M Hofbauer

see above, I saw it sufficiently enough as long as I could endure. I didn't think I would have to see it to the closing sequence with title and credits to judge it. when a wooden shed is on fire, you don't have to let it burn to the ground to know that it will burn to the ground. thats exactly the type of half-wisdom I was talking about. The conclusion is far from obvious, because it isn't even true. Third Newtonian Principle always applies, you don't need MythBusteers to "discover" that. However all it says is that any force of actio will result in / create a reactio with an inverse equal force. You cannot compare the impact on the object's head with the recoil experienced by the firing person. The force buildup, location and area are different and most importantly the firing person will brace himself and assume, well, a firing posture to absorb the recoil, thats how he absorbs the force exerted onto him without falling over. which, btw, MythBusters themselves proved because I *assume* that in their demonstration of the "only weapon capable of knocking over the target", firing the 12-gauge, the firer did not fall over onto his back?

something for the add-on... *g*

No ATMMs, no Zimmerit, I say...

...(cont'd) :mad: waaah don't even get me started on CSI. "we found this hair on the victim's dog which happens to be from a rare peruvian goat that lives in only one valley in the Anden mountains, and the clothes made from its wool are sold at only two shops in the world, one of which is in Tasmania, and the other right here in Miami, and coincidentally the shop owner doesn't take cash but only charges credit cards, and he sold the specific jacket, to which this hair must belong, only thrice..." get real. CSI has as much to do with real everyday criminal police/sheriff's department/DA work as George Lucas' original Star wars trilogy is an accurate depiction of current NASA operations. the problem is every idiot and his brother think they *know* anything because they learned that on TV...with MythBusters, but especially with all those court TV, CSI and lawyer TV shows all those "viewers" out there think they're experts for everything from law to medicine. and god save us from your apocalyptic scenario that indeed a generation of TV-educated youngsters think they have to take up the respective proffessions of their favorite TV shows... :eek: "I saw it on television so it must be true"... come on J. Kettler, I *know* you can do better than that take care, M. Hofbauer

