JonS

While I'm not going to defend the work of the 'we wuz robbed!' crowd, I wouldn't set too much store in Gehlen's work either. He was, after all, the guy who was constantly wrong footed by the Russians. I suppose you could say Gehlen had a great deal of personal familiarity with the Russian's tricks ... because he'd fallen for all of them. But that doesn't really seem like a ringing endorsement

Boredom, perhaps? Or maybe a sense of fairplay?

Boredom, perhaps? Or maybe a sense of fairplay?

Glad you like Katusha!!! (I'm the publisher)
 
We just made a trailer for Katusha Book Two, which is the book that has the most tank battles (until Book Three comes out later this year).  There's over 150 drawings of tanks, battles, and other action on the Eastern Front packed in with a killer rendition of the classic Soviet anthem "Katyusha" as the soundtrack:
 
https://youtu.be/KMUUNs3UkoU

For an upcoming scenario, I did quite a bit of research into the way Allied paradrops were scheduled and organised in 1944. Taking into account the limitations of the editor, I decided that the arrival location was essentially fixed, but the arrival timing can be messed about with, and organisation of the arriving forces could be heavily degraded. What I came up with was splitting a battalion drop into four company 'waves' (three rifle companies and one HQ/spt wave), each nominally 5 minutes apart. The later waves are - IIRC - more like 10 mins apart (to reflect mounting friction in the air), and all the waves are variable_5. I also used a fifth 'wave' of stragglers.
 
Don't forget to factor in how fast the a/c is traveling, and how quickly men can get out the door. The guys do not arrive in a nice compact blob. Typically, each a/c platoon-stick would be split into teams and stretched out over 3-500m along the flightline, with just a little bit of lateral dispersion. That, in turn, means that the LZ on your map has to be really freaking large. Also, the alignment of the various platoon sticks probably shouldn't all be perfectly parallel, but they should all conform to roughly the same approach and departure route (say, up to about +/-15° in orientation? A bit more for the Brits whose a/c flew individually within the stream, a bit less for the US who flew in formations. A bit more by night, a bit less by day).
 
Edit: oh, and don't forget the detachment of pathfinders who'll arrive 10-15 minutes before the first wave to set up the Eureka beacons and visual markers ...
Edit2: the various 3-500m strings of dropped troops within each wave should NOT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyaLZHiJJnE. 'Why' is left as an exercise for the reader
Edit3: each of the strings of dropped troops within each wave should be separated laterally by about 100m. The 'Why' is basically the same as in Edit2 above

When it's Kettler linking to the article.

He's still around?  Yeah, why would anyone want to dig that fossil up and ask him to comment on anything.

Doesn't seem very insightful to me. The chance probably doubled or even trebled in the last year. From 0.1% to 0.3%.

It is fricken Pat Buchanan for crying out loud. Since when did any of his prognostications earn an exclamation point?

This is front page, just below the top on Yahoo right now and shows how topical CMBS is.
 
http://news.yahoo.com/u-russia-war-over-ukraine-070000525.html
 
Regards,
 
John Kettler
 
 

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/lendlease.pdf

For an upcoming scenario, I did quite a bit of research into the way Allied paradrops were scheduled and organised in 1944. Taking into account the limitations of the editor, I decided that the arrival location was essentially fixed, but the arrival timing can be messed about with, and organisation of the arriving forces could be heavily degraded. What I came up with was splitting a battalion drop into four company 'waves' (three rifle companies and one HQ/spt wave), each nominally 5 minutes apart. The later waves are - IIRC - more like 10 mins apart (to reflect mounting friction in the air), and all the waves are variable_5. I also used a fifth 'wave' of stragglers.
 
Don't forget to factor in how fast the a/c is traveling, and how quickly men can get out the door. The guys do not arrive in a nice compact blob. Typically, each a/c platoon-stick would be split into teams and stretched out over 3-500m along the flightline, with just a little bit of lateral dispersion. That, in turn, means that the LZ on your map has to be really freaking large. Also, the alignment of the various platoon sticks probably shouldn't all be perfectly parallel, but they should all conform to roughly the same approach and departure route (say, up to about +/-15° in orientation? A bit more for the Brits whose a/c flew individually within the stream, a bit less for the US who flew in formations. A bit more by night, a bit less by day).
 
