CORE Tech Tree: Nuclear

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That's a nice idea! Something like for example (in armour research) research for tanks solid turret which opens the research tank turning turret after discovering that the solid turret was useless.

Only how do you find those useless research projects..................

Give them a name and make them a prerequisite for many of the other "REAL" techs.

If it's possible you could even make some of the techs random - ie sometimes certain techs will yield useful advances; sometimes they won't. Personally, I favour this approach.

This way, every game could be different. The tech that led to a break-through in your last game, could lead to a dead end in this game.

 

[MateDow]

Give them a name and make them a prerequisite for many of the other "REAL" techs.

If it's possible you could even make some of the techs random - ie sometimes certain techs will yield useful advances; sometimes they won't. Personally, I favour this approach.

This way, every game could be different. The tech that led to a break-through in your last game, could lead to a dead end in this game.

I don't know enough to know if that is even possible. It would make things interesting though MDow

 

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I disagree that 1945 should be the earliest. WIth sufficient dedication and resources, early 1944 should be attainable. The production rate of nuclear weapons is such that they're not going to throw the game terribly out of whack. I find nukes only accelerate or delay the inevitable.

Re: province destruction
The production rate is ahistorical. Once nuclear bomb production was started in earnest, dozens could be produced in less than a year. I would propose that one nuke, in game terms, represents several and could easily destroy everything of use in a province.

I hope the new tech tree gives enough incentive to go for a U-235 bomb. It's a waste of time unless you're *really* desperate in the current tree.

 

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Re: province destruction
The production rate is ahistorical. Once nuclear bomb production was started in earnest, dozens could be produced in less than a year. I would propose that one nuke, in game terms, represents several and could easily destroy everything of use in a province.

I just did a bit of research. In the year following the Trinity test the US produced 12 atomic weapons, one of which was used for testing and two of which were used on Japan, leaving a stockpile of 9 as of June 1946.

I agree that multiple explosions in an area(a crude multiple-warhead effect) could completely devastate a province. If the game does not allow the yield to be reduced, then I recommend highly that the production rate be slowed down to only 1 per year to reflect that it will take a number of small A-bombs to achieve the level of destruction the game portrays. Getting fewer of these big bangs will make folk think twice before spending all the ICs to get them.

$.02 more from me.

 

[JRaup]

I just did a bit of research. In the year following the Trinity test the US produced 12 atomic weapons, one of which was used for testing and two of which were used on Japan, leaving a stockpile of 9 as of June 1946.

I agree that multiple explosions in an area(a crude multiple-warhead effect) could completely devastate a province. If the game does not allow the yield to be reduced, then I recommend highly that the production rate be slowed down to only 1 per year to reflect that it will take a number of small A-bombs to achieve the level of destruction the game portrays. Getting fewer of these big bangs will make folk think twice before spending all the ICs to get them.

$.02 more from me.

The one hitch I see to this is that province size in HoI varies greatly. So, while 1 nuke would suffice for say Moscow or Hiroshima in game, trying to do the same to San Antonio wouldn't work. It's a trade off made by Paradox. as things stand, and given the proposed changes to the Nuke tree (long over due), I don't think this will be a problem. The later appearance of nukes, and the general tendency to be in an "end game" situation at that point anyway shouldn't require any tweaks to the rate of production.

 

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Nuke Tree Details

Elementary Physics & Chemistry

Radium (8001/8002): Discovered in 1898 by Curie. Isolated in 1911 by Curie and Debierne by the electrolysis of a solution of pure radium chloride employing a mercury cathode; on distillation in an atmosphere of hydrogen, this amalgam yielded the pure metal. Production would be possible with conventional electroplating technology.

Polonium (8003/8004): Discovered in 1898 by Curie. It is found in combination with Bismuth. Quite small quantities (0.2% that of radium) are found in radioactive pitchblende ores. Polonium was used as a research tool since it is a much stronger emitter of alpha particles than uranium or radium.

Geiger Counter Production (8005): The Geiger Counter was invented by Hans Geiger in 1928 and utilizes the Geiger-Mueller tube that detects ionizing radiation passing through a tube of inert gas and organic vapor. The more fragile mica window type will detect photons, alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. The glass window type is sturdier, but does not detect alpha particles. (contingent on 8006, 8007, and 8008 - renumber and relocate after these three in the tech tree?)

