Mark IV

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>you seem to miss that the Nahverteidigungswaffe was 360 degrees traversable from inside<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Didn't exactly miss it- it's just that both internal and external pictures make it hard to envision. It doesn't look as though there is enough clearance to rotate the thing forward, WITH a Kampfpistole attached (though one picture shows both positions, after rotation). And the placement of the port is always at the rear of the turret. But it must have been so. Isn't the photo of the Sturmtiger mounting on the fixed rear of the superstructure? (too good a subject to let it sink to the bottom).

A question, then, on the use of smoke shells (Schellnebelkerze). The illustrations (for Panther and Tiger) clearly show the orientation of the Nahverteidigungswaffe to the rear of the vehicle. If the primary purpose was to fire smoke (presumably to mask a withdrawal, or at least a repositioning), why wouldn't it face forward? It seems to me that a rearward firing smoke round would require a tank to rotate its vulnerable rear turret toward the enemy to create a screen, or to fire and then back through the screen. Ditto for the illumination round- firing to the rear would silhouette my tank and illuminate those of my comrades. For firing HE at close-assaulting ground troops it seems to make a little more sense, to protect the lightly-armored and -armed rear. I look forward to pictures of its placement in StuG III, one of which fired smoke forward to blind my Shermans, and fell back behind a rise (in CE). Perhaps the chief purpose of the Nahverteidigungswaffe evolved over time, designed as a utility, and with experience turned into a weapons system?

Thanks to you both for a valuable contribution! I'll keep my eye out for references.

... the tracked vehicle that helped the Wehrmacht write the book on armored warfare, an indefatigable workhorse with a hundred variations, unsung hero of the Panzer legend. Definitely not a Ford.

Check this link out! http://etloh.8m.com/strategy/offense2.html (don't know how I've missed this one before). I have read many accounts of German, Russian, and US use of smoke on the battlefield. Can't cite chapter and verse at the moment and I don't know how to quantify "how common" it was, but there is ample precedent for it. [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 04-11-2000).]

Preordered, won't copy. Think I've sold a couple as well and have already refused requests for knock-offs. I don't think BTS has TOO much to fear from pirating because REAL gamers recognize its value, for the reasons you stated. They will want to compensate BTS. "Casual" pirates wouldn't have bought it anyway (at least they'll get their asses kicked by the AI). But if we make converts to the game and "loan" them the CD, it's no different than breaking in to Steve or Charles' office and stealing office supplies. PS: I'm beginning to think that "the van" should be modeled in the game.

Sure, anybody can make a dam. How 'bout submarine pens, Mr. Smarty? Great, actually... REALLY looking forward to this. Awesome.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>You actually do pay every time you play. Just divide the price by the number of times you played. Its called 'Costing'.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Mere casuistry. The difference is that pay-to-play is open-ended. CM is prix fixe, meaning the total remains constant and my "costing" drops every time I play (conservatively estimating, if I played each of the 3 beta demo scenarios 6 times, and if I had payed 50 bucks for it, my cost would be 2.77/game. If I play again, it drops to 2.63). The difference between CM and cable TV is that the cost of collecting and policing a pay-to-play plan is ridiculously out of proportion to the market. When there's a CM in 60% (or even 1%) of American households, come on back. In the Hotline-download discussion, the idea that the priates <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>arent 'cracking' anything. That takes a certain expertise, not just a piece of hardware that everyone sells<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> ...seems to ignore the fact that the download system is accessible by modem, which is protected by an authentication and a password, which is crackable, which is therefore as insecure as anything else. So if <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The ball is in the software developers court and they might need a major shift in "selling" the product/service<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>...then we could agree that marketing over the net and shipping a hard CD on credit verification is a major shift in "selling", with lowest cost and least risk to BTS.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>350 megs is not too big for a download<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>many people now have high band width service<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Many, many more do not. All of them have mailboxes, however. Given limited time and resources, and unlimited projects, which would it pay BTS to pursue? <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>there may be some highly literate computer users (mostly the younger ones who know what and where the warez are) on this board who will find the Combat Mission Gold Release stuffed/zipped and saved as a Disk Copy disk Image on a Hotline Warez server and they will download it weeks before their CD_ROM and Manual comes to them in the mail.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Those savvy webdewdz, what'll they think of next... so you think the main motive for piracy is the inability of gamers to wait for the Post Office? I thought it was plain cheap dishonesty. If, as you say, they pirate for bragging rights alone, then no real harm done- no serious gamer dollars were lost to your warez pals. If there's any upside to the pirating of CM, it's that some young pirate may get interested enough in historically accurate wargames to recognize that CM is something special and deserves the bucks to keep more of the same coming. If they're not serious gamers then, as I say, no real dollars were lost. What you seem to be arguing is that, because the game will be pirated anyway, BTS should adopt a means of distribution that will facilitate pirating, in order to please a minority of their loyal following who will be pleased anyway. PS: I had not seen BTS' response when composing the above so please don't interpret this as "piling on". [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 04-10-2000).]

