Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Poll

Which team did you play in the last game?

Glorious Arstotzka
- 17 (16%)
Glorious Moskurg
- 13 (12.3%)
Ingloriously Didn't Play
- 76 (71.7%)

Total Members Voted: 106


Pages: 1 ... 335 336 [337] 338 339 ... 500

Author Topic: Intercontinental Arms Race: Finale  (Read 599790 times)

Madman198237

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5040 on: September 04, 2017, 09:54:06 am »

RDN-41-3 Deadliest Ray Mk. DEADLY
The engineers have been given strict orders to not screw up, and have gone and redone the radar improvements scheduled for last year.

Revision:
UF-BID-41 Supernova
This strange new development draws from the WWI experience of Europe, in which they deployed "starshells", basically large flares fired into the air over a battlefield. One over the target area, the magnesium in the shell caught fire, a parachute was deployed, and for about 60 seconds the battlefield was brightly illuminated by the powerful flare. This new shell aims to replicate that for use in our artillery and naval guns.

This will give US a nighttime fighting advantage, since they might very well be blinded (And they will certainly not be prepared for the sudden glare) through their NV scopes as we light off the star shells. As for the radar, the goals stay the same: Detect them before getting detected ourselves, and do it from every single warship.
Logged
We shall make the highest quality of quality quantities of soldiers with quantities of quality.

evictedSaint

  • Bay Watcher
  • if (ANNOYED_W_FANS==true) { KILL_CHAR(rand()); }
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5041 on: September 04, 2017, 02:28:30 pm »

I still think pocket radar is the way to go. When the vote box pops up, put me in on that please.

For our revision, we should copy Cannala and put RPG's on our salamanders to give them anti-tank capabilities: The Saltgrinder Rocket Package.


Quote
Revision: Saltgrinder Rocket Package

Based on the success of our mobile rocket-launcher artillery, the Saltgrinder Rocket Package is simply Sarukh rockets with a bit more warhead rather than propellant, mounted on the Salamander, Breaker, Stinger, and Haast.  Shorter rails for the rockets allows the configuration to be lighter, albeit with a penalty to accuracy.  At least two can be mounted on each Salamander, four on each Breaker, and up to a tonne on the Haast.  This shouldn't be an issue, since the weapon is designed to be used at shorter ranges or in dives.  The Saltgrinder can be mounted on Salamanders to give them a fighting chance against enemy tanks, on our Breakers to give them a larger punch against both heavy and lighter armor, and on our planes to give them a more accurate and proactive role in eliminating enemy tanks and light ships.

The Saltgrinder fills a role our army is missing. 



The jungle is going to be wet this year, so our fire weapons will be less effective.  The saltgrinder lets us still use our air power while being effective on the ground; combined with our new jet, it should be effective enough to ensure we gain ground.

The Saltgrinder is fully supported by the PAROI Party and carries their stamp of approval.

piratejoe

  • Bay Watcher
  • Obscure References and Danmaku everywhere.
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5042 on: September 04, 2017, 08:37:56 pm »

UF-BID-41 Supernova
Well, we are doing this as a revision, I don't care what anyone else says, we are doing this as it counters them quite a bit.
Logged
Battleships Hurl insults from behind thick walls, Destroyers beat up small children, Carriers stay back in the kitchen, and Cruisers are a bunch of tryhards who pretend to be loners.

Powder Miner

  • Bay Watcher
  • this avatar is years irrelevant again oh god oh f-
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5043 on: September 04, 2017, 10:15:30 pm »

I'm not yet invested in any particular design choice for the turn, but one idea to compete with the radar here, as I think it might well be very useful:
Retry Blood Eagle for our design.

It was a good idea before, just... not as a revision. One of the problems we're having in ground combat right now is that their armor completely outperforms ours, and ERA should be an all-around armor boost and a pretty significant one at that. Hell, if we can get ERA to put on the Salamander, even our performance on Titan would get a significant boost. With that and the Supernova (which is a pretty awesome idea Madman) we would probably be able to drive them out of the mainland and hold Tereshkova for a turn, which gives us a T33 boost

...oh, I missed last page's suggestions and ebbor already suggested it  :-\
Just consider this my argument for it, then.
« Last Edit: September 04, 2017, 10:21:07 pm by Powder Miner »
Logged

RAM

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5044 on: September 05, 2017, 12:12:43 am »

We need something to oppose heavy armour, and we need something to support our paratroops against heavy armour. Thus, we need to air-drop heavy tanks. Sadly, we cannot do that, as heavy tanks are, well, heavy, and thus get into terrible arguments with those whiny aircraft whenever they are asked to ferry them around. Honestly, you would think that they would get tired of fat jokes... The solution is to design a heavy tank-destroyer that can be broken up into parts light enough to be air-dropped.

