From Posleen thread

[Eleas]

Sadly, the Posleen war books weren't written for intense scrutiny.

The Posleen books are basically what happens when you take the concept and execution of Army of Darkness, declare that the arm and the chainsaw are now ray guns, remove all humour and satire, and somehow unaccountably make a profit by publishing the thing.

Given all that, I can't see consensus ITT as being viable. Surely the purpose is to debate, i.e. apply logic, but these are books by John Ringo. Without basic acknowledgement of the value of logic itself, where would you even begin?

[Simon_Jester]

Posleen universe is American wank full of steamy bullshit like e.g. Canada being "too cold". Russia is nigh the coldest nation on Earth, by the average temperatures most of it's population resides in, and yet Russia is game.

Yes. And while Ringo was stupid enough to miss that, he wasn't quite stupid enough to keep missing it after (I infer) people pointed it out to him. So he changed the backstory. The plot never really hinged on Russia being annihilated, so changing the backstory was all he had to do, and he did it.

So in my book he gets at least the minimal tiny quantum of credit for being smart enough to retcon his own dumb mistake. No more, but no less.

That's what happens when you tell young people organizations/things are 'evil' , like moths to a flame.

You think the SS are not evil? They killed at a rate of several humans per MINUTE in East European territories. That's a far larger degree of evil than anything encountered in history that far.

I think he thinks that designating them as uniquely evil has the unfortunate side effect of drawing a certain kind of mind to their legacy. Which says a lot about the kind of mind in question, but what can you do?

The USSR had lesser resources; it just issued MORE planes, MORE tanks and MORE weapons per TON OF STEEL. Not "more overall", but MORE PER TON. Which means the Germans were piss poor at managing the resources they had.

Yes. I wonder which side came out ahead in the "tons of steel destroyed per ton of steel used" competition, though. Probably the Russians, because they still won.

Question: does your count of German weapons include steel expended on fortifications (AA and coastal) used against the Western Allies? I'm going to guess "yes," but I'd like to be sure.

Except that doesn't make alot of sense. The military will be using almost exclusively airburst because the Posleen lack hard targets so there is no need for fallout shelters. Evacuation is WORSE underground because you need to get people through a small narrow entrance. Cost WILL be higher if only because you have to put lights and ventelation ducts everywhere so people can see and breathe.

At a guess? Stupidity encouraged by the Darhel. They were trying to get Earth's native human population wiped out in the process of taking gigatons of Posleen with them, remember?

The idea of putting your refugee shelters underground is just smart enough to pass a militarily inept politician's sanity check, and thus to be seized on and encouraged by Darhel who want to make the majority of Earth's population in developed nations relatively easy to kill.

Europe does okay now? Well, yeah, if you consider "is taken over without a fight" against giant Lizards that use retarded tactics that.

Well... without much of a fight. Again, Ringo gets only the credit for the difference between complete stupidity and almost-but-not-quite-complete stupidity.

[K. A. Pital]

I wonder which side came out ahead in the "tons of steel destroyed per ton of steel used" competition, though.

That is irrelevant. You should not destroy as many enemy units as possible, but achieve victory instead. It's like chess. Not destroy as many enemy pieces as you can, but achieve checkmate. If you have, it's irrelevant who has more pieces standing on the board. *shrugs* Hence it's important who is producing more efficiently, if we are talking about relatively equal efficiency of battle itself overall. The difference in performance of the T-34 and the German medium tanks was statistically not one of a kind, but one of a percent. I.e. not enough overwhelming to be decisive. Hence, economy comes into play. Producing far more, but slightly inferior tanks is better than producing far less, but slightly superior tanks, in a total war.

[Simon_Jester]

To be sure; but even irrelevancies can be a worthwhile matter of curiosity...

If it takes me 100 tons of steel to bring down weapons you used 150 tons of steel to build, I must be doing something right, or you must be doing something wrong, even if it's not being done decisively right or wrong.

[Stellar]

Hi Samuel,

What? I missed the part of World War 2 where the Germans conducted a massive amphibious invasion against prepared positions.

Which turned out to be the easy part for the Allies ( the deception worked wonders but essentially a massive and efficient exercise in logistics) and the moment the Germans recovered from the initial shock of being attacked where they did not expect they managed to set back the allied schedule by months and then more and more months as they systematically wore them down.

There was a group of tanks running away. When he called they ran faster. So he managed to get infront of them, stop them and when they got out he crushed their commanders skull and threatened to kill them if they ran.

That wasn't him as i think the incident you are referring to happened in book two with initial landings...

No, tanks will always be better. You can make it so that it fires constantly enough and over a wide enough area that the enemy can never get a shot off, you can rotate crews so that you can field it continuously, you repair it in the field, you can power it using local supplies, etc.

Tanks are not always better as very soon became evident in world war 2 with the incorporation of ever heavier anti tank weapons as well as the introduction of powerful personal AT weapons. Fact is there is no rear area of the Posleen to disrupt thus largely negating the need for the large gun and plenty of armor that is required to stick your neck right into the firing line of the enemy in the hopes that you can break trough and cut him off from his supplies and such sundry disruptions. The armor required to protect a tank sized target from the weapons advertised in this series is prohibitive and since you can protect a far more mobile, and thus more difficult to hit, man for a fraction of the cost while losing little of the firepower tanks do in my opinion make much sense.

Tanks are better than power armor for stand up battles. There are uses for power armor, but in a universe where it is expensive, tanks will always be a better choice for the scarce materials.

Stand up battles against the Posleen gets you plain and simple killed and being a static target for HVM/ plasma gets you cooked or vaporised. In the later books they have apparently figured out native production methods that allows them to use adapted galactic processes to produce armor sufficient to withstand Plasma and many HVM hits on the frontal arch at which point tanks becomes more than just expensive obvious targets for massed fire.

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/s ... hp?t=35753
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/s ... hp?t=60837

Do you post in those threads or do you have a specific point to make based on it? In RETROSPECT everyone has a theory as to why they lost but it was NEVER a given that they would. If you look at the original compromised invasion plans (or so they thought) for France and the low countries it was very conservative showing that not even Hitler had any inkling of how powerful a army he in fact had at his disposal. I say again that this Monday morning quarterbacking for France and the UK serves little purpose other than possibly indicating that you think they were supermen and thought they thought they could do anything they wanted to at any time. For all Hitlers manifest and voluminous faults he did understand that you can't fight the world ( or even France in 1939 ) with a expectation of quick victory.

Airburst- you don't need any penetration except against landers. Heck, you don't even need that. Once they open up you can have the superheated air enter and burn the crew to death.

Fine! I mean the fact that that is still contrary to widely held civilian and military notions as to what would happen in a nuclear war ( presuming air bursting and what you will need to destroy hard targets like nuclear silo's/posleen landers) is obviously not going to stop you from insisting that EVERYONE knows that the threat of air bursting nuclear weapons are wildly overstated. Since we know Ringo and everyone else knows too....

The USSR prepared extensively for fighting a protracted nuclear war with reload's for their silo's and mobile launchers as well as deeply buried construction facilities to keep remaining silo's supplied with more weapons. From 1960 onwards cities were built with rapid evacuation in mind with massive storage facilities/silo's on the distant outskirts of cities ensuring that sheltered population in cities could be resupplied on short notice. In all of that planning i did not find any mention of people driving trucks or carrying out essential tasks outside of NBC clothing. Either way what's wrong with precautions of that nature?

Stellar

[Samuel]

That wasn't him as i think the incident you are referring to happened in book two with initial landings...

My mistake- it was another person in power armor, I think his subcommander.

Tanks are not always better as very soon became evident in world war 2 with the incorporation of ever heavier anti tank weapons as well as the introduction of powerful personal AT weapons.

That is a bit like saying because they made machine-gun bullets that can go through armor, armored cars aren't better than calvary.

Fact is there is no rear area of the Posleen to disrupt thus largely negating the need for the large gun and plenty of armor that is required to stick your neck right into the firing line of the enemy in the hopes that you can break trough and cut him off from his supplies and such sundry disruptions.

The Posleen do not magically produce ammo. They are in fact stated to build factories in their conquered territories and they can only produce so much- weapons are in fact in short supply. Especially higher quality ones that can destroy vehicles.

The armor required to protect a tank sized target from the weapons advertised in this series is prohibitive and since you can protect a far more mobile, and thus more difficult to hit, man for a fraction of the cost while losing little of the firepower tanks do in my opinion make much sense.

Except that a suit of power armor is not equal to a tank. You can give a tank enough machine guns so that it can clear a much larger swath AND it can afford to carry enough ammunition to do so. Unlike power armor the tank only requires special material for its armored prow- the rest can be made of normal (or worse- you don't need a barrel, tough armor for the rest or electronic/NBC protection).

Stand up battles against the Posleen gets you plain and simple killed and being a static target for HVM/ plasma gets you cooked or vaporised.

Only if they can hit you. If you are firing outside their effective range and none of them can fire back because you kill them in less time than their reflexes allow them to fire their weapons, you win.

In RETROSPECT everyone has a theory as to why they lost but it was NEVER a given that they would.

If it was a given they would have surrendered. Of course no one thought they would lose so quickly at the time- they didn't have the information we did. People thought the Soviet Union was going to fall after Hitler invaded as well.

I say again that this Monday morning quarterbacking for France and the UK serves little purpose other than possibly indicating that you think they were supermen and thought they thought they could do anything they wanted to at any time.

England controlled about a quarter of the world's land area. I think calling them a superpower would be accurate.

For all Hitlers manifest and voluminous faults he did understand that you can't fight the world ( or even France in 1939 ) with a expectation of quick victory.

This, about a man who proceded to invade Norway, Denmark the Low Countries, The Balkans, Yugoslavia and the USSR?

presuming air bursting and what you will need to destroy hard targets like nuclear silo's/posleen landers

We won't be destroying landers. Once they are on the ground and unloading the superheated air from the blast will kill the crew.

is obviously not going to stop you from insisting that EVERYONE knows that the threat of air bursting nuclear weapons are wildly overstated.

No, I only expect the military and civil defense planners to know that because it happens to be their job.

Either way what's wrong with precautions of that nature?

They did that because, in order to destroy the USSR's command and control, ICBMs and other war fighting systems we would be using groundbursts to crack open said systems. Groundbursts do result in largescale fallout and when you are doing that for thousands of targets it makes being down wind a major health hazard.

[K. A. Pital]

For all Hitlers manifest and voluminous faults he did understand that you can't fight the world ( or even France in 1939 ) with a expectation of quick victory.

I have found the quote of the week. It's decisive. It's brain-crushing. Painful to read. A perfect mix of insanity and seriousness.

[Thanas]

A really stellar example of ignorance, too.

[Stellar]

Hi Samuel,

My mistake- it was another person in power armor, I think his subcommander.

Someone who had to put up with this sort of behaviour in more than one war....

That is a bit like saying because they made machine-gun bullets that can go through armor, armored cars aren't better than calvary.

My point appears overstated but basically you got the gist of it, there were ways to cavalry before, armored cars after that and in modern times tanks. Tanks do not i and off themselves lend any more military advantage than the heavy cavalry of Alexander or plate steel armored knights of later ages.

The Posleen do not magically produce ammo. They are in fact stated to build factories in their conquered territories and they can only produce so much- weapons are in fact in short supply. Especially higher quality ones that can destroy vehicles.

Which has not been a issue of the other 140 odd federation worlds they took as they overwhelm the defenses long before they supplied they brought runs out. Again my point appears overstated if one does not consider that the Posleen rear ( tanks can only go that far unsupported) does areas ( i did not mention anything about their distant industrial or resupply areas) much more closely resembles it's front than for human forces. Unless one manages to stage very deep penetrations with either no need for open lines of communication or , unlikely , open lines of communication heavy tanks ( which they would have to be) would work best to plug limited gaps or to blunt especially large enemy attacks.

Except that a suit of power armor is not equal to a tank.

No it is not as it can not evade any fire and will thus have to absorb it leading to the relatively quick destruction of big badly protected gun barrel and all other external weaponry. To protect a tank sized target in the frontal aspect against the same weapons that a suit can survive ( at least in this universe) would take 10 + suits worth of armor and how one would protect against mobility kills i wont even speculate. The fact that any HVM or Plasma hit would still kill you, you not being able to dodge on the offense, just means that you you are now losing ten suits worth of firepower trough a the central point failure of your sole weapons system. Presuming the conditions set out in the posleen verse that would be a very inefficient way to fight them.

You can give a tank enough machine guns so that it can clear a much larger swath AND it can afford to carry enough ammunition to do so.

Yes and the same guns on the tank would have the same cost as on many suits only they all fall silent if the single crew compartment is compromised. One can do that with artillery or by firing from concealed positions and a IFV that can not survive return fire, in a environment that will yield so much of it, is waste of resources.

Unlike power armor the tank only requires special material for its armored prow- the rest can be made of normal (or worse- you don't need a barrel, tough armor for the rest or electronic/NBC protection).

If it's never going to have to fall back or expose the side of it's turret and hull while firing at targets bearing in different directions.... Again by not armoring against side hits you are compromising ever more resources as there is only one crew compartment to be compromised.

Only if they can hit you. If you are firing outside their effective range and none of them can fire back because you kill them in less time than their reflexes allow them to fire their weapons, you win.

Then you could just as well be using self propelled artillery or assault guns of various descriptions in a direct fire role. I don't think you know what tanks are designed to do and have assumed that what they are commonly misused to do as primary role; a rather common misunderstanding.

If it was a given they would have surrendered. Of course no one thought they would lose so quickly at the time- they didn't have the information we did.

Even with the information we do have there is nothing in it that suggest strongly that the French must lose fast ( or at all) or that the Germans must always attack in the same way or were 'destined' to be altered in the Halder were eventually asked to. Many previous incarnations of ( the first Halder incarnation would have cost Germany half a million casualties for the capture of the low countries only) were certainly not going to yield a cheap victory an the series of events that led to the eventually Fall Gelb incarnation is no given.

People thought the Soviet Union was going to fall after Hitler invaded as well.

Yes, many 'learned' people had egg on their faces ( Pearl Harbor anyone?) and most of them the same type of 'military men' and 'historians' that see things so 'clearly' in retrospect these days. Fact is war is a uncertain thing at the best of times and those who speak in terms of military certainties are best ignored.

England controlled about a quarter of the world's land area. I think calling them a superpower would be accurate.

I was referring ( and not clearly enough ) to the Germans who some apparently think were so superior to the French that world war 1 was just a big misunderstanding and a war the French and allies won by shear luck. Germany could have bogged down in France the same way they did before and if they followed some of the original plans or the French and British reacted in even slightly different ways things could have ended very differently.

This, about a man who proceded to invade Norway, Denmark the Low Countries, The Balkans, Yugoslavia and the USSR?

Your only crazy if you do not understand your own means to accomplish the goals you have. Hitler's Germany took over much of Western and Eastern Europe, beat the British into a fine pulp ( they would never have been able to retake the continent with the empire as it was in that state) and got exceedingly close to doing the very same thing to the only power in Europe that could in the foreseeable future threaten Germany's control Europe and European Asia.

