Apocal

Initially those vehicle rear-mounted .50 cal mgs could be manned and fired but it caused endless grief with the turret rotating to the rear at the worst possible time to bring the mg to bear on the enemy. Eventually it was judged to be just not worth it and they pulled the plug.

Initially all Shermans came from the factory with the .50 mounted behind the TC's hatch. The thinking must have been that it was meant as an AA weapon and most attacks by aircraft would approach from the rear. So it was mounted in a way that permitted the TC to operate it while still partially under armor. However, by 1944 the Luftwaffe was all but out of the picture and very seldom made attacks on armored vehicles. The .50 was still useful against ground targets and was commonly used thus. At first, it was somewhat dangerous to do so since, as you noticed, someone—usually the TC—had first to climb out of the turret and kneel on the rear deck in order to fire forward if the turret was in its usual position of facing forward. So canny American tankers began rewelding the mounting for the MG ahead of the TC's hatch so that it could be fired with minimum exposure. I think that this modification was eventually also adopted at the factory and new late model Shermans began appearing in the theater in that configuration.

Michael

Hear, Hear!

I enjoyed the film and, yes, the final battle was somewhat exaggerated. How unusual for a Hollywood film!

Now back to my CM battle where a single, wounded soldier, hiding in a hedge, has denied my opponent the victory zone.

MANPADS organic carrier vehicle should be carrying additional missiles that can be obtained by loading the unit into the vehicle and using the ACQUIRE command.  Also, if you keep them near their carrier vehicle, I think they will automatically acquire another missile via ammo sharing.

In my opinion the main problem with QB point is with it impact on final score.
You can lost most of your forces but if you has captured objective (for example 1000 pts) then you win. Enemy received 0 point for objective and funny 40-50 point for all that he destroyed from your force.
In good old time of CMBB the points for objectives are correlated with points for forces (900 pts objective and 1500 pts for forces, for example)
This is why I don't play QBs...

Again it's apples and apple martinis.  
 
I've sat behind an AN/PPS-5B.  I was not impressed, and speaking as a former scout type the overall GSR experience was that it was pretty low fidelity.
 
In practice we did something called "cuing" which is basically the sequence of sensors you use to acquire something.  Basically it was broader sensors all the way down to eyeballs or if the situation called for it, someone putting their hands on it.
 
Radar was very good at providing strong indications of where there might a something.  It was never very good at finding personnel for sure, and against vehicles it was better, but still did not do much better than "tracked" or "wheeled" contacts, and again it's not like it could tell you if it was a HMMWV or a junked car, or even other large reflective masses giving off tank signatures.
 
So again, in working the "is there something out there" piece, GSR was good for letting us know there were some suspiciously bad guy like contacts, which then spooled up another sensor system (UAVs were pretty good in that role given their ability to give several contacts eyes on in short order) which then cued to other sensors and systems, and if the contact either needed to be further interrogated ("That sure as hell look like tank and tire tracks going into those woods....") or was confirmed (GSR never did this, the lowest fidelity we ever got good reads on was from the Raven) troops would be committed.
 
But 6 KM detection in a realistic combat situation was....no.  I'd doubt 10 KM too outside of situations like tanks rolling across salt flats or something.
 
Which leads me to be dubious of most ground based systems to say the least.   

Excal does have an IMU that performs only bit worse than GPS guidance. It only kicks in once the GPS signal gets jammed, so the error is minimized.

I think MikeyD and rocket man have good points:

A) I am one of those semi high altitude players..probably because I play real time mode. So most detail and animation is more than good enough for my ADHD camera movements.

. Now that I am using mods...the graphic quality is so much better. There are truly some driven talented artists out there.

Game play, story, realism, and REPLAYABILITY are key for me. I am so freakin' happy with the QB improvements of the latest games versus CMSF that eye candy quickly become of secondary importance.

I am not a graphics guru but generally I would say that better is the enemy of good enough.. Especially to make a game that folks with a wide variety of machines can play.

