WORLD WAR (1942-1964) Mod

[Suhiir]

Originally Posted by MarkSheppard

Actually, the M6 Heavy tank was what I was thinking of.

Even worse
There was a reason the H6 was never fully developed.

[MarkSheppard]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

There was a reason the H6 was never fully developed.

I've seen the actual message transcript in the US National Archives about the Army asking Eisenhower if he wanted the upgunned/uparmored M6A2E1 with 190mm frontal glacis and a 105mm HV cannon for dealing with the Siegfried Line.

[Suhiir]

As I recall in at least one spot on the Siegfried Line someone pulled a self-propelled 203mm howitzer up and after hitting one of the major concrete emplacements a couple times the Germans inside surrendered.

I gather that while the HE rounds weren't all that effective (they'd have blow a hole clear thru eventually tho) the concussion inside was unbearable.

[MarkSheppard]

Here's an adaptation of the Race Flag created by a Deviant Art Member:

Race Flag on DeviantArt

Calls for the Race Empire to adopt its own flag at least in Tosev III have forced the Emperor to decree in order to have the Empire its identity, the Domains of the Ssumaz will fly a flag. It is very simple in description, and also meant to be distinctive to the Tosevite flags. Adopted in 1985, the flag is vertical. The brown parts represent the mainly desert vegetation of Home, the green its people.

While many of the Race resented in having to have a Tosevite borrowing such as a banner, the Race eventually grew fond of it, seeing as a powerful symbol of their species.

Canonically, the Race has been united for so long that they don't even have a unifying flag or symbol, but I needed one for the mod; and using the generic YELLOW flag from early SPWW2 sounded a bit cheap (if keeping in line with the orange-y color that everyone used for the Race on world maps on deviant art)

[MarkSheppard]

Current spec-cing:

Landcruiser: 110mm gun; 5 to 6mm caliber coaxial, SAM on side of turret. Visually very similar to the AMX-40 or OF-40; at about 43 to 45 metric tons combat weight. Armor protection of around mid production T-55 to early T-62 level -- because its stated canonically that a 88mm L56 can't penetrate it frontally, they're still vulnerable to side shots from PAK guns. Plus, by the 1960s, German tanks are pretty much at parity (or close to it) with the Race; something not possible if it was a blinged up M1A1(HA) equivalent. Autoloaded gun, due to the need to economize on manpower in conquest fleet.

Troopcarrier Something roughly analogous to the Argentinian VCTP (aka TAM), with a 20mm or 25mm cannon + SAM.

Artillerycarrier: Analogous to the TAM VCA artillery, but in 100-120mm instead of 155mm. The Race is physically much smaller than humans, so I don't think they can easily manhandle 155mm rounds around.

Mortarcarrier: Analogous to the TAM VCTP mortar carrier variant. 80mm caliber or thereabouts.

Missilecarrier I'm not sure whether to include this. If the tanks have built in integrated SAM defenses (and radars), then why would there be a separate vehicle for carrying SAM systems not organic to the main tactical unit of operation?

[MarkSheppard]

Zingiber said, “If you can’t send landcruisers, send helicopters to help me take out some more of the Tosevites’ armor.”

Rethost made up his mind that if Zingiber made one more such idiotic request, he’d relieve him. He hissed angrily before he pressed the TRANSMIT button. “We have fewer helicopters than landcruisers to spare. The miserable Tosevites have learned something new.” They’re faster at that than we are. The thought worried him. He made himself continue: “They’ve brought their antiaircraft artillery as far forward as they can, towing it with light armor or sometimes even with soft-skinned vehicles. The helicopters are armored against rifle-caliber bullets. To armor them against these shells would make them too heavy to fly.”

-------------

The more he thought about it, the more it worried him. The Lizards didn’t have numbers going for them; their strength had always lain in their guns: their tanks and self-propelled pieces; if they were easing off with those …

-----

“Indeed so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “To that end, we have recently converted a munitions factory we captured from the Français to producing artillery ammunition in our calibers. The Tosevites manufacture the casings and the explosive charges; our only contribution to the process is the electronics for terminal guidance.”

---------

More shells whistled overhead, these southbound from Bloomington. Mutt hoped they were registered on the Lizard guns, but they probably weren’t; the Lizards outranged American artillery.

---------

“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon.

