2014 STGOD OOC Commentary Thread 1

[Jub]

I tend to like a bit of detail to things, but I'll work up the bare bones version and go from there.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't have a military budget roughed out yet, but given that I'm looking at a military that in major branches is 1/3 to 1/2 the size of some of the big boys, and/or operating a lot of considerably cheaper and lower-grade equipment. I am... cautiously optimistic about it being manageable given that I have roughly 75% of the said big boys' GDP.

As a clarification to those of us who are new and who might not be aware of this: previous SDNW games had the rule that to have one carrier out at sea at all times you need three total. One would be 'out' whilst the other two are 'in the shop' being overhauled, so they would rotate through the docks. So when someone says they have nine supercarriers total, this means they'll have 'only' three on the seas at any given time.

That is something to keep in mind in case you're wondering why people are deploying eye-wateringly high numbers of surface combatants.

This I am mindful of. My motive for my original observation was that nine carriers is in fact a 'global navy' of the sort the US maintains in real life: it's big and tough and dangerous. Since we have at least four players who are building such fleets, it seems logical that the overall world's level of naval armament is going to be a lot higher than in real life. Which is perfectly credible, but does cause me to step back and go "whoa, maybe there should be a gentleman's agreement IC or OOC on the issue."

Also, it means that realistically NO nation can achieve naval pre-eminence or superiority over all others. That doesn't work in a setting where everyone's economy is within shouting distance of everyone else's, and slightly smaller nations can outbuild slightly larger nations by going a little more 'all out.' It just leads to a massive arms race.

So I am really hoping we can arrive at a reasonable agreement on this subject that acknowledges that reality. If Boravia wants to have more aircraft carriers than anyone else in the world so that it can reliably win a naval war with any single nation in the world... it probably won't get what it wants. Not even if the Boravian player has a good reason for wanting that. There are too many people competing with Boravia for it to get the preeminent naval position just by wanting to... and if Boravia tries hard enough it touches off a general arms race where everyone else overclocks to keep up with the Boravians.

Activation time per CVN is not less than 900 days (based on activation time estimated for Oriskany in the 1980s). In a time of war you might get that down to 450 days. Activations would have to be conducted sequentially (discerning why this is and what other effects are made by this cause I leave as an exercise for the reader*).

Let me guess: because there's only so many places that can work on big honking warships, so unless you want to splurge even more money for a number of unused military drydocks that exist for the sole purpose of preparing reserve carriers... you have to do them one or at most two at a time in the same docks you'd normally use to build/maintain existing carriers.

[TimothyC]

Oh God, that's very likely the most stupid thing I've seen you type. Your 'reserve' carriers are not 'reserve', but 'active, only I'm not using them right now.' I should have known you'd try and cheat your way to a bigger force. To maintain a force in that condition would cost the same as having them in an active condition.

Go fuck yourself if you think I am trying to cheat anybody. I clearly outlined that I expected several months before either of them would get active in a war.

Oh, I'm sure in your own head you're not cheating, but it comes off that way, so let me lay this out in simple terms.

To maintain a force of four fuelled CVNs in the status that you want them (activation inside of 180 days) requires that you spend a very similar amount of money to maintaining the same carriers on active duty (money not accounted for on your list)*. You pulled them from service in an effort to seem reasonable by making a minor concession while not actually conceding anything. When confronted with the facts you got exceptionally defensive, and start complaining at the person who calls you out on it.

Now, as for your conventional CVs, They won't be as expensive to lay up into reserve, but keeping them in good shape is still going to be costly. I'd have to dig deeper into the costs of maintaining the US reserve fleet (which hasn't been keeping ships in good shape for decades) to get a better estimate, but the numbers won't be pretty for you.

* Nine Active CVNs (3 deployed, 6 in various stages of not-deployed) and 4 'Reserve CVNs, fully fuelled and on a 120-150 day reactivation schedule would likely cost the same as having twelve and a half ships on active duty. With that in mind, Steve could likely have whatever he wants without you increasing your military one bit in retaliation.

