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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Things You Only Noticed On Reread

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Just now, partner555 said:

He's done enough damage already, and you know "Ronin" really messed up if even Tony called him out for it.

Tony was the reason "Ronin" did that whole post in the first place. Of course, "Ronin" should have known by now that whatever Tony says isn't PC so him saying Elliot is gay wouldn't mean he's actually gay.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

For that sort of moron, 'enough damage' is like 'enough dakka.' He can always do more damage.

People talk about "more dakka".  I think, back in my Army days, I saw a serious proposal that would have been "that's enough dakka".  Quad mount Vulcan self propelled anti air craft guns.  At that time, the Army had single mount Vulcans, which could chunk out 3,000 rounds a minute.  A quad system would chunk out 12,000 RPM.  That 200 rounds of 20 mm high explosive rounds a freaking second.  They build one, but it lost out to the Sergeant York system, which ended up being, well, bad.  Bad enough that we didn't take it into service, and this was during the height of the Reagan era defense expansion.

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At some point (probably the multiple-mount Vulcan setup), you are consuming more ammunition than it is practical to have available, and will run out so early in the fighting that your weapon system becomes dead weight until resupply comes around.

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13 minutes ago, ijuin said:

At some point (probably the multiple-mount Vulcan setup), you are consuming more ammunition than it is practical to have available, and will run out so early in the fighting that your weapon system becomes dead weight until resupply comes around.

Mounted on a stretch M113A3  the space that normally would hold 14+ grunts was mainly used for ammo.  Granted that still only gave it about 90 seconds of full power.  Normal firing rate was bursts of 100-200 rounds per gun mount.  So around 120 plus or minus shoots.  Which is about right for a SPAAG.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

People talk about "more dakka".  I think, back in my Army days, I saw a serious proposal that would have been "that's enough dakka".

I agree absolutely, but remember, the 'more dakka' line is used by friggin' WH40K Orks. For Orks, there is NEVER any such thing as 'enuf dakka.'

Mind you, I do like the quad Vulcan proposal. Combine the proposal in question with a good computer and targeting system, and whatever it shoots at had better have entirely unreasonable amounts of armour or it will be a flying cheese grater. That won't be flying for much longer. (The TWB has a fan forum, right? Who is with me in making a fan suggestion that we have Doc and Roger create a quad Vulcan paintball gun?)

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1 minute ago, Don Edwards said:

That kind of firepower, even in paintball, would have a serious risk of being lethal. (Drowning the target with so much "paint", if nothing else.)

Clearly, but I would be satisfied with just a single frame of Doc and Roger being in the process of building it and Sandy yelling at them, "NO!!!"

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51 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

I agree absolutely, but remember, the 'more dakka' line is used by friggin' WH40K Orks. For Orks, there is NEVER any such thing as 'enuf dakka.'

Mind you, I do like the quad Vulcan proposal. Combine the proposal in question with a good computer and targeting system, and whatever it shoots at had better have entirely unreasonable amounts of armour or it will be a flying cheese grater. That won't be flying for much longer. (The TWB has a fan forum, right? Who is with me in making a fan suggestion that we have Doc and Roger create a quad Vulcan paintball gun?)

They already did the quad mount thing for a paint ball AA gun, and of course they mad the gattling paintball gun, so it would not take much to make that.

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34 minutes ago, Drachefly said:

This reminds me of someone seriously suggesting that a thousand ancient greek warships could stand up to a PT boat with a 20mm cannon and a lot of ammunition.

The greek warships might win, if and only if they were totally bloody-minded about it and completely heedless of losses.  Sheer numbers can overwhelm advantages in technology and firepower.  The colonial powers were taught that lesson especially well in africa.

A PT boat has very few spare crew and WW2 PT boats, IIRC, are rather open to arrow fire.  With a totally committed Greek fleet fighting normally (i.e. without undue fear), arrow volleys would take their toll on the human PT Boat crew even if only 1 in 1000 arrows ever hit the boat.

In any real-world engagement, the PT boat would almost-certainly win from the sheer fear engendered by an opponent moving and turning so impossibly fast and dealing out such destruction with its cannon.

