Blog - Vespers War
 

So, I am terrible at self-promotion, and while I've had a link in my signature for a while, I've never actually discussed my blog, The Vespers War, here. It's a look at World War I and (eventually) Inter-War vehicles and equipment using the 2.2 rules. I may also look back at the American Civil War, since it's interesting to me and black powder may see a resurgence in a post-apocalyptic scenario. I'm not keeping to any kind of schedule right now, but if there's anything in particular anyone wants statted out, let me know and I'll put it on my to-do list.

I'd be interested in seeing the Spanish civil war

The French FT and Schneider CA were both in use at the start of the war and have been done. Information is scanty for some of the improvised vehicles during the war, but at a minimum I can do the imported tanks (of which the most important were the Italian L3 tankettes, German Panzer I, and Russian T-26 and BT-5) and the Spanish Trubia.

I've added a pair of posts that were overdue, adding the Saint-Chamond armored vehicle (while it's often referred to as a tank, it's more of a self-propelled gun) and motorcycles.

It's been over a month since my last post (and I haven't made much progress on the Spanish Civil War material), but I have put up a new post with statistics for American Civil War field artillery. It doesn't cover everything, but it has the most common field pieces.

I have some of that - T-26 tank, Russian armored cars, Italian L3, early German panzers, the Trubia, the Republican armored cars, some of the artillery, a lot of the small arms.

Uncle Ted

I've started work on the Spanish Civil War with a brief overview of the most common armored vehicles. I also have a Master Index page with links to every page, organized by time period and category. It should be visible at the top right of any page on the blog.

T26 - ubiquitous pre-WW2 Soviet light tank that was mostly an unlicensed copy of the Vickers 6-ton.

FAI - Soviet light armored car (based on automobile chassis)

BA6 - Soviet heavy armored car (based on truck chassis)

I have the T-26's gun as longer-ranged but lower-powered, from running it through FF&S.
Where your version is:
Rng: 250
HE: C:2 B:5 Pen: -4C
KE: Dam: 16 Pen: 8/3/2

Mine is:
45mm L/46 Tank Gun Model 1932
Rld: 1 Rng: 355
HE: C:2 B:10 Pen: Nil
KE: Dam: 10 Pen: 6/5/4/3

I've made four posts today, adding the T-26, BT-5, CV-33 and CV-35, and Panzer I for T2k v2. The Trubia is still pending.

A whole bunch of new pages went up today covering small arms. The index page is here, and the links from it have somewhere around 125 firearms that were used to some extent during the Great War. There's also an obscure arms page with some of the oddball stuff that didn't see service.

:) Very interesting to see stats for some of those obscure but interesting small arms (the Burton 1917 LMR is a personal favourite of mine).

Some of them are just bizarre. The Huot I can sort of understand; it was an attempt to salvage the Ross rifle by turning it into a light machine gun. The Howell, though, is terrifying to watch in action, and every time I see an image of the Chauchat-Ribeyrolles my wrists start aching with sympathy pain. Firing Lebel ammo out of a moderately heavy gun with no shoulder stock is simply not good ergonomics.

I'll add anything more I run across. These were posted because I had time, and there was enough to make it worthwhile.

With the amount of work needed to modify a Lee Enfield into the Howell, I'm left to wonder why they didn't go all the way and build it from scratch (or rather, build it from parts). Personally, I would rather carry a Lewis Gun than the Howell despite the weight (but fortunately the US developed a decent automatic rifle at the same time in the BAR!)

There are enough 12 pounders around as display pieces these stats can come in handy!

According to Hazlett, Olmstead, and Park's Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War, there were 70 Alger Napoleons, 58 Ames Napoleons (possibly +9 for ones that were reported but not confirmed), 25 Greenwood Napoleons, 134 Hooper Napoleons, 184 Revere Napoleons, 40 Augusta Confederate Napoleons, 31 Columbus Confederate Napoleons, 36 Macon Confederate Napoleons, and 13 Tredegar Confederate Napoleons, so 591 to 600 in total back in 1983 when the book was first published. 3 inch Ordnance rifles are also extremely common, with 357 surviving in the 1980s, three by Sheffield Works of Pittsburgh and all the other from Phoenix Iron Company.

I've added a World War I Tank That Never Was, the Oberschlesien. Also, I went through all my old entries and adjusted Travel Speed and Fuel Consumption based on my suggestions on how to tweak Travel Speed by Tech Level.

I'm working on a post about WW1 grenades, and there's some information I can't find, so hopefully I can crowd-source from the board.

British Grenades:
I know the No 2 used tonite, the No 3 used TNT, and the No 20 used ammonite. However, I can't find how much explosive was in any of these.

German Grenades:
I know the filler mass for the 1915 diskushandgranate, but not what the filler was.

Austrian Grenades:
Pretty much all I have are names - Rohr, Lakos, Schwere - but I don't have information on grenade mass, filler mass, or filler type.

Any help with any of these would be appreciated.

While my interest has typically been the Cold War era, some of the early Jane's Infantry Weapons yearbooks still listed some of the equipment from previous decades (usually if it was still in general use when the yearbook was compiled).
I also have some Brassey's books that might cover the same weapons but I'm not so sure of those (I haven't checked them for some time!)
I can't say if any of them have the information you're looking for but I'll check through the yearbooks I have and report back if I find anything useful.

Thank you. I have a copy of Anthony Saunders' Weapons of the Trench War 1914-1918 that's been helpful with a lot of information, but it's occasionally sketchy on technical detail, along with an online copy of Major Graham Ainslie's 1917 Hand Grenades, but for most of the British grenades he only lists the total weight and the type of filler, with no mention of filler weight. And, as a British publication during the war, he's aware of German grenades but doesn't have much information on them.

