Why doesn't the USSR have any naval or land scientists? Should they be added in the near future? I can understand naval scientists, but land scientists not so much.
- 11
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Solution
Yeah USSR startup for facilities is criminally underdone. If France starts with a land warfare facility, so should the USSR.
No land scientists is also almost offensive
- 7
This is a fair question. The Soviets clearly had a lead in tank design and research during the 1930s and were early adopters of flame tanks. However, that was about it and they didn't show any real in anything else in the land special projects list. On the air side they again had good aircraft designers but didn't show any sign of progressing anything else. They did have a lead in solid fuel rocketry that lasted through the entire war but again no sign of anything else and that rocket ammunition lead doesn't feature in the game.
I would say there are arguments to give them flame thrower and rocket artillery techs for free or via national focuses but the lack of initial facilities is reasonable. The lack of scientists does seem to be a but unfair given the actuaL population of scientists they had but maybe it takes 100pp to get one out of the gulags.
I would say there are arguments to give them flame thrower and rocket artillery techs for free or via national focuses but the lack of initial facilities is reasonable. The lack of scientists does seem to be a but unfair given the actuaL population of scientists they had but maybe it takes 100pp to get one out of the gulags.
- 9
Moskvin, Grigory Nikolaevich. Soviet tank engineer, specialist in tank armament layout, participant in the creation of heavy tanks T-35, KV-220, T-100, SU-14, KV-7 and others, laureate of the 1st degree Stalin Prize, holder of the Order of Lenin.
Nikolay Valentinovich Tseits. Soviet armored vehicle designer, professor at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, leading designer of the Leningrad Experimental Machine-Building Plant No. 185 named after S. M. Kirov. Creator of tanks T-28, T-29, KV-13 and KV-5, developer of tanks T-35, KV-3, KV-4.
Koshkin, Mikhail Ilyich. Soviet design engineer, creator and first chief designer of the T-34 tank, head of the tank design bureau of the Kharkov locomotive plant named after Comintern
Nikolay Valentinovich Tseits. Soviet armored vehicle designer, professor at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, leading designer of the Leningrad Experimental Machine-Building Plant No. 185 named after S. M. Kirov. Creator of tanks T-28, T-29, KV-13 and KV-5, developer of tanks T-35, KV-3, KV-4.
Koshkin, Mikhail Ilyich. Soviet design engineer, creator and first chief designer of the T-34 tank, head of the tank design bureau of the Kharkov locomotive plant named after Comintern
- 4
But, on the other hand these guys are just part of the MIO staff. The characters represented as scientists in the game are research and development scientists rather than development engineers for designing equipment. What is needed is examples of researchers who would work on more innovative stuff and then you are likely to fall foul of my point that maybe the cost of Soviet scientists is just the political power to get them back out of the Gulags.
- 4
- 2
Over the French? They certainly had a doctrinal and production advantage, but the Char B1 was probably the outstanding tank at the start of the war.
Not that it matters, because having a facility with a scientist doesn't really mean much for tank design beyond flame tanks.
Erwin Aders was chief engineer at Henschel-Werke, Ferdinand Porsche was an engineer and even if he was a scientist he was certainly not a scientist in the standard sense of the word at least because he had no higher education, Edward Grotte was also an engineer. I have a feeling that if we continue to go through every scientist in the game we will find a dozen more engineers just like in the Soviet Union Personally for me there is no big difference between all these people above and those presented above in the thread, the only difference between Koshkin and Moskvin is the place of work, namely one was a private engineer and the other was a state engineer.
As for the idea of using PP to release some scientists from imprisonment, it seems to me to be a very good idea and would be historical in a way (Korolev is a good example) and at least somewhere else paranoia could be involved besides killing all the generals...
- 1
Let me remind you that on No Step Back release USSR had NO MIO for the most produced plane of WWII.
- 2
- 1
The problem with science and engineering was political control and purges. Science advances best with freedom of thought and experiment, and that did not exist in the Soviet Union at that time. Many scientists and engineers were sent to gulags for political reasons, although some of them also got out of there later. Some designers worked with their projects in prisons.
- 3
Both Italians and Germans had problems with freedom of thought, but somehow they are not stopped from having both scientists and MIOs, but with the point that technological progress is slower in such countries it is true because everything depends on the party or leader.
