aspqrz
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Joined: 7/20/2004
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Indeed. But there were real world constraints that were in place by 1939, and even more so in 1933, that should limit what the player can actually do.
The Germans, historically, tried to get around many of them, and failed.
Case #1: Naval Building Limits. Sure. They tried to build several whole new classes of Submarine by offsite production in nontraditional factories way to hell and gone from the slipways, largely targeted by the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign, and then assemble them onsite ... but, well, it didn't work out well.
* The nontraditional factories weren't up to the required levels of quality control and the various hull sections of almost all of the initial production run (those few that actually entered service before the end of the war, and almost all of those still working up after launch but nonoperational for crew or other reasons at war's end) found that there were significant size variations between them ... usually several inches ... and these are pressure hulls.
Sure. They could be welded together ... but they weren't able to handle the even the crush depths of the older, pre-war, designs ... rendering them effectively useless.
* The whole design process had been shortcircuited to rush them into production and, well, the usual problems that would have been found and corrected by a more normal prototyping process was cut out ... and the hull section size mismatches were only the very grossest of the errors that resulted.
* The assembly facilities proved to be just as easy, if not easier, targets for Allied bombers as the slipways they replaced. More vulnerable in some ways ... even if not actually hit by bombs during a raid, if the welders working on attaching two hull sections stopped the weld before it was finished, it rendered the whole job unusable .... and the weld process could take the best part of a day.
* By the time they were staring to be available, if still mostly unusable, the Allied ASW efforts had rendered the whole German U-Boat force a complete waste of resources.
Case #2. Iron and Steel production. The Germans didn't have enough iron ore, and couldn't afford to import as much as they would have liked (from Sweden and elsewhere) because they didn't have the foreign currency reserves ... and never did. Their pre-war solution was to expand the mining of iron ore in Germany ... but the problem was that the chemical composition of the ore was such that then available refining technology could either not process it, or do it only with significant difficulty.
The Germans went ahead with the expansion anyway, in the hope they'd make a breakthrough in refining tech. They never did. Postwar allied development, in fact.
Case #3. Aero Engines. As early as 1935/5, IIRC, Goering et al realised that German manufacturing practices and factories simply couldn't match the output of US aero engine factories, or, really, even British ones. And they realised that in event of a war the Brits would have access to US production while Germany wouldn't ... and, even before the war, Germany wouldn't as she didn't have the foreign currency reserves to buy.
Solution? Build a huge aero engine factory, sorta like an engine "Willow Run", and hope that it would boost German aero engine production massively enough. It failed because the Germans couldn't ever quite figure out how the allies managed to do what they did, because they could never organise it efficiently (one party systems generally have this sort of problem, as you may have noticed  ), and because the resources needed by it were simply never available at the levels needed (see the problem with steel refining/production mentioned above).
Case #4. The War came too soon. In a lot of other munitions and armaments related areas they had plans underway to expand production capacity underway in 1939 ... but not planned to come online until the mid 1940's ... so they had a choice. Abandon the capacity expansion programs in order to get short-term increases by, forex, working existing facilities three shifts rather than one, or, perhaps, two, for a short term boost, but long term dead-end ... or labour on with the limits enforced by the eventual expansion plans. They chose to do the latter, mostly, which is why there are considerable production increases in 1944-45 (Speer took credit, but the programs were already in place).
The real reason the Germans did so well is because they had a 2-3 year head start over the Allies. If they could have managed a quick victory, they may have gotten away with their gamble, but it was always a long-shot, given that the productive capacity, and expansion capacity, of the Allies was always much greater from the get go.
As it was, they did very well.
Could they have won?
Depends on how you define "winning".
It's pretty unlikely they could have conquered Russia ... something they even accepted themselves ... and the Brits, well, the closest example historically is the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon conquered most of Europe, and, so he thought, had Britain on the economic ropes (and, to a degree, he did), but Britain fought on, off and on, from 1789-1815. 26 years (yes, not all fighting actively).
Sealion is a nonstarter in anything even vaguely resembling reality. So Britain is going to continue to fight. And Germany simply doesn't have the naval or air resources to starve or bomb her into submission. So Britain is going to be there all along.
Nope. PPs don't represent everything.
Phil
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Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon; Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD)
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Email: aspqrz@tpg.com.au
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Printable Version
RE: The Rock - 
) why they didn't do this and Gibraltar was never seriously challenged. 
) to point out, the Kriegsmarine was last in the queue for access to resources. Sure, the Z-Plan got the money budget but, in Nazi Germany as in Soviet Russia, money was meaningless ... control of resources was what counted ... the money the KM had might as well have been Monopoly money for all the good it was. 
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