Apocal

Just looked in-game, there is jorizonal deviation.

I'm not going to claim as much experience as FightingSeabee, but in my experience, we tried to keep horizontal deviation to a minimum, while "stitching" (the term we used) the rounds through the (point) target. The reasoning was that it's much easier for the human eye to gauge direction instead of range. The beaten zone for a 240 isn't terribly wide, maybe eight feet wide if you're talking 800yards. But at that range it can easily be 50 feet deep (or more, if the gunner so chooses). For area targets (which we rarely trained for) there was a technique we called "cutting Zs". I'll go look right to see how "wide" the beaten zone in CMSF is. As far zoomed out and elevated I play, I could easily mistake what I think is laser straight for 1 or 2 meters wide.

No, thank you.

Thank you. This is something that's pissed me off for the longest.

For any otherwise interested parties whom I didn't email the save to: It is located here

When sending the save file, do you need the associated scenario or is that included in the save?

Willy Pete! Fun For The Whole Family!

It's really annoying that I can't get battalion fire support without having the damned Bn HQ along. Any workaround to delete the HQ while keeping the mortars? Or any other Bn asset I might need? If I'm showing a main effort company-level attack, I should be able to get the Bn Mortar Plt without the Bn HQ clown posse rolling along with them.

It's a deliberate exaggeration.

Have you used the Conduct of Fire trainer? Do you realize how much "yeah you can get away with that here, but don't try that **** in combat" there is behind any training utilizing CoF? And don't get me started on the convoy trainer, God, don't get me started on that. I could go on for hours on how cocked up that thing is. The executive summary: imagine Humvees and five tons on ice, shooting Nintendo laser guns at bad guys who will not die, even after you grow frustrated and start running them over with your 720-spinning Humvee. If I hadn't had a few experienced MPs around to show me The One True Path Of Convoy Protection, I'd have walked away from that traing believing A) there is no point to firing after being ambushed, as your fire will be ridiculously ineffective and clearing the kill zone should be as cautiously as possible, lest you have vehicular accident. No comment on any call for fire trainers, I've never seen it, though it wouldn't surpise me if one already exists. MILES... the most common form of cheating I saw was people positioning themselves close to machine guns and having their weapons effectively becoming MGs themselves. There wasn't much light concealment on the field I trained on (possibly intentionally), so that wasn't as prevalent as I've been told it is. Million dollars trainers don't necessarily equate to million dollar training. Of course, that's why I mentioned a more enhanced combat engineering sim. Combat engineering gets overlooked and outright shafted, but it could be a critical advantage in any terrain that isn't a pool-table flat desert devoid of chokepoints. A lot of maneuver commanders don't really understand what it brings to the table as opposed to something like an Abrams tank or an Apache and combat engineers spend much of their time "selling" their capabilities to Staff. It's also expensive to go out on live show-and-tells. So that would seem to be a perfect niche for a reasonably accurate simulation.

I have seen similar cases to the above. I chalked it to your standard missile shennigans (missiles aren't terribly reliable as a whole) and bad luck to have it happen twice in a row. This case is different. I can replicate it 100% of the time and it doesn't happen once, not twice or even three times, but four times in a row with two different teams firing on different targets. The missiles travel much further, on the order of 600 meters or so, then inexplicably nosedive into the terrain. The fact that it happens every single time and it appears I'm the only person who has noted it makes me cautious. Maybe it's actually some downside of the Javelin that I have not been made aware of.

Any numbers on how the upgrade improves in terms of practical accuracy? Most sources I've read (which are all Western) dismiss even the upgrade versions of the AT-3 as being obsolete and not terribly effective even in their prime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPCoxvtudsk Crap vid quality, but hopefully it gets the point across. 1) First two shots are at 1244m, second set of shots are at 1118m. 2) Cardinal direction is east. 3) Sun is rising but still well below the hill and horizon. 4) The anti-armor teams are the only ones to have spotted the bunkers (due to the CLU). 5) Wind is gentle from NW. 6) Target elevations are roughly 200m above the anti-armor teams. 7) Anti-armor teams are not under any kind of fire. 8) Temperature is hot. Is this a bug? Or is there something about Javelins I should know that I don't?