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Not only arrow fire, but fire arrows as well--the Greeks would keep trying to set fire to the PT boat, which at minimum would keep its crew busy trying to prevent fire damage.

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4 hours ago, Drachefly said:

This reminds me of someone seriously suggesting that a thousand ancient greek warships could stand up to a PT boat with a 20mm cannon and a lot of ammunition.

It's surprisingly difficult to sink wooden boats with cannon fire, and this isn't a big enough caliber for a really effective bursting shell.  Also PT boats may well be light enough the greek warships ramming tactic can sink them.  Can you kill enough people on the warships to immobilize them before any of them can close?  At 1000:1 odds it doesn't look good for a stand up fight, but you're faster, so in a running engagement maybe. 

Generally if the other side can hurt you at all, even if it takes a really lucky hit, engaging disciplined opponents at worse than a few handfuls to 1 odds is not something you should try by choice no matter how much of an edge you think your superior skills or weapons give you.  Run away and try to figure out a way to fight them in detail.

 

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Drifting off-topic, but as someone who's been acquiring WWII trivia, I just have to expound on PT boats.

If you even recognize what "PT boat" means without googling it, you probably got your impressions from one old TV comedy, McHale's Navy, and two John Wayne movies, They Were Expendable and In Harm's Way. All of these are pretty good watches, but all of them are completely bogus as to what American patrol torpedo boats accomplished during the war. One veteran of PT boat service who saw the John Wayne/John Ford movie (which was released just after the end of the war) said "They should have made the title They Were Useless."

They weren't, but as torpedo craft, they pretty much were. They had three Packard engines, just about the best America produced at the time, but without maintenance, they lost performance quickly, and most boats had trouble making anything close to their rated top speed most of the time. And American torpedoes were really crappy for more than half the war, and without constant maintenance, which really could not be done by the tiny crews carried by PT boats, they performed even worse. Many of the boats had their torpedoes removed and replaced by small guns, the favorite being a 40mm Bofors autocannon. The boats sank a lot of motorized barges in the Pacific and along the Italian coast, but did not sink anything larger than a destroyer.

Motor torpedo boats could be more effective; British MTBs operating out of Malta and German Schnellboot operating in the English Channel made some very deadly attacks against transports. The only battleship ever sunk by a motor torpedo boat was sunk in the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Sankt Istvan. BTW, the sinking was filmed, and it shows up in any number of documentaries about WWII, showing you can't really trust stock footage, especially if it's so old it's in the public domain.

And yes, I know, neither Austria nor Hungary has a coastline today. They lost theirs in WWI; it belongs to Slovenia and Croatia now. So far. It's changed hands an awful lot over history.

And in yet another aside, for you Sound of Music fans, Captain von Trapp had been a submarine commander in the aforesaid Austro-Hungarian navy in World War I. It was natural for him; his first wife was the granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the modern torpedo. He sank thirteen ships.

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On 11/16/2016 at 1:35 PM, Vorlonagent said:

The greek warships might win, if and only if they were totally bloody-minded about it and completely heedless of losses.  Sheer numbers can overwhelm advantages in technology and firepower.  The colonial powers were taught that lesson especially well in africa.

A PT boat has very few spare crew and WW2 PT boats, IIRC, are rather open to arrow fire.  With a totally committed Greek fleet fighting normally (i.e. without undue fear), arrow volleys would take their toll on the human PT Boat crew even if only 1 in 1000 arrows ever hit the boat.

In any real-world engagement, the PT boat would almost-certainly win from the sheer fear engendered by an opponent moving and turning so impossibly fast and dealing out such destruction with its cannon.

Arrow fire? What's the maximum range on arrows? What's the maximum speed on a Trireme?

Neither of these is particularly close to a comfortable range (1km) and maneuvering capabilities of a PT. If you stuck them in a box rather than the open sea, perhaps. 

If they're free to maneuver and the PT ever gets within 150% of extreme arrow range of any of the ships, they've done it all wrong.

 

As for effectiveness, poking several-centimeter holes in wooden targets is OK so long as one of the holes is below the water level. Also, use incendiary shells

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1 hour ago, Drachefly said:

Arrow fire? What's the maximum range on arrows? What's the maximum speed on a Trireme?

