Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Might reloading 7.92x57mm Mauser cartridges with black powder be suitable for that role?

There are several problems with that.

You often need a different kind of rifling for a gun barrel to last for a long time with smokeless powder, to the kind you want with black powder.

You can use cast lead bullets with black powder fairly easily, but the velocity you can easily get with smokeless demands jacketed bullets.

You can't get black powder rounds to have the same velocity as smokeless, unless you deliberately underpower your smokeless, which means the rifles need different sights, and any confusion with the ammunition means you will miss a lot.

The cleaning regimes for black powder and smokeless aren't the same, and confusion there ruins guns. I suspect gun oil may often be in short supply.

Training rifles are usually .22LR calibre, because they have much less recoil, which makes it easier to teach the basics of shooting. That sort of calibre is also good for light hunting.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Stories like that since Mark Twain show a pattern: the more the author knows about engineering, and the more experts he talks to, and the more research they put into the problem, the more people he or she decides are needed to achieve a lower final technology. So the Connecticut Yankee builds 1880s technologies in Migration Era Europe, but 20,000 Grantvillers just about build mid-19th-century technology in 17th-century Germany after hooking into the global trade network.

This would be a great excuse to postulate strange gaps in their knowledge: even if the Nazis had not hated actual experts (the boss preferred learned-sounding cranks), a few hundred or thousand refugees just can't bring and sustain the knowledge of the 1930s with them. So yeah, probably OK field medicine and machining, but they may be flat earthers or believe that Untermenschen cause the spontaneous generation of bacteria.

Well, yeah.

On the other hand, the world that the PCs might meet these guys on is flat. So it's not as if their pseudoscience is necessarily always wrong.

And if I manage to justify nuclear technology* as a new power source for their zeppelins, these couple of generations after the founding of their new society, I fully plan for their understanding of radiation to be abysmal and them to have a variety of pseudo-scientific theories that purport to explain the poor health of those few zeppelin crewmen who retain their full humanity.

*Because, seriously, the compact they've made with their scary Thing patrons means they'll face enormous pressure to a) Generate power out of all proportion to their population and mundane needs and b) Bring back a steady supply of conquered slaves, entirely aside from their labour needs. So, essentially, positing that the entire surplus production of the New Reich since its foundation was focused on generating power and the military exploration of other worlds would be pretty reasonable.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There are several problems with that.

You often need a different kind of rifling for a gun barrel to last for a long time with smokeless powder, to the kind you want with black powder.

You can use cast lead bullets with black powder fairly easily, but the velocity you can easily get with smokeless demands jacketed bullets.

You can't get black powder rounds to have the same velocity as smokeless, unless you deliberately underpower your smokeless, which means the rifles need different sights, and any confusion with the ammunition means you will miss a lot.

The cleaning regimes for black powder and smokeless aren't the same, and confusion there ruins guns. I suspect gun oil may often be in short supply.

Training rifles are usually .22LR calibre, because they have much less recoil, which makes it easier to teach the basics of shooting. That sort of calibre is also good for light hunting.

So, best to use .22 LR copies of the Karabiner 98k, like the KKW.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Icelander

If necessary, this might involve nuclear powered zeppelins, depending on how plausible it is that Nazi scientists might eventually invent nuclear reactors independently in their Last Redoubt.

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this. Did you just use the term plausible in a discussion of magic using, multiverse-spanning Antarctic space Nazis?

Okay, maybe I can also offer some helpful comments instead of just snark. You can get an idea of what a relatively isolated nuclear enterprise needs by looking at the Hanford project, the part of the Manhattan project that built functioning nuclear reactors in a formerly mostly uninhabited* region of the northwest United States. By 1944, an and arid and empty region of scrub-steppe had grown into a boom town of 50,000 people - so this is likely a minimum of what you need to build a functioning reactor.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/tour-site/life-hanford
This is a minimum, because you still need to import steel pipes, rebar, portland cement, copper wire, winches, jeeps, trucks, diesel fuel, cranes, and so forth. It also gets you a nuclear reactor in a large concrete building. To miniaturize the reactor enough that an airship can lift it will require even more work (although not necessarily more people).

Luke

* If you ignore the Yakama, Palouse, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples, which the US government regularly did. And the small farming communities of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were removed.

[Icelander]

While 7.92x57mm Mauser rounds would be more than enough for normal fauna, some of the worlds that these Antarctic Space Nazis will explore are home to some truly fearsome critters. As in, demonic dinosaurs, Lovecraftian horrors, regenerating monstrosities and giant insects with armored carapaces who beat up the square-cube law and take its lunch money.

While the stormtroopers of SS-Sturmkommando Totenkopf are no slouches themselves and in some locales, the Nazis simply relied on chemical weapons to do their killing, no doubt the senior Nazi leadership also took care to loot a sufficient supply of monster killing munitions when they created their new Reich.

Senior Nazis might have nice sporting Mausers chambered in elephant-hunting calibers or even the Mannlicher-Schönauer Grosswildbüchse in 12.7x70mmRB.

I'm also quite struck by the Panzerbüchse 39 in 7.92x94mm. It seems like an ideal weapon for a sharpshooter on a zeppelin to use against massive critters with hard to reach brains or other vital spots. With just minor modifications, it can also be used as the Granatbüchse 39, a handy grenade launcher, which makes it all the more useful aboard a zeppelin. I'm thinking that I'll have two aboard every scout craft.

