Sharonian Aircraft?

DTranslation please?

Cheers

John

Mil-tech bard wrote:Then there is also the possibility of charcoal as a fuel for Sharonan vehicles. See this for how Filipinos survived the Japanese occupation of Manila:



IPOPI stood for Industrial Products of the Philippines Incorporated — but people joked that IPOPI really stood for Itulak Para Omandar Pag[/i]

Translation:


Push to start when it stops

Thanks! That's a good joke .

Cheers

John

Mil-tech bard wrote:Translation:


Push to start when it stops

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Thank you for these numbers, Mil-tech bard!

I numbered some of your points for ease in reply.

1 Where are you? You can use the
Profile-update page to list your location.

The DFW area in Texas

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:2 Both the Union and the Soviets were working near farmers, who might have food to provide them.

They were also going through regions which had tools, and many other supplies, possibly available to them.

Of course they always knew where they were,
and what was near them.

The Germans had pretty much stripped the Ukraine before the destruction of Army Group Center in Operation Bagration. The Soviets had to rely upon central depot supplies.

The following is from the same "Armchair General" thread I quoted from earlier:

Operation Bagration 1944: which has 13,000 trucks carrying 26,000t of supplies for 2,300,000 men at around 550km with an advance lasting 40 days. Unit requirement is 275-120t per day which given the different unit sizes is roughly similar to the German requirement (equivalent to 450t-200t) but a half of the Allied one. The railways have a large measure of support and can advance at 7km per day for track completely destroyed by 'hook' trains and mines. So the advance keeps to within 240km of the railhead so truck journeys are 2 days round trip and 13,000t is delivered daily. Yet the size of the force is so large that this support only represents around half the requirement and so supply can only be given to the main avenues of advance which advance rapidly and the other half moves forward relying on the railway and supplies carried in their own transport.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:3 We are shown approximately how fast TTE constructs:
At the beginning of the story, the railhead has not yet reached Fort Salby, and the bridge over the Strait of Tears (Bab el Mandeb) is maybe-a-quarter-finished.

Book 2 (HHNF) begins with Darcel riding a train through Traisum Cut to Salby, where he finds a Uromath cavalry brigade which arrived by RR over Tears Bridges. Perhaps six-eight weeks have passed.

By the end of HHNF:
3.1 The first Hummer-message has just reached New Arcana
3.2 Darcel has reached Tajvana, Sharona, via Larakesh
3.3 Div-Cap chan Geraith is 2 days from Salby
Anndddd ...............
3.4 The TTE Railhead is 200 miles from Ft. Mosanik,
which is more than 800 miles past Salby "as the crow flies" not counting necessary detours.
Please note: miles, not kilometers.
EDIT: oh yes, and the TTE has 2,000 in that workforce. (Their safety is exchanged for release of 300 POWs.)

Total time of both books: perhaps 3 months, more or less.
TTE seems to be track-laying a bit, but not much, faster than the estimate here.
Which is very close indeed for a guess about DW's numbers!
Well Done, Mil-tech Bard!

It looks like David Weber has given the Sharonan railway workforce roughly 5 time the individual worker productivity of an American Civil War Era railway worker...which is about right for the difference between 1863 and 1900, plus the massive steam powered earth moving equipment shown in the text.

There are certain implications in this given the world spanning size of the Sharonan rail system and moderate bandwidth telepathic telecommunications.

Skimming 10% of that standing railway work force, organizing it, and sending it up the Portal Authority rail lines is going to make for one huge logistical expansion pulse.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:4 The Sharonans are running their RRs through wilderness.
All their supplies, they must bring from Homeworld, or at least a more inner Outworld, over those RRs.
This must slow them down "somewhat."

The key logistical issue with this planned Sharonan military campaign to Hells Gate is less the railways than the _Water Gaps_.

Again, from the same thread:

...the nature of the Soviet Union's supply chain vs. the Allies'...

