Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

No, I can't. Cartridges of the World doesn't have enough detail on German designs. Mauser, RWS and DWM will certainly have all the equipment you need.

The future ASNs would have done much the same thing as I describe them doing at Mauser Werke in this post at many other armament and ammunition plants where SS men might have connections. Any tooling and dies for purely civilian cartridges that were not being used during the war and thus not obviously vital to German war production would have been obtained almost as a matter of course during 1944, using various cover stories and/or bribes.

For the last months of the war, any and all tooling and machines that could be obtained with SS credentials and stories about Werwolf or the Alpine Redoubt probably would have been acquired, with future ASNs racing ahead of the Soviets in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Silesia, and ahead of the Western Allies in such arms-producing centers as Oberndorf and Suhl.

I know that Polish and Czech armament firms had extensive R&D in various cartridges before WWII and in Austria, the development of sporting cartridges was blooming in the Interbellum era. I don't know what happened to the sporting arms under Steyr-Mannlicher when the companies were taken over by the Germans, but it's quite possible that tooling for making sporting calibers was not regarded as militarily vital and some parts would have been available to the ASNs.

Unfortunately, a lot of the interesting development in the 1920s and 1930s happened in cooperation with Patronenfabrik Solothurn AG in Switzerland and the ASNs can't simply seize property in neutral Switzerland. Still, there would have been some equipment for experimenting with rifle loads in Steyr-Mannlicher hands, as the restrictions that led to them having to partner with Solothurn had already been removed several years before the Anschluß.

12.7x70mm Schüler cartridges were actually only ever made in one place, but while they were always sold under the name GECADO, that doesn't actually tell us whether they were technically manufactured in an RWS factory or the G.C. Dornheim factory, as it is not totally clear what the terms of their various agreements were. Dornheim was at the time selling cartridges made by RWS under his own trade-name, apparently by contract, but the company may also have retained some specialized manufacture. In any case, both factories that are plausible are located in Suhl, so it's probably not an important difference.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Don't know yet. I'm working on an industrial chemistry post (and that's an interesting optimisation problem), and after that I'll do a steel mill post.

(SNIP)

I look forward to those posts, especially the one for chemistry.

Brass shell casings are a bit tricky, and it took some experimentation to find an alloy flexible enough it would expand to seal the chamber, but not so soft the pressure would burst it or the heat would weld it to the sides.

However, that's a simple matter as compared to the creation of the primers .

Those require an ample supply of raw materials because they can never be reused.

Also, if the manufacturing process allows contamination, an already volatile chemical compound rapidly becomes dangerously unstable -- as in, "explodes and kills everybody" unstable.

The difficulty in the manufacture of reasonably large batches of stable primer chemical, the need to safely insert it in the copper primer capsule, and then get that annealed to the base of the brass casing, is why realistic AtE scenarios mean most people are reduced to muzzle-loaders, pretty quickly.

The ASNs face the same issues. Smokeless powder and lead slugs and saving the brass doesn't help unless they can make the primers.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

I look forward to those posts, especially the one for chemistry.

I'm looking forward to those too. It's amazing how willing johndallman is to provide awesome research assistence, which always adds to the plausibility and fun of my sessions.

Indeed, the entire SJ Games forums are an amazing community of intelligent and erudite people, whose esoteric hobbies and idiosyncratic speculation is a large part of what makes GURPS stand out, to me. Thank you all, for being the sort of people who'll care about the history of Antarctic Space Nazi settlement and their economic devopment. Without you, Nazis would never again ride dinosaurs.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Brass shell casings are a bit tricky, and it took some experimentation to find an alloy flexible enough it would expand to seal the chamber, but not so soft the pressure would burst it or the heat would weld it to the sides.

I'm assuming that making new casings that were good enough for high-pressure smokeless powder took longer than the ASNs hoped, but that some casings of the many millions of 7.92x57mm cartridges they brought were still being reloaded by the time they got it right.

And that they were able to conserve their smokeless ammo exclusively for only the most vital military uses because they brought an assortment of scavenged sporting cartridges and brass casings for sporting cartridges that could be reloaded with black powder, not the least important of which were 12G shotgun shells. Also, long before they could make casings from native metals that could tolerate smokeless powder pressures, they could make ones that were adequate for low pressure, large bore black powder rounds.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

However, that's a simple matter as compared to the creation of the primers .

Those require an ample supply of raw materials because they can never be reused.

Also, if the manufacturing process allows contamination, an already volatile chemical compound rapidly becomes dangerously unstable -- as in, "explodes and kills everybody" unstable.

The difficulty in the manufacture of reasonably large batches of stable primer chemical, the need to safely insert it in the copper primer capsule, and then get that annealed to the base of the brass casing, is why realistic AtE scenarios mean most people are reduced to muzzle-loaders, pretty quickly.

