From Posleen thread

[Samuel]

Yeah, but they could just set the stuff up on the side so they aren't dependent on the Indowy. Say the Indowy revolt or the humans liberate them, with those forges they wouldn't starve to death.

Not to mention they still need raw materials. The Darhel can simply own all the mines and power plants and since there are less of them, their control would be tighter.

[CaptainChewbacca]

All the Indowy need to manufacture goods are their own tech and a stellar nebula. There's no way the Darhael can squeeze them out of everywhere.

[Simon_Jester]

Certainly, Ringo never gave any reason to believe that in setting a machine can duplicate the feats of a Sohon user, any more than in Star Wars you can build a machine that uses Force powers to predict the future.

You could just clone the parts of the Indowy's brain that do the magic and hook them up to machinary.

That's an idea that might work, but that need not work: it could fail in a sane universe, or just one where the quality of brain/AI interfaces is limited. Moreover, it raises practical problems with the loyalty of an AI that has received the power to violate physical laws at will; the Darhel do sometimes have loyalty issues with robot war machines, for instance.

Alternatively, the Darhel are not the technological cutting edge of the Federation;

I'm pretty sure when you have centuries cutting edge becomes a bit irrelevant. Or do the Darhel have no scientists at all?

I assume they could do the programming, given enough time, if it's possible at all. But without Tchpth cooperation, the cost and difficulty of the process would be greatly increased. At some point, it's just not worthwhile.

Yeah, but financial control is weak. After all the Indowy are plotting to overthrow the Darhel so the system isn't strong enough because the Darhel can be replaced. What you want is one that gives you power over your subjects without giving them power over you like the current situation.

Ideally, yes. However, the Darhel can reasonably see the Indowy plotters as "under control;" were it not for the behavior of humans (who are latecomers to this system), they would have effectively no leverage and absolutely no chance of overthrowing them. The danger is so remote that radically restructuring their society in a way that reduces the number of intelligent beings they directly control to avoid it doesn't make quite so much sense.

Yeah, but they could just set the stuff up on the side so they aren't dependent on the Indowy. Say the Indowy revolt or the humans liberate them, with those forges they wouldn't starve to death.

At least until the humans revolt against Darhel influence in the mid-21st century, which is right at the end of the established timeline (no fully canonical books exist past that point), the Darhel have no reason to even seriously contemplate the risk of starving or being wiped out.

Remember, they do not maintain control to survive. They maintain control because they want to. Individual Darhel crave power; collectively, Darhel act in ways that maximize their power over the people around them, including non-Darhel. So a system which provides their economic needs and maximizes their control is, so far as they are concerned, objectively better than a system which provides their economic needs in a marginally more secure way but does not maximize their control.

[Vehrec]

All the Indowy need to manufacture goods are their own tech and a stellar nebula. There's no way the Darhael can squeeze them out of everywhere.

Yes they can. They own the starships, they own the nanites, the own the buildings that house the Indowy. If they decide that their population can use a bit of downsizing, all it will take a a few keystrokes to reduce atmospheric controls inside those megastructures or to shut down some of the farming operations that feed superfluous Indowy. They're not killing anyone, they're just making adjustments towards supporting a more ideal population size. If they stop releasing construction nanites to the Indowy, what are they going to do about it, go on a hunger strike in protest?

[Simon_Jester]

Remember, the whole point of this exercise is to minimize the hypothetical threat of the Indowy ceasing to submit to Darhel dominance. The Indowy have all the physical capabilities they need to run their own civilization; the only reason they don't do it is because the Darhel run the economy. But as a matter of practice, all economies are based on some level on the consent of the people involved. The Darhel only have power because the other two major Federation species choose to listen to them, rather than using their own perfectly adequate technical capabilities to take their toys and go play somewhere else.

In particular, the problem is the Indowy's Sohon adepts, and that the Indowy are the only species that has them in significant numbers. Convince the Sohon users that their species will be annihilated or marginalized in the new galactic order, and you test their willingness to extend consent to its uttermost limit. And the Sohon adepts are the one group who, physically speaking, have the power to blow the Darhel system wide open. They don't need Darhel permission to make nanites; they accept a system that forces them to get such permission because they prefer it to the anarchy that would result if they didn't. If Darhel rule stops looking better than anarchy, the Sohon users stop cooperating.

As it stands (before the events of the novels), the situation is a stable equilibrium. The three major Galactic species each have a niche in the system that they are content with, one in which their species can survive and even (by its own definition) thrive. By restructuring their economy to eliminate the remote and hypothetical threat of a mass Indowy rebellion*, the Darhel would destroy that equilibrium. Which would in turn make just such a rebellion far more likely, by moving the Indowy from an oppressed working class into a target for extermination.

So this whole scheme of 'replacing' the Indowy strikes me as a really bad idea. At best, it's a clever idea that has a large chance of backfiring, in exchange for a relatively small gain. The Darhel don't actually end up better off if they do this, not by their own definition, even if the plan works perfectly. And if it fails, they end up vastly worse off.

*"general strike" might be a better word...

[Samuel]

Except the situation is incredibly unstable. The Indowy keep on breeding and expanding and eventually something was going to snap. The trigger in this case was another one of the precurser experiments the Posleen. Why the Darhel assumed that all aliens would be friendly or weaker when they know humanity exists as an example of 1 being false and making 2 false given time...

[Simon_Jester]

Except the situation is incredibly unstable. The Indowy keep on breeding and expanding and eventually something was going to snap. The trigger in this case was another one of the precurser experiments the Posleen. Why the Darhel assumed that all aliens would be friendly or weaker when they know humanity exists as an example of 1 being false and making 2 false given time...

They wouldn't be the only civilization to ignore long-term threats that have yet to become clearly visible because they're afraid of the short-term costs of social upheaval.

It's all very well to say "we will be more secure if we rearrange everything this way." It's classic technocratic thinking, and there's no reason to assume that it won't work. But like most technocratic reforms, it runs into trouble at the implementation level. It's a high-risk, high-reward scheme (which many rulers avoid anyway), and one where the "reward" is not a reward at all by ordinary standards, merely a form of long-term insurance against an indefinite disaster that might occur in the future. Statistically speaking that's a reward, but only statistically speaking.

That still doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea when you sit down and do the math, in the sense that spending 1$ to get a 1% chance of winning 150$ is a good idea. But it's the type of good idea that people will often not follow through on because they convince themselves that the 100% probability of it being difficult to implement and causing social upheaval doesn't justify the much more remote possibility of it paying off.

