Mike Solli
Posts: 15792
Joined: 10/18/2000 From: the flight deck of the Zuikaku Status: offline
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2 Nov 42 Burma: I landed ~10k supply at Rangoon. That's not enough to really do much other than get Rangoon above 20k supply, so I was able to replenish the air units there. My army NE of Akyab is supplied finally. I'm trying a deliberate attack tomorrow to see what happens. Ted attacked me 5 days ago. I'm hoping he's low on supply because I have Akyab cut off and Cox's Bazaar has only a jungle hex to get supply in. No convoys are moving there. I have a couple of subs sitting along his SLOC to those bases. I get messages that I'm shooting down transports daily so he's flying in some supply that way, but he's losing several transports a day doing it, and has been for months. I'm hoping for the best with this attack, because it'll burn up my supply doing it. By the way, he's still not opposing me in the air. SE Fleet: Ted sent the whole shebang at Salamaua's defenses, 76x 2E sorties and 71x 4E sorties. I didn't have much in the way of defenses there, just a handful of squads in an AS battalion. His divisional attack pushed me out easily. Now he has a very beat up base. Ted sent a flight of P38s over Shortland Island. He lost 2 to my Oscar sentai there, while I lost 1 plane but the pilot bailed out safely. 5 Fleet: KB1 is one day's sail from it's destination: 10 hexes west of Adak. There it will sit, waiting for the inevitable assault against Adak. Ted has two tiny SCs there, and one is out of ASW ammo. I have half a dozen subs around Adak and another half a dozen around Dutch Harbor. He keeps sneaking merchant convoys to Dutch Harbor. I keep missing connecting with them with my subs by a hex or two. Rotten luck. Other Stuff Reinforcements: DD Tamanami (Yugumo class) - is joining KB1 off Adak. SC CHa-45 - ASW Well, all of my A6M3a and A6M2-N factories upgraded to the A6M5, so that question is moot. Everything that uses the Ha-35 engine is off (A6M5, Ki-43-IIa, Ki-45 & C5M2 - upgraded to the Judy-C). My 3x30 Oscar R&D factories gave me 6% and my 6x30 Zero factories gave me 12%. Banzai! I currently am up to 511 Ha-35 engines in the pool, so I'll keep the aircraft factories off for a few more days. I don't have enough Ha-35 engine factories producing to keep the Oscars and Zeros producing 100% of the time so I'll have to keep an eye on the engine pool level to maximize R&D. I'm ok with Oscars and Nicks right now, but I don't have a lot of Zeros in the pools so I'll have to turn some of them on to get the M5 going soon. I turned off a bunch of tiny xAK/xAKLs in the production schedule. It won't do much now but I'm going to start turning off merchant yards, a little at a time to keep my pool rising but slowly. Right now it increasing ~170 a turn. I'd like to increase my HI savings. Right now my HI savings are ~4800 a day. Turning off 70 merchant ship yards will bring it over 5k a day. I'll start there. I started the conversion of the Chitose to a CVL today. I'll start the Chiyoda tomorrow. 300 days...... That gives me 4 trained FP daitai of 24 planes each. They are either trained in NavS or ASW. I have them training the one they aren't good at. I'm going to let them train for the rest of the year. Then, I'll set them in strategic locations along my SLOC from Singapore on ASW missions. They'll be set at 40% ASW, 40% NavS and 20% rest. I still haven't decided where to place them. In addition to those units, I have several other units from a couple of AVs I lost early on. They're also at 24 planes and will be trained in a similar fashion. This has pretty much cleaned out my FP pool, but I rarely lose FPs anyway. They will all be at full strength in planes in a couple of weeks. When it's all done, I'll have 10-12 of these units along my SLOC, along with ASW TFs. I'm hoping to keep Ted's subs sighted and harassed so he can't attack effectively. Another nice thing about having 24 plane units is that each can have 1 AS battalion to keep it flying.
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