well I would appreciate it if you weren't dodging the issues at hand. I wasn't attributing statements to you, I was making a point. Maybe I didnt express myself clearly enough: the point is I think there is a discrepancy between on one hand taking offense at people flipping over because it is so unrealistic (side issue: scientific value of "MythBusters" while at the same time terminal ballistics / casualty modeling won't be anywhere realistic anyhow. Like, picking out one isse, not caring about others´. Like, if ceteris paribus for some inexplicable "gameplay" reason *g* all the WW II AFVs in ToW were to be pink with yellow dots and would be hovering through the air singing "Somewhere over the rainbow..." incessantly.... now along comes someone and, correctly, points out that the WW II AFV'S didnt have yellow dots. History channel had a feature on the Tiger and in that b/w footage there were no yellow dots. which not only in itself, in this generality is questionable (because the statement was unspecific, it is arguable ... e.g. the german ambush scheme often had contrast color splotches which means yellowish ocre splots in the brown and green areas), but also picks out only one issue, ignoring the rest. And my take is that since we're gonna have pink hovering singing tanks anyhow, yellow spots would accompany that / fit in ´just nicely. Well, I guess you get the idea now that I explained a bit more what I was trying to get at. Now, I am not saying that you are against gore and flying guts in ToW, but regarding you as a respectable serious person I do assume in bonam partem that you probably do *not* want that. But you can clear that up: Do you want gore in ToW ? If your answer is yes, well, then you are consistent with your request regarding flip-overs, but thats about all positive that can be said about your POV. If your answer is NO, well, then I do not understand what you are getting your feathers so ruffled about with me "putting words in your mouth" and all. Instead you could have adressed the issues at hand and spoken out clearly. you can help clear up any uncertainties by being more precise and specific than your beloved MythBuster namely agreed I forgot, I was writing the reply offline and going by memory. Feather in your cap, black eye for me. Even then, the info as such borders on pointlessness. And despite being hopelessly unspecific, it proves my point that full powered rifle projectiles do have the inherent capability, read momentum, to knock a person off its feet. to elaborate: you did not specify how the various projectiles (caliber? weight? velocity? shape?) ended up, most importantly, whether they passed through the target object or were absorbed. In the case of your "12-gauge deer slug", that info is still pretty unspecific. Weight? Velocity ? Slug Type - Brenneke, Remington, Foster type? Rifled? Sabot? ok, let me do the math for you and your MythBusters, but don't you go say I took those values out of your mouth and get all huffed up about it! It is *my* reasonable assumption necessified by a lack of such info from your post and MythBusters. A regular 12-gauge slug is a projectile of roughly 19mm diameter, will weigh somewhere around 30 g, and will be fired at a muzzle velocity of somehwere around 400 to 500 m/s. Let's take 500m/s in the shotgun slug's favor. It will lose that speed fast enough anyhow due to its unaerodynamic shape. I hope you agree so far. this means it carries an initial energy of 3.75 kJ (if you agree to the above but not this then you'll have to take it up with Adam Riese). coincidentally most WW II rifle ammo lies around that value, or above, be it the american .30-06 Springfield M2 (7.62x63), the russian7.62 Mosin M1908/30 (7.62x54) or the ubiquitous 7.92 Mauser (8x57 JS), they're all between 3 kJ to 4.5 kJ french 7.5x54 M1929C being at the lower end ), in some instances (some Mauser ammo) even up to 5 kJ. ergo: WW II rifle projectiles carry the same, often more energy than your usual 12-gauge-slug (lighter but way faster). (btw this all reminds me of the old 9mm Parabellum vs .45 ACP debate all too much...) which means that your MythBusters finding that "only the 12-gauge-slug" had the capability to knock a man-sized target over, is at the least misleading, because - now I have to assume because you are withholding that critical piece of information - most other projectiles were simply too powerful in penetration capability (E per cross-section in conjunction with bullet shape) so they simply passed *through* the target. Thats quite more to the story than saying merely "only the 12-gauge slug was able to knock the target over". If the rifle projectiles hit a location far away enough from the Schwerpunkt and manage to transfer their inherent momentum because, for example, they hit the head with helmet (yuck), then they all will knock the object over just like the 12-gauge slug. see above. please make a clear statement. what is it - are you for or against gory depiction of terminal ballistics? :confused: I fully understand the idea behind "MythBusters", no misunderstanding. The misunderstanding (of the point of my quibbling) is on your part: it does matter because the selection alone of what stupid ideas, pseudo-myths they're "busting" alone shows the unscientific, mass-appeal Britney-Spears-IQ type of character the show has. I don't understand how you can allude to, naw, *reference* MythBusters when you know that it's just a couple of bozos putting on a show for TV, often enough wrong, without proper scientific setup and approach (to extrapolate from the info at hand). plus... (ack hafta do it in two posts...crappy board code... tells me it cant let me post because the maximum number of images allowed is 8... :mad: )

Well than what's the difference between the Sturmpanzer IV and the Sturmmpanzer IV? does the extra M indicate it has more oooMMMMph ?

you know that slight bumpety-bump that you feel when you drive over a chicken that was crossing the street, and at the same time you remember that you forgot to program the VCR to record the latest episode of "The Easy Life" but you don't really care because you didn't really like the show anyhow but your kids wanted to see it? Well, it's COMPLETELY dfferent.

wonderbar.

