StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Looks like someone just got Taiho'd.

Ha ha, that was some serious ownage.

Winter Warriors XIII

Hat tip to Chewie for the alert.

Stuart wrote:By the way, I need lots of names for Corsair and Skyraider pilots. Who wants in?

If you're still looking, I'd like to get in. Though I've been inserted in Germania Delenda Est as well, so I'm not sure what to do about a proper name.

The worst Ace, ha ha ha ha ha!

Stuart wrote:By the way, I need lots of names for Corsair and Skyraider pilots. Who wants in?

I'd like to honor my grandfather (he served in the 8th Infantry Division)- but with a name like Grimm, I'm not sure it's a good idea. Otherwise I'd like to put mine up (It's in the URL for the Icon sets I've posted on HPCA)...

Or I'll just say it Timothy.Cizadlo (although in TBO the only Cizadlos would be in South Dakota - Farming - we only go back 4 generations)

Dead tree TBO Anvil of Necessity is out.

The AoN links will soon stop working.

Yeah, he went through and cleared all the AoN story-posts from the board. Its a good read, I'm the one who edited the book.

Three new parts.

Sceptered Isle - 13

Sceptered Isle - 14

and

Winter Warriors - 15

Enjoy!

Nice! Those dastardly Nazis are on the move...

Question: Japan's orbitting anti-satellite weapons in High Frontier are named Shin-Fu. It is my understanding that the proper sinitic reading of this particular compound was actually shinpuu. Was it a deliberate decision to spell it differently, or an accidental oversight?

XaLEv wrote:Question: Japan's orbitting anti-satellite weapons in High Frontier are named Shin-Fu. It is my understanding that the proper sinitic reading of this particular compound was actually shinpuu. Was it a deliberate decision to spell it differently, or an accidental oversight?

I took it out of a book called "Divine Thunder" which is a history of the Japanese Kamikaze Corps during WW2 (good read by the way). There, it stated that Shin-Fu was an alternate reading of the characters that make up the word Kamikaze. That suited me nicely, I wanted to imply that Japan knew that using the weapon to attack a SAC installation was suicidal but Kamikaze was too blatant a reference so I used the alternative Shin-Fu instead.

It's quite possible that the same characters can be transliterated multiple ways. That's a problem with a lot of languages that don't use our alphabet. Thai has the same problem, a friend of mine in Thailand has seen her family name transliterated in more than a dozen different ways

MariusRoi wrote:TBO US Military Budgets

So it would've been cheaper for us to have gone TBO route? Interesting.

General Schatten wrote:

MariusRoi wrote:TBO US Military Budgets

So it would've been cheaper for us to have gone TBO route? Interesting.

Thats not suprising, because the TBO route, atleast untill the 70s(if I recall correctly), has only two modes. "Off" and "Nuclear devestation", I'm not sure if that is such a great advantage. It has it's places, but do you really want that?

In the TBO verse it makes sense, I don't see how it can fit ours now.

BTW, chapter 16 is up in the usual place.

General Schatten wrote: So it would've been cheaper for us to have gone TBO route? Interesting.

The TBOverse force structure is somewhat less expensive to run for several reasons. One is that it is ruthlessly optimized for strategic warfare only, the non-strategic components are atrophied to the point of non-existance. In the event of regional problems that require conventional force, the U.S. looks to a local force who can contain said problem and backs them or (if no primary U.S. strategic interest is involved) doesn't do anything. The OTL force structure is an uneasy compromise between tactical and strategic forces and bears the costs of both.

Another reason why the TBO force structure is less expensive than OTL is that it is based around manned bombers, not missiles. Although an individual manned bomber is more expensive than a ballistic missile (one of the primary reasons behind the adoption of missiles in OTL) the overall system cost for a manned bomber fleet is significantly less than that for a ballistic missile fleet (the equivalent number of missile silos cost much more than an airbase for a group of bombers). Also, the critical factor (and I can't stress this too much) is that manned bombers can be recalled or retargeted, missiles can't. That makes the whole command control system, much, much cheaper.

A historical reason for the differential is that there is no Korean War and no Vietnam War. The former means that the process of restructuring US forces around strategic warfare went unchallenged (in OTL it was interrupted by the Korean War that recreated the U.S, Army), The lack of a Vietnam War means that the great stagflation that lasted throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s didn't happen in the TBOverse. That explains the huge swing upwards in the OTL funding line and the much less pronounced changes in the TBO line. The lack of a Vietnam War had other effects as well (combined with the fact that the "Baby Boom" happened later in TBO and was more spread-out).

Overall, the U.S. in the TBOverse is significantly better off than in OTL. In absolute dollar terms, wages are about half what they are in OTL but TBO prices are about a third of OTL levels. So, if you were suddenly transposed to the TBOverse, your US$80,000 would be cut to US$40,000 but that US$30,000 car you want would only cost US$10,000. The OTL dollar menu in OTL is the "quarter menu" in TBO.

Another thing, due to the lower amounts paid for defense and social welfare funding (payments for social spending = Human Resources line 150 in the OTL budget are capped at a set percentage of GDP in the TBOverse), tax rates are quite a bit lower. So each person keeps a bit more of their income.

