StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The facts that none of those missiles are nuclear missiles, that they don't have the performance of modern missiles, and that they appeared suddenly in America instead of being detected further away by radar or satellites might make them realize that its not an attack by Russia.

The Romulan Republic wrote:The facts that none of those missiles are nuclear missiles, that they don't have the performance of modern missiles, and that they appeared suddenly in America instead of being detected further away by radar or satellites might make them realize that its not an attack by Russia.

I would not be so sure. You see, many atomic procedures are relics of the cold war where having your atomic stockpile destroyed on the ground was a real and dangerous possibility. So they would be designed with the idea of having a hair trigger. Something like a massive attack on american infrastructure might just lead to a response along the lines of "Fuck! Nuke back now before they finish us off. We can sort it out later."

Perhaps, I don't really know.

It still likely that not much of the military within 300 km away from the Atlanta metro borders will survive. 5000 V2 and 30000 V1 in such a small area are enough to destroy US installations completely and many times over. That will happen within mere minutes as they launch; the bombers are icing on the cake, so to say. Indeed it makes sense to dedicate bombers to destruction of airbase locations 400-500 km away (outside the range of the V missiles but still close enough to be there within one hour or less).

If they follow up with paratrooper and plane crew drops and just send trains carrying soldiers onwards from Atlanta non-stop, they could move out more than 400 000 troops by the end of D1 or morning of D2 to the state borders, maybe slightly further.

It is also a bit scary: once the perimeter of German-controlled territory expands beyond 3000 km, the US can no longer adequately control the frontline. It has neither the manpower nor the AFVs to set up opposition on every kilometer, and it cannot bomb every kilometer either, while the Germans have men on every kilometer of the frontline. The Germans should concentrate all efforts on moving soldiers forward as fast as they can, and at some point the perimeter becomes too big to even think about containment. Once the perimeter is at 5000 km, Germans cannot be held and their units will keep endlessly pouring through the line.

Both V weapons are exactly useless for doing anythig besides causing random terror damage to a target the size of cities. You would be lucky to even hit a military base once after a hunded shots let alone something other than random forest.

V2s didn't really have a good guidance system. They have an estimated CEP of 6km. And they have contact fuses, not proximity, so they waste alot of energy digging craters in the ground. Sucks if you happen to be where it's digging a crater, but better if you're outside that area.

The V1's guidance was by dead reckoning. Failure to account for winds properly would cause it to go off course proportionally. Worse, they need launch ramps. They don't have those at the start of the scenario, and so can't launch them from the ground. Some bombers were modified for V-1 air launch, but that takes away bomb load from conventional bombs, and those are more useful to start with.

Beowulf wrote:V2s didn't really have a good guidance system. They have an estimated CEP of 6km. And they have contact fuses, not proximity, so they waste alot of energy digging craters in the ground. Sucks if you happen to be where it's digging a crater, but better if you're outside that area.

The V1's guidance was by dead reckoning. Failure to account for winds properly would cause it to go off course proportionally. Worse, they need launch ramps. They don't have those at the start of the scenario, and so can't launch them from the ground. Some bombers were modified for V-1 air launch, but that takes away bomb load from conventional bombs, and those are more useful to start with.

If Zor includes mounds of supplies and 20 million soldiers why are they missing launch ramps?

Because even if they have them they have to be at the very least set up? And stationary lauch ramps easily seen from tens of thousands of feet that also happen to have lots of volitile fuel laying around are generally something described as bomb magnets.

Are we changing the rule so that all their ammo dumps and repair yards are prepositioned? All their rail assets pre marshaled and organized (and actually work on modern rail systems)? Are huge tracts of ATL pre bullsozed so the armor formations can be organized and in place? Thats not what the OP says.

Patroklos wrote:Because even if they have them they have to be at the very least set up? And stationary lauch ramps easily seen from tens of thousands of feet that also happen to have lots of volitile fuel laying around are generally something described as bomb magnets.

Are we changing the rule so that all their ammo dumps and repair yards are prepositioned? All their rail assets pre marshaled and organized (and actually work on modern rail systems)? Are huge tracts of ATL pre bullsozed so the armor formations can be organized and in place? Thats not what the OP says.

