Kevin Mc Carthy said:
OK. This i can agree wholeheartedly with. Engineer, you ok with this?
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OK. This i can agree wholeheartedly with. Engineer, you ok with this?
You've been doing a lot of reading lately, haven't you?! 
Correct ... there was some serrendipity [USA] and some human error [GER] both involved. In the GC, i think to be faithful to the probabilities, we have to address the fact that either may not have ocurred for this game. To continually assume that they always ocurr in some way defeats an objective of the game.
At the least, we need to carefully examine the history that drove these type of events and then code an event which forces paths dependent upon circumstances and player choices.
For both of these, ENGINEER, you seem to have the best background. If you write the text and decision tree, I can code ....
Engineer said:
Correct ... there was some serrendipity [USA] and some human error [GER] both involved. In the GC, i think to be faithful to the probabilities, we have to address the fact that either may not have ocurred for this game. To continually assume that they always ocurr in some way defeats an objective of the game.
At the least, we need to carefully examine the history that drove these type of events and then code an event which forces paths dependent upon circumstances and player choices.
For both of these, ENGINEER, you seem to have the best background. If you write the text and decision tree, I can code ....
Engineer said:
German Nukes
PaxMondo:
PaxMondo:
In 1938, the SS investigated him because he had enough scientific integrity to refuse to knuckle under to some ideological German scientists who were dismissing quantum physics as a "Jewish" science. Heisenburg was cleared. He visited the USA in the summer of 1939 and was besieged with offers to come to the USA and teach like Fermi, Szilard, and others. He refused all offers.
Heisenburg was disillusioned about the prospect of democracy to oppose the great dictators. His belief was that the totalitarians would win. Given that decision, he decided that a German world empire would be better than the Soviet alternative. Some apologists for Heisenburg have suggested he did intentionally fumble the calculations, but the transcripts from the interrogation suggest that at the least he continued acting as if this was a colossal blunder instead declaring with relief he could "end the charade."
Heisenburg was a great theoretician, but was sub-par when it came to creating practical applications. I think that was critical problem for the German program - he was the wrong guy to head the program.
PaxMondo:
I took a second look at the drawing, and it seems that the premise was that you could have two halves of the spherical paraffin/uranium core and then bring them together with the volume of heavy water between the two halves serving as the moderator. The failure mode with that is if you lost track of the temperature and started boiling the water, then you replace the heavy water with less dense heavy-water steam. If you don't move the core halves then you the possibility of a run-away. The engineering solution is a kill switch that uses springs or counter-weights to return the core halves to their start positions at a safe distance in the heavy water tank.
Events:
1) Initial unsucessful British Commando Raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for success, burns supplies)
2) Subsequent unsuccessful British spy raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for succes, burns fewer supplies)
3) Subsequent unsuccessful British bomber raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for succes, burns oil and supplies)
4) Second spy raid on Heavy Water Convoy taking inventory to Germany (slight chance for success, burns supplies) (historical success in sinking the ferry where the heavy water rail cars were.)
5) Special do or die bombing raid on Berlin nuke labs (ahistorical) (moderate chance for success, burns supplies, oil, and manpower).
6) Heavy Water Pile Meltdown (ahistorical) (slight chance of simulating a dirty nuke hit on Berlin (or Moscow or Tokyo or Cambridge or Chicago or Paris) if a heavy water pile is achieved).
7) Heisenburg defects in 1939 (ahistorical) (A slight chance that the USA get a nuke tech but the Germans don't make the tons of uranium mistake and can move past the bomb mass miscalculation).
8) Nuclear Secrets Spying (historical) (Probably, the right way to do this is to have a small probability that whenever the USA or Britain discover a nuclear tech, it may be stolen by the Russians. The US compartmentalized their research so only a handful of trusted individuals knew it all. The British moved their people around and got more use out of them. Klaus Fuchs penetrated the British sysem and gave the Russians a stream of technology on diverse topics. Russian agents in the USA tended to get or not a single item).
PaxMondo:
In the case of the west you can see some progression with more experimental data refining the data, yielding better quality numbers. As I recall, the final calculation was in the tens of pounds and the designers padded that to about 100 pounds of fissile material. There is a coding question about how to apply a randomization factor on a technical advance (duration of 200 days +/- 50 days) or make success problematic. I don't know how to do that. But I can see about putting together a tree.