Dear John, no sweat. as outlined above, I am aware of said TV show. which would be interesting re. the probability of the bullet getting stuck in the target vs. simply passing through. loadout above Schwerpunkt would obviously add to the probability of the subject person toppling over. even in what little they showed and you told about, it becomes apparent that any high-powered slug has the inherent momentum to exercise a knock-over, as evidenced by the 12-gauge - only the 12-gauge shot (buick shot? or what?) has a nice tendency to neatly transfer all of its energy onto target. while we won't agree on the "quality" or lack thereof re. MythBusters and its spinoffs, we probably both agree that "salti mortale" are not realistic - most of the time. but here is *my* beef: just having them drop like that isnt realistic either. especially when in our melees we have full-powered rifle ammo of 3k, 4k J blasted into each others' face. why have a beef with salti, then? Likewise, regards. as a bonafide, let me explain to you where I read about the issue. It was during my first year in law school when re. criminal law I read some ballistics papers, I unfortunately do not remember the name of the article or the name of the publication, well it's been quite a while ago... I also barely remember the details of the paper on ballistics effects, they used a more physics-based approach, no pictures, some formulae. What I *do* remember much better was what was IIRC the next article that I happened to stumble while reading the former. It was a detailed examination of an unnatural death. A handicapped person in a wheelchair had committed suicide. With a muzzle-loader handgun. As was reconstructed, he shot himself into the head with it. THREE TIMES ! A muzzle-loaded weapon ! It described in detail the effects of the first shot and how difficult it must have been to subsequently load the handgun again. Indeed for the last shot he somehow mixed up the order in which the components (powder, filler and bullet) were to be loaded into the gun, or he forgot the filler part, or somefink. I do not remember the details. but what really impressed me was the sheer determination expressed by the act of killing yourself with a muzzle-loaded blackpowder pistol that you have to reload repeatedly to kill yourself. Oh, and the report was full of , uh, bloody details of the various (medical-pathological) effects of the subsequent shots. regards, M.Hofbauer edit: cause I cant spell "target" [ August 12, 2006, 02:11 PM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

while apparently J. Kettler and I both agree that flipping through the air when hit from a Luger isnt exactly overly realistic , my point was a differennt one, maybe I didnt stress that very well, where we differ is the question whether we really want casualty simulation to be portrayed realistically in the first place. Do we want heads to explode and brains splattered over the area ? Do we want guts hanging from open torsos, and mutilated bodies lying in pools of blood? People with their limbs torn off screaming and twisting in agony? No, we dont want that, and we wont have that. I'm assuming J. Kettler doesn't want that, either. But to show a soldier going down cleanly without an ounce of blood shed, like in a John Wayne Western or 1950ies crime thriller, is just as un-realistic as showing them flipping through the air. so his approach seems a bit hypocritical. He wants realism yet no realism regarding people being hit. The whole thing is a game. It is a game that, while being reasonably attached to realism, in dubio has fun reigning over realism. I think this has become clear from the descriptions so far (and in itself this isnt a problem). If 1C/BTS considers flipping over of soldiers to be a good way of showing they're hit violently and a spectacular way of pleasing the kiddie main RTS customer group expectations, then be it, I do not have any issues with that (and no, I am not being cynical, I mean it). btw: oh, and obviously John Kettler and I disagree over the scientific value of "MythBusters"...

No. There will only be the plain vanilla SdKfz 251/1, and german armor will exclusively be PzKpfw IV Ausf. H. Only allied armor will show all variants and sub-types in full detail.

hmmm...now I wonder whether that non-game-specific problem can happen in ToW? Didnt you get messages about the squad being under attack? It worked fine in cc with its color-coded messages from white to red depending on urgency (IIRC white for neutral messages, green for completed tasks (a la squad redeployed successfully), orange for problems (squad under fire/pinned) and red for casualties. So you could immediately jump on spot by clicking on that message in the message monitor. I wopuld imagine ToW could use a similar or similarly weffective method for handling all the various squads in a real-time environment...?

