APS changes everything!

[BlackAlpha]

Yeah but the armor became pointless for a reason. It was because it was a lot of work to manufacture and provide and no longer gave much protection from weapons any peasant in a levy could use. The horse continued as long as it did because as long as Armies were too small to construct proper frontlines (like the kind measured in 50+ miles) then maneuver was still relevant. Direct combat tended to produce a lot of casualties in Cavalry and it seems rather conspicuous to me that in the American Civil War, cavalrymen almost always fought dismounted. 

 

Once you've got a weapon that's ubiquitous and practical enough for everyone to use than the classic infantry-as-screen to some other core unit (mounted heavy cavalry/tanks) relationship reverses.  

 

You forget one huge difference. The musket was a soldier's primary, while a Javelin AT launcher is not. At least for now, you won't see Javelins in every single squad.

 

The Javelin also has limitations, like the time it takes for a Javelin CLU to get ready. Or the few minutes you get to fire the missile after enabling the missile seeker (if the tank moves out of sight during that time, then that's one less battery for you and more downtime). It's also heavy as hell. The Javelin is not perfect and has weak links of its own.

Edited February 15, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[c3k]

Dan, I =love= the angst in your first post! Yeah, welcome to the APS learning curve.

 

Russians have always had some advanced ideas in the military sphere. APS is one of them. However, their particular APS has a weakness, in that each cartridge fired leaves that pie wedge undefended. The benefit is they have a LOT of pie wedges (which should overlap). Israeli style has a weakness in that it only has 4 engagements. Its benefit is that it covers the front/rear with all 4, and anywhere on the sides with 2. No missing pie wedges.

 

Other benefits/drawbacks. Israeli ties the system into their FCS and platoon link. You shoot at a tank, every tank knows who you are and where you are...before your missile/rocket gets near your target. That's powerful mojo.

 

Javelin top-attack is very powerful. Russians are, no doubt, working on countermeasures.

 

Simple techniques (some already in use):

-Tandem projectiles. First one gets hit by APS, second one gets through.

-Swarm attack. Coordinate multiple firers against ONE target. (That would've been helpful for you, Dan.)

-Spoofing APS with EW. Make it go "boom" with a ray gun. Seriously. Make the sensors think there's an inbound missile by manipulating waveforms. As it fires off everything, it will henceforth be stripped of APS. That'll be worth a smirk.

-Beat the APS. Brute force it with higher energies. Big, massive, warhead which explodes 3m away still damages/blinds/knocks out tank. (Portability issue.) Kinetic energy is another approach. Highly energetic booster to get penetrator up to near tank gun velocities. That beats the reaction time.

-MIRV the warhead. Confuse the APS with mulitple inbounds.

-Blind the APS. They use radar to detect the inbound. Stealth the warhead, deflect the radar waves, put a jammer in the missile; any of these would get the warhead up to the tank with no intercept.

-Totally change the engagement. Make ATGM's which don't hit the tank. Have them miss. Really. Fly in front, drop down, and roll under the tank. Remotely fired, guided, antitank mines. Yeah, I should get credit for that one.

 

There's going to be a LOT of interesting back and forth on this front for years to come.

 

Ken

Edited February 16, 2015 by c3k

[Melchior]

You forget one huge difference. The musket was a soldier's primary, while a Javelin AT launcher is not. At least for now, you won't see Javelins in every single squad.

 

The Javelin also has limitations, like the time it takes for a Javelin CLU to get ready. Or the few minutes you get to fire the missile after enabling the missile seeker (if the tank moves out of sight during that time, then that's one less battery for you and more downtime). It's also heavy as hell. The Javelin is not perfect and has weak links of its own.

 

It's not that different though is it? Because at the same time most leaders still saw the pike and bayonet as the soldier's primary right up until around the 18th century. The Javelin isn't as common as a rifle sure but that's not the point. It doesn't have to be, it just has to be way more common than a TOW. So common that it's organic to infantry platoons rather than limited to specific anti-tank formations.

 

Muskets had limitations too, like vulnerability to moisture, misfiring, inaccuracy, etc. All weapon systems have caveats. What matters is what they can accomplish for the investment.  

[H1nd]

From what can tell, it might take some tweaking to get the APS modelling right. From what I have understood the Arena chance to intercept should go down with each used charge (gaps in the protection) but so far It has never failed to intercept anything for me as long as the missiles come one by one. One would asume that the odds should eventually stack against you if your APS has fired multiple times already but so far nothing like it. Maybe i'm just one lucky basterd

[BlackAlpha]

 

It's not that different though is it? Because at the same time most leaders still saw the pike and bayonet as the soldier's primary right up until around the 18th century. The Javelin isn't as common as a rifle sure but that's not the point. It doesn't have to be, it just has to be way more common than a TOW. So common that it's organic to infantry platoons rather than limited to specific anti-tank formations.

