Scope of the Last War, Ogre Construction

[FJCestero]

Has this ever been discussed before? In short: how many of these beasts were built?

I present my views below, but I'd like to hear others. When you consider the shear size of an Ogre versus the industrial capacity one might expect the world of 2070 to possess, versus the growing costs of military hardware...

Then consider we're talking 30 years of war (contrast with WW2 productions) versus possible production bottlenecks in BPC, cybercores, nuclear power systems, and super-conductors. Along with resources diverted to conventional forces, ship building, logistics and keeping the population pacified for thirty years of war...

OK, here goes.

COMBINE:

Mark-I ..... 300
Mark-II .... 700
Mark-III ...1,600
Mark-IIIB ..1,000
Mark-IV .... 400
Mark-V ..... 800
Mark-VI .... 100
Vulcan ..... 100
Ninja ....... 50
=================
TOTAL ......5,050

Not many Mark-Is were made, but low rate production was maintained for raiding. The Mark-II was the main Ogre early on, until the Mark-III supplanted it becoming the Combine workhorse. For most of the war it was the Mark-III/Mark-V dynamic duo that carried on the fight, which is why so many Mark-Vs were built, even given their large size and expense. As the war kept on, these two eventually 'merged' into the Mark-IIIB -- a 2073 design which came to new prominence as a design that could handle most of the missions of both. The Mark-IIIB would form the core of the Combine's late-war Ogre force. Beyond these, the Mark-IVs' numbers were limited by its long trouble plagued development cycle and limited combat role. The Mark-VI was built in limited numbers, as were Vulcans and Ninjas.


PANEURO:

Pikeman .... 500
Legionair .1,100
Huscarl .... 700
Fencer ..... 800
Dopelsdn ... 150
================
TOTAL .....3,250


The Paneuros like the Pikeman more than the Combine liked the Mark-I. With Sheffield and other facilities they built a lot of Legionnaires and Huscarls in desperation waiting for the Fencer to start rolling off the production lines. They then built a lot of Fencers as a matter of national pride. Always 'behind the curve' in Ogre production, the Pans made an enormous effort to at least dominate the high-end, building three Dopps for every two Mark-VI.

I might have underestimated Paneuro Ogre production: their numbers are around 65% (in terms of AV its 531,000 Combine vs 371,000 European or 69.8%), or about 3 to 2. I'm not sure Europa could've lasted 20-30 years against those kinds of odds, but maybe they preferred conventional forces and they did have the home court advantage.

By the way, if we count 2070 to 2093, that's 276 months. Or about 18 Combine Ogres per month. The Pans built an average of a bit under 12. Do these seem reasonable, considering size/cost/scale of the war and the resources of entire continents??

[masockwell]

Hey FJ!

Hope you are doing well. Are you still working on the various OGRE factions?

Cheers,


Mark
Joplin, MO

[FJCestero]

Originally Posted by masockwell

Hey FJ!
Hope you are doing well. Are you still working on the various OGRE factions?
Cheers,
Mark
Joplin, MO

Hi Mark! Yeah, if you haven't already check out the OGRE DE FanMade New Units thread. You might like it :)

[Desert Scribe]

Originally Posted by FJCestero

Has this ever been discussed before? In short: how many of these beasts were built?
***
Or about 18 Combine Ogres per month. The Pans built an average of a bit under 12. Do these seem reasonable, considering size/cost/scale of the war and the resources of entire continents??

I dunno, I'd say judging from the scale of the scenarios (where there are usually no more than two or three Ogres at a time), that your numbers are about a factor of 10 too large--so around 505 total for the NAC and about 325 for the PE, coming off the assembly line at about one or two each month.

But that's my head-canon; your mileage may vary.

[Misplaced Buckeye]

Originally Posted by Desert Scribe

I dunno, I'd say judging from the scale of the scenarios (where there are usually no more than two or three Ogres at a time), that your numbers are about a factor of 10 too large--so around 505 total for the NAC and about 325 for the PE, coming off the assembly line at about one or two each month.

But that's my head-canon; your mileage may vary.

I understand where you're coming from. It would seem though that many of the scenarios in which Ogres played a part have not come to light and especially the later battles when more Ogres took the field during the battle especially after Factory States. Look at WWII and that just lasted 5-6 years. We're talking decades here so the figures don't seem that far off and perhaps could be a little under. Consider the Bolos by Keith Laumer, in the later years of the Melconian Wars they were used in autonomous brigades.

[offsides]

IIRC, the Mark I was actually the most numerous version produced, both because they were so cheap (comparatively) and because they were air-mobile unlike bigger ones. Also, the Mark II was relatively under-produced, as it was deemed a general failure (too weak for it's cost) and mostly produced for client states. But that could be my faulty memory :)

That said, I also feel like the numbers seem high, but I think we're well into the nebulous territory of being able to make the numbers say whatever we want :)

I'm guessing that any one factory wouldn't be able to roll out more than 1-2 large Ogres a month, but a) I really don't know how many factories there really were, b) what the production rate for Ogres really was, and c) how many production lines there were per "factory" (which IIRC was more of a huge industrial complex than a single production line). So while it may feel a little off to me personally, it's also no worse a guess than anything I could come up with :)

[Mack_JB]

Any numbers could work, one just has to sufficiently and correctly outline the universe that allows for such numbers. Many or few, it's hard to say since so much of the Ogre-verse is fictional so far.

That said, the numbers in the OP do seem high. But only 10% of that seems low.

(as an aside, it would appear there have been roughly 9,200 Abrams built in the last 36 years)

[brettd]

So what's a reasonable expectation for worldwide Ogre production?

OK.... VERY rough figures here: Please be gentile...

Given that....