---------

As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft cannon mounted in place of big guns protecting them. If she spotted one of those, she’d sheer off. A hit or two from their shells would turn the U-2 to kindling. She deliberately thought about it in terms of the aircraft rather than herself.

---------

The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jäger stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known—it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.
Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jäger knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.


(Lizard aircraft firing standoff ATGMs at Panzer column)

---------------

“It’s even worse in those places than in the United States, because they don’t need to wreck their roads to make us go into the mud. As soon as it rains for more than two days straight, the roads themselves turn into mud. Why didn’t they pave them to begin with?”

The fleetlord knew Kirel could not possibly answer a question like that. Even if he could have answered it, responsibility still rested with Atvar. The Race’s landcruisers and troopcarriers, of course, were tracked. They managed after a fashion, even churning through sticky mud. Most supply vehicles, though, merely had wheels. Back before Atvar went into cold sleep, that had seemed sufficient, even extravagant. Against spear-carrying warriors riding on animals, it would have been.

--------------

Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jäger’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”

-------------

“Tell me about that thing, will you?”

Ristin turned one eye turret toward it. “That? That is a skelkwank sight, I think maybe from a bomb. Artillery shells use a smaller model. Skelkwank in your language is . . . is—” He paused and fluttered his lingers, a Lizardy way of showing frustration. “I think your language has not this word. Yep, that is what! think.”

(Laser guided weapons)

-------------

Try as they would, the Race’s pilots and missile batteries and artillery had not managed to knock out the Big Uglies’ manufacturing capacity.

---------

Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.

-------------

The Lizards’ advance positions, being lightly held, were soon overrun, though not before one of the aliens turned a Panzer IV to Jäger’s right to a funeral pyre with a rocket.

---------

It steers on the same principles as our machines, but it’s a lot easier to drive: the steering is power assisted and the gearbox shifts automatically.”

-------

Then he noticed the turret had no loader’s seat, just as there’d been no hull gunner’s position in the Lizard panzer’s forward compartment. Did the gunner or commander have to load shells, then? He couldn’t believe it. That would badly slow the panzer’s rate of fire, and he knew from bitter experience the Lizards could shoot quicker than their German counterparts.

Some of the gadgetry that filled the turret without crowding it had to be an automatic loader, then.

(Aha, they have Autoloaders)

[MarkSheppard]

His engines changed pitch as they breathed thicker air. Servos squealed, adjusting the sweep of his wings.

(Killercraft have VG wings)

-------

Teerts raked the stampeding herd of aircraft twice more before his ammunition ran low. Rolvar and Gefron had also done all the damage they could. They streaked for low orbital pickup; soon enough, the Race would have landing strips on the ground. Then the slaughter of Tosevite aircraft would be great indeed.

(Killercraft can go to low orbit.)

----

Like all starships of the invasion fleet, the 67th Emperor Sohrheb drew its primary power from an atomic pile. But, like most of the ships that landed on Tosev 3, it used a fair part of the energy from that pile to electrolyze water into oxygen and the hydrogen that fueled the Race’s air and ground vehicles.

(The Race's aircraft are LH2 powered)

[MarkSheppard]

Originally Posted by MarkSheppard

Current spec-cing:

Landcruiser: 110mm gun; 5 to 6mm caliber coaxial, SAM on side of turret. Visually very similar to the AMX-40 or OF-40; at about 43 to 45 metric tons combat weight. Armor protection of around mid production T-55 to early T-62 level -- because its stated canonically that a 88mm L56 can't penetrate it frontally, they're still vulnerable to side shots from PAK guns. Plus, by the 1960s, German tanks are pretty much at parity (or close to it) with the Race; something not possible if it was a blinged up M1A1(HA) equivalent. Autoloaded gun, due to the need to economize on manpower in conquest fleet.

...

Artillerycarrier: Analogous to the TAM VCA artillery, but in 100-120mm instead of 155mm. The Race is physically much smaller than humans, so I don't think they can easily manhandle 155mm rounds around.

