SgtMuhammed

Just tell him AJ really needs a hug. That should do the trick.

They do get their money's worth every once in a while though. I recently had a Stuka take out a platoon of T34s hiding behind some trees (unfortunatly the tanks not the plane were mine) and then return to decimate one of my defensive positions with machine gun fire. Then again I did get to see some Henkels take out a couple of its own trucks and ACs. I can't say if there is actually a problem or not so I won't. Remember though that air to ground communication and coordination was pretty basic at the time. Yes it was refined to a degree but not anywhere near what we have today. About the best it got was the ability to call aircraft into an area and hope that they were able to find the enemy. Ground forces could help sometimes by marking their positions or those of the enemy but it was still largely upon the pilots to find their own targets. Things look very different from the air at 2 to 3 hundred miles an hour than they do on the ground. Several allied units even went so far as to state that they would rather do without aircover because of friendly fire incidents. So it did happen, and indeed still does, and happened enough to be percieved as a real problem even late in the war. I don't use air enough to really notice but of the 20 or so attacks I have seen during my games only 1 or 2 have been against their own forces. Just my two cents.

Read the first post of the thread. The rest of it is just a way to pass time between thrashing each other both in the game as well as mentally.

Quest for the King. Part 3: We see our young, dashing, svelt, and athletic, hero (ok, middleaged, sloppy, pudgey, and lazy, hero) gazing out over the waters of the stormy Atlantic. Wow, I didn't think that thing was so big. Quickly our hero comes to what he feels is the best course of action for rescuing the captured king. From the desk of James Goodman, aka SgtGoody, serf of the MBT, squire in waiting to Sir Nidan. In concert with representatives from Germany, France, and Russia, I issue this resolution of protest to the Heavily Outlined, Out of Focus, Pseudo-dogs who are responsible for the capture of HRM MEEKS I. Your actions have left us no choice but to demand that you comply with UN and other applicable resolutions and release said king to his subjects. It is with unshakable determination that we release this statement and warn the HOOFPDs that failure to comply with this declaration will result in the issuance of further declarations. Do not underestimate the power of these decarations as they will be quite strongly worded and very declarative. The HOOFPDs are hereby advised that they will be held to a strict deadline by this body to comply with these demands. If word is not recieved by the time the sun expands into a red giant then the HOOFPDs will be judged to be in material breach of their obligations under this declaration and it will force this body to issue another. For the Pool and the king. There that should do it. [ March 10, 2003, 08:12 AM: Message edited by: sGTGoody ]

Sir AJ If you are quite through with downloading "mp3s (is that what they call jellyfish porn down under?)" send me an email with your new address or respond to my bloody turn. You inflicted this monstrocity you call a battle on me, the least you could do is finish it.

Isn't it required by law to be <font size=+4> AC/DC</font>?

Moving away from the technical, some other advantages of the M1's turbine is that it doesn't sound like a tank. Interestingly you can get a sound contact on an M1 when it is further away. Within a couple hundred meters all you hear is a whine and the track squeaking. They also smell a lot better than an M60. Crank up a company of 60s and it is hard to breath. M1s, on the other hand, smell like someone is cooking something (although I have never been able to decide exactly what). They also make great clothes dryers for any attached infantry. Just stand in the jet blast and you are dry in a matter of seconds.

Definitely more of a weekend trip. You might as well sinse the entire population of Austria comes to Germany every weekend anyway.

I don't think they were permanent formations but rather had a doctrine to guide their formation. I know that Kokott (26th VGD) organized some of his lead elements into assault companies for the innitial assault during the Bulge. Other accounts seem to show them being organized to lead attacks rather than being attached to other units for an attack. IOW they were part of their parent organization.

Yeah, one of my favorite parts about my visit to Bastogne was the 26th VGD Hetzer at the Mardasson. [ March 06, 2003, 08:32 AM: Message edited by: sGTGoody ]

Well coffeeTOSSER, your lack of wit and worth has caused me to completely forget any challenge in which you were a part. If you are finnished licking hallucinogenic frogs you cans send me a setup. Since I regard your tactical potential to be about equal to that of a sea cucumber I shall let you set the parameters (no more than 2000 points my computer is old) and pick the sides.

Para, did you see the ST while it was in Sinsheim? That thing is friggen huge! I also never realized the Panther was so big till I saw the one they have there. Really great place.

Been to Sinsheim but haven't been able to get to Munster yet. I really want to get there and to the museum in Munchen.

Then again that is because the A10 tends to take bird strikes from the rear. Yes you can put filters on jet engines. If you wanted to have huge intakes to provide needed airflow then designing the ducts to provide the proper shockwave is the least of your worries. Civilian aircraft don't even need the ducting because of the different characteristics of their engines. While filters would be impractical in the extreem they are by no means impossible.

