It's nice to see that some things endure the test of time and keep on giving. Long live the Butterfly Effect!
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In all technicality, the Naval presence of the region was already such, that if Soviets wanted, they could close the Gulf. As Finns had only few subs, and few coastal defense ships and little else. And the Baltic countries have no naval presence. And Sweden, most likely would protest, but only guard its own coast rather than risk angering Soviets.
With the main reason why such gambit was never done by Soviets was first and foremost that it would quite possibly turn the British eyes to the region. As Brits had, and always had their own issues with Soviets and its influence across the world.
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Well that's my plan to post at Top of Page ruined. I'm not angry, just disappointed.
I think you are badly over-estimating how much respect Paradox has for HOI4 and it's players. These are the people who said that communist Luxembourg is called "Rosa Luxembourg" or fascist Australia is "Empire of the Platypus". That is not the choice of people who are going to put any thought into fixing old bugs when there is new DLC to sell.
Of course Hitler wants back into the Rhineland, but he just had his bluff called and that has domestic consequences as well as international ones. The army and Von Neurath warned it was a bad idea but were over-ruled, OTL Hitler being right about the lack of reaction helped cement his place and allow him to carry on over-ruling other people later on (for better and worse). In Butterfly the opposite has happened, the rest of the government will feel emboldened to point out bad ideas and question his decisions.
Excellent to see old faces return, welcome back and I fully agree with the sentiment.
All true. I'd also imagine that if there were ongoing Finnish-Soviet talks then the Soviets would also have to keep the Gulf open or the Finns would just stop talking. The implied threat would be enough, actually going through with it would just risk attracting international support for the Finns, which is the last thing Stalin would want.
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I think there's about a week of people holding their collective breath when a top of page post should come up... after about a week someone is going to come along and break it, forcing this into a whole spiral of waiting out the other posts as well.
The amount of sandboxing does feel overdone sometimes. I really wish they would let me at the source code to try and bring HoI3 back into something of a workable state--you know, give it the ol' "Darkest Hour" treatment. Not introduce too much in the way of new stuff, but fix the little stuff and dig out some of the crazier ideas that PI had (For instance, how can organization be the only thing that drops? Seriously. I've had extremely long fights that should have cost significant amounts of armor and reflected in their manpower losses, but didn't necessarily reflect in the STR/ORG numbers at all... Or the one about the ministers that don't actually reduce their nation's tech decays the way that they are supposed to... oh well. Guess I just have to make my own, right?!
Hitler was nothing if not a gambler. He just didn't know when to let the professionals handle things... sounds somewhat familiar to others I have heard of.
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Hmm...neat? I guess...
There's an old debste about when history ceases to be personal and jokes and various other things can be made of everything that happened in a period. It seems paradox has decided the time is ripe to stop taking the 1930s seriously? Or at least, stop taking fasicm seriously and make it a dead fish in a shit lake where Hitler dies afrer slipping on a bannana peel and everyone in europe went communist with no issue.
Idk...an empire of polar bears and horses seems funnier in ckii than platypus' do in nazi germany for some reason. (There's a tag line for you).
Hmm. Okay, so this could change many things about the war when it comes. Quite a lot of german sucess came from being balls to the wall lucky and super confident in their movements, and Allied stupidity. At the very least, this probably means a war with russia will go very differently, not at all or even worse than otl.
Still...saying that, there's no italian navy and a much reduced italy to help germany out rather than cock up the whole war effort by wasting time in the balkans and africa.
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This is exactly why I hold back on replying to El Pip for the longest time
I usually hold off if things are close to a top of page...
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I never count such things (in my own AARs or others’)
. In this case, someone else fell into the pit lined with sharp pencils (a metaphorical import from T&T). It could easily enough have been me! But @El Pip, if you’re going to adhere to slower than real time, you must expect people to keep falling into the trap. - 1
Let me help with that top of the page...
Regarding all this Paradox talk, how do HoI 3 and 4 compare to HoI 2/Darkest Hour/Arsenal of Democracy? I'm currently playing heavily modded British Arsenal of Democracy campaign, and other then carriers I'm pretty satisfied.
Regarding all this Paradox talk, how do HoI 3 and 4 compare to HoI 2/Darkest Hour/Arsenal of Democracy? I'm currently playing heavily modded British Arsenal of Democracy campaign, and other then carriers I'm pretty satisfied.
