Pulp sci-fi

[Captain Obvious]

I was poking around the other day, looking for rumors of whatever happened to Rocketship Empires (although at the time, I had forgotten the name). Looks like all we're going to get is a selection of cafepress items on that front, but I did discover Hard Vacuum, another WWII in space sort of game. This is a straight-up wargame, but it could still serve as a pretty interesting Hero setting.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

Help me out here: there were Americans in World War 2?

Oh, wait, sorry, missed a footnote in my history books here. December 7th, 1941? Well, better late than never to join in, I say.

Seriously, I accept that the gaming industry is going to be a little fixated on 300 million American consumers, but is anyone out there in the community even aware that the United Kingdom had a GNP as large as Germany's in 1939 and a lot more Nobel Prize winners than the States? What, exactly, were the French and British doing about space? Waiting for the Americans to give them second-hand spaceships so they could join in? Jolly good show, what!

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

There are British ships in the game...some of the more powerful ones, too. Look again before flipping out. And the US was a de facto player in WWII long before they sent in troops, what with Lend-Lease and with Americans joining up with the British and Canadian militaries (and losing their citizenship in doing so...so highly unofficial, yet more sacrificing because of it).

 

France was beaten down before the space race took off, presumably. Or else they were being supplied by the British and the Americans.

[Doc Shadow]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

Actually I had thought Britain's GNP was larger than Germany's. But Britain and France also had a lot of catching up to do. Germany's military was completely dismantled and a new one built in the years between WWI and WWII, while the French and particularly the British downsized their armies and basically sat on their laurels for the next 20 years. They didn't need to spend all that money modernizing, they had won after all. In addition the German economy had ben focussing on producing military equipment since about 1936 or there about. The British didn't even start a small military build up until 1938. The political will just wasn't there under the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments.

 

Once the war actually began 68 years ago, both nations fought bravely but with tactics and equipment from the last war. It was a losing proposition from the start. As France was falling so was the Chamberlain government in the UK. The Miracle of Dunkirk occurred, followed by the French surrender and suddenly the UK had lost her biggest ally, her foothold on the continent and most of her army's equipment.

 

Most countries would have simply given up and accepted a negociated peace, which was what Hitler was hoping for. But the UK, with a tenacity that can only be admired, hunkered down rebuilt her army and held off the Nazis, pretty much alone, for the next 2 years. The US sent raw materials and, after the heroic efforts of the RAF in the Battle of Britain, war supplies.

 

But the average American was isolationist and had no desire to send their sons off to die in Europe again. They did not recognize the true depth of the Nazi evil at the time. Very few people did. And looked at the war as just another in a long series of European wars that had nothing to do with them, and in any case with so many Americans still out of work they had their own problems.

 

Was this attitude short-sighted?

 

Certainly. But it was also understandable. Roosevelt wanted to get involved but he didn't have the popular support to do so. As such he was very limited in what he could do in the face of the neutrality laws that had been passed.

 

Now once the US entered the war, victory was a forgone conclusion. Not because Americans are uber fantastic soldiers (they aren't), or because American Generals are tactical and strategic geniuses (only Patton was, the rest were mostly just competant), or because American guns, tanks, planes and ships were superior to everyone else's (some were, some weren't, and some were clearly inferior). No, victory was a forgone conclusion because of the incredible industrial capacity of the United States, which, at the time, dwarfed every one else's. World War Two was not won on the battlefield, or in the air, or at sea. It was won in the factories of the United States.

 

This does not belittle the effort of the fighting men and women of any nation. From the legendary bravery of the men and women of the French Resistance, to the bulldog tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds of the RN, RAF and British Army. From the grim waves of Russian soldiers determined to drive the invaders from their soil, to the cheerful, nothing-is-impossible, can-do of the Yankee GI. Every one of them truly deserve the appelation that Tom Brokaw gave them - The Greatest Generation.

 

To belittle the sacrifice of any of them, is to do so, to all of them.

 

As for Hard Vacuum, the French economy had been reduced to whatever was in a few colonies scattered across the globe. They had no resources to spare for it. Likewise the British also had other concerns, but they still managed to build the biggest ship in space at the time - HMS Destructor.

