ospreys. That's operating not against fleets, but single ships and smaller ones to boot.
I think we can think about phasing out the Seagull, or alternatively only using it against merchant shipping from Crow's Island. Stopping the production would change it from 50 Seagulls and 60 Ospreys to 80 Ospreys per turn.

@UR: I agree with your sea analysis.
On the auto gun: We already have a 40mm autocannon with 90rpm firing rate. My proposal would be to adapt that firing mechanism for the smaller calibre and - by slowing the firing rate - allowing higher muzzle velocities. Additional advantage would be a higher firing rate for tanks, too, at the price of a higher weight. How about this:
3.1: Adapt the reloading mechanism of the 40mm autocannon for the new gun. Slowing the rate of fire is acceptable for retaining muzzle speeds.

Adapting such a weapon for fighter use is certainly possible; a later variant of the Bf109 for example mounted such a gun. Rockets are good, too, but serve a bit different roles; generally you hit easier with a gun (muzzle velocity) and it's cheaper, while rockets provide a bigger punch.

On the tankette:
I don't like it, simply put. We've already proven that it's easily killed by our standard machine gun. No doubt they have something similar in their armament, and even if not their new tanks will almost surely be invulnerable against the 15mm and armed heavy enough to kill the tankette even with better armour.

On the sparrow design: I personally would prefer three hardpoints in total: one under the fuselage, for heavy bombs or heavy guns, two on the wings for lighter bombs, rockets or drop tanks. With placing the 'wing' hardpoints close to the fuselage, it might be possible to reduce the required structural reinforcement to just the wing area up to the hardpoints, with the rest unreinforced. I do not know enough to know whether that's realistic, though.

I, personally, like my fighters as multi-role ones with specialization: I am happy to accept only 95% capability in the air-to-air role if for that I can get the air-to-ground role to 50% of a purpose-built ground attack plane. In fighters, that probably means including hard-points. But yes, a traversable machine gun means both additional drag and is not effective, as you'd need a second person to actually use it effectively.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I'm looking at our loss figures for Seagulls and Ospreys: We've lost 52% of our Seagulls, and 23% of our Ospreys. That's operating not against fleets, but single ships and smaller ones to boot.
I think we can think about phasing out the Seagull, or alternatively only using it against merchant shipping from Crow's Island. Stopping the production would change it from 50 Seagulls and 60 Ospreys to 80 Ospreys per turn.

Problem here is that we don't know how much damage to enemy ships each type of torpedo plane did...

If 50 Seaguls  made at least 60% of damage that 60 Ospres did. Cost of aircrafts lost\damage done ratio is on Seagulls side, because here we have 156 points worth of Seagulls vs 280 points worth of Osprey losses

Also, I suspect that many loses happened because of enemy fighters, not  AA gunners, we need to operate Seagills in areas where enemy fighters are less likely and\or maintain Raven escorts for them... That means - paroling our territorial waters



On Tankette - It's good enough for light armor role for now, while vulnerable to enemy AT fire mobile machinegun position is useful thing. Besides we upgraded the armor, and I doubt that enemy uses machinegun as heavy as ours. Most importantly - 2t tankettes are much easier to ferry to Crow's island than a proper tank


BTW, I'd love to make fighter like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yep, with two propellers

[Patrick Hunt]

I'm leaning towards scrapping the Seaguls entirely.

Considering we produced 50 of them and lost 26.
Produced 60 Osprey and lost 14.

So we had less Seaguls in the air and lost almost twice as many they're clearly outmatched now, as fighters the Raven is still ok but as a bomber it's to slow and bulky to be effective without devoting massive amounts of fighters just to making sure it gets shot down by AA and not enemy fighters.

[evilcherry]

@Sparrow Fighter
The lack of lighter guns seemed that prevented it being Logrolled through, so it is inherently a compromise.
Nor it is going to be complicated; it is more like WWI-era designs which the pilot simply pointed a browning at infantry, on a ball-joint or so.
If not I prefer simplify it to a pair of 15mms. 4x15mm would probably be an overkill as the pilot won't stop firing until the enemy is out of crosshairs or down; we will end up using double amount of ammo for every plane down. Two seemed to be a good compromise.
Limited Ground attack capability, in terms of one or two hard points, is anyway essential for me to Logroll a design.
We want it to be nimble and highly maneuverable like the Raven, and...

@Heavy/Dual Engine/Escort fighter
Sorry I just hate this idea.
Heavy fighters, at the end of the day, largely failed its mission as a bomber-destroyer, as the light fighter is always more nimble and thus much better in dogfighting, and it turned out that the light fighter is actually no less capable of bomber interceptions.
A6M Zeros and Bf 109s dominated the skies for a few years (and only the Me 262 is a better interceptor overall) for good reasons.
I would detest the use of any heavy cannon on fighters, for similar reasons, unless someone is developing a ground attack aircraft which the osprey should be strong enough for a few turns.
If we need heavy weapons I would rather prefer...

@Rockets
This time I would be okay for such projects if there is space for it.
At this point of time we are definitely well-covered in every department, save Big Gun Capital Ships, and that is going to be a two-part process.
I would prefer the fighters use a set of 10kg rockets preset by fuse, but we need to develop a working rocket weapon first.
We need more data on the enemy, anyway.

@Tankette
I feel this weapon is just to make those on Crow Island feel better as they didn't have the goodies for a few turns. Anyway I feel it would work better as an infantry gun rather than an MBT.

@Seagull vs Osprey
The Osprey is definitely the better performer. Regardless of the material losses, we lose twice as much pilots on the Seagull, and good pilots are not really a renewable resource. In addition, any plane alive at the end of a mission is as good as a new one at the next one.
Not paradoxically, the Osprey is also the better patrol bomber - to start with it has longer range.
In hindsight the Seagull is a really bad idea, but we don't know the Osprey could have worked, and we simply re-engineered a fighter to make it "just work".

[Patrick Hunt]

Well we're building a 10mm so add that and we have a lighter gun for the Sparrow.

The dual engine I'm with you, it's a horrible plane.

The Tankette is probably going to be a light artillery piece just to make getting off crow beach a bit more difficult, I'm going to propose droppig the Seagull entirely it's just not worth it manpower wise, I'd rather have 20 more Osprey then 50 Seagulls.

Will people please do the damned spoilers? Because leaving them to me or one of the others to do ain't fair.
So I propose if people don't do the spoilers we don't count there idea at all, no reason we should do the work for them if they don't do it.