To elaborate on why this is, to keep a ship at the level or readiness that you desire means that you have to have crews almost fully trained, and ready to go. That means they are in reserves, and are trained to a very high level - higher than the normal level for reserve formations. You also have to deal with all of the issues in keeping a reactor fuelled but not running is going to be hard on the reactor, and is going to slowly burn fuel - which means the reactor needs to be treated as running constantly.

Let me guess: because there's only so many places that can work on big honking warships, so unless you want to splurge even more money for a number of unused military drydocks that exist for the sole purpose of preparing reserve carriers... you have to do them one or at most two at a time in the same docks you'd normally use to build/maintain existing carriers.

This is correct.

[Steve]

Thanas, my bomber count includes Tactical Bombers and Attack aircraft for fighting Klavostan, I haven't sat down to figure out exact numbers of each model yet. But after Klavo, Beo, and I figured out our active army sizes, Klavo has said he's going for an air force, and that's why I put 1,500 combat aircraft. You, with 1,300+ combat aircraft active as of now, can easily deal with my Air Force since I'll never be in a position to direct all of my strength at you.

And I think I already said I'm spending in the area of $400 billion?

Honestly, to avoid the effect of constant one-upmanship before the game starts, I think everyone should figure no more than 5% defense spending, and those who pick less should be recognized as having more money freed up for other necessities (I am, yes, thinking of Thanas' need to rebuild his country).

[Jub]

Shouldn't that limit be higher (maybe even 10%) given that a lack of nukes means that more conventional forces will need to be on stand by at any given time?

[Skywalker_T-65]

My current percentage is 3-4 (roughly 120 billion if I didn't botch my math). I can't see a reason to have more myself, since Arcadia hasn't been in a war for quite some time...and I don't see many people trying to invade either.

[Thanas]

I have several suggestions which we probably can only discuss once I get back on the thirtieth, but here goes:

- hard carrier limit on active carriers - 1 per trillion GDP. Reserve carriers to be laid up taking one to two years to activate, cost and time limit to be determined by mods for such an activation.
- treaty between the major carrier nations outlining the zones of influences As in, Beo promises not to deploy their CVNs east of Arcadia or in the sealane of Rheinland-Ostrheinland, Rheinland promises the same for a similar radius alongside the Coast of Beo's nation Cascadia promises to not get in the sealane between Rheinland - Ostrheinland or near the latter, and promises to get nowhere near Cascadia (radius up to Steve). Violation of the treaty will be treated as a declaration of war on the other two signatory states.

These are my two proposals. I don't want an arms race, but if necessary Rheinland will up the budget to 5% defence spending as well and pour the extra 2% into the Navy.

*************
Timothy, I'll wait on the numbers before I make a decision on the CVNs. For now, all I got is a modernization proposal for an Essex which doesn't make sense and is not a viable comparison here.
EDIT: Though to clear up any misconceptions: my reserve fleet of old conventional ships is exactly that. In the case of the carriers, they are old, not modernized and in the case of the 40s and 50 vintage ships certainly not capable of combat operations. A major plan in my storyline is to have a Fisher-like scrapfest.
*************
Steve, I don't think that is a viable comparison as I always have to leave planes in one of the two parts of the country, so I'll never be able to concentrate my strength against a single opponent either.

[Steve]

- treaty between the major carrier nations outlining the zones of influences As in, Beo promises not to deploy their CVNs east of Arcadia or in the sealane of Rheinland-Ostrheinland, Rheinland promises the same for a similar radius alongside the Coast of Beo's nation Cascadia promises to not get in the sealane between Rheinland - Ostrheinland or near the latter, and promises to get nowhere near Cascadia (radius up to Steve). Violation of the treaty will be treated as a declaration of war on the other two signatory states.

Depending on how you term "near the latter" for carriers near Ostrheinland, I would be willing to negotiate on that. Perhaps it's the result of a time in the 1990s or early aughts when it looked like our states were coming into conflict.