While the Darhel's social structure isn't rational, that irrationality is not unreasonable or unlikely. Very few societies are rational, because they're produced as much by short term decisions and chance as they are by long range planning.

[Samuel]

Given they have effective immortality due to their medical technology I would expect significantly better long term decision making. Of course it could just make the situation one of constant backstabbing.

Still the fact that none of the Darhel do this even as a side project argues against the Den of Vipers interpretation.

[Simon_Jester]

Given they have effective immortality due to their medical technology I would expect significantly better long term decision making.

The problem is that if you take a person and give them a long lifespan, you haven't really changed the way they think. You've only changed one of their premises, by giving them reason to believe that they'll live longer.

If you take a species that naturally tends to worry more about certain consequences of their actions in the next decade than possible (conceivable, at least) consequences that might crop up in the next century and give them long lifespans, it may not make much difference. They might worry about events next century, but they're still likely to be distracted by short term events. Countering the manipulations of a rival Darhel group now is likely to seem far more important than reconfiguring your civilization to make it marginally better able to meet a long term threat that might or might not emerge any time in the next several centuries. Moreover, Darhel infighting will tend to select for people who do concentrate on countering short term manipulations, because there's no advantage to being the only Darhel worrying about what happens if the ravening hordes from Andromeda come charging in.

Also note that this hypothetical restructuring won't help the Darhel if they're invaded by a violent enemy. They'd still be hopelessly screwed by their own inability to fight and kill without going into overload, and their vassals' unwillingness to fight at all.

[Samuel]

Yeah, but constant backstabbing would result in one group using the Posleen tech in order to get an advantage over other Darhel groups. You cannot have a society with constant backstabbing and total unity of culture or thought.

As for dealing with Posleen invaders I always thought they could simply have a space ship hit any world the Posleen take at a substantial fraction of c. The Posleen would soon learn that the Darhel don't negotiate with terrorists

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, but constant backstabbing would result in one group using the Posleen tech in order to get an advantage over other Darhel groups. You cannot have a society with constant backstabbing and total unity of culture or thought.

True. On the other hand, there is a Darhel government, and that government is not going to look kindly on rogue Darhel corporations trying to gain an advantage by overthrowing the basis of the system that provides security for the Darhel species. Even if, objectively, a new system would make them even more secure, there's still that little problem of handling the transition gracefully... a problem the government would end up saddled with. Easier to lock the Groups into a business model that doesn't threaten social upheaval, at least from the point of view of the high executives running the system.

As for dealing with Posleen invaders I always thought they could simply have a space ship hit any world the Posleen take at a substantial fraction of c. The Posleen would soon learn that the Darhel don't negotiate with terrorists

Three problems:
1) I'm not sure the Posleen space defenses are limited enough to make that viable, though they might be, and
2) This is suicide for the Darhel immediately involved in the attack, which makes it harder to find volunteers, and
3) The Darhel would ideally like to get the planets back in some semblance of good condition, which is where human sepoys come in.

The whole purpose of their interaction with humans was to use the humans to clear the Posleen while channeling enough Posleen to Earth to wreck their homeworld, and thus reduce human populations to a drop in the Galactic bucket that could be managed more easily. It almost worked, too.

[Samuel]

True. On the other hand, there is a Darhel government, and that government is not going to look kindly on rogue Darhel corporations trying to gain an advantage by overthrowing the basis of the system that provides security for the Darhel species. Even if, objectively, a new system would make them even more secure, there's still that little problem of handling the transition gracefully... a problem the government would end up saddled with. Easier to lock the Groups into a business model that doesn't threaten social upheaval, at least from the point of view of the high executives running the system.

Yeah, but it isn't pervasive enough to prevent the creation of secret socities. Really, all this depends on how much the Darhel are a police state and how tight their social groups are. If they live in something like 1984 and are as trustworthy as drow than it is unlikely something like this could work.

The problem is that under normal conditions each Darhel group would have an incentive to increase the productivity of the Indowy under their control and such competition would inevitably lead to mass production. To prevent that would require high levels of cooperation or extremely good secret police (which runs into the problem that it only exists if individuals cannot cooperate...).

I'm not even talking about capital intensive processes- the simplest way would be to organize the Indowy into assembly lines.

1) I'm not sure the Posleen space defenses are limited enough to make that viable, though they might be, and

Obviously do it before they seize the planet.

2) This is suicide for the Darhel immediately involved in the attack, which makes it harder to find volunteers, and

They were able to find enough volunteers to crew war machines to fight the Posleen previously. Given the numbers the Posleen field that is pretty impressive.

Or press gang and drug them.

3) The Darhel would ideally like to get the planets back in some semblance of good condition, which is where human sepoys come in.

I'm actually refering to a preset plan you could have in case of rebellion/alien invasion/urban decay/mad AI/super plague/demonic forces of Choas/etc. Obviously the Darhel did not have such a plan.

Of course I find it odd that the Darhel care. After all, the Darhel who owned those planets no longer matter (being poor suddenly) and the other Darhel already have enough wealth. Reclaiming worlds won't increase their power and adding another species to the mix destabilizes the situation. Even with humanity under their thumb they would have to worry about rogue humans.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, but it isn't pervasive enough to prevent the creation of secret socities. Really, all this depends on how much the Darhel are a police state and how tight their social groups are. If they live in something like 1984 and are as trustworthy as drow than it is unlikely something like this could work.

It's not clear how internally policed they are. Personally, I suspect that the Darhel government engineers the legal structure to make trying this kind of thing counterproductive. It's conceivable that a Darhel group could cheat the system well enough to get away with it, but it's also conceivable that they would fail. We don't know enough about the precise nature of competition among the Groups to know, and applying the model of terrestrial corporations and Adam Smith to them may not be accurate.

1) I'm not sure the Posleen space defenses are limited enough to make that viable, though they might be, and

Obviously do it before they seize the planet.

That's worse, because it means that you're trying to launch your relativistic projectile through a cloud of Posleen ships descending on the planet. This tactic would actually work better after the Posleen land, but even then I'm not sure how well it would work. I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not sure about it the way you are.

2) This is suicide for the Darhel immediately involved in the attack, which makes it harder to find volunteers, and

They were able to find enough volunteers to crew war machines to fight the Posleen previously. Given the numbers the Posleen field that is pretty impressive.[/quote]Well, for one they were losing. Badly. For two, they relied heavily on automation to actually run the war machines. A Galactic military unit generally involved a large amount of AI-managed weaponry that was released to open fire by a Darhel pushing a button... and the Darhel invariably lost the button pusher in short order; the Darhel wasn't really crewing the machine.

