Machine Guns in Safehold

Relax wrote:You are forgetting something rather important.

War, before the 20th century, only happened half of the year. And it was not until the middle(partial) to END of the 20th century that it was even contemplated otherwise.

Why? Food preservation. Disease. Shelter/warmth. And then ultimately, transportation through miles of thick deep mud. A hard to build railroad requiring hundreds of thousands of willing people is not realistic. Besides a RR will not help the above realities of war's aspects. Takes too much time, and the front moves too quickly for fixed transportation assets.

Even WWI was not a war during the winter. Pretty much everyone sat and survived. Why they could actually BUILD a RR to the front. The Front DID NOT MOVE and HAD not moved for years. No major offensives happened. Neither was WWII a war in the winter. Only on the best of days did anything happen by and large and that essentially consisted of airplanes flying. Ground troops on the eastern front did not move. In dead of winter, yes, but only short distances and very rarely due to one side being winter clothing equipped and other side NOT equipped as the ground was frozen. Do the Charis forces have winter gear and winter knowledge on how to survive? HELL NO! During WWII Spring offensives? Partially, but not really until LATE spring.

Charis and its allies have not solved the above problems making war possible outside of the normal 6months of the year time frame yet. It requires TRUCKS with BIG TIRES and and Internal Combustion Engines to make war remotely possible in non optimal months.

A railroad solves none of these basic realities of war's required logistics.

Therefore those canals are perfectly viable solutions for conquest avenues. They are the only viable solution.

Unless you are going to claim that there will be a stalemate... As if MWW is going to write the series into a stalemate like the Great War was.

evilauthor wrote:Yeah. There's not much point in putting an ammo manufactury in Tarot if all the ingredients have to be shipped there before Tarot can make ammo. If anything, you'd be lengthening the time it takes ammo to reach the soldiers who need it because the route from raw resource to finished product is being artificially lengthened by putting the ammo plant in such an out of the way place.

Also, I was under the impression that railroads would be used primarily for EoC's internal infrastructure improvement before being built in places outside the EoC.

n7axw wrote:I know that railroads are useful, but there won't be any in time for the current war. You guys tend to forget how stressed the EOC's industrial base has been to simply supply the weapons needed by the armies in Siddarmark to say nothing if coming up with the steel for the ironclads. Rail will be primarily a peacetime project.

The second thing I wanted to note here in response to posts upstream in this thread is Chishlom now has a manufacturing plant producing modern rifles and ammumition. Listening to Howsmyn's ruminations, he has plans to locate the bulk of ammumition production in Emerald which I understand to be a project underway. Also Siddarmark is well underway to having a manufacturing plant to produce modern rifles.

To summarize, efforts are being made toward dispersing Old Charis' industrial plant so that it won't be so concentrated in one place.

Don

CRC wrote:To go semi-auto or full auto they are going to have to change cartridges completely to a smaller size.

Castenea wrote:

Relax wrote:You are forgetting something rather important.

War, before the 20th century, only happened half of the year. And it was not until the middle(partial) to END of the 20th century that it was even contemplated otherwise.

Therefore those canals are perfectly viable solutions for conquest avenues. They are the only viable solution.

Three problems, 1) we have text ev that at least elite Chisholmian troops are trained and equipped for winter fighting. 2)Winter war fare was conducted by some long before the 20th century, look up the siege of Boston and the battle of Trenton some time. The British army detested that the US was tardy to go into winter quarters and early to leave them. 3) How is building a RR slower than building a canal?

The fighting is leaving the canal network in shambles in the area where the fighting is taking place. I would expect that in any area where there is a civilian population available to repair the canals as fast as they have spare man power to do so. These people will be repairing the canal for their own reasons (crops to market, finished goods from production centers) and in doing so make the military logistics much easier. Much the same happened in France in 1944-45 with their rail network.

n7axw wrote:I know that railroads are useful, but there won't be any in time for the current war. You guys tend to forget how stressed the EOC's industrial base has been to simply supply the weapons needed by the armies in Siddarmark to say nothing if coming up with the steel for the ironclads. Rail will be primarily a peacetime project.

The second thing I wanted to note here in response to posts upstream in this thread is Chishlom now has a manufacturing plant producing modern rifles and ammumition. Listening to Howsmyn's ruminations, he has plans to locate the bulk of ammumition production in Emerald which I understand to be a project underway. Also Siddarmark is well underway to having a manufacturing plant to produce modern rifles.

To summarize, efforts are being made toward dispersing Old Charis' industrial plant so that it won't be so concentrated in one place.

Don
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BobG wrote:What about traction engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine)? They were almost as large as a diesel cab, and while they were slow, they were powerful. I could see a traction engine pulling a train of cargo wagons or even barges, moving along at 10 mph, and even towing along the ice in winter. No where near as fast as a train, but they wouldn't require tracks. They would be a reliable means of moving supplies, and could even plow the roads as well.

BobG wrote:

n7axw wrote:I know that railroads are useful, but there won't be any in time for the current war. You guys tend to forget how stressed the EOC's industrial base has been to simply supply the weapons needed by the armies in Siddarmark to say nothing if coming up with the steel for the ironclads. Rail will be primarily a peacetime project.

The second thing I wanted to note here in response to posts upstream in this thread is Chishlom now has a manufacturing plant producing modern rifles and ammumition. Listening to Howsmyn's ruminations, he has plans to locate the bulk of ammumition production in Emerald which I understand to be a project underway. Also Siddarmark is well underway to having a manufacturing plant to produce modern rifles.

To summarize, efforts are being made toward dispersing Old Charis' industrial plant so that it won't be so concentrated in one place.

Don
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What about traction engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine)? They were almost as large as a diesel cab, and while they were slow, they were powerful. I could see a traction engine pulling a train of cargo wagons or even barges, moving along at 10 mph, and even towing along the ice in winter. No where near as fast as a train, but they wouldn't require tracks. They would be a reliable means of moving supplies, and could even plow the roads as well.

I am not suggesting they could replace the canals, but they could augment them in the summer, and provide relatively reliable transport in the winter.

A different point: while the amount of steel required still seems almost impossible to provide for rails to the front in Siddermark, they have by far enough people from surrendered troops to actually build the tracks.

-- Bob G


-- Bob G

n7axw wrote:Again, the question comes down to allocation of resourses. You have to ask not only if the proposal is worth while. This one sounds great...eventually. But is it crucial for the alliance to do something like this in the midst of a war when every effort is being made and resourses strained to get weapons in the hands of the troops? Consider...rather than having the completely modern rifles, the RSA still is using about 2/3 muzzle loaders, many of them courtesy of defeated Desnairian, Dohlaran and AOG armies on the theory that some rifle is better than no rifle. Or again, consider the shortage of ironclads at a moment when everybody's shells are blowing holes through outdated galleons. Or remember that Hanth's troops have yet to be updated to the M96's or that the limits on standing up new regiments is not manpower, but weapons availability.

JeffEngel wrote:For that matter, the steam engines that are in notoriously limited quantity would be sucked up by railroad locomotives, quite apart from the iron for tracks or chemicals for ammunition spewed out like horizontal lead rain.