M Hofbauer

if the game showed it's intestines to us it would look much less enjoyable. for example, the tanks as used in the armor model would be square boxes that resemble more the generic grey sound-spotted ?-tank instead of the mult-facetted way they really looked and how they are visually modeled.

those chess pieces really needed a dust-off, and I'm not talking about medevac.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon: This was a suggestion I made earlier, and I think it is a good one. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> careful there, Slapdragon, that line is grade-A sig material <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>I too am glad the bailey debate is put to bed.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Agreed. Le Bailey Bridge est mort. Vive la Sturmbrücke! [ 09-27-2001: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

Simon Fox: "the Jacko-Hofbauer relationship" ?? :confused: Hey, I never met Michael Jackson. I don't even like his songs. Or to put it into presidential english: "...uh...I never had a sexual relationship with that man, Michael Jackson."

JasonC, just wanted to emphasize that I fully agree with your Brad-LAV statement. I hope RMC reads this. I think he is the culprit behind all this. Maybe he will give us his view on the matter [ooops, writing it offline I see that RMC has already responded. Little weasel he is, no doubt ]

tero, well the finnish tankers obviously never played CM and apparently didn't know that such irrelevant things as superior optics have no effect on combat effectiveness accuracy is only a function of muzzle velocity, which is why the WW II M8 Greyhounds were so famous for their 2-km kills of german tanks ...uh...or - weren't they??

Jeff, 1) it seems the bunny is right now right in the middle of doing the intestines for GIC. You know, armor models, hit formulae, basic behavior and features and such stuff. If you want to make your voice heard you should head over to the GIC forum, *now* is the best time to ask for features and they way things are handled, and maybe have some sort of input before things are "set in stone" scriptwise (and I know that you know very well just like me how impossible it is to change any of these basic things lateron) 2) as to Al-'Alamayn: I do not oppose your statement on that battle. I wanted to point out that it seemed to me it would not meet the criteria set by JasonC in his original statement.Alöas, it seems one has to differentiate between technical superiority in a general, current level of technology - way, and concrete technical superiority in the local circumstances which could even be achieved (to take it to the extreme for illustration) by obsolete tanks when facing tanks which are even more obsolete. In retrospect I think you are right that the issue should be actual technical superiority in the local situation, and not measured against the current state of science in the field of armor (as JasonC put it: "Who had the better tanks? The British, going by weight in the mix."). yours sincerely, M.Hofbauer

Slapdragon and Maastrictian, the issue to my understanding was not inherent advantages of camoflaged AT guns, but it was all about accuracy. original quote from Runyan99, opening sentence of this thread: "I am fed up with the inaccuracy of the German 8.8 flak." Hence, hiding and foxholes were avoided and both sides put into the open, to ensure that both had the same chances to see each other, so that only pure accuracy would count. Again, the issue raised here in this thread is accuracy as far as I am concerned, not hiding the AT guns etc.

uh, btw, everybody/everything was "regular" quality in those tests, vehicles/guns were padlocked to face each other. Nashorn-Greyhound tests are done one on one, with seperated firing lanes, while the 10 vs 50 one-time fun shootout was a bunch vs a bunch.

redwolf, I made a lengthy series of tests to see if my suspicion that the Nashorn's excellent long-range accuracy was mismodelled was true or not. Too often I had lost them to simple 37mm or 40mm - equipped Armored Cars. The results so far show that indeed the little guns are just as accurate and better than the big ones. So far, Greyhound vs 8.8, at a distance of 1,000 meters the 8.8 is about a third more likely to die. And the score would be even worse if not a couple of them small hits would only damage the Nashorn. In other words, the accuracy is just as good as that of the logically inherently more accurate bigger caliber.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Panzer Leader: Put 10 guns 2,000 meters away from a sherman brigade and you will see. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> ...which is exactly what I did. I put up a setup between 10 x 8.8cm FlaK and 50 x M4 (plain vanilla) Shermans, facing each other at a distance of 2,000 meters. Within one turn (which took awfully long to compute) it was all over. All ten 8.8 FlaK were killed, at a loss of only one M4 Sherman. edit: in a second re-run of the test four shermans were killed before all of the 8.8 guns were destroyed. [ 09-26-2001: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jeff Duquette: Why El Alamein? Why not <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Jeff, because JasonC could argue that this was a matter of overall numerical superiority, and not of technical superiority, as the advantage of those Shermans and Grants over the Pz IV Ausf.F2 (IIRC) is debatable (to put it carefully). The way I understood his original premise was that he was referring to an edge in technology, in armor development having a practical relevance. Al-'Alamayn seems more an example of many good (but not cutting-edge, superior design, latest-breakthrough-in-armor-technology, amazing discoveries - type) tanks facing a small number of at least similarly good tanks plus a number of obsolete tanks. best regards, M.Hofbauer