My only request involves this: Ostrheinland's not too far from New Britonia, and that would be one place my CVNs would include in a Northwest Pacific patrol. When we define "near", I would like an acknowledged zone off the New Britonian coast for my CVNs and escorts to operate.

Steve, I don't think that is a viable comparison as I always have to leave planes in one of the two parts of the country, so I'll never be able to concentrate my strength against a single opponent either.

A reasonable reply, although I have the same issue, so I hope you consider that.

[madd0ct0r]

From my point of view (near the bottom of the heap), a naval arms race looks hilarious

The Republic of Champa will be happy to assist allies requiring berthing, victualling, or perhaps entertainment on shore leave. We respect your nation's security interests, and the Military Restriced Area ডিক টলা 'Ḍika Wavā' will be completely yours during your stay, on payment of a small gratuity.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Indeed, Orion offers much the same to our trusted allies (basing arrangements, port visits etc) and to our neutral friends at a small(ish) charge. As a smaller player on the world stage the idea of the major powers economically destroying themselves in an arms race is an amusing one, since it leaves plenty of options for the smaller nations to pick up the pieces.

[Simon_Jester]

From my point of view (near the bottom of the heap), a naval arms race looks hilarious

The Republic of Champa will be happy to assist allies requiring berthing, victualling, or perhaps entertainment on shore leave. We respect your nation's security interests, and the Military Restriced Area ডিক টলা 'Ḍika Wavā' will be completely yours during your stay, on payment of a small gratuity.

Indeed!

For it is written, in the 'peasant truisms' chapter of the Little Blue Book:

"I am asked, where does the five hundred kilogram gorilla sit? And I say, I do not know. But I hope he sits where I have had time to reinforce the chair!"

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

So I was just thinking we should turn one NPC into Shroomania...

[Purple]

So I was just thinking we should turn one NPC into Shroomania...

What does playing Shroomania entail?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Being utterly insane I suspect.

[Simon_Jester]

Eternal_Freedom:

Insane and AWESOME! Remember SCRAMming up?
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1) I feel that out of respect for Shroom, it would be unfair to use large amounts of the crazy he created without his consent. He's been off this forum for quite a while, and while he did all kinds of crazyawesome while he was here, that doesn't mean everyone has unlimited rights to use all his good ideas however they please.

If you get his permission, that's different.

2) Purple, to answer your question:

Shroom Man 777 is a guy with a very robust, frequently profane, often dark-comedic sense of humor. He also has a well developed sense for the absurdly wonderful or glorious aspects of a situation, along with the comical ones. He is very good at introducing fictional references into his own independent works and making them into entertaining farces. And he is capable of great productivity as a writer, when he chooses to exercise it.

He stopped posting on SDN... I'm not sure exactly, two or three years ago. However, he was a pillar of SDNW games one, two, and four, and his participation is on the whole remembered fondly by most of the people I've talked to about it.

[Purple]

I know shroom. I just... hoped you could describe him in a way that might inspire me to pay homage to him. But alas, I do not think I can do him justice.

Still, I do have some questions. If these seem random it is because I am sort of fishing for inspiration as well as trying to grasp the 50 pages worth of text I have to read. So bear with me.
1. I understand that Africa, in particular positions 4 and 8 have been defined as being a poor mess like modern Africa. Just how bad are we talking about?

2. How old is communism in this world? When was it founded and what nation had it first? As in, how likely would an established communist in name state be to have existed for several generations? Because I have a slightly crazy idea in my head for some reason about a constitutional communist monarchy... Yea...

But out of curiosity. How does that concept sound to you?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Eternal_Freedom:

Insane and AWESOME! Remember SCRAMming up?
________________________

Yup I still read that thread from time to time, along with BARIS.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Eternal_Freedom:

Insane and AWESOME! Remember SCRAMming up?
________________________

1) I feel that out of respect for Shroom, it would be unfair to use large amounts of the crazy he created without his consent. He's been off this forum for quite a while, and while he did all kinds of crazyawesome while he was here, that doesn't mean everyone has unlimited rights to use all his good ideas however they please.

