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Can't do my forts in the orbat, or update my railroads, the computer crashes too much.

Italy did however exist as a nation until Germany crushed it.

May not be able to complete my OrBat in time due to a medical emergency in the family, tomorrow morning I'll be on a speedboat headed towards the nearest major hospital.

There's a moratorium anyhow. My workload is currently rising to a peak, so I'm not sure I'll be able to continue playing either, regardless of how well the problems of conflicts are solved.

I've updated my orbat with my Italian lines of defence (and railroads etc), the rail network of Germany (note: austria and others not present at this time) and the lines of defence against the nordic empire. However, I'll not be able to do the same for the other frontiers until tomorrow or friday. Sorry about that, but there is just no way.

I'm more concerned with people who've yet to post a single line of OrBat or who have only posted one service of it.

I'll see if I can finish it up tonight, but I have errands to run, so it might be dicey. I'll at least try finish up my Air Force and get maybe 30-100 of my reserve divisions listed.

If not tonight, hopefully tomorrow, and if not then, definitely by the weekend.

Norade wrote:As for my ships don't presume to know too much about them, the designs posted aren't the ones I'm using except for general tonnage.

Ummm, if you are already launching ships (i.e. the Gigante class) then I'm going to officially call in a mod decision if you decide to edit the stats after having already launched a ship of that class. Now the pre-Gigante class ships I obviously don't know what they are armed with but since your biggest gun is a 16" then I'm going to bet that my 16.54" outguns you and I carry just as many plus they are in a super-firing configuration.

Hey Wilkins, Colombia is not making any "noises" about boats with 450 mm guns. In fact, we don't have any battleships at all, at the moment, and there are no designs on the board for the near future.

I thought the ship design thread was purely hypothetical?

I'm throwing the civilian elements that will be pressed into service in the case of a war up onto my OrBat as well. They are, of course, completely untrained in warfare and would be receiving outdated hardware if they ever were forced to fight.

Ecdit: The Boy Scouts of Afghanistan get their own division. You know why? Because they make excellent minesweepers and can't hold a mosin properly.

Ryan Thunder wrote:Hey Wilkins, Colombia is not making any "noises" about boats with 450 mm guns. In fact, we don't have any battleships at all, at the moment, and there are no designs on the board for the near future.

I thought the ship design thread was purely hypothetical?

I've alway figured it was hypothetical...until you actually build a ship of the class offered. Since I missed (and have since seen) where you withdrew from constructing your BB I was working on the assumption that the construction date meant you would have at least one with the keel being laid (and thus I'd have some idea that you were going for >16" guns). Anyway I'm sticking with the 18" guns since I've got so many freakin NF 4 and 5 neighbors.

Fair enough. I just wanted to make that clear.

On a somewhat related note I've finally got all of my Active Duty Divisions up along with Army locations. Reserve units (as noted but not indicated numerically) are organized in a propotion of 1 First Rate Corps per Active Duty Corps , 1 Second Rate Corps per Active Duty Corps and 1 Over-age Corps per Active Duty Corps.

Fortress and permanent emplacements are yet to be finalized but the majority of costal defenses are co-located with my fleet bases.

In case anybody asks, my ORBAT is on the wiki. I doubt any of you lack the observational skills to notice this, but you can never be sure.

I lost my spring sharp files and seeing as my ships haven't yet seen combat I've been allowed by Steve to rebuild them. Seeing as other nations haven't any ships designed at all, I am fine by the rules to do this and my designs will all be finallized and posted in my Orbat by tomorrow.

Norade wrote:I lost my spring sharp files and seeing as my ships haven't yet seen combat I've been allowed by Steve to rebuild them. Seeing as other nations haven't any ships designed at all, I am fine by the rules to do this and my designs will all be finallized and posted in my Orbat by tomorrow.