The alternative is what? They poof into existence in a solid random mass with equipment randomly positioned? Just a solid ten kilometer Nazi orgy?

Their 'rail assets' have the same gauge so obviously they do work on rail. And they first appear around ATL (given the numbers probably around the entire ATL metro area), not in the city proper, but it will not take them too long to take over it completely.

If half their bombers are en route, how can their missiles be unprepared? They lose anyway, why not give them the weapons they had in prepared to launch conditions, if their bombers can appear already in the air via nothing but magic?

And if they do not appear ready to battle it kind of seems pointless to appear at all. They appear in walls? On top of each other? Or we actually give them at least a thin line around the town to appear on?

Finally, it is obvious that their missiles suck donkey balls. What is also true is that they have probably a thousand missiles to launch for every military target within 300 km. Even with a 6 km CEP such numbers are kind of like God's very own MRLS.

Rail assets are the same gauge, but that's not all you need. Most German locomotives are either electric or steam, and neither of those are supported for intercity use in the US (there's some electric, but it's only certain corridors, like the northeast for Acela). I don't think there's any infrastructure for steam besides at rail museums, actually.

Mr Bean wrote: The alternative is what? They poof into existence in a solid random mass with equipment randomly positioned? Just a solid ten kilometer Nazi orgy?

Good question. But given ATL isn't a flat featureless plain the idea that they will show up optimally postioned is not realistic either. This was disgussed earlier int he thread (ie do they show op on top of buildings? In buildings? In place of real world objects? etc.).

Whatever happens, assuming ATL isn't turned into a flat featureless plain during their appearance, the Germans will not be in an optimal or remotely organized fashion for immediate operations. Even if we wanted them to appear as "fortress ATL" with carefully planned optimal advanced postions thought out in advance with instant assumption of them there are too many Germans to do that anyway. There will literally be dozens of divisions worth of formations appearing on top of each other (if you want them in battle formation anyway).

If some of those commenting didn't realize this then perhaps we were talking past each other before. Things like this are part of the reason why I have been so vocal about the Germans not getting out of ALT quickly and being so vulnerable to air attack off the bat. I am assuming all of this disorganization has to be sorted out, ammo moved to needed positions, fuel dumps established, coherent units formed and given logical frontage, etc. That plus the physical problems of moving that much material and that many men on the limited trasporortation infrutructure in the area mentiond are near insurrmountable obstacles under fire.

Stas Bush wrote:Their 'rail assets' have the same gauge so obviously they do work on rail. And they first appear around ATL (given the numbers probably around the entire ATL metro area), not in the city proper, but it will not take them too long to take over it completely.

Quick, tell the worlds rail system managers that rail guage is the only thing they have to worry about! Plenty goes into the real systems of a country and while the rail gauge may be the same do you think everything else has remained identical to WWII German standards in the 70 years since? How do these Germans operate computerized rail yard switching systems for instance (again, one Windows password away from disaster...)? Are their coal stores (plenty still used coal in WWII) on hand exactly where the Germans need them to operate their trains?

If half their bombers are en route, how can their missiles be unprepared? They lose anyway, why not give them the weapons they had in prepared to launch conditions, if their bombers can appear already in the air via nothing but magic?

Because the OP does not stipulate that? So where exactly are these emplacements going to go, and what happened to the stuff that was already there?

And if they do not appear ready to battle it kind of seems pointless to appear at all. They appear in walls? On top of each other? Or we actually give them at least a thin line around the town to appear on?

I brought this up earlier, nobody thought it important then. Its pretty clear that whatever happens its not good for the Germans unless you blank slate ATL.

Finally, it is obvious that their missiles suck donkey balls. What is also true is that they have probably a thousand missiles to launch for every military target within 300 km. Even with a 6 km CEP such numbers are kind of like God's very own MRLS.

Its not enough to effectively bomb a single target. Bombing raids in WWII often invoved thousands and thousands of bombs with far better accuracy over days and still didn't get their targets.