MT41-A "Cowsea" Mobile Turret
Quote
This is a heavy tank-destroyer composed of three parts.
1: A conveyance unit with medium side-armour and light front-and-back around the engine, transmission, fuel, and cooling, heavy-duty tracks, and a heavy attachment point for a turret unit.
2: A one-man Turret-unit with very-heavy front and forward-side armour with basic slanting. It additionally features mechanical loading assistance, a mechanically sealed dividing roof, a rear hatch for personnel access, at least 50 degree traversal, a cupholder, and deployable ground-bracing.
3: A gun unit, basically a gun, a big huge gun in fact. At least 80mm and potentially 120mm. Whatever we can air-drop, load with one operator, and will break through heavy tanks.
4: Fuel and ammunition packages.

Assembly: many ropes are attached to them for use in their deployment, which may required up to three dozen soldiers. Robust radio emitters are also attached, with a range of about 500 metres for locating them in poor visibility. Firstly the conveyance unit it righted(Using ropes and manpower) and fuelled, then driven to a turret unit, which in turn is righted and drawn into place using an attachment on the tracks to pull it into place by reversing. Then a gun is roped into the top of the turret, which is then sealed, likely permanently, or until overhauled...

Pros:
1: Hopefully assembled in between forty minutes and two hours. It is expected that this will get the first few into action quickly enough to support an attack and the last of them viable before the enemy can mount a coordinated response, giving our paratroopers something that is, in the proper circumstances, more than a match for heavy tanks.
2: At only about 2 metres in width, it should be capable of traversing forests. Unlikely to be able to actually fight in them, but still, the ability to push heavy weapons through unusual regions is valuable. Not to mention the ability to hide in all manner of nooks and crannies in order to ambush or increase the density of heavy defences at a location.
3: By forgoing the armouring of a crew compartment or much anything else, it is extremely light for what it is. With luck, this will make them quite numerous, both for air-deployment and attachment to conventional forces.

Cons:
1: Its relative length and imbalanced armour makes it very vulnerable to being flanked. It would be reliant upon formations. Though it would offer heavy fire support to stop its support from being overrun or suppressed.
2: Again, it's long for its width, and the modular design makes weight distribution a bit haphazard. It won't turn well and may have difficulty moving very fast, along with some risk of bogging on soft ground. It should still be much faster than infantry and is intended more as a heavy armoured support gun rather than cavalry.
3: the length of tracks that extend past the turret leave it exposed to immobility even from the front. This does, of course, not stop it from suppressing enemy armour movements.
4: with only a single operator and limited internal space, rate-of-fire can be an issue, though hopefully numbers and skilled engineering will make up for this.
5: It could potentially be captured while disassembled and unprotected. This, of course, is not an issue, as the enemy don't understand basic mathematics, and must somehow figure things out with some sort of elaborate memorisation scheme that is incompatible with metric...
Make no mistake, it is an extreme design with many flaws, but it could get us a near-impenetrable turret that an go through most anything onto any battlefield we like. We won't get this without sacrifices, but it could break their anti-landing doctrine and their heavy-armour doctrine in one blow. In ambushes it should be the epitome of doom and it should convert a band of desperate paratroopers trying to scrounge together some anti-tank mines into something more akin to an anti-tank bunker and turn that one tank that was preventing our forced from advancing along a road into a speedbump... Yes, one doofus with an antitank rifle can kill it from the side, but that is what support forces and reserves are for, and the potential gains are well worth it.
Logged
Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

VoidSlayer

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5045 on: September 05, 2017, 12:33:17 am »

I proposed a similar self propelled gun in the original game and it worked as a great stop gap measure before making a full tank.  This will give us experience in modern armor production while focusing on the main selling point of a tank, the main weapon.

Taricus

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5046 on: September 05, 2017, 02:39:58 am »

Except we already have the main weapon, and we don't need to worry about designing a self propelled gun as it does nothing. Coming from the other side that designed the first SP gun, it won't take the role of any tank.
Logged
Quote from: evictedSaint
We sided with the holocaust for a fucking +1 roll

RAM

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5047 on: September 05, 2017, 03:19:46 am »

It isn't trying to take the role of a tank, it is trying to be a relocatable bunker that can be airdropped.
Logged
Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

Taricus

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5048 on: September 05, 2017, 03:22:11 am »

Air-droppable bunker is something of a paradox. Besides, we technically already have those with the salamanders. And making something that has to be assembled before being used in the field is a bad plan especially for an armoured vehicle.
Logged
Quote from: evictedSaint
We sided with the holocaust for a fucking +1 roll

evictedSaint

  • Bay Watcher
  • if (ANNOYED_W_FANS==true) { KILL_CHAR(rand()); }
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5049 on: September 05, 2017, 04:40:42 am »

I love the name, but it is not a very solid design.  Sorry man.

RAM

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5050 on: September 05, 2017, 05:09:59 am »

Air-droppable bunker is something of an ideal. Bunkers are great at ambushing, defeating a strongpoint, and holding a line. Paratroopers typically resort to ambushes because they are too slow to flank any other way and too poorly equipped to confront things openly. Paratroopers tend to just shut-down confronting a strong point. Oh, sure, they can defeat them, but always by taking the long way around. Paratroopers basically don;t have the numbers or equipment to attack from the front. Paratroopers are all about quickly taking a critical location and then holding it until armoured vehicles show up and nuke them from orbit.