okay Mr I-Love-television-made-for-the-double-digit-IQ-audience, In fact, I did; I happened to stumble over it while zapping around, so I saw it on two occasions, each a couple of minutes before moving/zapping away in disgust. I remember one of the guys looked like a bouncer/biker kinda guy, the crew all in all looked rather goofy, looked like they could feature in MTV's Pimp My Ride (that show which is about always installing chrome wheels plus several PSP2's and flatscreens no matter who the car owner is or what his individual likes are). One apparently was about letting someone float to the ground from the air in a inflated rubber boat (Dinghi?sp?), where they plain forgot that any such large, indense object will tilt and flatter while falling through the air so the "person" (dummy" simply fell out (doh!). the second was about some cowboy/wildwest myth, IIRC; something about shooting from the hip or weapons of the wild west...could be that I am mixing this up with some other bull**** "what-if" show... I remember they let a fat-bellied retiree who claimed to be sort of a wild west fan shoot a bit and then compared his action to an active duty police officer who did the same shooting range, they both had one go at it, this was timed and the result was to be the cobnclusive final verdict on how WildWest weapons compare to modern firearms...or somefink... both instances were a plain insult to human intelligence. the approach was, well, *very unscientific* and very reminding of chidren TV series. It also reminded me of that other "Bull****OrNot" series...whats it called... Unsolved Mysteries? naw, thats not it...I mean the one where they show several "mysterious"/"magic" stories/episodes and you can guess whether they are "true" or completely made up, they reveal that at the end of the show... forgot the name, but its right up the very same bull**** alley so I am sure you know the title. whats next? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a reference for melee fighting? Rambo II for an illustration of the capacity of automatic weapons' magazines? The A-Team to show that nobody really gets hurt during an intense automatic weapons firefight? The Teletubbies landscape to justify the naked clean grass terrain in CM ? or...finally... HistoryChannel "documentaries" to show "how it really was"... *cough* puleeeze... p.s.: I thought I had already complained to you about the degradation of the local TV program due to the influx of BBC/DiscoveryChannel "documentaries" and the like?

MythBusters, eh ? what a reference. there goes any creditbility... men toppling over from small arms fire is a simple function of energy(target) of the projectile, impact location w/r/t weight distribution/Schwerpunkt of the target incl. leverage effects (habitus of the target person), and the ability of the projectile to pass off the momentum it carries onto the target (i.e., a .30-06 will simply make a clean hole so it cannot transfer its momentum onto target; the regular 9mm Parabellum also has a tendency to pass through target and hence transfer only a fraction of the energy it has (roughly 500 Joule IIRC) onto the target in the first place.) It is OBVIOUS that Hollywood is, well, Hollywood. People are not flipping over like that. But, PLEASE, ... MythBusters LOL... And the NO is not an absolute given the right circumstances. You bet that a 4kJ rifle projectile that somehow manages to transfer all of its momentum onto target, at a location far above the Schwerpunkt, *will* knock a standing man-weight man-sized object over. But in a ToW game scenario the question is a different one. Knocking people over isn't the issue. If in a ToW-type melee the opponents empty their automatic weapons and rifles into the other guy's body/head from 5 meters apart the results in RealLife would be, uh, rather spectacular... bloody, gory, Real Read (images of Jordanes' account of the battle of the Catalaunian Fields come to mind). The question is, do we really want an ultimately realistic portrayal, or a more, well, Hollywood-style representation of effects? If there isnt going to be the real mess anyhow we can just as well have comical flipovers.

IIRC in IL2 the recorded movie clip in playback didnt always exactly show the same results as what had happened in reality. was this bug ever fixed?

thats exactly what i was thinking along... and indeed, I agree with you... ... this abstraction becomes an irritation the bigger the abstraction is...which means the bigger the object is. but please note I did not explicitly say that I think this should be done or would be very easy (though sure it is way easier than fully modeling house interiors etc.?). I am intrigued by the *idea*. I commended the fresh thinking lying beneath that idea. And, I think, I am more leaning towards it the smaller the object is. I sure wouldnt want a huge factory abstracted so it would absorb a dozen squads. But, like you said, small objects like bunkers and the like. I am pondering the idea. MfG M.H. [ August 11, 2006, 08:19 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

Pellentesque consequat, orci in laoreet ultricies, neque pede varius diam, sit amet porttitor arcu sem nec ipsum. Maecenas ut dui. Donec lobortis, enim vitae mollis euismod, neque orci imperdiet mauris, non tincidunt ante purus non magna. Nullam gravida dignissim lacus. Sed congue dictum nibh. Cras adipiscing scelerisque mauris. Mauris magna dolor, accumsan sit amet, congue eget, ornare in, felis. Suspendisse non velit. Nam tincidunt neque facilisis lorem. Aenean sed neque at augue semper tincidunt.