3) The Darhel would ideally like to get the planets back in some semblance of good condition, which is where human sepoys come in.

I'm actually refering to a preset plan you could have in case of rebellion/alien invasion/urban decay/mad AI/super plague/demonic forces of Choas/etc. Obviously the Darhel did not have such a plan.

Yup. Again, not necessarily a surprise. The Galactics do not make good military planners. The Indowy and Tchpth won't, and the Darhel can't think about it too hard without going crazy and dying of adrenaline poisoning or its equivalent.

Of course I find it odd that the Darhel care. After all, the Darhel who owned those planets no longer matter (being poor suddenly) and the other Darhel already have enough wealth. Reclaiming worlds won't increase their power and adding another species to the mix destabilizes the situation. Even with humanity under their thumb they would have to worry about rogue humans.

Because the Darhel have a government, and desire to avoid going extinct. That means stopping the Posleen somehow, and given a choice between scorched earth defensive tactics and using human sepoys, I can see why they chose human sepoys.

[Samuel]

It's not clear how internally policed they are. Personally, I suspect that the Darhel government engineers the legal structure to make trying this kind of thing counterproductive. It's conceivable that a Darhel group could cheat the system well enough to get away with it, but it's also conceivable that they would fail. We don't know enough about the precise nature of competition among the Groups to know, and applying the model of terrestrial corporations and Adam Smith to them may not be accurate.

What do we know? I know they had a council with a first amoung equals, but beyond that...

[Simon_Jester]

To tell the truth, I don't know and don't feel up to trawling the books looking for it. I'm pretty sure there was a bit more than a mere "first among equals," but I can't prove it.

[Stellar]

Hi,

Just to play devil advocate, although I severely detest the Americanwank.....

there ARE plausible reasons for the utter screwup seen.

Only people who have their eyes wide shut do not understand how much of 'screwup' this world represents and how different ( and good) it could be in the absence of the type of leadership that Ringo clearly , and logically, doesn't include in his books. His world has plenty of short sighted fools as well as long scheming humans/aliens which makes it exactly like the real one contrary to some naive commentary in this thread and in so many other places.

For one, we already know that Mike had no understanding of nuclear warfare with his "its better to have multiple kiloton nukes than single gigaton nuke to inflict widespread damage" and no mention of airburst.

Actually it's quite clear that he understands that one can do very much the same type of damage with a half dozen 100 Kt warheads as with megaton ( or even two ) when used against industrial&build up targets. As for airbursts that's presumed against anything but buried targets by most people who even claim a lay opinion.

Similarly, they hired civilian consultants such as Mike for "science fiction expertise" along with "experts", who may have been politically hired (think Bush adminstration in Iraq).

Yes, and given who the government will 'consult' ( or pretend to listen to) only to do continue doing what they have so far done , or had in mind already, i would not read too much into their choices or consider the whole concept naive or purely a literary device.

In Book 3 or 4, there was also mention of how "experts" drove the design of the ACS, requiring it to have "lasguns" effect via overpowered guns.
Given incompetent advice, the role of powered armour, which could be designed as mobile reserves to plug the line suffered its own variant of design creep.

Bradley IFV anyone? Hell they are turning the F-22 into a strike bomber too and decided that stealth is so important that national security can be compromised by basing the entire stealth strategic bomber force ( unless your still counting the lancers, for some reason) in one location. We could go on for days with the mixture of mission creep and institutional idiocy that produces weapons unsuited to slaughtering anything but largely defenseless third worlders.

Then have the idea that its the shinest new design, its AMERICAN and its expensive, meaning only the Americans can afford to buy so many, thus, America placed huge emphasis on developing such suits.

It's not about placing huge emphasis on it being expensive, revolutionary, or new as much as it is about a vein attempt to fight bloodless , and very unpopular, wars against third world countries ( that's what empires do after all ) while 'coincidentally', unless you believe it's a leftist/communist conspiracy, creating a acquisition system that buys weapons that can not and will not be effective tools in a war against the real threats.

Throw in unseen political pressures to buy such suits by other powers for prestige and well...... the resources that might have gone towards developing armoured vehicles capable of holding the line disappeared.

The research did not ( Shiva's , tanks, artillery, intelligent SAW type weapons, Metal storm, lasers and the like) stop but money were poured into systems that could be available in large numbers at the time of the invasion. As it turns out nothing could be done about tanks in time and the suits were only really available because of the mercenary activities that American and NATO forces were willing to undertake with them. As is explained in the book NATO got hammered on Diess and lost a lot more than they expected. The eventual victory did however lead to a bounty when they managed to take and sell the captured Posleen ships. Either way even what did get ordered where not often delivered as the galactic 'infrastructure' simply could not support ( for the reasons he attempts to outline and some members are discussing on page 4/5) much rapid construction and the Darhel not interested in making planet Earth truly defensible.

For all we know, the Darhel applied economic and pyschological pressures to pressure humanity into buying wonder weapons. (Buy one hundred and get 10% discount, for the whole human race).

Well that stands to reason as nations and military leaderships are very often seduced by the idea that they can eat their cake and have it too. Fighting bloodless wars is a imperialist wet dream and they will expend as much of the host imperial nations national budget as they can if it means that they can control more of the world while not having to deal with dead or mangled soldiers and the resulting negative attention. Having said that they don't have any great love of robots either as without people to command and control there would not remain much in the way of a power trip; controlling machines is not exactly what imperialist and militarist get off on.

Lastly, while a draft has been legislated, we have no real data about how such an army was governed. For all we know, a good portion of the Army was created along the National Guard and politicians were screaming that their states HAD to be protected and minor defensive lines HAD to be manned.

Yes, lobbying clearly creates the most efficient defense of a country possible otherwise it wouldn't be done that way! Then again do we really need 'new' excuses for the hopelessly inefficient American armed forces, which consumes the large majority of the worlds military expenditure, without any similar output in capabilities when it's been run that way since it first got the chance for expansion? I am confident that given the same resources and manpower numbers peace loving Canadians could control the world more efficiently and the Germans perhaps a few solar systems by force; but that's just idle speculation on my part so please ignore it.