As a historian in training I am cursed to read even less entertaining authors than Glantz. Try G.R. Elton or Kitchen. It is a major failing in the field that some historians are taught that in order to be taken seriously they have to write seriously. There is no reason good history can't be good writing as well.

Well you could but you would have to have an intake that was gigantic in order to get enough air flow. That is why aircraft engines are designed to withstand hits by normal debris such as birds. (This is also why the Air Force has invested a lot of money in chicken substitutes for testing as well as the chicken gun to fire them at test engines.)

Glantz does a good job of clearing up some of the myths of the battle. It is easy to declare that one particular action was THE action of a campaign when you think about it for 50 years. The mistake people often make is assuming that the participants at the time also felt the same way.

Like when you mean to say "Pass the salt please," and it comes out "You stupid *@$%@ you ruined my life!" Updates: Sir Horlund is finally realizing exactly how over matched he is. I aint through yet you Scandinavian wanker. lunarkorndog has finally found one of my trenches. Not bad considering it is only turn 19 of a 40 turn game. At this rate we will have to turn this into an operation. Of course what could one expect from a Polish wanabe Dutch wanker. Sir Nidan my erstwhile liege, has taken refuge behind the ruins of the town pub. Little does he know we have replaced his Panther with a cleverly disguised BT7. He should be finding out any time now. Of all my opponents the only one who isn't a wanker, for now at least.

It is an interesting paradox. It has been estimated that it takes the expendature of tens of thousands of rounds to cause one casualty. So who is doing all that shooting. There is anecdotal evidence of troops feeding their extra magazines to the guys who were doing all the shooting. Then there are also accounts from earlier wars such as the recovery of thousands of rifles from Gettysburg and other battlefields that had never been fired but had been loaded several times. One thing that several people have mentioned but that gets too little official notice is the right-place-right-time factor. You almost always end up with "sweet spots" on a battlefield. These spots just seem to give you an overwelmingly good position from which to engage the enemy. During one fight I was in I ended up flanking an attack into one of the mock towns here in Hohenfels. I must have killed nearly a platoon by myself and towards the end of the fight I was begging mags from the other guys in the building with me. The couldn't get the same angle because we didn't want to stuff a whole squad into one window. Conversly the area that the attacking unit occupied was a very bad spot. At the end of the fight I was out of rounds but most of the platoon still had plenty. Things like that happen all the time, with vehicles as well as individual troops. When all other factors are equal, luck often rules the battlefield. It often seems that such arbitrary things as luck have a huge effect on combat but are never officially recognized because they are impossible to predict. The OPFOR at NTC uses M551 Sheridan's with fiberglass pannels bolted on them to simulate Russian equipment. Here in Hohenfels we use M113s as BMPs and M60's as T80's. No they don't look anything alike but they don't look like BLUEFOR either. We have several T62s and 55s as well as MTLBs and BTRs that are on display that we can crawl around in but nothing that we can drive around. At NTC they have a few actual Russian vehicles that the actually roll missions with. At JRTC (the light infantry version of NTC) they use actual HIND helecopters. I have climbed around on one but never flown in one (they are friggen huge). During war time our mission was to continue to train the units befor they deploy. The army feels that the existance of the OPFOR as a training tool has greater benifits than breaking them up to provide any sort of subject matter experts. Remember, the majority of the OPFOR are just privates like anywhere else, they just get to do their job a lot more.