If you get his permission, that's different.

2) Purple, to answer your question:

Shroom Man 777 is a guy with a very robust, frequently profane, often dark-comedic sense of humor. He also has a well developed sense for the absurdly wonderful or glorious aspects of a situation, along with the comical ones. He is very good at introducing fictional references into his own independent works and making them into entertaining farces. And he is capable of great productivity as a writer, when he chooses to exercise it.

He stopped posting on SDN... I'm not sure exactly, two or three years ago. However, he was a pillar of SDNW games one, two, and four, and his participation is on the whole remembered fondly by most of the people I've talked to about it.

We don't necessary have to like copy his stuff. We merely have to emulate it.

He's just too lazy to come back to SDN these days, what with life and what not. He has moved on really.

[Purple]

Mind if I throw a random idea at you guys. It just came to me and I want to hear what you think. Should I try and flesh it out or go for something else.

Peoples Republic ... something... communism .... something.

The nation was either a former colony or in a civil war or a corrupt monarchy or something that sucked. Several generations ago a communist rebellion/revolution emerged from this situation resulting in the nation becoming a full fledged communist dictatorship. The leader of this group and the nations first leader led the nation through these hard times and in the aftermath set him self up as an absolute dictator. As far as dictators go he was relatively mild, did not run too many labor camps and did to his credit manage to pull the country into modernity by its ears kicking and screaming. He eventually died of old age still on the throne and was succeeded by his son a revolutionary fighter him self. The second leader was a relatively good ruler him self and the nation prospered under him. However as it often were not all things are good that seem to be. Whilst the old man was alive, the various power groups centered around members of the former revolutionary leadership kept quiet. But with him dead, tensions started flaring up and members of these groups started openly criticizing each other threatening to ideologically tear the country apart. And it is during this time that the second leader died of a convenient heart attack leaving the nation to his 23 year old son who is anything but fit to rule. Left without a strong leader to keep them in line the various groups start getting ever more brazen with their actions eventually leading up to a small number of high profile murders. Fearing that the country might fall apart, an end result that none of them desire the various groups manage to agree on how to restructure the system to ensure none of the others can get too much power.

The end result of this is basically a constitutional monarchy. The lineage of the "great leader" is still in place. And in rhetoric the current one is still the absolute bellowed dictator of all he surveys. But in reality he actually has very little power, compatible to say the Queen of England. The nation is run by a large, parliament like body built from members elected from within the party leadership similar to how the Soviet Union worked. And the system in general only pays lip service to Communism (much like the UK and monarchy).

On the surface, most of the tensions are not visible. At least not to a foreign observer. The system seems to be running fine. People are employed, the economy is not failing and the nation just seems to be a decent 2nd world country. But scratch the surface and you can see that the party is continuously in flux and that if you want to get ahead in life the question is not how good you are, but who are your friends. The ordinary man does not have to care about such things. But if you want to say be a factory manager you have to be in the party clique that has ownership over that factory. There is no rampant inefficiency and stuff because the leadership mostly agrees that there is no point ruining the pie you are fighting over so they won't promote idiots. And because the other party cliques are just waiting for you to promote an idiot so that they can use that slip up to ruin you politically and take your share of power for them self. But you can see that under a saner government the nation would be better off and a 1st world power.

So really, the country works. It functions. But it's always just a few steps away from either splintering too much so that no clique can reasonably ruin the others and falling into inefficiency and nepotism or one group growing too strong and turning it into a proper dictatorship. All the while they keep saying how they are a prosperous united nation under the guidance of the dear leader.

Obviously massively WIP. But how does it sound so far?

[Beowulf]

I've made a decision: I'll be dropping down to 6 active CVNs (plus one in refueling/overhaul). In exchange, I'm not going to sign any treaty limiting my freedom of the seas.