Just my .02.

Cheers.

Things would have to be going incredibly, ridiculously over the top wrong for someone to successfully blow all 2000+ of tactical aircraft into irrelevance. And if they did so, there isn't a battalion-level air defense system in the world that would stop them from rolling us, given the limitations on those systems.
 
The fact that these systems actually work and consistently down aircraft in CMBS is about the most unrealistic thing in the game.
 
 
 
There is very little realistic or simulation-like about CMBS' depiction of air defense.

That SAMs are worthless and that a good CAP is the only thing that will keep you safe.

Is it? When was the last time a few US companies got bombed?
 
The reason the US Army skimps on AD is because when the US Army actually goes to war those assets end up sitting around doing nothing or get retasked to do something useful. It's an inefficient allocation of resources.
 
Frankly this whole discussion is navel gazing. It matters in Combat Mission but not in reality.

They love Putin for perfectly understandable reasons totally divorced from any understanding or misunderstanding of "humanist freedom": he turned the economy around and restored a sense of national dignity. It isn't exactly a secret that the majority of the current Russian middle class owe their position in society to Putin's massive increase in the mid-level state bureaucracy, nor is some uniquely Russian love of totalitarianism the reason they cheered when we he ended the Chechen War decisively in Russia's favor and it is should obvious that breaking the effective political power of the oligarchs was going to be extremely popular after the loot-fest of the nineties.

"that is a very bold and unsupported claim"
 
Bold yes, granted, intended even.  Unsupported I don't think so, I supported it.  You might call it debatable if you like, but not unsupported.
 
As for the effects you trace to bombing, 100,000+ single engine fighters won the air war over Germany, not the ~50,000 heavy bombers.  And no, the bombers didn't significantly reduce German fighter output.  They forced some dispersion but final assembly really didn't need special equipment and was readily dispersed.  The Germans ran out of pilots not airframes in any event.
 
On the decline in German war output in late 1944, it was caused less by bombing than by manpower - they only met the losses of the summer of 1944 by sweeping out the actual war economy of men, and that is the single biggest cause of the decline in production in late 1944.  The only bombing caused shortage was oil, which mattered certainly but didn't directly cause the output fall.  It mattered primarily by making the air victory permanent, secondarily by restricting the effectiveness of German armor late war.  But it was still pretty effective even on shoestring supplies.
 
Yes the Germans spent plenty on air defense.  But a heavy Flak gun cost 1/16th what a heavy bomber sets you back, and on average took out half a plane apiece.  The Germans were not going to go bankrupt at that rate of exchange.  The bomber only delivered maybe 10 bombs within a mile of the intended aim point over its whole operational life.
 
Also, your estimates of the cost of the bomber offensive to the US and the UK is low. "As much as 40 to 50 per cent of the British war effort went into the RAF and the USAAF consumed as much as 25-35 per cent of US industrial output. The USAAF grew to 2.4 million men in June 1944, or over a third the size of the US Army. The operational costs were steep. RAF Bomber Command lost 8,325 bombers and 64,000 casualties among their aircrew. The USAAF lost 8,237 bombers and 73,000 crew members which exceeded total USN and USMC casualties in the Pacific."  Another key finding of the post war survey was that the whole bombing campaign was much more "late-weighted" than popular histories let on, with most of the tonnage dropped after the full defeat of the Luftwaffe.  "“It is of vital significance that of all the tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany, only 17 percent fell prior to January 1, 1944 and only 28 percent prior to July 1, 1944”.  German military output was still rising throughout that period, and only peaked in the fall of 1944.
 
Early in the war, the British estimated that in night bombing operations, only one sortie in three got within 5 miles of its intended target, with a factor of 4 variation around that mean determined largely by visibility (moon or no, cloud cover or clear).  They were proud of the fact that they got that up to 60% during clear weather by mid 1944.  Of their own losses under the Blitz, the economic impact in the worst month was measured by British economists and came out as less than that caused by ordinary holidays shortening the work-week in certain months - it was within the calendar-scale variation, in other words.
 
