Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: joliverlay

NO, but 9 women can have 9 babys in a month.

Don't nurf the PBM capabilities for research to much because the AI is not working. Against a human this strategy might now work as well.

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ORIGINAL: joliverlay
Do NOT penalize spreading research around.

IE putting 100 Research Points/ per month on G14, G10, FW190D, and Me262 do not penalizer each other. But putting 400 points on FW190D alone would.

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From what I've read about Speer and the Reich Armaments managers, I'm not convinced they really went into a total war production effort before 1943--4 and that they could clearly have done much earlier. Likewise, had they decided to focus on a single jet engine, they perhaps could have moved faster. I suspect Messersmitt would have preferred to use the BMW jets rather than the Junkers product. They may have wasted much effort on the BMW jet which could have been abandoned. Do you see my point?

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ORIGINAL: harley


My point is the "mythical man month"

throwing resources at a project will not bring it to fruition earlier, as people step on one another's toes, work is duplicated, empire building happens rather than cooperation. Then there's the inspiration, and by that I mean the eureka moment one man has at one point in time - that cannot happen when everyone is on top of one another. If Kurt Tank had to work with all these dweeb engineers he may never have come up with the idea for the widget in the thingumybob that actually made the TA152 possible, instead he would have been lost in the miasma of administration, work allocation and petty politics.

So...

We need to maintain the ability to bring in a type earlier... But not this early. There's ways I can do that, and I open that up to discussion, the community is a valuable tool to brainstorm these ideas.

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ORIGINAL: von Shagmeister

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ORIGINAL: harley


My point is the "mythical man month"

throwing resources at a project will not bring it to fruition earlier, as people step on one another's toes, work is duplicated, empire building happens rather than cooperation. Then there's the inspiration, and by that I mean the eureka moment one man has at one point in time - that cannot happen when everyone is on top of one another. If Kurt Tank had to work with all these dweeb engineers he may never have come up with the idea for the widget in the thingumybob that actually made the TA152 possible, instead he would have been lost in the miasma of administration, work allocation and petty politics.

So...

We need to maintain the ability to bring in a type earlier... But not this early. There's ways I can do that, and I open that up to discussion, the community is a valuable tool to brainstorm these ideas.

Remember way back in the development forum I said that it was too easy to bring forward the inservice date of late war a/c. After the discussion Sarge did implement a number of roadblocks by adding extra engine types which would require the re-tooling of factories with consequent loss of actual production but even with this I still advocated a flat 200 "research a/c built" cost to advance one month instead of the present 100 and I think this should be across the board for all a/c development. Also as I said at the time as an Axis fanboy it grieved me to say it but it's just too easy to advance the inservice date.

von Shagmeister

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ORIGINAL: guctony
As I play more and read more about german Air warfare something hits me. I think much of the problem comes from Messerschmitt specially From Willy Messerschmitt. Like a good bussiness man He got good connections with the party and enforced Use of his product to great extend. in 1936's clearly Heinkel produced a bit more complex but faster plane the BF 109 But what I read tells me it was a executive decision to divide fighter production to Messerschmitt and bomber production to Heinkel.

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And The Design of Bf 109. There is two novel features, one is use of landing gear and other is easly removable wings. So Bf 109 could easly moved around and serviced unliked many other planes. Because the wing doesnt have to carry the load of landing gear both wing could be in simple construction and could be easly detached form the main Body. So the plane can be moved very easly around.

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But we know the end Result was a narrow tire span that make landing and take of was very difficult. And almost 15% loses occured from landing and takeoff.

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In design point of view this features are only for the factory and Company. It would greatly accelerate the production. One legs on it is on a moving production line. So The wings. But this is so profit oriented.

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Even late in the war if I am not wrong he elluded high order of mass producing different planes other then his own. One example if I am not wrong is HE-219. He was ordered to mass produce HE-219 but he slip on to it.

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And BV-155 issue. When the design project transfered to Blohm-Voss they discovered it was very badly detailed and there was alot of discussion and argument.

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Accually These reasons are quite make me transfer all the Messerschmitt production to something different.

Kurt Tank was not the most company man neither Hortens. They were good designers. So we see them perish after the war.

BUt what they design still lives On.

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what about the F4U, it had even more (and it also had it's cute little nicknames for the numbers killed learning to fly it)

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ORIGINAL: Nicholas Bell

[sarcasm]

To be fair, how about accelerating some Allied designs then too instead of all this Nazi fantasy stuff. B-29s & P-80s for example.

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Another possibility to counter the "perfectly organized Nazi state economy" wetdreams. How about no USAAF vs USN rivalry and we get to fly F6F and F4U over Europe in 1943. Nice long-range, maneuverable, durable, and heavily armed. In fact, why not just introduce the 20mm armed versions early while we're at it.

