Ship mines too rare?

[EwingNJ]

Calm down. Frankly I could care less about mine quantities. I was, however, responding to something Mr Wilkerson mentioned in reference to variable production. The mines simply served as a convenient example given the topic of this thread.

[emorbius44]

I think "mines in the Pacific" is more of a "could have been" than a "was" on the Japanese side in the early war period. Towards the end however, things got serious. The "Ryuku Barrier" was a real Oceanic mine barrier - not do-able in either WITP or AE. But turning each successive Allied invasion target into a 3000-7000 mine hornets nest - was not much done - and certainly not in the early going - in stock it is possible to do this - and somehow I wind up getting the "credit" for the darth of mines in AE - though actually my proposal of mine "production" started at higher levels and grew substantially higher towards the late war.

I can see your point and I understand what terminus is saying. I think between he and I there is a philosophical disagreement. He's telling what they did, which is accurate but I look at it from the point of view of "what they could have done?" The Japanese sat on their battleships for the whole war until they were useless. If they had run Yamato and Musashi a couple of times down the slot in 1942 things could have been much different. So maybe they never used their mine layers but what if they had? If you are going to play a game and do exactly what they Japanese did then you might as well just turn on the history channel and watch it. So I like to explore alternatives, see if I can change the production priorities, etc and get more of an edge. If one uses the same resources but manipulates them differently I don't see that as inherent unreal ism. What I'd like to know (and so far googleing hasn't done much) is just how many mines they built or what their production rate was. As I did point out the game presently only gives the U.S. 60% of the mines they actually did lay (and they had a massive effect on Japanese shipping at the end) so just that alone would indicate that an upward adjustment needs to be made I'll do it in the editor but I might have a hard sell with my long time e-mail opponent. Absent any hard data I'm thinking either doubling or tripling the production rate.

Bob

P.S. We're playing a Guadalcanal warmup before we hit the biggie and that has no mine pool at all. I find it hard to believe that neither Truk or Rabaul had any mines whatsoever, especially given the three mine laying subs that are operating at the beginning of that scenario.