It took an average of 5 sorties to *wound* one civilian on the ground, and 13 to kill a single German civilian.  The Allies were trading 1 Allied airman (and about $20,000 worth of airplane) for 2 German civilians killed and 5 wounded over the whole course of the bombing campaign.  That would only have been an effective exchange if the targets had all been military personnel.  Since they disproportionally were not and the Germans didn't draft a quarter of the whole population, they were actually losing military manpower on the exchange, net net.  It took tons of bombs dropped to wound a single civilian.  And that was for the large majority of the bombs which were missing their intended aimpoint by miles but still managing to hit entire cities.  The main economic effect was to destroy about 20% of the German housing stock - but with 15% of that only being leveled after mid 1944 (see above on the timing of the tonnage delivered).  The Germans simply didn't rebuild that housing.  This inflicted considerable hardship on German civilians in the last year of the war, on top of the civilian casualties it caused directly, but that was its primary destructive effect, and it "lands" quite late.
 
On the whole, the Allies would probably have been much better served by a tactical air force focused on both winning air superiority and supporting the armies in the operational battle area, using lots of fighters and fighter bombers along with medium bombers.  The long range of e.g. the B-24 was certainly useful for ASW, and some of the Allied medium types were inefficient in comparison.  (The B-26 was a dog, for example, about as expensive as a B-24 with less payload and much less range).  With less invested in that whole airforce and more of the logistics thus freed from bomb supply and the like, instead used to avoid the artillery ammo shortages of the second half of 1944, and generally increase the supply of 155mm shells fired at German military personnel, rather than 500 lb bombs dropped on German civilians.  A battalion of 12 such howitzers cost the same as 1 4 engine bomber, and lasted considerably longer than 25 missions.
 
This may seem a bold claim, but I think all the best post war operations research bears it out.  The strategic air role vastly overpromised and overclaimed during the war, with senior airmen ideologically focused on claims they could win the war on their own if only allowed to ignore all other missions.  They couldn't and they didn't, and if they had subordinated the air force to the army, it would have served their national militaries at least as well as it did, and could have done so, effectively, with only half or so of the resources actually lavished on the arm.  The four engine bomber was the poster boy of that allocation decision, and I regard it as pretty clearly a misallocation.  (In hindsight, obviously.  But objectively so). 

That attack air would have to slip through in terms of sensors:
 
PATRIOT
E-3 Sentry AWACS
Ground based early warning radars
Fighter based sensor systems 
Other NATO radar platforms (which are largely designed to share a common operating picture with US assets)
 
From those sensors, any number of fixed wing assets can be massed on the attacking element.  If the initial waves are ineffective, more planes can be vectored to target (unlike SAMs) until the enemy aviation is no longer mission capable.  
 
Then if they're bopping above the horizon Patriot might just zot them anyway.  
 
If the enemy attack dodges all those sensors, all those planes who's only job is to spot and destroy enemy CAS or strike assets, the ability of a M6 Linebacker to save the day was zero.  Four stingers will not stop the sort of onslaught that would have to exist to bypass that sort of layered defense, and the howling hoard of thousands of PAK-FAs that do not exist would simply pop the M6 like a zit before flying to strafe the tank company to pieces with dual AK-47s fired out the window because you are describing a situation that is so craycray I find it worthwhile to talk about it using that word.
 
The Linebacker was like issuing a shotgun to a tank crew to fend off enemy infantry boarding the tank.  If the infantry slipped through everything else, and is now standing on my turret, that shotgun would be mighty helpful.  But it would only be helpful after EVERYTHING ELSE HAD FAILED SO CATASTROPHICALLY AS TO BOGGLE THE MIND (the rifles are for if we have to leave the tank, not some sort of alamo defense).
 