As a direct measure, the U.S. economy in the TBOverse is about 43 percent larger than in OTL. If you take the area beneath the OTL line but above the TBOline in the graph provided, that is pretty much the economic cost of the Vietnam War. God knows what the cost of the war in Iraq will be, the Government is making most of the same mistakes. At best, I see another era of '70s style stagflation coming.

As a direct measure, the U.S. economy in the TBOverse is about 43 percent larger than in OTL.

Yes, but I expect the rests of the worlds economies(barring the Triple Alliance) is far below it's OTL level, no?

Ace Pace wrote: Yes, but I expect the rests of the worlds economies(barring the Triple Alliance) is far below it's OTL level, no?

Not really, no. Southern Europe (Spain, Italy, Greece, tha Balkans etc) weren't involved at all and they prospered greatly. They (especially Spaina dn Italy) are also significantly better off. Northern Europe (with the exception of Finland) is about the same as in OTL. Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romana etc) is a LOT better off than in OTL - in fact they are about equivalent to OTL Western Europe. The reason is that they didn't get nuked, they didn't get fought-over by the Germans and Russians and they didn't get stuck with 30 years of communism. Also, when the U.S. started doling out Marshall Aid, it went to Russia and Eastern Europe, not Western Europe. So, the Eastern European countries made out like gangbusters. The only negative thing for them was that they got hit by the great famine of 1947-49 as well and that had some pretty grim effects.

Russia had a bad time in the 1950s and 1960s and was only really kept afloat by American aid. By the 1970s and onwards, they're doing reaosnably well as the country gets rebuilt. By today, they're much better off than OTL.

The areas that are significantly worse off are essentially Western Europe (the UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands etc - no point in mentioning Germany of course) all of which had 7 years of German occupation, the after-effects of the nuclear bombing of Germany and the lack of any form of Marshall Aid. They were left to their own devices and their recovery took a long, long time. In TBO, Western Europe is of relatively little political clout until the early 1990s.

The Middle East is a mess primarily because of the ill-assembled assortment of cantankerous parts called The Caliphate and the competition for their oil from Siberia. Africa is the same in TBO as it is in OTL except South Africa is a lot larger. South America is almost untouched by the events of TBO, its identical to OTL.

So, the situation can be summarized by saying the world trading patterns in TBO are quite different from OTL. The center of gravity of the world trade and political events is the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. The center of European power is South and East rather than North and West. The impact of those differences is, of course, what lies behind the TBO novels.

In TBO is the Russian far-east developed to the point where the Siberian oil fields are actually a factor in the world oil market?

CaptainChewbacca wrote:In TBO is the Russian far-east developed to the point where the Siberian oil fields are actually a factor in the world oil market?

If I remember correctly they are.

Stuart: I was wondering a few days ago - what does the US look like from a mental health perspective in TBO (ie: stigmas, ect) relative to OTL?

CaptainChewbacca wrote:In TBO is the Russian far-east developed to the point where the Siberian oil fields are actually a factor in the world oil market?

Very much so. There's much more oil under Siberia than presently allowed for in reserve calculations. There was an article in Platt's Oilgram (compulsory readingf or anybody interested in the oil industry) that suggests the reserves actually under Siberia may be three or four times those of Saudi Arabia. Some of the sources I've read (for example This item tend to be very optimistic about the oil reserves in Siberia.

A note on oil reserves. Historically, oil fields fit a pattern that is usually described using the nomenclature of the nobility of a European country. In each of the world’s great oil basins, there is a single huge basin known as the Emperor Field. This is usually flanked by (typically) two smaller but still vast fields called the “queen” field and the “king.” These are surrounded, in turn, by several moderate-sized fields, or “Dukes.” What's left after that are only small pools of crude reserves or “peasants”. Each of these fields have peculiar characteristics that identify them. When OTL western oil experts started looking at the Siberian fields in the 1990s, the came to the conclusion that the Talin Field is a Duke field while the rest of the West Siberian Basin fields are peasants. That means the Emperor, King and Queen fields are still out there, waiting to be found, and if they have the same size relations to the known fields as the models predict, the reserves could be huge.

In TBO, the U.S. moves into Siberia in a big way from 1942 onwards. They industrialize the area - mostly to get around the shipping blockages problem and to replace the industry that was in the west but got destroyed during the German invasion. So, there are American engineers all over Siberia, building new factories and towns to a ccomodate the refugees from the German-occupied areas. Some of those engineers are oil industry people and they got to work on the Siberian fields. By applying American oil industry technology, they were able to vastly increase the output from those fields (Soviet oil recovery was only able to bring up 15 percent of the oil down there; time-comparable American technology was able to bring up 55 percent). So, the arrival of the Americans alone almost quadrupled Russian recoverable oil reserves. Those American oil experts also realized the Big Field is still out there and started to look for it. I rolled a dice and the gods said, they found the Emperor Field in 1950. Exploiting it is a problem due to harsh conditions but the dice said that it starts to come on stream in 1960 and flow increases from that point onwards.

In TBO, the U.S. runs on Siberian oil to top up its own reserves. That gives the Russians their hold on American policy. It's a much more equal relationship than it seems at first glance, America has the military power, Russia has oil.