- 4
Definitely. There were 17 B1s as of Early 1936 in the French army.
The Soviets had 35 T-35 monsters, and 200+ T-28 tanks at the same time.
In 1936 the Soviets were the only "War economy" in Europe, clearly preparing for large-scale military action based on the output they had.
In terms of research, everyone was doing something. Out of European powers (ex-USSR), France probably did the most, followed by Germany and then by UK. But USSR in landship research simply invested a lot more than the others.
Last edited:
1931, Stalin quote: We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed.
What does lack of freedom of thought lead to? How is it possible when half the country is in the GULAG and the other half of the country is guarding the other half. But in the end, it was able to resist Germany and turn back and was able to stop the Germans. Apparently, barrage squads and shooting in the back really work, as we were shown in Enemy at the Gates.
- 3
Well yeah. I conceded that the USSR had doctrinal and industrial advantages. It's quite difficult to overstate how useless French high command was, and how wrong their understanding of post-WWI warfare was. They didn't build enough tanks and they didn't use them right and they may not even have known how many they built -- they certainly had no idea how many planes they built in the leadup to the Battle of France. But purely technologically, the B1 was an exceptional tank for 1936, possibly the exceptional tank, and I don't think scientists and research facilities are intended to represent how the equipment is used, where the USSR was undoubtedly far ahead of the French.
T-35, SMK, other designs that are less known.
On the air side, the USSR had the same problem as Italy or Japan: it was incapable of developing its own engines.
Once after the Winter War of 1939/40, the Western powers instated an arms and tech embargo on the USSR, which prevented the USSR from obtaining latest engines.
After that, Soviets had to basically rely on trying to make something out of French engines they had on hand (not counting their Mikulin AM engine line, that had its own major issues).
Add to this, the fact that Soviets had severe issues with high-octane aviation fuel production up to 1945 inclusive...
Soviet rocketry was a catastrophe. Extremely expensive and very much useless. Dispersion values for Soviet WW2 rockets were faked until 1960 when this was discovered.
Soviet rocketry was simply "gorgeous' with the "whew-whew-bash-bash", which made it look like it was an effective weapon. In reality it wasn't.
It was moreso the "Social policy", while purges came in second.
USSR was fighting an internal silent civil war, and was adamant on raising a "new generation of communist-minded people" that would "Exclude priviliged classes from the old regime".
As such, it forbade people from "non manual labor" backgrounds from getting a higher education for the sake of "Equity".
As a result, you commonly would have people in university who didn't have an elementary school degree.
Marshal. Zhukov for example had 3 grades passed, elementary school at best. Yet was in the High Command.
How did they graduate?
Well, they went as far "collective exams" where 1 person from a 20-30 people class would write the exam for everyone, and if he did well, everyone passed.
Other techniques would also get developed, so in reality, getting a high school degree in France or Germany was not the same value as a high school degree in the USSR.
It was all for the show, "the leadership tasked us to pump out graduates, we're pumping out graduates".
Same would go in University.
You can have a brilliant senior aviation engineer, but if he doesn't have someone who can design the undercarriage/wheels of the aircraft (Mr. Silvansky and his I-220 I'm looking at you), you won't get far.
Similarly, you can have someone go to an Artillery military academy, but he may not be capable of applying basic trigonometry or calculus.
Gulag and political persecution because "We suspect you of sabotage (and not that you just don't grasp basic math)" was just a small part of the major effort.
French high command was extremely competent. They built more tanks ( and arguably better tanks) between (I believe) Munich 1938 and September 1939 than Germany or UK.
Blaming the French is an anglocentric and sovietcentric thing, to cover up for the catastrophes of Greece 1941, North Africa 1941 and Barbarossa 1941.
In reality, Germans advanced in France 1940 slower than in the USSR in 1941.
I recently read an interesting take that a lot had to do with French politics.
For some reason France invested heavily in its naval bases (Mers el Kebir) and battlefleet (Richelieu) for prestige reasons.
At the same time, Socialists supported large-scale fortification expenditure as a way to combat the Great Depression unemployment.
In terms of aircraft, there was a major nationalization following the Popular Front 1936 election victory, that messed up its aircraft industry.
Not only that, the UK decided to keep its airforce outside of France, which skewed the numbers in Germany's favor.
The B1 was the best the French had, was fairly cheap (a B1 and S35 had a 20% price difference), but it was the same level as Soviet T-28, T-34 or German Pz. IV.