At war what matters is tracks (trains will run out of coal after 200 km anyway, though if they find some, others may go for 400 km as they are closed cycle steam locos). The Germans just have to ride the train from point A to B, and if the track is set to a wrong direction, manually correct it (even if that breaks the switch).

Actually, fortress ATL does not sound too stupid as with several million households the Germans can pretty much appear in squads inside every house and there will be still enough left for blockposts, offensive units and the rest.

Duh guys! I am not saying they can use trains to ride across the US! There is no coal. I was thinking about them only using the coal in tenders, which means 100-200 km tops.

Its good to know you think rail systems operate like a toy train set. "Just set em up and flip the switch!"

BTW the traffic problem I have been harping on regarding ATLs roads is the same for the rail system, x1000. What happens to all the rail stock on the rails already? What happens when I take all the rail stock of the entire nation of Germany over the entire war period and put ALL of it onto the rail milage of metro ATL. At the same time.

How long does it take to entrain a WWII pazer division? In a fashion where they can then disembark and fight in an organized fashion basically as they step off the trian? Or are they showing up on their trains, ready to go?

I would assume that the 70 armoured trains appear set, since these are actual units. It takes a while to put tanks on rail, but let us be generous and say Germans only transport infantry via rail. And they do not magically get all rail stock of Germany, only several thousand trains (as not all railway stock was military-oriented production, though BR52s certainly were). There are no jams on the railway 'x1000', as the railway is operated in a centralized fashion and trains that can jam it (the Germans ones) are all operated by the Germans, so they can only mover forward a fraction of their rail stock. Still, the capacity of the railway is a lot greater than that of any highway, and the Wehrmacht was trained to restore broken railway sections within several hours. It is certainly a good option for the first day of the attack.

Yes the Germans were very good a rail repair as they relied on it more than most of the other combatants. Assuming no preexisting stock on the tracks and being generous I would give you the third, maybe the second day to get traffic moving at all, but there is no way any German rail moves on the first day. Not that it maters because the rail bridges start falling on day one.

I am also not understanding this fetish of having the Germans move as far as possible on the first day without regard to follow on supplies/ammunition, heavy equipment, air/flack cover, flank protection, etc. etc. All this is doing is putting the forces out to be immediately flanked and encircled for easier destruction. Not to mention it flies in the face of German operational doctrine and tactics. The only time I can think about this being done is at the end of the French campaign where they already had the bulk of the French Army contained or routed and were doing so inside the limited geographic region of France itself. But before that breakout there were several instances of the French exploiting holes between Army unit frontages. It was not simply ignored.

Just like this ridiclousness of the entire Luftwaffe pilot corps commiting suicide the first day, its equally ridiculous for the German Army to just say "screw it, go as far as possible and then die bravely and uselessly!" Even with the Gestapo standing behind them German armies on the Eastern Front routinely abandoned "fortess" cities when it made sense (perhaps not as early as they should have, but they did) or called off offensives that no longer made sense. Evdn the relief efforts for Stalingrad were called off when reality sunk in, and that was with Hitler screaming and yelling in person at the OKW.

Why would the first trains in the queue not move? Are railways perpetually occupied by something?

Why would the Germans not rush all their mobile units ahead when that was what they did IRL and there is even more incentive to do it now? In Barbarossa their units were sometimes 100 km ahead of the main bulk.

Luftwaffe are committing no suicide: given that US forces in the area are hopelessly outnumbered, forward deployments will not see any heavy combat on day one other than bombardments. Unless the US learned to teleport hundreds of thousands of troops. I know no such thing as a teleport, sorry, and the US Army has 420 000 servicemen in the entire nation, not at the invasion point.

1.) Actually yes, rail lines and especially freight lines are very often occupied. Which is why sophisticated systems of control using all that technology that is incomprehensible magic to the Germans exist to deconflict it.

2.) In Barbarossa they were advancing in one direction, side by side, with dedicated frontages of optimal concentration (initially at least) with non jammed communications. There was a plan other than "expand so we don't get bombed to death" and a timetable for ultimate victory on the front instead of diluting themselves just to be bottled up and killed next week anyway. All of this is lacking here, and the problem regarding advancing a line abreat vice an ever expanding circle regarding logistics and lines of communication are hopefully obvious.