I think "sucky" is fair, from a manual user's point of view. I have to proof docs sent me in PDF all the time. Since I create the originals in Word on a PC (which is backwards compatible, though piggishly, BTW) then send them to MacGraphics people for layout, they come back in PDF. I find the easiest way to show corrections is to Print Screen and mark up in Paint Shop Pro. Then I send back a JPEG of the document section. Odd, but it works (smaller files, too). Marketing types like to use PDF on the web because it hinders "creative" manipulation of published specs, though anyone can doctor one up if they really want to. At least now, PDF is searchable. PS: Haven't you ever had to download the "latest" Acrobat viewer, because the file was created in a later version of Acrobat? I have....

Where but here could you get a link to "Great looking models" and just KNOW you're going to see a P-38 Lightning?

You need the full version of Adobe Acrobat to do that. It is imperfect, and will substitute odd fonts, and pretty much grenade the formatting. But it beats typing. I have Acrobat 4.0 if I can help and it's not *too* big. markfour@mindspring.com [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 04-06-2000).]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>With the wave of a magic wand......... *POOF*<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Hey, there was a 4 hour, 9 minute lag time between wand-wave and guachification. This is unacceptable. Perhaps guachi needs an email capable cell phone. Imagine calling for 81mm support and seeing DELAY: 4:09:00 on your screen! Really...

Otto Skorzeny. Thinking outside the box... "special" access to resources and influence... creative commando ops and conventional combat command against Red Army... and best of all he survived to be a successful businessman and die of old age 30 years later. Fantasy WWII at its finest.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Showing trucks & jeeps getting toasted by armor seems to have a sadistic bent <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Rather the point of "breaking through", isn't it? Regrettably common occurence in WWII... But Nietzsche wrong? 2 out of 3's not bad. Cool POTDs. Definitely Wednesday. But wrong? Beware, lest an idol crush thee! [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 04-06-2000).]

Arty modeled in CM is mostly battalion-level due to the scale, and thus a little different from the wide-frontage, painstakingly-planned walking barrages of WWI (and some of WWII, including BoB), by divisions and corps and such, for huge masses of infantry. The kind of artillery we've seen so far (in the beta demo) is mostly "ad hoc": "hey, shellac the perimeter of that village" or "help! Kill everything around the church right now!". You can schedule infantry behind the barrage but once the stuff is launched, the saying is "artillery has no friends". If something goes haywire with your evac, or your advance, you have the same local weather as the other guy. Still, following a good 105-whacking up with an immediate charge seems productive. Calling in arty on one's own (US) position was common at the Bulge (and with both sides on the Ostfront), and there's no good reason not to be able to, since one would have clear LOS to one's self. Of course it would have to be maintained for optimum accuracy, and LOS could be compromised in the unassing process. But never, ever, call for 9th Air Force tactical bombardment in support of local ops (unless you're German). The 30th Infantry called them the "American Luftwaffe"...