We won't be destroying landers. Once they are on the ground and unloading the superheated air from the blast will kill the crew.

Yes, such a perfect plan with ships to automated that they barely need to be commanded; closing things such a blast doors would be far too difficult.

No, I only expect the military and civil defense planners to know that because it happens to be their job.

The same leaders that left America virtually without passive defenses the entire cold war while the Russians built ABM defenses en mass and created the civilian infrastructure to truly fight and win a nuclear war? If you want source material i can drown you in the stuff but frankly i sense that you still believe that 'the leaders' are on your side and will do what's best for you and the 'country', right?

They did that because, in order to destroy the USSR's command and control, ICBMs and other war fighting systems we would be using groundbursts to crack open said systems. Groundbursts do result in largescale fallout and when you are doing that for thousands of targets it makes being down wind a major health hazard.

Air bursts creates much less fallout LOCALLY but that should not be confused with no local fallout or a lack of it elsewhere.

Stellar

[Samuel]

My point appears overstated but basically you got the gist of it, there were ways to cavalry before, armored cars after that and in modern times tanks. Tanks do not i and off themselves lend any more military advantage than the heavy cavalry of Alexander or plate steel armored knights of later ages.

You do realize that is an extremely bad analogy? Alexander used his champion calvary as a decisive factor repeatedly.

Which has not been a issue of the other 140 odd federation worlds they took as they overwhelm the defenses long before they supplied they brought runs out.

Or the Posleen take cities and retrofit the plants to turnout shotgun rounds by the millions. Given how crappy they are supposed to be it wouldn't surprise me and given the Galactics pathetic defenses it makes the idea of foraging on alien worlds a reasonable plan. Or the Posleen bring their factories with them and use local metal and power to run them. Or the Posleen have designed weapons that are backward compatible with what their targets use and refill their shotguns with the Galactic equivalent of marbles.

Again my point appears overstated if one does not consider that the Posleen rear ( tanks can only go that far unsupported) does areas ( i did not mention anything about their distant industrial or resupply areas) much more closely resembles it's front than for human forces. Unless one manages to stage very deep penetrations with either no need for open lines of communication or , unlikely , open lines of communication heavy tanks ( which they would have to be) would work best to plug limited gaps or to blunt especially large enemy attacks.

This only works if the Posleen have many dispersed factory locations. If they set up the majority of their industry by their landers you could cut off entire armies by seperating them from the source of the ammunition. Given their complete lack of aiming and preferance to take down aircraft with mass fire you could get them to run rather dry easily.

No it is not as it can not evade any fire and will thus have to absorb it leading to the relatively quick destruction of big badly protected gun barrel and all other external weaponry.

The Posleen use massed fire. You CANNOT DODE IT. You cannot hide behind dirt. If they manage to get a shot off, you die. The only way to beat them in open combat is to insure you fire first and that none of them get a chance to do so.

A tank can pull that off. A suit cannot. The suits weapons have to be manually aimed for starters while a tank can simply have its guns follow a preset program.

The fact that any HVM or Plasma hit would still kill you, you not being able to dodge on the offense, just means that you you are now losing ten suits worth of firepower trough a the central point failure of your sole weapons system.

What is the range of a HVM? Suits do not outrange them but you can give tanks powerful enough guns that they do.

Yes and the same guns on the tank would have the same cost as on many suits only they all fall silent if the single crew compartment is compromised.

No, the suits use energy weapons. A tank can use machine guns. We don't have alot of laser rifles, but we do have ALOT of machine guns. Even better we have a shitload of bullets even though we have almost no anti-matter (which is the main limiting factor for the use of the power armor).

If it's never going to have to fall back or expose the side of it's turret and hull while firing at targets bearing in different directions

You can fall back with your front facing the enemy. The Posleen aren't noted for flanking either.

Again by not armoring against side hits you are compromising ever more resources as there is only one crew compartment to be compromised.

Bah! If they can reuse Shermans we can reuse these boys.

Then you could just as well be using self propelled artillery or assault guns of various descriptions in a direct fire role.

I'm proposing a vehicle with an armored front that uses machine guns that fire in such a way that a cone in front of them is constantly covered.



Like that, but looking more like a bulldozer. And with alot more guns and an more open rear.

the Germans must always attack in the same way

You mean exact details or pushing through Belgium? Because the second was rather inevitable.

Yes, many 'learned' people had egg on their faces ( Pearl Harbor anyone?)

That really isn't a good example. It looks at the evidence suggesting an attack there... and ignores the mountion of evidence suggesting a strike towards the other American possessions in the Pacific.

most of them the same type of 'military men' and 'historians' that see things so 'clearly' in retrospect these days. Fact is war is a uncertain thing at the best of times and those who speak in terms of military certainties are best ignored.

Except that we can explain how and why things happened. Sure it is in hindsight, but part of that is because the relevant information was classified or simply unavailable.

Your only crazy if you do not understand your own means to accomplish the goals you have. Hitler's Germany took over much of Western and Eastern Europe, beat the British into a fine pulp ( they would never have been able to retake the continent with the empire as it was in that state) and got exceedingly close to doing the very same thing to the only power in Europe that could in the foreseeable future threaten Germany's control Europe and European Asia.

This is a complex topic that many, many other board members are better able to adress, but to put it bluntly, BS. Hitler declaring war on the United States is an obvious example. Hitler could only control the territory he had gained by brutality and only maintain his position by looting the occupied nations of Europe. Eventually they would run out of tribute and he would be destroyed by the British backing a European land power.

Yes, such a perfect plan with ships to automated that they barely need to be commanded; closing things such a blast doors would be far too difficult.

We are talking about the Posleen. They have extremely shitty reaction to the unexpected. And if you kill all of the first wave there will be no one left to mention this to the second.

The same leaders that left America virtually without passive defenses the entire cold war while the Russians built ABM defenses en mass and created the civilian infrastructure to truly fight and win a nuclear war? If you want source material i can drown you in the stuff but frankly i sense that you still believe that 'the leaders' are on your side and will do what's best for you and the 'country', right?

That was a political decision. I am refering to the actual experts who do plan these things. In the event of a situation where things look like the potential end of the world, political stupidity gets turned down (and focused more towards finding a boat off the island).

Air bursts creates much less fallout LOCALLY but that should not be confused with no local fallout or a lack of it elsewhere.

No, it mostly goes into the upper atmosphere. Which really isn't a problem for us.

[Stellar]

Hi....

Blah blah blah. You could say that the entire war was "Hitler's luck" or "bad luck" and everyone else was just running around doing nothing, going from your logic above. That's preposterous bullshit.

Thing is i did not say that the entire war was Hitlers bad luck or bad luck in general but tried to suggest that given the choices already made and victories already achieved this specific mistake Hitler made would prove the most serious of them all and in my opinion the one that cost 'him' ( as that's the way he were using Germany) his thousand year Reich. If i said what you suggested i would agree with your 'analysis' ( generous as i am) that it's preposterous BS but since i did not...

he Red Army was not defeated, neither annihilated according to the Nazi fast assault plan. In fact, Nazi failure to annihilate it and reach target goals was clear by August-September of 1941, no matter the successes they achieved.

The Red army had practically no defenses ( numbered in divisions, not the nine armies of which eight were destroyed in the drive for Moscow more than two months later ) in a line between Bock's halted army group center in early August and it took them two months to assemble the armies that the Bock , with much the same forces as in August, destroyed two months later in far more unfavourable weather. Problem being that the panzer forces being split from army group to support Army group South and North aided in the capture and destruction of additional very large concentrations of Russian forces showing that they were not halted for any deficiencies in weaponry or supplies. Fact is Hitler ,and in some part the OKW, did exactly what they did in France ( in France it led to the escape of a largely intact BEF) only in this case Rommel and other leaders where either not around or followed orders more closely. The Soviet Union had been soundly defeated by August 1941 and if Hitler did not yet again intervene to disperse or halt forces Moscow would not have been around for the Siberian divisions to converge on and stage their winter offensive from.

It wasn't.

Well that's a good enough argument , i submit!

Posleen universe is American wank full of steamy bullshit like e.g. Canada being "too cold". Russia is nigh the coldest nation on Earth, by the average temperatures most of it's population resides in, and yet Russia is game.

So fine. That doesn't make sense.... Does this in your mind prove sufficient evidence for dismissing everything else or can we try to work on a case by case basis?

Germany had a larger industrial base than the USSR, if that's what you're referring to. Mobilization scales were roughly comparable (21 million Germany alone, probably around 25-30 million with satellites, versus 34 million for the USSR), not a complete overwhelming like some claim.

Agreed. Germany did not lose trough having too few men available under arms or Russia win because it had so many that it could endlessly throw them away. The German industrial base were many things but efficient it was not and even with the Speer reforms it didn't approach anywhere near it's full potential. What it could have managed had it not being under constant air bombardment and implemented Russian and American production practices is something fit for at least a thread of it's own.

Yes, because Germany refused to employ continous mobilization, refused to fully mobilize in 1940 and 1941, and refused to replenish losses with reserves for the fear that this would undermine the whole concept of "blitzkrieg". In the end, the only thing undermined was Germany's ability to win the war.

I agree with you but feel compelled to point out that even with all the 'mistakes' ( crimes really given the cost to the world and Germany) Germany defeated all comers and got exceedingly close to taking Moscow, Leningrad and thus capturing European Russia.

You think the SS are not evil? They killed at a rate of several humans per MINUTE in East European territories. That's a far larger degree of evil than anything encountered in history that far.

If you think that's as bad as human history gets you have sadly studied but a very small part of it. Perhaps it's better that way as what's there to be found ain't pretty and sadly turns to the Germans into just another conquering nation. Then again you free to hate the people, organizations or nations that you like and i will do as little as possible not to give you reason to decide that i am defending criminals because their happens to have been, or are, greater one's around. For the record the large majority of men who served in the SS were regular soldiers who did regular fighting and regular dying; butchering defenseless people wholesale is luckily not a task you can find many to do in that or this day and age.

The USSR had lesser resources; it just issued MORE planes, MORE tanks and MORE weapons per TON OF STEEL. Not "more overall", but MORE PER TON. Which means the Germans were piss poor at managing the resources they had.

This is true. Lucky for us as i reckon that if the Germans managed to get that too right from the start a large part of the world might be speaking German today.

Stellar

[Vehrec]

he Red Army was not defeated, neither annihilated according to the Nazi fast assault plan. In fact, Nazi failure to annihilate it and reach target goals was clear by August-September of 1941, no matter the successes they achieved.

The Red army had practically no defenses ( numbered in divisions, not the nine armies of which eight were destroyed in the drive for Moscow more than two months later ) in a line between Bock's halted army group center in early August and it took them two months to assemble the armies that the Bock , with much the same forces as in August, destroyed two months later in far more unfavourable weather. Problem being that the panzer forces being split from army group to support Army group South and North aided in the capture and destruction of additional very large concentrations of Russian forces showing that they were not halted for any deficiencies in weaponry or supplies. Fact is Hitler ,and in some part the OKW, did exactly what they did in France ( in France it led to the escape of a largely intact BEF) only in this case Rommel and other leaders where either not around or followed orders more closely. The Soviet Union had been soundly defeated by August 1941 and if Hitler did not yet again intervene to disperse or halt forces Moscow would not have been around for the Siberian divisions to converge on and stage their winter offensive from.

Professional study logistics. You understand this, yes? You also should understand that there were very real supply shortages, the Soviet union had NOT been defeated, and that the Panzers had outrun their supply lines and dumps hundreds of miles short of Moscow. By failing to encircle and defeat the entire Soviet Army in their first 500 or so Kilometer dash, the Germans lost all hope of succeeding in Operation Barbarossa.

Germany had a larger industrial base than the USSR, if that's what you're referring to. Mobilization scales were roughly comparable (21 million Germany alone, probably around 25-30 million with satellites, versus 34 million for the USSR), not a complete overwhelming like some claim.

Agreed. Germany did not lose trough having too few men available under arms or Russia win because it had so many that it could endlessly throw them away. The German industrial base were many things but efficient it was not and even with the Speer reforms it didn't approach anywhere near it's full potential. What it could have managed had it not being under constant air bombardment and implemented Russian and American production practices is something fit for at least a thread of it's own.

Still pathetic in comparison. Mass production can only take you so far when you've tapped out your supply of labor and are critically low on such basic materials as fuel oil and steel. And the fact is that they WERE under bombardment, not that it had much effect until 1943. Might have beings and hypotheticals are out of place in the discussion of total war.

Yes, because Germany refused to employ continous mobilization, refused to fully mobilize in 1940 and 1941, and refused to replenish losses with reserves for the fear that this would undermine the whole concept of "blitzkrieg". In the end, the only thing undermined was Germany's ability to win the war.

I agree with you but feel compelled to point out that even with all the 'mistakes' ( crimes really given the cost to the world and Germany) Germany defeated all comers and got exceedingly close to taking Moscow, Leningrad and thus capturing European Russia.

Leningrad was under seige for months, but I don't believe the germans ever came close to cracking it. Moscow was just plain out of reach in any meaningful sense. Even if the Germans manage to get there, it's another street to street battle, which takes time. Time favors the Soviets. More time, more tanks, more men, more chances for the dangerously thin supply lines feeding the Germans to be snapped by misfortune, air raids and partisans.

You think the SS are not evil? They killed at a rate of several humans per MINUTE in East European territories. That's a far larger degree of evil than anything encountered in history that far.

If you think that's as bad as human history gets you have sadly studied but a very small part of it. Perhaps it's better that way as what's there to be found ain't pretty and sadly turns to the Germans into just another conquering nation. Then again you free to hate the people, organizations or nations that you like and i will do as little as possible not to give you reason to decide that i am defending criminals because their happens to have been, or are, greater one's around. For the record the large majority of men who served in the SS were regular soldiers who did regular fighting and regular dying; butchering defenseless people wholesale is luckily not a task you can find many to do in that or this day and age.

Actually, surveys show it's quite easy to do with the right rhetoric and enough guys in uniforms shouting at the guys. This does not erase the fact that the murder done by the SS was more organized, more efficient and on a larger scale than any other in the recorded course of human history. Moreover, the SS was also explicitly an arm of the Nazi Party. It was an inherently political body, no matter what your opinion of it may be. Given the tiny fraction of the total number of former soldiers available to Germany that these men comprise, there was never any reason other than JOHN RINGO OH NO for these things to happen.

The USSR had lesser resources; it just issued MORE planes, MORE tanks and MORE weapons per TON OF STEEL. Not "more overall", but MORE PER TON. Which means the Germans were piss poor at managing the resources they had.

This is true. Lucky for us as i reckon that if the Germans managed to get that too right from the start a large part of the world might be speaking German today.

Oh god. pfff. You're killing me over here. Seriously? Let's review what Germany had. Part of france, the Balkans, Austria half of Poland and Germany itself. Most of which needs to be secured against partisan action. Against them? Britain, America, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Combine all that and you must have at least a third if not half of the world's land area. More than half of it's total industrial capacity, oil fields, population, the list goes on. Germany no matter how well run or how efficient NEVER STOOD A CHANCE. From the day they rolled into Poland, their defeat was inevitable as the rise and fall of the tide.

