Turn 18 22-October-1941 Economic
Remarkably the interceptor factory evacuation continues. The Yak-1 factories at Engels and Saratov are evacuated.
These factories faced no prospects whatsoever of being overun by ground forces in the near future - its evacuation is solely down to our air bombardment.
These factories expand to an eventual capacity of 25 each turn until they stop production in turn 68. If left unhindered the Engels factory would produce 1,465 Yak-1s and the Saratov factory, which had a slightly lower intial capacity, 1,444. We are unlikely to be able to cause further damage to the factory in its new location. The bombing damage together with its evacuation means we expect the Engels factory now in Nizhny Tagil to produce 963 and the Saratov factory now in Nizhny Tagil to only produce 909. This is a net
loss of 1,037 Yak-1s. The Yak-1 factory at Tatischevo remains under bombardment with its capacity choked. While our Soviet opponents have prioritised the defence and evacuation of the LaGG-3 factories, presumably because they rate the LaGG3 as a better fighter, the vulnerability of the Yak-1 factories and the disproportionate losses to bombing perhaps means more priority should have been given to them.
The evacuation of these two factories actually increased their damage levels. If there had been no more bombing and no evacuation we expect the Engels factory would have produced 1,147 and the Saratov factory 1,053 or a total net loss of 709 Yak-1s. This is 328 less than will be the case. Implicitly the Soviets have told us they think our continued bombing would have destroyed 329 or more extra Yak-1s. The losses they have already had should tell them it would almost certainly have been much more. They left taking action here much too late. For all the goings on at Gorky it appears they missed the much bigger story at Saratov.
All our bombers continue to operate on repaired rail lines connected to the home rail network using staging bases to extend range. Vehicle conservation is important and for some is a reason to not use the air force at all. Although so far I have not seen it documented a staging base placed somewhere between a bomber base and the target will give a maximum range to target of one and a half times its radius. So our Heinkel bombers, which have a radius of 43 hexes, actually have a maximum range of 64 hexes to a target. Thus we square the circle of both using an air force and not losing vehicles for it.
It may be mud but our strategic bombing campaign continues along the Volga valley and into the West Caucasus.
With the evacuations we are down to only three fighter bomber factories in range. At Gorky the bombing of the hex with the LaGG-3 factory has to be shared with the bombing of the T34 factory
At Stalingrad we continue to choke the expansion of the T34 factory and at South Stalingrad the T60 factory reaches 46% damage. This means at least another three turns of lost producion or an extra 144 T-60 that we know will never be built due to lost expansion.
Which raises the question are we overbombing the T60 factory? Each turn the factory remains damaged we know with 100% probability another 48 tanks will not be built due to lost expansion, and with a probability equal to twice the damage rate it will not produce 2 tanks due to stopped production. The difference between 0% damage and 1 % damage is large, the extra between 1% and 50% is minor. When the Soviet team decide to evacuate the factory the damage will automatically reach 50% - meaning the closer damage already is to 50% the less extra pain they incur. If we actually get to 50% damage there is then no lost opportunity cost of tanks not produced at all, the only cost will be in rail capacity which for a 2 size tank factory is small and at a time when this is less of a constraint. If anything we want to make the choice hard and painful, or even dissuade them from evacuation so we retain the option of continued bombing. This would suggest the optimum damage level for the tank factory each turn is actually 1%, not close to 50%. The only advantage of getting damage levels of 4% or higher is that we "book in" future turns of damage while we can before Soviet defences improve or the weather makes it impossible.
For the first time we add Kuybyshev to our bombing target list. As well as the damage to the vehicle factory we targeted we can see collateral damage to the manpower as well. With the Yak-1 factory at Saratov gone our bombers move on to the vehicle factory there too. This means, together with the vehicle factories at Murom and Yaroslavl, we have been attacking four vehicle factories.
Many thanks to those who gave me errors and corrections to my spreadsheets on Soviet production. In particular I know now when it says production stops in a particular month, there is still production in the first week of that month. These figures are with the new updated understanding - but previous posts are on the old and so may be up to one weeks production out. I will eventually get an updated spreadsheet into the library of WitE resources with these error fixes