The ASNs face the same issues. Smokeless powder and lead slugs and saving the brass doesn't help unless they can make the primers.

Somewhat famously, the authors and community for the 1632 series assumed that primers and percussion caps would be extremely dangerous to make. Which they can be. And the early firearms industry by the protagonists is written with that assumption.

Then, a fan named Robert Head demonstrated a method for synthesizing Potassium Chlorate which which was a lot simpler, easier and safer than the methods assumed by the authors. At first, some readers were skeptical, but as the method can literally be duplicated by amateurs at home, using household tools available in the 17th century, pretty soon there was no way to object. Not once actual readers had reality tested it and demonstrated to the authors.

Quite cleverly, the authors simply incorporated it into the story. The Out-Of-Time people in the story, who were not prepared for their world shift and who are mostly not scientists, engineers or technical experts, simply missed it. And a downtime rival found the process in one of their uptime books and started making percussion caps...

[Icelander]

As Karl Maria Wiligut is without a doubt the most powerful occultist among the ASNs and apparently responsible for the very possibility of them settling new worlds, his eccentric religion of Irminism has become almost a state religion.

Officially, NSDAP members and SS men are not required to be congregants, but they are not allowed to ahere to any 'non-Aryan' religions, which pretty much leaves various flavours of Germanic paganism, whether those are latter-day inventions or the very different practices encountered among the native quasi-Germanics.

Indeed, a close-knit and deceptively powerful society of Armanen rune magicians also exist with the higher echelons of the SS and these have been much more successful than the Irminists in appealing to the existing priest-kings and other religious figures among the natives. The greatest single magician among the ASNs might be an Irminist, but his powers are intuitive and ecstatic in nature and he cannot teach very effectively unless the student has some measure of his combination of innate visionary genius and unstable mental health. The most accomplished organisation of well-trained and educated rune-magicians is without a doubt the much smaller order of the Armanenschaft.

All the same, professing Irminism has become almost a prerequisite for high office in the SS, unless one is a powerful adept of another religion (those capable of magic are prized enough so that they are almost assured of success regardless of eccentricity).

What does this have to do with Goslar? - you might be pardoned for asking. Well, the otherworldly analogue of Goslar is about 150 km east of the initial ASN settlement on the world of Germania Hyperborea. And Karl Maria Wiligut claims that in ancient times, around -12,500 BCE, it was the center of the Irminist faith on Earth, before those pesky schismatic Wotanists (of whom the Armanists are the 'modern' incarnation) destroyed it and drove them to the Externsteine, of which the otherworldly analogue forms one of the centerpieces of the ASN settlements on multiple worlds, as one of their most vital gates.

What power might not await the ASNs, or at least those of them who are loyal Irminists, in Goslar?

Also, more prosaically, Goslar is located by Rammelsberg, the site of the mine in longest continual operation in Germany. The main ores mined at Rammelsberg include lead-zinc ore, copper ore, sulphur ore, mixed ore (Melierterz), brown spar (Braunerz), barite ore (Grauerz), banding ore (Banderz) and kniest along with the important minerals of galena, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, baryte and vitriols. The chief metals extracted from these ores included silver, lead, copper and zinc, on which the wealth of Goslar was based.

Goslar is part of the Harz range, which has historically been a mining center. It also lies on an old trade route, an analogue of which lies straight through the initial settlement of the ASNs in Germania Hyperborea, about where Paderborn would be on Earth. The Hellweg, used for millenia BCE and into medieval times, connects the Rhine (around Duisburg) through Paderborn to Höxter, which is on the navigable Weser river. From there, medieval copper traders would travel by cart to Einbach, where they could get some of the way to Goslar on the river Leine, finishing their trip by cart, again.

It's likely that even the early TL2 'Germanic' tribesmen had been using the route of the old Hellweg before the arrival of the ASNs for salt trading and it's almost certain that more technologically advanced TL2 societies around the Rhine and Weser regularly drive salt carts over this route and may use it for other trading between them as well.

More than likely, most of the finer TL2 and any TL3 weapons, art objects and other trade goods that the ASNs discover among their early TL2 'Germanic' neighbours originally came down the rivers from 'Celtic' cultures to the south and east and were then carried over the Hellweg by merchants from more settled societies in the neighbourhood to sell among the wilder tribes, in return for whatever you buy from warlike Iron Age tribes only a few generations removed from nomadic cattle ranching.

How soon could the ASN settle Goslar and start fortifying settlements along the Hellweg?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm looking forward to those too. It's amazing how willing johndallman is to provide awesome research assistence, which always adds to the plausibility and fun of my sessions.

It's stuff I like learning anyway, and it's the nearest I can come to participating in your games.

