Dragon's Fury - World War against America and the West

[stevep]

Jan 9, 2022 9:16:54 GMT lordroel said:

Jan 9, 2022 9:15:16 GMT gillan1220 said:

I read that. The premise is stupid on how America downsized its military prior to the 21st century and virtually did nothing as China gobbled all of the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Central and South America.
Here's the TV Tropes page for it: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Invasion

Everything is possible as long as the author can write it.

  The horrifying and totally weird bit is that books like these get published and sell!

[lordroel]

Jan 9, 2022 12:42:10 GMT stevep said:

Jan 9, 2022 9:16:54 GMT lordroel said:

Everything is possible as long as the author can write it.

  The horrifying and totally weird bit is that books like these get published and sell!

There are always people out there that read these kind of things.

[gillan1220]

I will continue reading the story tomorrow. It's really long and it hurts my eyes. Anyways, I really just want to see the ending where the U.S. and allies may win over the Sino-Indian-Arab alliance in an epic conclusion.

[lukedalton]

Jan 9, 2022 10:15:42 GMT simon darkshade said:

The issue with RD 20+ is that the central story has never really been written. There are the side stories where every authorial insert is a dashing war hero, the final battles which are very interesting and a general outline that misses out a fair bit; for example, there are extensive fact files on people’s favourite areas, but no US Army order of battle. Throw in the fact that a large number of those stories are offline and I can’t really put it in with the others.

My mention of TLW was not based by who was fighting on what side, but of being of good quality and possessed of a story that isn’t politically driven.

Take in consideration that RD 20+ started more or less as a semi-RPG that exploded beyond any previous thought, hell it was more or less the reason i joined AH.com; so the general lack of consistency and many over the top is understable...i left it a little after the thread moved to HPCA due to me finding the place awfull

[simon darkshade]

It is understandable, but it is all that it is. Until such time as it actually tells the story of the war rather than just a selection of vignettes on the prowess of individual people and a very few battles, then it cannot be compared with more fulsome accounts. I like the shared setting idea and would love something like it for myself, but runs into the issue of disputes over canon (I remember the initial pages on AH.com, replete with Commie separatist Scottish republicans) and the main storyline/timeline being utterly neglected for over a decade.

As an RPG, it isn’t that successful. As a coherent AH timeline, it lacks meat on its bones.

[gillan1220]

From page 54 of the book.

GIR ARMED FORCES

ANALYSIS ARMY AND AIR FORCES

Country	Infantry Divisions	Armored Divisions	Tanks	APCs	Attack Helicopters	Aircraft
Iran	35	15	1350	900	250	250
Afghanistan	5	3	250	300	100	100
Turkmenistan	2	3	500	800	20	150
Uzbekistan	3	1	200	400	20	100
Tajikistan		1	100	100	10	50
Kyrgyzstan		1	100	100	25	100
Best Case GIR	45	24	2500	2600	425	750
Iraq	10	5	1000	1000	200	100
Pakistan	35	20	2000	900	150	200
Worst Case	90	49	4500	4500	775	1050
Modern Equipment	50	25	2000	2000	300	500

Naval

Country	Frigates (FFG)	Submarines	Aircraft
Iran	16	6	32
Pakistan	14	12	24
Worst Case GIR	30	15	56

[lordroel]

Jan 12, 2022 13:05:21 GMT gillan1220 said:

From page 54 of the book.

GIR ARMED FORCES

ANALYSIS ARMY AND AIR FORCES

Country	Infantry Divisions	Armored Divisions	Tanks	APCs	Attack Helicopters	Aircraft
Iran	35	15	1350	900	250	250
Afghanistan	5	3	250	300	100	100
Turkmenistan	2	3	500	800	20	150
Uzbekistan	3	1	200	400	20	100
Tajikistan		1	100	100	10	50
Kyrgyzstan		1	100	100	25	100
Best Case GIR	45	24	2500	2600	425	750
Iraq	10	5	1000	1000	200	100
Pakistan	35	20	2000	900	150	200
Worst Case	90	49	4500	4500	775	1050
Modern Equipment	50	25	2000	2000	300	500

Naval

Country	Frigates (FFG)	Submarines	Aircraft
Iran	16	6	32
Pakistan	14	12	24
Worst Case GIR	30	15	56

Nice gillan1220 .

[simon darkshade]

Ah, the good old 20 Pakistani armoured divisions. And Afghanistan having 3 such units with a total of 250 tanks.

[gillan1220]

Jan 12, 2022 15:39:43 GMT simon darkshade said:

Ah, the good old 20 Pakistani armoured divisions. And Afghanistan having 3 such units with a total of 250 tanks.

I forgot to add, another POD here is Osama bin-Laden was killed between 2001 to 2005 (where the bulk of the PODs occur). So somehow, the U.S. got to successfully do its nation-building in Afghanistan without the Taliban doing an insurgency?

[simon darkshade]

Nation building does not make three armoured divisions active, given that each costs $600 million+ for a base fit; each would have, at a minimum, 250 tanks. The author is just engaging in the creation of giant forces for their own sake.

[stevep]

Jan 12, 2022 16:03:10 GMT simon darkshade said:

Nation building does not make three armoured divisions active, given that each costs $600 million+ for a base fit; each would have, at a minimum, 250 tanks. The author is just engaging in the creation of giant forces for their own sake.

  I did notice that the average size for most of those armoured divisions seemed to be 90 tanks which rather undermines their status, unless I'm seriously fouled up my maths.    As you say the author is creating massive military formations to make the odds look overwhelming, hence the final US victory seems even more magnificent.