 

Perhaps next time you could check things out before you spout off.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

Now once the US entered the war, victory was a forgone conclusion. Not because Americans are uber fantastic soldiers (they aren't), or because American Generals are tactical and strategic geniuses (only Patton was, the rest were mostly just competant), or because American guns, tanks, planes and ships were superior to everyone else's (some were, some weren't, and some were clearly inferior). No, victory was a forgone conclusion because of the incredible industrial capacity of the United States, which, at the time, dwarfed every one else's. World War Two was not won on the battlefield, or in the air, or at sea. It was won in the factories of the United States.

 

I don't remember the exact quote, but I read something along the lines that a Tiger was a match for a dozen Shermans, but there was always a thirteenth...

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

I refuse to not flip out. Flipping out is my right. It's in the constitution, right under the part where the government has to run a railway on Vancouver Island. (That's right, we Canadians have a good constitution. And if there isn't an Internet constitution that says that you're allowed to flip out without reading something, then there's a lot of very confused people out there.

What got me about the scenario presented in this fine resource is that it puts the Brits in a tagalong sidekick mode. Britain ended up on the verge of being a sidekick, but while I don't know if you Americans have noticed, the Brits usually walk a fine line. They pretend to be sidekicks, but mainly to rook you. When they're really incapable of playing an independent part, they sit in their rooms feeding coins into the heater and pretending to be above such things.

Great Britain's national income (the measure of choice in 1939) was about 40% larger than Germany's. Modern GNP estimates pull the numbers down to parity. (Or so it says in Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction.

The long and the short of it (I lie, I'm incapable of being brief) is that the British armed forces were huge, as was their defence budget and the R&D portion of it was equally big. British aircraft production pushed past German in the second quarter of 1939, and this was a great deal worse than it looked for the Luftwaffe as it was approaching a developmental and scientific bottleneck in which ULTRA and radar are only the tip of the iceberg.

Of course all the spending in the world doesn't matter if there aren't boots on turf where it matters. I suspect that the imminent next flight of BEF reinforcements might have been enough to turn the tide in the critical fighting of 20--2 May, but that's as may be.

At that point, the UK was hooped. It had to accelerate army production to the same scale as air and naval building, cutting off exports at a time when American imports were as vital to their economy as ever.

Worse, American manufacturers were suddenly on the hook for a 2 billion dollar French spending spree. It would have been as idiotic for the Americans to let Britain goas it would have been for Britain to let many of the best American defence contractors suddenly declare bankruptcy. So Britain pretty much spent its immediate credit assuming the French buys, and the Administration played along, making an additional offer of American surplus field guns, mortars and rifles to really involve Americans in an expected imminent German invasion of Britain. This wasn't what the British needed. Guns and rifles are glamorous but not that hard to replace. What was lost in France was stuff like shells, cable and trucks.

"Lend-Lease" won the war, but later. In the meantime the folk "fact" that is stuck in people's heads is that an advanced industrial economy with the largest public research and development effort on Earth somehow couldn't produce high technology. This is a bad lesson to teach, IMHO. Not quite up there with, say S. M. Stirling pounding us with the notion that eugenics works, but bad enough.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

I suppose the majority of this rancor comes from Hollywood's inability to see heroism or value from real-world events that didn't star Americans, but that's not what people actually believe. People that matter anyway...those who have no interest in history in the first place won't bother to learn any of this, and their understanding is based on smoke and mirrors as much as anything else.

 

None of which has anything to do with the game this thread is linked to, given that Britain is represented in the original game while the USSR and Japan had to wait for expansions.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

I suppose the majority of this rancor comes from Hollywood's inability to see heroism or value from real-world events that didn't star Americans

 

None of which has anything to do with the game this thread is linked to, given that Britain is represented in the original game while the USSR and Japan had to wait for expansions.

 

Nah, the rancor (darn, you've seen right through me) is directed at a guy named Corelli Barnett. The Hollywood vision of the world is just about being human.

What a pity that I spewed all my anger over what looks like a a fine game setting. That said, if we all just surrendered to bad history, we would still believe that Columbus proved that the world was round.

[tkdguy]

Re: Pulp sci-fi

 

I'd like to see a modern-day version of this game. You can include the Chinese, Israeli, and other fleets. Weapons would include rail guns and ICBMs.