Funding for such lines afterall had to be made through Congress. Ditto to the draft Army and etc. And we won't even need a leftist government to do this:D

But it's always the leftists fault and if it's not readily obvious your just not digging deep enough! I love how the conspiracy has merit only in as much as it serves to demonize what little progressive forces still remains in the west. And by that i don't mean what YOU( and certainly not you painrack) think 'the left' is.

Stellar

[Stellar]

Hi again Painrack,

The fact also remains that the Germans had fortified the coast whereas the French were not. They had been flanked out of their fortifications. When the French were defending the Maginot line, they held out against the Germans and the extended Maginot Line also provided serious problems for the German army, despite propangda showing otherwise.

The Allies breached the Atlantic wall with light casualties ( it was not a major obstacle and nowhere near ready to be so in itself) and it was not fortifications that held them up in Normandy and France but German field defenses and better employment of far more limited resources. As for the Maginot Line it was a serious obstacle and that is why it was mostly bypassed mostly showing that the Germans certainly did not believe the propaganda that fixed defenses where obsolete.

It wasn't. But then again, the Americans were not really losing the battle in Normandy, Italy and the like.

Neither were the Russians in late 1943 but that doesn't mean that they could keep on affording the same losses of men and material they were taking hence the long periods between offenses and the suspensions in even the strategic bomber campaign against Germany. Fact is the invasion Sicily was a pretty close run thing and Anzio were pretty much that with Italy instead of proving to be a serious drain on German resources turned out to be a massive drain on allied resources. As for Normandy and France one can say the same thing given the slow progress of the allies and the cost to them showing that their planning for ending the war in Europe by land invasion severely underestimated the remaining German capacity to resist in the West, East and South.

Newsflash, the Germans lost all the various battles, the Allies won.

Thanks for reminding me...

And it wasn't just a simple matter of overwhelming resources either.

Then why the massive disparity in casualties and equipment lost by the respective sides? I wont argue that it was simply a question of overwhelming resources when i think it's clear that doctrine was the biggest allied failing with technology and more than adequate resources making up the shortfall to victory.

By this stage of the war, the Allies had mastered the use of combined arms, Ninth airforce provided superb support and coordination.

Which along with massed fire support were for the most part what allowed allied progress in eventually capturing France... I wont mention the massive volume of friendly fire casualties but suffice to say that if the Allies had 'mastered' combined arms warfare the Germans were at that point past masters and were losing not because their doctrine were more flawed but because they could not match the Allies in actual resources.

The germans excellence in small unit warfare and mortars was countered by the Americans own training in markmenship and massed artillery, including air support.

I am surprised that you think the Germans were only better in small unit warfare and that their mortars stood out specifically? Where is it stated or where does it become obvious from combat records that American marksmanship or air support where more significant than those of the Germans when they still had similar resources? Isn't what the Ninth did right basically what the Germans did years before and what they did wrong mostly what the Germans discarded?

Again i don't think there is anything the Germans did that couldn't or were not eventually copied/adopted by others with similar affect but this suggestion that the Allies were fast learners and that they would have managed victory in the historic time-frame without their vast resources is something i can not accept as a accurate.

Stellar

[Stellar]

Hi RH,

Tanks are not better than what, as it became evident in WW2? IMO, what you stated implies, in my mind, some sort of comparison between tanks and some other sort of vehicle.

Why by comparison? Is it not clear that i consider tanks to be no more than another component of a national armed force that if misused becomes as inefficient/ineffective as any other? Tanks did not 'revolutionize' warfare any more than cavalry did and to suggest otherwise is something quite incomprehensible to me.

There are of course some environments where tanks are more appropriate than say, light infantry, but Infantry/Artillery/Armour complement and support each other.

Yes 'of course' and it's called combined arms; suggesting that tanks or any other aspect of a combined force have these magical power to defeat the enemy has no place on even this discussion board and is the reason why i am objecting to this tank centric reasoning seen here.

I would dispute that the Posleen do not have rear areas, they have industry, and their much beloved loot has to be transported around. Not to mention their nesting areas.

I would dispute that it's anything like human rear areas and that their 'loot carriers' are as dangerous as the average human truck driver.... Not to mention our suburbs with women and children.

With regard to size, a NATO tank target measures 2.3m by 2.3m, how much smaller do you think a power-armoured humanoid is going to be?

Again you are bringing up a irrelevancy ( a armored human sized target would be about 2 meters x 1-1.2 meters but it can crouch, fire around corners, can entrench itself with the stated 'cratering charges', can change direction without any significant turning radius and can jump many meters into the air. Show me a tank that can similarly evade massed fired ( armor can't defeat it) and i would have no reason not to like them for all situations. Either way 2.3 meters is a closer approximation for old/new Warsaw pact tanks ( the majority of tanks in service in the world) than it was/is for NATO tanks which only later started copying those type of measurements.

Besides, a somewhat smaller, possibly faster humanoid target isn't going to offer any advantage over a tank-sized target in light of the God King saucers' superb autotargetting capabilities.

So you would rather try to armor something against strikes that are impossible to avoid ( since they don't apparently miss or get overwhelmed by numerous targets) than to try evade fire as much as humanly possible given the extreme cost of trying to armor a tank ( in just the frontal aspect) like a much smaller human target? Would you please help me understand why our our infantry men today are not covered in toe to head armor and are still expected to use movement and fire suppression to inflict damage and escape return fire? I didn't think so ....

The point of power armor is to present as small a target as possible and to evade as much fire as possible just like in the real world.

With regard to armour, a tank would, if upgraded with what the Indowy build the suits out of, much better battlefield mobility than a suit of armour.

And to armor it with the same expensive materials would cost you the same as armoring quite a few suits without the same dispersal of fire effect multiple targets presents the enemy. As for battlefield mobility mobility is useless if your mission killed by the first thing that hits your track or external mounted weapons/sensors. Either way the war against the posleen is NOT a mobile war but a purely defensive one where victory is not achieved by 'breaktrough' ( which is impossible) but by destroying whatever they can throw at you and then hoping that you can exploit it by either moving forward your defensive lines or pursuing them with mobile artillery units and screening forces.

Besides, the 1mm RGs don't affect an human armoured Abrams, the 3mm RGs can mission kill one, which just leaves the HVM and plasma cannons. All of which are rare among the normals.

