dieseltaylor

My immediate thought is of paragraphs : ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_machine_gun potted history Your thinking seems sound to me. Terrain is so important for weapon systems effectiveness. On a bigger scale actual logistics was a consideration and I understand Her Majesty's Government [HMG] disapproved of MG's - which were all HMG's at the turn of the century - as they thought they would mean excess [costly] bullets would be used!

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Economy/wm2135.cfm For a heavy view I get several Auto reviews daily - for US, Europe and China and so for the last three years or so have been reading the nitty gritty. Personally I think that poor management is the reason for the collapse of the Detroit 3. Group think amongst the executives and complete lunacy from Cerebrus are just indicative of the poor quality. Mulally in for Ford is the only one who seems to hae some savvy - but given Ford has mortgaged itself to the hilt it was going to be tough. The workers are a large part of the problem but that is down to management letting them get away with it. Management has also failed on technology and foreseeing the future and planning for it. However it is the economic side that makes you weep. Granting up to seven year loans on vehicles is unwise. The other real screw-up is the discounted sales to the rental companies which knocks the bottom out of the market for private owners trying to sell second-hand. Latterly they all three realised this but it was then too late to think they could save themselves simply by cutting out the rental sales which I suspect were barely if at all profitable.

I am amazed at the lethality given it is only a minute of firing. HC loses effectiveness quite quickly with angles in RL and I believe this is reflected in the game. Would putting the Matildas at 30 degrees off make a significant difference? I understand this is nothing to do with your original testing but it is intellectually an interesting step from your lethality figures to what lowers it - or indeed increases it.

Aha! I am wrong. I was taking the points for the death of a TC whilst the tank remains. On two MkIV's costing 200pts the death of two t/cs to snipers was 75points total. A dead Brumbar costing 280 with rarity on dies for 169vps including 2 crew members. The 3 captured crew are worth 38 points. So bizarrely killing T/C's is very points efficient and worth more than the entire crew dead. You can understand the confusion. Major re-think required here : ) I did understand that crews spotting was degraded though I have never carried out tests to see if this was true.

The big three were badly run in terms of model development, pricing strategy, and labour relations. Mulally appears to have some idea what to do at Ford. GM I would give a fail grade to. Cerebrus are patheic at Chrysler and you have to wonder at their smarts in taking Chrysler on. Daimler must be laughing themselves silly. A for what will happen - Chrysler will die and the other two will go on. Either through Chapter 11 or bailouts. Capitalism - what an advert for crap management these three have been. Also in its way it shows how allowing companies to get too big too "fail" is not actually very good idea for society. When there are lots of firms, be it banking or cars, then decisions are varied and this gives more scope for different results. Seems that Group think in three companies lead to the same result/faults across the industry. Interesting case is the E7 by Carbon Motors. Touted around this month it is a custom police car. Ford have the majority of the market with the Crown Victoria and you can see that frustrated Ford employees got no traction in offering a new product through Ford and left and set up their own company. Another words Ford was not interested in evolving the product until such a gap in the market existed that someone else stepped in. Sound familiar? I hope all could be saved but that ain't going to happen.

I assume that commanders duck in and out between bursts of fire from MG's. : ) Perhaps two MGs are required! I have had a crew from a MkIV bail as I was shooting it up the backside with a US halftrack. I can only assume that they decided it was tank mounted MG and they were about to go bang. It was in the scenario Chaulnes where there are lots of tanks so it is possible they could see enemy tanks, or knew of enemy tanks in front of them so rotating the turret was not really going to solve their problem - of extending their life expectancy.