[K. A. Pital]

The Soviet Union had been soundly defeated by August 1941 and if Hitler did not yet again intervene to disperse or halt forces Moscow would not have been around for the Siberian divisions to converge on and stage their winter offensive from.

If Hitler had not diverted his units to Ukraine, he would have a flank and then later his supply line for the Moscow attck exposed to an almost 1 million strong Army to counter-attack. Does that sound sane to you? The operations in Ukraine were critical to secure a free road to Moscow.

Risking the entire Wehrmacht force directed to Moscow to fall prey to a large flanking assault by the Ukrainian forces would just be too reckless, even for Hitler, insane as he was.

Thing is i did not say that the entire war was Hitlers bad luck or bad luck in general but tried to suggest that given the choices already made and victories already achieved this specific mistake Hitler made would prove the most serious of them all and in my opinion the one that cost 'him' ( as that's the way he were using Germany) his thousand year Reich

His Reich was doomed when he initiated Barbarossa and later declared war on America. Critical failures. The rest matters not, in the grand scheme of things.

Fact is Hitler ,and in some part the OKW, did exactly what they did in France ( in France it led to the escape of a largely intact BEF)

Going after the BEF was taking a major risk. Do you know that taking major risks does not always yield success? The same could be said of the Moscow operation. The entire Barbarossa was a huge gamble anyway - the Germans prepared oils and fuels and supplies only till Autumn. They had no plans for a protracted war. They started failing the deadlines by early August 1941 (i.e. not meeting the target goalposts and keypoints), and failed the entire plan by end 1941.

Does this in your mind prove sufficient evidence for dismissing everything else or can we try to work on a case by case basis?

Crap fiction doesn't require my attention.

The German industrial base were many things but efficient it was not and even with the Speer reforms it didn't approach anywhere near it's full potential. What it could have managed had it not being under constant air bombardment and implemented Russian and American production practices is something fit for at least a thread of it's own.

German industry was often inefficient in Arms production and NOT MOBILIZED to full extent by 1941. However, it was, as an industry par se, more powerful than the Soviet one - even if more wasteful (i.e. less AFVs for ton of steel, etc)

Germany defeated all comers and got exceedingly close to taking Moscow, Leningrad and thus capturing European Russia.

I have to remind you that winning Barbarossa required taking the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line by Autumn 1941. That was failed. Without that, even taking Moscow or Leningrad would not be victory.

If you think that's as bad as human history gets you have sadly studied but a very small part of it.

In the XX century, no other military/paramilitary unit achieved a similar kill rate per unit of time, save the Khmer Rouge during the Pnom Penh massacre. Want to argue?

For the record the large majority of men who served in the SS were regular soldiers who did regular fighting and regular dying; butchering defenseless people wholesale is luckily not a task you can find many to do in that or this day and age.

Hundreds of thousands of SS-men guarded camps, executed Slavs, Jews and Roma in large scale massacres, et cetera. This applies to the entirety of the SS, including the Waffen-SS as well who were involved in all that by A LARGE MAJORITY.

Lucky for us as i reckon that if the Germans managed to get that too right from the start a large part of the world might be speaking German today.

No. The Jews and Slavs and other "untermenshen" would be massacred and largely annihilated, but that's it. You wouldn't feel much difference over your part of the world. That's it.

[Stellar]

Hi,

He's contrasting the rapid German advance through the bocage country in 1940 with the glacial advance of the Western Allies through that territory. I'd say that doing so neglects some key facts:
-The Germans were attacking from the other direction, and, more importantly...

The Germans were attacking from the other direction but the defensibility of terrain does not always lead to it being well defended. The Germans had created conditions in France by which the defense of Normandy quickly became irrelevant while the Allies decided to take the peninsula and fight trough the best the Germans could marshal against the.

-By the time the Germans reached the difficult terrain in question, they had already managed to trap most of the opposing forces in that theater in the Dunkirk pocket, leaving the French in no position to put useful forces into Normandy to stop them.

They managed to defend the rest of France, the low countries and Western Germany in much the same way ( to say nothing of Italy) in exactly the same way with the same heavy casualty's to Allies forces so isn't it perhaps more accurate to say that they not only retained the capacity for effective large scale offensives but also very effective defensive fighting? Why is Normandy being singled out as if the 'difficult' terrain were really to blame for the manifest allies failures there?

Thus, they did not have to advance against significant opposition. Even once the Allies got far enough from the beaches that their reliance on seaborne transport was no longer relevant (it was no longer an amphibious assault, but was rather a pitched land battle), they still had to advance over a much stiffer defense than anything the Germans faced in the same area four years later.

Certainly true but not for lack of terrain or logistical,manpower means on the allies side. The Germans managed to defend where they did and attack where they did not because of the terrain favouring them but because of superior organization and small unit integration.

As for the 'Hex gaming' i merely suggested that those who are familiar with simulation gaming of this nature will probably understand that all the factors that makes it good defensive terrain also makes it the ideal place for old fashioned infantry combat or truly combined arms fighting. That the Germans managed to hold the allies is in no way surprising when considering some of these factors as well as all the many others than remains.

But thanks for coming closer to a understanding of what i attempted to make clear than so many others here.

Stellar

[PainRack]

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

there ARE plausible reasons for the utter screwup seen.

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. 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). 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. 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. 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.
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).

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. 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

[PainRack]

The Germans were attacking from the other direction but the defensibility of terrain does not always lead to it being well defended. The Germans had created conditions in France by which the defense of Normandy quickly became irrelevant while the Allies decided to take the peninsula and fight trough the best the Germans could marshal against the.

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.

They managed to defend the rest of France, the low countries and Western Germany in much the same way ( to say nothing of Italy) in exactly the same way with the same heavy casualty's to Allies forces so isn't it perhaps more accurate to say that they not only retained the capacity for effective large scale offensives but also very effective defensive fighting? Why is Normandy being singled out as if the 'difficult' terrain were really to blame for the manifest allies failures there?

It wasn't. But then again, the Americans were not really losing the battle in Normandy, Italy and the like. Newsflash, the Germans lost all the various battles, the Allies won. And it wasn't just a simple matter of overwhelming resources either. By this stage of the war, the Allies had mastered the use of combined arms, Ninth airforce provided superb support and coordination. The germans excellence in small unit warfare and mortars was countered by the Americans own training in markmenship and massed artillery, including air support.

[Stellar]

Hi Samuel,

You do realize that is an extremely bad analogy? Alexander used his champion calvary as a decisive factor repeatedly.

Oh i try to 'realize' as many things as i can and i am surprised that you have not or do not realize that everyone Alexander faced had heavy cavalry and/or heavy infantry of their own. Having a elite body of troops has very little to do with the effect they ultimately have on the outcome of the battle and as Alxander, and so many others, proved it's all in how and when they are employed.

Or the Posleen take cities and retrofit the plants to turnout shotgun rounds by the millions. Given how crappy they are supposed to be it wouldn't surprise me and given the Galactics pathetic defenses it makes the idea of foraging on alien worlds a reasonable plan. Or the Posleen bring their factories with them and use local metal and power to run them. Or the Posleen have designed weapons that are backward compatible with what their targets use and refill their shotguns with the Galactic equivalent of marbles.

The point being that the Posleen do not have the logistics 'tail' that human armies tend to have and if you manage to cut a hole in them you will at best run into posleen with less weapons/ammunition going to barter or buy some at their nearest factory/supply point or other Posleen flush with supplies on their way back from there. You will not run into thousands of practically undefended vehicles of many descriptions going here there any everywhere else to support normal human fighting formations.

This only works if the Posleen have many dispersed factory locations. If they set up the majority of their industry by their landers you could cut off entire armies by seperating them from the source of the ammunition. Given their complete lack of aiming and preferance to take down aircraft with mass fire you could get them to run rather dry easily.

The problem being that very large volumes of Posleen will be killed without using much ammunition thus leaving massive volumes of equipment and ammunition ( and food as we are told) on any field of battle thus making entrapment largely useless. You just can not seem to get your head past the idea that doctrines can be different and that you can not fight everyone in the same old way!

The Posleen use massed fire. You CANNOT DODE IT. You cannot hide behind dirt. If they manage to get a shot off, you die. The only way to beat them in open combat is to insure you fire first and that none of them get a chance to do so.

The posleen used massed fire which are divided between the aiming points their god kings designate for them. If single shots are fired they will likely be met with overwhelming firepower and promptly destroyed ( such as tanks) and the more aiming points you can provide them with the better your chances of infliction casualties without suffering the damage resulting from concentrated firepower. This is another very good reason why the armor required for one tank to survive HVM or 3mm rounds would be much better spent on the 10 odd suits that can be similarly protected for the same resource value. If the tank can fire from long enough distances to escape counter fire it makes itself obsolete by virtue of being obsolete piece of equipment who's resources is best spent on SP howitzers or large bore mortars.

A tank can pull that off. A suit cannot. The suits weapons have to be manually aimed for starters while a tank can simply have its guns follow a preset program.

The suits do not actually need a person inside to fight as the scene with the president makes quite clear. Suits have men inside for the same reason we still claim to put men in aircraft when we have long had the technology to make UAV's.

What is the range of a HVM? Suits do not outrange them but you can give tanks powerful enough guns that they do.

It is not specified but i think it would be fair to say that if it's used against planes ( as is the plasma weapons) it's range is substantial and terrain features and likely combat distances are the only practical considerations we need see as barriers to their effective engagement envelope. Perhaps their performance is degraded over long distances but since these weapons are so well aimed and god kind sensors directed weapons so accurate what kept the suits alive consistently were the ability to evade being directly hit or escaping the main blast area. As you might remember the Plasma and HVM weapons fired at one of the battleships did very significant damage to the super structure long before the lander started putting larger munitions right trough the main torpedo belt......

No, the suits use energy weapons. A tank can use machine guns. We don't have alot of laser rifles, but we do have ALOT of machine guns. Even better we have a shitload of bullets even though we have almost no anti-matter (which is the main limiting factor for the use of the power armor).

I didn't factor that in so i must admit that the weaponry on the tank should be very cheap if far less destructive in comparative weight based effect. If we take machine guns ( and i surmise cannons in the 20-30 mm range) it must however be noted that effective engagement ranges falls significantly and that these types of ammunition takes up truly vast amounts of space as compared to the munitions and weapons issued to the suits. Since we have largely established that a tank can never engage Posleen formations with direct fire without the expectation of return fire machine guns will either have to be internal and thus turret aimed or external and lost to 1 mm storms in short order. Either way it can not evade much fire by movement ( without the addition of massive side skirts armor to protect running surfaces) if it's side hull areas are not similarly heavily armored but that would then require most weapons to be turret mounted which reduces the possible armament considerably. Without native armor production, galactic armor used in suits is too expensive, that is strong enough to stand up repeated Posleen heavy/ medium weapon strikes ( as humanity apparently manages in the later years of the war) tanks are a losing proposition that are only in the fighting line because turning the factories off serves even less purpose and they do provide a measure of mobility and firepower that can be employed for well angled defensive fire.

You can fall back with your front facing the enemy. The Posleen aren't noted for flanking either.

This is true, that tanks need to keep their front facing the enemy, but the Posleen are natural flankers by virtue of having superior numbers.

Bah! If they can reuse Shermans we can reuse these boys.

Sure can but if they are improperly used ( direct fire against large masses of posleen) they will be promptly targetted and destroyed. Fighting the posleen is all about concealment ( escaping return fire as best you can) and massing fire over limited frontal areas so as to prevent the Posleen from overwhelming you frontallly or flanking you. Since you are fighting from fixed positions it makes more sense to have almost towed filed artiller that can dug in to hearts content thus soaking return fire, in sand and concrete, where armor could not.

I'm proposing a vehicle with an armored front that uses machine guns that fire in such a way that a cone in front of them is constantly covered.
Like that, but looking more like a bulldozer. And with alot more guns and an more open rear.

If you are not expecting to be able to survive return fire ( not in that thing you wont) why do you wish to call it a tank and insist on describing it as such? A main battle tank is meant to be armored to absorb the enemy fire that results from losing concealment when on the attack and armed to be able to kill what is required to force it's way trough the enemy front lines. When it's not armored and depends on range and firepower it's more akin to the M-10/18/36 tank destroyer series of weapons which attempted to defeat enemy armor by means of mobility and firepower&superior ballistics. There is nothing wrong with that but it's more aptly called "Gun Motor Carriages" as they were called then.

You mean exact details or pushing through Belgium? Because the second was rather inevitable.

It was in no way envitable and that is what i am trying to say. It is by no means self evident that France always had to be knocked out in such a short campaign or really at all. There is NOTHING invitable about the second world other than perhaps the fact that major European powers were going to clash military in some way in the 1940's. As for the involvement of Japan and the USA those were NEVER given facts.

That really isn't a good example. It looks at the evidence suggesting an attack there... and ignores the mountion of evidence suggesting a strike towards the other American possessions in the Pacific.

And the Japanese struck all the targets. It is a good example because it was so obvious that simulated strikes were conducted against pearl harbor by American generals and the British struck Tarento a full year earlier with just one carrier. The Japanese had sufficient air power to go after all their major targets , and managed to gain them, AND conduct a massive strike on Pearl. If this was not or could not be considered in 1940, as it supposedly was not, then your argument for intelligent Amerian leadership in the year 2000 is absolutely mooted.

Except that we can explain how and why things happened. Sure it is in hindsight, but part of that is because the relevant information was classified or simply unavailable.

Yes given exact knowledge ( presuming that everyone is telling gods honest truth about how they made decisions or took action) knowledge of events we can say what did happen but we never can and never will have the means to evaluate what the chances where that things took place as they seemed to have. To confuse what did take place with some notion of inevitability is what i am strongly objecting to here. There was nothing inevitable about Germany's victory over France and there was nothing inevitable about it's defeat in the east given even modest alternative sets of decisions often reached trough chance.

This is a complex topic that many, many other board members are better able to adress, but to put it bluntly, BS.

And yet you feel the need to call it BS! So much for feining modesty&ignorance......

Hitler declaring war on the United States is an obvious example.

Well in my opinion it was not a very sensible thing to do but i say that because i understand the American reluctance to go to war. If Hitler had not declared war Roosevelt would have been even harder pressed to gain priority for the European war but given the disparity of forces and future threats this might have been relatively easily concealed from the American public. Either way Hitler apparently felt sure that Roosevelt ( lend lease and far more support to the UK than his powers as president really allowed) would find a way to involve America fully in the European war and declared war so as to support Japanese efforts. In terms of mistakes made this is most certainly not the one that undid Hitlers Reich but i would agree that it reduced German's chances of a favourable and negotiated settlement to the second world war significantly.

Hitler could only control the territory he had gained by brutality and only maintain his position by looting the occupied nations of Europe. Eventually they would run out of tribute and he would be destroyed by the British backing a European land power.