The 1mm round will wreck the main gun and will ( according to the book any ways) sweep any external weapons and sensors off the tank as well as ruining it's running gear and penetrating side turret and hull armor. HVM and Plasma rounds are 'rare' in that given thousands of human sized targets shooting from behind cover your as individual unlikely to get blown to bits but planes or any such exposed targets are initially quickly the focus of all fire with predictable results. The only way a tank with suit like armor can survive is by indirect or very long range fire and that role could better be filled with truck mounted mortars, regular artillery ( dozens for the price of a suit armored tank) or a ersatz assault gun type vehicle.

Coming to cost, from what I remember, the ACS suits were fucking expensive to design and procure. An applique armour kit, as MKSheppard has suggested in similar threads, would have been the much better (especially cost) solution than fucking about with mind-power built hunk of junk.

As is eventually cleared up in this thread ( i tried to explain it but failed... ) the shape of suit isn't what makes it very expensive as the armor comes from a process that is inherently time consuming, and very improbable, and inherently expensive per square inch bought. As for the armor kits they did try and they did eventually come up with native armor kits that allowed M2 derivatives to survive direct hits by even HVM and Plasma fire at which point tanks become as lethal as surviving return fire allows them to be.

Say it ain't so, attrition warfare against an enemy which pretty much embodies the concept isn't a good idea? That's why maneuver warfare exists.

All warfare is essentially attrition warfare with victory going to either the side that can inflict greater damage( material or human) than the enemy can sustain or the side that can sustain greater damage than the enemy can inflict before running out of political will or economic means. That is why Vietnam and North Korea are not American colonies and Russia not still in German hands; human history abounds with examples of unlikely winners and unlikely losers.

The only way to fight the Posleen is to dig in and allow themselves the opportunity to expend themselves uselessly on your defenses hoping to in doing so create favourable situations that will allow attack, if only by means of moving your defenses forward to gain defensible or economically useful terrain, or exploitation of temporary Posleen weakness. Attempting to defeat a far larger enemy force by maneuver IS possible but only if you can defeat him in detail by massing your smaller forces to do so; America couldn't do that and neither could the rest of the world being stretched so thinly everywhere. Maneuver warfare is based on the premise of exploiting perceived weakness or to create it by massing overwhelming forces in one region while halting enemy forces with defensive fighting elsewhere. It is not based on the notion of 'moving' everywhere but of moving with overwhelming force where and when it matters.

That being said, the saucers and well armed normals are the problem, once they're dead, the rest are ripe for the reaping.

If your in a power suit or very well armored tank, yes, but out of cover human soldiers and IFV's are swept away very quickly.

So it took them a shitload of time to figure out how to manufacture a plate to fit on a vehicle?

It was native built armor based on many years of studying Posleen and galactic weaponry. They never did fit suit armor on tanks as it's far too expensive to attempt doing so.

For your reading pleasure, from "The Technology of Tanks" by Richard M Ogorkiewicz

Thanks. I like the author and respect his work ( which i am familiar with, as should have become obvious to people who actually are) which is why i don't consider tanks obsolete in the real world and only objected to the claims that tanks have a similar role on a battlefield with a alien enemy with the equipment and fighting style of the Posleen. If you can not or do not comprehend the difference between the real world and stated characteristics of Posleen verse perhaps this discussion is not for you and you should move on to some of the military forums where this sort of discussion is standard?

Stellar

[Stellar]

What was worse than the Nazis that has happened? The genocide of American Indians, complete and utter, comes to mind.

I never specified a era which is i suspect why Stas suddenly decided to add that bit to then promptly attack the straw man; some people have a hard time compromising when it comes to being perceived as being fallible. In the twentieth century the second world war period was as far as i know the worse even if various countries suffered comparable periods of destruction and lost comparable large volumes of their populations in the twentieth century. I thought i could introduce the point of view that Germans are not uniquely evil ( even in the twentieth century) and quite human but perhaps i should have done it more circumspectly given the apparent ignorance of human history displayed so far.

Other than that - I'm all ears.

Why?

For that matter, the genocide of the American Indians took place over almost 400 years (1492-~late 1800s), and the majority of deaths were from the inadvertent spread of disease in the early 1500s by Spanish explorers and conquistadors.

They CLAIMED it was inadvertent but we all know that wasn't exactly ( and that's generous to the Spanish) the case and that similar diseases had ravaged other peoples and new colonies in times past.

The actual genocidal campaigns, such as Hispaniola, took 30 years to kill a million people through overwork and starvation, again inadvertently. Later campaigns in North America made use of disease as well, but were directed against tribes with fewer than 10,000 people each. While the scale of the deaths is in total maybe equal with the Second World War in its entirety (assuming about 20-30 million inhabitants pre-1492 in the Americas and a 95% fatality rate), four centuries versus six years is a massive difference.

Again i never specified a era or suggested that i were referring to shear numbers. I am talking about actual successful genocides in era's past or at least one's that came very close. As for holocaust the vast majority of 'Jewish' people killed were only so by faith and not actually of Semitic descent which is what makes the Nazi ideology both sick and it's goals utterly unattainable. By focusing it's killing on people of Eastern European descent ( Jewish or otherwise) it showed that it's policy had only so much to do with anti Semitic beliefs in itself ( not like there was much consistency or actual science/knowledge involved in Nazi ideology or policy ) and everything to do with killing people of more general Slavic descent. As European 'Jews' were largely from eastern European genetic descent it made imperialistic sense ( called Nazism in Germany's case) for them to be hated as their destruction would create the 'living space' and imperialist goals that were by no means new to Germany. If one wishes to be pedantic/accurate the Holocaust was firstly a genocide of Slavic people ( as much use as such generalizations is ) many of which victims happened to follow Judaism and some who where of actual semitic descent.

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-So ... 0700613587

I am not sure of that link just shows how confused Germans in general or Germans of Jewish descent in particular were of Nazi aims&goals ( or if they were clear in nazi minds) or whether it just shows what happens when you try to mesh bigotry with German efficiency and mass conscription.

And i hope that anyone who wants to respond to this post in anger, or with accusations that i am denying the holocaust ( or similar idiotic accusations), will take some time to consider if it's really worth screaming at me if you think i am that much of a fanatic. Maybe that's just too much too hope for but i am not going to stop doing so now.

Stellar

[Stellar]

[R_H]So, "willing" a plate of material into existence is a lot more difficult than visualising a suit of armor atom-by- atom/molecule-by-molecule? OK...We are however assuming that what ever the suits are made of isn't available simply as a plate, with no visualisation construction needed.