WW2steel. I deduce your tests are head on which makes testing easy but does not really allow for more natural battlefield events. I am concious that the Matilda side and rear armour is substantially better than the MkIV. Also your figures quoted above are a little bit lacking in refinement though you probably have the exact data not included above. Specifically including all tactical damage is not really that helpful as a gun damaged tank or an immobilised one does not get you any points in CM1. Gun damaged tanks tend to make themselves scarce to avoid being knocked out so you are unlikely to get the points. This is probably not the case but if all, or the majority of the MkIV's were KO'd but a substantial proportion of the Matilda's were still live then the bare statistics would be misleading. The longer range shooting I take means that after expending all their ammo the MkIV's got those results. However it is not clear how much HC you were giving to the MkIV's for these results in your test but I assume you are buying plattons as you mentioned in your first testing post. At least with the Matilda's you know there are roughly 80 rounds of AP. : ) I appreciate the work you do - but give me a set of figures and I will look for wrinkles in the methodology : ) The first round hit rate is astonishingly good at 500m. Bit worrying really! Incidentally both HC and APDS are over credited with accuracy over RL.

A lot of effort during WW2 went into designing decent cupolas and hatches because of the dangers of being either shot, or blind in the tank. Carius mentions that particular point in "Tigers in the Mud". Regarding flanking fire. I am a great fan of it however in a lot of maps the ability to get a flanking firing position is difficult because the maps are not big enough. I did have an exception last year where a river running across the map meant the defence could use flank fire to cover the meandering river's fords and bridges. It is joyous that pillboxes/bunkers could actually present their flanks to the enemy armour and be reasonably safe from being taken out in minutes by dozens of shots through the firing slit at range. Similarly if one had enough mines and barbed wire to make like a river you could do it in-game but you rarely have enough points for map size.

Dietrich - Crew's for spotting in CM1? Crewmen can be very expensive. As I understand it they cost the proportion of the dead vehicles cost - that is a five man crewed Tiger knocked out costing 250 points would be 250 points if they all die. If two escape and are later shot that is an extra 100 points even more points if captured. I like people who let me capture crews : ) I have to say I have never proved it, and I am not sure if it applies in CMBB - I think it does. Certainly sniping a Tiger commander is very points effective. : ) My impression has always been that CM1 was originally designed to be very good with tanks and that infantry etc was a supporting cast. Certainly playing in minute turns on LAN it plays exceedingly well on that basis. Given the time span of CM1 games the concept of replenishment of ammo does not really hold water. However scavenging ammo from fallen friends might be thought possible if there were 5 minutes or so free of enemy fire.

and even some text

Miele mouthed Boscheded!

I never realised that was a good enough reason to get banned!

I do not know which Russian tanks are in "The Balka" but rear vision slits certainly existed on some Russian tanks turrets - good foresight in the circumstances. : )

Dietrich - I had always assumed that ATG's would for all practical purposes be unspottable until they started firing or were overrun by infantry. I am familiar with Carius's writing and examples of ATG's at work. ATG's were lethal. They also got killed. This was generally a function of how good an ATG was at killing and the terrain they were operating in. The British 2pdr was a very good ATG in the early war however with better German tanks they took big losses for little reward. In game terms picking the wrong period can make ATG's look very weak and useless. If I phrase it as "In game terms has CM1 got the balance right between tanks and ATG's" I would say yes. I tend to use ATG's a lot in CMAK. However you have to bear in mind I play games where I expect to have 6 ATG's and flanks. A platoon of tanks and some units to move the ATG and you have a combined arms force where the loss of a unit or two is not game over. If I play small games where I have two ATG's and the board is relatively small then I would die pretty quickly against tanks generally. I would probably be firing head-on and he has probably guessed where the ATG;s are and got mortars and HMG's firing or ready to fire. People expect too much of the game engine when they play such small actions. The fact that Tiger Valley is the most popular downloaded and appreciated game is because it is done on the correct scale. That is apart from the great map and balance : ).

