Ryan Thunder wrote:
So the landing at Almirante is okay, I guess, but the 14th Army's landing near Santiago will have to be moved East, I suppose.
Its seasonally flooded and late August would be a period of lower rainfall and generally dryer terrain. Looking at the overheads on google there are a couple towns in the are indicating regions of dryer terrain south of the seasonally flooded areas which is what I tried to align my assault with. Looking at the modern road network there is some indication it may be better to run straight up to Puerto Mutis but that would be so dependent upon river depth that I chose instead to attack near but the difference in axis of attack would be minimal. The landing to the East of Tonosi should also be effective though I've scaled back the length of advance there ( I had them doing 75mi in 4 days which is doable but probably too much, they now only move 55mi in 4 days).
The landing at Alimrante is actually further south at Casas Viejas which is on mixed scrubland and forest.
MKSheppard wrote:CmdrWilkens wrote:Where the fuck is he going to find spare carrying capacity for heavy shells used ONLY by his fortress guns unless he shorts on sending troops in?
He can move in 100mm Cannon/Guns that outrange all your pack howitzers by 10 to 15 kilometers; and then keep them fed by trainloads -- you can fit a crapload of 35 lb shells and their propellant on your typical train.
Dumbshit.
Fine he gets his 100m guns (though why they outrange my 105s I'm missing) while Ft Sherman fires off all its heavy shells after a day or two of fighting. He might or might not sink my ships (thought they will undoubtedly be heavily damaged). Why do you ask? I take my information from the hit count on the Bismarck available
here Over ranges starting under 25,000 yards she was hit between 300 and 400 times of which (on a percentage basis) somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 would have been 14" or 16" shells from more than 700 fired and yet she did not sink from that volume of fire while still evading a huge number of hits at relatively close range. Certainly his land based guns will have a better stability and accuracy but even assuming this doubles (and there are a host of reasons to suppose this is generous) then he would need to fire off roughly 350 shots of heavy guns in order to achieve roughly 80 hits...which would not be against just one ship but against dozens of targets. In order to place say 60 shot aboard all of my front line battleships (those with the protection best able to take it) this would require somewhere in the range of 1,600 shells, to place say 50 on the second line would require 1,700 shells.
Again that is if we take accuracy from an engagement at ranges that quickly dropped under 10,000 yards to be doubled for a land based unit working north of 25,000. So in order to disable my ships would require something northwards of 5,000 shells (adding in the next line of battleships, the two lines of battlecruisers ) and if I stayed at range we'd be looking at northwards of that by a pretty significant margin. Which brings up the point of consideration on this is that the Bismarck suffered these hits mostly at under 10,000 yards with damaged steering so I think the accuracy estimates would be ridiculously generous. So anyway as a summary, yes he could damage my fleet and do so severely. But at ranges of 30K yards plus his accuracy would degrade further and I could still target his monitors and sink them well out of their effective range. All of which comes back to my original point which is Ft Sherman could easily fire off all its shells and still leave me with a fleet (though one which would need a year or so to refit) and plenty of heavy units left that outgun his monitors.
Now Fort Panama I have no means of taking that save by costly assault over land.
The Gap is a bottleneck of all bottlenecks and EVERYTHING he is sending needs to go through there.
Ha, funny that you're the one to talk about logistics, when you're launching an amphibious operation in the era before widespread mechanization/motorization. Who the fuck is going to move all the artillery, food, water, and ammunition across the beach? Magic Pixie Fairies? A rail line, no matter how horribly bottlenecked, beats men lugging shit across a waterlogged beach by several miles.
Doing it the same way it was done at Gallipoli, only if I assault to the north it would be shallow draft steamers moving up the river while in the south it would be shallow draft steamers partially beaching themselves since I only need 2-3 days of supplies in order to advance to a point where road/rail resupply links back up with my main axis of advance. Troops can typically carry 5 days or so of food, water, etc on hand while associated horse/mule transport isn't heavily burdened if packing for less than 10 days. I'm not using the beach as my main axis of supply which you seem to be assuming. You have repeatedly failed at reading the map where each of these hooks is designed to be short forward jumps that quickly re-unite with the overland advance.
I don't know where you missed my overland advance that is bringing the heavy guns with them
Too bad they'll get there just in time to see your amphibious force annihilated.
Since they would be reaching the line of the Canal concurrent with the assault that would be rather difficult. See previously in regards to the opposing division counts.