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ahhh german production politics. One of my favorite topics! :)

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ORIGINAL: guctony
As I play more and read more about german Air warfare something hits me. I think much of the problem comes from Messerschmitt specially From Willy Messerschmitt. Like a good bussiness man He got good connections with the party and enforced Use of his product to great extend. in 1936's clearly Heinkel produced a bit more complex but faster plane the BF 109 But what I read tells me it was a executive decision to divide fighter production to Messerschmitt and bomber production to Heinkel.

I thoroughly disagree with the assesment. Yep, the He112 was faster. It was also smaller and lighter, and thus had a much more limited development potential. and contrary to your stated point of "it was a bit more complex", the He112 was way, way more expensive that the 109, most of it coming from its complex wing design.

Even then, the official luftwaffe single-engined fighter competition was held during 1936. By that date the 109 was in a very good shape and could easily be put into pre-production. In contrast the He112 was a nightmare of mechanical problems that still required more than one year to be fixed. In the competition there were two planes calling the atention: one with very good performance and ready to be put in service, the other with even better performance, but more expensive, and really not ready for the trials.

The results can hardly surprise anyone. In fact the Bf109 won against all odds, for Milch and Messerchmitt had an extreme personal feud dating back from some years behind. If the RLM chose the 109 as winner with that personal hate of Milch against Messerschmitt it was only because the plane was excellent, cheap to build, cheap to maintain, and ready for production. And had won the hearts of a lot of pilots, mechanics and high-ranking personnel within the RLM. Milch simply couldn't say "no"...as much as he wanted to because he really HATED (with caps) Willy Messerschmitt and wanted to kill Bayerische Fleugzeugwerke since some years before (and he almost achieved it at least once).

The He112 on the other hand simply wasn't ready, and had no backing by pilots or RLM "top" heads. Yeah, it was liked, more or less. Yeah, everyone was impressed with it's promised performance. But the plane in 1936 couldn't deliver what it promised, everyone liked the 109 more, thus the 112 was the loser. And a clean loser.

The He100 was a whole different world. It was an extraordinary design for its time but I still wonder about it's development potential. And anyway the He100 came as a flying prototype during 1938. Too late. Germany was hard pressed by then to build enough 109s to fullfit the luftwaffe demands. Even by the war start, the Luftwaffe had a lot of outdated 109Doras in front service because there weren't enough Emils to cover for the demand.
Under those circunstances changing production was a no-no. It would've required a stop,retooling and restarting of the factory lines producing the plane. As it was it was a close run for the LW to have enough planes for the Poland and French campaign. So, simply said, Germany couldn't allow itself to build the He100 by 1938.

Something similar happened to one of my all-time favorite planes, btw, the Focke-wulf Falke. It was an outstanding design, superior in almost everything to the Bf110. However by the time the Falke was ready to be built, Germany couldn't build it because it would've meant stopping the 110 production line, retooling it, and starting it with the Falke. Again, there weren't nearly enough 110s to cover the ZGs demands of the plane (IIRC some ZGs went to war with 109Ds as their main fighter, like ZG26, for instance). To introduce the Falke simply couldn't be done.

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And The Design of Bf 109. There is two novel features, one is use of landing gear and other is easly removable wings. So Bf 109 could easly moved around and serviced unliked many other planes. Because the wing doesnt have to carry the load of landing gear both wing could be in simple construction and could be easly detached form the main Body. So the plane can be moved very easly around.


I think you're not giving enough credit to Messerschmitt. He applied almost every novel aeronautic feature he could in his plane. Retractable landing gear, wing slats, and for the first time a total dissatention to wing loading, fixing instead on speed as the main weapon of the plane, etc... He gave his plane cannons at a time when almost every other designer in the world was fixated on MGs. And he achieved all that in an easily built plane (more than 30.000 built in the extremely inneficient and corrupt Nazi production system), easily serviciable, and with a long life expectancy with upgrades.

Honestly, being a plane designed in 1935, one couldn't ask much more from Messerschmitt, or his plane.

Did the plane have faults?. Of course, there has been no combat plane without an achilles heel in the whole story of aviation. But by its time, the 109 was a superb machine.

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But we know the end Result was a narrow tire span that make landing and take of was very difficult. And almost 15% loses occured from landing and takeoff.

I always find it kind of funny that the 109 is remembered among other things because its "dangerous" landing gear while another plane with exactly the same gear distribution, with almost the same % of loses in landing accidents as the spitfire is rarely mentioned for it.