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Sounds worryingly plausible, I shall bear this in mind.
It is a bit odd they didn't. HOI2 got the equivalent with Arsenal of Democracy, but HOI3 never got it's own final fixed version. Strange of Paradox to turn down money for basically selling the working version they should have made in the first place, most unlike them.
I think because CK2 never pretended to be even slightly serious or historic in the first place, it was always openly fantastical even before the Atzec invasion or the demon worship DLCs. Take this classic CK2 bug from years back;
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-studio-anything.615174/page-98#post-19138242
Basically every single Greek/Byzantine character was checking against every other character to see if they were allowed to castrate or blind them. If you had a large Greek culture empire it could be 70%+ of the processor time being used just to check on blindings and castration. Things that should have been relatively rare were assumed to be something every AI character wanted to do as soon as possible and would if the rules allowed.
I can guarantee nothing like the OTL Russian campaign will occur. But you could probably already guess that. Certainly the Germans won't be so monumentally lucky for narrative reasons alone, if you tried to apply that level of luck to a different set of circumstances it would look ridiculous. The African adventures did distract Britain for quite some time, if Italy had stayed neutral and the Med been a quiet (ish) lake then that's a massive net gain for the Allies, just in terms of extra warships to throw at the U-boats and being able to ship via Suez instead of all the way around the Cape. Hell if Italy didn't join the war then a France Fights on scenario becomes more plausible. There's an interesting AAR in that, but it is not this one.
This is exactly why I hold back on replying to El Pip for the longest time
Wise men.
I will accept the slower than real time approach has some drawbacks, but I think it's worth persevering with.I never count such things (in my own AARs or others’)
I can't speak for 4 from personal experience, though others can, but it does look very different. I understand it does the high level strategy thing much better (if you like that sort of thing), much more point and click with no need to be as fussed about managing air power, upgrading individual divisions or multiple levels of commander, which in fairness is the kind of thing the staff would handle not the supreme leader. Last I looked it does have the usual set of massive exploits, you can use paras to get any nation to surrender almost instantly, naval combat remains terrible and the AI can easily be provoked into launching suicidal attacks against your dug in troops. Some or all of these might have been fixed though.
For HoI3 vs the HoI2 family, they are clearly closer. Both have the depth in terms of ministers, leaders, unit names, etc that 4 lack. A bit more micro-management heavy, you do need to keep an eye on units more and in 3 upgrading divisions and changing composition can be a bit fiddly and annoying. Whenever I play 3 I miss the tech teams from 2, but then I like the better map and OOB organiser. I'm a bit torn on division composition, on the one hand I like being able to customise divisions with brigades and give them some personality (like have one armoured division with an extra heavy tank brigade as the mailed fist, or one with just light tanks for speedy exploits), but I can understand why some prefer the simplicity of the HOI2 system.
Overall, I keep being tempted to convert Butterfly to HOI3 (mostly for the TAG switching, the OOB organiser, no auto-closing CVEs in naval combat and the detailed division composition) so that's probably my favourite.
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Supporting Appendix A: Aero-Engine State of the Art Mid-1930s
Supporting Appendix A: Aero-Engine State of the Art Mid-1930s
The Air Ministry's struggle to supply a modern monoplane fighter to the Monarchist Air Force was, primarily, a problem of aero-engines, which is how the Spanish Venom became involved in the so-called Cooling Crisis that racked the Ministry and the wider aero-industry. It has been noted that the Spanish Venom and it's engine had no problems with cooling so, in theory, should have been isolated from the crisis. While true this misses the point; by the time it was finally over, the Cooling Crisis itself was only tangentially related to cooling, having expanded to cover much wider government concerns about engines and aeronautical-industrial policy in general. That being the case, a degree of background knowledge about aero-engines of the period will assist in understanding what follows, hence this appendix, though rest assured a high level summary will more than suffice. For our purposes a 1930s aero-engine designer had two key choices to make; how to arrange the cylinders and how the engine would be cooled, while there were obviously countless other design decisions that were vital in determining how the engine would perform, these were mostly peripheral to the unfolding crisis.