The M6 was canned after this process:
 
1. Army cancels ADATS
2. Someone decides we still need SHORAD
3. More or less, the M6 is made from nearly off the shelf parts
4. M6 more or less doesn't really do much.  In large exercises, if red air closes with blue forces the M6 is just not enough to matter.  Deployed, what enemy air existed was something the M6 couldn't help with
5. M6 and ADA soldiers serve as adhoc infantry.
6. M6 vehicles are refurbed to replace higher mileage M2/M3 platforms.  
 
It wasn't super useful, even in its heyday.  

Ponder this.  How many castles did the mongols build?

Negatron, it has "Detection" out to 8 KM, which is to say the sensor can locate something vehicle sized around 8 KM, but it won't be sure if it's a Tank, IFV, T-90 or M1A2 until around 2 KM. It's the diffrence between seeing something moving down the street and being able to tell if it's a woman worth getting a phone number from.

The doctrinal solution for big money systems like that is keeping a backfield Rivet Joint/Compass Call to monitor emissions (including radio communications), then plaster the area with long-range rockets to force them away from the front line or suffer attrition. Since there aren't that many actual systems, the Russian Army can't afford to habitually lose them to dumb **** like that.

Same source:
 
"Red Army Handbook 1939-1945", by S. J. Zaloga and L. S. Ness, 1998 (Alan Sutton, Thrupp) gives on page 179 a table of the ranges in metres at which Soviet tanks and assault guns were knocked out by 75mm and 88mm guns in 1943-44, as follows:
Range_______75mm gun_____88mm gun
100-200_______10.0%_________4.0%
200-400_______26.1%________14.0%
400-600_______33.5%________18.0%
600-800_______14.5%________31.2%
800-1000_______7.0%________13.5%
1000-1200______4.5%_________8.5%
1200-1400______3.6%_________7.6%
1400-1600______0.4%_________2.0%
1600-1800______0.4%_________0.7%
1800-2000______0.0%_________0.5%
 
However, note the time period. Tanks and self propelled guns with weaponry capable of 2000+ meter shots with any sort of reliability comprised a very small portion of the total vehicles in battle until about mid-1944 when the Panther began to be seen in larger numbers (and were still a minority till the end of the war) so that is why the discrepancy with the NW Europe numbers.

Effective fire beyond 2 km is practically entirely restricted to claims by the firing side, with nothing verified by the side being fired at.  Even then it is generally restricted to ace quality shooters.  
 
You won't find operational importance cases of a side reporting they were stopped and defeated by ranged enemy AT fire at ranges beyond 2 km.
 
The closest you will get to that is AT guns in particularly open terrain, causing some loss at ranges up to 1.5 km.  For example, the famous 88s in the desert at Halfaya pass opened fire at 1600 meters, and later again at 1400 meters against a second attack.  But they still inflicted most of their kills considerably closer, at half those ranges.  Those ranges can be verified by loss reports on the losing side, rather than claims by the shooting one.  You should never believe own-side claims about extreme range fire.  They are never trustworthy.

Similarly if you have a crewed weapons or that one guy in the squad with the AT weapon, Murphy's Law results in them never having the LOS you need to the target.

I think the big problem, and the most obvious one after more than ten years of these games, is that scenario designers often make maps that are TOO small in relation to the amount of units involved.   The real battlefield is largely an empty battlefield.   This may take care of the reinforcement problem right there.   

That's entirely unfair.  You're forgetting burying your 1990's opposition in literal waves of the finest 1960's equipment, and shooting Corps level artillery at bushes that might be full of candy.

Us Army breaks their infantry squads into two teams, thats why. United States Marines still use 3 fireteams a squad(Because we are awesome).

I've pounded them with off-map howitzers.
 
Also Bradleys "laser chicken" helped me a lot.
I've lased them with my foot ATGM teams.
They popped smokes everywhere around them thus blocking their own view.
Meanwhile, I've managed to get to my position safely.

Odds are they are benefiting not just from being stationary, but also have dismounted infantry eyes aiding in their spotting. Try using mortars -- or any responsive tube, really -- to work the area over before you advance and see how that works out.