- 3
- 1
TLDR: Look uhh this post kind of got out of hand. The TLDR is:
- French high command was not extremely competent. They were, in fact, extremely not-competent.
- They built good tanks but had no idea what to do with them.
- French high command deserves every bit of blame they get. Sorry, France! Your generals were old defeatists.
- The biggest problem with the air war was that the French built a lot of planes (which were not as good as American, German or British planes) and then parked them somewhere and no one in high command knew what had happened to them.
- That's right, they literally lost their air force in the couch cushions.
French high command was as incompetent as any group of senior military officers has ever been. I'm sorry, saying it's Soviet-centric to acknowledge the failings of French military leadership is ignorant. "For the High Command, stagnation had become the supreme form of wisdom. ... Our strategists were little more than bookworms in the library, sheltering their insufficiencies behind precedents. They had made of the Ministry of War, the War Council, the General Staff, gigantic machines where the plethoric central services reigned amid mountains of paper... The General Staff, convinced of its infallibility, made the defense of its prejudices and prerogatives the essence of its action... Having retired to its own Sinai among its revealed truths and the vestiges of vanished glory, [it] lived on the margin of events, devoting all its efforts to patch up an organization which had been superseded by the facts." That's from France's own postwar Parliamentary Investigating Committee. Or we could ask Petain himself -- "After the war of 1914-1918, it was finished for me. My military mind was closed. When I saw the introduction of other tools, other instruments, other methods, I must say they didn't interest me."
Gen. Jean-Baptiste Estienne, who was France's premier tank expert, proposed the creation of an independent tank army in 1920, armored corps which foresaw the German armored divisions. In 1930, he refined his tank warfare doctrine, asking for not only independence but insisting on close collaborations between independent armored forces and a large air force providing direct battlefield combat support, writing that "assault artillery [armored forces] will henceforth determine the destinies of armies and peoples." Unfortunately, French high command disagreed. Gen. Julien Dufieux, the Inspector General of Tanks and Infantry, wrote Weygand to say "there is no possibility that a mechanized combat detachment can ever be used to lead a complete operation by itself" and insisted that tanks be dispersed as infantry support vehicles, not concentrated in independent armored units. At Estienne's prodding, French high command resolved the doctrinal dispute by issuing the Manual of Instructions for the Employment of Tanks, and did not resolve it in his favor:
In addition, the Manual instructed that tankers be under the command of infantry officers at all times. In 1938, a Major Laporte wrote in Revue d'Infanterie: "Not even the most modern tanks can ever lead the fighting by themselves and for themselves. Their mission must always be to participate along with the fire of the artillery and heavy infantry arms in the protection and support of attacks... On the field of eternal battle the principal enemy of the foot soldier remains the enemy infantryman, who, as our instructions recall to us, alone CONQUERS GROUND, organizes it and holds it. The tank must above all be considered as one of the auxiliaries of the foot soldier." The emphasis is in the original. Also in 1938, Petain himself wrote that "it would be imprudent to conclude that an armored force... is an irresistible weapon. The decisive results obtained by this force would have no tomorrow.... As for tanks, which are supposed by some to bring us a shortening of wars, their incapacity is striking."
And as for the air force operating in close coordination with armored columns, High Command scuppered that too. Petain wrote that "direct action of air forces in the battle is illusory," and Gamelin agreed, saying, "There is no such thing as the aerial battle. There is only the battle on the ground." The Manual of Instructions, produced under Petain in 1921, wrote of the airplane that "by day it scouts, by night it bombards." And that was all. There was not much revision in the manual issued in 1936 under Gen. Georges -- "this does not essentially modify the essential rules laid down in the previous instructions." French bombers were never equipped with radios, for they were never expected to operate in support of troops.
So doctrine. And as for production -- orders for the B tank were 10 a month from 1935 to 1939, and in most months 10 tanks were not produced. After the conquest of Czechoslovakia in 1939, France was producing eight B tanks a month. In 1933, the French army only spent 41% of its allotted budget, and only 67% in 1934, while all the while Weygand begged for more funds to modernize. In 1935, when Gamelin replaced Weygand, only 40% of the budget was spent. The postwar Parliament described the situation as "unbelievable", and the Finance Minster at the time described "an absence of overall planning, a lack of any direction" in military spending. Part of why the Maginot Line was seized upon so eagerly was that it represented a simple way to spend money. Money = concrete = Good Job, without having to think about anything, or, say, read Guderian, JFC Fuller or Estienne, all of whom were saying essentially the same thing about the potential for armored breakthroughs.