The arrangement choice came down to radial or inline; a radial engine had the cylinders 'radiate out' from a central crankshaft somewhat like a star, hence why the Germans referred to them as sternmotors (star engines), conversely in an inline engine the cylinders were aligned behind each other and formed into banks, the banks were then arranged in a wide variety of configurations from the familiar 'V' through to 'W', 'H' and even 'X' shaped engine blocks. Radials of the time were generally less efficient, for the same displacement capacity a radial engine would produce less power than the equivalent sized inline, the spread out cylinders also meant they had a larger frontal cross-sectional area. The combination of these two factors meant that, for a similar power output, a radial engine would be larger, cause more drag and so have a slower top speed, all while using more fuel. On the plus side a radial was mechanically simpler with fewer critical moving parts and typically less vibration, hence they generally had greater reliability and simpler, less frequent, maintenance. In contrast the choice around cooling was far simpler; air or liquid. Using the air passing over the engine for cooling did result in a cheaper, lighter and in theory more reliable engine, however liquid (anything from simple water through to pressurised water/ethylene glycol mixes) was far more effective at removing heat, though at the cost of weight and an increase in fragility, the radiators in particular were often sensitive to rough operation and battle damage. The complicating factor was that the simple hydraulics of a liquid cooling system were far easier to master than the black art that was high speed air flow around a running aero-engine.
A selection of mid-1930s aero-engines, showing the various configuration in operation or under consideration. Clockwise from top left: a Napier Dagger VIII H24; a Gnome-Rhône 14K radial; a Mikulin AM-34 V12 and a Rolls Royce Exe X24. The AM-34 was a fairly typical liquid-cooled V12 of the period, like most Soviet engines of the time it was 'inspired' (copied) from a Western design, in this case a Fiat 'A' series V-12. The French 14K represents the other typical type; an air-cooled radial, specifically a two-row radial engine. The '14 'referred to the total number of cylinders, these were then arranged in two 'rows' of 7 to form the heart of the engine. In contrast to the Soviet effort the 14K was very much a leading design, becoming the benchmark two-row radial against which similar engines were judged. If the AM-34 and the 14K were typical, then the Dagger was not, quite aside from it's unusual 'H' configuration it was an air-cooled inline, an unusual choice that would prove challenging to develop and one we will be looking at later in more detail. Finally the even more unusual Exe, representing both the inline 'X' configuration and, more importantly but less visibly, the revolutionary 'sleeve valve' type engine, like the Dagger the Exe was air-cooled.
Two binary choices produce four possible outcomes, however in the case of aero-engines the design process normally resulted in either an air-cooled radial or a liquid-cooled inline, though as we have seen the recherché choice of an air-cooled inline would occasionally emerge. The radial engine shape was a good match for air-cooling, plenty of surface area on the exposed cylinders and a low/zero maintenance cooling system dovetailed well the (generally) lower maintenance and simpler radial engine design. At the other end the more compact inline engines needed the more effective liquid cooling to dissipate the heat, the extra weight being easily offset by the higher power outputs. The air-cooled inline offered a weight saving and potential reliability/ruggedness so was perennially attractive, but was hard to make work, while the liquid-cooled radial combined the worst of both and so was the path (almost) never taken. The two dominant types gravitated towards certain roles, if you wanted absolute performance then you went liquid-cooled inline, if not the air-cooled radial was often the better option. Hence why commercial aviation mostly ran on air-cooled radials (cheaper, rugged, simple to maintain) while the Schneider Trophy and air-speed world records were dominated by liquid-cooled inlines (more power, less drag). This balance would change as technology advanced, not least improvements in fuel quality and aerodynamics becoming less of an art and more of a science, but it is a reasonable enough statement of the position in the mid to late 1930s.
The Bristol Hercules, shown in a period cutaway drawing, one of the new generation of radial engines that Bristol and the Air Ministry hoped would invalidate much of the above explanation. Like the Gnome-Rhône 14K the Hercules was a 14-cylinder twin row radial, unlike the French effort it used sleeve valves in place of the conventional poppet valves. Along with the distinctive sleeves themselves the two key consequences of this choice can also be seen; the five ports per cylinder (three inlet, two exhaust, labelled A,B,C and D &E respectively) that dramatically increased power and efficiency and the mass of gears (labelled X,Y and Z in the centre of the engine) required to operate the two rows of sleeve valves. Essentially Bristol had traded away a degree of the radial engines simplicity in exchange for extra power, but crucially the engine was still air cooled and could take a supercharger. In line with Air Ministry thinking the Hercules was intended for use in the next generation of bombers and large commercial aircraft, if it could live up to the promises of it's designer.