So let's see...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-5TS
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2-62

115mm gun 2A20 (L/52.6)
Maximum muzzle energy is 6.96 MJ
3BM3 Sabot: 5.5 kg projectile out of a 22 kg shot weight, 1615 m/sec muzzle velocity.
3UOF HE Frag: 14.86 kg projectile out of 28 kg shot weight, 905 m/sec muzzle velocity

From my website:

http://alternatewars.com/BBOW/Ballis...ights_Calc.htm

Scaling down the T-62's gun to 110mm gets us:

Sabot: 4.81 kg projectile and 6.28 MJ muzzle energy at 1,615 m/sec.
HEF: 13 kg projectile and 5.33 MJ muzzle energy at 905 m/sec

Dropping back to my website again:

http://alternatewars.com/BBOW/Ballis...stics_1-07.htm

and plugging in:

110mm Proj Diameter
13 kg projectile mass
905 m/sec initial velocity
45 degree departure angle
0 m fire/target altitude
G8 Drag Model with a form factor of 1.0
0.1 integration interval
Ballistic Trajectory Evaluation

Gets us:

Maximum Range: 15,500 meters, with a time of flight of 67 seconds and a fall angle of 66 degrees

This isn't actually bad. You could get it up to maybe 19-20~ km with rocket assisted shells (wild *** guesstimate, not scientific analysis).

Bonus of using the same gun in your tank and SP howitzer (albeit in different mounts, allowing different elevations):

Resupply problems are dramatically eased for ammunition and spare parts -- important if the Race can only bring the ammo it needs on the ships it departed with.

As for AP penetration, you can just close your eyes and imagine pretty much the same performance as the 115mm:

3BM4 (1963 Steel) 228mm @ 1000m
3BM21 (1970s Tungsten) 360mm @ 1000m

Albeit with tungsten as the main weapon, since the shipping costs of a 4.8 kg sabot projectile across interstellar distances is so high that why not bring the best -- even if it's solid gold?

Depleted Uranium, I don't think the Race would use it -- due to their "long view" tending to avoid messy contaminated battlefields or carcinogens in conquered races.

One thing you'd have to do is have multiple landcruiser slots filled in the OOB representing:

1.) The initial invasion fleet, 100% tungsten sabot rounds, 100% MANPADs

2.) A year or two in, where you're forced to use earth-made steel sabots since you expended a lot of your tungsten rounds in the initial fighting.

[MarkSheppard]

Some more thoughts...

I'd rather use SPWW2 because that gives us all the OOBs, Icons and stuff already preloaded for WW2, saving development time vs porting SPWW2 stuff to MBT.

But this would require some changes to the Turtledovian "Race" OBAT.

In his classic OBAT, everything has built in MANPADs; capable of shooting down helicopters to fighters; but there's no built in MANPAD or SAM weapon class for SPWW2.

We can just abstract the lack of SAMs away; by explaining that the heavy SAM stuff (S-300-PMU equivalent) is kept well away from the frontlines, and assigned to guard supply depots, using their extreme range vs low flying, low performance WW2 planes to shoot down stuff like paratrooper transport formations from 200 miles away.

What we could do is do some more "thonkery" and modify things a bit; and keep things in line with Turtledove's "roads less travelled" path that he likes to do.

Since 1945, everyone from time to time keeps proposing autocannons for coaxial armament in tanks (Centurion prototypes in 1945, AMX-30 early run, and serious proposals to have the M1 armed with 105mm and a 25mm Bushmaster).

So what if the Race did that? I mean, we already have real world examples with the BMP-3 weapons module which has a 100mm gun plus a 30mm autocannon.

The way it could be explained is that they could use advanced blue force networking so that a group of tanks can slave their autocannons together and pre-slew their turrets so as to deal with incoming enemy aircraft.

So you'd have weaponclass 4 "AA Capable FLAK MG/AUtocannon" as the coaxial on their tanks, and as a primary weapon on their IFVs.

Since we're drifting from Turtledove's original concepts, we could have their 30mm stuff firing advanced combined VT/time fuzes to increase their efficiency vs aircraft or against ground targets such as infantry in foxholes via airburst, or delayed detonation to kill targets behind walls. So the 30mm autocannons would have about 20-25% more HEK than what they normally would have for their calibre.

Further, since we're drifting even further, what if for large caliber guns such as tanks or artillery, they use liquid propellant since rate of fire will be low enough with those that refilling it between shots won't be bad, and it will ease the resupply burden of these 4.5 foot lizards loading their tanks.

[Suhiir]

Good documentary on an alien attack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lj2afg31oU