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Germanboy: Now here is a good one - the German Military Secret Service (a hopeless bunch of wastes of space) is called Militaerischer Abschirmdienst - abbreviated MAD. Mushy peas<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> (left the mushy peas bit in because it somehow seemed to fit with the first part) Yes the MAD is something of a castrate (the german one, not the Canadian one): (quote) §4 (Befugnisse des Militärischen Abschirmdienstes) (1)(...) (2) Polizeiliche Befugnisse oder Weisungsbefugnisse stehen dem Militärischen Abschirmdienst nicht zu; er darf die Polizei auch nicht im Wege der Amtshilfe um Maßnahmen ersuchen, zu denen er selbst nicht befugt ist. (end quote)(more available upon request) ->the cannot do anthing really ->all they are allowed to do, as far as I can gather (§4 Abs.1), is read and evaluate collected data. They are definitely only double-zero material in the rest-room sense, not in the Bond, James Bond - sense.

freezing up (ping!) is a problem I often encounter. It depends on your computers performance, not on the magic number 256. If the puter is big enuff, it'll handle more than 256. Like Spetcerx said, it has all the time in the world to do the calculations.

you mean it will have a toilet inside the vehicle ? <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>RMC:The new system shouldn't need to worry about these "legacy" systems. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> it will have to worry about these just as much as a dozen GIs have to be aware of a couple hundred Montagnards with bows&arrows. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>RMC:But the LAV can carry the same and better weapons up to 105mm.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I am CONVINCED that if you can modify a *LAV* to carry and fire a 105mm, and from a turret at that, then it should be possible to modify a Bradley to do same.

she said something about getting out just to get a pack of cigarettes. then again, come to think of it, that was weeks ago...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Agua Perdido: And even the 'worst' Sherman generally has advantages over the German ubers in ground speed, turret speed, anti-infantry firepower, and cost.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> in CM, yes. but that is exactly the issue here. think again and answer for yourself - is your above statement really true for the Panther *outside* CM (aside from cost) ?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JasonC: "the superior quality of the Finnish armour (namely the Stugs)" Um, that is laughable. A StuG is certainly not superior to T-34/85s etc. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> mind you, he was specifically mentioning the IS-2, too BUT...what are all those petty russian tanks compared to a full handful of finnish StuG IIIs ?

yes, applause to argie for finding that material!! <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Spook: From argie's link (Good job, sir!): (...) Use of untrained troops, poor weather, various terrain conditions, and enemy activity will lengthen assembly time by 30 percent. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> it seems that's pretty far out on a limb there, giving such hard data like facts - personally I'ld imagine that "enemy activity" can in fact delay the assembly infinitely. The_Capt raises an excellent point - would a realistic engineering model make the game too realistic, too complex, simply no fun to many people? in a way remotely similar to organizing logistics, where it can also be an art to have all the right stuff arrive at the right places at the right time despite all kinds of problems, the least of which is enemy action. Complex, but fun to many - while to many others it would be a dread. I remember playing with the Matchbox AVRE bridgelayer as a kid, and with the plastic soldiers it made a great tank+bridge combo. I think some of the people who want to include the different funnies are imagining something like a sandbox employment of these vehicles. Interesting thought. The question then is not if they were historically used in combat or not. CM allows for such things to simply be done, whether they happened in real life or not. Similar like facing off a platoon of Jagdtigers and Königstiger against a mixed platoon of T26 E and Comets. Come to think of it, actually, how many of the common CM battles we witness each day would have happened anything like that in reality? How many Btn or Company commanders had such a god-like omnipresence and omnipotence of a CM player even under full FOW? We have to face it, CM is foremost a GAME, and many of the abstractions and design decisions were made to make it a *fun* *game* (otherwise as a Btn commander you'ld be standing somewhere, largely immobile, at view level 1, with messengers coming in every once in a while (or not, depending on situation) to report what's going on and to receive orders. CM is more like a box full of chess pieces, toys, which are modeled realistic in themselves and their characteristics, so that one can throw them onto a beautiful table (map) and play with them and see how they fare against the other toys. In that light, the funnies would be additional Tonka Toy vehicles with certain abilities. The player can try and see if he can employ them within his battles. Whether or not they actually did something in real life is irrelevant at that level. ok, I'm fine with fascines as soon as CM will have terrain tiles which even remotely allow for such stuff - but I insist on having the 251/7 Sturmbrücke, too, then [ 09-26-2001: Message edited by: M Hofbauer ]

