HFQ Official Snippet #9

It would be nice to see a snippet of the Desnarians examining the M896s. The how the heck did they do that conversation. Along with the, I've got a bad feeling about this conversation.

At the risk of sounding negative, Desnairian commerce raiders capturing a ship with M96s sounds... well, it sounds as if the level of common sense in Charisian Navy is the same (low) as in an average company nowadays, filled with managers and other assorted idiots.

Please bear in mind that this is a ship carrying the very latest tech available to ICA, tech that the enemy did not yet have a chance to see, and thus should be protected by all means, until the time it's used for the first time.

- No scuttling charges? Come on? A few barrels of gunpowder would send this ship to the bottom before Desnairians could capture it. That a number of the crew would die (or even all of them) is a moot point, since Desnairians killed them anyway, and any captured alive would suffer Question and Punishment.
Scuttling charges are a >>cheap<< way to prevent your weapons from being captured by the enemy.
(ICN, the #1 navy of Safehold, doesn't know about scuttling charges? Ok, maybe Merlin didn't think about it... but come to think of that, Merlin/Nimue was a naval officer in the Terran Federation Navy. Not likely that he never heard of the idea)

- No better escort for ships carrying the latest tech? I understand that the ICN does not have enough hulls to escort >>every<< transport properly. But it sure has enough to escort >>any specific one<< of them, and M96s would rate high enough, at least in my book, to have a double or triple the usual escort.

- In fact, why not carry them in whatever stowage space is available on serious warships? Save transports for anything that the enemy already knows of - gunpowder, shells, artillery such as was already used in battle, food, whatever.
Put those 5000 M96s on a couple of serious war galleons. No commerce raider in his sane mind is going to attack them anyway. They will go for the transports. Hell, take 1/3 to 1/2 of the shells and round shot out, if there really isn't enough space, and put crates with M96 in their place.

- Keep in mind that ICA did the complex maneuver in Siddar City just to convince Temple spies that a large chunk of ICA that just arrived is going to stay there, while they instead went elsewhere. So, they're quite capable of tricks. So... my idea with putting crates with M96 onboard warships shouldn't be that foreign to them.

- I could think of these ideas in an hour, and yet the whole set of ICN admirals could not, in all the weeks and months? No way.

Joat42 wrote:I'm of the opinion that the inner circle should produce dead end technologies and leak them to the CoGA, it's an excellent way for the CoGA to expend a lot of resources which doesn't really help them in the war. Of course, this means that they have to divert some resources to it or possibly use Owl to manufacture the items for them.

I remember that in WWII the allies "leaked" by various means to Nazis gadgets that did nothing but divert the researchers. It would be a good strategy for the inner circle.

There are some bright people on the church's side, but being smart in means keeping your head down to avoid having the inquisition cut it off.

The primary advantage of an inclusive economy over an extractive one is that the smart people don't need to keep their heads down, so they can concentrate on being effective. EOC has not only individual advantages, but the major one of having had an inclusive one working for some centuries. Zion is not only extractive in nature, but anti - inclusive. Zhaspar had a reason to be irritated by Charis in the first place

Aethor wrote:At the risk of sounding negative, Desnairian commerce raiders capturing a ship with M96s sounds... well, it sounds as if the level of common sense in Charisian Navy is the same (low) as in an average company nowadays, filled with managers and other assorted idiots.

Please bear in mind that this is a ship carrying the very latest tech available to ICA, tech that the enemy did not yet have a chance to see, and thus should be protected by all means, until the time it's used for the first time.