Independent of armored warfare doctrinal shortfalls, it cannot be overstated how awful the French command and control was, or how poor their grasp of strategy was. The Military Staff College was described by a junior officer as "having become a school of eunuchs, where it was no longer a question of raising the level of the thinking." Another said its teaching was "of an astonishing poverty." The Center of Advanced Military Studies was just as bad. General Tony Albord said that the French fear of new methods, new tactics and new doctrines was "the principal cause" of the disaster of 1940. If we go back to the 1936 revision of the Manual of Instructions under Alphonse Georges, who would be commander-in-chief of the northern front during 1939 and 1940 despite being perpetually on the edge of a nervous breakdown, "the Committee which has drawn up the present instructions does not believe that this technical progress sensibly modifies the essential rules hitherto established in the domain of tactics. Consequently it believes that the doctrine objectively fixed at the end of the war [WW1, 1918] by the eminent chiefs who had held high commands must remain the charter for the tactical employment of large units." And that was the plan -- to fight the next war with the methods of the last one, and sidelining any officer who dared criticize the heroes of 1918. Estienne out, Petain's principle of the inviolable front in -- not as strategy, but as law. Bigger than law. Scripture. Holy writ. If you've got troubles with it, De Gaulle, tell it to your bartender, because Petain, Weygand and Gamelin have spoken.
The biggest factor skewing fighter and bomber numbers in Germany's favor? French planes were produced and parked at airfields, and the French military did not know where they were, because the French senior officers were completely incompetent. I cannot stress enough how absurd French behavior surrounding their air force was. While they were screaming at the British for planes and pilots, they had nearly 2700 planes in North Africa, including more than 700 of their newest fighters and more than 400 bombers. Gamelin, a man who was easy to stun by the end of the war, was stunned to learn that over the course of the Battle of France the French Air Force actually grew in size, and had more modern fighters and bombers at the time of its surrender than it did at the beginning of the war. To quote extensively from William Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Repulblic:
Sorry. Forgive the long quote. The situation with the French Air Force remains, as far as I know, shrouded in mystery -- though when de Gaulle was evacuated from France, Spears wrote that he was astonished to see "more planes than he had ever seen before" packed wingtip to wingtip at the airfield at Bordeaux, and was actually somewhat cheered by the sight, because he thought they were being evacuated to North Africa, where they'd be used in continuing French resistance. Suffice it to say, however, that the British reserving the bulk of their fighter force for home defense was not the critical factor in the loss of the air war over France in 1940. Allow me to quote the footnote that appears in the above quotation:
The French also purchased more than 500 American aircraft of various types, and had more than 300 Curtis P-36s available in May 1940. What percentage of them saw combat in ZOAN, I do not know, and I don't think anyone else does either. Postwar French military and political memoirs read like, in the words of R.A.C. Parker, "a study in competitive self-exculpation. The military chiefs seek to lay the blame on the politicians, the politicians on the army and both groups on the British."
Last edited:
- 2
- 2
Even hypothetically it's nonsense... The Soviets won by a completely different factor than the barrage squads.
- 1
I would leave this link here, quite old sugesstion with around 10 Soviet scientists in different areas, not presented in the game yet:
Also aside from tanks, Soviets had relatively huge park of railroad artillery and heavy artillery
Also aside from tanks, Soviets had relatively huge park of railroad artillery and heavy artillery
- 1
- 1
This statement, whilst true, doesn't fully reflect what the special projects system is doing. These projects are research in the sense of needing freedom of thought, they are engineering projects that require scientists because they are trying to do new things that aren't already well understood by engineers. These types of project do not need freedom of thought and are, in fact, one of the things undermining true scientific research. If anything, the Soviet Union had major long-term issue because all of its research projects were directed but the consequence was their stagnating economy which didn't fully hit home for a couple of decades. The Soviets should be really good at HOI4 style projects since they don't have any "blue sky" element and they can co-opt scientific resources on any scale they like. Just takes PP to get them out of the gulags or whatever other restrictive environment they had been stashed away in.
- 1