In retrospect my earlier post to this thread might be construed, with effort, as SP bashing. I am chastened. I spent many, many hours on SPs 1&2 back when CM was just a gleam in Steve and Charles' optics. They were great. They were groundbreaking. They had the best graphics of the time. And, their manual sucked (you see, chastened, but unrepentant). I prefer CM. It would be foolish to promote CM through slams against other games, and 3D realism may not be for everybody. As a C-Missionary I try to make sure everyone's aware of what this game has to offer, but I don't cruise for arguments with other gamers. Of course, if I felt someone was misrepresenting "our" game through ignorance or malice, I would feel compelled to set the record straight... in the nicest way, of course. "Gunner, beehive, troops in the open!"

M4A2 was diesel-powered. Check out dano6's article on sherman development over at CMHQ. The diesels went to Russia and the UK.

The midi link alone worth the click... http://ingeb.org/Lieder/esbraust.html Mood music for CM. Panzerlied, and check out Wacht am Rhein (2nd version, or Melodie, is best, but for real flavor try the MP3)... Panzergrenadieren greatest hits. Thank you. [This message has been edited by Mark IV (edited 04-05-2000).]

Help me understand this, as I'm not a scenario designer (yet)... Can't a lopsided scenario (in terms of equipment, force size, even terrain advantage) be "balanced" with the victory assessment? I don't mean VL locations (though that would count too), but in how the game interprets the resulting score? If I get all the VLs, but I have 3 to 1 casualties when I had a 4 to 1 force superiority, I would win a pretty slight victory, I would think (or even take a loss). Isn't this the balance, or am I missing something? It wouldn't matter if it was platoon vs. battalion if the points were assessed right...

CM and SP are really different approaches to different scales (being mono-game-ous myself, meaning I can only delve into one game at a time, this is no contest. Sorry, SP.). That said, if SP folks were so fired up, they could divert their energies to providing the documentation that SP1 and 2 lacked (I never went further with the series than that). Hell, the threads on the CM manual here, were bigger than the documentation that came with SP2. And the AI comparison is tragic... shall we talk about OBA targeting? I don't think SP could have thought up a more convoluted, unreal system than the one they chose. Micromanagement was MORE necessary in SP; it just took place at a different scale. However I would argue that if you want to micromanage, the capacity and the tools for it are easier in CM. I like the realism the tacAI provides in CM- I like troops to disobey me when local situations threaten, and I can accept that this will result in some dumb decisions because that's REAL. A good commander has to plan on a certain amount of independence, misinterpretation, and outright pig-headedness because he leads men, not ones and zeroes (well, there's zeroes in every outfit... ).

"The the 550-pound CBU-72 cluster bomb contains three submunitions known as fuel/air explosive (FAE). The submunitions weigh approximately 100 pounds and contain 75 pounds of ethylene oxide with air-burst fuzing set for 30 feet. An aerosol cloud approximately 60 feet in diameter and 8 feet thick is created and ignited by an embedded detonator to produce an explosion. This cluster munition is effective against minefields, armored vehicles, aircraft parked in the open, and bunkers. During Desert Storm the Marine Corps dropped all 254 CBU-72s, primarily from A-6Es, against mine fields and personnel in trenches. Some secondary explosions were noted when it was used as a mine clearer; however, FAE was primarily useful as a psychological weapon. Second-generation FAE weapons were developed from the FAE I type devices (CBU-55/72) used in Vietnam." http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/cbu-72.htm FAS is chock full of useful info.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>a clean install has gotten rid of all the badly written software, and windows is singing along<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> CCJ's keen sense of irony, keeping the board light... (PC boy here, so douse the MicroBics... CCJ, tried PSP6 yet? CM of PC graphics, I tell ya)

Expensive delivery system, too. For residential applications there are powdered magnesium loads available for the ubiquitous 12 gauge. Don't forget your sunnies! I mean, how the hell you gonna spray a flock of ducks with bitter apple?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Can we just drop the topic, at least until the americans get an education in political theory<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Diplomatic, that. Is that a padlock I hear? Hope so.