Fair enough, though unless you can seriously up your Gigante I will outgun and outnumber your top line battleships

CmdrWilkens wrote:

Norade wrote:I lost my spring sharp files and seeing as my ships haven't yet seen combat I've been allowed by Steve to rebuild them. Seeing as other nations haven't any ships designed at all, I am fine by the rules to do this and my designs will all be finallized and posted in my Orbat by tomorrow.

Fair enough, though unless you can seriously up your Gigante I will outgun and outnumber your top line battleships

Yeah, well I'm still not worried about any war between us.

I have posted up 1 battleship design and 1 cruiser design on the wiki thus far and they are more or less finalized. I have a couple of designs up for posting there too but I am still in the midst of tweaking them.

Everything but my lightest Cruiser and destroyers are done now.

I have overlooked the map, the longitude of the borders between the Soviet Union and Manchuria, as well as Beowulf's force mobilization statistics and all that, and I have found the following:

1) he does not have enough manpower to even properly defend the border in peacetime (8 fortress divisions + 8 infantry divisions is not even nearly enough for that, and that's assuming none of these divisions defend any cities inside his territory but are all put along the border - very risky disposition). The general strategic thought of the time was that a division can maximally defend a front 20 km wide (stretched to the max).

Though technically you can spread divisions on 100-150 km wide fronts, that would result in extremely weak defensive density and of course, cannot be considered anyhow effective against breaches where several divisions are concentrated on 20 to 80 km fronts.

Thus most nations actually considered point defence (i.e. creating fortified regions around cities, all that) and keeping forces mobilized at those cities and ready to move out. The border would not be permanently manned. However, Beowulf insists that it's manned, so I calculated it on that basis.

The total width of borders of his Heilongjiang province with Russia and Mongolia alone is more than 2500 km (only the Argun-Amur borders alone are 1500 km long), if I measured it correctly on Wikimapia (thanks to it's excellent measuring tool), and his Argun-Amur border with Russia alone is 1000 km long.

If he says that sections of the border fortifications are manned by divisions, he should fully understand the implications of such stretching. 16 infantry and fortress divisions (that's all his fortress and infantry divisions available in the territory), plus 4 mechanized infantry divisions would man a border of 1500 km wide (the three Mountain divisions as I gather man his far North borders with me), one division per 90-100 km roughly. A 20 km section would thus be defended only by a single regiment, at best. See calculations of his defensive thingies below:

2) His defence line, if considering approximately the proportions of the Maginot line - (Maginot line - 5000 blockhouses, 142 large fortifications, 352 casemates, 78 shelters, 400 km wide, thus giving a proportion of 90% blockhouses, 6,5% casemates and 2,5% large fortifications) and applied to a 4 times longer border (1500 km only to Amur's northenmost point) or a 6 times longer border if he also fortifies the North, is not much to talk about actually.

Applying the rates, that results in 2050 blockhouses, 148 casemates, 56 large forts (or fortresses) per 1500 km (let's say no one gives a crap about the Far North because frankly, it should be so), or - 1 blockhouse per kilometer, 1 casemate per 10 kilometers and one large fort per every 27 kilometers of border, of his first defence line (Line Yat).

Assuming 50% of them are old, because construction of such magnitude and on such an enormous territory can't be fully accomplished in 5 years unless Beowulf wrecked his economy, there's about 70 new construction casemates and around 30 new large forts along his entire border.

Note that there's also a line 50 miles behind it mirroring it's fortifications, so Beowulf actually built 4100 blockhouses, 300 casemates and 112 large forts, effenctively the same as the Maginot line or very close to it in terms of size. So I wasn't joking about him having the Maginot line, he actually wrote a system of fortifications roughly equal to it. Well, perhaps on a larger border, but the amount of construction does not change, and in fact it increases the larger the border.

He has 3000 km of purely military railways (one along the border and the other doubling it 10-20 km away) running along the border, considering that Soviet-Mongolian-Manchurian border stretches 1500 km wide. I don't think any nation had such shit in real life, and he should be either disallowed to have it, or penalized in economic terms.