Brutality only? Based on what? I mean didn't the German army conquer those territories first by being provided with sufficient means and political backing to do so? The occupied nations of Europe were not looted in the classical sense as their industry and populations were harnessed to create goods and resources for the Germany. France proved particularly efficient and it's industry served Germany without needing many further demonstrations that the Germans were going to be around for a while. As for the claim that 'tribute' would run out 1940 is not the middle ages so frankly talk of tribute is a bit strange. Either way Britain had little resources left in 1939 ( if you hadn't realised they were bankrupt by November 1939) and had to start selling of colonial/imperial assets to afford goods and in short order tapped out that resource too at which point they started selling national corporations at fire sale prices and finally asking Roosevelt for a handout; this all took place before the battle of Britain proper were concluded and the risk of invasion seen off completely. Britain continued to oppose only because it had sufficient assets and a willing taker ( USA) and soon after only because the USA were willing bankroll the resistance. Britain were economically defeated by 1940 and it was the US backing of Britain and the USSR that enabled resistance to continue in the ineffective manner that it did for so long.

We are talking about the Posleen. They have extremely shitty reaction to the unexpected. And if you kill all of the first wave there will be no one left to mention this to the second.

We are talking about a make believe universe and you are trying to make it's make believe antagonists even more useless and stupid than they are portrayed to further your apparent disbelief that the American way of war does not and can not involve massive volumes of casualties no matter how alien the enemy. Frankly i don't understand why this must be so and don't understand why it's such a sore point with so many. It's like the last two American wars have invalidated everything that came before with no one apparently willing to consider the possibility that no war is exactly like the last one.

That was a political decision.

Yes it was as it was possible then( in the 60's) and still is technical feasible to build Ronny's 'starwars' today. It's a political choice to leave the American people totally vulnerable while insisting that foreign invasions be staged to 'pacify' foreign enemies and threats. Perhaps they are afraid that if they protect Americans well enough at home they will lose their excuse for hundreds of overseas military bases and invasions of foreign countries? No kidding it's political and how else could imperial machinery work?

am refering to the actual experts who do plan these things. In the event of a situation where things look like the potential end of the world, political stupidity gets turned down (and focused more towards finding a boat off the island).

Your naivity is startling and i wonder how you could have studied human history ( even American history, seperate branch of humanity as one is so often led to believe) and arrived at the conclusion that times of war results in saner conduct than is the norm for a given government. Where is the historic evidence for that claim and if provided is it a norm or the rare result of mass action by a suitability well educated and motivated public?

No, it mostly goes into the upper atmosphere. Which really isn't a problem for us.

I feel compelled to remind you that the upper atmosphere is still part of the atmosphere of our planet and what goes up does come down with the issue largely being where. To suggest that we can use nuclear artillery liberally ( and that ground forces are equipped or trained to fight in this way) without consequence to the global ecology is a rather frightening thing to claim. Perhaps you will at some point feel ready to start posting the sources that have make this so plain in your mind despite the academic and popular belief to the contrary?

Thanks.

Stellar

[[R_H]]

From previous Posleen threads

Questions on Ringo's Human-Posleen War series.

Without ofcourse forgetting the 3mm railguns that can go through Bradley's the long way and mission kill M1A2's

More Ringo Stupidity.

Meanwhile, the Indowy have given O'Neal a suit of armor just before the Posleen landings with the following armor rating:

"Sixty-millimeter frontal monomolecular uranium-silicon alloy with energetic reinforcement. The energetic reinforcement is logarithmically autocontrolled against nonrelativistic–velocity projectiles. As the round comes closer to a penetrating angle, the deflection energy increases logarithmically."

Gee, you know, this would be really really great stuff to have mass
produced in 2 foot thicknesses (609mm), because that's how thick the
armor on the M1 is, and installed at Lima, Ohio, replacing the old
Chobham packages; making the M-1 nearly invincible to Posleen attacks.

Also, it would be relatively easy to mass produce this stuff compared
to a ACS suit; because instead of visualizing each and every atom in a complicated piece of battle armor, with all it's various advanced sub
systems, teh Indowy would only have to visualize a flat slab of armor.

Starcraft Vs. Posleen

Just to clear up one minor mistake. Their light(1mm railguns) can't do much to an Abrams, their heavy(3 mm) can mission kill one, it's the obscenely overpowered grav guns that the human power armor ACS use that can go through one the long way. The weapons they have that can reliably kill an Abrams are actually fairly rare among the individual troops.

Preview of the new Posleen War book: Eye of the Storm

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power against a huge posleen horde.

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver lightning"?

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds, or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will do the job more efficiently.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down the front ranks with railgunfire.

Wow. Thanks Shep. I was going to mention the oddness of having enough rejuv for war criminals, but not the US army, but you beat me to it. It is FUN to see you rail against Ringo- you keep on learning something new.

I can has more railing?

In one of the books; the Posleen's weapons completely ineffective against ballistic weapons -- they're able to shoot down ICBMs in their boost phases; but once they go fully ballistic and the warheads debuss; they can't hit them.

In any rational world, this would be part of the briefing dossier the Galactics give the Humans -- "Posleen weaponry excellent against powered, transmitting targets; not very effective against unpowered ballistic, non transmitting targets"

So......why not create the MRLS Division?

Your typical US Army division consists of 8-11 Manuver battalions, and 3-4 Field Arty battalions, plus support units. Now, a hypothetical MRLS Division would probably have two manuver battalions as security elements, et cetera. That leaves 13 MRLS battalions in the unit; each MRLS Battalion has 29 M270 launchers. That's 377 M270 launchers in my Hypothetical MRLS Division. Each launcher carries 12 MRLS rockets. That's 4,524 MRLS rockets from a single MRLS Division.

Oh, did I also mention that I was going to use multiple MRLS divisions to pound Posleen landing zones?

Assuming 65% of the rockets from a single MRLS division are intercepted, we're still going to have 2,940 MRLS rockets impact the target zone. Let us look at the effects of this.

The M77 submunition used in the MRLS system is a shaped charge submunition which can penetrate up to 100 mm of RHA. The steel casing of the M77 also produces fragments which kill or wound to a radius of 4m from detonation. A total spill of all 12 rockets in a MRLS launcher will pretty much wipe out a grid square (1000 x 1000m).

Looking at a map of Virginia...Culpeper, Rapahannock, Fauqier, and Prince William Counties (Where the majority of the Posleen landings appear to have been in Gust Front) if you drew a circle around them, it would form a circle 70~ kilometers in diameter, with a total area of 219.8 square kilometers. Since 65% of all rockets are being intercepted (a SWAG), we're only assured of 128~ square kilometers of destruction per MRLS Division.

(I'm lowballing this, a different method of calculation gave me 245 sq km).

Luckily I did say that we were going to use multiple MRLS divisions.

Sure, it sucks for the people stuck in that place, but hell, we managed to get people to install bombs in their houses so they can commit suicide when the posleen knock on the door, we'll be able to eradicate four counties in Virgina with MRLS spills with little if any political backlash.

And since this is the initial Posleen landings in 2004, well, the Posleen will have not evolved the following tactics:

1.) Breaking up their battalion equivalents for assaults with spacing in between.
2.) Using houses/structures as cover from artillery

So the slaughter by MRLS will be terrible; God King saucers are open topped; and are killed easily by .50 BMG rounds, so even if we discount the fact that the KE of a .50 BMG round and the HEAT effect of a M77 submunition are different kinds of energy, the God King Saucers are still going to have their inhabitants shredded, and they will have the crap knocked out of them; 100mm RHA penetration is nothing to sneeze at.

So that means the majority of the Posleen in those four counties will have been decapicated by our MRLS mega-spill.

Oh did I mention that I'm following up with a second mega-spill in 20~ minutes as soon as my MRLS divisions reload? And with large parts of the Posleen ADA network suppressed, killed, or writhing in chaos, the second salvo will have even more missiles arrive, and the carnage will be awesome.

*********************************
Why Ringo's Military Designs Make No Sense
*********************************

Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004, instead of waiting until 2009 to appear, instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun rounds instead of complicated suits.

To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret "add-on" weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the "coaxial" 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the "A4" Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.

The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few "silver bullets" for old time's sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.

Let's not get to the Bradley:

The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo coming to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.
3.) Where the hell is the ammo coming from?

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us considerthe following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen really like to attack in human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from 25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind the first few ranks.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize, shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.

***********************
SheVas and why they make no sense
***********************

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship accidentally hits a Posleen lander over Virginia and annihilates it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 billion LOSAT armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms; that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put 48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain, easier to replace than SheVas.

***********************
Why the US Military's Artillery Doctrine Makes No Sense:
***********************

Posleen do not have the following:

1.) Artillery
2.) Counterbattery Fire
3.) Firefinder radars

So why does the US Army spend so much time mass producing 155mm wheeled opentopped guns based on South African Chassis, when they should have been producing M270 MRLS. A Posleen attack meeting a MRLS Division would cease to exist under steel rain.

What's the reason for producing guns anyway?

Guns are good for:

1.) Sustained fire (useful, but we can just get 8" Howitzers to do that for us instead of 6.1" (155mm))

2.) Counterbattery fire (Uhm, since the posleen have no artillery, why do we need this capability?

The US Military KNOWS the way the Posleen attack; they've had five years to prepare, analyze and they build the WRONG DAMN THINGS! If you gave me a few MRLS Divisions, I could annihilate entire military map sheets of anything that lives in minutes, inflicting millions of Posleen casualties for zero Human. Yet Ringo's Humans all do it the stupidest possible way, muddling along the fighting for five years, allowing the Posleen to slowly learn basic military tactics, making their jobs much harder in the end.

Wait? What about the Posleen's uber anti rocket device which does nothing against shot and shell?

Firstly, it's nothing of the sort. It only tracks and destroys POWERED projectiles; or projectiles that are TRANSMITTING. In the books, artillery shells with cameras in them that transmit pictures back are shot out of the sky easily, but dumb shells aren't.

And in book 4, hundreds of ICBMS are launched from the Northwest against Posleen positions in Tennesee; most of the ICBMs are shot down by the posleen in the BOOST phase, but once the warheads debuss and are on pure ballistic trajectories, the posleen can't do anything to stop 'em.

**************************
What would I have done if I was in charge instead of Mighty Mite?
**************************

I would have simply done the following for my anti Posleen force:

1.) Obtain M-1 and M-2/M-3 armor upgrade packages from the Indowy before Posleenfall.

2.) M-1 Abrams gets cannister, and the capability to airburst 120mm HE rounds like some Russian tanks do, and a 25mm coaxial chaingun firing HE fuzed rounds.

(The Abrams actually was considered for a 25mm Bushmaster in the design process, so this isn't insane.)

3.) The M-2/M-3 Bradleys obtain said 25mm HE rounds fuzed for detonation shortly after impact.

4.) Hordes of LOSAT armed Bradleys are procured to deal with Posleen landers.

5.) Hordes of M270 MRLS systems are built and scores of MRLS rounds are stockpiled, along with 8" tracked howitzers.

6.) Hordes of 120mm Mortar Armed M113A3s are built and assigned to the Abrams/Bradley/LOSAT task forces.

7.) Mass production of Watercooled Browning .50 Caliber HMGs; are distributed all over the United States to anyone who has the space to store 1 billion rounds of .50 BMG.

8.) I mass produce the M-14 once again, and re-equip my infantry forces with it. Horse sized aliens won't be dropped by 5.56mm

9.) M249 SAWs are replaced on a one-on-one basis with M-240Gs.

When the Posleen land; I move up my armies; and then begin the process of reducing the Posleen pockets. A hour or two of MRLS salvos from my MRLS Divisions to clear the landing areas of anything ALIVE (hey, if people are caught in there, they're dead anyway), then I move in my M-1s, M-2s, M-3s, under a constant hail of 8" gunfire and 120mm Mortars, with LOSAT armed bradleys picking off Posleen Landers.

Mechanized task forces of M1s and M2s proceed in, eliminating scattered bands of Posleen who survived the MRLS barriages. Once the majority of Posleen have been eliminated, the infantry dismounts and proceeds to mop up the few scattered Posleen who survived all this with their infantry weapons.

I estimate total eradication of all organized Posleen resistance in the Landing Pocket in a day or two, with mop up of scattered bands of Posleen in out of the way places for several months after the main pocket has been eliminated.

**************************************
Why are the Humans as stupid as Star Trek Ground Forces?
************************************

I realize that Mr. Ringo must make the book exciting and he obviously wants to write more than just one book; but did he have to make humanity, in particular, it's militaries so terminally brain dead? Having the conflict drag on for years and years on Earth wasn't necessary to keep the story going; there are 70~ planets that the GalFed has lost to the Posleen in the last couple of years; they all have to be retaken...which is room for several more books...

Edit: forgot to add in the first part dammit.. lol

So the slaughter by MRLS will be terrible; God King saucers are open topped; and are killed easily by .50 BMG rounds, so even if we discount the fact that the KE of a .50 BMG round and the HEAT effect of a M77 submunition are different kinds of energy, the God King Saucers are still going to have their inhabitants shredded, and they will have the crap knocked out of them; 100mm RHA penetration is nothing to sneeze at.

Small clarification. THey're not "killed" directly by the rounds themselves. They have to hit that technobabble battery thingy to blow the saucers up (They need .50 cal rounds to do that IIRC). Not that I am saying the MLRS couldn't be designed to do that. (Actually if they managed to salavage or figure those batteries out, I bet they could have used them as some sort of explosive.

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

You mean above and beyond the actual design/nature of the grav guns in general, right? An Actual laser or plasma weapon (hell if the Posleen have them I'm sure Earth could) would have made more sense than that, though railguns probably would have been better. Or somethign firing HE rounds (or just antimatter rounds)

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power against a huge posleen horde.

I don't remember any actual velocities given for the grav guns the ACS use. Of course, there's so many calc-oriented problems iwth how the grav guns are depicted I'm not even going to get into velocity (or the recoil issues - I did analysis of all that and I believed that the gun's firepower was both overrated and unrealistic from a recoil standpoint even with technowank power armor.) The antimatter-powered rounds were even more ludicrous given how utterly fragile they were (First book is a good example there)

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver lightning"?

Depends alot on interpretation. Ther'es some variants on how much TNT the grav guns are (50-100 kilos, in some cases more) and how many rounds (some depict it for many rounds, others for a single round.) Its too bloody inconisstent. Though I tned to believe 100 kilos for a barrage of bullets. Of course, that's a rather minor issue considering they designed the things to act like a "sci fi raygun" as I recal (which is stupid, since if you wanted a raygun a laser would be more practical and I find it hard to believe they couldn't have engineered laser guns)

Frankly I don't see why they didn't copy the Posleen and make some sort of sclaed up railgun, or just use some weapon that fires "explosive" rounds (the antimatter charged rounds would have made more senes that way I think.) Or if you ARE going to stick with the gRav guns stick them on an armored vehicle.

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds, or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT.