I read somewhere that an Ogre Mk III weighs 1700 tons. (if you don't like this, just figure out a number you like and multiply/divide the numbers below by the ratio to your preferred Ogre weight)

and...

A "standard" WWII tank weighed on average about 30 tons (Sherman/Mk IV, T-34)

and...

VERY roughly 200K-ish medium "tanks" (or similar, e.g. Su-85) were produced in WWII (not counting dinky stuff like Su-76's and Mk I's, Matilda I's, Stuarts and such...). I'm basically thinking of tanks like Mk III-VI, Stg's, Soviet tanks/TD's T34 and up, Shermans, Matilda II's, Cromwells, US TD's, stuff like that.

This means that the world produced about 200K*30 Tons or 6M tons of medium tanks in the 39-45 period. This figure is probably an underestimate.

6M tons divided by 1.7K tons gives you roughly 3500 Ogre-weights worth of tanks over five-ish years, or about 700 Ogres a year worldwide (2/day).

Of course, Ogres aren't WWII tanks. Of course the production capacity would be very different. Of course, the Ogre production is in addition to other armor production, and so on and so forth... etc... ad infinitum....

Looking at it another way, the roughly 100K T-55's which were built at 36 tons each gives you 3.6M Tons, the weight equivalent of 2000 Mk III Ogres. Even if you think a Mk III is 10 times heavier than stated above, you still get the weight equivalent of 200 Ogres (each weighing the same as 500 Soviet 1950's MBT's). That's a lot of Ogres.

People sure build a lot of weapons.

[FJCestero]

Jumping back in: Of course, everyone who's pointed out the wide range of posible numbers are entirely correct. I might have erred on the high side as DS has pointed out, maybe a more "realistic" value would be in the 60 - 80% range. Then again, when FDR challenged America to build 50,000 airplanes they all said he was crazy. America of course didn't build 50,000 planes -- it built 150,000. With half our current population and no robotic factories...

My numbers were sort of reverse engineered from production schedules (as some of you have no doubt guessed) and operational tempo. I figured that to support thousands of miles of front across 5-6 continents, considering non-combat losses (we lost about as many tanks and planes to breakdowns, bad weather, training and carrier landings as we did to enemy bullets) you'd need about 20 (+/-) Ogres a month. Much more than that, and the world wouldn't last 20 years. Much less and Ogres would be too small a part of the overall war effort for anyone to care enough to make a game about them!

That said, I do think most of the Last War was fought by conventional units. It's just that Ogres got most of the glory (???): think Hurrican vs. Spitfire. I'd place the total mass of Ogres build to be in the 10% ballpark compared to the mass sum of Heavies, Missile Tanks, GEVs, etc. It's a gut instict thing, but I think of it as an war-ecology of sorts: a mass of conventional units supporting a smaller population of Ogres at the top -- predators vs prey almost. But there again, 20-30 years of production can really add up. My guess is the Pans were cranking out Heavies like we did Shermans, or the Russians the T-34. I don't give much credence to Gurps:Ogre personally -- I put the Heavy Tank around 80-100 tons (growth over time, the Abrams is HUGE compared to your average WW2 panzer). The 200+ tons of G:O is too much, me thinks. I also think the "average" Ogre was in the 800-1000 ton department. Briefly: the cost per ton of an Ogre vis-a-vis a Heavy can't be radically different else one would have displaced the other as an inefficient application of resources. Since a Mark-III (my "standard") can kill about 12 armor equivalents, this puts it around 12 * 90, or 1080 tons, maybe lighter because it's more expensive (but not too much) per ton what with the nuke-plant and cyberbrain. Now, if there's 10 tons of convetional armor out there for every ton of Ogre, and Ogres are 10 times more massive than tanks, then there should be about 100 tanks to every Ogre, give or take.

So, take the M-4 Sherman (wikipedia): 49,234 x 30.3 metric tons from Feb '42 to July '45 (42 months) works out to 8,524,515 metric tons of Shermans if their production had kept up for 20 years. 10% of this, dedicated to Ogres at 1,000 tons each is 852 Ogres in 20 years.

More Ogres could be "justified" since the production figures for the Sherman includes a ramp-up tail which would affect Ogres much less amortized over 20 years than the Sherman's 3-1/2. Plus the fact that the US in WW2 was still just getting started in terms of war production. The projected numbers for '46 and '47 (tenuous as they might be) are scary! Given 20-25 years of flat-out effort to boost production numbers double the number of Ogres would not be amiss.

This of course assumes a certain equivalence: that a ton of Sherman was as "hard" to build then as a ton of Heavy Tank will be in 2070. An assumption thrown the monkey wrench given robotics...

Still, maybe I did over do it. Sure, the US built more than Shermans (Aircraft Carriers come to mind, along with DE's, etc) but the Combine would also have to build other stuff as well (satellites, battlesuits, etc).

Hmm... I've got to think about this some more. Thanks to everyone! Hope my explanation above gives you some insight into where I'm coming from.

[Buzzardo]

There's another way to tackle this issue: Production capacity. How often does a completed Ogre roll out the (very large) doors at a production facility? How many production facilities exist? (I doubt that all production facilities are equal. Some would be larger, some smaller. But let's keep it uniform for the sake of simplicity.)

Answer those questions, and you'll know how many Ogres were built for The Last War. You'll have to adjust for waxing and waning numbers of production facilities, but it might be possible to establish an average for the period.

One last thought, I'd guess an Ogre's complexity is more on the order of a largish ship (say a WWII cruiser or modern destroyer) than a tank. How long does it take to build a ship during war time? Toward the end of WWII, the US was producing a carrier a month and enough other ships to escort the carriers and landing ships and so on.

Just another way to think about it. Whether it's a useful way to think about it is up for debate.