Dan Weaver

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PzKpfw 1: Heh,the 50cal not supress ? you ever been under fire?. The 50cal despite its 'slow' ROF will chew a person up or any light armor itll eat thru a logged sandbagged bunker or an urban wall, even some cement, itll burrow into a foxhole. It'll send Inf running screming for cover, and that qualifies as a supression effect, in that when ones fireing at you you eat dirt hell you try to tunnel. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> LOL! Great post. Dan

Those look real nice. Dan

Valera Potapov's Russian Military Zone, my main source on WW2 Russian armor, cites the T-34-76 as massing 30 900 kg, but that's just a nitpick. I thought the T-34-76 might have had a less powerful engine than the M4A3 but it turns out that they both had a 500 hp engine. One thing that I can think of is that the T-34 had less ground clearance than the M4A3 and therefore might have had a tendency to slog its belly into the mud. Another thing is that the Sherman has a higher center of gravity than the T-34 and might not settle as easily into the mud. A third thing is that the T-34's tracks seem vertically shorter than those of the Sherman, and maybe they were more easily submerged. Dan

Engineers are a Godsend. Nothing is so effective at urban battle and killing tanks in particular as an engineer platoon with its satchel charges and flamethrowers. Remember how badass they were in Steel Panthers?

Perhaps I'm wrong here but don't nearly all gun rounds travel supersonically? Dan

I surrendered my PBEM game against NTM because in a fit of incompetence I'd managed to lose all my tanks in one turn, he had my infantry pinned down and split up across a river, and one of my flanks was wide open. I could have probably held out but looking through the commander's eyes I could see that there was no further point to resistance. If I'd been playing as the Americans I probably would have fought to the last man but as it stood I got tired of the monotonous slaughter. Dan

The Bradley, which was originally designed to be a cav scout, became the US Army's IFV due to the interaction of two unfortunate circumstances. First and probably most important, the Soviets introduced the BMP-1 in 1970, pioneering the Infantry Fighting Vehicle. There was an immediate demand in the US Army to match this latest Soviet innovation. Second, the Army was badly outnumbered in tank strength in Central Europe during the Bradley's design cycle. The M-60A1s that it did have could not reliably handle Soviet T-64s and T-72s. There was a definite need to provide as much anti-tank firepower as possible in order to keep US forces from getting overwhelmed. Enter the Bradley, with a heavy AT missile on every box. The Bradley isn't a bad vehicle, especially for the Central European terrain in which it was designed to fight. It's certainly a quantum leap over the M-113, which couldn't keep up with M-1s, was poorly armored, and was impotent against tanks. The current M-2A2 ODS version of the Bradley is fast, well armored, and well equipped to deal with tanks. Its real flaws are its large size and its lack of capacity. A US mechanized infantry platoon is too small to be much more than a security element for its four Bradleys. US mechanized forces are therefore enormously potent against armor and in open terrain but lack punch in close quarters. Dan [This message has been edited by Dan Weaver (edited 08-07-2000).]

Fighter-bombers for me range from completely useless to a great hindrance. I've seen them show up three times. First, they bombed one of my infantry platoons as it was taking an easy stroll across a wheat field, causing heavy casualties. Thanks guys. Second, they dropped their bombs on a half-strength, bypassed enemy rifle squad, ignoring the large concentration of enemy armor that was out in the open several hundred meters away. Third, they fired their rockets at some isolated enemy troops, ignoring a large concentration and two tanks out in the open. The Army Air Farce strikes again! Dan

The problem with Villers-Bocage is that the designers reduced the British to unbelievably low skill levels in order to give Wittman a chance at repeating his incredible deed every time the scenario was played. Villers-Bocage is a straw-man scenario, a fun little one-man jaunt, and it's about the worst possible thing to base a gripe on. Play scenarios the game was designed for, like First Clash at Cambres or Nijmegin. I think tanks do just fine. Dan

I'd like to PBEM somebody from the Allied side, DYO, from 700 to 1000 points. If you want to write an AAR, that's a bonus. I'll write one from my side and post it after the end of the battle. Dan

I've seen instances where the ratio of dead to total casualties was as low as 1:10. I've also seen instances where the ratio was as high as 1:2. It's all very much in the luck of the bullet. Dan