Which is the main problem with all of these German attack plans, they are assuming the only logical response to the situation the Germans encounter is somehow not given any thought.

Rail lines can be occupied, but between stations there are generally free rails, inasmuch as there's no train every 10 km or so unless we are talking about a heavily used rail rapid transit system. Control systems are meant to prevent accidents under normal operation of modern rolling stock. As the entire thing is one huge accident, I am afraid the Germans will have to make do with breaking rail switchpoints to get somewhere.

Here they are advancing in all directions in numbers vastly exceeding Barbarossa but not totally impossible to imagine (Soviet final Berlin offensive employed up to 3 million men). Having a plan here would be too possible, and given the situation 'spread out and capture everything because there are zero defenders is a nice one.

Not moving is begging to be killed, so moving is necessary to at least ensure a negotiation lever. 6 million hostages are a potent motivator; zero are nothing.

Taking six million hostages in the first place doesn't speak well to their final outcome.

Patroklos wrote:Taking six million hostages in the first place doesn't speak well to their final outcome.

The final outcome of what? The US killing millions of their own citizens because it cannot negotiate with Nazis?

Why would the Germans kill millions of citizens?

Dude, for the majority of these people from 1943 and beyond this is their escape. Before this they were stuck under the Nazi regime and on the losing end of a devestating war. For those with knowledge from 1944 on this is the only way to save their lives. We are specifically told the SS are not here (I think? I need to check again) so the most fanatic and more importantly the party task masters are not there to hold the line. The Germans will surrender, and if they hope to get any leniency for the crimes they committed (the ones who did, which includes the entire leadership) during the real WWII not using the massed means of their destruction on this new front will go a long way to achieving that. That is their prime negotiating point.

Why should the Germans kill them as opposed to holding them hostage so that the US cannot bomb them, and then negotiate?

Patroklos wrote:We are specifically told the SS are not here

Kriegsmarine are not. The SS I'd say should be in the game, they are ground forces and pretty much a Wehrmacht auxiliary.

The OP specified the SS wasn't there, or one of Zor's immediately subsequent clarifying posts did.

Block wrote:Why would we bother with nukes? FAEs and Napalm would be enough to tear through the ranks of German foot troops wholesale.

A nuclear weapon causes destruction on a scale far larger than a fuel-air bomb, although those would be good too. The sheer size of the threat and the impossibility of meeting the German horde of foot soldiers in rifle-to-rifle combat makes nuclear weapons a more inviting choice simply because it can stop an advancing infantry column, no matter how large or determined. Not just blow a hole or two in it.

Stas Bush wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:And yes, nuclear weapons would definitely be on the table for targeting large units in the open field, targets of a type that the Wehrmacht horde will present in great numbers. Unless the President is an utter idiot.

Fallout will hit nearby cities, though. And of course, the road network in the US is a lot more dense than anything ever met by the Germans before, just as the urban zones are pretty dense too.

Georgia contains large stretches of open country between urban concentrations, and in the country the road network is much less dense than in urban areas or suburban infill. What roads there are will tend to channelize the German advance through otherwise difficult terrain.

From a cursory look it seems Metro Atlanta has enough housing units to keep many Germans inside, in squads of five or four per house. They can literally hold the 6 million hostage, and the ratio of 'enemy to civilian' casualties will not be all that good.

There is no need to drop bombs on individual German soldiers in houses. Bombs would be dropped on concentrations of war materiel, and if the Germans make widespread use of human shields to protect such concentrations, while it might work in the short run it would only ensure that they are shot out of hand when their invasion force finally falls apart from being encircled and repeatedly nuked every time it goose-steps outside the immediate Atlanta area.

Stas Bush wrote:Fallout is still an issue even if you use only airbursts, and considering that Germans hold Metro Atlanta hostage if you are willing to nuke the state, you might as well just nuke it with the inhabitans.

Again, nuclear attack would logically be reserved for German field formations in the open. Exactly how do you envision this working?

The OP specified them being enroute to US bases nearby, not enroute to nowhere, so I assume installations in Georgia are going to be bombed (they also have over 5000 V2 rockets and even with abysmal targeting these can destroy a fair share of installations in mere minutes, all inside a radius of 300 km from the launch point).

