Patron 2010 - Silver

@JuliusBorisovBeamdog
I report and reload every time. You must have a ton of my reports.

The new update is a disaster. It keeps crashing…even more so than before. And it´s an uphill struggle just to get the game to load. Most of my battles are done without any visible units,
Could live with it if I was able to reload and continue but that German general and the Iron cross picture with the loading-bar on permanent empty haunts my sleep…We are not amused

Thanks for this excellent picture of a great ship’s demise. Earlier in 1941, Ark Royal famously launched the torpedo-bomber attack which jammed the Bismarck’s rudder, delivering the German battleship to the pursuing British naval units who otherwise would have failed to catch her.

The concept of wanting to add extra IPCs to a territory is certainly clear enough (there have been all sorts of house rule proposals over the years to add IPCs to various territories in various A&A games), but what puzzles me is the idea of having IPCs be generated by factories because in the real world – and indeed in A&A – factories / industrial complexes consume money and resources rather than generate them. In other words, they take the economic resources provided by the state (labour and raw materials) and convert them into manufactured goods (such a weapons). I suppose that a mine could be considered a type of industrial facility which produces raw materials, and thus generates IPCs, but the point is that mines are not factories; they don’t manufacture tanks and guns and aircraft. Similarly, factories in real life don’t produce infantry; they do manufacture infantry equipment, but such personal equipment isn’t modeled in the game. A facility which “produces” infantry, i.e. which trains raw recruits and turns them into soldiers, would be better described as a boot camp or a training facility, which could be added to the game as a specialized fixed installation – but again, it would consume IPCs rather than generating them.

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

@CWO-Marc
yea Spruance steaming away at night was a smart move. I wonder if Halsey was in the same situation if he would have. I kinda doubt it

Agreed. Ray Spruance was an excellent combat officer – he and Halsey spent the last few years of WWII alternating command of the 5th Fleet / 3rd Fleet, which was actually the same force whose name got switched every time the two admirals rotated, much to the confusion of Japanese naval intelligence – but he was very different from Bill Halsey in terms of style and personality. Spruance was precise and analytical; he certainly didn’t lack aggressiveness (when he made a decision to attack, he sent in “everything that wasn’t bolted to the flight deck”), but before making his decision to attack he would carefully weigh all the factors of the situation, which sometimes translated into over-cautiousness. Halsey was a hell-for-leather type – sort of the naval counterpart of George Patton – whose fighting spirit greatly inspired his men (the enlisted sailors loved him, not least for the fact that he could drink and swear as well as any of them), but this sometimes translated into recklessness. After the war, someone – I think it was Spruance himself – said that it would have been better if Halsey has been in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (where the IJN lost hundred of planes and pilots, but managed to save the bulk of its fleet) and if Spruance had been in command at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (where Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy operation, and compounded his error by leaving no covering force to guard the San Bernardino Straight).

@Wittmann said in How many G40 games have you played?:

@oysteilo how very medieval!

To go even earlier than the medieval era, I’ve just gotten a mental image of a player using a creative interpretational workaround of the “no calculators and no pen and paper” rule by showing up at the next game with an abacus. Or maybe a slide rule, for a 1940s-style solution.

@barnee said in Wrecks of WWII Carriers Kaga and Akagi Located:

When i read the article I had forgotten that the carriers and a light cruiser on the last day of the battle were the only Japanese ships sunk. Seems odd, even with only planes vs ships

Actually, the outcome reflects good tactical judgement by Admirals Spruance and Fletcher, who were the commanders on the spot. (Fletcher was technically in overall command, since he was senior, but in practice the two American groups – the Hornet/Enterprise group commanded by Raymond Spruance and the Yorktown group commanded by Jack Fletcher – operated fairly independently. Once Yorktown was sunk, and Fletcher had transferred his flag to a cruiser, Spruance was the only carrier commander left in the game.) The Americans were vastly outnumbered at Midway, and not just in carriers; Yamamoto committed about half the Imperial fleet to the operation, if you count all the groups of forces he deployed. The Americans, following Mahan’s principle of going all-out for the enemy’s capital ships (defined in Mahan’s time as his battleships, but by 1942 being redefined as his carriers), concentrated all their attention (and their limited bomber resources) on Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu and sent them to the bottom. Also important, but less well-known, is the fact that Spruance, once evening came, steamed eastward (meaning away from the Japanese forces) in order to avoid risking his precious two remaining carriers in potential night-time surface combat (at which the IJN excelled) against the still impressively large Japanese armada. He and Fletcher had eliminated Yamamoto’s key pieces, the carriers, for the loss of just one US carrier (the patched-together Yorktown, which had taken a beating at the Coral Sea shortly beforehand), and that in itself was enough to make Midway a US victory of enormous strategic importance. Even the Japanese recognized this; they briefly considered taking another crack at capturing Midway by sending in their battleships (including Yamamoto’s flagship, the 18-inch gunned Yamato) to bombard the island prior to staging an amphibious landing, but soon gave up on the idea and turned west to head for home.

The discovery is well-timed: Roland Emmerich’s new Midway movie is set to be released on November 8, 2019. The trailer can be accessed here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6924650/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Battle of Midway: World War Two Japanese carrier wrecks found

21 October 2019

Deep sea explorers have found two Japanese aircraft carriers that were sunk in battle in World War Two.

The carriers were among seven ships that went down in the Battle of Midway, a major air and sea battle fought between the US and Japan in 1942.

One ship, the Kaga, was discovered last week, while wreckage from another carrier, Akagi, was found on Sunday.

Until now only one other ship sunk in this battle had ever been found - the American vessel USS Yorktown, in 1998.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-50124313

UK World War Two Bombing Site Map

Here’s something that may interest folks who like data and statistics about WWII:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50056395

UK World War Two bombing sites revealed in online map
16 October 2019

A new map that plots every German air raid on the UK during World War Two has been released online.

A researcher from the University of York used wartime intelligence reports to compile the Bombing Britain database (http://www.warstateandsociety.com/Bombing-Britain) of more than 30,000 locations.

Dr Laura Blomvall, who carried out the research, said the raids stretched from the Orkney Islands to the Isles of Scilly.

The map has been launched to mark the 80th anniversary of the first raid.

German bombers attacked the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh on 16 October 1939. The last raid was a V2 rocket attack near Iwade in Kent on 29 March 1945.