As it will become important later we should also discuss the new technology that threatened to disrupt this neat division. This is not the jet engine we discussed in Chapter XCIX, in the 1930s jets were too new to disrupt much of anything apart from research budgets, nor was it the jet's siblings the turo-prop and the thermojet, both under development across the Continent but no further advanced. We are talking about something far less visceral, and more evolutionary than revolutionary; the sleeve valved aero engine. Traditionally aero-engines had used poppet valves to control the flow of fuel and air into the cylinder and to allow exhaust gases to exit. However, there are limits on how large a standard poppet valve can be and still function at the high temperature and high revolutions per minute of an aero-engine and this limited the efficiency of a standard two valve cylinder. In an inline engine the solution was simple; just add more valves, this is why a typical inline V-12 aero-engine of the period would have four valves per cylinder, two inlet and two exhaust. A similar solution was possible for a single row radial but was fearsomely difficult for a two row design, not without causing larger problems elsewhere in the engine. This was unfortunate, as it was correctly realised by most manufacturers that future aircraft would need the extra power that only a two row design could give, hence why almost all of them continued to use two valves per cylinder and take the hit on efficiency. Bristol, with the enthusiastic support of the Air Ministry, had decided to take the road less travelled and pursue the third alternative; the sleeve valve. Broadly speaking a poppet valve moved up and down to open and close the valve (typically it was opened by a cam and then pulled closed by an integral spring), the sleeve valve instead rotated a metal sleeve inside the cylinder wall, when the holes in the sleeve aligned with those in the cylinder the valve was open. Despite being developed in the 1910s the idea had only come to the attention of aero-engine makers in the late 1920s after Sir Harry Ricardo had highlighted the many theoretical advantages of the sleeve valve over the poppet valve, not the least of which was the possibility of a two row radial engine with multiple valves per cylinder. While Bristol had taken the lead on the technology, spending several years, and several million pounds demonstrating just how hard it was to turn those theoretical advantages into physical items, they were not alone; Rolls Royce and Napier were both also working on sleeve valve engines. If the results obtained were worth all the time and effort was a matter of considerable debate within the Air Ministry and so, inevitably, the sleeve valve was dragged into the Cooling Crisis maelstrom.
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Notes:
The next chapter was getting a bit monstrous, it was over 4,000 words and still not finished. I needed to split it somewhere, so I decided to try a new idea. I say new, I've just stolen it from @Wraith11B, so the promised bit on radial vs inline engines has been dumped into this 'Appendix' chapter, along with some nice pictures and more than you need to know about sleeve valves.
Hopefully this is acceptable, though I must make clear there is absolutely no plot progress at all in this update. So if nothing else I feel this is a new record even for me.
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Understandable. Though, then it wouldn't be a HoI2 AAR anymore now would it?
sometimes. progress of aircraft engines is more important than plot progress now is it? more so if you were making a colossus update anyways~
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Nice, I finally understand the difference beetween radial and inline engines. After seeing them mentioned in countless discussions and timelines one would expect me to google it, but...
Looking forward to finding out what is Spanish Venom
Looking forward to finding out what is Spanish Venom
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Always a good idea to split bits off before they become too large to handle. Nice esoteric delving into mid-30s aircraft engine design. You never know when you may need such important information in the future, best to be across the basics.
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I'm glad an idea of mine has encouraged this development!
(Psst, what did I do so I can do it more...)
(Psst, what did I do so I can do it more...
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Like everything else historians have ever named.
Pippy lied.
If the war ends up being a rock-paper-scissors contest over Poland between Hitler and whoever...
Saying that...more about the world cup?
Edit:
Also that link is a little sad. So many unmerged accounts devoted to seeing this project through.
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Which is one of the reasons I've not swapped across. That and the fact that I very rarely have to play the game, right now putting in an actual HOI2 screenshot rather than a suitable picture would be a bit jarring (to me at least) so I don't even need to go back and get all the screenshots I failed to get.