V-2s have a circular error probable of about four kilometers (assuming elaborate radio beam apparatus hasn't been set up), so those 5000 V-2s, if all fired at the same dot on a map... 2500 of them will land within an area of fifty square kilometers, or about fifty hits per square kilometer. To effectively wreck a facility will require several hits per square kilometer at least, so to ensure saturation the entire V-2 force will have to be concentrated on, realistically, a single digit number of targets.

And as to food supplies, isn't Savannah essentially one of the busiest ports in the US with massive cold storage facilities and lots of food EXIM cargo passing through on a daily basis? There are also Walmart storage centers and maybe some US governmenr stockpiles (the location thereof is unknown to me, so not sure if any are in Georgia).

it's not that the stockpiles don't exist, it's that they're hopelessly inadequate to the task of providing long term survivability once ongoing food shipments into the area are stopped. Even if the nuclear strikes on field formations don't convince the Germans to give up, they can't hold out more than... I don't know, weeks? A few months at the very most.

Finally, the Germans will have several thousand BR50-driven steam trains to quickly reach towns on the railway network even during day one, and around 70-100 armoured trains, which can be a rather nasty surprise as they can move thousands of troops out 100 km away and beyond, and an armored train parked in a railway station of a small town is nothing nice - the cities will be captured before people realize what is going on and even if the train is bombed later, the initial spreadout can still happen with enough speed.

Signalling is gonna be a bear. It'd suck to be sending a horde of troops down the track on troop trains only for them to run into a massive coal train blocking the tracks.

The Romulan Republic wrote:Since we're talking about America using nukes, I'm going to question weather the US would be willing to launch nuclear strikes on its own soil unless it was losing using only non-nuclear means.

With the sheer number of German soldiers involved, this will become obvious fairly quickly. I expect nuclear attacks on the German field formations within two or three days, personally.

There may be a warning shot in the form of high altitude airbursts. I'd do it.

I also have to point out that their is bound to be a political backlash from nuking American soil, although that might be cancelled out by the shrieking of the idiotic Right wing warmonger lot demanding nukes be used and the pressure the President would be under to not appear weak/indecisive.

I think under the circumstances it might not be such an issue.

Stas Bush wrote:I am not sure the US will not mistakenly start a nuclear war with Russia when suddenly military installations in Georgia are hit by over 5000 ballistic missiles out of the blue. And 25 000 cruise missiles, too.

I really doubt that; the US military is not pig-stupid and can tell nuclear from conventional weapons.

Also no, the V-1s cannot be launched in such huge numbers because they are fired from fixed launch rails at a limited rate. You could theoretically fire the whole V-2 production run from mobile truck launchers in short order. No way to do that with V-1s.

Purple wrote:

The Romulan Republic wrote:The facts that none of those missiles are nuclear missiles, that they don't have the performance of modern missiles, and that they appeared suddenly in America instead of being detected further away by radar or satellites might make them realize that its not an attack by Russia.

I would not be so sure. You see, many atomic procedures are relics of the cold war where having your atomic stockpile destroyed on the ground was a real and dangerous possibility. So they would be designed with the idea of having a hair trigger. Something like a massive attack on american infrastructure might just lead to a response along the lines of "Fuck! Nuke back now before they finish us off. We can sort it out later."

No, all those protocols are based on the massive early warning radars and satellites designed to detect a Russian attack before it hits anyone. Among other things, because there is more than one nuclear power in the world and you want to hit the right one. It's not some kind of mindless spasm. A great deal of effort and time went into planning this out so that an effective counterattack could be organized while under a nuclear attack far more devastating than anything the Wehrmacht could do in a week of trying.

Stas Bush wrote:It still likely that not much of the military within 300 km away from the Atlanta metro borders will survive. 5000 V2 and 30000 V1 in such a small area are enough to destroy US installations completely and many times over.

As noted, most of the V1s can't be launched, half the V2s will land more than four kilometers from their actual targets. For blowing up point installations, V2s stink. They're most effective when fired at a large target where hitting it anywhere will still do harm to the enemy- like, say, the entire city of London.

