SgtMuhammed

Haben Sie Feuer?

Again we are comparing apples and oranges. 20mm cannon vs .50 cal machine gun. Yes your crew of 4 to 6 could wheel your 20mm around but I would love to see them try to bring it up stairs or through heavy woods. Two guys can move a .50 with tri-pod and even a couple boxes of ammo. Been there and done that. You can even fire the .50 from an improvised brace, the same cannot be said for the 20mm.

Just a quick note about cannon firing and signatures. Cordite is not black powder, there is a lot of ejecta in the muzzle blast but not a lot of what one would really regard as smoke. If you are looking directly at a gun firing you will see the blast pretty easily, expecially if the crew has taken no steps to reduce dust from the ground. This signature will dissapate quite quickly, within a matter of seconds, so if you are distracted by other things, like a battle, then it is very easy to miss. Locating a gun in a woodline does provide quite a bit of cammo but also really reduces the effectivness unless the crew has a lot of time to clear lanes of fire. A lot of woodlines here in Europe tend to be all or nothing affairs, either somewhat ornamental windbreaks or thick treestands. Putting a gun more than a few tens of meters back will render it almost useless.

The only sound I remember hearing when my track would bog went somethinglike this; "We'll make it sarge, I never get stuck." This was then followed by the repeated sound of someone getting kicked in the CVC. One of the other American sounds caught my attention. The first couple times I heard it I swear I thought they were saying "Enemy Dude, open fire." Had to listen real close to realize it was Troops and not Dude.

I don't know about that. A friend of mine said a guy he knows heard from a budddy that Madmatt thought he heard someone who looked like a guy who lived next to Steve think about telling Charles' uncle's ex-roommate that a company associated with a group who really like companies like BFC might be interested in conducting a study about considering another patch. I'm already hitting the refresh button.

Braggart!

And I only paid $2000 for it. Guy on ebay said it was a steal.

Yes, this inter-service rivalry thing is getting a little out of hand.

My CMBO experience was generally that arty spotters tended to be too accurate. Yes those short rounds can be a bitch, I once had the very last round of a barrage go short an KO one of my Shermans, but I found map fire to be so accurate that I rarely bothered to stress about LOS for my FOs. Rockets on the other hand...I have seen barrages where 75 percent of them land in the correct grid and even one where, I'm not kidding here, no two hits were less than 100 meters appart. In CMBO rockets were more of a hey neat thing than a really useful tool.

Another little note just because... The American units that formed much of the initial force during Kasserine were the 1st Armored and the 34th Infantry. Both were some of the first troops to be rushed to full strength and sent to Europe after the outbreak of war. There training back in the States came during the startup of the mobilization cycle. While they were in England (or Ireland) units still in the States began training with new lessons learned and with new equipment. In early February the 34th began to recieve quantities of the new bazookas. LTC Thomas Drake, commander of the force on Djebel Ksaira (just south of where the Demo scenario takes place), planned to figure out how to use them and then start training on 14 February. As has been stated by others, American troops were trained under some pretty unrealistic doctrinal expectations. During prewar exercises infantry were able to KO tanks by hitting them with bags of flour which simulated hand grenades. Troops were taught the "tank roll over" technique of hiding in your hole and popping out behind an enemy tank. Of course this ignored the close cooperation practiced by the Panzers and Panzergrenadiers. In short, American troops were very well trained to fight WWI at the start of WWII.

Intel 8088 2mh, 20mb hard drive, Herculese monochrome card, 256kb RAM. Looked at me like I was crazy.

PIV 2.0 Intel Extreme Video card (64 MB) 512MB RAM. Runs great but the scenarios are pretty small. I did end up with a lot of smoke and tanks firing in one run and it still only took about 10 seconds to process turns and it ran like silk. Charles do a little tightening of the code perhaps?

Here's another member of the AAA fan club. The 51 unloaded his rockets on my firing line but luckily his shooting was as bad as his target identification. He did return, however, and straif several German infantry squads, something I didn't notice too much in CMBB or CMBO. I happened to be at just the right angle when the rockets came in. They look pretty neat.

Actually the official word is that you will be able to approximate the Boccage in CMAK. They said they threw that in as a Western Front bone.

Tankers don't like to get their tanks dirty. You never know when the beast will decide to crap out on you so why take chances you don't have to. I have seen crews flee an immobilized tank that is suddenly engulfed in a grass fire. Pretty neat actually. The hit that immobilized the tank caused the sparks that started the fire. A couple minutes later the fire spread and the crew beat a hasty retreat.

A lot depends on the situation. The Germans tended to slap a weld on and send it back to the line while the Americans would often pull tanks back to a repair depot and issue the crew a new one. Normally a gouge that didn't cause any extra damage would be left until the vehicle was scheduled for services anyway. Really deep ones that seriously degraded the armor would probably have quick patches welded into place.

Everyone knows that being in a Ford is faster than walking.

Seubersdorf, Germany (a little north of Regensburg)

Seen too much strange stuff in training and real life to whine about bad turns. Little hint. Never let your computer know what unit you are depending on to win. It will be the first to bogg, die, take a gun hit, cause the game to crash, switch sides, or whatever tragedy you can imagine.

Prettymuch anything with "The True Story of..." usually isn't.

That Nelson fellow had an annoying habit of pulling of things like that.

I saw a 155 WP round hit once about 1000 meters from my position. Through the binos it loked like the sun bounding along the ground trailing a white cloud.

One of the problems with the Tiger was that its weight demanded very close attention to the state of roads and bridges in its operational area. A poorly scouted route could easily leave the Tigers stranded in the wrong place.

Ahh the old choice between performance and blowing up when anyone looks crosswise at you. The Buffalo sacrificed the first to avoid the second. Kind of like an anti-Zero. One of the strangest things about combat is that weapons considered by one country to be a flop (the P-39 for instance) can be the darlings of another.

Some vets I have talked to described the sound of the 42 as being like someone ripping linnen. I have fired its grandson while training with the Bundeswehr and it is a bitch to control. A lot of fun though.