Considering how often I remember them fighting from fixed positions, rigging the guns to fire from a stationary power source (or one that could be wheeled in rather than carried) probably would have helped alot more. The "lack of power problem" in the latter books kinda bugged me, because you'd think that recharging stations would be something they'd plan ahead on.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will do the job more efficiently.

Again, some sort of more sophisticated grenade launcher type device probably would have been more sensible. I remember a number of military people discussing flaws in the ACS books and the limited use of indirect fire weaponry (like MLRS) was a big drawback.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down the front ranks with railgunfire.

I wouldn't have bothered with the suits at all. Given the level of AI they developed or what the interfaces with the suits - autonomous or remote-controlled combat vehicle/robots probably would have made more sense (Tracked or wheeled), especially if you stuckthe grenade/mortar launchers on them. Or even just plain old railguns. This is particualrily annoying as they manage to rig up some quais-autonamous weaponry in latter novels (I remember something about tripod mounted machine guns and stuff)

Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004, instead of waiting until 2009 to appear, instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun rounds instead of complicated suits.

Or just go for indirect fire. As I recall its quite possible to design the Abrams to fire guided munitions (I know soviet tanks can do it). The Posleen can't kill what they can't see/hit) A HE or cannister type round at 8-12 km would be nasty on infantry.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo coming to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.
3.) Where the hell is the ammo coming from?

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us considerthe following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen really like to attack in human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from 25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind the first few ranks.

as I remember the ACS suits had grenade/mortar launchers that could already fire some high-tech grenades, so I dont see why they couldn't have adapted existing machines to shoot them, rather than wasting time with the suits or Grav guns anyhow.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize, shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.

ringo adapted Metalstorm to one of the SHeVas in the fourth book as I recall.

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship accidentally hits a Posleen lander over Virginia and annihilates it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 billion LOSAT armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms; that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put 48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain, easier to replace than SheVas.

My problem with that analysis is that you seem to be only accounting for KE, not the issues of force/momentum of a physical impactor. Moreover, what you are talking about is dozens of individual rounds vs one single round - that also introduces issues of pressure and/or intensity (depending on whether you talk about force or KE, respectively - I doubt dozens of LOSATs will hit the same area the way a single round would.)

IIRC the Kinetic aspect was only one part of the Anti-Lander system: they also used a small antimatter warhead to do it (which I imagine you could duplicate with the LOSATs).

I vaguely recall those heavy weapon suits had some sort of heavy weapon that might have been anti lander, but I havne't read the fourth book in ages, so maybe the LOSAT idea might still work.

In any case, there's still other problems with SHeVA. For one thing in Gust Front those big planetary battle stations that were never completed. They armed those with some big ass antiship railgun type weapon that flung heavy projectiles at a considerable fraction of c and was far smaller than SHeVa. Why not have mounted those into mobile platforms from the getgo?

Even worse, we learn from the latter novels (book 3 onwards and Watch on the Rhine) that humans CAN use posleen weaponry, including the lander based railguns (those SHEVA wannabes in Watch were one such example) so they still had ways to get around the ETC Battleship gun. hell, those HVMs were very effective and would have been a more sensible weapon.

I'm also pretty sure that given gravgun wank, they could have devised some sort of "nuclear shaped charge" design and done away with the need for a kinetic penetator aspect at all.

In general:

The "no nukes" aspect of the novels bugged me as well, because I remember them acting as if the only useful nukes would have been ICBM, when there exist nukes down to the man-portable level. With access to higher technologies they probably could have come up with even better nukes (I'm sure alot of the antimatter wnak would bea pplicable).

What also bugged me is that they decided to wait until the third novel to bring up salvage of Posleen weaponry, when this should have been something they were doing from the get go. Nevermind the tech they acquired should have been more along those lines than what they came up with with those wanktastic ACS suits.

[Samuel]

The point being that the Posleen do not have the logistics 'tail' that human armies tend to have and if you manage to cut a hole in them you will at best run into posleen with less weapons/ammunition going to barter or buy some at their nearest factory/supply point or other Posleen flush with supplies on their way back from there. You will not run into thousands of practically undefended vehicles of many descriptions going here there any everywhere else to support normal human fighting formations.

Except that you can have vehicles that are armored enough to be completely invulnerable to rear line troops. As for undefended vehicles, I'm pretty sure that they do have those for demolishing human cities and converting the materials to their use. They probably make interesting explosions.

The problem being that very large volumes of Posleen will be killed without using much ammunition thus leaving massive volumes of equipment and ammunition ( and food as we are told) on any field of battle thus making entrapment largely useless. You just can not seem to get your head past the idea that doctrines can be different and that you can not fight everyone in the same old way!

Except we can destroy their equipment and ammunition. At the simplest we can simply make the area the troops died impossible for them to recover. Or we can collect the gear and use it. Or we can simply do enough damage that it is useless. Just naplam the area until everything melts together.

If single shots are fired they will likely be met with overwhelming firepower and promptly destroyed ( such as tanks) and the more aiming points you can provide them with the better your chances of infliction casualties without suffering the damage resulting from concentrated firepower.

Except that only their rockets can get through the armor we are talking about.

If the tank can fire from long enough distances to escape counter fire it makes itself obsolete by virtue of being obsolete piece of equipment who's resources is best spent on SP howitzers or large bore mortars.

What I am proposing has a large enough spread so that it doesn't take up the same slot as artillary.

The suits do not actually need a person inside to fight as the scene with the president makes quite clear. Suits have men inside for the same reason we still claim to put men in aircraft when we have long had the technology to make UAV's.

And the Darhel claimed they had problem making AIs that were obedient...

It is not specified but i think it would be fair to say that if it's used against planes ( as is the plasma weapons) it's range is substantial and terrain features and likely combat distances are the only practical considerations we need see as barriers to their effective engagement envelope.

So we have no idea of its effective range.

the suits alive consistently were the ability to evade being directly hit or escaping the main blast area.

How can you evade rounds that are going at a good percentage of c?

Also you don't need to worry about counter-fire if you are killing the enemy before they can get a shot off. Against human armies this doesn't work, but they don't generally come in waves that are unable to use cover.

This is true, that tanks need to keep their front facing the enemy, but the Posleen are natural flankers by virtue of having superior numbers.

That you can simply pull back. They are slower than any vehicle we can build.

Since you are fighting from fixed positions it makes more sense to have almost towed filed artiller that can dug in to hearts content thus soaking return fire, in sand and concrete, where armor could not.

Railgun rounds are supposed to be hitting .1 c. Do you honestly think sand is going to stop that?

There is nothing wrong with that but it's more aptly called "Gun Motor Carriages" as they were called then.

Thanks- I'm not really a military expert. Of course that could be useless if the armor protects from the rounds... but the momentum causes it to break off from the rest of the vehicle. The laws of physics in the story need work.

It is by no means self evident that France always had to be knocked out in such a short campaign or really at all.

Yes it was. Germany was aiming for a short war unlike WW1 and the only way to do that would be to go through Belgium into France.

There is NOTHING invitable about the second world other than perhaps the fact that major European powers were going to clash military in some way in the 1940's.

That was in no way inevitable until the Nazis seized power.

Brutality only? Based on what?

The fact that German occupation policies gradually evolved into mass executions in responce to partisan activity?

The occupied nations of Europe were not looted in the classical sense as their industry and populations were harnessed to create goods and resources for the Germany. France proved particularly efficient and it's industry served Germany without needing many further demonstrations that the Germans were going to be around for a while.

I'm pretty sure Germany didn't exactly pay for what they took- wasn't it all backed by fiat money that was essentially worthless?

We are talking about a make believe universe

Serious Business.

Your naivity is startling and i wonder how you could have studied human history ( even American history, seperate branch of humanity as one is so often led to believe) and arrived at the conclusion that times of war results in saner conduct than is the norm for a given government. Where is the historic evidence for that claim and if provided is it a norm or the rare result of mass action by a suitability well educated and motivated public?

Read the responce you gave above this one. The one where you claim their activies are carried out to justify their budget which is why they are non-optimal. When given a real threat that justifies their existance they will no longer need to spend time and energy justifying their activies and will presumably work better.

I feel compelled to remind you that the upper atmosphere is still part of the atmosphere of our planet and what goes up does come down with the issue largely being where.

By which time they will be significantly less radioactive.

To suggest that we can use nuclear artillery liberally ( and that ground forces are equipped or trained to fight in this way) without consequence to the global ecology is a rather frightening thing to claim. Perhaps you will at some point feel ready to start posting the sources that have make this so plain in your mind despite the academic and popular belief to the contrary?

Generally situations that involve the extermination of the human species by alien hordes are considered acceptable times to ignore the environmental consequences of military action. Mostly because if we lose such considerations become irrelevant.

[Stellar]

Hi Vehrec,

Professional study logistics. You understand this, yes? You also should understand that there were very real supply shortages,

Professional armies make sure that they employ people who study logistics and can tell them if their plans are logistically possible or not. The successfully armies are normally those who heed the advice... As for the claim that there were very real supply shortages there were very few logistical surprises during the initial campaigns and supplies arrived where they were planned when they were planned thus enabling the destruction of the overwhelming majority of Red army army groups in European Russia. You wish to argue that this happened despite these 'real supply shortages' while maintaining that professionals study logistics? How do you reconcile their success with such a severe failure in logistics that were in no way reflected by their successfully summer campaigns of June and July of 1941?

the Soviet union had NOT been defeated, and that the Panzers had outrun their supply lines and dumps hundreds of miles short of Moscow.

I do not see how that conclusion were reached:

http://books.google.com/books?id=qX1eGW ... 41&f=false

[ex]In the postwar period, under the influence of the writings of German generals involved in Barbarossa campaign -- Guderian in particular, there has been a great deal of attention given to the implications of a successful German attack on Moscow. Some historians, Stolfi for example, have gone so far as to suggest that a German victory in the war against the Soviet Union depended on capturing Moscow before the winter of 1941-42 and that there were no good military reasons for the Germans not achieving this result. Such writings focus on the redirection of panzer forces south -- on Hitler's orders -- as the primary reason the German campaign failed to reach Moscow before the winter. In response, other historians like Glantz have suggested that part of the reason the Germans turned south was the increasing Soviet resistance on the Moscow axis at the time of the Battle of Smolensk and the need to secure Army Group Center's southern flank. These are the same reasons expressed by Hitler in his arguments with the army generals and written into Directives 33 and 34.

In either case, Smolensk is considered the decisive encounter for determining the strategic result of the campaign. The battle of Smolensk was completed on August 5th. According to Glantz, total Soviet casualties in this battle amounted to 344,926 of the 581,600 man strength of their forces engaged in this battle (for the period July 10th to September 10th). The Germans claimed 300,000 prisoners and the destruction of most of the remainder of the 700,000 man strong Soviet force opposing them (by August 5th). Both claims lead to the same conclusion. Army Group Center had severely mauled the Soviet forces in this battle and at the end of it there was no meaningful Soviet resistance left on the road to Moscow. It was early August 1941.

http://www.onwar.com/articles/9903.htm[ex]

If after the Smolensk battles that opened the road to Moscow Army group center were so mauled and out of supplies how were in split into forces significant ( on the 23 of August; two weeks after concluding the earlier battles) enough to turn both North and South and lead to the collapse of Soviet resistance in Western Ukraine? Why were the panzer's strong enough to encircle 600 000 men but not to continue the advance against the remains of a broken enemy 3 weeks earlier? In fact how was this self same army group center that remained static for nearly two months able to attack and encircle and destroy another half a million man force when they eventually moved on Moscow at the end of September? How would a Soviet force half the size and with no time to prepare have fared against a Army group center of which just a small proportion were sufficient to seal the fate of a half a million strong Soviet force in the Western Ukraine? How was the Soviet army in the Western Ukraine supposed to reverse fronts ( while already giving ground to army group South) and attack the self same panzer formations that soon after encircled and aided in their capture? It makes no sense as it was not something they could conceivably do.

By failing to encircle and defeat the entire Soviet Army in their first 500 or so Kilometer dash, the Germans lost all hope of succeeding in Operation Barbarossa.

No. That is incorrect. Hitler lost hope but Bock was ready to continue towards Moscow and had prepared everything accordingly including destroying all opposition he met. It took Hitlers direct intervention to stop him and divert him to aid army group South in the destruction of Soviet South-Western Front which it had already proved itself well able to do. By failing to encircle the entire Soviet army in their first 500 Km dash the Germans did not fail as that was never the objective of the original five week campaign. In the first two weeks the Wehrmacht took 60 000 casualties ( 15 000 killed/missing) and the Red army a million. Up to the end of August it was 257 000 for the Wehrmacht and close on 2.5 million for the Soviet Union meaning that they had lost more troops than they deployed on the western front at the start of the invasion. If the destruction of the Russian armed forces is what Hitler had specifically in mind ( it wasn't; that was the aim of the OKW/OKH) they came close but since he never really believed that the moment things did not look like immediate victory he panicked and diverted army group center North and South thus changing the nature of the war to one of attrition ( capturing land and resources) instead of continuing for a coup de main on Moscow.

Still pathetic in comparison. Mass production can only take you so far when you've tapped out your supply of labor and are critically low on such basic materials as fuel oil and steel. And the fact is that they WERE under bombardment, not that it had much effect until 1943. Might have beings and hypotheticals are out of place in the discussion of total war.

Germany were rarely low on Steel and fuel oil and rare metals were a far more serious consideration. Germany had not tapped out it's supply of labor ( they were not working double shifts till late in war) and were not using it's labor resources in captured territories very efficiently for fear of creating civil unrest and the like. Might have been's and hypothetical's is what the discussion of the Posleen universe is all about and they certainly have their place in any study of contemporary history.

Leningrad was under seige for months, but I don't believe the germans ever came close to cracking it.

They had the opportunity to take it early in the war but the panzer formation in question managed to divert itself sufficiently to allow relief forces to invest the approaches; it was a close run thing in the same way Moscow was despite the best efforts of Hitler to distract army group center.

Moscow was just plain out of reach in any meaningful sense. Even if the Germans manage to get there, it's another street to street battle, which takes time.

Not in August 1941 after the first battle of Smolensk. There were no army level organized resistance on the Moscow approach Axis and it took a direct halt order from Hitler to force Army group center from pursuing the few hundred thousand that escaped the Smolensk pocket. There is no reason i can spot why Army group center could not have been busy encircling Moscow by early September 1941. To have street to street battles you need soldiers, not much of that left for the Russians in August, and the point of capturing Moscow wasn't to get Moscow but to destroy it as rail hub for European Russia. If Moscow had been encircled by early September all Soviet forces in European Russia were left stranded and would have faced destruction in detail by being cut off from both lines of escape and resupply. The sources i cited earlier suggests much the same.

Time favors the Soviets. More time, more tanks, more men, more chances for the dangerously thin supply lines feeding the Germans to be snapped by misfortune, air raids and partisans.