What would be the Range, Dmg and Rcl of a 7.92mm bullet driven at 4,000 fps from one of those?

The MG 131 machine gun seems like ideal armament for the prestigious and valuable zeppelins that explore new worlds for the glory of the New Reich. Obviously, MG42s would be the main armament, but one MG 131 seems like it would be a nice addition in the case of an attack by Winter fey knights riding armoured shantaks or something even scarier.

Other ideas, suggestions?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this. Did you just use the term plausible in a discussion of magic using, multiverse-spanning Antarctic space Nazis?

It's an inverse magical realism homage kind of thing. I thought I covered that already. :-)

Seriously, though, the PCs might encounter them in the Dreamlands and it's obviously most sensible for them to conclude that as with the yeti that look like Star Wars wampas and the White Riders on blood-sucking ice spiders, these are simply pop culture artifacts in the mind of the dreamer.

However, I want there to be viable answers to every question the PCs might ask about the origins and background of these Antarctic Space Nazis, enough to cause pkayers to wonder whether they are entirely imaginary...

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Okay, maybe I can also offer some helpful comments instead of just snark. You can get an idea of what a relatively isolated nuclear enterprise needs by looking at the Hanford project, the part of the Manhattan project that built functioning nuclear reactors in a formerly mostly uninhabited* region of the northwest United States. By 1944, an and arid and empty region of scrub-steppe had grown into a boom town of 50,000 people - so this is likely a minimum of what you need to build a functioning reactor.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/tour-site/life-hanford
This is a minimum, because you still need to import steel pipes, rebar, portland cement, copper wire, winches, jeeps, trucks, diesel fuel, cranes, and so forth. It also gets you a nuclear reactor in a large concrete building. To miniaturize the reactor enough that an airship can lift it will require even more work (although not necessarily more people).

So you could buy several hundred senior SS, leading scientists and selected settlers, along with several thousand stormtroopers (who conveniently don't even require food) quickly building up a slave settlement of fifty thousand or more and managing to build reactors to power zeppelins in 40-50 years?

By which time the slaves would be pushing a million and the free citizens would probably be around 50,000.

[AlexanderHowl]

Not really, a enslavement ratio of 20:1 without the ability to purchase modern weapons from outside source ends up with the slaves killing the masters (or the masters butchering the slaves during a failed revolt).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Not really, a enslavement ratio of 20:1 without the ability to purchase modern weapons from outside source ends up with the slaves killing the masters (or the masters butchering the slaves during a failed revolt).

As previously mentioned, the majority of the slaves are quite securely controlled by Things. This is, obviously, quite a big point of vulnerability if these Things ever turn on the Nazis, but it does mean that the only slaves capable of rebellion are bed slaves, skilled or creative slaves or the like. And those are far fewer, comparatively speaking.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Senior Nazis might have nice sporting Mausers chambered in elephant-hunting calibers or even the Mannlicher-Schönauer Grosswildbüchse in 12.7x70mmRB.

I've been using a similar rifle in a Weird War II game for several years. It's excellent as readily carriable firepower, but the Rcl is brutal.

I'm also quite struck by the Panzerbüchse 39 in 7.92x94mm. It seems like an ideal weapon for a sharpshooter on a zeppelin to use against massive critters with hard to reach brains or other vital spots.

What would be the Range, Dmg and Rcl of a 7.92mm bullet driven at 4,000 fps from one of those?

GURPS: WWII, has 1,200/5,400, 13d-1 (2) and Rcl 2.

There is however, something better that the Germans captured quite a few of: the Soviet PRTS-41 anti-tank rifle in 14.5x114mm Russian. You can cribs stats from the ZiD KPV machine-gun in High-Tech. Weight is 49lb, and capacity 5+1.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I've been using a similar rifle in a Weird War II game for several years. It's excellent as readily carriable firepower, but the Rcl is brutal.

In terms of game stats, anything with RoF 1 or lower ignores the Rcl stat entirely.

From a real-world comfort perspective, yeah, I imagine that firing the .500 Jeffries from a fairly light shoulder rifle without any form of recoil reduction is pretty brutal. Still, beats becoming shantak fodder.

Originally Posted by johndallman

GURPS: WWII, has 1,200/5,400, 13d-1 (2) and Rcl 2.

Mmmm, yeah. Those are some nice stats for a marksman's rifle, especially one fired from a floating platform that pretty much guarantees control of the range.

My PCs have pistols, sawed-off shotgun, black-powder Winchester lever-action in .45-70 and one bolt-action rifle in .577 Tyrannosaur, which in terms of long range efffectiveness is not all that advanced over a TL6 elephant round.

Ordinary Karabiner 98k outrange them comfortably. PzB.39 is just adding insult to injury.

Originally Posted by johndallman

There is however, something better that the Germans captured quite a few of: the Soviet PRTS-41 anti-tank rifle in 14.5x114mm Russian. You can cribs stats from the ZiD KPV machine-gun in High-Tech. Weight is 9lb, and capacity 5+1.

That's an outrageously light rifle to fire such a hefty round.

Arranging to have a few of these is no problem. But what about ammo? Did the Germans have factories making these rounds for captured rifles?

The PzB.39 has the added benefit of the manufacture of the APHC ammunition having been stopped at a time when the inner SS leadership were starting to put together a plan for a Last Redoubt, so arranging for the tools to become part of the secret settlement plans would have been easy.