Loading and unloading ships was a major bottleneck for the allies. Much slower than loading/unloading trains

The UK had vast supply dumps that had been built up over a couple of years, but getting those supplies to France, never mind to the units, took more effort than in Russia despite a shorter distance.

- UK depot to UK port by train or truck. Even if the depot is in the port city, it isn't dockside.

- UK port to French port by ship. The distance is almost trivial, but loading and unloading takes time and functional port facilities. The Germans did a good job of destroying as much as they could in the French ports. Cherbourg surrendered on June 29, but was only at limited capacity by mid-August.

- French port to depot by truck. Get it off the ship and haul it over to a local depot to be sorted for immediate loading onto truck convoys or for storage until needed. You need to unload the ship as fast as possible to make room for the next one. You have to organize your supplies in the depot. For example, artillery and mortar ammo needs to be sorted by lot. You don't want to send a battery 50 rounds per gun spread out over 15 different manufacturing lots.

- Depot to units by truck. The last leg. This is the only point in the allied supply chain which matches the Russian one. This is where the better quality French road network would make a difference.


The Soviet Union was all rail except for the last leg to the units (excepting a few cases where river transport was part of the chain.) Trains are modular. You can load a 25 car train with one type of materiel at a large depot, break it up at an intermediate rail yard and allocate a few cars to each of several separate trains, and send them to different locations for transfer to trucks. More efficient than unloading and loading onto a different train.

Any train cargo that can be unloaded by hand can be unloaded at an ordinary siding. Given a few days and a local unskilled labor force, it's easy to build a log-wall-faced platform for unloading directly from train to truck, or for driving tanks directly off the rail cars. Much easier to improvise with rail transport.

The design of the Portal Authority modular freighters is by far the most important logistical issue.

If it something like a railway roll-on/roll-off vehicle transport, it means one thing.

If it is a break bulk freighter like a WW2 Liberty or Victory ship, it means something else, very bad, for the Sharonans.

The Arcanian transport dragons can move 60 tons of stuff with magic augmentation.

I think we are going to be seeing high altitude Dragon bombers with magical homing smart rocks versus Port Authority modular shipping as a major feature in future books.

Mil-tech bard wrote:snip

The key logistical issue with this planned Sharonan military campaign to Hells Gate is less the railways than the _Water Gaps_.

snip
The design of the Portal Authority modular freighters is by far the most important logistical issue.

If it something like a railway roll-on/roll-off vehicle transport, it means one thing.

If it is a break bulk freighter like a WW2 Liberty or Victory ship, it means something else, very bad, for the Sharonans.

The Arcanian transport dragons can move 60 tons of stuff with magic augmentation.

I think we are going to be seeing high altitude Dragon bombers with magical homing smart rocks versus Port Authority modular shipping as a major feature in future books.

As I recall there wasn't any water gaps between Hell's Gate and the Sharonan front. Past Hell's Gate along the Arcana chain there is an immediate water gap and a bunch of swamps. Getting sufficient supplies past that will be a chore. Sharona will have to either build a modern shipyard in contested worlds or design ship modules that can be moved by rail and assembled in contested worlds. Neither will be easy.

Getting back to the idea that Sharonan logistics are going to have huge disadvantages compared to Arcanian airlift. It ain't necessarily so.

I have traveled through the railway pass in New Mexico that the Traisum (sp?) Cut is modeled on, and I have researched something called "Slack-line cableway excavators" which were available during it's construction.

"Slack-line cableway excavators" were used extensively by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the major water projects that tamed the Mississippi.

"Slack-line cableway excavators" are one of a family of older "low-tech" technologies called "Ropeways."

Ropeways were used a lot on the US West Coast in the 19th century to move timber and agricultural products from land to "dogleg" schooners before the advent of motor vehicles. "Dogleg" schooners were a particuarly small and handy small ship type which could navigate really narrow passages to get close inshore at most any cliff area or inlet.

