2014 STGOD OOC Commentary Thread 1

[Esquire]

Well, naturally.

[The Romulan Republic]

Edited. Sorry, posted before it was finished.

[The Romulan Republic]

I've decided that Corona was a Britonian colony before seceding. The secession occurred almost five hundred years ago, and the colonization occurred a significant amount of time before that. Will that conflict with established history?

[Simon_Jester]

If our history is roughly that of the world we know, that's taking things back into medieval times. A bit early for most nations to have founded major overseas colonies.

Hm.

One thing I'd like us to focus on, in the week or so before game start, is today's world. We've got a great deal of analysis and speculation of what was happening during our setting's equivalent of World War Two, but not a lot today.

I mean, who cares about a bunch of gunfights between capital ships that probably got scrapped and made into razor blades and washing machines decades ago? I'm worried about more recent stuff. Has there been any equivalent of the Gulf War or Falkland Islands War? What ongoing border conflicts exist? Are there any areas that, like Israel/Palestine in real life, are sources of major contention and ongoing conflict?

If we're going to spend a lot of time talking war, let's talk wars that happened recently enough to have direct effects on someone who isn't an octogenarian.

[Steve]

Off the top of my head? Klavostan considers the southern part of the Great Plains Republic to be proper Klavostani territory, and they've been agitating for years to reclaim it.

A number of NPCs probably have problems like inter-tribal warfare, unstable governments, etc.

[madd0ct0r]

Has anything happened down our end? Hakistan, (NPC5) is supposed to be a bit of a military junta. Any border skirmishes?

I'd quite like for the two of us to be arguing over sea EEZs based on a mud island that's since eroded away again. Too funny not to include: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8584665.stm

[Siege]

Lower Sankara (#4) is a clusterfuck. Actually, so much is most of central Astrafica (fuck it might as well make up a name). I'm not sure about South America but it might be similar.

[Eternal_Freedom]

South America is pretty messy. Steve and I have been putting together some details of a Cascadia/Orion War in the 1960's that results in Orion having to secure gauruntee the borders of a nation of Britonian refugees, which grates on us quite a bit. South America (for want of a better name) is a mess.

[Thanas]

Rheinland kept out of major and minor wars. Though we quite frequently do coup the government in one of our two former colonies, usually by using the Likedeeler and Landsknechte. Rheinland armed forces proper haven't fought a war in decades.

[Thanas]

I'm concerned about the battleships. Corona's navy doesn't have battleships or carriers.

Would it be credible for a navy with nothing stronger than cruisers and submarines to defeat a small fleet of old battleships?

Dude, old battleships can be mission-killed and/or sunk by one modern anti-ship missile. They are wastes of money and manpower. Seriously, one modern destroyer could sink the entire US battleline of the Second world war and not even exhaust all of its missiles.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If Corona sunk a bunch of old battleships with modern cruisers, isn't that similar to what happened at Tsushima? Weren't we looking for an analogue for that in the game world?

[Esquire]

It's a little late for a direct Russo-Japanese War analogue, but if the shoe fits... might help explain the sizeable battleship fleets still around, actually. And that would be modern for WWII, not modern-modern, just to be 100% clear.

[Simon_Jester]

I honestly can't understand why people would keep around big-gun battleships in the modern era, not if their military has anything called a "cost-benefit analysis."

Umeria has a ship class that probably gets called a battleship or missile battleship or something, but is basically built from the keel up as a missile-carrying ship designed to fire big salvoes of cruise missiles, or to fire barrages of SAMs big enough to shoot down a whole squadron at once. Stuff like that.

The fact that it probably has some heavy artillery in the 150 to 200mm caliber range is immaterial; that's a secondary armament.

If Corona sunk a bunch of old battleships with modern cruisers, isn't that similar to what happened at Tsushima? Weren't we looking for an analogue for that in the game world?

OK, stop and hang on.

The key point here to understand is that weapons have been getting more dangerous rapidly throughout the industrial age. At any given point since 1850 or so in real life, a fully modern warship would reliably defeat a ship built using state-of-the-art technology from 20-30 years earlier.

Now, "Tsushima" refers to a specific battle where both sides had, in theory, ships that were more or less modern. Some of the Russian ships were on the elderly side, but not insanely so. However, the Japanese ships were more modern by a small margin, were better handled, and were in much better shape because they hadn't literally had to sail clear around the world to get to the battle.

What made Tsushima so special was that there had been almost no major naval battles between the large warships of great powers for many years prior to that time. Therefore, some important things about the battle came as a surprise to everyone:

1) Yellow people had just beaten white people in a pretty much fair fight. This surprised a lot of racists.
2) Cannons could shoot (semi) accurately a lot farther than they had 20 years earlier, and an order of magnitude farther than they had 50 years earlier. This radically changed naval tactics, and Tsushima was the first indication that this was happening.
3) People learned a lot about the effect of (then) modern ammunition on armored warships. Previously there had been very little combat between heavily protected, steel-armored ships, so nobody was sure exactly what would and wouldn't work on them.

Tsushima was not a complete slaughter where one side had powerful weapons and the other side had worthless weapons.

By contrast, a battle between ships armed with modern antiship missiles (which can blow a ship to pieces from a hundred kilometers easily if not shot down or jammed off the target) and WWI or WWII-era ships armed only with cannons would be a one-sided slaughter.

