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#1
03-14-2010, 11:29 PM
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Soviet Hit List
(resurrected from the archive - kato13)
Webstral Soviet Hit List -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that I’m reading the list of targets in the USSR, I’m noticing that NATO hit a lot more military targets in the USSR than the Soviets hit in the US. The US hit list reads like a who’s-who in petroleum refining and storage, with a few SAC facilities and top-of-the-pyramid command facilities thrown in for good measure. The Soviet hit list has petroleum refining and storage centers, to be sure. However, it appears to me that the Western powers were more interested in decapitating the military chain of command, with some military industry and ICBM sites added to the mix. Does (did) the Soviet Union have fewer petroleum refineries and storage facilities than the US? Given the Soviet tendency towards massively centralized facilities, this would make sense—but I’m just speculating. Any thoughts on this, anyone? Webstral ************ kato13 The following might be useful I believe this is current world so the russian data might be off. Im pretty sure the US data would be accurate for t2k since we have not built any new refineries in 29 years. http://www.ravensworth.org/s-usrefineries.html http://www.ravensworth.org/s-eurorefineries.html http://www.ravensworth.org/s-otherrefineries.html Russia has 21 refineries Ukraine has 6 Azerbaijan has 2 Kazakhstan has 3 US has 139 refineries edit added Asian refineries which would have been part of the former Soviet Union. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- kato13 ************ thefusilier From how I understand it, the Soviets had only a few refineries but they were very big. Same goes with some certain factories. Fewer in number but massive production. There is a Google Earth file you can download that lists and shows on the map nearly every refinery in the world. That and the program itself is great for locating such places. thefusilier ************ Webstral Quote:
Webstral ************ kato13 picture is worth a 1000 words -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ok I needed to do a proof of concept using the Google Map API for work so I made a US refinery map. I used the data from the pages above. http://maps.juhlin.com/maps/refineries.html Some notes. For simplicity if two or more refineries were in the same city I combined them onto one point (adding the bpd). I placed the marker in the city names since I did not have detailed addresses. I centered on the Lower 48 states. Alaska and Hawaii Have data you just need to scroll. If anyone has any suggestions let me know. kato13 ************ Stilleto69 Great work Kato, I've been doing a little work myself regarding oil refineries in the US and their proximity to the various nuclear strike per cannon. I've found that there are some refineries that were not even touched by the nuclear strikes. Now, getting the oil to refine is another matter. Stilleto69 ************ General Pain ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote:
What to search for in Google Earth to get this ? General Pain ************ thefusilier Quote:
Check PM. I'll send you the file. __________________ The Fusilier ************ chico20854 Quote:
I think the target lists reflect to a great extent the limitations on the information available to GDW 20+ years ago. The US target list was adapted from a late 1970s Office of Technology Assessment study on the effects of nuclear war on the U.S. GDW basically took the list of refinery targets from that list (equal to 60% of US refinery capacity, which is why several large refineries remained intact with the canon target list) and added, as you said, some SAC facilities and high-level C3I sites. That probably satisfied GDW that the nuclear exchange did enough damage to cripple the US government without so much damage that 2300 would become Gamma World. Also, there was still a USSR in place at the time and there may have been some security concerns about publishing a list of other great palces to nuke... On the Soviet side, I'm not sure how much information on the USSR GDW had available to it. For example, putting together a list of major Soviet refineries might have been tough in 1985. On the other hand, military district headquarters, missile fields and some major industrial sites were known and could be included. So GDW may have just picked what they could find rather than put tons of thought into what the US targeting strategy was. Jason Weiser is working on a target list for the US (what got hit in the US). It's a big project that probably won't be finished enough to put up here for a while, but we're looking into it. I also have a list of over 1250 potential nuclear targets in the USSR and Pact that I've been puttering around with for years but will probably never boil down to a list of what was actually hit... it comes down to any city in the USSR with over 50,000 had some potential nuclear target in it. There is good reason to revisit the canon Soviet target list to change it based on better information, allowing a different targeting strategy to be implemented. chico20854 ************ MW Turnage Quote:
Memphis, for example, has several refineries on the river and as far as I recall there weren't any hits closer than the Gulf Coast. I think Chico hit the nail square on the head: the target list was probably the best that GDW could do under the circumstances. The question remains as to whether or not to keep with that. Personally, I say keep it and chalk any oddities up to launch errors, outdated plans, faulty intelligence, etc. Otherwise too much of the post-Massacre history just doesn't work IMHO. MW Turnage ************ TrailerParkJawa Quote:
California is a great place to solve that issue. The refineries at Bakersfield are surrounded by the oil fields. The problem now would be getting power to the pumps and finding technical staff to run the refinery. I'm assuming you could set up a power station on the refinery premises if you needed too. On a side note to Kato, the target on your Google map listed as "near Martinez" is Avon, California on the GDW target list. Avon doesn't seem to be an actual town, perhaps it was in the past. I haven't been able to find out much about it except that the refinery there had Avon in the name. I agree with Chico on the state of information gathering in the 1980's. It was no simple task to compile information then if someone had not already done the leg work first. Also GDW wanted to present an aftermath where civilization has broken down but people are not on the verge of exinction. TrailerParkJawa ************ Webstral In support of what TrailerParkJawa has said, I think it’s important to bear in mind that the Soviets weren’t trying to destroy the United States with the nuclear exchange. The idea was to knock the US out of the war. “Fearful of a general strategic exchange, neither side targeted the land-based ICBMs of the other [at least until the US went after SS-22 sites in the USSR], or launched so many warheads at once as to risk convincing the other side that an all-out attack was in progress.” (GDW, Twilight: 2000, Referee’s Manual, v1) The Kremlin would be as conscious of MAD as anyone. They weren’t fighting to destroy everything. They were fighting to win. The Soviets wanted the US out of the ring, whether by decision, TKO, or KO. Since a KO blow would be met with a nuclear counter-KO, a decision would work just fine. Destroying sixty percent of the US refinery capacity is a rather elegant solution, I think. The US economy is based on transportation run on petroleum. Get rid of the majority of the petroleum inputs and knock out the electrical grid, and the US will have no real capacity for supporting the fighting in Europe. At the same time, the US hasn’t been subjected to an attack of annihilation; therefore, the Soviet Union need not be subjected to an attack of annihilation. When the conventional struggle of WW3 went awry for the Soviets, they turned to their “…nuclear weaponry [which had] remained intact…. The very backwardness of large areas of the Soviet Union would allow it to survive better than the USA after a nuclear exchange…. Also, if they were really prepared to go to these lengths there was a good chance of a deal with the United States before the major destruction took place.” (Hackett, The Third World War, p. 354) The gradual build-up of the exchange from battlefield nuclear weapons to theater nuclear weapons to strategic nuclear weapons reflects the idea that the Soviets weren’t interested in an all-out exchange. In a general sense, each attack (of multiple warheads and multiple targets) was intended to put them ahead in the game without inviting an all-out response. Attacks on the most prominent refineries of the US but not generally on the population centers reflects this philosophy. The problem was that NATO was playing the same game. Both fighters got to the fifteenth round, which says something for the virtue of self-interested restraint. The judges’ decision, however, has yet to be delivered. Last edited by kato13; 03-15-2010 at 03:38 PM. 
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#2
03-15-2010, 02:06 PM
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*bump*
__________________
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
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#3
03-15-2010, 05:57 PM
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Are the creators and writers of the game still around? Could we reach them somehow and hear their take on what their thoughts were while designing the game? They would probably be quite intrigued to find many people still interested in their work twenty-five years hence; a "Behind The Music"-like look at T2K would be fascinating to all of us on this forum.
My vaguely-informed speculation is that they didn't want to go whole-hog like Morrow Project and just nuke everything but there had to be enough damage to reduce all parties involved (U.S., Sovs, and the Europeans)(obliterating the Chinese not withstanding) to roughly equal military parity and keep everyone on their own territory, more or less, as well as keep an active war from continuing to mutual extermination. In addition, if you just wipe everything and everyone out it really crimps your ability to tell a good story about survival, orders-of-battle, etc. None of which explains quite to my satisfaction why strategic nuclear weapons weren't employed in greater numbers (even at a crawl, in tit-for-tat exchanges) against the opposing side's nuclear arsenal, and nuclear infrastructure (plutonium/tritium production, weapons storage and assembly facilities...why weren't the Pantex Plant in Amarillo hit? And Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River...the list goes on.).
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#4
03-16-2010, 01:22 AM
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