Alpha Particle Detection (8006): Rutherford had discovered on Alpha Particles in 1899, but mistakenly took them for radiation, like x-rays. By 1903 he experimentally demonstrated that he could bend a stream of Alpha beam in strong electric and magnetic fields, demonstrating that it was a positively charged particle. Alpha particles are a helium nucleus, two protons and two neutrons and can only travel a few centimeters through the air before being stopped.

Beta Particle Detection (8007): Henri Becquerel discovered Beta Particles in 1900. Beta particles are free electrons released by a atomic decay or a nuclear reaction. They can travel a few meters through the air before being stopped.

Gamma Ray Detection (8008): Discovered by Paul Villard around the turn of the century, they were conclusively demonstrated to be photons by Lord Ernest Rutherford in 1914. Gamma Rays are caused by atomic decay or nuclear reactions, and have very high energy and short wavelengths. Gamma rays can travel interstellar distances.

Large Van de Graaff Generator Construction (8009): This was developed in 1929 by Robert J. Van de Graaff at Princeton University in the USA. An electrode connected to a hollow sphere is raised to a high potential and then a rapidly moving silk belt carries ionized negative charge to another electrode inside the sphere. The large potential difference between the two electrodes ionizes the air inside the sphere.

Mass Spectrometer Theory (8010): Originally developed by J. J. Thompson in 1899 in the United Kingdom, this notes that as one places ionized atoms under certain electrical and magnetic fields in the hard vacuum of a cathode ray tube, the trajectory of the atoms will vary depending on the mass and charge of the atom. The atoms left impressions on a photographic plate and were instrumental in experimentally proving the existence of isotopes of stable, non-radioactive atoms.

Note that most of this section takes place in the 1899-1929 time window. Also the Van de Graaff generator and Geiger counter are about twenty years after the theoretical discoveries so they might make a better fit in the next block of technolgy. Also note the broad geographic distribution of the discoveries: France, UK, USA, and Germany.

 

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Hi;

Just starting to read through this thread. Before i start posting here, i want to offer up a number of things.

1. Those of you that have the chance, you should visit the museums at Los Alamos, FermiLabs and at UoC. Very informative.

2. The Trinity site is open to public viewing 2/year [spring/fall]. Again, i encourage anyone to go.

At Los Alamos, there is a photo, blown up, covering an entire wall. It is a photo of the Manhattan project team [Yes, all those Nobel laureates] at Los Alamos. They are all standing in a semi-circle around a technician holding the bare core of the Trinity bomb in his hand wearing only an asbestos glove. None of the team is more than 10 feet away.

This photo is the basis for my main comment of this thread: do not make the error that you need to discover everything about atomics to build an a-bomb. You don't. They didn't, so don't go there. Long Term radiation sickness was not known until the 50's.

The 3 key technologies to enable atomic weapons are explosives, electronic detonators, and separation chemistry.

Explosives
You need very powerful, controllable, and predictable explosives to set off the chain reaction. All 3 variables are of equal importance. Your goal is to compress the core to extreme pressues for a fraction of an instant. This means, there cannot be a weak side, or your pressure will 'leak' out. TnT will not work, no mattter how much, except by pure luck.

Detonators
You need a detonator that can function to the microsecond at a bare minimum. Then, you need to create a dozen of these, exactly the same to within that same micro-second tolerance amoung all of them.

Separation Chemistry
The purification of U235 from U238 [or any of the other trans-uranium elements] is a difficult, hazardous process that was learned through a lot of terrible trial and error. Lot's of error. It is a Chemical process, not atomic. The current HF centrifuge process is like making candy compared to what they were doing.


Note that i specifically leave out all of the atomic research on my critical path items. AFAIK, by the mid-30's most of that was already known sufficiently.

While these first comments are sure to engender a lot of controversy, I reiterate that it is based upon my readings at these museums and on biographies of a number of the Manhattan project team leaders [Fermi et.al.] Also, I am a chemical engineer [but not a nuke eng.] and for those of you that can remember, i was member of an industry panel following the TMI incident to create recomendations for improving nuke power operator saftey.