 Bunkers typically don't get to choose where they are. An ambush bunker will likely get discovered first, and even if it works once, it likely gets itself onto maps for its efforts. A more-or-less fixed, directional heavy position that can join in on an ambush is wonderful if you can get it.

 Strongpoints typically don't put themselves in the path of a bunker. That ends up being a large part of why people use bunkers, to force the enemy to either make a massive strongpoint and blunt it, or to force it to go somewhere else because confronting a bunker head-on is terrible. A bunker or tank that was blocking an important path is a big problem, but if you can magically summon a heavier bunker with a bigger gun in front of it and just start shelling all day then it largely solves that problem, a slow vehicle can still be fast compared to paratroopers and forcing them to give up their position is generally a win.

 Paratroopers typically stop functioning when tanks show up. No supplies, no heavy weapons... A bazooka won't break the front of a decent tank and if all you have are infantry then it doesn't have to worry about being flanked, and if all you have are A.P.C.s and they have tanks then you probably won't have A.P.C.s for much longer. If you can summon bunkers around your position then suddenly the enemy tanks have something that they can't just sit back and shell all day. The amount of armour that you can drop from a large transport plane is actually really impressive if you only have to cover the front of a one-man pod.

Assembly in the field is a problem, but it is the only way we can get anywhere near this performance out of an airdrop. And field-assembly is not necessary, it only comes up in airdrops, it can be surface-shipped to the front pre-constructed to support infantry more conventionally.And given all the options, a field-assembled vehicle is about the best. It can move itself once righted which speeds up the process of assembling the parts. It is much better than trying to assemble a long-range radio or giant gun or something that couldn't move. And given that the options are "mess about in a field with things that are not particularly useful right now" or "confront heavy tanks with satchel charges and bazookas" I don't see the downside to the assembled weapons plan. Certainly not perfect but better than nothing.

Superr-heavy, umm, okay, make that extra-heavy, I didn't check the list and wanted the thing above heavy...
Extra heavy is 100mm
iron/steel is, roughly, ehh, let's say 8 grams per cubic centimetre? 80grams per centimetre squared of 10 centimetre armour?
Reckless can carry 4 tonnes.... 50000 cubic centimetres... 5 square metres? You can do a lot with 5 square metres... or 3+1/3 square metres if you want super-heavy. That is, if you are only covering a gunner position. Let's call it a 2.2x2.2 metre sheet of extra-heavy armour. Sure it is cramped to put a human behind there and give them space enough to operate a gun, but then you go and make them sit instead of stand, it is not impossible. If we upgrade to Ice Giant only transportation then it is basically limitless freedom... Or we could try a sandwich of aluminium to reduce weight and see if layered armour is good for anything, but the price might be a problem then...

What we don't have at the moment is something that can tell a medium tank to go away and find something else to do with itself. We especially don;t have something like that which can be deployed with paratroops. We ought to have learned a lot about armour from The Vodka, so that should be easy enough. We have guns in the range, although I have no idea what the weight of a gun sans-moorings is, but getting whatever we can lift into a setting that can be deployed ought to do the trick, although it is possible that the barrel would need to be skimped on, which would be a sincere problem, but might let it fight in woodlands... It has been made abundantly clear that Salamanders are too light to be deployed alone. Now either we can try to negate that by some obscure means, which likely wouldn't work because we really need to drop the vehicle rating given how the game works.
...
I guess we could try to get a vehicle bonus from somewhere else? Give our infantry railguns to take out heavy tanks and trade that in for a bonus to our vehicle rating? I mean, yes, my proposal has problems. It will probably cop a big penalty to open regions, given how prone it is to being outflanked and how much faster proper tanks will be, but it ought to effectively address the absence of a heavy tank and also give a big bonus to paradrops. Unless it rolls badly, and nothing about it seems all that revolutionary. I mean, we already upgraded our parachutes, guns, and armour...
Logged
Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5051 on: September 05, 2017, 06:55:00 am »

If you want something that can deal with a medium tank, just upgrade our RPG
Logged

evictedSaint

  • Bay Watcher
  • if (ANNOYED_W_FANS==true) { KILL_CHAR(rand()); }
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5052 on: September 05, 2017, 01:57:52 pm »

Not a bad idea - what if we made our rpg's wire guided?  We could give it a catchy name, like "Saltseeker" or something.

Taricus

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5053 on: September 05, 2017, 01:58:58 pm »

Wire guidance would basically ruin the point of them being a quick and cheap weapon.
Logged
Quote from: evictedSaint
We sided with the holocaust for a fucking +1 roll

10ebbor10

  • Bay Watcher
  • DON'T PANIC
    • View Profile
Re: Intercontinental Arms Race: Summer 1942 (Design Phase)
« Reply #5054 on: September 05, 2017, 02:02:55 pm »

Yeah, we want quick, cheap portable, not a museum display piece.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 335 336 [337] 338 339 ... 500