ITAKLinus
Posts: 630
Joined: 2/22/2018 From: Italy Status: offline
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Ok, here is my perspective. Probably it has some shortcomings somewhere. And probably others have different opinions. Individually, I think that in R&D the rule is "go big or go home". Thinking in industrial and strategic terms, you don't achieve much anticipating a model of few months. Suppose you put 4 factories on KI-94-II. You get it few months before it's scheduled. Say 6 months (and it would be quite a miracle such an advance). It's 1-SEPT-1945. Does it change something? At that point the war is either lost or won (with "won" I do mean a draw which is, accordingly to me, a Jap victory). Now think you put a lot of factories on the KI-94-II from 7-DEC. I use the excel tool I link you in this discussion to make my calculations usually. If you put enough factories, you have it in mid-44 if I remember correctly. It is a game-changer. There are many tradeoffs, but it's my personal idea about R&D. Just an example with KI-94-II, a model I am researching in one of my PBEM. I think I have more than 30 factories on it. Way more, probably. I am far behind on the rest of the R&D, though. Again, it's a matter of your grand strategy and your doctrine. For example, if you privilege a sort of kantai kessen to be done somewhere in late '43, you probably need an approach which is completely different from a doctrine based on elastic response. I feel that the best way to organize R&D is figuring out your grand strategy and doctrine first of all. Then you define what you need and when to accomplish your strategy. Finally, you allocate resources to that. So, if your idea is to have a quick 4:1 autovictory (or 3:1 at 1-JAN-1944), you require to implement your vision (a sort of blitzkrieg defeating the Allies and making them ask for peace) into operations. And these operations require assets. Assets you can either produce outright from 7-DEC or research and then put into production. In this reasoning, it's contradictory to research KI-94-II, for example: why do you research half-heartedly (is it an actually existing word, btw?) if you do not plan to reach the date in which it will become operational? I give you a brief example of what I do mean. I decided to go for India in one of the two PBEM I posted above. Leaving aside the whole strategic reasoning behind that, I started researching and producing what I needed to accomplish my operational objectives, based on the strategic ones. Therefore I invested relatively a lot in researching Helen-IIa to have it soon and mass-produce it (200/month) and I privileged long-legged IJAAF fighters (Oscars) instead of good sweepers such as Tojos, reasoning being that I the territory is huge, AFs are available in great numbers but long range offensive assets are to be preferred to short-legged tojos. Moreover, I figured out I couls sweep Karachi from a base WEST of Ahamadabad or how the hell is spelled without triggering emergency reinforcements. Mass production of an inferior plane, Oscar, has been therefore preferred to the better Tojo because of operational reasons, which find their grounds in my strategic goals. Here the link to the research excel spreadsheet. Don't know whether it is 100% accurate, I found it on the forum and so far it has been correct for most of the models. Not for my current heavy investment in KI-94-II but it's because I got lucky. https://www.dropbox.com/s/44qps38pynyw8cs/research.xls?dl=0
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Francesco
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