 

Muskets had limitations too, like vulnerability to moisture, misfiring, inaccuracy, etc. All weapon systems have caveats. What matters is what they can accomplish for the investment.  

 

I think you are missing the point. The Javelin is not as commonly available as Muskets were (far from it, in fact), hence your comparison is wrong.

[Melchior]

Tanks aren't as numerous as heavy cavalry were either. That's my point. Since the Napoleonic Wars their has been a trend towards larger armies with fewer but individually more potent weapon systems. The Javelin is naturally a part of this trend, but then so is heavy armor. Anyway i'm not trying to argue that armor is obsolete. Tanks will never disappear, what i'm thinking might lose its role is the MBT because its protection is too difficult to provide for too little to gain. We've already seen a trend towards moving guns off of tracked chassis onto much cheaper wheeled chassis like the Stryker MGS and Centauro. One would argue all those fleets of T-55AGMs have been modernized with the same idea in mind (ie: gun carriers not battle tanks). 

 

OTOH the protection of MBTs might still be worth the investment because after all, if you're investing in a tank you've already gone far with your buck, might as well go a little further. 

[TeaReks]

I think you are missing the point. The Javelin is not as commonly available as Muskets were (far from it, in fact), hence your comparison is wrong.

 

Javelins are likely as common as machine guns were in WWI and look how much they shifted warfare.

[dan/california]

Dan, I =love= the angst in your first post! Yeah, welcome to the APS learning curve.

 

Russians have always had some advanced ideas in the military sphere. APS is one of them. However, their particular APS has a weakness, in that each cartridge fired leaves that pie wedge undefended. The benefit is they have a LOT of pie wedges (which should overlap). Israeli style has a weakness in that it only has 4 engagements. It's benefit is that it covers the front/rear with all 4, and anywhere on the sides with 2. No missing pie wedges.

 

Other benefits/drawbacks. Israeli ties the system into their FCS and platoon link. You shoot at a tank, every tank knows who you are and where you are...before your missile/rocket gets near your target. That's powerful mojo.

 

Javelin top-attack is very powerful. Russians are, no doubt, working on countermeasures.

 

Simple techniques (some already in use):

-Tandem projectiles. First one gets hit by APS, second one gets through.

-Swarm attack. Coordinate multiple firers against ONE target. (That would've been helpful for you, Dan.)

-Spoofing APS with EW. Make it go "boom" with a ray gun. Seriously. Make the sensors think there's an inbound missile by manipulating waveforms. As it fires off everything, it will henceforth be stripped of APS. That'll be worth a smirk.

-Beat the APS. Brute force it with higher energies. Big, massive, warhead which explodes 3m away still damages/blinds/knocks out tank. (Portability issue.) Kinetic energy is another approach. Highly energetic booster to get penetrator up to near tank gun velocities. That beats the reaction time.

-MIRV the warhead. Confuse the APS with mulitple inbounds.

-Blind the APS. They use radar to detect the inbound. Stealth the warhead, deflect the radar waves, put a jammer in the missile; any of these would get the warhead up to the tank with no intercept.

-Totally change the engagement. Make ATGM's which don't hit the tank. Have them miss. Really. Fly in front, drop down, and roll under the tank. Remotely fired, guided, antitank mines. Yeah, I should get credit for that one.

 

There's going to be a LOT of interesting back and forth on this front for years to come.

 

Ken

The back and forth over the next ten or twenty years will certainly be fascinating.  Spoofing the APS to detonate as the troops unload would be uhm awe inspiring, at least in C3ks world view.    The U.S. did an ATGM that was a DU rod with a bloody great rocket attached.  I recall reading it worked fine but was just too big to be practically man portable. Then they realized the Javelin was the guaranteed golden bb at least for a while, and let it drop. That idea may get a reboot.

[womble]

Warheads that detonate and project an Explosively Formed Projectile outside the detction range of ADS, producing a high velocity penetrator "from thin air" going through the top armour might be one way round the defense, given that it's not fast enough (and the output therefore isn't designed) to intercept current long rod penetrators.

[dan/california]

There would seem to be a vast scope for both radar spoofing/jamming, and a HARM missile of some description.  Just a nice little drone package to acquire the emitter coordinates and relay them straight to the available artillery would be nifty.  All of these things are of course capable of being spoofed in turn.  But a given battle, or even a shortish war such as the one postulated here could turn very sharply based on this kind of tech.  The Ukrainian disadvantage in game, especially without MBTs on the board is crushing.