This is The Butterfly Effect; most things are more important than plot progress, especially long engine-porn related diversions.
Excellent! Just the reaction I was hoping for.Nice, I finally understand the difference beetween radial and inline engines. After seeing them mentioned in countless discussions and timelines one would expect me to google it, but...
Looking forward to finding out what is Spanish Venom
Part of the reasons I went off on this was that I had never been 100% sure about quite why Bristol (and others) doing Sleeve Valves was thought so clever and important, so that little section was my excuse/motivation to read up on the subject.We will finally see the Spanish Venom in the next chapter, which is mostly written. I've even found a nice picture of it and written the caption for it.
A thorough understanding of the mechanical principles of 80 year old aero-engine design never did anyone any harm. It may never do you any good either, but lets not dwell on the negatives.Always a good idea to split bits off before they become too large to handle. Nice esoteric delving into mid-30s aircraft engine design. You never know when you may need such important information in the future, best to be across the basics.
Sticking bits in an Appendix and not being fussed that they aren't at the end. My mild OCD was complaining that you can't have an appendix in the middle of something, but then I saw you did on 'Der Adler..' and it worked. So I realised I could do it as well.I'm glad an idea of mine has encouraged this development!
(Psst, what did I do so I can do it more...
Just because something is tangentially related doesn't mean you don't need to understand it. That's my excuse and I am sticking to it. As to the name, well it started off being about Cooling and that bit stuck, so close enough.Like everything else historians have ever named.
Pippy lied.
The big war, when it comes, will definitely not be about that.
We will return to the World Cup when Butterfly reaches mid-1938, which is about 1 year of game time away. (I.e. ages). Quite aside from my normal approach to update speed I have big things planned for the updates after the Cooling Crisis, some of them will actually involve the plot.
Even amongst those that got merged there are many who haven't logged in for a while, as you say a bit sad.
And of course some who do log in but have abandoned commenting on this. Tempted to shout out to a few with some @ s to let them know this isn't dead, but that's probably bad forum etiquette.
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Oh
.Would be difficult to say when they stopped so difficult to say what to say when trying tk get them to read a new chsoter? Is the anglo meat trade still their hit topic or have they moved on to tractors, imperial mail or maybe which side do the british pick in spain? The world cup, the olynpics, the italian war, the various navyporns, the airporns, the tankporns (not as many of those), or the economic mass debate walls of texts?
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Well, I for one am glad that something good has come from my tome... I think that I have half of your posts in the AAR and almost 13% of your thread pages, but I always thought it was nicer to put the Appendices in more "annual" order (aside from the ones that I'm turning into the multi-year ones) rather than ones that all had to come at the end.
I @'ed more than a few of the ones who I know followed my previous efforts (as bad as they were: seriously, you should take a look at Der Morgengrauen or Der Aufsteig, the links are in my first post), though I don't think many showed up to read (or just have and didn't post anything). I don't think anyone would consider it bad form: I tend to think of the readers as old friends who have dropped away for awhile, and hitting them up every so often to check in can be nice! Another point is that sometimes the forum might accidentally think that there hasn't been any updates that one has seen when there have been: I've had that problem with @Bullfilter 's Civis Romanum when I might have opened it in a tab only to run out of time to look at it.
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The range of the diversions does make it difficult to work out what sort of reader Butterfly would appeal to. Basically to fully appreciate it's majesty you need to be a true Renaissance Man.
)It does work well, that's why I
Excellent points. So to celebrate the next update, which will even be at the top of the page, I have gone back over to see what happened to a few old readers who's comments I've noticed the lack of. Ignoring those who haven't been seen in months (@Vann the Red, @Duritz @Jape , hope you chaps(?) make a return at some point.) I have a little list;
@H.Appleby , @TheExecuter , @Kurt_Steiner , @Davout , @Le Jones , @SirCliveWolfe , @caffran
If any of you had forgotten this existed, assumed it was dead or been tricked by Paradox into thinking it hadn't updated, then I am delighted to confirm we are once again updating. Of course if you have been desperately trying to forget this existed then I do apologise for dragging up the memories.
In any event, forward we go to finally find out what the Spanish Venom is and to investigate what damage it will do to Republican Spain (and to the Air Ministry)
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