Al-'Alamayn ? how?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ciks: How exactly did they work? The link machinerman provided doesn't work for me... Where they lauched from ground? How? [ 09-26-2001: Message edited by: ciks ]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> (didn't get to look at the picture yet) the 15 and 21cm WKs were firing a laucher having several barrels, mounted on a trailer. 28cm/32cm WK were fired from their crates (Wurfrahmen), sometimes from simple launching devices, though sometimes they would be mounted six apiece on the sides of a SdKfz 251/1. the 28cm Wurfkörper, consisting of HE, are more comparable to an FAE than the 32cm WK because the way they were used created a similar shockblast effect (Gasschlagwirkung). The 32cm Wurfkörper Fl. was an incendiary device, more like a long-range fire projector: a single round of it would saturate an area of 200m^2 with its 50 liters os firing liquid. The round without filling cost 33.12 RM, an iron packing/firing crate cost 45.50 RM and the "Schwere Wurfgerät 41" launching construction holding 4 of the packing/firing crates cost 298.70 RM (which puzzles me considerably, because it is such a simple steel frame construction that looks like even I could weld it together; keep in mind that for the same price you would get an MG42!). Minimum range was 750m for the 32cm WK. The 28 and 32 WK were fired in combination, with the 28cm WKs creating a mess of rubble, and the 32cm WKs setting the area afire. Some sources even refer to the respective SdKfz 251 - carriers carrying an individual mix of 5:1. However, I assume there is a misunderstanding there, and think that the 5:1 ratio s referring to the mix among the total ordnance fired by a battery in a fire mission.

seriously though, if the allies get fascine funnies, shouldn't the germans get the SdKfz 251/7 m Sturmbrücke ?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hon John Howard MP LLB: However to throw a cat amongst the pigeons how does the "skid" Bailey go as used in the final campaigns in Italy?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Beware - Slapdragon is not your average urban pidgeon. He's more like...uh... a Killer Flamingo!

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Tread Head: Just a question for all of us who have no real war-gamming interest in the mighty Russian front. A lot of us prefer the west and what CMBO has to offer. With all the hype of CMBB going on here, it makes one fear the future of CMBO.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> just a post to let you know there's plenty of people who actually look forward eagerly towards the fighting on the eastern front. taste is something very subjective.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vanir Ausf B: If round hit a MG port it could certainly go through. At least I can't think of a reason it wouldn't.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> *that* is a *weak spot*. I specifically excluded these above. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vanir Ausf B: Certainly the short ranges are a big part of it. That emphisizes the Allied tank's faster turrets.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I was not referring to maneuverability or faster turrets (again, where the Panther turret speed is open to dispute), but to simply shootouts. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vanir Ausf B: They weren't built with Western Europe in mind. They were built to be used on the Eastern Front. They are a fish out of water in the CM knife fights. I suspect they will be more usefull in CM2.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Well of course it doesn't work well in the bocage or in city fighting. To make it clear: put the Nashorn into an environment for which it was designed, make a scenario with 1km++ of visibilty, and you will see that the Nashorn still sucks. That's what I was referring to.