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That would be perfectly fine.

Wonderful. How are those tests going to be determined, by the way? Perhaps you ought to ask some of the more knowledgeable board members.

Ryan Thunder wrote: Who placed an order for 12 Archers from me? Was it you?

Yes. I kinda assumed those 12 you mentioned Siege had were meant for me, and posted a test report

SiegeTank wrote:Dude, Wilkins, "continent of Furesque"? That's an entirely new level of wrong spelling...

I'd almost forgotten to ask this question but who the hell is this Wilkins character?

PeZook wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote: Who placed an order for 12 Archers from me? Was it you?

Yes. I kinda assumed those 12 you mentioned Siege had were meant for me, and posted a test report

Oh, I'm not sure how I missed it.

I think you we're a little confused when you wrote it, because it mounts a 120mm howitzer, not a 105mm, and has a crew of four, not two, plus a mount for a machine gun of your choosing. It's the size of a frakking Chinook. That's why they're so expensive.

And please, do recall that the AA-1 is the Air Defender, which is entirely different from the AM-1 Archer.

Most of the other concerns you raised are legitimate, though. I'll have my engineers working to address them for the next mark.

EDIT: Aw shit... I must've forgotten to update the entry in the Building thread. Sorry, everybody. -_-;

No one operates a 120mm howitzer. There may be some that operate 122mm, but the vast majority are either 105mm or 152/155mm.

Beowulf wrote:No one operates a 120mm howitzer. There may be some that operate 122mm, but the vast majority are either 105mm or 152/155mm.

Whatever it is, its something you people operate. I remember that much. XD

122mm, then.

Y'know, Lonestar, San Fuego could turn to the FUN for support. Plus I imagine traditional local Sirnothese trading partners could do the same instead of letting the OD bully them into the organization.

Ryan Thunder wrote: Most of the other concerns you raised are legitimate, though. I'll have my engineers working to address them for the next mark.

Ah, okay. I'll fix up the report.

And with all due respect,there's no way you're going to make it armored enough or mechanically reliable enough to compete with tracked mobile artillery, since it's still gonna be a helicopter no matter what you do

CmdrWilkens wrote:I'd almost forgotten to ask this question but who the hell is this Wilkins character?

Touché!

Steve wrote:Y'know, Lonestar, San Fuego could turn to the FUN for support. Plus I imagine traditional local Sirnothese trading partners could do the same instead of letting the OD bully them into the organization.

I'll worry about that when Setzer posts on a semi-regular basis. As it is, I specifically excluded Sinorth from the OICAS.

PeZook wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote: Most of the other concerns you raised are legitimate, though. I'll have my engineers working to address them for the next mark.

Ah, okay. I'll fix up the report.

And with all due respect,there's no way you're going to make it armored enough or mechanically reliable enough to compete with tracked mobile artillery, since it's still gonna be a helicopter no matter what you do

Are helicopters really that much of a hassle? I can accept that its no good for extended operations without an airbase for maintenance, but mechanical failures preventing take-off in the field on short missions?

Copter's getting dispersed is your own fault, by the way, for not coordinating them well enough.

Seige, i find it a bit perplexing that you would say that San Dorodo, a nation you personnally discribed as being as Libertarian as possible would have things such as saftey or building codes.

Zor

Zor wrote:Seige, i find it a bit perplexing that you would say that San Dorodo, a nation you personnally discribed as being as Libertarian as possible would have things such as saftey or building codes.

Zor

That's up to the judge to decide.

Zor wrote:Seige, i find it a bit perplexing that you would say that San Dorodo, a nation you personnally discribed as being as Libertarian as possible would have things such as saftey or building codes.

San Dorado is 22,3 million people packed together in an area the size of New Jersey. You can't expect to run something like that with no rules at all. So yes, what little regulation was deemed absolutely necessary is in place. And in a city that includes a central district that dwarfs Manhattan, I think a building code that ensures no sky-scrapers topple into the Presidential Palace after a small earthquake fits the definition "absolutely necessary".

Of course there's lots of places like the Sprawl where no-one cares if you build to code, but that doesn't mean the code doesn't exist, and in the central districts of the downtown area at least it's strictly enforced. Again, we might be slightly nuts, but we're not stark raving mad.

Ryan Thunder wrote: Are helicopters really that much of a hassle? I can accept that its no good for extended operations without an airbase for maintenance, but mechanical failures preventing take-off in the field on short missions?

