MikeyD

Remember when Tucker Carlson was interviewing Putin who recited his boilerplate spiel about invading Ukraine to 'de-nazify' it, and Tucker looked personally offended by the remark.

"How reliable was the swingfire and striker?" Swingfire, if I recall correctly, had a quite long minimum range. It was fired upward then had to be gathered into the LOS. So a Swingfire missile could be halfway down a standard CM map before the gunner got proper control of the missile. Wiki says minimum distance is 150m. That would be arming distance, it could be 700m or more downrange before the gunner got the missile in the crosshairs.

There's a CM saying. When playing Russians send a platoon where you'd normally sent a squad, send a company where you'd normally sent a platoon, and send a battalion where you'd normally send a company. That advice applies more generally, as well. Brit and German mech infantry both have smallish squads/sections. Individually they're not very flexible. Flexibility comes from using multiple squads in a coordinated manner. Two panzergrenadier squads equal sixteen men with four lmg Considerably more useful than a single squad. I'm reminded of those robust 13 man Marine squads in CMSF2 that nobody can stand up against.

When I was running out of room I moved my exe game folders (along with all those big BRZs) to another drive but kept the Documents /CM stuff where they were in Documents. Everything worked just fine. About mods, I still drop my mods into a Z folder in the documents folder along with the BRZs, the old-school way. The game doesn't like folder-in-folder, be aware.

I look at the module from the opposite end as a content guy and I had great fun making scenarios for the module. Downfall isn't France, it isn't Italy, it isn't Russia, its not the bulge. Its its own thing with its own peculiarities to play with/work around. I was sorry my 'paying job' kept me from making more scenarios to include. About DF Exploitation playing Germans. Either your bunker wipe's 'em all out or it get's KO's by the first hit and you're in a pickle.

Unjustified? Like the assassination of an Iranian general?

I recently read that Bradley has finally been greenlighted (greenlit?) to be upgraded with Iron Fist LD APS after improvements had increased reliability to 70%, up from something like 50-60% before. When Stryker Slat was fielded it was said to be only 50% effective in tests.

I wonder what weapons Russians are equipping their meat wave soldiers with, considering they're expecting them to die within minutes. A 50 year old rifle and a couple clips of ammo?

That brings to mind the old saying attributed to Omar Bradley 'Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics'. That's the big Ukrainian victory. The Russian plan (after their failed coup de main) was to simply run Ukraine out of artillery shells, anti-tank missiles and aircraft then move in, winning by default. But Ukraine didn't run out of artillery shells, ant-tank missiles and aircraft. Russia had done all those costly meat assaults in vain.

"Will" rather reminds me of those teenage girls in the UK who thought it would be a good idea to travel to Syria and present themselves as child brides to ISIS. Its impossible for a sane person to even guess what they were thinking at the time.

People have largely forgotten the original ISIS - the guys waging their war of conquest in Syria in 2014 - were largely Russians who had been radicalized by the Chechen war. So Russia experiencing a random ISIS terrorist attack is not out of the question.

I had a coworker long ago who was an old WWII Pacific jungle fighter. After spending years island fighting he pulled a Yossarian and decided he wanted to survive the war. He hit on a strategy. When his unit was up to go on patrol he'd hop in the units sole Stuart light tank to do 'regular servicing', drove it to a nearby patch of sand, pulled a sharp right turn and Oops! The tank shed a track! Sorry guys, I've got to stay behind and fix this. Worked every time.

You (almost) never see blizzards in CM scenarios, or dense fog, or moonless overcast nights, or moonless nights with dense fog on muddy ground because some condition just aren't all that fun to try to play in. Not to say having your men stumbling through a monsoon or a blizzard can't be entertaining as a demonstration scenario. But you wouldn't want to make a regular habit of it.

The Ukraine war has rather vindicated the bogging model, actually. At certain times of the year you just don't want go on a drive through the countryside. In the game go to the menu and look at 'Conditions'. If terrain is labeled as 'muddy' you're in for a hard time. If its labeled 'wet' you're in for a slightly less hard time. I've learned to aim for safer patches of ground - hopping from hard ground tiles to rocky ground tiles. I made a flooded 'muddy' ground map for CMFB module. But the flooded road has gravel tiles beneath it so bogging is rare if you stick to the road.

First thought off the top of my head, Tiger has a 5 man crew all viewing the forward battlefield from a 9 foot tall platform, T64 has a 3 man crew and is 2 foot shorter.

Succinct.

You can probably maneuver a plane like that with a dead engine, but a missing one would kind'a throw off the center of gravity a bit.

I recall a cold war era report that said engagement ranges in Germany rarely exceed 1500m. there's always going to be an intervening copse of trees or hedge-lined road or village cluster. Yes, maybe you'll find that valuable spot looking down the full length of a river valley for your TOW but don't count on it. I believe in Ukraine its been said typical Javelin engagement ranges have been around 900m (about from treeline to treeline), which is still within the range of the old CMCW M47 Dragon. Whenever I play big maps the fight eventually devolves into individual engagements for smaller pieces of real estate. So huge maps are only good for the first third of the battle.

Happy end of daylight savings time to my fellows in the US! The clocks changed automatically and all of a sudden I'm sitting at the computer typing at 4am. I think its time to go to bed now.

I'm reminded of the old film 'Poltergeist'. The dad is trying to watch the football game but his neighbor's TV remote is on the same frequency so his TV channel keeps switching to 'Mr Rogers'. I would imagine frequency saturation would be a limiting factor in drone warfare, especially for long range drones. A dozen drone in the air all trying to broadcast pictures back to their operators and the operators all trying to broadcast steering commands to their drones. How are these frequencies being coordinated?

Starting in late January, or thereabouts, it started raining and didn't stop. The British zone of operation became a flooded quagmire. The time window in the game where the Brits were fighting on snow would be pretty small. Most of the Western Front snowy photos we know were taken early January, a week or more after the Bulge battles took place.

Ammo expenditure got so bad with the introduction of the assault rife that the Pentagon tried to limit the M4 carbine to either single shot or 3 round bursts. No full auto feature (M4 in CMSF2). They later backtracked and put full auto back (M4A1 in CMBS) more as a morale booster to the infantry than for any real utility. Some years ago I tried a gameplay experiment. I played a scenario without 'eye of God' elevated view, no rewind, no flying over the map, no moving beyond my own forward line of contact, no floating icons, the camera only looking over the shoulder of one of the grunts on the ground. The game suddenly became very much more challenging. You find yourself cowering behind a wall as the earth shakes around you from incoming artillery. You hear tanks but see nothing unless you dare to look up and expose yourself. The enemy is seen in fleeting glimpses. Played as a FPS game instead of a tabletop game CM becomes brutal. I don't have the self restraint to play the game like that exclusively but I do try to avoid overlooking the map like an omniscient being as much as possible.

I get the impression Putin's standing order is to 'Attack' every day, no matter how futile or suicidal or pointless. The whole point is to be seen to be attacking. Every day, somewhere along the line there's an attack of some sort.

So Putin talks about 'DeNazification' and Tucker's response was 'Hey, I take that personally!'

The simplest explanation is (A) if a plane is somewhere where it hadn't ought at night its liable to attract unwanted friendly attention. The more 'heroic' explanation is (B) a daring infiltration of Ukr AA units on a near-suicide mission. The more sci-fi explanation is (C) new unsuspected technology. My guess is a combination of A and C. The plane got a missile warning alert that caused it to maneuver wildly, which then spooked the local air defense. But what do I know?