Vark- sorry for disturbing the thread but I suppose I tend to the view that if a game plays well enough extra levels of realism rarely improve the gaming experience. CM has been fortunate to evolve to CMAK. CMSF from what I have been told by my friends was unfortunately tending towards the unplayable when launched - but was amusing for those who had not parted with the money and could hear the gory AI movement stories. I understand it is improving. For CM2 I live in dread that the play area will be reduced. I know plenty of people play on maps effectively with no flanks to worry about [highly artificial] whereas I play on the biggest possible maps - the extra terrain may be irrelevant for flags but it does make the players more honest than skulking along the map edge. The personal fitted laser for each infantry squad would be the first thing I would adjust. Infantry squads should have their effective range limits obviously but knowing to the metre how far another unit is over 2000 m is bogus. There should be a fudge factor. This would be particulaly useful in night and poor visibility as the current system allows complete gamesmanship. Borg spotting is flawed. Perhaps this could be solved for units out of touch of an HQ by the concept that infantry would be concentrating on their immediate vicinity - however when settled into a position - not under fire -then there spotting radius increases by x metres per minute. If not in contact with a radio equipped unit the spotting radius remains limited or possibly opaque and they can "see" enemy icons misplaced by metres [variance increased by range]. If I were to generalise[!] I think the lethality of weapons dictates map size and unit size. By my reckoning Napoleonics are played at a much higher unit level because for the player it is more fun. Playing with a company of infantry, some artillery, and a troop of horse would be very limiting in the long term replayability stakes. Les Grognards aims for Corp movement - probably for good reason. : ) CM1 units are far less lethal than CMSF units. In my mind the maps for CMSF should be very much larger but then if BF were commissioned to make a small unit trainer then thye are getting into the right scale. Whether the realisticish trainer equals good gaming experience depends on the players favoured style.

Really? I look forward to the results of the test : )

Possibly because the choice of shot is not yours and it is showing normal AP. Now if you were to cheat and arm it only with HC I doubt the game engine would notice : ) Incidentally HC was very inaccurate past 400 metres and is not something modelled in the game. German tanks crews would carry a few for dire emergency.

Solargirl did seem a little unlikely on the CM board

There does seem to be a strange reluctance to credit tank crews the ability to use the Mk1 eyeball as a method for spotting. When an ATG fires there is noise and dust generated - the bigger the gun the more fuss. Also seeing how your infantry scatter and which way they look is also informative. Finger pointing has also been known to be used as a directional aid. Borg spotting can be very silly particularly relaying information back from behind enemy lines from snipers. But to believe that on the battlefield anything but direct radio contact is a mandatory requirement is to throw the baby out with the bath water. I could also argue that there are compensating "features" in the game such as real soldiers using sound location [Mk1 Ear]. In any event any game can be deconstructed by its apparent faults but the overall effect is what matters. I find chess unrealistic but it certainly seems quite popular so as a game it has something going for it.

Interesting. All this and no mention of time required/allowed. Or of weather. There seems to be an assumption on good weather - fair enough. However time has always been the most important part of the attack/defence equation and the number of turns crucial to whether the battle works. Terrain is probably the second most important ignored variable. If anyone is curious about how important terrain can be I am quite happy to sit a large ubercat on the end of the sole bridge in a narrow map bisected by an unfordable river and defeat any number of infantry : ) Of course I would wish for a time limit slightly shorter than my expected ammo firing time.

If you mean the text is part of the e-mail and difficult to separate out ask your opponent to send the game file as a zip file that you can then unzip into your PBEM folder. Also consider PBEMHelper. More complicated than a zipped file it does have considerable benefits. It can be used quite simply to track receiving and sending games or can be used in its advanced mode. If you are not overly techie you may want to master the zipped method if my diagnosis is right : )

I love middle eastern and punjabi music. This is great music a really good dancer is Sadie from Sheboygan