I presumed a precursor composite material that may be a liquid or any odd shape that is then manipulated on the atomic level to form the basic structure of the suit or armor panel in question. Either way i think it's utterly senseless to argue with the creator of this universe about how it 'should' be. If your unhappy with the way the Posleen verse work i suggest you find another or just stick to the one we pretend to understand best.

A tonne of steel is cheap, a tonne of parts manufactured out of steel is (more) expensive. It would be cheaper.

This stands to reason but you are presuming that the suits actually have parts which is as far as i can tell not really the case. Again i presumed that creating the suite and creating a similar mass of armor for a tank would be pretty much the same price but frankly we don't know and can't tell exactly what he had in mind. Since Ringo pretty much created this universe from the bottom up ( he decided what sort of enemy he wanted to fight and then built the universe accordingly) why can't you just accept that in this universe power suit combat is the most efficient way to fight the posleen in the open?

The whole vehicle wouldn't have to be up-armoured, just (IMO) the crew compartment and other vulnerable bits, it doesn't have to be slathered in unobtanium.

The purpose of a crew compartment is to provide the space inside a vehicle the crew requires to fight it effectively but if that is the only part that is protected against attack ( not even mentioning that there are no non critical areas inside a tank) how long will the external weapons, sensors, running gear, engine and the like survive to make the presence and survival of the crew worthwhile? This is a very American centric way of thinking of the crew as more important than the fighting efficiency of the weapon itself and why they would have and will today lose a war against a nation with the same economic means.

Relatively few tanks on the battlefield? The HVMs and plasmas aren't "numerous", shotguns and bola (?) blades are.

They are numerous as every god king has either one or both with anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in fifty having HVM's or plasma depending on the 'wealth' of the leader. Since 3 mm railguns quickly have a cumulative destructive effect on a suit one can but wonder what the effect would be on a slower and larger target such as a tank.

How big are these suits of armour? I'm guessing they increase the silhoute (sp) of a human sized figure significantly. HVMs, railguns...dodge? Er, right, of course.

I stated my guess earlier ( increase of about 20 - 30 cm's to users height and perhaps a little more to shoulder cross section) and while it increases the profile it makes it far more maneuverable more than offsetting the increased target profile. When i say 'dodge' i obviously ( why am i presumed to be brain dead?) i mean it in the same way that soldiers say when they 'dodge' bullets; you are moving into or out of cover and not in fact 'dodeging' any specific bullet or missile which would at these speeds be logically quite impossible to do.

Perhaps if you did not turn those you disagree with into bumbling morons, by drawing the illogical conclusions about their intentions or statements, you could consider more legitimate objections to my opinions and ideas?

Err, main battle tank, ever heard of one? They have enough armour to survive engagements with AT weapons, of the vehicle mounted and handheld variety.

Yes, they can survive such weapons, depending on where it hits, but mostly they still have to survive by not getting hit as even a failed attack by anti tank weapon strike will degrade fighting efficiency and sometimes compromise the armor against future strikes. I don't really understand why you bring this up as the point of main battle tanks must be to actually fight trough these AT defenses or at least survive them by fighting from well prepared defensive positions.

The Posleen aren't "all the same". Most of them aren't much more than cannon fodder! A minority are well armed though.

But the minority are dispersed in the 'crowd' massively increasing it's combat capabilities. If this minority were fighting somewhere in a distinct formation ( like armor divisions today) it would matter but they do not and you never call tell where in the mass of posleen the 'minority' will fire from and kill you. As for the 'rest' they may be cannon fodder to tanks if there are sufficient numbers of tanks to survive that 'minority' fire but otherwise they just soak and disperse fire by the tanks making them just about as useful as the average Infantry soldier we use up in such volumes in our modern wars.

If the shotgun armed Posleen mass fire at an MBT, they have a snowball's chance in hell of killing the crew or disabling the vehicle. Tanks can be entrenched, if you wish to do so.

They have no chance ( it's physics) but they can probably strip off any external sensor, or weapons including the main gun, that is not armored against shotgun or 1mm ( the standard weapons) strikes. Tanks can be entrenched but then so can practically anything with wheels and a gun that we do not normally call tanks. To pay such a high price for something that is just as dependent as infantry on remaining undetected and well hidden to survive is rather pointless. The power suits can break cover and attack because they can cover large enough volumes of space and engage in enough abrupt changes in vector to disperse enemy fire to a degree significant enough to allow a chance for survival. They are maneuver units par excellence and against a enemy with the massed fire of the posleen the logical replacement for tanks.

I don't see how fighting a trench war is the right thing to do against the Posleen,

It's not the 'right' thing as much as it is the only thing that allows survival. The surviving humans have basically moved into mountain fortress areas of the world where the Posleen can not bring enough bodies and weapons to the front to inflict casualties fast enough to achieve breakthroughs. I am no longer sure that you even read the books but if you did i do not think you grasped how Ringo's posleen verse actually works. Again if you can't deal with the strange goings in in these alternative universes perhaps you should stick to the one we know best.

especially if you can maneuver better than they can. If there are cheaper ways than to defend than tanks, what are they?

Artillery in it's various forms, towed or self propelled, suitably protected by sand and concrete. Since there is nowhere where human forces can maneuver ( giving up any more land means more people starve, etc) and thus trade space for inflicting casualties you have to stand and fight everywhere thus reducing tanks largely to mobile fire brigades where mobility is more important than survivability meaning that they wont be MBT's and perhaps not even tanks at all.

Defending with tanks is still cheaper than defending with ACS.

But 'defending' with tanks is a oxymoron! If your defending with tanks ( not counter attacking which is different) your doctrine is flawed and you will suffer the same fate as the French and Russians ( or anyone else who tries) who spread their tanks out amongst infantry thus missing the point quite completely.

Oh, the irony. You just told MKSheppard, of all people, to go read some military history.

Yes, perhaps if you knew a bit more of it you could or would have figured out how much of it i have read. Then again i will be the first to acknowledge my ignorance of the subject matter as there is too much for a lifetime and i am not even midway trough mine. My judgement of him is based on what i think i know of military history and since both our opinions of each other rests on our subjective interpretations of our own knowledge of the topic i see no harm in you having added your similarly subjective point of view here. ( )

Out of curiosity, what are your criticisms of the Posleenverse?

Perhaps if i have no other posts in this thread left to respond to i will saddle you with my subjective opinion of this particular make believe universe. At this stage i would rather just smile and continue to point out the errors in reasoning that led to so many people expending energy on logging on to a online forum to critique a make believe world.

