The Hell of Money Island: Summer 2022

[MengJiao]

  This is from South China Sea.  A John Gorkowski naval game designed with the help of the US Army.  The Army's
view of a war at sea has many interesting aspects.  For example the C-130 Hercules can kill just about anything and Virginia-class submarines
are roughly equivalent to C-130s for attacking ships but otherwise not all that useful.  Might be true.  Kind of twisted, but certainly worth a shot.
Here we see Vietnam is offering some assistance and a Virginia-class sub (or two) is heading toward the sneaky Chinese.

[W8taminute]

Looks like a good game.

[MengJiao]

Looks like a good game.

   Fun so far.  Apparently, all I'm interested in is how fast the Chinese can knock out Vietnam even if the US Navy tries to impede the Chinese.  I guess the next question would be
how fast can all the local powers push the Chinese out of the South China Sea with a lot of help from the US Navy.  The game turns run for a maximum of 70 hours so I guess things
should happen pretty fast (or as little as 12 hours for some scenarios).

[W8taminute]

^Oh wow that time scale is pretty short per turn.  Yeah that sounds like things happen very quickly.

[MengJiao]

^Oh wow that time scale is pretty short per turn.  Yeah that sounds like things happen very quickly.

  It's like 3-7 hour turns so like 3-8 turns a day.  The scale is set at 45 miles a hex (sort of the nautical horizon if you are in the middle of the hex), the hours seem to be a matter of a variable strike-cycle (out and back say 250-1500 miles with some missile shooting in between).  Subs do have some interesting options with interrupting enemy moves and if you try to attack a major target in a c-130, you probably aren't going to survive especially since missiles are launched in "stealth order" stealthiest first and the C-130 isn't very stealthy.

And here's a situation -- I've flown in some US stuff to DaNang.  The Harriers are spent since they flew in from more than 16 hexes away, but the C-130,having dropped off some airborne troops, could theoretically attack some submarines.  Unfortunately, the C-130 would probably get shot down (though come to think of it, the Vietnamese Flankers might take some rough vengeance on the
planes that shot down the C-130):

[MengJiao]

  about 15 hours into the war, Da Nang is pretty beat-up, a lot of Chinese planes have been shot down and each side has lost a submarine (1 Vietnamese Kilo and one Chinese Shang SSN).  A lot
faster tempo than the Russian attack on Ukraine.  Games are going to have a rough time working out how to simulate something like the Russian attack on Ukraine.  Hopefully, we'll never find out
how fast China might knock out Vietnam's long-range strike forces in the 2020s.

[W8taminute]

I see the C-130 survived but there is a lot of hardware in that area.  Where is he (C-130) based out of?

[MengJiao]

I see the C-130 survived but there is a lot of hardware in that area.  Where is he (C-130) based out of?

  That's a new C-130.  It's in Da Nang.  The other one (the first one) was shot up as bait and then finished off when Da Nang was bombed one-third of the way into the Stone Age.  It's still bait,
but I'm not sending another raid...too many Chinese planes went down last time.  The Harriers are in Haiphong.  They do as well as Flankers for interdicting enemy air moves.  I'm trying to come up with
a better strategy for the Chinese than bombing everything in sight.  That uses up a lot of bombers in this game anyway.

[MengJiao]

I see the C-130 survived but there is a lot of hardware in that area.  Where is he (C-130) based out of?

  about 20 hours into the war, through the magic of infantry in the administrative phase, some airbase repairs are accomplished:

[W8taminute]

^Oh that's cool.  But it sure does look very tense there with all of those Chinese ships prowling about. 

[MengJiao]

^Oh that's cool.  But it sure does look very tense there with all of those Chinese ships prowling about.

  China is in a bind here it seems.  It looks like you can't obliterate Vietnam and hold the Spratleys at the same time if the US starts arriving pretty fast as in within less than 2 days.
Probably unlikely.
I'll have to invent a scenario with fewer bombers and carriers, I guess.

[MengJiao]

I'll have to invent a scenario with fewer bombers and carriers, I guess.

  Okay.  Malaysia and Vietnam against a elsewhere-busy China and fully committed Philllipines and a slowly arriving US.  The US flags show where
US air reinforcements can enter if any become available.  China and the US will gradually bring in more forces:

[W8taminute]

That looks pretty manageable.  It will be interesting to see how the slow buildup affects the battle.
So did you give up on the first game?

[MengJiao]

That looks pretty manageable.  It will be interesting to see how the slow buildup affects the battle.
So did you give up on the first game?

  The USA was going to clean up pretty fast and basically the more stuff the Chinese sent in, the more of it would get blasted...so a smaller game, but the random rolls have been
painfully USA all the way, so the Chinese might not have much to do in this game either despite a nice set of airstrikes on Borneo.

[W8taminute]

Is this game set pre 2022 or sometime in the near future?