Interesting

I wonder what you could have done with 1.9trillion dollars Biomass for Power - NS - a few highlights ........................... It's telling that Canada, with over 400 million wooded hectares, has no healthy forest to devote to biopower. The lumber and paper industries monopolise it and, as Kumar suggests, biopower can succeed only by feeding on their scraps. This problem is even more apparent elsewhere. In the US, biopower has become the single largest provider of renewable electricity, thanks primarily to waste biomass from the paper industry. That resource is now fully exploited, though, and the US Department of Energy estimates that future biopower growth will slow, providing around 1.7 per cent of the country's electricity by 2030. So where can we find biomass to feed the power stations? Fortunately, untapped resources exist in many parts of the world, including waste from sugar-cane processing in Brazil and waste palm oil and rice hulls in Asia. In the US, livestock produce over 1 billion tonnes of manure annually, most of which is left to rot. Why not collect the stuff, convert it to methane in anaerobic digesters and use it in power stations? Michael Webber at the University of Texas in Austin calculates that US manure could generate 68 million megawatt-hours each year - almost 2 per cent of the annual US electricity demand (Environmental Research Letters, vol 3, p 034002). The infrastructure to collect and transport manure would incur its own costs, so local-scale operations might be key to maximising profits. With that in mind, plans by Finnish company Wärtsilä to build small combined heat and power plants attached to two breweries in the north of England could be a sign of things to come. Using spent grain from the brewing process to generate power, their output will be modest - around 3.1 MW of electricity each. That's plenty to power the breweries' operations, though, and any excess will be sold to the grid.. Wind Power The time and money being spent on wind power is perhaps not surprising when you consider that, based on global average annual wind speeds, worldwide there is the potential to generate 106 million gigawatt-hours of electricity per year from wind - five times the total amount of electricity generated globally today. Recent estimates put the cost of generating electricity from wind at €0.04 to 0.08 per kilowatt-hour, comparable with nuclear power, and electricity from gas turbines with natural gas at today's prices. The dramatic increase in the length of turbine blades - mostly for offshore wind farms - mirrors the rapid expansion of wind farms worldwide. Between 2006 and 2007 global capacity leapt by over 25 per cent to 94 gigawatts (GW) - equivalent to around 90 average-sized coal-fired power stations - that's a ninefold increase on the 10.2 GW generated from wind just 10 years ago. By comparison, total global electricty generation from all sources increased by just 30 per cent. All indications are that this booming growth in wind energy capacity will continue. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), based in Brussels, Belgium, predicts that the global wind market will grow by over 15 per cent from its current size to reach 240 GW of total installed capacity by the year 2012. By then, wind energy will be producing more than half a million gigawatt-hours of electricity a year, pushing its share of the global total from 1 per cent in 2007 to 3 per cent. How has wind gone from being a quaint afterthought to such a significant contributor to global electricity generation in such a short space of time? The biggest influence on wind generation has been the huge investment in a few key European countries that are rich in wind resource and driven by ambitious targets to cut CO2 emissions. Germany leads the world, with 19,460 turbines in 2007 capable of generating 22.25 GW, which can supply 7 per cent of the country's electricity. To encourage the shift to renewables, all suppliers of electricity from renewable sources are paid a premium "feed-in" tariff for the first five years they supply power to the grid. But Germany may soon be toppled from its wind power throne. The GWEC predicts that in 2009 the US will overtake it and become the world's biggest producer of wind-powered electricity. China, which has succeeded in doubling its capacity every year since 2004, is not far behind. The Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association forecasts it will reach around 50 GW by 2015. Geothermal AT FIRST glance, geothermal energy seems almost too good to be true. It's clean, inexhaustible, provides predictable 24-hour power and you can get it just about anywhere. A 2006 report by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that there is enough geothermal energy in the US alone to meet the country's energy needs 2000 times over. According to the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), based in Washington DC, the best sites can generate electricity for as little as 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 8 or 9 cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas plants. There is a snag, however. Outside of geologically blessed places like Iceland, Japan and New Zealand, where volcanically active rocks are close to the surface, the Earth's heat is locked away under several kilometres of rock. Now, though, new developments are making these depths easier and more cost-effective to reach, and the world is beginning