[Thanas]

I'm still busy with the conference but manged to do some reading and have decided that keeping nuclear carriers in reserve as I originally planned is not feasible or in any way economically. I have also finally found something detailing the extent of such changes. Thus, any carriers Rheinland keeps in reserve will need to undergo a maintenance period of no less than 1.5 to 3 years and cost at least 1,2 (just refueling) up to 2.5 billion (complete overhaul including modernization of ship systems). Numbers are taken from here detailing similar maintenance on the USS Nimitz. This does not include airwing costs in case a new airwing needs to be purchased/trained. In short, maintaining a nuclear carrier surge capacity does not seem to make a lot of sense.

[Esquire]

I wonder if it would be possible to design a more modular reactor core somehow - encase the entire thing in lead shielding, maybe, with robot arms for any internal task required? Then you could lift the old one out through a very large and very well-armored hatch and just slide a new one in, cutting down on the time require. I'm assuming there's some reason you can't, though, since otherwise somebody would have by now.

Of course, it may not actually be desirable to speed up the RCOH process because of all the work that gets done during the OH part. If the ship will be in drydock for years anyway having all its computers replaced, why compromise reactor design just to speed up a once-in-a-lifetime refueling operation?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Thing is, the reactor isn't a self-contained unit. You've got all the heat exchanger parts as well, at least half of which probably get replaced when the reactor is re-fueled. Then there's all the control systems, emergency systems etc.

The idea of having reactors that you can swap out like batteries is an interesting one, but it means that you essentially have to replace the whole thing rather than replace the fuel rods, which is expensive to do.

[Esquire]

True, but for a ship that already costs over ten billion dollars, what's a couple hundred million more? I'm assuming here that a design where the radioactive bits could be contained is a) possible and b) would be 'cheap' enough to produce in quantity. Although you'd need some sort of way to get the power out while keeping the radioactivity in... maybe use the lead shield as the heat exchanger? I don't know; I'm not a nuclear engineer.

Anyways, if you really needed to reactivate a bunch of old carriers quickly, such a system might be worth it. I can't really think of a situation that would call for doing that, though, not in a world with GPS and guided missiles.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, the reactors are huge. And there are more than one of them. A hatch big enough to lift a reactor out through would be a large object on the overall scale of the ship. And each such hatch (from two to eight would be needed per carrier) is potentially a large weak point in the hull of the ship.

Modern ships are designed around the concept of a "hull girder," a box of steel beams running the full length of the ship, which provides the ship's resistance to attempts to make it bend in the middle: Such bending can go upwards and downwards, which can happen during routine operation just because of the physical forces on the ship, and side to side, which is usually caused by battle damage.

The thing is, for a big ship, that 'hull girder' has to be a very strong steel box that encompasses most of the ship's hull. It's okay to build stuff on top of the hull girder, that's what we call "superstructure," but you want as much of the important machinery spaces (like the reactors) inside the hull girder as possible, because stuff inside the hull girder is more protected from battle damage and random stresses.

A ship with a weak hull girder has, in effect, a "bad back:" it takes relatively little applied force to permanently deform the hull, and any permanent deformation of the hull has major consequences. It can reduce the ship's speed. It can cause the ship to permanently 'pull' to one side or the other in a turn. It can cause damage to long, narrow, fast-moving things like propeller shafts. It can make it hard to align sensitive equipment. It can cause heavy machinery (like giant hatches, or the elevators that lift planes onto the flight deck of a carrier) to become jammed and impossible to operate. Potentially it might even increase the risk of the ship just plain breaking in half and sinking into the ocean.

You do not want your ship to have a weak hull girder.

The catch is that your "giant hatch for the reactor" proposal basically translates as "Let's cut a biiiig hole in the hull girder and put a door in it. While we're at it, we have to make sure the reactors are NOT buried deep inside the ship where it's safe, because then we'd have to physically remove all the stuff we put on top of them to get at them, which would make installing the giant hatch pretty pointless."

It probably doesn't sound like such a great idea when phrased in those terms.
_________________

Now, the Umerians don't have this problem in that form... because the Umerians have no nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. They do have a number of nuclear surface combatants, though, and come to think of it they're coming due for their midlife refuelings... just about... now?

Uh-oh.