Hi, I don't really want to engage in a debate over what damage 150 250KG bombs would do to PH. I don't think they repaired the actual damage in 2 weeks. If I drop a 250KG bomb on your crane track it will not be repaired 2 weeks later. (I don't think spare track is in warehouse and I don't thinkl the surface the track is laid across will be repaired yet. Dropping a bomb near the lock in a dry dock is going to make the dry dock require repair.
The "actual damage" was largely to ships. Those were not repaired in two weeks. The problem was heavily influenced by the fact that ships have to be patched underwtaer before they'll float. Once they float you have to move em for permanent repair etc. I'm sorry you don't want to debate the effects of the damage, but that IS the
heart of the what happens if we "bomb the 'strategic assets'" at PH question.
Re: a 250Kg bomb will do to a RR track. The effects have been widely documented. Major US railroad companies in 1876 could lay 20 MILES of track per DAY (that includes building the substrate as needed). All a track requires is a stable foundation, ties, and iron. So bingo a 250Kg bomb hits. You fill the hole and compact. That takes about an hour, in my experience, monitoring street construction. Depending on the nature of the foundation and fill, maybe a whole day for a really sizeable hole if you want to start adding a concrete substrate. You lay the new ties and rails. That takes about ten minutes for a hole, say, 50 feet in diameter.
These items are not just laying around in warehouses.
Heck YES they are. It's ties, rails, and concrete. It's not like some secret tech or reserved only for military use. You could fly the darned stuff out from the west coast in a day (more or less depending on the number of holes you wanted to fill) if you did noty have a heap of it to hand. Rail stock and ties could be found in warehouses aplenty throughout the US in 1941 and had it become a critical resource there were hundreds of miles of unused line that could have been pulled up and recycled. Believe me the rail tracks for this thing are trivial to replace.
86 out of 100 might have been excessive. In WITP repair is supply and engineers. PH is low on supply from day 1. It will require several weeks for supply to begin arriving from west coast. First piority at PH is going to be the airfields, and then port and then repair. (repair will be busy preventing ships damaged in first strike from sinking.)
PH is low on supply because of what? The bombing? What sort of supply is lacking? Engineers? Does the game model assume that all the engineers in PH are sitting around a table in abuilding with a sign on the roof that says "Civil Engineering Division: Bomb Here?"
Repair teams don't work that way. The Civil Engineers whose specialty is substrate, rail lines and runways are not going to be involved in ship damage control because they're not going to know anything about it. For that sort of stuff you'd need mechanical engineers that specialize in naval design (like my cousins).
If that's the way Matrix is thinking about repair facilities then this stuff should just be removed from the target list. The only way you're going to wipe out the engineers from the general civil population is to kill most of the civilians. That'd be one really big, soft, amorphous target and would take many more days of bombing than KB can deliver.
The motors on your giant pillboxes are all on the outside.
(The cranes at Philly were/are not made of concrete.)
A motor is a piece of cake to fix. I'm not sure what drives the beastie in the given photo to move it along the rails. I suspect it's the locomotive at center-right. If so, that locomotive is your best target. I think that the US could quickly find a spare locomotive among the 900 or so surplus locomotives that we gave to the USSR.
But enough of my opinion. Do air dropped bombs have any effect on land targets?
Well, yeah, but the effect depends on the target. Take a runway for example. You can crater it to pieces. Depending on how the runway's mad eand what it needs to hold, this can be a critical kill or just another ho-hum repair. Cratering a runway will prevent the Concorde from landing there for a darned long time, but not a 747. Definitely little effect on, say, a C47 or B17 once the rubbish is removed and the hole is filled and compacted (or covered with marston matting).
You can bomb warehouse. These can be rebuilt with wood frame and tin. A few weeks required, tops. Really, anything in PH can be rebuilt or replaced quickly. To mess up a turbine machine shop, for example, you'd need to destroy machine tools like lathes. Basically, the USAAF in Europe discovered that while you can really make a shambles of floor space, ruining machine tools is really hard to do. It requires an intense melting fire or blast damage so big and thorough and dense that big solid steel thingies shear from the blast effects.
Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics.
Didn't we have this conversation already?