- No scuttling charges? Come on? A few barrels of gunpowder would send this ship to the bottom before Desnairians could capture it. That a number of the crew would die (or even all of them) is a moot point, since Desnairians killed them anyway, and any captured alive would suffer Question and Punishment.
Scuttling charges are a >>cheap<< way to prevent your weapons from being captured by the enemy.
(ICN, the #1 navy of Safehold, doesn't know about scuttling charges? Ok, maybe Merlin didn't think about it... but come to think of that, Merlin/Nimue was a naval officer in the Terran Federation Navy. Not likely that he never heard of the idea)

- No better escort for ships carrying the latest tech? I understand that the ICN does not have enough hulls to escort >>every<< transport properly. But it sure has enough to escort >>any specific one<< of them, and M96s would rate high enough, at least in my book, to have a double or triple the usual escort.

- In fact, why not carry them in whatever stowage space is available on serious warships? Save transports for anything that the enemy already knows of - gunpowder, shells, artillery such as was already used in battle, food, whatever.
Put those 5000 M96s on a couple of serious war galleons. No commerce raider in his sane mind is going to attack them anyway. They will go for the transports. Hell, take 1/3 to 1/2 of the shells and round shot out, if there really isn't enough space, and put crates with M96 in their place.

- Keep in mind that ICA did the complex maneuver in Siddar City just to convince Temple spies that a large chunk of ICA that just arrived is going to stay there, while they instead went elsewhere. So, they're quite capable of tricks. So... my idea with putting crates with M96 onboard warships shouldn't be that foreign to them.

- I could think of these ideas in an hour, and yet the whole set of ICN admirals could not, in all the weeks and months? No way.

You're quite right, but it seems from the snippets that the ICN didn't really appreciate the threat of the Desnairian commerce raiders until after the attack that captured the M96s. Future shipments will presumably be better protected, but as RFC has said, no navy can defend itself against a threat that it doesn't know about.

n7axw wrote:It wouldn't surprise me if in HFQ we started to see assembly lines for various sizes and different levels of complication of steam engines. That would be a real game changer, wouldn't it?

I'm pretty sure, given the rate at which the casement ironclads are being produced, the Delthak works already has a steam engine assembly line, and we know of three (maybe four) kinds of engine -- two stationary, if the turbines-drive-air-compressors is in service, two marine. We're seeing something like a hundred substantial engines in a year which is a rather high rate of production for a single works that's just inventing the assembly line and truly interchangeable parts.

There's also the small problem that "there's a stick of dynamite in a bucket of water" and teaching people how to safely run steam engines takes time. The Navy seems to have sorted this out -- the engineers we've seen are very good -- but it still takes awhile to replicate instructors.

Given that they're (maybe) already at stationary turbines for the air compressors, Corliss engines may not be required for stationary uses. That's the first design more efficient that water power; it's also much easier to maintain than any kind of turbine, so probably useful for smaller-scale installations than massive integrated heavy industry facilities. Though maybe they'll just go straight to Skinner Uniflow engines.

Hi IvisibleBison,

Quite right.

At 10-12 pounds each 5,000 M96's would only weigh 25-30 tons, and could easily be carried by a war galleon by removing a slight amount of her ammunition if necessary, if some of the ballast, or a bit of both; or two war galleons if that's too many for one; the same for the 100 mortars; at less than 300 pounds each they'd only total 14-15 tons, not counting their packaging, IIRC.

Of course RFC may tell us they already were carrying such cargoes.

L

InvisibleBison wrote:

Aethor wrote:At the risk of sounding negative, Desnairian commerce raiders capturing a ship with M96s sounds... well, it sounds as if the level of common sense in Charisian Navy is the same (low) as in an average company nowadays, filled with managers and other assorted idiots.

Please bear in mind that this is a ship carrying the very latest tech available to ICA, tech that the enemy did not yet have a chance to see, and thus should be protected by all means, until the time it's used for the first time.