What dangerously thin supply lines? Please show how the Germans managed to meet so many strategic goals with supply lines that were not sufficient? I mean can a non sequitur get much grosser? Can you post details of German supply and casualty projections as opposed to those suffered so we can see the disparity of expectations against reality? Can i provide a hint in stating that the Germans supply needs mostly matched their expectations, that they suffered no more casualties than they expected and that their rail refitting/replacement went better than expected despite partisan activity?

Actually, surveys show it's quite easy to do with the right rhetoric and enough guys in uniforms shouting at the guys. This does not erase the fact that the murder done by the SS was more organized, more efficient and on a larger scale than any other in the recorded course of human history.

Actually it's a question of being threatened with death yourself to make people kill in such organized fashion and even then most of those people will soon become useless and a sizable fraction self destructive in behaviour or successfully suicidal. Human beings are not wired for it and it takes massive coercive power to get people to kill non threatening people on command. I still disagree with your claim that the SS were more organized, more efficient and that they committed atrocity on the largest scale in human history but frankly i don't care to be 'correct' as any attempted discussion of the reality of SS behaviour and crimes will probably result in me being painted as a 'denier' of some description. Since there are plenty of crimes no matter which way you look at it i can but ask that you eventually go back to source material to take a closer look at how few people you actually need, and they employed, to butcher millions in this, or that, day and age.

Moreover, the SS was also explicitly an arm of the Nazi Party. It was an inherently political body, no matter what your opinion of it may be.

So what? Since when does being a member of the NAZI party and or SS made you a stone cold killer hell bent on destroying entire populations of other countries? Their is as vast gulf between what most SS members/German believed about Nazism as there is between what most SS members/Germans did to involve themselves in actual war crimes and genocide. But then again they lost the war and if you lose your crimes is exposed whereas if you keep winning no one seems to count the bodies you leave behind.

Given the tiny fraction of the total number of former soldiers available to Germany that these men comprise, there was never any reason other than JOHN RINGO OH NO for these things to happen.

This much i can certainly agree with. Whether they chose it as device to get commercial reaction amongst SS myth loving amateur historians everywhere or because they are Nazi sympathizers i can but guess at but whatever they did do it hardly changes the historic fact that but a small fraction of SS members were ever brought up on charges for their conduct. If you wish to convict entire organizations based on the actions of a few that is your right but certainly doesn't change anything.

Oh god. pfff. You're killing me over here. Seriously? Let's review what Germany had. Part of france, the Balkans, Austria half of Poland and Germany itself. Most of which needs to be secured against partisan action. Against them?

Germany had France, not part of it. Perhaps you are not familiar with puppet governments? It had Norway and Greece ( well done on overlooking two entire countries) and Alliances with significant others which even you might be familiar with. As for partisan action don't confuse allied propaganda for actual disruption to the German economy or the volume of resources and goods it managed to extract from these occupied territories.

Britain,

Defeated in 1940 and kept in the war by lend lease. If not for lend lease Britain would have lost the means to employ it's colonies in it's struggle.

America,

90% of the public opposed joining the European war even after Britain and France declared war and only the intervention of Japan allowed American men to be drafted into a European war. Rightly it was the US that defeated Germany with the rest mostly animated by the truly massive volumes of resources and credit flowing from it.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Presuming the capture of Moscow ( The point about which the claim revolves) a threat to be starved into submission and cut off from American lend lease.

Combine all that and you must have at least a third if not half of the world's land area.

And Britain controlled much of it and could in 1940-1941 barely muster sufficient resources to defeat two German divisions in North Africa. Land area is worthless if run in the unique wasteful imperial method of Britain. Britain was, as you should know, bankrupted before the remains of the BEF arrived home.

More than half of it's total industrial capacity, oil fields, population, the list goes on. Germany no matter how well run or how efficient NEVER STOOD A CHANCE. From the day they rolled into Poland, their defeat was inevitable as the rise and fall of the tide.

Only there's no truth to it and if the German offensives against Moscow were not halted in the same way as the offensive against the BEF ( Hitler, Hitler) the war might have ended very differently with Germany having no major setbacks in 1941 and probably no Stalingrad's in 1942. With pressure lifted there North Africa falls and with it British oil supplies in Iraq. The world war could have still ended in eventual German defeat much later but not after a protracted cold war type scenario with the United States of America. I really would like you to tell me exactly why so many authors have noted the feasibility of a German strike against Moscow and why you disagree with the predicted consequences of it.

Thanks

Stellar

[PainRack]

Professional armies make sure that they employ people who study logistics and can tell them if their plans are logistically possible or not. The successfully armies are normally those who heed the advice... As for the claim that there were very real supply shortages there were very few logistical surprises during the initial campaigns and supplies arrived where they were planned when they were planned thus enabling the destruction of the overwhelming majority of Red army army groups in European Russia. You wish to argue that this happened despite these 'real supply shortages' while maintaining that professionals study logistics? How do you reconcile their success with such a severe failure in logistics that were in no way reflected by their successfully summer campaigns of June and July of 1941?

The German Staff has attracted criticism purely because of their ignorance of logistics, in particular, maritime logistics. Rommel disastrous campaign in Africia is notable for this.

Guderian, despite his apologia noted in particular that the German logistic train had failed in the attack on Moscow. He also noted that he couldn't succeed in an attack against Moscow due to the paltry forces under his command, increased resistance, weather and supplies.
His rebuttal that the diversion into Kiev caused the failure at Moscow doesn't make sense. Yes, it increased wear and tear, inflicted more damage on the Germans and etc etc etc. However, the German forces simply couldn't ignore such a strategic threat on its flanks and the German Army had problems in commiting enough forces to contain such a threat due to their own strategic miscalculation.

What dangerously thin supply lines? Please show how the Germans managed to meet so many strategic goals with supply lines that were not sufficient? I mean can a non sequitur get much grosser? Can you post details of German supply and casualty projections as opposed to those suffered so we can see the disparity of expectations against reality? Can i provide a hint in stating that the Germans supply needs mostly matched their expectations, that they suffered no more casualties than they expected and that their rail refitting/replacement went better than expected despite partisan activity?

How about the fact that Guderian counted only 50 available tanks in his inventory during the dash for Moscow? There's also just simple realistic facts. The Germans had long single roads that were poor, subject to the weather.

Actually it's a question of being threatened with death yourself to make people kill in such organized fashion and even then most of those people will soon become useless and a sizable fraction self destructive in behaviour or successfully suicidal. Human beings are not wired for it and it takes massive coercive power to get people to kill non threatening people on command.

It does require massive coercive power, however, the means are readily available. The existence of child soldiers in Africia, the massacare in Cambodia......

Germany had France, not part of it. Perhaps you are not familiar with puppet governments? It had Norway and Greece ( well done on overlooking two entire countries) and Alliances with significant others which even you might be familiar with. As for partisan action don't confuse allied propaganda for actual disruption to the German economy or the volume of resources and goods it managed to extract from these occupied territories.

You mistook his point. The Germans for example committed an entire armoured division to Yugoslavia so as to contain partisan action. Infantry units were also committed to other actions simply to defend railway convoys and etc.

Defeated in 1940 and kept in the war by lend lease. If not for lend lease Britain would have lost the means to employ it's colonies in it's struggle.

Britain however still retained the Royal Navy, the funds and the manpower that could take on the Germans. They might have required America industrial might to stay in the fight, but once equipped with that, they proved a significant foe on its own.

And Britain controlled much of it and could in 1940-1941 barely muster sufficient resources to defeat two German divisions in North Africa. Land area is worthless if run in the unique wasteful imperial method of Britain. Britain was, as you should know, bankrupted before the remains of the BEF arrived home.

Say what? No it wasn't. The British mustered and constantly regenerated army divisions to fight all over the world. In 1940-1941, the British successfully launched an invasion of Italian Ethiopia and other Africian campaigns that tied up the KAR and despite constant tactical reverses, kept the Desert Army alive with recruits from ANZAC and Indian forces. India at this point was also involved in a massive buildup that has never been adequately credited in Western sources. It was Britain failure in Asia that led to much of this army to be devoted to fighting against the Japanese instead of the Germans, however, British forces, along with other Commonwealth divisions such as the Canadians could and did make up for the slack. Canada in particular built up an entire aerospace and naval industry so as to participate in the war and provided 48% of all naval sorties into the Atlantic in the Battle of the Atlantic. AND also provided significant forces for the landing of Normandy later, as well as providing aircrews for the begining bomber campaign of Germany in 1941.
Britain finanicial difficulties was only truly apparent AFTER she lost her dollar arsenal in Malaya. India own finanicial resources was diverted into a massive buildup, including massive infrastructure changes such as the laying of railroads to supply the new Indian Army. Much of this capacity was later diverted to fight against the Japanese.

Only there's no truth to it and if the German offensives against Moscow were not halted in the same way as the offensive against the BEF ( Hitler, Hitler) the war might have ended very differently with Germany having no major setbacks in 1941 and probably no Stalingrad's in 1942. With pressure lifted there North Africa falls and with it British oil supplies in Iraq. The world war could have still ended in eventual German defeat much later but not after a protracted cold war type scenario with the United States of America. I really would like you to tell me exactly why so many authors have noted the feasibility of a German strike against Moscow and why you disagree with the predicted consequences of it.

With what logistics? The German campaign in North Africia could not have been concluded in 1942.

The offensive against Moscow isn't as clearcut as you argue it to be.

[Stellar]

If Hitler had not diverted his units to Ukraine, he would have a flank and then later his supply line for the Moscow attck exposed to an almost 1 million strong Army to counter-attack.

There was no million man army on the Southern flank of Army group center. The Soviet South-Western Front had at that point lost most of their tank strength and were 'successfull' only in terms of how it had not let itself be encircled by Army group South. It was pressed severely and there was no practical way that it could have sent sufficient tank forces north to threaten Army group center supply lines without then inviting encirclement for lack of remaining mobile forces.

Does that sound sane to you? The operations in Ukraine were critical to secure a free road to Moscow.

I now the classical arguments made to explain the halting of Army group center but unless you can describe how the Soviet South-Western front were supposed to reverse fronts while retreating before Army group South to attack army group Center your only begging the question as to why Army group Center could not have been used to crush the South-Western front before the Smolensk battles? The operations in the Ukraine were far removed from the operations against Moscow and there were a very specific reason why there was a Army group North, Center and South.

Risking the entire Wehrmacht force directed to Moscow to fall prey to a large flanking assault by the Ukrainian forces would just be too reckless, even for Hitler, insane as he was.

The entire Wehrmacht force were not directed at Moscow and both the South and Northern Groups were meeting with sufficient success ( about as conservative a claim as can be made) to guarantee that large forces could not disengage and threaten Army group Centers supply lines. Army Group center was the strongest group but it was also logically expected to face the most Resistance on it's direct approach line to Moscow. As it turns out it was both strong enough to clear the approach Axis to Moscow by mid August 1941 ( leaving not organized armies standing in front of it) and to soon after split of forces so significant that they sealed the fate of the Soviet South-Western military district. To suggest that Army group center had not retained it's panzer or personal strength in August and that it could not have been used directly against Moscow instead of having it's vital Panzer forces directed South and be so effective is to beg the question as to how the Russians could have defended Moscow with much less forces than the panzer's went up against in the Ukraine.

His Reich was doomed when he initiated Barbarossa and later declared war on America. Critical failures. The rest matters not, in the grand scheme of things.

Well i think it is really a waste of my time to argue with people who believe in the inevitability of the German defeat when they were clearly defeating the USSR in 1941 and clearly defeating the USSR in 1942. Hitlers Reich ( and this is not something i wish for) was sadly not doomed by his invasion of Poland, France, the low countries, Norway, Greece and so much of the Balkans. Why this, according to you, changed when operation Barbarossa were initiated i do not know and why, when they had in two months destroyed or captured the entire army that were deployed against them at the start of the war, such facts do not sway your mind i can only marvel at. Why they kept right on losing in 1942 when they were not defeated in 1941 one doesn't know and why they suffered far more casualties in 1943 than they managed to inflict on the 'losers' in 1943 we can also just guess at. Fact is given only slight changes in the historic record widely different outcomes could have been achieved for many of the factions involved and to argue differently is to discuss fate, destiny and such rubbish.

Going after the BEF was taking a major risk. Do you know that taking major risks does not always yield success?

Only in Hitlers mind. He wanted to save his Panzer's from further damage and somehow reasoned that he would not need the Luftwaffe for the coming battle with Britain. He managed to halt the German formations that could have, at some cost i will admit, have smashed the BEF and instead sent in the Luftwaffe to lose pilots and planes that Germany could much less afford to lose. Hitler can be said to have a very nervous personality and twice when he was presented with the opportunity to reach stated objectives he diverted the German armed forces sufficiently to allow their escape. With the escape of the BEF he lost his chance for a invasion ( yes, it could be done given slight alternations to Luftwaffe strategy against RAF) of Britain but with Moscow it can perhaps be said that he had lost his greatest opportunity to defeat the only European land power that could seriously threaten Germany for decades to come.

The same could be said of the Moscow operation. The entire Barbarossa was a huge gamble anyway - the Germans prepared oils and fuels and supplies only till Autumn. They had no plans for a protracted war.

Barbarossa was not a gamble in the sense that the campaign yield unexpected results as if one looks at the staff work and projections they are very accurate for the initial ten week campaign and only start diverging significantly in November. Up to that time casualties were lower than what they prepared for in replacement pools and reserves and panzer and other other vital mechanized forces were not degraded beyond expectations. Remember that there is a difference between idealized expectations and what the General Staff projected they could accomplish with what they had; these projections are based on a thorough understanding of means and methods and it proved highly accurate up until the point where the Wehrmacht had defeated and captured more Russians than were under arms when they started the campaign. Considering that a failure is a intellectual failure of a magnitude much larger than anything the OKW/OKH came up with in 1941.

They started failing the deadlines by early August 1941 (i.e. not meeting the target goalposts and keypoints), and failed the entire plan by end 1941.

Which does not explain why they managed to clear the approaches to Moscow with the battle of Smolensk where another 600 000+ man army were routed with more than half being captured or killed. The 'mistake' i am attempting to discuss happened after this and as the actions of Army group center proved they were very fighting fit still and not only managed to defeat a much larger Soviet force months later but also to give up their 'depleted' ( so called) panzer formations to aid in the destruction of a similar force in the Western Ukraine. How that can be the result of dire miscalculation i do not know but i hope you can start introducing some evidence. The date i have so far provided are all things that actually happened with the alternatives and possibilities cleared stated.

Crap fiction doesn't require my attention

Then you should really 'move on'.

German industry was often inefficient in Arms production and NOT MOBILIZED to full extent by 1941. However, it was, as an industry par se, more powerful than the Soviet one - even if more wasteful (i.e. less AFVs for ton of steel, etc)

Yes, i am sure we read the same books ten-fifteen years ago only it's clear that you stopped there.

I have to remind you that winning Barbarossa required taking the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line by Autumn 1941. That was failed. Without that, even taking Moscow or Leningrad would not be victory.