[a humble lich]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It's stuff I like learning anyway, and it's the nearest I can come to participating in your games.

I agree. I am in awe of the work Icelander has shared with us in these forums. I wish the games I have put together were this detailed. And the forum is amazingly helpful and supportive. Other fora for other systems are often not nearly as friendly.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

No, I can't. Cartridges of the World doesn't have enough detail on German designs. Mauser, RWS and DWM will certainly have all the equipment you need.

Mauser Werke had a Gruppe 30, in English called the Weapons Research Institute and Weapons Development Group, led by Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer, the Technical Director of Mauser, who was based at the Oberndorf plant. Gruppe 30 handled everything from mathematical analysis of firearm and cartridge design to smallarms and up to aircraft autocannon (a specialty of von Lossnitzer, who would later go on to contribute to the design of the M61 Vulcan, after the Americans 'acquired' him in Operation Paperclip).

More relevant to our needs is Abteilung 37, the Light Weapon Development, led by Ernst Altenburger (one of the two founders of Feinwerkbau) and containing four departments under Altenburger, Alex Seidel (founded H&K with Heckler and Koch, two other Mauser engineers), Dr. Ludwig Vorgrimler and Erich Illenberger. They were charged with R&D into smallarms up to 15mm.

I can find evidence that Wilhelm Stähle (along with Dr. Vorgrimler, generally credited with design of the StG 45(M)) did some research into intermediate cartridges before settling on using the 7.92x3mm Kurz for the assault rifle that became the StG 45(M) design and that they had the capability to make prototypes in different calibers, to compare performance. Interestingly, there was also a Department 355 belonging to an Abteilung 35, led by Dr. Karl Maier, mathematical physicist, whose task it was to perform mathematical analysis of R&D designs (also 'acquired by the USA after the war).

Basically, Mauser Werke invented most of the accepted methods and protocols in modern firearm R&D between 1942-1945, in Oderndorf am Neckar. A huge number of the most well-regarded firearms in the modern world are either directly designed by one of the engineers working at Mauser in WWII or use design principles from a design by one or more of them. This includes most H&K weapons, like the MP5, G3, HK21 and others, but also SIG assault rifles, the M61 Vulcan autocannon and a range of sporting and target weapons.

It also looks like many of them emigrated abroad after the war or else risked execution by the occupying force in order to continue to design weapons (I've now found five Mauser engineers who are either rumoured or confirmed to have stolen equipment in order to found new armament firms). Given such extreme dedication to their craft, it doesn't strike me as implausible that some of them would be willing to take a huge leap of faith and go somewhere unknown and strange to them if that meant continuing their work.

Not to mention that all of them had been willing to work alongside thousands of slaves, who did the repetative and less technical tasks at Mauser Werke in Oberndorf, so they already have crossed that mental hurdle, and, indeed, many of the technicians and engineers will have some years of experience in training unskilled and unwilling laborers to be able to manufacture TL6 and TL7 firearms in an efficient manner.

Not to mention that much of their R&D was focused on how to maximise limited resources and manufacture effective military weapons while suffering shortages of various strategic materials and skilled workers, but with access to vast reserves of unskilled slave labour and the possibility of training slaves enough for them to operate assembly lines.

Indeed, those Mauser engineers who were 'acquired' through Operation Paperclip and similar efforts by other Allies essentiallly did accept something like what the ASNs will offer them, making a snap decision to emigrate to a country with whom they had been at war, based only on promises. I think the ASNs should be able to secure a few of these highly valuable experts for their armaments industry.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It's stuff I like learning anyway, and it's the nearest I can come to participating in your games.

Originally Posted by a humble lich

I agree. I am in awe of the work Icelander has shared with us in these forums. I wish the games I have put together were this detailed. And the forum is amazingly helpful and supportive. Other fora for other systems are often not nearly as friendly.

Y'all too sweet for y'all's own good.

[adm]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Y'all too sweet for y'all's own good.

I would love to see the "final" campaign documents for for your games.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by adm

I would love to see the "final" campaign documents for for your games.

Ironically, the best, most coherent and most complete notes for one of my campaigns is likely to be what I post on the forums.

Notes for my personal use tend to be cryptic, random jottings, names of NPCs without any explanation (because I figure I'll remember the details once I see the name), inexplicable short and staccatto sentences abondoned halfway through, numbers noted down without context (time someone used Luck, wounds, consumables, etc.) and general indeciphable gibberish. No one could possibly get any use from them except me... and to tell the truth, if it's been a while since the game, I generally have more luck looking up whatever I wrote on the forums, if I want to know what happened.

Having to present my ramblings so that someone understands them improves not only the clarity of the writing, but the quality of the content. I'm convinced that campaigns I prepare 'out loud', i.e. during forum conversations and speculation with forumites, are a lot better than they otherwise would be.