ORIGINAL: rjopel
With the UK producing 5000/day and it being 52 days sailing time for the EURO M class ships I use I need 62 ships in the CS convoys to keep it even.
Also figure it'll take a at least a month or two to get all those ships to Cape Town and started on the runs you'll build up a nice base of supply.
This is true as far as it goes, but the bottom line is, no matter how many ships you employ, the UK can only put a maximum of 150k supply per month into CT. And that doesn't get the job done for Oz.
More importantly, UK only produces 15k per month of fuel. Even if you ignore any xAKs needing to be topped off on arrival, that is an eye-dropper compared to what CT needs for further trans-shipment to Perth, so Oz can make its own supply. The EC gives lavish amount of either commodity, supply or fuel. I found that I was using about 2/3 of my xAKs to haul fuel to CT rather than supply in 1942. The ships hauling anything to Perth need fuel at both ends, and Oz needs the fuel to power Sydney, and fund fleet ops to defend the Solomons.
By the time Aden opens you're also geting lots of Independent Supply Convoys stopping there, some with a million supply. I never hauled supply to Aden, except to load up ships I was transferring into that sub-theater permanently. Sent them with an EC load since they were heading there anyway. But past May 1943 you shouldn't ever be short of anything at Aden. I found I needed hulls to get stuff out of Aden to Colombo, and then, later, to get millions of points over to Burma (Rangoon) to send into China and to pay for large scale combat in Indo-China and re-taking Malaysia. In the second half of the war supplies from CONUS become a backwater need in SE Asia. You still need to pump up PH all the way along if you do anything in mid-Pac. I had over 7 million supply in PH at one point, and now in April 1945 it's down to 1.2 million despite steady CS convoys all along. The war moves west and so do the piles.
I'm about to get the huge influx of ETO divisions for use in Downfall, so I need to recall 700-ish transports to the WC from the PI to haul them all forward. It's always something.
man.[&o] 