That was the ideal line for a efficient defence of European Russian against remaining Soviet power in Asian Russia. Even without capturing Leningrad or Moscow 1942 was a terrible year for the Red army and the only thing that kept it in fighting shape was that it were inflicting sufficient casualties on the Wehrmacht to prevent it from reaching such a defensible line. Had Moscow and Leningrad fallen in 1941 as per this new time line the counter attacks staged by the fresh Siberian divisions could not have taken place and the German armed forces of 1942 very significantly stronger and it's possibilities for conquest in 1942 even greater than they turned out to be in historic fact. It must be remembered that despite the fact that Germany suffered great casualties when they failed to prevent the buildup at Moscow the Red army consistently lost more troops, more equipment and more aircraft in those desperate winter assaults that more often than not utterly failed with heavy casualties. The winter war of 1941 was a terrible time for Red army made bearable only because they actually managed to inflict significant casualties while going on to take the punishment they had so far.

In the XX century, no other military/paramilitary unit achieved a similar kill rate per unit of time, save the Khmer Rouge during the Pnom Penh massacre. Want to argue?

I said nothing about the XX century but i can see why you wish to restrict it so. Even in this period sadly i don't think the SS/Nazi's were the greatest killers or perpetrated the biggest Genocide. Frankly i would rather not discuss genocides and Holocausts as there has never been room for discussion of actual historic events and there probably will not be while common mythology holds that Germans/Nazi's committed a unheard of crime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wa ... death_toll

Hundreds of thousands of SS-men guarded camps, executed Slavs, Jews and Roma in large scale massacres, et cetera. This applies to the entirety of the SS, including the Waffen-SS as well who were involved in all that by A LARGE MAJORITY.

I suppose i should have said Waffen-SS ( The guys that draws all the fan boys and the one's raised to fight the Posleen) as they are what i presumed you understood we were talking about. The waffen SS committed more of their share of war crimes ( killing prisoners, etc) but were not generally involved in Holocaust. Either way that is about as much as i am willing to commit to the 'defense' of the waffen SS legacy so i will do my best to avoid further discussion of such a tainted topic.

No. The Jews and Slavs and other "untermenshen" would be massacred and largely annihilated, but that's it. You wouldn't feel much difference over your part of the world. That's it.

People have been getting annihilated for thousands of years in episodes that tragically doesn't make the NAZI efforts stand out to anyone other but those who don't know human history. Perhaps you can see Nazi Germany as uniquely evil but sadly i can't and know that worse has happened and believe that worse can and will happen in the future.

On the other point why wouldn't my part of the world be affected?

Thanks

Stelllar

[[R_H]]

No, tanks will always be better. You can make it so that it fires constantly enough and over a wide enough area that the enemy can never get a shot off, you can rotate crews so that you can field it continuously, you repair it in the field, you can power it using local supplies, etc.

Tanks are not always better as very soon became evident in world war 2 with the incorporation of ever heavier anti tank weapons as well as the introduction of powerful personal AT weapons. Fact is there is no rear area of the Posleen to disrupt thus largely negating the need for the large gun and plenty of armor that is required to stick your neck right into the firing line of the enemy in the hopes that you can break trough and cut him off from his supplies and such sundry disruptions. The armor required to protect a tank sized target from the weapons advertised in this series is prohibitive and since you can protect a far more mobile, and thus more difficult to hit, man for a fraction of the cost while losing little of the firepower tanks do in my opinion make much sense.

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

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? 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.

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. 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.

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.
Spoiler

Has anyone calculated if any of those RG projectiles would be feasible penetrators?

Tanks are better than power armor for stand up battles. There are uses for power armor, but in a universe where it is expensive, tanks will always be a better choice for the scarce materials.

Stand up battles against the Posleen gets you plain and simple killed and being a static target for HVM/ plasma gets you cooked or vaporised. In the later books they have apparently figured out native production methods that allows them to use adapted galactic processes to produce armor sufficient to withstand Plasma and many HVM hits on the frontal arch at which point tanks becomes more than just expensive obvious targets for massed fire.

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

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

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

Chapter 2 Development of Tanks since 1945

2.1 General Trend

The armour piercing capabilities of anti-tank guided missiles also led to claims during the 1960s and early 1970s that they were making tanks obsolete. Similar claims had been made before, when other anti-tank weapons first appeared and they ignored, once again, the fact that tanks had never been invulnerable and that armour protection was not their only or even principal attribute. Nevertheless, infantry anti-tank guided missiles were widely acclaimed as 'tank killers'. In part this was due to them being produced by the aerospace industry which has been much more articulate and aggressive in promoting its products than those concerned with tanks.

Further claims that tanks were becoming obsolete were then made on account of the development of missile-carrying helicopters. They were encouraged by the very first use of helicopters against tanks by the US Army which occurred in 1972 at Kontum during the closing stages of the war in Vietnam: it was highly successful but its scale was very limited (2.7). A broader basis for the claims made for helicopters was provided by the results of trials and in particular of a US-German-Canadian trial carried out in 1972 in Germany at Ansbach in which an average of 18 tanks was adjudged to be 'killed' for each helicopter 'kill' (2.. The results of this trial were widely advertised at the time but little was said about its scenario, which favoured helicopters.

Claims made for anti-tank guided missiles reached their climax at the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when Egyptian infantry armed with Soviet-made 'Sagger' missiles repulsed the initial counter-attacks of Israeli tank units with heavy losses. The immediate reaction of many people to this was "time was running out for the tank" (2.9). But although the Israeli units which were involved lost a high proportion of their strength, the number of tanks they actually had was relatively small (2.10). Many more tanks were subsequently lost by both sides to the guns of the opposing tanks, which showed that the claims made for the relative effectiveness of anti-tank guided missiles on the basis of the initial engagements along the Suez Canal were greatly exaggerated. The losses inflicted by their guns also demonstrated how effective tanks continued to be.

After 1973 infantry anti-tank guided missiles were viewed somewhat more objectively. In particular, their limitations as well as their capabilities were noted and they were seen to have limited battlefield mobility as well as being vulnerable to suppressive fire. Moreover, the smaller missiles were rendered far less effective by the development of new types of armour which were almost three times as effective in relation to their weight as conventional, homogeneous steel armour. The new type of armour was first successfully developed in Britain and soon after its appearance it was adopted, in 1972, for the US XM-1 tank which was described in 1976 by the US Secretary of the Army as "impervious to any currently known anti-tank missile" (2.11).

Guided missiles could always be made large enough, of course, to destroy any tank. But if they were large they were no longer portable infantry weapons and would have to be mounted in armoured vehicles to have any reasonable degree of battlefield mobility. These vehicles could include battle tanks and a gun-cum-missile launcher actually formed the main armament of the US-German MBT-70, as well as one or two other tanks developed during the 1960s. However, by 1972 it was generally recognised that guns were superior, after all, to guided missile systems as tank armament.

Chapter 9 Guided Weapons

9.1 Development of Anti-Tank Guided Missiles

Moreover, instead of threatening the existence of tanks the development of anti-tank guided missiles has created an additional demand for tank-like and other, if only light-weight, armoured vehicles because the more powerful of the missile systems need to be mounted in them if they are to have an adequate degree of battlefield mobility and if they are to be, therefore, fully effective.

Chapter 10 Mobility of Tanks

10.3 Battlefield Mobility

Whatever is done to minimise their exposure to enemy fire, tanks can not avoid it and so their battlefield mobility is a function not only of their automotive characteristics but also of their armour protection, which enables them to move freely in the face of possible or actual fire from many enemy weapons. This distinguishes tanks from unarmoured weapon carriers which may be highly mobile in the automotive sense and which may have a high degree of operational mobility but whose battlefield mobility is, nevertheless, inferior to that of tanks because they are highly vulnerable to the fire of machine guns and other light weapons present in large numbers on the battlefield, as well as being vulnerable to artillery shell fragments. In consequence, they can not move as freely as tanks can.

The number of enemy weapons to which tanks are immune depends on the amount of armour they have and this is generally reflected in their weight. As a result, the battlefield mobility of tanks is related to their weight, because the heavier they are the better is their protection and the greater, therefore, is their immunity to enemy weapons and the freedom with which they can move in face of an enemy. This is in complete contrast to the operational, as well as the strategic, mobility of tanks, which are adversely affected by weight, and makes it important to distinguish between them and battlefield mobility.

[Stellar]

The German Staff has attracted criticism purely because of their ignorance of logistics, in particular, maritime logistics. Rommel disastrous campaign in Africia is notable for this.

Losers always attract criticism for their mistakes and rarely are their achievements given similar praise. Rommel did not have a disastrous campaign and managed to keep the armed forces of the commonwealth fully employed for years. What did Rommel 'in' was not a lack of logistical support but his incapacity to understand that he was supposed to hold the fort and not try to take Brita ins; Rommel were in fact very well supplied ( using American armor divisions in 1944 as basis) to fulfill his actual defensive mission. Again the OKW are being taken to task for managing to fail in goals that they did not set and were taken up by upstart Generals who should have known better than to try defeat Britain's land forces in North Africa with such modest force. Perhaps we can take up the battle for the Atlantic at a later date?

Guderian, despite his apologia noted in particular that the German logistic train had failed in the attack on Moscow. He also noted that he couldn't succeed in an attack against Moscow due to the paltry forces under his command, increased resistance, weather and supplies.

Yes that was the case in November and December when the cold weather had set in wreaking havoc with equipment and readiness of units. Again please do not repeat the conventional wisdom as set out in many dozens of the books i have read. I am quite familiar with the conventional view...

His rebuttal that the diversion into Kiev caused the failure at Moscow doesn't make sense.

His rebuttal, where?

Yes, it increased wear and tear, inflicted more damage on the Germans and etc etc etc.

Actually the distraction to the South did not so undo Army group center that it did not manage to get moving two months after stopping ( after the panzer diversions to the SOuth and North) and smash the resistance built up in the intervening months. I do not understand how it's argued that the panzer formations who were active during that two month span were somehow not well enough supplied to have continued a shorter and better supported attack against Moscow proper.

However, the German forces simply couldn't ignore such a strategic threat on its flanks and the German Army had problems in commiting enough forces to contain such a threat due to their own strategic miscalculation.

This is inaccurate. Please refer to my earlier sources and post your own if you wish to contest their factual nature. If army group South had been halted by severe resistance it could be argued that Army group center were threatened but it was not and the Soviet South-Western front were retreating everywhere and not able to accomplish much other than managing to stave off encirclement.

How about the fact that Guderian counted only 50 available tanks in his inventory during the dash for Moscow? There's also just simple realistic facts. The Germans had long single roads that were poor, subject to the weather.

Yes, yes more of what we both 'know' , from having been told so repeatedly in so many books, that is disputed by the actual series of events that nearly led to the capture of Moscow in October in terrible weather and after extended diversions to fronts and battles where the aid was not required. The scenario discussed here involves a continued movement towards Moscow on 23 August at which point Guderian personal strength were at 80%, had just fought the battle's of Roslavl, Rogachev, and Gomel and without the strain of having had panzer's diverted to costly excursions in support of army group South that had not request assistance.

It does require massive coercive power, however, the means are readily available. The existence of child soldiers in Africia, the massacare in Cambodia......

If similar pressures are applied in other societies it yields just about the same result which is basically what i am trying to indicate by not considering Germans uniquely evil or in possesion of uniquely powerful means by which to defeat their enemies.

You mistook his point. The Germans for example committed an entire armoured division to Yugoslavia so as to contain partisan action. Infantry units were also committed to other actions simply to defend railway convoys and etc.

The point being that divisions so deployed where normally in formation, refitting, rebuilding or otherwise incapable of being deployed. There were armored divisions in France during Barbarossa too but they were left there both as invasion guard ( and normally in some stage of unpreparedness) and because there were only so much resources and means to keep German armies supplied in the East.

Britain however still retained the Royal Navy, the funds and the manpower that could take on the Germans. They might have required America industrial might to stay in the fight, but once equipped with that, they proved a significant foe on its own.

They did not have the money to pay for the fuel required to operate the Royal Navy. People do not seem to understand the Britain was bankrupt and that if not for Roosevelts deceit ( ignoring the will of the American public and creating lend-lease treaties after buying up British American assets and the like) British resistance would not have been increasing from 1940 onwards but decreasing as it lost control over it's colonial assets. I really should not have to tell anyone about this....

Say what? No it wasn't. The British mustered and constantly regenerated army divisions to fight all over the world. In 1940-1941, the British successfully launched an invasion of Italian Ethiopia and other Africian campaigns that tied up the KAR and despite constant tactical reverses, kept the Desert Army alive with recruits from ANZAC and Indian forces.

Yes, it managed to keep almost two German divisions busy at severe cost to itself. Very impressive ( i am aware of the Italians). Britain succesfully launched invasions of countries most people don't know about because it needed the victories and knew it would not gain them against Germans.

India at this point was also involved in a massive buildup that has never been adequately credited in Western sources. It was Britain failure in Asia that led to much of this army to be devoted to fighting against the Japanese instead of the Germans, however, British forces, along with other Commonwealth divisions such as the Canadians could and did make up for the slack. Canada in particular built up an entire aerospace and naval industry so as to participate in the war and provided 48% of all naval sorties into the Atlantic in the Battle of the Atlantic.

I know. This is actual historic fact and yet has no relevance to how the British were unable to effectively fight the German armed forces in 1940-41. I am aware of the rarely mentioned Canadian contribution ( Never have heard much in the way of a bad word said about the Canadian fighting man, etc) and of the Australian fighting men in the deserts of North Africa and the jungle's of SEA. Please presume i know about as much as i do and that when you think i am forgetting something that you a merely missing the intent of my point.

AND also provided significant forces for the landing of Normandy later, as well as providing aircrews for the begining bomber campaign of Germany in 1941
Britain finanicial difficulties was only truly apparent

To who? The British public in 1940/lay student of history? What about the rest of us that actually took the time to see when the UK started selling of state assets to make a defense of the isle's possible? Why did the British give up all those bases/access to land ( on 99 year leases no less) for fifty outdated destroyers? Why did Churchill tell Roosevelt that if Britain lost ( oh wait, that could never happen and no one believes that it could) America could be directly threatened from British colonial holdings in the Caribbean ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyers ... _Agreement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_c ... ld_War_II)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
( Yes, your allowed to use wiki)

AFTER she lost her dollar arsenal in Malaya. India own finanicial resources was diverted into a massive buildup, including massive infrastructure changes such as the laying of railroads to supply the new Indian Army. Much of this capacity was later diverted to fight against the Japanese.

The Cash and carry program ended because Britain had run out assets it could convert to cash ( once the wall street guys smelled blood in the water they didn't really see the point of offering much for these assets) and since Roosevelt were committed to the defense of Britain he quickly moved to create a alternative program to completely undo the Neutrality act the American citizenry had demanded in the late 30's. Few people realise that much anything less than the attack on Pearl would have dragged the US into war but again Hitler is given to be a complete fool who clearly thought he could fight the world alone and did not plan to distract Britain's entire empire, and the clearly belligerent US government, by alliances with nations who had their own history with British Imperialism and American economic support of it. What about some credit where it is due or is it only 'fate' and 'destiny' when it leads to a German defeat?