It is also a bit scary: once the perimeter of German-controlled territory expands beyond 3000 km, the US can no longer adequately control the frontline. It has neither the manpower nor the AFVs to set up opposition on every kilometer, and it cannot bomb every kilometer either, while the Germans have men on every kilometer of the frontline. The Germans should concentrate all efforts on moving soldiers forward as fast as they can, and at some point the perimeter becomes too big to even think about containment. Once the perimeter is at 5000 km, Germans cannot be held and their units will keep endlessly pouring through the line.

The issue is that it isn't a perimeter, it's a bunch of isolated outposts held by division-sized German forces under heavy counterattack from helicopter gunships and aerial bombardment. They need more time to spread out and form a recognizable perimeter, especially the airborne units.

Stas Bush wrote:If half their bombers are en route, how can their missiles be unprepared? They lose anyway, why not give them the weapons they had in prepared to launch conditions, if their bombers can appear already in the air via nothing but magic?

I'm sure the V2s can be prepared and fired fairly quickly; the problem is that historically the Germans only ever had a limited number of units trained to launch them, and deployable forces to launch them. They were the equivalent of artillery shells- just because the Germans have, say, twenty million artillery shells doesn't mean they have enough guns or gunners to fire them all.

And if they do not appear ready to battle it kind of seems pointless to appear at all. They appear in walls? On top of each other? Or we actually give them at least a thin line around the town to appear on?

I assume that formed units appear in spaces large enough to hold them and prepared to move. But that doesn't mean that static equipment (i.e. radar installations and launch rails) can suddenly materialize out of nowhere fully prepared to operate.

I mean, do they have deep bombproof shelters appearing pre-dug out of nothingness?

Finally, it is obvious that their missiles suck donkey balls. What is also true is that they have probably a thousand missiles to launch for every military target within 300 km. Even with a 6 km CEP such numbers are kind of like God's very own MRLS.

Actually, with a six kilometer CEP that means half the missiles land within a circle six kilometers in radius around the target, or an average of about four to five missile strikes per square kilometer. This is not enough to deliver a saturation bombardment attack against... well, pretty much anything.

Patroklos wrote:If some of those commenting didn't realize this then perhaps we were talking past each other before. Things like this are part of the reason why I have been so vocal about the Germans not getting out of ALT quickly and being so vulnerable to air attack off the bat. I am assuming all of this disorganization has to be sorted out, ammo moved to needed positions, fuel dumps established, coherent units formed and given logical frontage, etc. That plus the physical problems of moving that much material and that many men on the limited trasporortation infrutructure in the area mentiond are near insurrmountable obstacles under fire.

Well, we can reasonably assume the Germans know their own arrival positions and DO have a... call it a mobilization plan... telling them where to go and what to do to get as many troops extricated as fast as they can.

But that doesn't translate to being able to mobilize the maximum possible force under ideal conditions as though the Atlanta area were a flat featureless plain.

Stas Bush wrote:Its not enough to effectively bomb a single target. Bombing raids in WWII often invoved thousands and thousands of bombs with far better accuracy over days and still didn't get their targets.

Although they'd generally paste the hell out of the general area. If one thousand V2s are fired at a single target, that target's general vicinity will be in terrible shape afterward... but the target itself is probably untouched.

(Wernher von Braun once tried this during prototyping of the V2; he reasoned that given how inaccurate the missiles were, the safest place to stand while watching them hit the ground was right on the target).

Simon_Jester wrote:

Stas Bush wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:And yes, nuclear weapons would definitely be on the table for targeting large units in the open field, targets of a type that the Wehrmacht horde will present in great numbers. Unless the President is an utter idiot.

Fallout will hit nearby cities, though. And of course, the road network in the US is a lot more dense than anything ever met by the Germans before, just as the urban zones are pretty dense too.

Georgia contains large stretches of open country between urban concentrations, and in the country the road network is much less dense than in urban areas or suburban infill. What roads there are will tend to channelize the German advance through otherwise difficult terrain.

I will confirm Simon 100% on this, and this is largely the case in much of the US outside the NY-NJ-MA megalopolis.