A "dog's leg" is a nautical term for a particularly crooked, zig-zag, course with multiple tacks in a short distance.

Please see the following on Aerial ropeways and cableways, plus railroad worktrains that utilized ropeway/cableway technology.


1) Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/ ... sport.html

Transport infrastructure

Ropeway towers could be constructed from timber or iron and were generally between 100 and 300 feet (30 to 90 metres) apart, although much longer spans were possible if necessary. In bicable ropeways the tension in the track cables was produced by weights applied at one of the terminal stations. However, in longer lines it became necessary to apply additional tension at intermediate points.

For this purpose tension stations were built at distances of about 3000 to 6000 feet. The cars passed from one section of the cable to the next by means of intervening rails - so that no interruption occurred in the continuity of the track. This means that there are no limits to the length of a ropeway: each (longer) ropeway consisted of multiple sections that could be considered as separate ropeways.

The same technique was applied to "angle stations", which were used to make a curve in a ropeway (tension stations and angle stations could be combined - see the illustration above, right). The largest drawback of an aerial tramway, also relevant today, is that it can only be built in a straight line. Every angle in a ropeway requires the erection of an angle station, which raises capital costs. However, in general, few angle stations are needed because ropeways can be constructed above most obstacles.

Moreover, each tension and/or angle station can also double as a loading or unloading station. Goods could even be sent along different routes via a switch if more ropeways met at a single point. The picture above shows a ropeway switchyard of a German coal plant (described in a 1914 book) where three lines of carriers converge.

To guard against the risk of accident from the premature discharge of a bucket or other cause when crossing public highways or railroads, wire nets were usually suspended between supports on either side, or structures especially erected for the purpose. An arrangement of a shelter bridge as required by a county council to hide the cableway where it passed over a public road can be seen on the right.

and


The many advantages of ropeways
Why did aerial ropeways become so successful at the turn of the twentieth century? The main reason was that they were considerably cheaper than their alternatives, be it transport by horses and carts or transport by railroad. The ropeway was economical in operation and required only a minimal capital outlay.

The investment that would be entailed in a hilly country by the necessity of making tunnels, cuttings and embarkments for a line or railway was avoided.

A cableway could be constructed and worked on hilly ground at a cost not greatly exceeding that which would be called for on a level country. Rivers and ravines could be crossed without the aid of bridges. Gradients quite impractical to ordinary railroads could be worked with ease.

One calculation showed that a ropeway only 1 mile (1,630 metres) long with a difference in altitude of 0.4 miles (645 meters), would require a railway of 15 miles (24 km) to reach the same point. Ropeways were also generally half as expensive to operate when compared to cartage by mules, horses, and oxen.

Furthermore, an aerial tramway could be up and running in no time. Some lines could be easily moved from one place to another with comparative ease. An installation of 1 mile length at a beetroot farm in Holland, with a daily capacity of 50 tons, could be taken down and put up again in a fresh place in one day, by the aid of 20 men, provided the distance to cart the component materials did not exceed 5 miles.

Ropeways continued to work during weather conditions that would bring surface hauling to a standstill (like floods or heavy snow, especially interesting in mountain areas) and they could be operated at night without hazards. Wear and tear were relatively low. Ropeways did not occupy any material quantity of ground, and the intervening land between posts could be left for cultivation or other use. Terminals could be arranged so that the material transported could be delivered at the exact spot where it was needed, saving all the expense of rehandling. One disadvantage thet ropeways had was that they were more vulnerable to high winds and electrical storms than other transportion options.


2) Aerial Ropeways in Nepal
http://www.notechmagazine.com/ropeways/

3) Ropeway conveyor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropeway_conveyor


Ropeway conveyor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A ropeway conveyor or material ropeway[1] is essentially a subtype of gondola lift, from which containers for goods rather than passenger cars are suspended.

