Full 3 Hour Armaments Video out Tomorrow

Patrons,

The full 3 hour 'War Plans, Armaments & Economics' video will be out tomorrow, barring a nuclear strike on Great Britain or something (I am watching my final draft export now). This time I'm not making one of my stupidly optimistic predictions that I will immediately blow past.

Firstly, I want to apologise for the complete debacle the creation of this has become.

I was not lying when I said I intended to upload the first part of the video in early October. However, as I am prone to do, I decided last minute I wanted to include a bit of extra detail. In particular to add a more specific count of division numbers, Germany's potential Eastern Deployments, and a bit more explanation on the workings of the Habsburg Common Army and the Monarchy's internal politics.

As everyone apart from myself could have guessed, this was less simple than I imagined. For example, whilst there is general agreement Austria had 48 infantry divisions (although I did find one source that said 49), there is no agreement over how many Germany had in specific theatres. Alexander Watson says 73.5 infantry in the West, Zuber says 68, David Stevenson says 78. Why I ever thought this would be simple I don't know, the Germans were of course famously terrible record keepers. I've gone with Watson's numbers because I've seen them corroborated elsewhere, but suffice to say what I thought was going to be a couple of days of a job turned into a couple of weeks.

I extremely stupidly decided that since billing was suspended for that month anyway and I had missed my stated deadline, I might as well push ahead and add the French and British sections on. As I had already written the script, I reckoned I could finish the video by early-mid November latest and give everyone a nice surprise.

Naturally I both overestimated my video editing speed yet again, and ended up adding more information. For example, a thorough explanation of the French Three Year Law and a look at both the Royal Navy and the British Army's separate war plans and inter-departmental rivalry. Delving into Royal Navy pre-war planning was, I think, probably one of the worst decisions I have ever made in my life. Jacky Fisher believed all War Plans should be kept in the First Sea Lord's head as he was scared of leaks, and thus would continually fire off red herrings to distract people from his true his aims.
Trying to parse between these was not fun. Nicholas Lambert has written a very good book on the Royal Navy's plans for economic warfare, but it is something of a death march through the Admiralty archives, and I did rather feel like my eyes were on the verge of melting by the end of it.
This stuff might be nectar for some people (and as one of my hobbies is reading Lord Salisbury's 150 year old memo's I am hardly in a position to judge) but personally I think I did well to avoid spending Christmas in an insane asylum. I will flatter myself that I do quite like the final product for this section of the video, but I can't claim the creation process was particularly pleasurable.

Whilst I think the production rate for this chapter averages out at about half an hour per month, which isn't terrible by my standards, I didn't go about making this chapter the right way at all.
I do think the video is better for everything being released together, as being able to slip bits and pieces of new information in as I went was helpful. However in hindsight, I should have released each Great Power section separately and then made any changes in the omnibus edition.

All that is left to say is thank you very much for sticking with me, it really does mean an awful lot when there has been such a dearth of content. I really do hope you like the final product, for all the stress this video has caused I do think it is probably the most interesting chapter I've produced in this series so far.

TL;DR I need to keep my trap firmly shut when thinking about making anymore predictions, do not ask me for the lottery numbers.