3) There is simply no realistic way for him to seriously mess with my offensive in it's initial stages - there's barely a division's worth of men on the attack vectors, and that's me being generous and basically putting his larger fortresses manned by FDs (or a large share of that FD) where I attack (not exactly rational, I know). I'll post the map later today.

Map (preliminary) - only cadre forces displayed, date of the attack (doesn't display all cadre forces either, only rifle divisions, fortress and mountain divisions, I'll make amends to it later)


Think about it. There's also 30 divisions in reserve at my hand (10 Corps) and 9x3 = 27 reserve divisions at Beowulf's hand, and possibly around 2-4 Chinese divisions that he managed to prepare for battle.

I have 21 cadre rifle divisions, 2 territorial (50%) divisions, 2 tank "brigades" (oversized), 8 cavalry divisions + 30 reserve rifle divisions, i.e. 53 rifle, 8 cavalry divisions and two oversized TBs versus Beowulf's 20 cadre divisions (only part of them able to participate, since they man other parts of the border - fortress divisions cannot be moved at will, and with a 1500 km long border there's about one fortress division on each 180 km of border) and 27 reserve rifle divisions - 47 divisions, of which clearly not all are even close to the front line.

That's 297 000 men in rifle divisions, 20 000 in tank forces, 56 000 in cavalry forces + 405 000 in reserves immediately in the region. Beowulf has 120 000 in fortress divisions, of which only 15 000 on each flank can be active (re-dislocating them would be a nightmare, with all the supplies stored in fortifications), plus 120 000 in rifle divisions and 60 000 in motorized divisions, and 405 000 in reserves. He is defending a 1500 km wide border and his mobile forces are twice less than mine.

I'll make maps with battle progression and all logistical information quite surely. Never thought it would come to this, but...

Stas, seeing as you seem to know fortresses a fair, bit, or at least have done some research what do you think of my fortresses?

Large Fortifications

-Three 18"/52 dual turrets
-Three 12"/45 quad turrets
-Twelve 6"/50 guns in single turrets
-Bunkers partly underground and made of five meter thick concrete and half meter thick steel plates
--Gas defenses consisting of blast doors, piping with grenades culverts, and gas mask lockers
--Food, water, and ammo stock piled for a month
--Has quarters for a division of soldiers

Other Fortifications

-Two 16"/45 dual turrets
-Two 10"/45 dual turrets
-Ten 5"/50 guns in single turrets
-Bunkers partly underground and made of two meter thick concrete and inch thick steel plates
--Gas defenses consisting of gas curtains and piping with grenades culverts
--Food, water, and ammo stock piled for two weeks
--Has quarters for a brigade

I'm not honestly sure if these are weak, strong or what so advice would be helpful.

How many of them are you going to build?

Also, Stas, Beowulf said he was manning his border with Mongolia (I forgot how many men, but several divisions worth as I recall), further taking away from his ability to defend with the USSR.

And, unless there was an extremely large Soviet push, I'd imagine he would never leave his border undefended, especially as I have my entire active army manning the border. Sure, it's in a defensive pose, but that'd still be threatening enough to want to leave the border defended, I assume.

Maybe Beo is using Italian divisions of 2 Brigades each, to stretch Division numbers and make strength appear greater? In fact, Italian divisions of... Volksturm!

"Got a pulse? You can walk?"
"Yeah."
"Here's a gun, there's the front. Chop-chop."
"No bullets?"
"Find some, they're lying around up there. Now go."

I'm probably not going to have exact figures for my forts and where my divisions are until the weekend but until then here are some place holders. Most of my forts are coastal fortifications to protect my big ports. I figure all but two of existent fortress brigades would be manning those. A few small forts in strategic passes with Peru eat up the last two brigades. Mostly my borders haven't been militarized yet.

As for divisions, all 10 of my infantry and all of my marine divisions are being mechanized and are basically useless right now. My mountain divisions are all watching Peru and my Cavalry, motor rifle divisions and tank brigades are all in the northeast in case of invasion of myself or Spanish Uruguay.

I know this is pretty damn vague and I'm working on making it less so.