I was under the impression that as a HMG, the MG32/42 was rather average. Most games undermodel the effect machine guns have, especially HMGs. I can understand in FPS where developers don't want to place the majority of the combat power into relatively few, boring "support weapons" and have the gameplay stagnate but in wargames it's something of oddity. CMSF isn't necessarily perfect in that regard, it does better than most and I do more often than not find myself thinking in terms of getting GPMGs and HMGs into advantageous positions when fighting an infantry battle.

That's pretty much doable right now in CMSF. To an extent, Grozny '94 as well.

Grozny '94.

I was wondering if anyone else experienced a problem when firing Javelins against a target at drastically (200m) higher elevation. Mine track perfectly fine at first, gaining some altitude, but not enough, then they kind of fall off and hit the ground well short of the target. I did four shots, 2 at a shade under 2000m and another 2 at approximately 1200m. All experienced the same behavior. Real-time, so no saves to give, although if necessary I will replay scenario, record via FRAPS and post on YouTube.

Alek, most of what you speak of can and should be handled by the scenario designer. The intel advantage can be simulated by early intel. Poor maintenance can be simulated by cutting units, especially vehicles, out of the TOE. Bad operative management is trickery, but could be simulated by splitting the unit and having portions come to battle as reinforcements. ****ty training is obvious and simple to implement. The M1 uberspotting is not a factor any longer. My tanks generally take three or four RPGs before they spot the firing team. ATGMs are a bit easier, being insanely huge in a majority of cases. And Syrians suck at using the AT-3C because the AT-3C itself sucks.

The ones I can think of: Dynamic mine detection. Running around with the idea that your troops will never be able to detect mines is negative training IMO. We have a lot mine detection gear out there and some of it even works! More types of obstacles and realistic breaching equilpment. Combat engineering has gotten a short shrift (at least over here in the States) because our Super Bowl of training is entirely engineer-unfriendly. It's one of those things we probably don't train enough at, speaking at the tactical level. Possibly stretching the design a bit to function as a call-for-fire trainer?

I'm assuming you meant CMSF. You can adjust fire missions, although some (including myself) think it takes just a bit too long in CMSF.

No. The closest thing in your case would be having the team with rockets perform buddy aid on the fallen RPG gunner. Not that I'm aware of. Almost makes me wish there was an "Abandoned Weapon" feature of the game, but it's easily possible that is just simulating weapons taken out of commission when the wielder was killed.

Indeed. METT-C more than anything else should dictate your SOPs and any concept of operations you'll think of. Unfortunately, many (most?) CM scenarios are painfully short on actionable intel, probably in the interest of game balance. The aeroscouts? You have any good unclass sources regarding those operations? Probably not much out there, but I figure it can't hurt to ask.

We still do air assaults into contested areas. We try to execute in such a way that the disadvantages you put forward are minimized, but obviously the enemy gets a vote as well. Just look at Operation Anaconda in 2002 or the massed helo raid we tried against Iraq in 2003. The US lost 3035 Hueys during the Vietnam war, approximately half were due to non-combat accidents. In that same timespan, they flew over seven million flight hours. Assuming an average sortie time of two hours, thats under one loss every thousand sorties. They were... controversial. After Vietnam a lot of people pointed to the helicopters relative vulnerability and loss rate as a demonstration of "if the Vietnamese could do that, imagine what the Soviets are going to do to them!" Other people pointed out that fixed wing aircraft suffered similar rates of loss and the controversy continued until the Reagan years and we could afford both significant amounts of Army rotary wing and Air Force fixed wing assets. Agreed.

I was under the impression it was treated as extended for LoS purposes, similar to the Bradley and Stryker TOW launchers. The vehicle itself is usually pretty damned slow. But using the FO/FCT type team inside it shaves a minute off their call for fire, in my experience. No idea.

None I've heard of. It's impossible to PID your target or anything potentially in the danger area. And things like smoke, tracers, man-prominent terrain features, lasers and GPS coords don't show up on it.