- No scuttling charges? Come on? A few barrels of gunpowder would send this ship to the bottom before Desnairians could capture it. That a number of the crew would die (or even all of them) is a moot point, since Desnairians killed them anyway, and any captured alive would suffer Question and Punishment.
Scuttling charges are a >>cheap<< way to prevent your weapons from being captured by the enemy.
(ICN, the #1 navy of Safehold, doesn't know about scuttling charges? Ok, maybe Merlin didn't think about it... but come to think of that, Merlin/Nimue was a naval officer in the Terran Federation Navy. Not likely that he never heard of the idea)

- No better escort for ships carrying the latest tech? I understand that the ICN does not have enough hulls to escort >>every<< transport properly. But it sure has enough to escort >>any specific one<< of them, and M96s would rate high enough, at least in my book, to have a double or triple the usual escort.

- In fact, why not carry them in whatever stowage space is available on serious warships? Save transports for anything that the enemy already knows of - gunpowder, shells, artillery such as was already used in battle, food, whatever.
Put those 5000 M96s on a couple of serious war galleons. No commerce raider in his sane mind is going to attack them anyway. They will go for the transports. Hell, take 1/3 to 1/2 of the shells and round shot out, if there really isn't enough space, and put crates with M96 in their place.

- Keep in mind that ICA did the complex maneuver in Siddar City just to convince Temple spies that a large chunk of ICA that just arrived is going to stay there, while they instead went elsewhere. So, they're quite capable of tricks. So... my idea with putting crates with M96 onboard warships shouldn't be that foreign to them.

- I could think of these ideas in an hour, and yet the whole set of ICN admirals could not, in all the weeks and months? No way.

You're quite right, but it seems from the snippets that the ICN didn't really appreciate the threat of the Desnairian commerce raiders until after the attack that captured the M96s. Future shipments will presumably be better protected, but as RFC has said, no navy can defend itself against a threat that it doesn't know about.

RFC wrote:[Snip]

The captured cargoes, however, had provided Desinair with five thousand precious M96 rifles, almost a hundred three-inch mortars, and two entire batteries of four-inch rifled field guns . . . among other things.

[Snip]

OK the Desnarians have enough to equip 50 companies with modern weapons, about one and a half Devisions, and perhaps enough ammunition to keep them fed for a short while, but then what they can't make ammunition for them, and such weapons go through lots of ammunition very quickly.

One argument against repeating arms in the Civil War was they burn through Ammo fast, and Desnar unlike the USA in the Civil War don't have ammunition factories. For all we know they captured little if any ammunition, and without ammunition these fine weapons are so much scrap steel.

Poker

pokermind wrote:

RFC wrote:[Snip]

The captured cargoes, however, had provided Desinair with five thousand precious M96 rifles, almost a hundred three-inch mortars, and two entire batteries of four-inch rifled field guns . . . among other things.

[Snip]

OK the Desnarians have enough to equip 50 companies with modern weapons, about one and a half Devisions, and perhaps enough ammunition to keep them fed for a short while, but then what they can't make ammunition for them, and such weapons go through lots of ammunition very quickly.

One argument against repeating arms in the Civil War was they burn through Ammo fast, and Desnar unlike the USA in the Civil War don't have ammunition factories. For all we know they captured little if any ammunition, and without ammunition these fine weapons are so much scrap steel.

Poker

Agreed, these weapons will never be used by ordinary soldiers. However, it's entirely possible that they will be used by select groups of soldiers (think special forces/bodyguards etc) depending on how much ammunition Desnair was able to get from the convoy.

Also, if they have some smart people they can probably interpolate the effectiveness of the weapons in battle and come up with tactics that will lessen the impact of meeting them on the battlefield.

DDHv wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I'm of the opinion that the inner circle should produce dead end technologies and leak them to the CoGA, it's an excellent way for the CoGA to expend a lot of resources which doesn't really help them in the war. Of course, this means that they have to divert some resources to it or possibly use Owl to manufacture the items for them.

I remember that in WWII the allies "leaked" by various means to Nazis gadgets that did nothing but divert the researchers. It would be a good strategy for the inner circle.

Also attack plans - Dead body/Submarine/brief case attached to dead body's wrist. Fun.