dieseltaylor

Indeed welcome. I have now learned a bit more about the war in Italy and therefore the thread has value for me and perhaps most others.

Interesting from the publishing method and also for the scope. I will keep an eye on it. Having looked a little further into the LulU side I also struck that an e-book option surely would be a better seller AND if carefully thought about arrangements made for maps and charts to be easily printable for thos who do not use A4 readers. Or even those who do : )

Thanks for the link. Really moving.

Looks like this game is about to boil up, Hoping for a single shot to penetrate both German vehicles and then a nice explosion to clear out the crews. : )

Perhaps something on the ToDo list for BF. Market Garden will be interesting as shells travel through from one German position to another via a Sherman : )

ian.;eslie! "Lust" and "amo" in your post ....whats going on .... best of luck: ) BTW welcome superwoz

Go it GAJ. BTW the shell exiting the turret back might explain why I have twice had pairs of MKIV's hit at the same time.

"Around the Horne" was a notorious radio programme for double-entendres in the 60's ... incidentally double entendre is not an expression in modern French. This from Wikipedia

Forwards! BTW on YouTube GB you just get 2 secs of viewing so I moved to World for the video.

Interesting stuff, Thank G. for the internet.

JonS - Thanks for explaining it. It is quite simple but looks like most in the thread had not cracked it! BTW I cannot see it explained in the manual in the artillery section have I missed it? Whilst on artillery am I right in saying every on-board artillery is able to use both its smoke and its HE.? In case anyone is curious about the practical use I gave a cease fire order to a battery of 25pdr in maximum fire mode when we reached the 40 smoke allocation and when they reacted a further 28 rounds had been fired. Of the 12 smoke 4 went as spotting rounds and then the smoke arrived. As you can appreciate there is a significant delay for relaying the battery and for correcting the spotting rounds before the smoke screen arrives. Practice to get confidence in this arm would not be wasted.

Reading the historical bumf it seems the bazooka actually was a lot less effective than presented to the the public/soldiers and in the media at the time. One shot one kill is pure Hollywood. Keeping the PIAT was possibly not as silly as it appeared.

There is a certain sense of wonderment that BF goes to this sort of detail over playability. Given there is no facility to tell your battery to conserve enough shells for a later smoke mission the onus for control lies heavily on the players. As I have more info on the small UK gun/howitzer I give info on charges. The 25pdr [88mm] also used charges and you can see how complicated it could be be. However overall there would be many more charges than warheads to enable more than minimum fire range. I find it strange that the 75mm appears to be handicapped in the charges department or is this historically correct? I have read very few artillery memoirs or accounts but shortage of charges has never been worthy of note. Would it be simpler just to allow them to fire what they have? I have a vested interest as I have a new player to introduce and he is not a detail man - tracking ammo each turn is not the kind of thing I think he will like.

Leakey's Luck - Carver's book is very good. However in this instance the enemy tanks were already engaged in battling guns so are arguably distracted from another threat.

I officially hi-jack the thread. Now called Spotting

NOW THIS IS HOW TO HIJACK A THREAD : ) Anyway it came about regarding spotting ability for a tank dead ahead at 800 feet FEET. Followed by various anecdotes. Fortunately JK has gathered together some respectable sources for us all to read. And then we can start raiding our libraries for anecdotes that generally cut very little ice. I hope that people make the important distinction between static and moving targets as there are innumerable stories of static vehicles/men being unspotted.

Good to hear an original anecdote. And your Anglais is better than my Francais: ) Just a couple of queries. Was the gully to front or side? Was it a friendly tank? Was it unseeable in the gully from where you were situated? It might help me get a handle on RL.

Anecdotes about headlights aside this is a live battlefield and moving large objects at quite close range - 800ft. I don't hold with it being a difficult spot. Non-spotting for non-moving targets for days or hours I have no problem with but not spotting vehicles moving close too!?

Foliage may be the answer as c3k suggests.

So the M-10 modelling is counter-intuitive. He uses his binoculars when he is buttoned! JonS - I am glad we can agree on the edge-hugging. Your historical commanders never had guaranteed flanks and of course fought before the concept of a continuous front.

Sounds quite a clever idea. I'll give it a go. Thanks.

I am reading a book by Ken Tout "In The Shadow of Arnhem" and on P.26 he mentions the Black Watch [Canada] who start an advance with 300 men and have 16 left unscathed attacking vainly Fontenay. All within a CMx2 battle time frame. Later, and rebuilt, they are in a stupid attack in Holland and a Company commander starts with 90 men and ends up with 4 unscathed. Obviously the extreme end of suffering. At Tilly in one case only 2 men survived the battle from a 30 man platoon. They were luckier than a 90 man force which was wiped out by the Hitlerjugend.

Lets face it there are insufficient defending troops/points and Bill is edge hugging on both sides of the map. Sucks. It is a problem but when faced with map-making in CMx1 , and I am a fan of large maps, I would make the terrain difficult or impossible to negate the benefit of edge hugging. This would be a time and cost to travel sort of equation. Unfortunately if you go for a historical map then edge hugging may become very attractive - particularly having a safe flank means looking straight ahead and one flank and observation seems key.

I forgot to ask if the scenario is one where there are solid map edges so retreat is not an option. I was amazed when it first came out to see my panicked men bounce off the edge of the map and run back into bombardment.

YD - I understand your point but then surely your battlefield is not the total sum of a front line. Those hold-outs were preventing you rolling up a further flank off-board. That is how I am going to rationalise it : )