 

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Pax Mondo:

Note that i specifically leave out all of the atomic research on my critical path items. AFAIK, by the mid-30's most of that was already known sufficiently.

This is probably the most contentious part of your message and I'll get to it.

I would suggest that countries essentially be lumped into three broad groups.

Tier 1: Industrialized States: This would be western Europe, North America, the USSR, Japan, and possibly some other countries like Australia, Brazil, and Argentina. They have western universities that can generate science and industrial capability and demand to build the sort of tools that go into making nukes. These countries would have virtually all the technology known as of 1-1-36 in their starting OOB.

Tier 2: Non-industrial states with western education systems: These countries would have the kernal of physicists, chemists and engineers in their university system to replicate the science on lab scale. Therefore, they would have the theoretical parts of the tech tree. However, they would typically depend on imports for the industrial side of things. To build a nuke they would have build the appropriate industry from scratch. Countries in this tier would include New Zealand, Columbia, Bulgaria, China, etc.

Tier 3: Non-westernized states: These nations simply don't have any basis to know where to begin building a nuke. They simply have chosen to organize their societies on different lines or are too dirt poor to even start. Countries here would inclde Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Tibet, etc.

So part of the reason for the in-depth tree, imho, is to put some realistic barriers in front the players who might want to play countries in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 categories and still have nukes. After all, to figure out how to design the bomb (getting to the three big items PaxMondo listed) you need some understanding of the physics. However, if you have the theory, I would expect that you won't need all the hardware that went into developing the theory (things like Mass Spectrometer Construction) so at least the Tier 2 nations would have an easier time getting to the nuts and bolts of bomb construction.

Within this scheme of things, I don't think I'm too far from Pax's position insofar as there are a handful of genuine nuclear physics breakthroughs left to get through in the 1930's and then it's a massive, complex, and uncertain engineering exercise to get to a workable bomb.

There is an argument that the nuke tree will end up a lot like the current naval tree where just about all the first rank powers start 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down the tree and little nations usually won't have the resources to ever catch up. But I don't think that should mean we eliminate the early techs so anyone can start building treaty light cruisers at the start of the game.

 

[unmerged(19746)]

Well said. I definitely am in favor of the 3 tier system your outline above.

One thing to note, with this and other tech trees I'd like to see inconsistencies removed. i.e. If japan has super BB, then it should have all the prereqs as well. If Germany starts with something further up the Atomic tree than others, they should have the prereqs for it as well. (just a minor peave of mine) If an item wasn't needed IRL to achieve the higher end result, then it shouldn't be needed in game either(superior turret optics?).

 

[Steel]

Well said. I definitely am in favor of the 3 tier system your outline above.

One thing to note, with this and other tech trees I'd like to see inconsistencies removed. i.e. If japan has super BB, then it should have all the prereqs as well. If Germany starts with something further up the Atomic tree than others, they should have the prereqs for it as well. (just a minor peave of mine) If an item wasn't needed IRL to achieve the higher end result, then it shouldn't be needed in game either(superior turret optics?).

Wherever a country knows a tech but not the pre-reqs this is due to a game balancing design choice. Essentially there's situations where a country had a certain model (say Super BB) but if we gave them all the pre-reqs they would be far too advanced and be able to advance ahistorically.

 

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Pax Mondo:
This is probably the most contentious part of your message and I'll get to it.

Anticipated that it would be. My assertion is based upon my readings that most of the physics involved were discovered [and published] by 1939. Granted, only a handful of people could understand these papers, and there were some refinements made subsequently.

So part of the reason for the in-depth tree, imho, is to put some realistic barriers in front the players who might want to play countries in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 categories and still have nukes. After all, to figure out how to design the bomb (getting to the three big items PaxMondo listed) you need some understanding of the physics. However, if you have the theory, I would expect that you won't need all the hardware that went into developing the theory (things like Mass Spectrometer Construction) so at least the Tier 2 nations would have an easier time getting to the nuts and bolts of bomb construction.

Within this scheme of things, I don't think I'm too far from Pax's position insofar as there are a handful of genuine nuclear physics breakthroughs left to get through in the 1930's and then it's a massive, complex, and uncertain engineering exercise to get to a workable bomb.