nobody is forcing you to do it. Like moon said, if you dont intervene manually, you can leave it tothe game to automatically assign it. well I sure hope it wasnt a "mis-type", as you call it. how do you assign experience? well, technically you cant. how can you jump all over the battlefield while the action is paused? how can you rewind and rerun the last minute of firefight again and again? the answer of course is: in reality, you cant. in a game, you can. if you need a mental crutch to get over it, think of it this way: Obergefreiter K. Nadier did something heroic during last battle, say, he disabled a KV with a toothpick. His Spiess H. Lohfraunachbarin commends him and as a reward ("wenn dir des scho so an schpass macht, nachert kannsde des gleich amol richtich lerne") sends him to the Panzernahbekämpfungslehrgang which means a week in the rear (as a reward) and increased experience in taking out KV's with toothpicks.

not buying it. M1TP had always been THE tank simulation, not a RTS. It wasn't meant to be played solely from the map. Map was for calling artillery and controlling some of your assets. The Schwerpunkt of the game clearly lay in the simulation of the M1 tank (gunner, commander, driver). and how is watching from another vehicle's perspective a point that speaks for RTS and against a simulator? By your definition, IL2 is a RTS, too, because you can give orders to your wingmen and watch from their planes, too. that is -excuse me- a silly definition of RTS that doesnt fit general view of what a RTS game is. Coincidentally it would encompass most FPS games, too. M1TP is as much *the* symbol for a tank simulation as Command&Conquer is for RTS.

Moon, that is excellent news. I think.... Well, I am sure it is... You see, on one hand, this is shaping up real nicely, watching your soldiers evolve, giving out medals, scavenging, capturing (and keeping!) equipment. This is what I as a CC player always dreamed of. We probably both agree that these aspects rate highly in the fun department - but they're actually a bit of a penalty w/r/t realism. So, this game could end up as a wargaming heaven, or a gameyish nightmare. But I am convinced it will be the former. Looking forward to ToW ! oh, and re. the discussion about Megakill: actually you can't praise him ehough for his *excellent* language skills IMO. in fact, from my experience with the english of Oleg & Co. re. IL2 at first I doubted that Megakill could be an official from the developing 1C studios, because their hallmark was a ...uh, "not always easily comprehensible" use of the english language (not that it mattered that muich, what matters is the game they produce, but sometimes it was really hard to understand just what they were getting at), and Megakill using a, well, normal english.

spanish, not italian. you know, what your neighbors are speaking. wnder how you dont starve in Miami.

Well even tho I share your benevolence w/r/t the original M1TP (or even easily surpass it), I couldnt disagree more. M1 Tank Platoon was/is not RTS. It was/is a straightforward Simulator. It's like calling IL2 a RTS, or FlightSimulator. edit: clarify: ...or like calling MS Flight Simulator a RTS. M1 had a pretty decent ballistic system. I remember well how SABOT wouldnt get the job done on T-80s fronts at range, but if you superelevated and managed to hit them with a high-arcing HEAT from the top you could take them out at ranges beyond the 3999 (meters) that was the maximum for the ballistics computer. [ August 10, 2006, 10:24 AM: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

are you, by any chance, in the SF ?

thats because IIRC johnny-come-lately didnt evolve with cc but jumped the bandwagon with cc2 and only later discovered THE TRUTH . For people being raised with CC it was the other way around, they had to get used to that new U/I handling of cc2+.

ah, so this is what all the Aufklärer-Fernaufklärer-reconnaisance-recon_detachments-Aufklärungsabteilungen-Panzerspähwagen-Späher-scouts-uswusf were for... and here I was thinking that like in RedAlert the forces in WW II didnt have any maps and terrain knowledge and simply stumble forward into the dark edges of the map to be surprised by whatever they find there.