Divine retribution for gaminess... Dan

The claim that no missile is able to penetrate the front of the M1 is false. The Maverick, Hellfire, AT-9 Ataka, AT-16 Vikhr, tandem-warhead Kornet, Kryzantema, and RPG-29 can bull their way through it. The TOW2B, Javelin, BILL 2, and Gill/Spike can strike the thin top. The LOSAT and CKEM don't even notice that the tank was there... And any grunt who fires an AT missile at a tank from the front is pretty dumb. The hard thing for a grunt these days is his IR signature. People show up like beacons on the M1's thermals. Light AFVs are useful but they don't belong in the heavy tank role and never have. Every attempt to use them that way has turned out inferior to the main battle tank. MBTs can get lighter, though. If you cut the crew down to three men, take all but one out of the turret, and install CKEMs, you can probably squeeze an MBT down to 45 tons. When CKEMs are flying around the battlefield, armor's almost superfluous anyways. They've got three times the penetration of a round from the M1A2's main gun. Try to armor a tank to defeat KE missiles, and it may end up at 155 tons! Dan

Using a C-5 to carry an M-1 is an enormous waste. The entire US inventory of C-5s can ferry about a battalion of M1s per day and land a division in six days, while the SL-7 fast sealift ships can do it in seven days. C-5s are desperately needed for their enormous supply hauling abilities. In real life, you'd never be able to sequester the C-5 fleet for six days. Dan

The first thing I urge you to do is to pop on over to http://www.tanknet.org where we talk about this kind of horse pucky every day. Haven't heard about the Americans developing that tank with the Brits. They were working together on the stealthy TRACER recon vehicle but that got sh*tcanned by Congress last budget cycle so I don't know what's going on now. For sure, nobody will ever design a 155-ton tank. It couldn't operate on any surface in the world. It would smash even a paved road. The Russians have been developing the T-95 for an interminable period of time. There was speculation that they'd announce it this year, but once again it failed to show at the Nizhniy Tagil arms expo. It's purported to weigh approx. 45 tons and carry a 152mm gun in a small unmanned turret. It's a sleek looking little beast and I hope they work it out. Dan

Oh heck, Mike, I'm not even old enough to drink yet. I wish I was worthy of your compliment! Dan

A conventional "follow-your-troops" campaign is completely unrealistic. Many front-line US infantry regiments took close to 200% casualties in ETO, meaning that your troops would turn over not once but twice at the regimental level. At the company level, it would be even more nightmarish: four or five times turnover, if you managed to survive at all that is. Platoons and company commanders were killed by the dozens every day. On the Russian front, it'd be even worse. Put a rifle division in Stalingrad, and see how long it lasts! I enjoy the current style of operation a great deal and I think it's a much better simulation of the grinding combat of World War II, which doesn't end when you reach your next objective. Operations make you cry for reinforcements, rearmaments, and repairs. The operation I'd like to see is Patton taking it into his own hands to drive from Argentan to Falaise. Dan

An 88 AT gun's a lot less visible than an 88 attached to a tank. If you dig it in, you can mount an impressive AT defense. Dan

Did a few more experiments, using all sorts of different ranges and all 76 and 90mm armed US platforms. I couldn't find any real consistency in the use of tungsten related to distance, number of shots taken, size of gun, or ammo load. Tank and TD crewmen seem to randomly select a round to use, with a strong preference for AP unless they're firing at a King Tiger or Jagdtiger. Once they start using that round on a target, they'll keep firing it until they blow their target up or get killed. It seems to me that Allied tanks and tank destroyers would want to use their tungsten rounds on anything larger than a PzIV to kill it right away before it became a threat. Maybe I'm missing some subtlety of doctrine or technology, but right now their behavior doesn't make sense. Dan

That story's apocryphal. Nobody can seem to find the unit or the tank it happened to, and the actions of the American forces don't match up with doctrine. Dan

That's incredibly cheesy, Fionn. I can't believe you faced 9 Jumbos in one game. That's like all the Jumbos in an entire division...the opposing commander must have really kissed some ass to score those! "Give me all the heavy tanks, please!" Dan

The CV9040 is a Swedish IFV that carries a 40mm gun. It carries eight men and has a low profile, so it fixes the flaws of the Bradley. http://www.army-technology.com/projects/cv90/index.html Some corrections here: The T-90 has a main gun equal to the M1A2/Leopard 2A5: False. The 2A46M1 has been outperformed by the Rheinmetall for years. Its armor is also about equal, with the addition of Kontakt-5 ERA that makes it invincible to M1A2 cannon rounds at medium to long range: False. Russian advisors instruct Cypriot T-80UM1 operators that their Kontakt-5 suite degrades M829A1 performance by approx. 38%. There's no way the Russians are going to undersell themselves on this. Krisantema is a big badass, yes. That gets the SP-AT nod. The hypothetical T-72 vs. Merkava engagement has already been carried out as Babra mentioned, back when the Merks had 105mm guns. The Merks slaughtered the T-72s. Dan

I was trying to ensure that the tank crews weren't worrying about conserving tungsten rounds. Dan

Would you please send me your tankers, Fionn? ( at my tungsten-fearing dorks) Dan

LOL, Joe. Dan