There is an argument that the nuke tree will end up a lot like the current naval tree where just about all the first rank powers start 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down the tree and little nations usually won't have the resources to ever catch up. But I don't think that should mean we eliminate the early techs so anyone can start building treaty light cruisers at the start of the game.

Agreed. Make it even simpler, let's just distill it down to the essential. All we have to accomplish here: create a very expensive timeline that cannot be arrived at prior to say '43 even with a full start in '36. Also, these other advances ended up having HUGE impacts upon a whole range of industries, but most of these effects did not happen until after WWII. So, they can all be ignored [simplifies things considerably. the technology tree of the 50's/60's is quite a bit more complex than the 30's].

So create a 6 - 7 year timeline, costing about 60 - 70 IC/day ramping up to 100 IC/day to give you a "Big Boy" at the end. Cost of actually building one a-bomb should take 120 days and cost like 40/day => 4800 IC total. This will do for the democracies.

The real problem is that Germany achieved almost the same results on far less investment. How? Slave labor. Extortion. Spies. Brutality. So for fascist governments, the timeline needs to be the same, but the cost needs to be radically reduced: divide by 5 or so.

For the purpose of HOI, we will have to ignore the theories that question whether the Germans were actually achieving their goals. Some postulate that their explosive charges were not consistent/predictable enough to have ever achieved a thermo-nuclear reaction. I am not aware there is a concensus, so we will just ignore that controversy and assume their technique would have worked.

This is going to bring up a real conundrum: knowing in advance the costs and the benefits, very few players will research this for the simple reason within the game terms there is no payback [nor should there be]. I would encourage everyone involved to keep this in mind. We want to be accurate, but we should not spend excess resources on game part that by our intended design will not be used.

 

[unmerged(14102)]

Comments inserted below ...

4) The H-bomb is too soon. The USA restarted its H-bomb research after the Soviets demonstrated their first A-bomb in 1949. It took them three years to get to the 1952 H-bomb demonstration. Like some of the advanced naval tech tree stuff, even a dedicated program might be virtually impossible to achieve in the 1/1/48 deadline of CORE, but we need to make sure there are some filler tech's in there to make enough time for the research.

Deuterium separation, IIRC, was the main stumbling block. The SOV's brute forced it to get their first one built. The US military infrastructure developed a 'commercial' [ok, not commercial, but larger volume method] way to do it. So after the first H-bomb went, they were able to replicate fairly quickly.

5) Links - links - links: Fully as important as the basic tech tree is the smart use of linking technology between some of the engineering nuclear techs and the electronic and manufacturing technologies. I know that machining the explosive plates is critically important so you can't get past the 8908 Explosive Sphere Test without super-precision machining capability. What I don't know off the top of my head is whether this will beg creation of additional technologies in those parallel trees, or whether, for instance, you can use use something like "jet engines" as an alternate way to establish that capability (for the turbine blades).

There are scores of technologies that spin off of the Manhattan project research [this set the precedent for the Mercury/Apollo research gains], but few of them have significant commercial/military implications for 5 - 10 years. I would ignore them for this game.

As for precursors, you can break them down to what granularity you like, so long as it ends up being a big number.

6) .... However, the USA also had a lot of the industrial and electronic computing techs complete ahead of the Manhattan project so those R&D acceleration factors need to be backed in to the base durations..

This is a key point: US was able to accomplish the Manhattan project because much of hte support technology had been going forward long before to Einstein's famous letter. Great deal of conjecture on that point of fact ... drives the paranoia complexes crazy ...

7) I'm fuzzy on the details, but I recall that the UK basically transferred their preliminary A-bomb research to the USA to jump-start the US program. I'm sure Churchill brags about that in his history of WW2, so I'll need to check that tonight.

There was a technology transfer. Fermi's biographies that i have read downplay's it's importance. Churchill's biographies tend to make a big point of it. I tend to go with Fermi's side: i really beleive that by '39 most of the obstacles were not atomic theory, but very serious engineering issues on a wide variety of fronts. The lab museums hardly mention this point at all, but then i do not take that as a surprise.