I did, however, find a 1909 Scientific American that refers to Hales' new grenade having 4 ounces of filler. Given the date, that would be the No 2, so that one's answered.

Unfortunately, I don't have Rick Landers' Grenade: British and Commonwealth Hand and Rifle Grenades, and it's apparently quite rare on this side of the pond. And as far as I can tell, English-language publications about grenades from non-English-speaking countries simply don't exist.

You might be able to contact Brian at RUSI for the information you need. Looks like they've got plenty of publications on the subject.
https://www.thecollectingbug.com/rus...ia/view/horz?4
https://www.rusivic.org.au/library
May be a similar organisation closer to you that may even send you hard copies on loan.

Either late this year or early next year I should be able to access the Library of Congress; right now it's not practical because of transportation issues (there are two Metro lines I can take in to DC; one is barely running due to construction and the other is completely closed for repairs). They have one of the three copies of Grenade that WorldCat shows as held by institutions in the US (the other two are at Harvard and the First Division Museum in Illinois).

Worth contacting them now anyway. Brian at RUSI is happy to scan and email documents, perhaps the US libraries will do the same?
I'm not even in the same state as RUSI, and there's about 200 miles of water in the way as well. They've been REALLY HELPFUL with my research on the ANZAC sourcebook (one day I'll settle on a proper title for that...)

No joy from my library. Jane's Infantry Weapons 1976 only has British 36M anti-personnel grenade and nothing earlier. I wasn't really expecting it to have the German or Austrian grenades but given the longevity of various British infantry weapons in far flung corners of the Empire I thought there may be some Commonwealth nation still using the older grenades.

My Brassey's Infantry Weapons of the Word 1975 also had the 36M but the same info as the Jane's.

(See EDIT below)
For what it's worth, maybe as a comparison because the 36M was specifically designed for Mesopotamia (I believe it was inter-war rather than WW2 but definitely not WW1), the 36M weighed 27 1/4 ounces in total and according to the cross-section image of the grenade, explosive used was: -
Baratol, 20/80, 2-oz. 7-dr.
I believe dr. is short-hand for dram which according to http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_all.htm 7 drams is 12.402 916 367 grams (1 dram being equal to 1.771 845 195 3 gram)
... meaning the 36M had 69.101 962 617 grams of filler
I absolutely was tempted to round up/down those figures but I don't know how finicky/forgiving the formulae in WTH or even FFS are so, yeah, I included all the decimal places!

EDIT: Bah! I see from doing some checking for images that there's no comparison between the British No.2 & No.3 grenades to the 36M grenade

I'm actually sticking with T2K for grenade damage, using 250 grams of dynamite is 1 DP and 5 times the square root of half the DP is the concussion value. FF&S bases it on the diameter of the grenade, which is fine if they're all egg-shaped, but with weird-ass cylindrical grenades and disk grenades and hairbrush grenades, it doesn't work well. T2K also covers thrown grenade range, where everything up to 1 kilo is the character's throw range and everything massing higher is throw range divided by mass (just about everything is 1 kilogram or less).

Where I am using FF&S is for rifle grenade indirect fire range, which for this tech level is 35 meters multiplied by the rifle's damage die and divided by the grenade's mass in kilograms.

The 36M actually is a late World War 1 grenade - the No 36 is the No 5 Mills Bomb adapted for use from a rifle cup launcher, and the M was developed in 1917 with shellac to waterproof it for use in Mesopotamia. The early No 36 had 70 grams of amatol filler (using ammonium nitrate instead of the barium nitrate of baratol).

I didn't know that, I had never really delved into WW1 equipment and so I thought the 36M was the result of experience from that war i.e. produced afterwards.
So again this forum is educating me!

@ Vespers War - I don't know if you visit Maxim Popenker's site about military firearms but he recently (although I don't know exactly when) added the TuF to his pages.
The stats he's posted are like everyone else's - sparse due to the lack of more more comprehensive info but he does separate weights for the gun and its carriage. I think you probably already have this data but here's the link in case you want to check it
https://modernfirearms.net/en/machin...ineguns/tuf-2/

I'm not sure whether I got it from Maxim's site, but I did find enough to generate MG 18 TuF stats (it probably was his site, since I do check on it occasionally, but I'm bad about tracking where I get technical data).

MG 18 Tank und Flieger
Wt. 37 kg (+86 kg tripod), Mag 75B or 50
ROF 5, Dam 9, Pen 2-3-4, Bulk 11, SS 5/1, Burst 11/3, Range 211*

*Range does not include tripod modifier

It's marginally better than the T-Gewehr:
Dam 9 instead of 8, so very slightly better penetration
ROF 5 and either 50 or 75 rounds instead of SS and 1 round
About 10 meters more range, plus a tripod instead of bipod
On the down side, much heavier than the T-Gewehr at 123 kg instead of 17.2 kg.

After those two weapons, nothing I've done so far is above Dam 4 (the US's shotguns would be Dam 5 if they had slug, but they were only ever issued 00 shot). The MG 18 is going to be virtually immobile on the battlefield, but if they could have been fit into Beutepanzer in place of the 6-pdr they could have been very useful as a rapid-firing anti-tank and anti-infantry weapon.

It's been a while, but I posted a blog update today with stats for the Char 2C, an early postwar tank that was in development during WW1 but deliberately delayed once Petain took over because he (and Estienne) didn't see a use for it.

Other blog posts since my last post in this thread have been about the US Army's experimental Robotic Combat Vehicles and stats for rockets that flew between 1985 and 1995, intended for use with Dark Conspiracy but potentially useful for a less conventional T2K game.