PaxMondo:
In 1938, the SS investigated him because he had enough scientific integrity to refuse to knuckle under to some ideological German scientists who were dismissing quantum physics as a "Jewish" science. Heisenburg was cleared. He visited the USA in the summer of 1939 and was besieged with offers to come to the USA and teach like Fermi, Szilard, and others. He refused all offers.
Heisenburg was disillusioned about the prospect of democracy to oppose the great dictators. His belief was that the totalitarians would win. Given that decision, he decided that a German world empire would be better than the Soviet alternative. Some apologists for Heisenburg have suggested he did intentionally fumble the calculations, but the transcripts from the interrogation suggest that at the least he continued acting as if this was a colossal blunder instead declaring with relief he could "end the charade."
Heisenburg was a great theoretician, but was sub-par when it came to creating practical applications. I think that was critical problem for the German program - he was the wrong guy to head the program.
PaxMondo:
I took a second look at the drawing, and it seems that the premise was that you could have two halves of the spherical paraffin/uranium core and then bring them together with the volume of heavy water between the two halves serving as the moderator. The failure mode with that is if you lost track of the temperature and started boiling the water, then you replace the heavy water with less dense heavy-water steam. If you don't move the core halves then you the possibility of a run-away. The engineering solution is a kill switch that uses springs or counter-weights to return the core halves to their start positions at a safe distance in the heavy water tank.
Events:
1) Initial unsucessful British Commando Raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for success, burns supplies)
2) Subsequent unsuccessful British spy raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for succes, burns fewer supplies)
3) Subsequent unsuccessful British bomber raid on Heavy Water Plant (slight chance for succes, burns oil and supplies)
4) Second spy raid on Heavy Water Convoy taking inventory to Germany (slight chance for success, burns supplies) (historical success in sinking the ferry where the heavy water rail cars were.)
5) Special do or die bombing raid on Berlin nuke labs (ahistorical) (moderate chance for success, burns supplies, oil, and manpower).
6) Heavy Water Pile Meltdown (ahistorical) (slight chance of simulating a dirty nuke hit on Berlin (or Moscow or Tokyo or Cambridge or Chicago or Paris) if a heavy water pile is achieved).
7) Heisenburg defects in 1939 (ahistorical) (A slight chance that the USA get a nuke tech but the Germans don't make the tons of uranium mistake and can move past the bomb mass miscalculation).
8) Nuclear Secrets Spying (historical) (Probably, the right way to do this is to have a small probability that whenever the USA or Britain discover a nuclear tech, it may be stolen by the Russians. The US compartmentalized their research so only a handful of trusted individuals knew it all. The British moved their people around and got more use out of them. Klaus Fuchs penetrated the British sysem and gave the Russians a stream of technology on diverse topics. Russian agents in the USA tended to get or not a single item).
Engineer said:
However, as the gain_tech command only works when ALL the prerequisites are known and "knowing a tech" like Heavy Water Plant, is not the same as BUILDING one.
Nuclear Spying
Good points on the mechanics of the spying.
I took a quick look at Harvard, and it lists both gain_tech and steal_tech commands. I recall tinkering with the steal_tech for the draft espionage events that I was working on. I think steal_tech gets around the prerequisite issue and just adds the tech to their inventory.
Some techs are theoretical and stealing in a conventional sense is easy to imagine. In the case of Fuchs and Gaseous Diffusion, for example, by stealing the finished designs, then the lead time and wasted effort getting to that known good process is cut short, but building the enormous gaseous diffusion plan costs the same whether you do it at Oak Ridge or Magnetogorsk. In a way this is a back-handed argument in favor of the complicated tech tree so you could have "stealable" theoretical techs and "non-stealable" tech which really represents industrial infrastructure
You could argue that the savings from a successful spy tech could be to award the stealing power a certain number of supplies, letting them divert IC into research. The counter argument is that there is no mechanism to force that so a player could use the fruits of espionage to build more combat units. That would lead to abusing the system.
Another consideration is that maybe we're focussing too closely on nukes. Fuchs, for example, passed on intelligence on radar proxity fuses and new explosives, in addition to his nuke intelligence. Instead of restricting the spying to nukes,you could trigger on a time basis (quarterly?), and let the Soviets gain a random tech.
