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Shroom Man 777 wrote:Oh, come on. What would you rather have? Mushroom Mercenaries out being happy and gay, or some dubious mercenaries from Frequesue, the Border States, or Velaria out doing atrocities?

*Makes notes to ban any Shroomanian mercenaries on Byzantine soil*

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Well, that is finally done with, now I just need to work out how the actual sharing of power will work for both the Commonwealth and the Kingdom, but that I won't need to attempt to enunciate the creation of.

Aw, but guuuys! Shroomanian PMCs are actually very nice and fuzzy!

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Aw, but guuuys! Shroomanian PMCs are actually very nice and fuzzy!

That's exactly the problem!

Oh, anybody who's willing, please let me know what you think of my wiki page for Miratia. The military hardware page is under construction, but feel free to comment on what looks finished there, too, if you like.

Well, the Shroomanian mercenaries are also very ripped and well hung and if they have to, they can punch your face in with their overmuscled fists. Or blow people up with bazookas. Is that good?

So...you MESSheads go ahead and buy your fancy shmancy aircraft carriers. I'm gonna go and do something more worthwhile

Nice one, PeZook! Expect to have the MOM making use of a lot of those organoids... right about now!

Unlike the Shroomina Mercs, Shepilov Solutions aren't crammed with pussies and incompetents.

Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Fingolfin almost casually added a force to his army that's about the size of (if not larger than) my entire military? XD

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Oh, come on. What would you rather have? Mushroom Mercenaries out being happy and gay, or some dubious mercenaries from Frequesue, the Border States, or Velaria out doing atrocities?

Isn't that kind of the point of mercenaries? To do the atrocities your own troops can't be caught doing?

PeZook wrote:So...you MESSheads go ahead and buy your fancy shmancy aircraft carriers. I'm gonna go and do something more worthwhile

We do civilian stuff too. We're just too lazy to write it up.

Quick note on the Wiki thing: rather than clutter it all up with our stuff, me and Beowulf thought it'd be a good idea to make our various pages subpages of the current SDN World page. I don't know how to do that but I'm sure somebody does. Beo did it from his user page for Tian Xia so I'm sure he knows.

Existing country pages and such could easily be redirected to the sub-pages if need be.

Anyway, just a thought.

Actually, you can even use the move option. If I knew how to work it. Which I don't.

EDIT: Figured it out. Viola!

http://www.stardestroyer.net/mrwong/wik ... d/Tian_Xia

RogueIce wrote:Actually, you can even use the move option. If I knew how to work it. Which I don't.

"The Vineyards" has been moved to "SDN World/The Vineyards"

Ryan Thunder wrote:Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Fingolfin almost casually added a force to his army that's about the size of (if not larger than) my entire military? XD

Er what? I'm still smaller than MESS militaries with twice my economy. Heck, until the recent reinforcement, 2 Airbourne divisions of mine equaled to 1 Cannissian airbourne division. This is meant to correct that lack of force.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote:Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Fingolfin almost casually added a force to his army that's about the size of (if not larger than) my entire military? XD

Er what? I'm still smaller than MESS militaries with twice my economy. Heck, until the recent reinforcement, 2 Airbourne divisions of mine equaled to 1 Cannissian airbourne division. This is meant to correct that lack of force.

Relax. I actually thought it was amusing. I have... four regiments total, with a company or two left over.

C'mon, Miratia's a third-world country. We're tiny!

Ryan Thunder wrote:

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote:Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Fingolfin almost casually added a force to his army that's about the size of (if not larger than) my entire military? XD

Er what? I'm still smaller than MESS militaries with twice my economy. Heck, until the recent reinforcement, 2 Airbourne divisions of mine equaled to 1 Cannissian airbourne division. This is meant to correct that lack of force.

Relax. I actually thought it was amusing. I have... four regiments total, with a company or two left over.

C'mon, Miratia's a third-world country. We're tiny!

You probably could squeeze in a few more regiments. Singapore with 300-400 billion economy has about .... 10-20 or so.

I have no good conception of size, but I'm pretty sure that my army and marines are the smallest of the branches of my armed forces; I'm an island nation, though, so I might be able to get away with a relatively small army. My navy and air force are easily the largest of the branches by far, though I think I may be starting to overextend myself with regard to the former.