What Marshal found was that out of a squad of 10 or 12 men only 2 or 3 would actually ever fire their weapons. This is modified for area weaponst that are usually directed to fire at areas rather than specific targets. What you find is that some soldiers are reluctant to shoot anything they are not sure they can hit, such as someone popping out from behind cover or a running soldier. Others will tend to spray bullets around at whatever may seem threatening, trees, bushes, people and will go through their ammo very quickly. Still others will freeze for one reason or another which may or may not have anything to do with common concepts of fear, morality, etc. Lastly you will have that group that is able to keep their heads and employ their weapons and their training effectively. Of course there are shades of in between all over the place such as soldiers who will fire their initial magazine but never reload or soldiers who will reload but never fire, and a million different things in between. One of the big findings was that soldiers still clung to the socirtal convictions against the taking of another human life. While conciously wanting to engage the enemy the mind will think up a thousand reasons why not to pull the trigger. This is why the U.S. Army went to pop up targets for gunnery training, to instill in its soldiers a target reflex, you see something pop up you shoot. This greatly increased the number of actual shooters in Vietnam and I would suspect in the Gulf although I haven't really seen any figures. So what does all this rambling have to do with the question? What one tends to find is that the distribution of shooters tends to even itself out. Every squad seems to find a couple people that it can rely on. Interestinly these are not always the same people. You almost never find an entire squad of shooters or of non-shooters. The quality levels in the game reflect how the squad performs as a whole rather than the presense or lack of any individual killers. It is very possible, and even the norm, for a squad to perform its job well and still only have a couple men in position to effectivly engage the enemy, the quality levels reflect this. Looking at a CMBB battle we see that the squad is credited with X number of casualties caused rather than soldier X is credited with those casualties. So while there may be vast differences in individual performances the whole squad still needs to work as a team to achieve the mission. Even a great shooter with no backup is going to get killed. Notes about being OPFOR: How to become OPFORE: Join the Army. Request infantry, armor, or cav (OPFOR tends to be rather short of engineers or arty they are usually just simulated). Request to be assigned to 1st Battalion 4th Infantry Regiment in Hohenfels, Germany, or 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Ft. Irwin, California. Make it through Basic and AIT (not a real challenge these days sadly). Be prepared to spend the next 2 or 3 years of your life in the field or repairing tracked vehicles. Good things about OPFOR: When you go to the field you know you are going to get in a fight (which is the funnest thing about army training). In a regular unit you will often go to the field for months at a time just to sleep in the dirt. You nearly always win. You are fighting over the same piece of ground over and over (I didn't use a map after my first six months in "the Box" [the manuever area]) and you don't have to worry about things like supply, casualty evacuation, or doing things the "right" way (BLUEFOR {the good guys} is graded on everything they do during a fight, even how they load their vehicles). When a battle is over you get to go home (at least in Hohenfels, at Irwin (NTC) they stay in the field a lot longer because of the distances they have to travel (it is the size of Rhode Island). BLUEFOR has to stay in the box and be tactical even when there is no OPFOR around. Things that stink: Vehicle maintainance. You are constantly doing back breaking work to keep your 40 year old equipment running. Plus you have to do most of the work yourself because an OPFOR company has three times the vehicles as a regular army unit but only the same number of mechanics. Anything that breaks has to be fixed before you go home because there is usually another mission the next day. Little time off. The NTC guys have the better deal here because they have more troops but not much better. You work, holidays, weekends, day, night, in bad weather and good. Once a rotation ends for BLUEFOR they go home and do normal Army stuff for several months. For the OPFOR you go back into th field to fight the next unit. I have worked for 75 days at a stretch with no days off during heavy rotational periods. OPFOR is, at the same time, the funnest and worst job in the Army.

That is going to be one well aged drink. If I owe you turns you will have to wait, I am engaged in mortal combat with the "Great Satan" (Microsoft for the less informed, well I guess that covers just about everyone here doesn't it) for control of my computer.

Unless it runs on MOGAS (regular unleaded) U.S. Army vehicles run on JP8 (which is slightly more refined diesel). The Turbine in the M1 can run on any flamible liquid, for that matter so can some army trucks, but they get the best milage with proper fuel. The M1 does not have to stop for maintainance every three hours. The are actually one of the most reliable tanks in the world. All armored vehicles require a lot of maintainance compared to their lighter bretheren but most of that is of a preventive nature rather than to correct actual breakdowns.

OPFOR (OPposing FORces) the U.S. Army's resident badguys. We're the guys the rest of the army comes to train and lose against. One thing you will find is that your heavy weapons tend to drive the enemy into your lesser systems. Plus you have to remember that your machine gun is one shooter and is an area suppression weapon. A squad is usually half a dozen or more shooters trying to hit specific targets. With a few notable exceptions it usually works out this way which is why machine guns are not nearly as effective if they are by themselves.

I found, in three years of simulated combat as part of the OPFOR that there are three types of vehicle crews. There are the Killers who will aggressivly engage the enemy and will make or break your unit, the support guys who can be counted on to not screw up too badly but don't expect wonders, and the riders who couldn't spot a tank if it rammed them. This breakdown seems to work for pretty much any military organization. Often we would come back from a mission with a platoon total of 20 to 25 kills, 16 to 20 of which would have been made by two guys. (Yes I was one of the killers 120 Bradleys, 7 M1's, and 150 APCs and Humvees all computer confirmed) The problem, of course, is if those guys get taken out or are not available then the performance of the platoon takes a nose dive. This is often true in the rest of life if you think about it. The point is that even in units with the same amount of training and experience you will have widely varied performances. Some people are just plain lucky or unlucky. The quality levels don't reflect the number of kills the individual soldiers have recorded but rather their training, experience, and general moral. Every soldier in an elite squad isn't Rambo nor is every soldier in a conscript unit Beetle Bailey. [ March 03, 2003, 09:26 AM: Message edited by: sGTGoody ]

He can get killed if he doesn' get out of the way. There is about 4 feet from the end of the breech to the back of the turret. When the cannon goes off it goes all the way to within a few inches of the turret wall in the blink of an eye. It wouldn't even notice someone standing there, they would just be jelly on the back wall.