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Old 06-16-2017, 11:35 PM
Olefin Olefin is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Greencastle, PA
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As I posted earlier HW was clearly an overboard attempt to explain the US not being the world's superpower in 2300 - so Loren wrote this to try to explain why the US wasnt as strong as before. However he did so in a way that pushed the bounds of what could be believed to where they broke - especially for those who knew that nuclear attacks on the scale of the war, if anything, would have thrown huge amounts of debris into the air and caused heavier winters and wetter weather and possibly shorter growing seasons.

Also the weather that affects much of the US would not have been affected by the location of the nuclear strikes in NA - you would would need to disrupt the weather patterns in the Pacific and Canada to really affect North American weather - and there werent enough nuke strikes in the right place to do that.

2300 AD doesnt need a destroyed US taking a huge amount of time to recover because a drought combined with nukes kills off 90% of its population to produce a French domination of the globe - all you need is the US deciding to go back to its roots as a regional power and letting the rest of the globe go on its own way to do that - and the events of 1996-2000 (i.e. before HW's uber drought occurred) were more than enough to make that a reality

And its future predictions for the rest of the year frankly have some major holes in them - there is no way MilGov would pull out of the only oil producing area left in CA, resulting in its strongest remaining unit mutinying against orders when the whole rest of the book states MilGov's big drive is to keep the remaining oil producing areas going at all costs

Let alone having its forces in CA go from 5000 men and 24 tanks down to 2800 men and seven tanks in barely eight months - and no effort being made to recruit new men to keep it formations intact - is frankly ridiculous - and of those men only 1600 are actually answering to the Army?

If food is short you arent going to have much trouble getting men to join up to defend that food - especially if wearing the uniform means you and your family are first in line for what food there is.

I can see some desertions - but having the US Army fall apart completely and not able to recruit at all when half the Southwest, Texas and a good piece of Alaska is under enemy occupation? And especially not after they found out what New America was up to - the Army would have been recruiting anyone who could still stand and carry a rifle!

And 43,000 men come home and less than 1400 are actually used as replacements? And those combat veterans with years of experience under their belts get sent to the Ozarks and basically get wiped out by a bunch of New American militia? (Do the math - 85th Infantry - 400 originals +600 combat vets from Europe + 400 from the 194th which was a training unit and thus elite =1400 men and by April only 300 survivors? I read the Ozarks and dont remember the NA being composed of only ex-Green Berets and Rangers).

And many of those units arrived in Bremerhaven intact and fully functional - including the 28th (which was the PA National Guard). The 28th could have formed up and walked home to rebuild PA - and yet they and several other fully functional units that were obeying MilGov higher command and showed up as functioning units in Bremerhaven all somehow just disappeared?

I dont see the US Army saying "nope lets just let them all go home, after all it would be too much trouble to have them form up again". They would have been sent from the docks in Norfolk as functional units to reinforce the 5th in Texas or kick butt in the Ozarks or say kiss it goodbye Charlie to NA in West Virginia. Thats why you bring them home in the first place.

If there is a module that seriously needs to be retconned and rewritten its HW.

Its not just the drought - the module as a whole goes way way out of its way to kill off the US and to make the US military sound very stupid while doing so.
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