What you typically have are your cities and outlying suburbs with many dense streets and highways running through them. The cities will be where highways converge, although quite often there's bypass highways going around the city as well. Suburbs will typically either sit atop one of the highways or have a main road running through them that goes to the highway or the city.

Once you leave the suburbs, however, you are dealing with long stretches of highway that occasionally encounter towns; the majority of exits will be to rural roads that access small country towns. There's a broad spiderweb of rural roads that tend to center upon towns, but we're talking little two-lane roads here, 55 mph speed limit max. No passing lanes, more often than not there's no shoulders to the roads. They take a long time to get anywhere that's more than a little town with two traffic lights.

And while there's a lot of those little towns... they're not important. The bigger towns that the roads will eventually take you to usually aren't terribly important, either. There are also a fair number of homes laying along country roads... again, nothing important.

That's something like 95% of the South's land area right there. Big stretches of country, the occasional urban cluster, little-to-medium sized towns scattered around the countryside. Plenty of room in between. Forests, swamps, farms, hills, rivers, some mountains. It's ridiculously open compared to western Europe, where a brisk walk along the highway can take you from one city to another in a couple days. Here? Couple weeks is more like it.

Simon_Jester wrote:The OP specified the SS wasn't there, or one of Zor's immediately subsequent clarifying posts did.

This leaves them with a bit less men; around 17 million in the Wehrmacht and 1+ million in the LW, plus the 500 000 engineers.

Simon_Jester wrote:The sheer size of the threat and the impossibility of meeting the German horde of foot soldiers in rifle-to-rifle combat makes nuclear weapons a more inviting choice simply because it can stop an advancing infantry column, no matter how large or determined. Not just blow a hole or two in it.

With nukes (sufficient numbers thereof) one can stop the entire advance, especially if the decision to detonate them comes early on. But then again, if Patroklos' suggestion about them appearing in sort of a 'fortress Atlanta' is taken as a basis, the US will have to deal with the fact that over six million civilians will perish, too.

Simon_Jester wrote:There is no need to drop bombs on individual German soldiers in houses. Bombs would be dropped on concentrations of war materiel, and if the Germans make widespread use of human shields to protect such concentrations, while it might work in the short run it would only ensure that they are shot out of hand when their invasion force finally falls apart from being encircled and repeatedly nuked every time it goose-steps outside the immediate Atlanta area.

Um... Metro Atlanta has a huge number of housing units and short of blowing up the entire conurbation, how will you ensure war materiel is destroyed? Nukes don't work that way, neither ordinary explosives. The US houses are basically carboard... they will be blown away and inhabitants will die (with the occupying soldiers, but still). It may also work for other towns near Atlanta Metro, as the Germans may likely have more men than these small towns have population.

Simon_Jester wrote:Again, nuclear attack would logically be reserved for German field formations in the open. Exactly how do you envision this working?

By leaving most soldiers in the Atlanta conurbation, the Germans have a steady stream of reinforcements. If you nuke them in the open once, they will certainly stick to towns and not get out in the open (something that should be clear to them: even in their universe going out in the open was stupid since the US had thousands of bombers, and it would be dumb in 1940's USA much less now).

Simon_Jester wrote:V-2s have a circular error probable of about four kilometers (assuming elaborate radio beam apparatus hasn't been set up), so those 5000 V-2s, if all fired at the same dot on a map... 2500 of them will land within an area of fifty square kilometers, or about fifty hits per square kilometer. To effectively wreck a facility will require several hits per square kilometer at least, so to ensure saturation the entire V-2 force will have to be concentrated on, realistically, a single digit number of targets

There aren't that many air force units in Georgia. The rest can be considered lower priority targets. The biggest city is already theirs; other large cities are not within reach. The only thing left is airfields. Not sure if there are many in a 300 km circle outside Atlanta either...

Simon_Jester wrote:It's not that the stockpiles don't exist, it's that they're hopelessly inadequate to the task of providing long term survivability once ongoing food shipments into the area are stopped. Even if the nuclear strikes on field formations don't convince the Germans to give up, they can't hold out more than... I don't know, weeks? A few months at the very most.