Ropeway conveyors are typically found around large mining concerns, and can be of considerable length. The COMILOG Cableway, which ran from Moanda in Gabon to Mbinda in the Republic of the Congo, was over 75 km in length. The Norsjö aerial tramway in Sweden had a length of 96 kilometers.

The world's first cable car on multiple supports was built by Adam Wybe in Gdańsk, Poland in 1644.

In Ethiopia the Italians built the Asmara-Massawa Cableway in 1936, which was 75 km long.

Conveyors can be powered by a wide variety of forms of energy, electric, engines, or gravity (particularly in mountainous mining concerns, or where running water is available).[2]


4)History Friday: 81st ID’s Peleliu Lessons for MacArthur’s Invasion of Japan

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/38212.html


There were some good reasons the 81st ID thought of the Aerial Tramway at Peleliu. The US Army Corps of Engineers had used cableways and tramways as labor saving devices to build bridges, damns and water projects through out the American West for decades before WW2. It was, in the 1940′s, just one of the every day tools US Army Engineers thought of in the same way that today’s smart phone users today view the Internet. After WW2, particularly after the Korean War, helicopters replaced most applications of cableway and tramway technology inside the US Army. This is so long ago for the current US Army that in places like Afghanistan, where that technology would have been highly useful to relieve helicopter resupply of positions on high mountains, it just isn’t remembered.

The effect of these aerial tramway delivered sandbags was several fold. First, it took away much of the effectiveness of Japanese snipers and mortars, particularly their 50mm grenade dischargers, in producing a lot of American casualties.

Second, they gave American infantry a protected position to fight from with crew served heavy weapons (machine guns, mortars, light artillery) and artillery forward observers for Japanese counter attacks and infiltrations.

Third, it left American infantry _covered_ positions *closer* to Japanese positions to launch their “Blowtorch and corkscrew” flame/explosive attacks from. The 81st ID — unlike the 6th Marine Division at Sugar Loaf on Okinawa — didn’t have to cross the same ground over and over to get close enough to inflict attrition losses on underground Japanese positions. This was a very important development. At Biak, Leyte, Luzon, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, flame thrower operators were dead men walking. This resulted in the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service having to train up a new generation of flamethrower operators for the next operation. This didn’t happen for the US Army after Peleliu. The 81st Infantry Division’s portable flamethrower operators actually survived the campaign. That was unheard of in Pacific Theater combat!

Last, when sand bag positions were placed around engineer roads for tanks and trucks, the 81st ID’s covered positions gave infantry close support to both the engineers and vehicles. Preventing the mining of those roads at night and allowing movement during the day. Thus allowing the application of huge “super-flame throwers” cobbled together from flame thrower guns, fire hoses, pump units and gasoline fuel trucks to flood out the largest multi-story “Cave Warfare” positions with thousands of gallons of fuel. What the 81st ID took on Peleliu was taken ONCE…and it stayed taken. That was the heart of what I call “Sandbag Constrictor” tactics.

It was absolutely certain that the 81st ID’s tramway and the sandbag “constrictor” tactics would have been used on Kyushu.

5) All About Work Trains
http://www.railroad.net/articles/railfa ... orktrains/

An early Illinois Central ditcher, X8001, is posed with its operating crew about 1912, copied by C. W. Witbeck from an old photograph. The bucket is positioned and dragged by the wooden beams. The near one, with the "ship's wheel" capstan, adjusts the angle of attack of the bucket, and also empties it.

A Chesapeake & Ohio ditching train. From left to right: Locomotive 6095, dump car AD35, flat car X2080 with crane D33, dump car AD36, caboose 3519, and Jordan spreader BS3. This consist is typical of trains used for drainage ditch maintenance, and also for building embankments and fills. This scene is at Marion, Indiana, on August 25, 1970. Photo by L. L. Davis.

A close view of an American Steam Ditcher in virtually as-built, if slightly battered, condition. Gulf Mobile & Ohio 66376 was found in this state at Meridian, Mississippi, on February 21, 1965. Note that the shovel chassis is chained to the flat car to prevent it from shifting in transit. Such a machine could be used as a crane by removing the dipper arm, and in fact nearly all the last surviving ditchers were so operated. Photo by John C. La Rue, Jr..

