Lightzy said:
Krafweerk:
Dunno, man.
For some reason I can't agree with anything you say :>
For one thing, making a new tech tree is completely unnecessary and seperating branches of it (such as military, gov, bio, etc) is simply servered from reality.
Would guns be invented without chemistry, metal working, physics, etc?
biological weapons without medicine and biochemistry?
Would anyone have bothered researching chemistry if they didnt want to make a gun? Youre looking at it backwards. Nessescity is the mother of invention. You dont research something unless you need it.Only in astro sciences will you be researching something, only for knowledges sake, and end up discovering something completely unrelated and useful.
People thinking hrmm...we gotta get out of this rain, led to construction, which set the stage for people who were thinking...hrmm there has to be a better way to get water into our cities. This also opened the door for people who were thinking hrmm we sure do need something around our city to keep stuff out..though construction could be applied to all of these things, they are not interdependant. They also arent dependant on any other branch of scientific thought. While the theory can be applied to forts, aqueducts, walls, mines, etc etc, if there was no need for walls, no one would have invented them, if there were no need for mines, no one would have invented them...or researched them...or worked on improving them.
The point is, just because I research chemistry, it doesnt mean it needs to automatically give me guns. I may not need gunpowder...though I may need combustion engines. Nothing is an enevitable. Why are military and civic advancements paired together, raising research costs, and limiting my choices.
Take a look at the CivIII mod, Double your Pleasure...it spread the tech tree out enough, and removed alot of the interdependancies, and worked quite while. It gave you more options...which really is what a realism mod is about. Giving us options vanilla Civ doesnt.
And secondly..
WE ARE all speaking chinese and russian...

chinese is the most common language on earth.
after that, spanish, and I'm pretty sure that after that -- russian.
Because the most populated nation on earth is china...so obviously chinese speak chinese.
I certainly dont know it, and I could care less about learning it. China and prussia have been some of the largest civilizations since the beggining of time. How many times have either of them ruled the world?
Lets count shall we.
...
...
Hopefully the point has been made.
I urge you to check out the cia factbook (google it) about russia and china. They are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from leading economic powers. I have more sway in my small toe over geo-political issues than russia or china...its just that they have alot of really big bombs.
Oh, and also, it was the hinderberg disaster that crossed out zeppelins really,
And that's because germany didn't have helium, so they filled em up with hydrogen instead, which is very highly flammable and dangerous. The explosion itself was probably caused by the layer of outer coating on the baloon, which made it catch fire from even slight electrical currents.
Point is, after hindenburg, nobody wanted to be in a zeppelin.
Zeppelins actually have huge potential. You can build flying cities like that.
Loaded with so much heavy weaponry that nothing much is likely to be able to get anywhere near.. you can even build armor casing AROUND the balloon. it doesn't mind.. And even if someone DID manage to blow up the balloon, you could equip the zeppelin with thrusters to give it a comfy landing..
I think you just like zeppelins. I dont believe that you believe what you just said.
We'll take world war two for example...assuming you can make a reasonably safe zeppelin, as safe as a Lancaster, Wellington, He111, B17, etc...explain to me how youre going to attach enoughs to this huge floating target to make it safe from attack.
Its fact that the defensive guns on B17s were ineffective...even in good formation, with trained crews, nothing can stop a fighter from shooting you down...you may get him too, but he's gonna make it to you, and shoot you.
Battleships are another example. Or carriers...how many carriers and battleships were sunk by aircraft? How many AAA guns do those have?
Bizmark, Arizona, Yorktown, Lexington, Kyoto, the list is as long as my arm.
If world war two wasnt proof that zeppelins have no place in the modern military I dont know what does. It shows example after example that the advantages a zeppelin would have (Size, armament, ability to move large amounts of equipment and personnel, staging area for aircraft) were the same advantages other pieces of equipment had, and all of those same pieces of equipment were found to be totally ineffective.
Sheer size just makes you a bigger target. Thats why no one uses battleships anymore...armament is expensive, and usually ineffective in stopping a deterimed adversary...hence why we dont build Tiger like tanks anymore. Large amounts of troops and equipment on one transport is a bad idea. Hence why we moved to convoy "conga lines" in response to the uboats. Lastly, a staging area for aircraft is the grand prize, because if you knock that out, you knock out your opponents ability to effectively attack you. Such a prime target requires DOZENS of other smaller vessels to defend it...a "taskforce" if you will.
We already have a navy, why do we need another one in the air.
The only advantage left to a zeppelin would be fuel consumption....though since no large standing army has had fuel shortages in 100 years, I doubt that would be an attractive feature.
What world war two taught us is that small units, small tanks, small planes, that can very quickly and quietly get into, and out of, enemy territory and hit a target, is the wave of the future. A smaller faster unit is going to be more effective at penetrating enemy defense than a larger slower one.