It has 2 move a turn at basic level. 3 if you have completed Magellan's Expedition. 4 if you have invented Nuclear Power. (Don't ask me how this works. When you reach Nuclear Power, all your ships get 1 extra move. I do not know how you install a nuclear power plant on a trireme, I just know it gets the extra move.)

In Civilisation 2, Range is a moot point because it assumes the strategic level, which is to say that each unit actually represents several of the vessel in question and that when you move to attack, you are engaged in combat. Certain weapons have First Strike, which is to say they are allowed to strike and do damage before the enemy can strike back. The equivalent of a PT would be able to carry up to 3 Cruise Missiles. These have First Strike and each will be guaranteed to eliminate one Trireme unit before it would even get to attack.

A PT unit would be Modern and would therefore have either 30 or 40 HP. A Trireme is Ancient and would only have 10. Even when engaged in combat, a Trireme with its minimal attack power would only be able to do 1 point of damage if it hit, which would be a tall assumption. The PT unit, on the other hand, would do from 12 to 18 damage with each hit and would hit nearly every time, eliminating one trireme per hit.

Given enough Triremes and time, the PT unit would still sink in the end. But it would be a tall assumption. It would presuppose a PT unit willing to hold still while it was surrounded by Triremes (stacking them would be a really bad idea as this would allow the PT to spread its damage over multiple Triremes, potentially sinking a dozen or more of them per hit). And in the end, they could win only by wearing it down. The RL equivalent would be that it continued to fight until it had run out of fuel and ammunition, which just doesn't strike me as the ideal naval combat tactic.

ETA: This was a rather heavily modded version of Civ 2 and I am reconstructing this from memory. Any deviations from vanilla Civ 2 are entirely on my head and I apologise in advance if I have made egregious mistakes in that direction. Thank you. :)

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20 hours ago, Drachefly said:

What's the maximum range on arrows?

I don't know what the maximum range of arrows fired with period bows was, but I can tell you that using a modern wooden longbow (5' (1.5 m) tall from point to point when the bow is not drawn), the maximum range at which I can hit a target the size of a PT boat on a day with wind speeds of less than 10 mph (~16 km/h) depends on the direction of wind relative to the firing direction.  Assuming my target is downwind (obviously the most favorable position to be in when firing a bow at long range), it's about 1200 m, also assuming I don't have to hit it first try.  If that arrow is on fire, that range decreases to about 1100 m.  So it's entirely feasible that someone who's trained their whole life to shoot long range with a bow (which I haven't - just 10 years or so) could hit the PT boat at range if they can predict where it's going to be when the arrow arrives, which would also take time to calculate.

Whether or not that actually does anything is another matter entirely.

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OK, so bows are longer-ranged than I thought. The cannon has a 1 km effective range vs fighters, which are considerably harder to hit than a trireme (much smaller, much faster, and elevated to boot). Their maximum overall range is several km. Indeed, if they're using HEI shells, then the longer range might slow down the shells enough to get them to detonate properly despite the wooden target. Not that that should really be needed.

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36 minutes ago, Drachefly said:

OK, so bows are longer-ranged than I thought. The cannon has a 1 km effective range vs fighters, which are considerably harder to hit than a trireme (much smaller, much faster, and elevated to boot). Their maximum overall range is several km. Indeed, if they're using HEI shells, then the longer range might slow down the shells enough to get them to detonate properly despite the wooden target. Not that that should really be needed.

To be fair, Yzjdriel did talk about modern bows with favourable wind. Greeks in triremes would not necessarily have access to these nor to modern materials and bow construction techniques. An older English longbow would have an extreme range of some five to six hundred yards and these were the marvels of their time. In the early 19th Century, a Turkish visitor to England armed with a recurved bow managed to shoot some nine hundred yards. If you were talking shortbows from earlier dates, you would be lucky to make some three to four hundred yards.

And again, we are talking skilled archers here. Ten years of practice is not quite amateur level; Yzjdriel should not sell himself short. Mind you, the one thing Greeks couldn't be said to be short of was physical strength. With decent bows they could probably achieve fairly scary ranges. But another factor to count in: back then, really good bows were expensive and took time to make. Many made do with slings or throwing spears. The legendary longbow of Odysseus was a nobleman's weapon and not something a common shipboard trooper would be armed with.

