Thorondor

Logically, you report to a suitable officer, which would send you to company, battalion or regimental HQ, where you would be reasigned along with the rest of the reinforcements, or reunited with the rest of your unit. The personell officer at the relevant level would be in charge of this, as directed by command. It was not unusual for effectively destroyed units to be "reformed" at a fraction of their nominal strength when in a pinch. For instance, some of the Africa Corps regiments where down to 90 fighting men towards the end. Chain of Command-wise it would be to bothersome to "skip" organizational levels, so if your company is the size of a platoon, it remains a company on paper, though it would probably be attatched to some other unit, or banded together in a battle group.

I obviusly haven't paid enough attention to my GMG targets... It was not mentioned in the weapon presentations, which made me wonder. (The Carl Gustav 84mm HE round can also be timed for air burst, so it could have been overlooked as there is no separate AB round. I'm a 84mm team leader in the Norwegian home guard, so I've got a special interest )

For quite a while I have been pondering on the posibilities of cooperative/team gameplay for CM. Allowing platoons and companies to be comanded by different players, lots of exiting opportunities would be opened, like team coordination and comunication, fog of war (While it is true that you dont see a great sign floting in the sky over enemies someone else has spotted, it is also true that there is more than one person capable of making decitons in a battalion, regardless what the colonel thinks), and playing larger scenarios in real time. So, the questions are if it is tecnically doable, and if it is something people other than me would like to see?

Some of the weapon systems included in the NATO module have airburst capability; notably the CV9035 and Carl Gustav that I'm aware of. Will this be modeled in game?

It would be har for one piece(Short of a PanzerHaubitz 2000) to manage that. A battery is however made up of 6 or more pieces, and would be capapable of delivering a shell every four seconds with little dificulty. The normal way (for us, at least) to execute a fire mission would be to first fire spoting rounds to get on target, and then fire a three shot barrage form all the guns, 18 shells in from 20 to 30 seconds on a normal day, and then repeat as needed. My post was actualy inended to give some information on the way artillery opperate today, and the rough reloading times of a FA piece. Maybe it should have been under anouther thread, but here it is anyway. As a curiousity: Largest amount of atillery fire per meter of frontline: The russians did at one point of the drive for berlin comit 10000 pieces to 10 kilometers of front. The tactic used was to fire a continous line of shells, move it 50 meters, and fire again. Not a very nice thing to have happen to you.

I did national service in the Norwegian Field artillery last year, and thus have some first hand knowledge of the loading and fiering of artillery, namely M109A3GN 155mm self proppelled howitzers. This version is not the autoloading Paladin fielded by the US, but has a manualy loaded Reihnmetal weapon. Granted, it is not actual WWII piece, but judgin from the older display pieces (Among them 105s) we had standing around the mecanism is basicaly the same. And some of sigth adjustment instruments had the eagle of the Reich on them. On the the issue of artillerty endurance, this is dependent on many factors, like previous activity that day and ammo supply. The battery record for a three shot barrage was about 13 seconds. The procedure was of course not exactly acording to drill, but thats probably the way it would be in a war. A trained 155mm crew can, upholding drill and all, fire a three shot barrage on a 20-25 second average without to much extra effort. This is using separate bag charges, and having to ram the grenade into the chamber. A 105, fiering regualr shells, could fire a barrage much faster. We did series of several barrages in fast sucsession without great dificulty, and again a 105 crew would have a even easier job. It is my impression that what takes time in bringing down arty fire is not as much the reload time of the weapon, with the exception of the REALY big guns, but calculating the fiering data. We did this by computer. We did however fire with manualy calulated data at one ocation during the final testing of the battery. During this shoting the guns where on stand by while the data was calculated, wich took some minutes. It would therefore be asumed that the time between shots is CM is actualy used for calculating and reaiming rather than just reloading. Maybe the rate of fire should increase when the guns are zeroed on a target? There is altso a strong posiblity that the reload time is a game balancer. A six gun 155mm battery each fiering three shots in 25 sec would maybe be a bit to much firepower for a blanced game. But a full Nebelwerfer barrage would be a awsome sigth [This message has been edited by Thorondor (edited 09-14-2000).]