No, if nukes fly they will likely want to give up, that's true. However, there are some things that may give them enough food during the first month - horses, for example. There's no way they can feasibly feed 2,7 million horses. But they can quickly start killing them to feed themselves.

Simon_Jester wrote:It'd suck to be sending a horde of troops down the track on troop trains only for them to run into a massive coal train blocking the tracks.

Steam trains don't run faster than 80 kph anyway, and they mostly navigated railways in Eastern Europe where running into something is a minor threat; a bigger is being blown up by the partisans: either the train, or the track, or both.

Simon_Jester wrote:With the sheer number of German soldiers involved, this will become obvious fairly quickly. I expect nuclear attacks on the German field formations within two or three days, personally.

Would it? I mean, would the US really accept a dead civilian for each three dead Germans? Warning shots and trying to catch them in the field sure might happen, but going all out?

Simon_Jester wrote:Also no, the V-1s cannot be launched in such huge numbers because they are fired from fixed launch rails at a limited rate. You could theoretically fire the whole V-2 production run from mobile truck launchers in short order. No way to do that with V-1s.

Heh, good point on the rails. I guess they will have to keep them coming during the day.

Simon_Jester wrote:The issue is that it isn't a perimeter, it's a bunch of isolated outposts held by division-sized German forces under heavy counterattack from helicopter gunships and aerial bombardment. They need more time to spread out and form a recognizable perimeter, especially the airborne units.

Outposts, if anything, should be set up inside urban zones; that will provide them with necessary human shields and make fighting a lot more difficult. Since we are talking about a lot of manpower but small distances, it will be quite unlike Barbarossa where fighting could happen in the vast open fields 100 km away from any town. And if there is no perimeter, then it is even more dangerous. If the US cannot control its frontline adequately, this means Germans can sneak into places where no US military are present. Spreading all the tanks into a thin encirclement line isn't how the military works, they cannot put an Abrams every kilometer apart on the border of Georgia and leave the rest of the place totally undefended.

Simon_Jester wrote:They were the equivalent of artillery shells- just because the Germans have, say, twenty million artillery shells doesn't mean they have enough guns or gunners to fire them all.

Even what can't be immediately manned (though with the number of Germans appearing it may be that more can be manned than I think of) is still useful: the US can blow up mortars and machine guns and flak positions endlessly to find another one rolled out the next day from a garage or warehouse or whatnot nearby. This is why I said to win decisively the US will have to raze the conurbation... especially in the 'fortress Atlanta' case.

Simon_Jester wrote:I assume that formed units appear in spaces large enough to hold them and prepared to move. But that doesn't mean that static equipment (i.e. radar installations and launch rails) can suddenly materialize out of nowhere fully prepared to operate.

Hmm. If formed units are appearing in large enough places, then certainly they would appear both inside and on the border of the Atlanta metro area; they might even fill all of Georgia to the brink and still have a density that barely allows divisions to move together (I have to check that though) due to the formation requirements.

Simon_Jester wrote:I mean, do they have deep bombproof shelters appearing pre-dug out of nothingness?

Not really. Why? The buildings they do not get.

Simon_Jester wrote:Actually, with a six kilometer CEP that means half the missiles land within a circle six kilometers in radius around the target, or an average of about four to five missile strikes per square kilometer. This is not enough to deliver a saturation bombardment attack against... well, pretty much anything.

4-5 missiles per square km with 5000 missiles? Now I'm sure military installations aren't that big, and 1000 square kilometers is quite a lot of area.

Simon_Jester wrote:But that doesn't translate to being able to mobilize the maximum possible force under ideal conditions as though the Atlanta area were a flat featureless plain.

That is far from ideal; chaos in a city of 6 million is preferrable to 20 million appearing in the open where one night-time nuclear bombardment ends it in the first or second night.

Simon_Jester wrote: but the target itself is probably untouched.

If runways are damaged, aircraft is useless as it can neither land nor take off. If barracks are hit killing all tanksmen, tanks are useless. So it depends on just what and how is damaged. I am thinking that hangars, airplanes and runways due to their large size and - in case of planes - poor resilience are going to suffer the greatest damage.