HOI is good insofar as it makes fairly elaborate provision for signals intelligence in the game system. However, they did not make any provision for industrial espionage or sabotage.
Good points on the mechanics of the spying.
I took a quick look at Harvard, and it lists both gain_tech and steal_tech commands. I recall tinkering with the steal_tech for the draft espionage events that I was working on. I think steal_tech gets around the prerequisite issue and just adds the tech to their inventory.
Some techs are theoretical and stealing in a conventional sense is easy to imagine. In the case of Fuchs and Gaseous Diffusion, for example, by stealing the finished designs, then the lead time and wasted effort getting to that known good process is cut short, but building the enormous gaseous diffusion plan costs the same whether you do it at Oak Ridge or Magnetogorsk. In a way this is a back-handed argument in favor of the complicated tech tree so you could have "stealable" theoretical techs and "non-stealable" tech which really represents industrial infrastructure
You could argue that the savings from a successful spy tech could be to award the stealing power a certain number of supplies, letting them divert IC into research. The counter argument is that there is no mechanism to force that so a player could use the fruits of espionage to build more combat units. That would lead to abusing the system.
Another consideration is that maybe we're focussing too closely on nukes. Fuchs, for example, passed on intelligence on radar proxity fuses and new explosives, in addition to his nuke intelligence. Instead of restricting the spying to nukes,you could trigger on a time basis (quarterly?), and let the Soviets gain a random tech.
HOI is good insofar as it makes fairly elaborate provision for signals intelligence in the game system. However, they did not make any provision for industrial espionage or sabotage.
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Nuclear Research, too many days!
Hello Mankind!
I am playing HoI C.O.R.E. as the Soviet Union.
The year is 1942. I clicked on Nuclear Research, scrolled down too Semi-modern Nuclear Power and clicked on "start project".
It was cheap, only 1 IC. That's good. FOR 6840 DAYS! That's not good!
ETA: 5:00 November 8. 1961. That is WEIRD!
Doesn't the game end' at 1948?
Hello Mankind!
I am playing HoI C.O.R.E. as the Soviet Union.
The year is 1942. I clicked on Nuclear Research, scrolled down too Semi-modern Nuclear Power and clicked on "start project".
It was cheap, only 1 IC. That's good. FOR 6840 DAYS! That's not good!
ETA: 5:00 November 8. 1961. That is WEIRD!
Doesn't the game end' at 1948?
Vincent Julien said:
That's not a bug. That's reality. There is a VERY long stretch between making an atomic bomb and making a civilian-operable nuclear power plant. In history, the United States didn't even manage to build the first experimental reactor for producing electricity until 1951. And the first commercial plant didn't go online until 1957. The ridiculously long time of the research project is to make it impossible to get during the normal game span, but to make it possible for modders to edit or bypass so that it CAN be used if the player really wants to.
Engineer said:
As I recall, the "steal_tech" command doesnt actually work properly, alas.
Tim
Steal_tech
I've been looking at it more closely and unfortunately, steal_tech result in gaining random techs so you can't use it for directed theft.
What I've been doing to get around that is complicating the events using gain_tech so the triggers include the pre-requisites and opening up the date windows. You can also include multiple techs in the event. That way you can almost instantly gain technology once the usual requirements for gain_tech are satisfied.
I've also run across a pretty good book, Bombshell by Albright, that goes into the Theodore Hall spying case. It's a good supplement to my other sources on espionage. In Albright's account, the Russians didn't really start allocating resources to their nuke project until after the US detonated the bombs on Japan. In terms of the new tech tree, that would involve letting the Soviets get the gold techs and some of the specific theoretical techs via event.
I've been looking at it more closely and unfortunately, steal_tech result in gaining random techs so you can't use it for directed theft.
What I've been doing to get around that is complicating the events using gain_tech so the triggers include the pre-requisites and opening up the date windows. You can also include multiple techs in the event. That way you can almost instantly gain technology once the usual requirements for gain_tech are satisfied.
I've also run across a pretty good book, Bombshell by Albright, that goes into the Theodore Hall spying case. It's a good supplement to my other sources on espionage. In Albright's account, the Russians didn't really start allocating resources to their nuke project until after the US detonated the bombs on Japan. In terms of the new tech tree, that would involve letting the Soviets get the gold techs and some of the specific theoretical techs via event.