[lukedalton]

Jan 11, 2022 6:19:34 GMT simon darkshade said:

It is understandable, but it is all that it is. Until such time as it actually tells the story of the war rather than just a selection of vignettes on the prowess of individual people and a very few battles, then it cannot be compared with more fulsome accounts. I like the shared setting idea and would love something like it for myself, but runs into the issue of disputes over canon (I remember the initial pages on AH.com, replete with Commie separatist Scottish republicans) and the main storyline/timeline being utterly neglected for over a decade.

As an RPG, it isn’t that successful. As a coherent AH timeline, it lacks meat on its bones.

Well, it always lacked a guiding hand as everyone put ideas that later were retconned, take as example the UK as first was occupied but when later JN1 joined he disagreed with Great Britain falling and it was retconnetted away...because why not; it was a thread that was undone by his own success and better not talking when it passed at HPCA.
But yeah, a proper timeline will have been very very very usefull so to also avoid too excessive wankage

[lukedalton]

Jan 13, 2022 14:25:38 GMT stevep said:

Jan 12, 2022 16:03:10 GMT simon darkshade said:

Nation building does not make three armoured divisions active, given that each costs $600 million+ for a base fit; each would have, at a minimum, 250 tanks. The author is just engaging in the creation of giant forces for their own sake.

  I did notice that the average size for most of those armoured divisions seemed to be 90 tanks which rather undermines their status, unless I'm seriously fouled up my maths.    As you say the author is creating massive military formations to make the odds look overwhelming, hence the final US victory seems even more magnificent.

I think it's more the fact that he really really really don't have any sense of scale, IRC the initial war in the ME had seen the combined Iraq and Iran air forces take so much loss that in any rational universe they have basically ceased to exist

[simon darkshade]

I think we can all agree that the author’s sense of military scale and logistics was simply absent. There is the kernel of an idea here, but it wasn’t well executed.

Luke, I remember reading the original thread on AH.com and thinking that the big problem from the start was that everyone was setting their own pet parameters. Much of it later ended up as great, albeit coloured by people’s areas of interest and some degree of wish fulfilment. The screwiness of events did continue; I remember one chap over on TBOverse posting about an event where the entire Politburo was assassinated in comic book graphic style, thus introducing something a bit troublesome for continuity.

To do something like that properly, there needs to be an agreement from the start as to the general situation before people utterly cut loose with playing. The problem with casually introducing something like a Soviet occupied Britain is that it really limits a large part of the world from the get-go.

Being an order of battle aficionado of decades, I like the idea of a fully mobilised U.S. Army as an intellectual exercise, but it wasn’t fully explored as there hadn’t been the same type of history of its expansion as Jan/Bernard did for the British Army. It removes the baseline.

Rolling this back to Dragon’s Fury, that is part of the problem. By creating imaginarily huge armies at the start, Mr Head limited what could possibly stop those enemies, forcing himself into a vicious cycle of having to create new tech. By not basing the beginning of the scenario in some form of reality, it makes it difficult to adhere to logic down the line.

In my own Dark Earth works, for example, I tried to keep to some recognisable frameworks and numbers in the 1945-50 timeframe, creating a non-outlandish basis for Korean War mobilisation and Cold War expansion. I spent time doing research, reading up US Army divisional histories and postwar plans for the ANG and Reserve and eventually finding the frequently mentioned but very hard to find 1952 Lisbon force goals. I then scaled them up to fit the setting, but worked in what I hope was a logical trajectory of force size. Dragon’s Fury does not do that, creating 20 armoured divisions where in @, there were/are 2.

[lordroel]

Jan 13, 2022 15:59:07 GMT simon darkshade said:

I think we can all agree that the author’s sense of military scale and logistics was simply absent. There is the kernel of an idea here, but it wasn’t well executed.

Luke, I remember reading the original thread on AH.com and thinking that the big problem from the start was that everyone was setting their own pet parameters. Much of it later ended up as great, albeit coloured by people’s areas of interest and some degree of wish fulfilment. The screwiness of events did continue; I remember one chap over on TBOverse posting about an event where the entire Politburo was assassinated in comic book graphic style, thus introducing something a bit troublesome for continuity.

To do something like that properly, there needs to be an agreement from the start as to the general situation before people utterly cut loose with playing. The problem with casually introducing something like a Soviet occupied Britain is that it really limits a large part of the world from the get-go.

Being an order of battle aficionado of decades, I like the idea of a fully mobilised U.S. Army as an intellectual exercise, but it wasn’t fully explored as there hadn’t been the same type of history of its expansion as Jan/Bernard did for the British Army. It removes the baseline.

Rolling this back to Dragon’s Fury, that is part of the problem. By creating imaginarily huge armies at the start, Mr Head limited what could possibly stop those enemies, forcing himself into a vicious cycle of having to create new tech. By not basing the beginning of the scenario in some form of reality, it makes it difficult to adhere to logic down the line.

In my own Dark Earth works, for example, I tried to keep to some recognisable frameworks and numbers in the 1945-50 timeframe, creating a non-outlandish basis for Korean War mobilisation and Cold War expansion. I spent time doing research, reading up US Army divisional histories and postwar plans for the ANG and Reserve and eventually finding the frequently mentioned but very hard to find 1952 Lisbon force goals. I then scaled them up to fit the setting, but worked in what I hope was a logical trajectory of force size. Dragon’s Fury does not do that, creating 20 armoured divisions where in @, there were/are 2.

I once in the beggining of the forum toughed, why not, so i copied almost 115 post of the AH.com original Red Dawn 20 + discussion and posted it here on the forum, as a archive: Red Dawn 20+ AH.com archive