Island nations don't have to worry about ground maneuver warfare, so they should focus on airmobile and amphibious warfare. The Royal Emmerian Army, being the army of a multi-island nation, will be focused primarily on this, and in effect will be relatively modeled on the USMC and Royal Marine Commandoes.

Contrast this with the Old Dominion Army, who had to face down the Shepistanis across a hostile border for...god knows how long. They had to primarily focus on offensive and defensive warfare across a defended border spanning the entire width of a (relatively) narrow peninsula, and as such ended up being a large, well-padded army seemingly restricted (for the most part) to mechanized combat on land.

Think about that.

Lonestar wrote:Unlike the Shroomina Mercs, Shepilov Solutions aren't crammed with pussies and incompetents.

Oh, you did not just call Rock Ironbeef a pussy!

Well, I have a huge land border, a few lakes, and a god-forsaken strip of coastline to manage with a relatively tiny population of just over eight million people. My capitol city is roughly the same size as Toronto, with an overall population of around three millions.

Thankfully, at the moment most of that territory is strategically useless. Nobody seems to want it. We have Uranium, sure, but it's not our top resource. Timber is quite a bit more common and lasts quite a bit longer, if managed properly.

My armed forces is budgeted something like 1% of the population and 10% of the national budget (about 16% of the GDP.) 75% of that (at a guess) goes into maintenance, including salaries, leaving around $1Bn annually for research and acquisitions. This is how I'm able to maintain an almost entirely native technology base and have all these cool toys, even though Miratia's just a Principality.

Right now, about half of that is going into a comprehensive national air defense and civil defense program. AAA bunkers, air defense radars, experimental anti-ballistic missile defenses, fallout shelters, and means for civilians to rapidly get to them safely, et al.

So, in short, I have a small military and focus on force multipliers.

On a somewhat related note, is the idea of airborne (!air-mobile) rocket artillery nuts?

Ryan Thunder wrote: On a somewhat related note, is the idea of airborne (!air-mobile) rocket artillery nuts?

Step 1: Mount rocket pods on helicopters

Step 2: Do the same on ground attack aircraft and drones

Ta-dam! Airborne artillery

PeZook wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote: On a somewhat related note, is the idea of airborne (!air-mobile) rocket artillery nuts?

Step 1: Mount rocket pods on helicopters

Step 2: Do the same on ground attack aircraft and drones

Ta-dam! Airborne artillery

Well, yes. But they're usually armed with rockets that are limited to tank-gun ranges, aren't they? I'm just wondering if there's a reason why they aren't equipped with weapons that can engage at howitzer ranges that I haven't thought of. I've considered weight; carbon fibre or some other sort of strong/light material would certainly help with that. Alternatively, fewer missiles, but they're barely numerous enough as it is.

Else I would've just gone ahead and done it when there was room in the budget.

Consider working to stabilize a more volatile (and likely more effective) long-range rocket propellant. This may be the (potentially amusing) solution to your air-artillery woes.

Weight would be the main issue, methinks. One MLRS rocket weighs around 300 kilograms, so if you want to match the performance of one MLRS vehicle you need to carry 3.6 tonnes of rockets alone, not counting the launch equipment which can easily weigh another dozen tonnes. The US MLRS is about 20-23 tonnes.

Furthermore, a helicopter won't be able to keep up the same volume of fire, since it's far more difficult to reload. If you use the same idea as your helicopter-howitzers, then you get added costs for maintenance, R&D, crew training etc - and the engineering challenges are far more nasty than with your helihowitzers.

So for every MLRS heli, you could probably buy an entire battery of standard MLRS vehicles. Kind of like with the Archer, really.

On the other hand, firepower of small rockets scales up rapidly with numbers ; A Blackhawk with 4x30 = 120 Hydras can rapidly deliver what amounts to a massive mortar salvo with decent precision. By any standard, that's respectable firepower, especially for airmobile troops who are usually quite light on heavy support.

Hydras alone are pretty inaccurate. You are better off with laser guided hydras which I believe Raytheon was working on at one point of time.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Hydras alone are pretty inaccurate. You are better off with laser guided hydras which I believe Raytheon was working on at one point of time.

Well, it can be any small diameter rocket, obviously.