PS: I would like to consider my activities in a slightly more positive light (a defense of logic rather than a attack on the entertainment value of a series of books) but i would be the first to admit that the distinction might not be obvious to the type of people who attack the literary efforts of others.....

Stellar

[Bakustra]

For that matter, the genocide of the American Indians took place over almost 400 years (1492-~late 1800s), and the majority of deaths were from the inadvertent spread of disease in the early 1500s by Spanish explorers and conquistadors.

They CLAIMED it was inadvertent but we all know that wasn't exactly ( and that's generous to the Spanish) the case and that similar diseases had ravaged other peoples and new colonies in times past.

Funny, I didn't know that Ponce de Leon intended to wipe out the Adena/Mississipians, especially seeing as he didn't know they existed.

The actual genocidal campaigns, such as Hispaniola, took 30 years to kill a million people through overwork and starvation, again inadvertently. Later campaigns in North America made use of disease as well, but were directed against tribes with fewer than 10,000 people each. While the scale of the deaths is in total maybe equal with the Second World War in its entirety (assuming about 20-30 million inhabitants pre-1492 in the Americas and a 95% fatality rate), four centuries versus six years is a massive difference.

Again i never specified a era or suggested that i were referring to shear numbers. I am talking about actual successful genocides in era's past or at least one's that came very close. As for holocaust the vast majority of 'Jewish' people killed were only so by faith and not actually of Semitic descent which is what makes the Nazi ideology both sick and it's goals utterly unattainable. By focusing it's killing on people of Eastern European descent ( Jewish or otherwise) it showed that it's policy had only so much to do with anti Semitic beliefs in itself ( not like there was much consistency or actual science/knowledge involved in Nazi ideology or policy ) and everything to do with killing people of more general Slavic descent. As European 'Jews' were largely from eastern European genetic descent it made imperialistic sense ( called Nazism in Germany's case) for them to be hated as their destruction would create the 'living space' and imperialist goals that were by no means new to Germany. If one wishes to be pedantic/accurate the Holocaust was firstly a genocide of Slavic people ( as much use as such generalizations is ) many of which victims happened to follow Judaism and some who where of actual semitic descent.

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-So ... 0700613587

I am not sure of that link just shows how confused Germans in general or Germans of Jewish descent in particular were of Nazi aims&goals ( or if they were clear in nazi minds) or whether it just shows what happens when you try to mesh bigotry with German efficiency and mass conscription.

And i hope that anyone who wants to respond to this post in anger, or with accusations that i am denying the holocaust ( or similar idiotic accusations), will take some time to consider if it's really worth screaming at me if you think i am that much of a fanatic. Maybe that's just too much too hope for but i am not going to stop doing so now.

Stellar

So... what? What are you trying to say, exactly? You started out with a vague declaration of "the Nazis weren't unique in human history," then graduated to a lengthy post of babble about the Holocaust. Seriously, could you be a little clearer?

[Stellar]

Funny, I didn't know that Ponce de Leon intended to wipe out the Adena/Mississipians, especially seeing as he didn't know they existed.

Because i just said that accidents don't happen and that humans can't do very destructive things ( like the holocaust) out of either shear ignorance of the natural world or warped convictions about their place in it. Right, want more straw?

So... what? What are you trying to say, exactly? You started out with a vague declaration of "the Nazis weren't unique in human history," then graduated to a lengthy post of babble about the Holocaust. Seriously, could you be a little clearer?

I am certainly the introspective kind ( the misunderstanding could be due to my inability to communicate my ideas) but sadly i can't think of many ways to say as much as i did in less words of make it more precise at this time. I can however give some headlines for those who think everything could or should be reduced to them; Nazi's not history greatest or most efficiency killers, Holocaust had victims other than Jewish people, Imperialist abound, Nazi's were efficiently crazy. Hope, but doubt, that helps.


Perhaps you could read the original post a few more times considering some of the following points?

1: The author believes that people are pretty much people; their all hopeless ignorant to various debilitating degrees no matter how they look, where they grew up, to which god they pray or what the color of their skin happens to be.

2: When you can not discern meaning in a post it means one of two things; the author does not know what he is saying or you do know enough to make sense of it. Perhaps it's no surprise that those who eventually learn something are those who presumes the later by trying to figure out what their missing?

3: Few people who actively participate in forums are of the kind that can agree to disagree; that type of person normally just read without commenting.

4: Current author has had more practice being disagreeable, but honestly attempting to be, than most and while he does do his best to be clear but in his experience common sense supposes common knowledge but sadly common knowledge ( at least at this level of assumed common knowledge) isn't with predictable results to common sense.

Perhaps you could PM me with a summary of the 'conclusions' you drew from those points ( the American subspecies is especially interesting if only because they are so intensively studied) so that i can further refine my 'method'? Oh well.

Stellar

[Bakustra]

Funny, I didn't know that Ponce de Leon intended to wipe out the Adena/Mississipians, especially seeing as he didn't know they existed.

Because i just said that accidents don't happen and that humans can't do very destructive things ( like the holocaust) out of either shear ignorance of the natural world or warped convictions about their place in it. Right, want more straw?

You implied that the Spanish made deliberate use of biological warfare against the Native Americans when they first arrived. You are, frankly, wrong, or, more likely, mistaken. The largest single death tolls come from smallpox, and in the case of the Adena, who were the largest death toll from the time period, Ponce de Leon's expedition is the only one that could have reached them. You must show evidence that he set out to kill people with smallpox, rather than looking for the Fountain of Youth.

So... what? What are you trying to say, exactly? You started out with a vague declaration of "the Nazis weren't unique in human history," then graduated to a lengthy post of babble about the Holocaust. Seriously, could you be a little clearer?

I am certainly the introspective kind ( the misunderstanding could be due to my inability to communicate my ideas) but sadly i can't think of many ways to say as much as i did in less words of make it more precise at this time. I can however give some headlines for those who think everything could or should be reduced to them; Nazi's not history greatest or most efficiency killers, Holocaust had victims other than Jewish people, Imperialist abound, Nazi's were efficiently crazy. Hope, but doubt, that helps.


Perhaps you could read the original post a few more times considering some of the following points?

1: The author believes that people are pretty much people; their all hopeless ignorant to various debilitating degrees no matter how they look, where they grew up, to which god they pray or what the color of their skin happens to be.

2: When you can not discern meaning in a post it means one of two things; the author does not know what he is saying or you do know enough to make sense of it. Perhaps it's no surprise that those who eventually learn something are those who presumes the later by trying to figure out what their missing?