A typical crawler crane on a flatcar, which replaced the old American Ditchers. Reading crane R830 rests on its carrier car, 96610, at the Lehigh Street yards in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 28, 1974. Photo by John C. La Rue, Jr.

I deem that you have proven your name:
you are a Mil-Tech Bard!

H. True Map-addict

Mil-tech bard wrote:Getting back to the idea that Sharonan logistics are going to have huge disadvantages compared to Arcanian airlift. It ain't necessarily so.
[snip long proof - htm]

PZ,
It looks to me that Mil-Tech Bard is referring to the
Water Gaps between the Front (at Salby) and Sharona.
They are the one Gap in Reyshar: (6000 miles of Pacific)
and the Gap in Salym: (1000 miles of Mediteranian).

But I agree with your memory: no Gap between Salby & HG.
See Thread in this Forum: Worlds Outgoing From Sharona.

HTM

PeterZ wrote:at bottom

Mil-tech bard wrote:[snip - pz]

The key logistical issue with this planned Sharonan military campaign to Hells Gate is less the railways than the _Water Gaps_.

[snip - pz]
The design of the Portal Authority modular freighters is by far the most important logistical issue.

If it something like a railway roll-on/roll-off vehicle transport, it means one thing.

If it is a break bulk freighter like a WW2 Liberty or Victory ship, it means something else, very bad, for the Sharonans.
[snip - htm]

PZ replied:
As I recall there wasn't any water gaps between Hell's Gate and the Sharonan front. Past Hell's Gate along the Arcana chain there is an immediate water gap and a bunch of swamps. Getting sufficient supplies past that will be a chore. Sharona will have to either build a modern shipyard in contested worlds or design ship modules that can be moved by rail and assembled in contested worlds. Neither will be easy.

The issue with water gaps is that old style pre-ISO container or "BOX" break bulk freighters unloaded at a rate of 20-30 tons per hour per hatch.

Loading was a fraction of that pace as the empty space of a break bulk freighter had to be braced with (usually wooden) structure, cushioning and dunnage for whatever load was being placed into it.

A 10,000 ton freighter would have five hatches and that was the largest economical for government freighters of WW2.

Commercial freighters of the time were 50% to 60% the size and ran to four hatches because of the costs of the freighter sitting in port idle while loading operations were happening.

Wartime governments could through huge numbers of people at government freighters in a way commercial operators could not.

I took the Vietnam War to kick off the "Container Revolution" we live with today.

The Sharonan's have a huge incentive for multi-modal containers, especially with the 6K mile Pacific water gap in their supply line. They have not been shown any containerized shipping infrastructure, despite much of their transportation system being center stage, so I assume they don't have ISO style containers.

I have not seen enough of the Arcanians to make a call on their logistics.

Their slider-ways, magic levatation loaded ships, magic stand-alone personal computers and Dragon pod transports suggest they may be closer to such a containerized shipping package system.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:PZ,
It looks to me that Mil-Tech Bard is referring to the
Water Gaps between the Front (at Salby) and Sharona.
They are the one Gap in Reyshar: (6000 miles of Pacific)
and the Gap in Salym: (1000 miles of Mediteranian).

But I agree with your memory: no Gap between Salby & HG.
See Thread in this Forum: Worlds Outgoing From Sharona.

HTM

hi all just added a thought

the sharonians did well because janaki glimpse gave them the edge in the prepostioning of thier weapons in advance. not saying they wouldnt have downed some dragons as demonstrated by the first portal battle. also of note because sharonians are tech people it curious that they were not at a minimum using light then air units at least as far as artillary observation and plotting a map talen placed in a observation balloon would lead to a deadly amount of fire course i could be wrong but did strike me as funny that they had no air concept at all