It doesn't matter whether the ships carrying the missiles are called "battleships," "cruisers," "destroyers," "frigates," "lolboats," or whatever you want. The point is, antiship missiles are vastly more accurate than naval gunfire, at much longer ranges, and most of them are harder-hitting than a 16" shell ever dreamed of being.

Now, you could have an interesting battle where one side makes limited use of early antiship missile technology while the other relies on guns, but where the WWII-era ships at least have a prayer of closing into range, because the more modern ships' missiles are less accurate and powerful. However, no such battle has been fought in real life to my knowledge, so it would be like nothing ever seen before.


Other stuff:

Has anything happened down our end? Hakistan, (NPC5) is supposed to be a bit of a military junta. Any border skirmishes?

The point of contact between Umeria and Hakistan is pretty rugged terrain as I envision it; it'd be less bad than trying to prosecute a war across the Himalayas but worse than trying to do so across, say, the Ural Mountains. So the skirmishes would more or less have to be using Champa as a battleground. In which case they're skirmishes over your border, not ours.

P.S. The Umerian army's prestigious career tracks are all through the engineers, the artillery, or both; there may be some cross-pollination between my dudes and your dudes.

I'd quite like for the two of us to be arguing over sea EEZs based on a mud island that's since eroded away again. Too funny not to include: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8584665.stm

Duly noted.

[Thanas]

Rheinland keeps their two super-large BBs around for national pride, their history and because they like to shell beaches. Oh and just in case another BB happens to sneak up on the task force (not going to happen, but contingency upon contingency).

[Steve]

So are we going with 2000 as start year but with some 2010-level tech like smartphones? Or are we just going for 2014 tech period, which means I think we should just have 2014 as the start.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's hard to differentiate between 2014 and 2010 technology, really. I'm sincerely in favor of setting 2014 as the start date so that we can do easy equivalences between eras of the past in our own world and in the fictional world, but I can adapt if there's a groundswell for the Nice Round Number.

[Siege]

Sticking with 2014 would have my preference also.

[TimothyC]

I honestly can't understand why people would keep around big-gun battleships in the modern era, not if their military has anything called a "cost-benefit analysis."

The Hawai'ians keep the big-gun cruiser around as a command ship and as a potent surface warfare ship in it's own right (the current render has many, many anti-missile/rocket/shell interceptors). It's also a prestige piece, one that they already own as opposed to having to buy a new(er) carrier [that they likely couldn't afford to keep running]. Replacement of Cheifess-Apostle Kapi'olani is a going concern (hence all of the upgrades).

One thing I'd like to point out is that while externally The Unified Kingdoms look like paradise, there are some not-so-pleasant things under the surface (population controls on the Hawai'ian Islands proper, various limits on speaking out against the monarchy, ect.

[madd0ct0r]

Other stuff:

Has anything happened down our end? Hakistan, (NPC5) is supposed to be a bit of a military junta. Any border skirmishes?

The point of contact between Umeria and Hakistan is pretty rugged terrain as I envision it; it'd be less bad than trying to prosecute a war across the Himalayas but worse than trying to do so across, say, the Ural Mountains. So the skirmishes would more or less have to be using Champa as a battleground. In which case they're skirmishes over your border, not ours.

P.S. The Umerian army's prestigious career tracks are all through the engineers, the artillery, or both; there may be some cross-pollination between my dudes and your dudes.

I'd quite like for the two of us to be arguing over sea EEZs based on a mud island that's since eroded away again. Too funny not to include: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8584665.stm

Duly noted.

me and my big mouth.
I think there's a few rivers involved somewhere - would you want one to be the border marker or the ridgeline separating two valleys that both feed into champa?

EDIT fixed quote tags

[Force Lord]

The biggest and costliest ships the Granadian Navy has are aircraft carriers and arsenal ships. The amount of them combined Granadia has can be counted with one hand, like, around 3 carriers and 2 arsenal ships.

[Skywalker_T-65]

I've said several times (including in the OrBat) that I fully realize the Arcadian Navy is anachronistic. Hell, they probably realize they are, since any Navy with half a brain would be telling them as much. That being said, they have (in their mind) valid reasons for keeping the ships around. That, and despite using the Montana as a valid RL comparison, the newest Arcadian BBs are built from the ground up to modern designs...and that includes absolutely bristling with missiles.

All Arcadian ships, aside from the Carriers and the ceremonial Irene I do in fact. Cruisers, destroyers, frigates....all are fully modern missile ships.

[Thanas]

Relax, nobody is ragging on you. And if they are, they can deal with Rheinland having two massive Super Dreadnoughts.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Oh it wouldn't bother me even if anyone was. Mostly since I think it could be fun story potential, since Arcadia loves its navy, and as such...they would probably get rather annoyed (in-character) if people made fun of the 'stupid battleships'.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Orion keeps it's dreadnoughts around because we found them very useful in providing fire support during our brief war with Cascadia in the 60's. We updated them to replace the secondary battery with AEGIS-style SAM launchers to keep it viable, but the new build ships to replace them will be built on a similar design: retain the main battery but add modern cruiser-style missile armaments in place of the secondary guns.

Like Arcadia we keep them around because we're very fond of them, and since they've served us so well in the past, and they look muchprettier than a modern CG/DDG, we keep them going.

And I am fine with a 2014 start date, it's what I've been planning on anyhow.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Oh right, the start date.

I've built my OrBat around either (hence the 2000/2014 split at the top), so either one can work for me.