I'm not discounting the English assistance here. All i'm suggesting is that the sharing provided confirmation of what was already known/suspected rather than totally new material as yet never discovered. Helpful? Yes. Irreplaceable? Probably not. Maybe make a nice event, give one or two techs in the path for a few destroyers or something?

 

[unmerged(14102)]

I just did a bit of research. In the year following the Trinity test the US produced 12 atomic weapons, one of which was used for testing and two of which were used on Japan, leaving a stockpile of 9 as of June 1946.

But, at the time of the Nagasaki Bomb, the US had no further nukes in it's arsenal. IN fact, the Nagasaki bomb was put together with everything they had. And according to the museum info, IIRC, it was several months B4 they had another.

They had built a couple of 'dummies' to fool spies, one of which is still in the Los Alamos museum.

 

[MateDow]

Anticipated that it would be. My assertion is based upon my readings that most of the physics involved were discovered [and published] by 1939. Granted, only a handful of people could understand these papers, and there were some refinements made subsequently.

The basic physics behind the developments were discovered, but no one put them together. There was still a lot of physics that had to be done before the first nuclear pile could be built. There was even more that had to be done before the theoretical bomb could be designed, and even more that ha to be solved for economical production.

Agreed. Make it even simpler, let's just distill it down to the essential.

I think having more techs with a lower cost is a more realistic way to go. It was a series of small discoveries and technologies that made the bomb possible, not a few large discoveries. Pretty much, the tech tree above doesn't have a lot of fluff. These were hurdles that had to be crossed before a nuclear weapon could be developed.

All we have to accomplish here: create a very expensive timeline that cannot be arrived at prior to say '43 even with a full start in '36. Also, these other advances ended up having HUGE impacts upon a whole range of industries, but most of these effects did not happen until after WWII. So, they can all be ignored [simplifies things considerably. the technology tree of the 50's/60's is quite a bit more complex than the 30's].

So create a 6 - 7 year timeline, costing about 60 - 70 IC/day ramping up to 100 IC/day to give you a "Big Boy" at the end. Cost of actually building one a-bomb should take 120 days and cost like 40/day => 4800 IC total. This will do for the democracies.

As far as I can tell, we can't adjust the cost or yield of the nuclear weapons that are produced. We can make technologies that decrease the building time for the weapons, but not actually set the time. Other than centrifugal seperation, the other methods of refining U235 only speed up the bomb building process. This allows a country that wants to rush through the tech to build just that single method of getting U235. That will give a base rate for bomb construction. That single method requires 40 IC for 360 days to build that plant. The other methods take the same industrial commitment. This is addition to researching the next gold tech and all of the associated techs around that tech. It should work out to about the cost that you are proposing.

The real problem is that Germany achieved almost the same results on far less investment. How? Slave labor. Extortion. Spies. Brutality. So for fascist governments, the timeline needs to be the same, but the cost needs to be radically reduced: divide by 5 or so.

Germany really didn't get to far in her nuclear weapon research. They didn't finish building their nuclear pile by the end of the war. It wasn't one of their priorities. There was a proposal before the production minister (Goebels?) and he decided that resources would be better spent on tanks, aircraft, and rockets.

I think that for Fascist governments the costs should be higher. They don't exactly want the free passing of information that is a necessary part of theoretical physics. Look at the number of major discoveries by the Germans after the rise of the Nazi government. There weren't many (I can't think of one). Part of this is due to the repression of non-German scientists (being polite here), but a majority was the distrust of information exchange.

For the purpose of HOI, we will have to ignore the theories that question whether the Germans were actually achieving their goals. Some postulate that their explosive charges were not consistent/predictable enough to have ever achieved a thermo-nuclear reaction. I am not aware there is a concensus, so we will just ignore that controversy and assume their technique would have worked.

This is going to bring up a real conundrum: knowing in advance the costs and the benefits, very few players will research this for the simple reason within the game terms there is no payback [nor should there be]. I would encourage everyone involved to keep this in mind. We want to be accurate, but we should not spend excess resources on game part that by our intended design will not be used.