They were related to firing the gun, so these may be fixable. Armor is simply impossible to do, unless you develop some awesome materials, and we could simply pile more of them onto the PzH2000

Ryan Thunder wrote:Copter's getting dispersed is your own fault, by the way, for not coordinating them well enough.

No, the problem is that they need a relatively large clear and even surface to land, thus batteries get dispersed all the time while relocating.

EDIT: As for the building codes...does it really matter if San Dorado has any, if the building will be subject to Byzantine law anyway?

You can be certain Byzantine laws would. We straddle on a fault line and any building that doesn't follow earthquake building code in any part of the Empire will see some people locked up in jail and their licenses to architect removed.

Wouldn't building codes be adhered to for liability reasons? I'm sure lawsuits by survivors could be expensive... and there'd be a lucrative market in 'maintenance' companies.

PeZook wrote:EDIT: As for the building codes...does it really matter if San Dorado has any, if the building will be subject to Byzantine law anyway?

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:You can be certain Byzantine laws would. We straddle on a fault line and any building that doesn't follow earthquake building code in any part of the Empire will see some people locked up in jail and their licenses to architect removed.

Like I said, "Universal Construction has operated in Arabiapolis for some time now; surely this demonstrates that we are perfectly up to the job of following the rigorous Byzantine construction codes and safety demands." We're perfectly capable of adhering to local building specs. San Dorado might be slightly nuts, but its companies aren't utterly insane... How else do you think we've grown to be as big as we have?

PeZook wrote:No, the problem is that they need a relatively large clear and even surface to land, thus batteries get dispersed all the time while relocating.

Ah, I misunderstood.

SiegeTank wrote:How else do you think we've grown to be as big as we have?

Paying off everybody in sight? Or do you mean in addition to that?

RogueIce wrote:Paying off everybody in sight? Or do you mean in addition to that?

Us? Paying people off? Naaaaah...

For those of you who are wondering, development of the Longbow was started some time shortly after the development of the Archer was completed. Numerous deficiencies were found not only in the design, but in the project requirements. In short, we realized it wasn't so hard to do better.

As a result, what would have been a project to refine the Archer quickly became a complete overhaul.

The Longbow mounts a 155mm howitzer in an air-mobile platform. The chassis can be rotated like a turret, as with the Archer.

AM-2 Longbow
Crew: 7 (pilot, copilot, flight engineer, gun commander, 2 gunners)
Length: 16.8 m
Rotor diameter: 18.7 m
Height: 5.37 m
Empty weight: 18 500 kg (includes integrated main weapon)
Loaded weight: 24 000 kg (includes 2 000 kg of shells)
Max takeoff weight: 25 000 kg
Powerplant: 2× 2.8 megawatt turboshafts

Performance
Maximum speed: 320 km/h
Cruise speed: 225 km/h
Range: 620 km
Service ceiling: 5 370 m
Rate of climb: 9.75 m/s

Armament
- 155 mm howitzer + 50 shells
- 2 universal door gun mounts + up to 250 kg ammunition.

The loaded and MTOW weights seem to low, given that the list amount of shells weighs 2.5 tons by itself. Listed amount of crew still seems low. You're at the very least still missing the gun commander. You probably need another loader as well. So that's a crew of 7, with a weight of about 1 ton as well. So at the listed MTOW, you've got about 1 ton of fuel, which will last... not very long at all. A CH-47 normally carries up to 3 tons of fuel in its tanks, and has a range of ~700km. With 1 ton of fuel, you're down to about 240 km, or about 1 hour flight time. And this doesn't count anything else a fighting vehicle would carry either.

Beowulf wrote:The loaded and MTOW weights seem to low, given that the list amount of shells weighs 2.5 tons by itself. Listed amount of crew still seems low. You're at the very least still missing the gun commander. You probably need another loader as well. So that's a crew of 7, with a weight of about 1 ton as well. So at the listed MTOW, you've got about 1 ton of fuel, which will last... not very long at all. A CH-47 normally carries up to 3 tons of fuel in its tanks, and has a range of ~700km. With 1 ton of fuel, you're down to about 240 km, or about 1 hour flight time. And this doesn't count anything else a fighting vehicle would carry either.

Augh. I didn't associate "unloaded" with "unfueled" for some reason... 1 moment, if you please.

EDIT: This one's based off the Black Hawk's lifting capacity. Of course, given the improvement in the ratio of engine power to MTOW between the Chinook and the Black Hawk, I imagine that a platform with a pair of turboshafts that are each more than twice as powerful (2.8 MW to the Black Hawk's 1.3 MW) should have quite a bit higher lifting capacity.

Unless I've got it wrong, of course.