mdiehl -> (4/7/2003 4:32:57 AM)
|
[QUOTE]With Japan not having to absorb almost 2 years worth of losses and having secured their supply chain completely, what makes you think they would have (a) no better technology to throw at the Americans and (b) would have been such a cake walk?[/QUOTE] The overwhelming preponderance of Japanese losses with respect to ships and ground units occurred after mid 1943. As to tech and production, Japan had no significant surplus capacity, was still generally starved for ferrous metals, and had a very weak capacity for generating new machine tools. Vamping up Japanse industry to levels comarable even to, for example, pre-war France's, would have been a much more complicated and difficult matter than merely securing access to bauxite, rubber and petroleum. Japan also leacked the intensive industrial training infrastructure of the western powers. Even with unfettered access to all resources desired, it would have taken Japan about a decade to meet US 1939 industrial production. [QUOTE]I would presume that an unharrassed Japan would have some pretty nice advanced U-boat clones[/QUOTE] Irrelevant. By 1943 the UBoat problem was largely solved. True, ship losses continued, but Allied ASW was far, far more dangerous to submarines than the latter were to surface vessels. [QUOTE]By then and at a minimum FW/190 level of aircraft to throw against the Americans[/QUOTE] Not even close. Japan's problem wasn't the lack of ability to design good powerplants (which is really the heart of it all when it comes to the differences between early and late war combat a/c), but in the ability to produce these to the tolerances required for high performance engines. Japan had chronic problems with all her in-line designs and all the high kW output late war radials, such that the teething problems experienced by, for example, the US B29 engines, seem like a seamless transition from design to operation. In the late war, more than 65% of high kW Japanese engines were rejected because of their inability to meet design specs and failure specs. Then there's the matter of fuel. Japan's capacity for refining high-octane fuel was, literally, non-existant in 1941. The most that they could have hoped for was to develop a very low output for high-grade synthetics by 1944, with some help from Germans (who'd spent much more time thinking about how to get more energy from a/c powerplant designs, but who were still three years behind the US). [QUOTE]resulting in a fairly high rate of losses against the big bombers who we find to be completely invulnerable in Uncommon Valor.[/QUOTE] Even with something operating akin to the FW 190, Japan's ability to coordinate the operation of aircraft against inbound strikes began the war at WW1 levels. By the end of the war they'd caught up to where the UK was in early 1940. [QUOTE]Would this late entry also mean that Germany got time to gear up completely to war production, increasing the threat levels in the west?[/QUOTE] No. It means that the USSR would have fielded many more P40s, P47s, M3s, and M4s, and that there's a decent chance that the US would have been manufacturing T34/90s (it was after all basically a Christy designed suspension, so I figure it might be armed with the US 90mm M1). Either way, Germany loses in 1945. It's just a matter of how many more men and how much more material they lose in the USSR. [QUOTE]Perhaps the V3 ( ) would be landing in Washington DC by that point in the war had resources not been wasted elsewhere ...[/QUOTE] Perhaps Martians would have seized control of Washington or London, or maybe the V3s would have been shot down by Shrike or Sprint SAMs. Maybe the USS Nimitz would have time warped back... [QUOTE]A million and one possibilities ensue with a late entry by the USA. Perhaps Germany gets the first A-Bomb.[/QUOTE] Not a chance. Germany's bomb designers were barking up the wrong tree, following Heisenberg's erroneous fuel equations. As a result they needed vast quantities of DO2 (deuterium O2 or "heavy water") to do their basic research. Norwegian partisans (IIRC, nine of them) sabotaged production. When the factory was repaired, the Norwegians sank the tanker-barge along with its heavy-water cargo (which at the times was all tah Germany had). Germany could have screwed around with Heisenberg's plan for a decade without success. More likely, however, is that after 5 years of the indordinate expense, AH realizes that his money would have been better spent on PzVs and has Heisenberg shot. Had the Germans gotten to the productoin of fissile material, they most likely would have nuked their own research facility, because Heisenberg's model demanded a lot more fissile material in the reaction than was actually needed.
|
|
|
|