The tree as it is set up now has only techs that worked (for the most part). There are some techs that weren't as successful, but were still an intellectual part of the technology involved. I think that a player knowing the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the game can be tempted to research this technology when they shouldn't. The cost to Germany of diverting research unhistorically toward nuclear research should make them vulnerable to Soviet armor and British bombers. Britain should have to defer research because of the cost associated with defending the empire. Tibet should NEVER be able to develop nuclear weapons unless she becomes the dominant power in the Far East. My goal is to make it historically accurate that the US was the only country in the world with enough resources to spare to devote to this project and make it a success. Germany and Japan even at the height of their conquests didn't have enough resources to divert for this research or materials production. MDow

 

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...
2. Nuclear Reactors must be made BEFORE you can start refining the material for bombs.(I noticed the tech for it shows up way too late in the tree)

No. At least in the sense that most people think of Nuke Rx's. You only need an active nuke pile, not a reactor. BIG difference. Tennessee and Hanford were initially only piles, not full reactors until the '50's. Reactor's imply control and power generation. Piles are the reactor cores: where you can irradtiate materials, concentrate fission elements, etc. Fermi's first work just got the reaction going in a controlled environment, and that is all that was built on a bigger basis in Tennesse and then later in Hanford. These were then expanded in a number of steps.

Reactors [for power generation] come WAY after nuke bombs. Bombs are a piece of cake compared to a reactor. TONS more engineering before you can build those. Even the small one put in the Nautilus was an engineering achievement of the first order, and only the fact it was ocean going made it safe.

 

[unmerged(14102)]

The one hitch I see to this is that province size in HoI varies greatly. So, while 1 nuke would suffice for say Moscow or Hiroshima in game, trying to do the same to San Antonio wouldn't work. It's a trade off made by Paradox. as things stand, and given the proposed changes to the Nuke tree (long over due), I don't think this will be a problem. The later appearance of nukes, and the general tendency to be in an "end game" situation at that point anyway shouldn't require any tweaks to the rate of production.

I think we are worrying over a minor point. Using the San Antonio of the 40's example, a Hiroshima nuke would have destroyed the City of San Antonio as it existed then. An in that era, there was almost nothing other than the immediate city except for farms and ranches. IE, for all intents and purposes that province is gone: no IC, infrastructure reduced to dirt roads, no power, no air, no rail [nexus is gone] ergo: province gone.

The same arguement can be made for most, if not all, of the other provinces. Albuquerque was a quaint town of about 25K then, the balance of the state maybe 250K more people. With ABQ gone, the state would have been essentially at a standstill for years re-building the infrastructure. US66/US85 [now I40/I25] intersection destroyed and a major railhead junction would have disrupted US east/west commerce in a BIG way.

You don't have to level a province to take it out of the game. You just have to make it unusable.

 

[unmerged(14102)]

Wherever a country knows a tech but not the pre-reqs this is due to a game balancing design choice. Essentially there's situations where a country had a certain model (say Super BB) but if we gave them all the pre-reqs they would be far too advanced and be able to advance ahistorically.

I agree strongly with this. You do not have to research everything that you 'need to' in order to build something. You can cheat, but it ussually costs you when you do: it goes slow, something it omitted, or a flaw surfaces. For HOI, I would not allow this, other than the OOB's [as we do now], as it could create far too many potential inequities. Also, simulating the trade-offs is quite difficult and would not add significantly to the game.

 

[unmerged(14102)]

The basic physics behind the developments were discovered, but no one put them together. There was still a lot of physics that had to be done before the first nuclear pile could be built. There was even more that had to be done before the theoretical bomb could be designed, and even more that ha to be solved for economical production.

I think we may be talking semantics. What i read in Fermi's biographies to me is engineering problems: he knew pretty much what he needed to do, he just had to figure out how, with what, find that, build it, test it, and voilla! a lot of work indeed. Maybe if i was a physicist, this would be what physics is. ;-)

I think having more techs with a lower cost is a more realistic way to go. It was a series of small discoveries and technologies that made the bomb possible, not a few large discoveries. Pretty much, the tech tree above doesn't have a lot of fluff. These were hurdles that had to be crossed before a nuclear weapon could be developed.

NP. That is what i meant, i was just referring to the total investment. Break it up as you please.