[antaress73]

There is no APS system in the game that can defeat a Javelin firing in top-attack mode, if the Javelin is fired horizontally than yes it can be intercepted.

Error buzzer.. Wrong .. Top attack diving javelin exploded right above an M1A2 by APS. A beauty and surprise. Trophy is like a dome so there is vertical coverage ( i googled it afterwards).

Edited February 16, 2015 by antaress73

[AttorneyAtWar]

Error buzzer.. Wrong .. Top attack diving javelin exploded right above an M1A2 by APS. A beauty and surprise. Trophy is like a dome so there is vertical coverage ( i googled it afterwards).

 

Errrr I meant OPFOR systems of course!

 

Edited February 16, 2015 by Raptorx7

[Apocal]

Arena owns pretty hard guys.

 

It's science.

 

In the first subtitle, I actually miscounted: the APS intercepted a two shot volley, not just one. In total, Arena took down a total of four RPGs before being expended with the tank itself taking two more in the front armor, one in the side reactive armor and a final killing blow struck through the fresh gap in the ERA. The following vehicle wasn't nearly as lucky, knocking down two incoming RPGs successfully, but due to its positioning as it climbed out of a shell-hole, an RPG from the high rear was outside of Arena's engagement envelope and penetrated the top turret. The trailing T-90 had it easy, picking off a sole RPG before going ahead and putting effective fire on two RPG teams in adjacent buildings.

What does this mean tactically? For starters, you can still get unlucky, even with the latest and greatest protection. Secondly, there is a hard-limit on how much derp you can survive. Thirdly, that limit is fairly high, with Arena successfully engaging both volleys, one with almost inches to spare. Fourth, armor is just a bit higher on the modern battlefield food chain when so equipped with APS; a single infantry AT weapon does not present the "golden BB" threat it previously did outside of 150-200m or so.

Edited February 16, 2015 by Apocal

[Michael Emrys]

A bit of that was also the lack of any sort of cavalry tradition in the United States.

 

There was a long standing tradition of mounted troops. Whether you choose to call them cavalry or dragoons is a matter of nomenclature. The "calvary" of the ACW (and later of the Indian Wars) was actually more of the nature of dragoons. They were called cavalry mostly as a matter of tradition.

 

Michael

Edited February 16, 2015 by Michael Emrys

[BlackAlpha]

Javelins are likely as common as machine guns were in WWI and look how much they shifted warfare.

 

But machine guns didn't make infantry obsolete, so that's a bad comparison as well.

 

Instead of talking about historical anecdotes, it's better to look at how things stand in real life. Are tanks obsolete at the moment? Are tanks being phased out? No and no. In fact, countries are designing new tanks. Why do you think that is so?

[c3k]

From what can tell, it might take some tweaking to get the APS modelling right. From what I have understood the Arena chance to intercept should go down with each used charge (gaps in the protection) but so far It has never failed to intercept anything for me as long as the missiles come one by one. One would asume that the odds should eventually stack against you if your APS has fired multiple times already but so far nothing like it. Maybe i'm just one lucky basterd

 

Yeah. In-game, the Arena system has a higher miss chance. It's low, but higher than Arena. Remember, there are 21 (?) wedges. They should overlap. If several get used, such that a gap appears, it only takes a slight turret rotation to keep some protection pointed at the area the previous threats came from.

 

The game, right now, does not model each Arena cartridge and pie wedge. That's a little too granular. Instead, it takes a system approach to the tank's defensive suite.

 

How many separate ATGM gunners on the battlefield would all know to aim at the same point, and then could? "Hans, fire at wedge 17!" The game gives a slight benefit to the Russians in this regard.

 

Ken

[Melchior]

But machine guns didn't make infantry obsolete, so that's a bad comparison as well.

 

Instead of talking about historical anecdotes, it's better to look at how things stand in real life. Are tanks obsolete at the moment? Are tanks being phased out? No and no. In fact, countries are designing new tanks. Why do you think that is so?

 

Infantry didn't become obsolete, infantry lines did. The machine gun threw out over 2000+ years of tactics and thinking that came before it. All because it was now a 6 man team that could put out as much fire as an entire infantry platoon. 

[BlackAlpha]

Yup, things evolved, just like the tank currently is evolving. That's partially what I meant.