Edit: oh, and don't forget the detachment of pathfinders who'll arrive 10-15 minutes before the first wave to set up the Eureka beacons and visual markers ...
Edit2: the various 3-500m strings of dropped troops within each wave should NOT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyaLZHiJJnE. 'Why' is left as an exercise for the reader
Edit3: each of the strings of dropped troops within each wave should be separated laterally by about 100m. The 'Why' is basically the same as in Edit2 above

http://www.katushagirlsoldier.com/
 

You know, Kettler, if you weren't in such a gut-busting hurry to gish-gallop your way from one logical debacle to the next, you might have noticed this:
 
Yes, that's right. The thing you've been asked for, at least four times, but have steadfastly refused to provide.
 
Not surprisingly (Seriously; not a surprise. Memory is a terribly fallible thing.) it is fairly different to the way it has been presented, which is of course the point of asking for a reference. And it's worth noting that this tactic was far from being a widespread thing – it applies to one platoon for a period of about 7-10 days in the middle of June, since that's the only time 66AR was attached to 101A/B. That lack of common adoption might suggest how successful it was.
 
The description as given is also fairly mangled, making the relative spatial positions of the Germans and Americans difficult to follow. For instance, the M5 launches through a pre-existing gap and has to deal with a potential ambush on the other side of the hedgerow which they achieve by … firing ahead? What about the Germans along the hedgerow they just burst through? I'd also hesitate to call the firepower generated by a single M5 with a few paras clinging to the back as 'massive', particularly when directed speculatively against an entire hedgeline.
 
Finally, Blacker's book is basically an oral history, with all the problems that implies, rather than being a reliable academic history like Doubler's CWTE.
 
tl;dr: the thing you descibed sort-of exists. But not in the way you imagined.

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

M1A2 weighs about 62,000kg
penetrator from an M829A3 round weighs about 10kg
MV of an M829A3 penetrator is about 1,555m/s
(all figures from wiki)
 
From that:
* the post-impact velocity of the tank+penetrator after an inelastic collision is 0.252m/s,
* about 12MJ (aka 12,000kJ) of energy are dumped into the M1 during the collision, which is equivalent to about 3kg of TNT.
 


No, but there is room for a fairly wide continuum of effects between 'no effect at all' and 'permanent combat ineffectiveness'. I'd be in favour of temporary but significant degradation of crew effectiveness following non-penetrating (or HE) hits on tanks, with effects - in terms of both duration and impact on crew effectiveness - scaled to the amount of energy being dumped into the target. The 'stunned' 'panic', etc morale states are already in the game, and I'd like to see them used more often for vehicle crews.

Kettler,
You clearly still won't accept that you're just flat out wrong about Doubler. Despite being told you're wrong by at least half-a-dozen people across four threads.
 
Therefore, I propose the following. I'll re-examine my opinion of you when you stop spamming the forum, knowingly spreading false information, gish-galloping, and all the other nonsense you regularly pull.
 
Deal?
 
Frankly, there is NO advantage in this deal for me. You have shown over and over and over again that the best you are able to come up with is either wrong, worthless or trivial. I desire absolutely NONE of the dross you call information. Occasionally - occasionally - despite your best efforts you might accidentally stumble across something that's vaguely interesting, but even though broken clocks are right more often than you, there's no value in paying attention to them either. The rule of thumb did not come out of nowhere.
 
Sweet FSM. Is that really beyond your google-fu?

Bud_B,
 
kohlenklau is absolutely right. Think of it as firing 122 bullets in an instant, for that's how many lead balls are in that M2 round. That's why artillery had it. To keep infantry from overrunning the guns. The M8 has the same basic gun as the obsolete towed M6 ATG, so fires the same ammo. Call it a strong argument in favor of effective use of dispersion and cover. In Closing with the Enemy, Doubler talks about a bocage assault technique in which demo charges (lots of emplaced explosives, unlike the CM satchel charge) were set off in the back corners of the near hedgerow. Two Stuarts would come racing in, blazing away with canister into the far corners to kill the MGs habitually found there (crossfires), then lighting up the length of the hedgerow in between with MG fire. That seems doable, right? True, but that's only part of the tactic, for the decks of the Stuarts had US tank descents on them, whose specific job was to make sure a Panzerfaust or Panzerschreck didn't wipe out the rather occupied Stuarts. In closing, it occurs to me that it may be incorrect to show tracer effects on the canister shot balls, for they are not tracer equipped. Granted, my realization is more than a bit late!
 
Regards,
 
John Kettler

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?

For those playing along at home; after being called out on repeating previously-shown-to-be-wrong information, Kettler has now moved on to
i) a weird MilHist version of the Gish Gallop
ii) various forms of "woe is me, it's all just sooooo unfair"
iii) flooding the board with irrelevant, quickly googled, links
iv) vigorously contesting points nobody has made
all of which, like the repetition thing, we've seen dozens of times before.
 
Would anyone like to place a bet as to which of his 'tactics' will be trotted out next?