3: Few people who actively participate in forums are of the kind that can agree to disagree; that type of person normally just read without commenting.

4: Current author has had more practice being disagreeable, but honestly attempting to be, than most and while he does do his best to be clear but in his experience common sense supposes common knowledge but sadly common knowledge ( at least at this level of assumed common knowledge) isn't with predictable results to common sense.

Perhaps you could PM me with a summary of the 'conclusions' you drew from those points ( the American subspecies is especially interesting if only because they are so intensively studied) so that i can further refine my 'method'? Oh well.

Stellar[/quote]
If you want, I will take this to PMs. However, your points require some further clarification. Point one: a. provide a group (which sought to wipe out large numbers of people) that killed more than the Nazis, who killed at least 40 million people, conservatively. b. Yes. This is something that Stas brought up, but the only group that comes close is Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, with about 1 million/year. I calculated, using figures for the Holocaust from isurvived.org, a killing rate of about 3.3 million people/year, including all the dead from the Holocaust and the estimated 27 million Soviet citizens who died as a result of the war. But if you have some other criteria, please provide it.

Point two: I was aware of that. I think that virtually everybody in this thread was aware of that, and if anybody was not, feel free to PM me or Stellar with this factoid.

Point three: I have no idea what you are trying to say with this. Please re-clarify.

Point four: Please clarify this, as I don't want to misunderstand you.

Point five: Ah, cynicism.

Point six: Ah, arrogance! Lovely, lovely arrogance, with a hint of snideness to taste.

Point seven: Well, if you're going to take that attitude, then there is no need to take this to PMs, as if I am so unreasonable as to be unconvinced by your arguments, then publicity is your only recourse.

Point eight: Okay, but if you're aware of problems with expressing your meaning, then you really should not declare automatically that the other person's problems with understanding are their fault,even if you phrase it in a general way so as to back down from it easily. Stop throwing stones from that house of yours.

[PainRack]

The Allies breached the Atlantic wall with light casualties ( it was not a major obstacle and nowhere near ready to be so in itself) and it was not fortifications that held them up in Normandy and France but German field defenses and better employment of far more limited resources. As for the Maginot Line it was a serious obstacle and that is why it was mostly bypassed mostly showing that the Germans certainly did not believe the propaganda that fixed defenses where obsolete.

I believe the point was the Allies competence vis a vis the Germans, as opposed to the fortifications involved. The Allies certainly faced a much more difficult operational task of assaulting the Atlatnic wall than the Germans did in attacking through the bocage country. The Allies difficulties cannot be dismissed purely as a result of German tactical superority.

Neither were the Russians in late 1943 but that doesn't mean that they could keep on affording the same losses of men and material they were taking hence the long periods between offenses and the suspensions in even the strategic bomber campaign against Germany. Fact is the invasion Sicily was a pretty close run thing and Anzio were pretty much that with Italy instead of proving to be a serious drain on German resources turned out to be a massive drain on allied resources. As for Normandy and France one can say the same thing given the slow progress of the allies and the cost to them showing that their planning for ending the war in Europe by land invasion severely underestimated the remaining German capacity to resist in the West, East and South.

Neither could the Germans. Kesselring success should not be denied, but the Italian front was always meant to be a secondary front. Indeed, much of the success Kesselring had could be attributed to the bulk of Allied airpower being focused on France and the landing. Supplies, landing craft, POL was all redirected towards the Normandy buildup. If more combat resources had been directed towards the Italian front, Kesselring defence would probably have been less successful, in particular, the use of airpower in interdicting the vulnerable supply routes of the German army.

[qipte#Then why the massive disparity in casualties and equipment lost by the respective sides? I wont argue that it was simply a question of overwhelming resources when i think it's clear that doctrine was the biggest allied failing with technology and more than adequate resources making up the shortfall to victory. [/quote]
In what sense? Operation Shingle had 43 thousand casualties for the Allies, 40k casualties for the Axis forces involved. To make matters worse, the Allies have the manpower and medical resources to actually treat and rehab wounded, returning them to the front as effectives. The Germans don't.
At this stage in the war, Allied medical care was superior to the Germans in every plausible sense, from plasma,blood, antibiotics to even hygiene and bed status. The Germans was so stretched for manpower that casualties were placed back on convalescent duty, and in 1944, back to the front before they have time to properly heal.

There are problems with Allied doctrine, such as US tank doctrine but to suggest that it was the single biggest allied failing when one considers how effective the Allies coordinated artillery and airpower with their ground forces, the logistic superiority, the medical care....

Which along with massed fire support were for the most part what allowed allied progress in eventually capturing France... I wont mention the massive volume of friendly fire casualties but suffice to say that if the Allies had 'mastered' combined arms warfare the Germans were at that point past masters and were losing not because their doctrine were more flawed but because they could not match the Allies in actual resources.

Except that US airpower at this time was generating more sorties than the Germans did, with higher readiness rates and etc even when the Germans were at their height during the Battle of Britain.
The US would also better air support via Ninth Airforce during the subsequent breakout.
If anything, comparing Operation Goodwood friendly fire casualties, when the Bombers actually violated their own doctrine and orders and not to mention their respective commanders refusal to actually train said squadrons in tactical support is........ misleading.

I am surprised that you think the Germans were only better in small unit warfare and that their mortars stood out specifically? Where is it stated or where does it become obvious from combat records that American marksmanship or air support where more significant than those of the Germans when they still had similar resources? Isn't what the Ninth did right basically what the Germans did years before and what they did wrong mostly what the Germans discarded?

Ninth airforce had perfected other means of designating targets other than just laying out panels to mark out to Luffwaffe bombers. Part of the reason is Allied technical superiority in terms of radio at this time.

Again i don't think there is anything the Germans did that couldn't or were not eventually copied/adopted by others with similar affect but this suggestion that the Allies were fast learners and that they would have managed victory in the historic time-frame without their vast resources is something i can not accept as a accurate.

Stellar

It is IMPOSSIBLE to seperate the Allies vast resources from any discussion of their doctrine. It is the Allies access to superior metals and electronics that allowed them to have aircraft of better performance, which translates to being able to exploit tactics that the Germans could not use. Ditto to their access to greater fuel and automobile industry, which translates to increased mobility and supplies which then translates to how the US could sustain airpower and ground battles longer.

[K. A. Pital]

Stellar, you're too dumb to adress my points, so you pick on other posters or what? Did my questions to you just evaporate and you decided to troll anew in the thread?