Yes, the gear was a compromise. It had too short track and could give problems when landing or taking off. However remember that in that 15% of accidents one has to include all the untrained kids who slammed themselfs against the ground when trying to land by late 1944/early 1945. For the time being (1935-36) Messerchmitt designed a plane for well trained pilots. They also had accidents, of course, but he wanted a plane easy to build, easy to maintain in flyable condition. It's a tradeoff, and I always thought it worked all right in the end.

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In design point of view this features are only for the factory and Company. It would greatly accelerate the production. One legs on it is on a moving production line. So The wings. But this is so profit oriented.

Not really. When germany started to give some serious steps towards war production fighter parts were built at very different companies. That includes the Bf109 and the 190.

Its worth mentioning that kurt Tank also took a lot of compromises so his fighter could be easily built and maintained on the field. He took modular production ideas and took them to the limit. His way to deal with the problem of changing a wing was radically different than messerschmitt, though, but in an overall analysis, both Messerschmitt and Tank had easiness of production and maintainance as one of their top objectives when designing their respective planes.

and I'll insist, with more than 30.000 109s built and more than 20.000 190s built (an awesome feat in an inneficient production system as the one in Germany), they gave the Luftwaffe a tool to fight until the bitter end...mostly because of their attention to easiness of building and maintainance.

So no, I don't think messerschmitt was thinking about profit when designing his plane.

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Even late in the war if I am not wrong he elluded high order of mass producing different planes other then his own. One example if I am not wrong is HE-219. He was ordered to mass produce HE-219 but he slip on to it.

This I've never heard of. Sources?

And in any case the He-219 program was full of $h1t. Firstly the plane couldn't deliver what the designer said it could do. Secondly there was such a crapload of politics behind the program that noone wanted to get dirty in the pool of scum that plane caused (Milch vs Heinkel, Heinkel friends with Kammhuber, Kammhuber vs Milch. His persistence about taking the 219 into production was one of the reasons kammhuber got sacked, so go figure who wouldve accepted any mass production orders without some serious issues.)

And thirdly, Messerschmitt had already his hands full with the Bf109 updates, the Me210/Me410, the Me262 project, the projected 109 successors, the Komet, the Amerika Bomber, etc. I'd also have tried to avoid complying such an order as to take part in yet another program (and even more as I said if it was so full of flying crap as the He219 was).

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And BV-155 issue. When the design project transfered to Blohm-Voss they discovered it was very badly detailed and there was alot of discussion and argument.

Unsurprising. The Me-155 was never more than a more or less low-rank, low-priority item in the wide messerschmitt AF set of projects. The concept was interesting and thats' why the RLM ordered the design to be trasnferred. Blohm und Voss didn't make out anything decent out of it, anyway, and for them it indeed was a high-priority project. And yeah, there were some controversial points between BuV design team and the Me design team acting as "bridge" for the transfer to be smooth. But Messerschmitt, personally, had nothing to do with it (he never gave the plane anything like a bit of attention, to be honest...at that stage he was totally centered into turning the Me262 into a viable combat plane)

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Accually These reasons are quite make me transfer all the Messerschmitt production to something different.

Kurt Tank was not the most company man neither Hortens. They were good designers. So we see them perish after the war.

BUt what they design still lives On.



I'd say the 109 design still lives on. And what about the Me262, or the myriad of projects studied in the Messerschmitt AF, many concepts of which were later used in 2nd and 3rd generation jet fighters. Messerschmitt for sure had a tremendous ego, but I think he did a very nice job within the Nazi production system to provide the luftwaffe with the right tools to do a decent job, up to the end of the war.

said that, Kurt Tank for me is a semi-god, for the Fw190 is my all time favorite, the Falke as I said, is other of my favorite all time planes, and tank designed them both. But Messerschmitt was a hell of a designer aswell.

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ORIGINAL: Nikademus

If players want a true what if scenario....how about simply one where Germany has more gas, and a bigger pilot training program?

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ORIGINAL: Kesselring

Can anyone tell me how to manage/change the production, please? I cannot find the R&D section in the manual.

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ORIGINAL: swift

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ORIGINAL: Kesselring

Can anyone tell me how to manage/change the production, please? I cannot find the R&D section in the manual.

click List of Targets
click Production List (upper left corner)
click any of the sites for changing the production
if you click an assambly plant, it will show you what parts and engines are needed for the A/C you want to produce
click Show Requirements for overall industrial overview

and click on production control on the bottom to toggle between AI and human control

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ORIGINAL: guctony
But I think it will be a bit different in this game. At the start of the game non of the Bf 109Ga flying group accept Bf109G's now after 30 day the started to accept. And by the way how can we know which groups will fly Ta 152C in real life it was none.