As far as I can tell, we can't adjust the cost or yield of the nuclear weapons that are produced. We can make technologies that decrease the building time for the weapons, but not actually set the time. Other than centrifugal seperation, the other methods of refining U235 only speed up the bomb building process. This allows a country that wants to rush through the tech to build just that single method of getting U235. That will give a base rate for bomb construction. That single method requires 40 IC for 360 days to build that plant. The other methods take the same industrial commitment. This is addition to researching the next gold tech and all of the associated techs around that tech. It should work out to about the cost that you are proposing.

Sounds fine. I can support this ok., and AFAIK you are right about the HOI model.

Germany really didn't get to far in her nuclear weapon research. They didn't finish building their nuclear pile by the end of the war. It wasn't one of their priorities. There was a proposal before the production minister (Goebels?) and he decided that resources would be better spent on tanks, aircraft, and rockets.

Correct. I was referring to their trigger research, which may have been why the overall project was not pushed forward.

I think that for Fascist governments the costs should be higher. They don't exactly want the free passing of information that is a necessary part of theoretical physics. Look at the number of major discoveries by the Germans after the rise of the Nazi government. There weren't many (I can't think of one). Part of this is due to the repression of non-German scientists (being polite here), but a majority was the distrust of information exchange.

MateDow, i think we're going to diverge here. Both their progress on nuke and rocketry far exceeded everyone else if you look at it, particulary cost effectiveness on what they spent.

Nukes for example: yes they did not build a pile, but i think the general agreement is that they easily could have. When the decision not to build one [spring '42?] they were vey much on par with the US efforts, and BTW Roosevelt and the Manhattan team knew that. All the discussions that i have read center on their trigger efforts and whether they would ever have succeeded. This problem flowed on into the V1/V2 rockets [air burst trigger problems limited their effectiveness] as well.

As for Rocketry, let us not downplay their incredible advances. Brutal, short sighted techniques that caused numerous problems. But you cannot discredit the achievements. They got a lot more spending far less than the US did. The US rocket efforts were a quagmire of wasted funds.

I don't think we can [i can't think how to code it, maybe Steel has an idea] but i think the best solution would a special case for facists where the development costs are lower, but nuke yields are much lower [give an reverse effect on production rates]. So GER could build nukes, but would ever get 1 or 2 per year max.

The tree as it is set up now has only techs that worked (for the most part). There are some techs that weren't as successful, but were still an intellectual part of the technology involved. I think that a player knowing the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the game can be tempted to research this technology when they shouldn't. The cost to Germany of diverting research unhistorically toward nuclear research should make them vulnerable to Soviet armor and British bombers. Britain should have to defer research because of the cost associated with defending the empire. Tibet should NEVER be able to develop nuclear weapons unless she becomes the dominant power in the Far East. My goal is to make it historically accurate that the US was the only country in the world with enough resources to spare to devote to this project and make it a success. Germany and Japan even at the height of their conquests didn't have enough resources to divert for this research or materials production. MDow

Agreed. Everything above is accurate. Any spending on nukes would be painful to GER. In v1.06, playing SP VH/F, you have to be quite focused on your strategy to succeed, and trying to squeeze nukes in would be really tough no matter the cost. In MP, i can't see anyway GER could spend on nukes and not get destroyed with that strategy.

I would go one step further: if the US had known the outcome, would they have invested? As an HOI player, i wouldn't. Taking all that investment, and putting it into, for example, just additional B-29 wings would give many time the firepower payback in the game. All those B-29's might have ended the war 6 months earlier. who knows?

The real benefits of the Manhattan project [like Mercury/Apollo] came 10 - 20 years later in the economic growth via products and technologies spawned from the huge research investment. I am not knocking the Manhattan project investment in its histroical context. But within the game context, there is little doubt that it is a white elephant.

 

[Steel]

Quick question: what's the general opinion on deactivating the nuclear technology tree for third-rate nations? The point of this is to stop tech trade where DI is wasted on giving nuke techs to Oman, Yemen etc.

 

[unmerged(14102)]

Quick question: what's the general opinion on deactivating the nuclear technology tree for third-rate nations? The point of this is to stop tech trade where DI is wasted on giving nuke techs to Oman, Yemen etc.

NP for me. In fact, i would not trade it at all period except through events. Nukes and rocketry were [are] pretty close held technologies that shouldn't be traded even between allies. Handle the few histoical trades via event.