With what logistics? The German campaign in North Africia could not have been concluded in 1942.

Those freed by the capture of Moscow in September 1941 and the resulting inability of the SU to launch significant winter offensives or offensives as effective as those they did. For the record all the industry that fled past the Urals, to say nothing of Moscow itself, in late August and September would have fallen into German hands thus significantly weakening Soviet industrial capacity in 1942.

The offensive against Moscow isn't as clearcut as you argue it to be.

No it's not as clear cut as in history as we know it it did not happen and thus is taken as cannon and the logical result of Barbarossa. This is the problem with discussing alternative choices and decisions in history; most people don't even know what did happen and yet insist that things must have happened in exactly that way!

Stellar

[K. A. Pital]

There was no million man army on the Southern flank of Army group center.

There was over half-a-million men in the units of the SWF alone. Regardless of losing their "tank strength", Hitler doubted - and so would anyone sane in his place! - that Army Group South would be successful in dealing with the Soviet SWF on it's own. And what if it weren't? In that case it would expose the advancing AGC to a flanking attack - not against the bulk of the Army Group Center forces, but against it's overextended supply lines.

Moreover, the turn southward was pre-ordained even before Hitler's main directive, because he consistently ordered the Wehrmacht to destroy Potapov's 5th Army that was threatening Reichenau's advance on Kiev from the Pripyat region, which was difficult terrain and quite rightly judged by Hitler as a major risk point.

But, if instead of turning for Kiev, Army Group Center peristed with the advance on Moscow, the proportion of forces would not guarantee success. Units of Army Group South would not be available for us. The advance of 60 divisions of Army Group Center would be going against 43 divisions of the Western Front, 35 divisions of Reserve Front, partly the Briansk front (up to 20 units), and up to 20 units formed in the Moscow Military District. More than that, the reserve of the Stavka for the Moscow direction also had 8 more divisions. This is 130 divisions all in all, capable of taking it to the battle of Moscow against a single 60-division strong German Army group, with no assistance from either North or South, because both of those would not be available for help.

Yes, I would agree with you that the turn south had only a secondary goal of eliminating the flank threat. It's first and foremost goal was freeing up the units of Army Group South to be used in the Moscow offensive.

The operations in the Ukraine were far removed from the operations against Moscow and there were a very specific reason why there was a Army group North, Center and South.

See above. It all started after the Wehrmacht continously (!) failed to destroy and disperse Potapov's 5th Army, quite unlike other units. Then it was a matter of determining risks. Hitler thought the risk of advancing to Moscow with just Army Group Center is too great. Who're you, Mr. Armchair General, to think otherwise? With hindsight we know that the forces opposing AGC were large enough to make the issue not clear cut.

The entire Wehrmacht force were not directed at Moscow and both the South and Northern Groups were meeting with sufficient success ( about as conservative a claim as can be made) to guarantee that large forces could not disengage and threaten Army group Centers supply lines.

At the same time they were binding themselves in heavy combat, and failing to eliminate certain threats. See above. Moreover, them getting bogged down meant they would not be able to assist AGC in the fight for Moscow.

Army Group center was the strongest group but it was also logically expected to face the most Resistance on it's direct approach line to Moscow. As it turns out it was both strong enough to clear the approach Axis to Moscow by mid August 1941

Bull-shit. See the force proportion above.

...how the Russians could have defended Moscow with much less forces than the panzer's went up against in the Ukraine.

Really? See above. The USSR was already employing "permanent mobilization" by August. You're having your dates off. It's not just "OH THE SIBERIANS" who solved the battle for Moscow. The USSR already started forming new divisions, and in rather large numbers.

Well i think it is really a waste of my time to argue with people who believe in the inevitability of the German defeat when they were clearly defeating the USSR in 1941 and clearly defeating the USSR in 1942.

No, it failed to capture a major part of the Soviet industries (thanks to the masterfully done evacuation of factories in 1941), failed to utilize them efficiently, and failed to meet Barbarossa deadlines. The Wehrmacht wasn't "clearly defeating" the USSR in either 1941 or 1942, because it hadn't even met it's own targets of victory, and FAILED - I repeat for those too dense - FAILED to destroy the RKKA as a fighting force. The RKKA was badly beaten, but it never ceased operating as an Army.

Why this, according to you, changed when operation Barbarossa were initiated i do not know and why, when they had in two months destroyed or captured the entire army that were deployed against them at the start of the war

They had not destroyed the entire RKKA. That was the goal of Barbarossa, but it was failed. A major part of it was destroyed, but the USSR's permanent mobilization strategy, industrial evacuation and mobilization started... and guess what, the task of Blitzkrieg is to DEFEAT the enemy until he mobilizes. The Germans failed to do that. The USSR mobilized, and turned the scales. Unlike Poland and all other nations, where the Blitz destroyed their standing armies COMPLETELY before they mobilized.

I think you should read a history book.

Why they kept right on losing in 1942 when they were not defeated in 1941 one doesn't know

Because tactical defeats can continue even after the strategic situation is decisively changed. If you're a moron who can't determine the difference between strategic success and tactical success, I can only feel sorry for you. But there are good books on why 1942 was a year with many losses, and yet the USSR won.

and why they suffered far more casualties in 1943 than they managed to inflict on the 'losers' in 1943 we can also just guess at.

Because 1943 was the breakneck year. The Wehrmacht was not broken in 1942 as a fighting force.

He managed to halt the German formations that could have, at some cost i will admit, have smashed the BEF

That's completely irrelevant for the war outcome. Destruction of the BEF meant little in the grand scheme of things. It made a difference for Britain, but not for Germany if it still attacks the USSR and USA.

With the escape of the BEF he lost his chance for a invasion ( yes, it could be done given slight alternations to Luftwaffe strategy against RAF)

It couldn't. You should read Halder's diaries or something. The OKH did not consider "Sealion" feasible. After checking the ability of German industries to create enough landing craft, it found that it was completely infeasible in the 1940-1941 period. And how would they do it without landing craft?

Barbarossa was not a gamble in the sense that the campaign yield unexpected results as if one looks at the staff work and projections they are very accurate for the initial ten week campaign and only start diverging significantly in November. Up to that time casualties were lower than what they prepared for

Casualties matter not. What matters is reaching target keypoints. That was failed.

Remember that there is a difference between idealized expectations and what the General Staff projected they could accomplish with what they had; these projections are based on a thorough understanding of means and methods and it proved highly accurate up until the point where the Wehrmacht had defeated and captured more Russians than were under arms when they started the campaign.

The General Staff projected, and hoped to, annihilate the entire RKKA (well over 4-5 million men, if we include reservists and other drawn-up formations in mid-1941) before winter. It was a failure. Either you don't understand what failure is, or what?

Let me explain it to you, moron. The German submarines sunk more tonnage than their cost. They were cost-effective. Also, Germany possessed the largest-in the world submarine fleet at the time of it's defeat. What does this mean? It means the German submarines were an utter failure. Because regardless of how much you ACCOMPLISH, it's irrelevant if you don't accomplish THE GOAL. The goal was NOT accomplished, no matter how you twist, and spin, the facts. The RKKA was not destroyed, and the USSR was NOT annihilated and defeated politically and militarily, which the Germans expected to occur BEFORE winter.

Which does not explain why they managed to clear the approaches to Moscow with the battle of Smolensk where another 600 000+ man army were routed with more than half being captured or killed.

Yeah, except the defence of Smolensk was a major slowdown. And see above. Why do you care about tactical victories, when the strategic situation was changing not for the Germans'?

The 'mistake' i am attempting to discuss happened after this and as the actions of Army group center proved they were very fighting fit still and not only managed to defeat a much larger Soviet force months later but also to give up their 'depleted' ( so called) panzer formations to aid in the destruction of a similar force in the Western Ukraine.

See above. Army Group Center would face Soviet permanent mobilization with newly forming divisions already in August.

Yes, i am sure we read the same books ten-fifteen years ago only it's clear that you stopped there.

Because you're an idiot who can't look up the numbers, right?

Main Industrial Output Gauges:

1940, Coal:
Germany [pre-war borders] 233,7 million ton
Annexed Reich regions 34,0 million ton
European Axis (Nazi satellites and occupied nations) 96,9 million ton
Total for the European Axis, including imports 364,6 million ton

USSR 165 million ton

Reich [Germany+Austria] to USSR ratio, coal production, 1940: 1,62
European Axis to USSR ratio, coal production, 1940: 2,21

1941, Coal:
Germany [pre-war borders] 239,5 million ton
Annexed Reich regions 76,0 million ton
European Axis (Nazi satellites and occupied nations) 87,3 million ton
Total for the European Axis, including imports 404,3 million ton

USSR 151,4 million ton

Reich [Germany+Austria] to USSR ratio, coal production, 1940: 2,08
European Axis to USSR ratio, coal production, 1940: 2,67

(Addendum - in 1942 coal production in the USSR: 75,5 million ton)

Steel, 1940
Reich alone [Germany+Austria]: 31,8 million tons
USSR: 18,3 million tons

(in 1941-1942 production in the USSR plummeted to 8,5 million tons and steadily was around 8-11 million tons during following years, and until the very end of the war, the USSR did not overcome the Reich in steel production)

Electricity, 1940
Reich [Germany+Austria], 77 billion kwt-h
USSR: 48,3 billion kwt-h

In 1942, the USSR made 29,1 billion kwt-h, in 1942 - 32,3 billion, and in 1944 - 39 billion. Meanwhile Germany in pre-war borders produced 46,5 billion in 1942, 47,4 billion in 1943 and 49 billion in 1944 (approximately) before collapsing in late 1944-1945.

Pig Iron, 1941
Germany: 37,9 million ton
USSR: 14,9 million ton

Oil, 1940
USSR: 31 million ton (1941: 33 million)
Germany [w/imports and captured holds]: IIRC 19,5 million ton

However, after the attack against the USSR, oil production fell to 18 million ton in the Soviet Union 1943, whereas Germany in the same year produced 8,9 million + 18 million of Romanian oil imports (+ minor other imports, including the US-Spanish oil deals, and European Axis imports). In 1945, the USSR barely made 19 million ton due to all the wartime ravage, and it took time to restore oil production to pre-war figures.

By all major industrial gauges, the USSR was inferior to Germany (not to mention the entire European Axis!), and only in one critical raw material it had supremacy (oil), which was negated by the German attack which made the European Axis have more oil than USSR.

Disparity in production:
The USSR produced 8 times more airplanes per 1 steel-cutting machine in service.
The USSR produced 5 times more tanks per 1 ton of steel.

The USSR even in 1942, the worst industrial year, produced 24 504 tanks and self-propelled artillery, whereas Germany - only 6 189 tanks. Germany had a 4 times advantage in tons of steel produced, but since the USSR produced 8 times more per ton, that equalled to 2 times more tanks overall than Germany. DESPITE the massive industrial advantage of Germany and the European Axis.

You're either a lying asshole, or what?

That was the ideal line for a efficient defence of European Russian against remaining Soviet power in Asian Russia. Even without capturing Leningrad or Moscow 1942 was a terrible year for the Red army and the only thing that kept it in fighting shape was that it were inflicting sufficient casualties on the Wehrmacht to prevent it from reaching such a defensible line.

See how you lied above? Now you admit that the RKKA was still "in fighting shape" and even managed to inflict enough casualties on the Wehrmacht so that it did not reach a "defensible line". That is a failure. Germany failed to destroy the RKKA as a fighting force, neither in 1941 nor in 1942.

Had Moscow and Leningrad fallen in 1941 as per this new time line the counter attacks staged by the fresh Siberian divisions could not have taken place and the German armed forces of 1942 very significantly stronger and it's possibilities for conquest in 1942 even greater than they turned out to be in historic fact.

"Fallen"? I think you're missing something. The Germans were not intent on taking Leningrad. They were intent on starving the entire city to death. Hitler and the OKH even had a special order that FORBADE to even ACCEPT the capitulation of Leningrad, even if such were offered, and the entire city was to be killed with it's whole population. As for Moscow, see above. There is absolutely no "hard evidence" Army Group Center could have TAKEN the city on it's own since the USSR already started re-forming units.

...the Red army consistently lost more troops, more equipment and more aircraft in those desperate winter assaults that more often than not utterly failed with heavy casualties. The winter war of 1941 was a terrible time for Red army made bearable only because they actually managed to inflict significant casualties while going on to take the punishment they had so far.

Yeah, well I never disputed it was a terrible time. However, the Germans failed their goals - that's "A". And "B", the USSR mobilized it's industry which was more efficient at producing armaments than Germany. This was doomspell.

I said nothing about the XX century but i can see why you wish to restrict it so.

Actually, I would love to see other examples of such intensity of slaughter per unit of time. The Nazi slaughter in Belorussia achieved a rate of 1,7 civilians killed per minute. Such a rate is only replicated by the Pnom Penh massacre. And yes, Nazi Germany commited unheard of a crime, and wanted to commit an even greater crime. You don't know it slated the "lesser races" for destruction and slavery? How much do you actually know, "Wikipedia"? How the fuck are "wars and disasters" relevant to fucking intensity of mass slaughter of civilians? Tell me.

Don't fucking throw general references to Wikipedia, go on and show me a unit, military, paramilitary or otherwise, which has achieved a similar kill rate of civilians or POWs (not soldiers!) per unit of time. I.e. over 1 person per minute or the like.

I excluded pre-XX century to not touch upon genocide of the American Indians and the like, which was more utter and complete, even if it took a longer time.

I suppose i should have said Waffen-SS ( The guys that draws all the fan boys and the one's raised to fight the Posleen) as they are what i presumed you understood we were talking about. The waffen SS committed more of their share of war crimes ( killing prisoners, etc) but were not generally involved in Holocaust.

If you understand "the Holocaust" only as killing the Jews in gas chambers? Or what? Let me explain: the Waffen SS has been formed from HARDCORE Nazi units (police battalions, Nazi volunteers and such) who had ALREADY been tained by such stellar actions as:
1) guarding death camps, a Crime A in itself
2) massacring civilian populations, assisting the Einsatztruppen and their like
3) pogroms
4) guarding concentration camps, a Crime A in itself

People have been getting annihilated for thousands of years in episodes that tragically doesn't make the NAZI efforts stand out to anyone other but those who don't know human history.

Yes, Nazi efforts do stand out. They murdered 10% of my country's population is THREE, and let me make it clear to you, boy, THREE YEARS. Unless you can find ANOTHER example of such brutality and intensity, I can very STRONGLY assure you the Nazi efforts DO stand out.

know that worse has happened and believe that worse can and will happen in the future.

What was worse than the Nazis that has happened? The genocide of American Indians, complete and utter, comes to mind. Other than that - I'm all ears.

On the other point why wouldn't my part of the world be affected?

Are you from the USA? In that case you should well know Germany lacked the ability to do shit to the USA. In fact, no one in the Axis had the resources for a military invasion of the USA. It was out of the question. Meanwhile, the USA industrial power alone was enough to bring the Axis to defeat. Hope that is clear enough.