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2 hours ago, Drachefly said:

OK, so bows are longer-ranged than I thought. The cannon has a 1 km effective range vs fighters, which are considerably harder to hit than a trireme (much smaller, much faster, and elevated to boot). Their maximum overall range is several km. Indeed, if they're using HEI shells, then the longer range might slow down the shells enough to get them to detonate properly despite the wooden target. Not that that should really be needed.

A fighter might be harder to hit than a trireme, but damage it recieves is going to matter significantly more. A shell through an engine or into the elevation controls is going to make it difficult to impossible to stay in the air, causing it to crash or retreat in short order. A hole in the side of a trireme might cause it to start raking on water, but the trireme is a very light ship with a relatively shallow draft. 140 men can lift the 40 meter boat out of shallow water and carry it onto the shore. The ships were estimated to have the top of their hulls at a little over 2 meters above the water with about a meter draft. It will sink if it is taking on water, but it might take it a while. The better tactic, in my opinion, would be to aim for the rower banks to try to disable the main propulsion.

Though it is unlikely the triremes would be able to do much to the PT boat. A trireme had some archers and marines on board, but they were there to protect the rowers if someone tried to board the ship. The trireme's main method of attack was ramming to bash enemy ships apart. And a trireme simply doesn't have the speed needed to catch the PT boat. A group of researchers recreated a trireme and got a group of 170 volunteers to row. They got a top speed of 8 knots with a cruising speed of 4 knots. This was with an imperfect replica and an untrained rowing team, so a proper greek trireme might be faster, but not the 40+ knots needed to catch the PT boat.

All-in-all, I think the PT boat would win the fight due to simple endurance. I doubt the PT boat's engine would run out of fuel before the rowers of the trireme fleet exhausted themselves.

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30 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

All-in-all, I think the PT boat would win the fight due to simple endurance. I doubt the PT boat's engine would run out of fuel before the rowers of the trireme fleet exhausted themselves.

Easiest way, I think, would be to idle ahead of the silly things at a speed of five or six knots. Slow down if they looked like giving up, gently adding throttle if they came too close. Then wait for bad weather. Once the bad weather is there, sink them at your leisure while they are fighting to stay afloat.

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Just now, The Old Hack said:

Easiest way, I think, would be to idle ahead of the silly things at a speed of five or six knots. Slow down if they looked like giving up, gently adding throttle if they came too close. Then wait for bad weather. Once the bad weather is there, sink them at your leisure while they are fighting to stay afloat.

I wouldn't be surprised if the PT boat could just plow through a good number of them.

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24 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Easiest way, I think, would be to idle ahead of the silly things at a speed of five or six knots. Slow down if they looked like giving up, gently adding throttle if they came too close. Then wait for bad weather. Once the bad weather is there, sink them at your leisure while they are fighting to stay afloat.

Wouldn't necessarily need to wait for bad weather. A trireme doesn't have enough room for the supplies needed to stay at sea for more than a day. They would run out of fresh water to keep the rowers hydrated and have to head for shore.

11 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I wouldn't be surprised if the PT boat could just plow through a good number of them.

I'm not so sure about that. Both are wooden ships and the trireme is specifically designed as a ramming ship while the PT boat is designed as a torpedo platform. It would be a very risky manuever anyway, as smashing through a trireme would risk either damaging the PT boat or one of the trireme crew members getting aboard(if nothing else, falling onto the boat as it tries to smash through the rowing banks that run the length of the trireme)

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Just now, Drasvin said:

I'm not so sure about that. Both are wooden ships and the trireme is specifically designed as a ramming ship while the PT boat is designed as a torpedo platform. It would be a very risky manuever anyway, as smashing through a trireme would risk either damaging the PT boat or one of the trireme crew members getting aboard(if nothing else, falling onto the boat as it tries to smash through the rowing banks that run the length of the trireme)

Ahh, I had thought that the boats had metal hulls, but they were plywood, my mistake.

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