[Melchior]

Which has actually been my point too. I'm not really saying the armored vehicle is disappearing, it never will as long as the gun continues to exist. What i'm saying is that the MBT may be on its way out. The proper "tank" as we know it. I mean Apocal is right too, muskets didn't get rid of Cavalry, they just changed them so drastically that they weren't the cavalry they used to be anymore. That's how we look toward the future in my mind. 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

 

 

Which has actually been my point too. I'm not really saying the armored vehicle is disappearing, it never will as long as the gun continues to exist. What i'm saying is that the MBT may be on its way out. The proper "tank" as we know it. I mean Apocal is right too, muskets didn't get rid of Cavalry, they just changed them so drastically that they weren't the cavalry they used to be anymore. That's how we look toward the future in my mind.

 

I have to differ on the tank being on the way out.  There's not really a viable tank alternative, or a technology that tank alternatives can use, that tanks cannot. And there's no "musket" as much as ATGMs were supposed to herald the end of the tank (as were mobile AT guns in the 1930's) the two systems are very much locked in a evolutionary arm's race, but neither really claims a massive advantage.  

 

The fate of the FCS and the marginal performance of the MGS seems to indicate the highly mobile gun platform sans protection isn't practical (and may honestly never be, the active defenses those all rely on also will mount right on a tank). 

 

The only system that I can really imagine that could represent a "musket" would be a railgun, in that it's something that could effectively penetrate any armor yet known to man from any range or something.  But it's still a system literally decades away from fitting on a platform that might be mobile enough to see battlefield use

[BlackAlpha]

Which has actually been my point too. I'm not really saying the armored vehicle is disappearing, it never will as long as the gun continues to exist. What i'm saying is that the MBT may be on its way out. The proper "tank" as we know it. I mean Apocal is right too, muskets didn't get rid of Cavalry, they just changed them so drastically that they weren't the cavalry they used to be anymore. That's how we look toward the future in my mind. 

 

Well, if not a MBT, then what exactly? So, what's your idea on how the MBT will evolve?

 

Personally, I think the MBT will stick around for a while and will be doing an arms race with missile based weapons. There are still a lot of possibilities with protection systems for tanks, you can make them still much bigger and thus more effective, but missiles are near their physical limit, not much you can improve there (anti tank MIRV or swarm variants would be pretty huge). For that reason, I suspect APS will at some point surpass missile based weapons and will make tanks nearly immune to missile based weapons. Like panzersaurkrautwerfer mentioned, I think the only possible game changer for tanks might be a railgun IF we can manage to create the technology to fit it on something as small as a tank.

Edited February 16, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[dan/california]

Well, if not a MBT, then what exactly? So, what's your idea on how the MBT will evolve?

 

Personally, I think the MBT will stick around for a while and will be doing an arms race with missile based weapons. There are still a lot of possibilities with protection systems for tanks, you can make them still much bigger and thus more effective, but missiles are near their physical limit, not much you can improve there (anti tank MIRV or swarm variants would be pretty huge). For that reason, I suspect APS will at some point surpass missile based weapons and will make tanks nearly immune to missile based weapons. Like panzersaurkrautwerfer mentioned, I think the only possible game changer for tanks might be a railgun IF we can manage to create the technology to fit it on something as small as a tank.

Then you need a tank to mount the railgun.  Sixty tons of persuasion is going to be around awhile.

[BlackAlpha]

Or maybe you will be able to put it on an IFV and use it to kill tanks easily. Combine that with more robust anti missile protection systems and maybe the MBT will become obsolete (gun and protection surpassed by other vehicles). But we'll need to wait and see how the railgun develops. And we'll also need to wait and see if any new revolutionary power sources, that are small enough for tanks, come into existence. It will take a very, very long time... Dozens of years, at least.

Edited February 16, 2015 by BlackAlpha

[womble]

Even if there is one system on the battlefield that can be guaranteed to breach any armour that can be moved, there will be plenty of other systems around which, while they can be guaranteed to breach a lesser protection, can be bounced by the heavy guys. Consider also that if a compact, energy-dense power source is developed for juicing up the railgun or laser, it will also be available for powering the MBT which will be able to move around even more armour, or use the weight saved in its power train to stack on more plate. And there will be an interim period where the MBT will be the only thing sturdy enough to carry this new, shiny weapon system, and you'll want it protected as well as possible against all lesser threats which can be protected from. Bushmaster sabot rounds seem to be able to go through anything except an MBT glacis, even now, so your railgun platform will want its frontal armour at least to be able to defend against that level of threat "plus one".

[Duckman]

Isn't decoys and swarming a logical answer to APS? It will make ATGMs more advanced, but with things like Javelin they're going that route anyway. A decent sized missile should be able to deploy some submunitions/decoys. Another possibility is jamming, but I don't know how feasible that is on such a small scale.

 

Anyway, they came up with a solution to reactive armour so I'm sure ATGM manufacturers will solve this too.