to realise the potential of geothermal energy. The key to tapping this resource is a relatively recent technology called enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which can create a geothermal hotspot pretty much anywhere. The process involves fracturing hot rocks, then injecting water, which heats up as it circulates through them. It is then pumped back to the surface and passed through a heat exchanger, which drives a turbine, generating electricity. A number of EGS projects have recently come online. The world's first commercial plant in Landau, Germany, was commissioned in 2007 and already produces 22 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. A 1.5-megawatt (MW) pilot plant in Soultz, France, began operating this June and a test plant at Groß Schönebeck, Germany, should be online by the end of next year. In southern Australia, a 1-MW demonstration plant should be producing electricity by January. In the US, meanwhile, the Department of Energy has invested over $5 million to add an EGS system to a conventional geothermal well - where water is pumped through naturally hot rocks - east of Reno, Nevada, in the hope of increasing its productivity. .... Tidal WELCOME to the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada, home to the highest tides in the world. Here, 100 billion tonnes of Atlantic seawater flow in and out of the 270-kilometre-long bay every day. The sea level at Fundy rises by an average of 11 metres, reaching a maximum of 17 metres at the narrowest point, twice a day without fail, thanks to the moon's gravitational pull. Could this tidal movement be used to generate power? The unwavering predictability and scale of the tides in some parts of the world make them an attractive renewable energy source. The World Energy Council estimates that Fundy's tides alone could generate 17,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy per year. Some estimates put the energy in the world's tides at as much as 1 million GWh per year, or about 5 per cent of the electricity generated worldwide, though only a fraction of this is likely to be exploited due to practical constraints. Sunny side up There's much more to solar power than photovoltaic cells Photovoltaic cells are currently the fastest growing energy technology, with production increasing by around 48 per cent each year. By 2015 the price of electricity from PV cells is expected to match that of conventional energy generators. (For a detailed account of the state of the art in photovoltaic cells see New Scientist, 8 December 2007, p 32.) But photovoltaic cells aren't the only way to capture the power of the sun. Large-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) systems are all the rage in the energy-hungry US. Last June, the 64-megawatt (MW) Nevada Solar One CSP plant switched on near Boulder City. Since then, over 1.6 gigawatts of new CSP capacity have been announced in neighbouring California. In the past year or so, the US Bureau of Land Management has received more than 30 planning requests to develop large-scale CSP plants across the US. The situation is similar in Europe, where around a dozen plants are under construction with at least 24 more proposed in Spain alone. Sound economics lie behind this enthusiasm. At the moment, electricity generated by large-scale solar concentrator systems costs around 12 US cents per kilowatt-hour. Though this is around four times the price of electricity from a coal-fired power station, it's half the price of electricity produced by photovoltaic cells. What's more, this technology offers an advantage that could prove decisive in the longer term: the ability to store energy for hours or days at a stretch. Rather than converting sunlight directly into electricity, a CSP system uses arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight onto tubes filled with water or oil. The fluid is heated under pressure to around 400 °C and is then circulated to a steam turbine to generate electricity. By replacing the water or oil with molten salts, typically a mix of sodium nitrate (NaNO3) and potassium nitrate (KNO3), and storing this hot mixture in insulated tanks, it is possible to use energy collected during daylight hours to generate electricity at times of peak demand - day or night. "With this system you can make electricity when you want," says Massimo Falchetta, an engineer at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment, in Rome. That means the energy can be sold for a higher price than stuff from wind generators or PV cells. Solar concentrators are nothing new. The Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) plant has been operating in California's Mojave desert since 1985. Made up of nine energy farms capable of generating a total of 354 MW, SEGS is the largest solar concentrator system in the world. During the 1980s and 1990s, US engineers tested various designs, including power towers - mirrors arranged around a vertical pipe system - and systems with molten salts. However, the US Department of Energy halted research in 2000 after the US National Research Council suggested that any further gains in performance would be insignificant. Development continued in Europe, and later this year the first commercial molten salt-based solar collector system is due to be switched on at Guadix in Andalusia, Spain. Andasol-1 has over 500,000 square metres of parabolic mirrors and will generate 50 MW of power. With large storage tanks for the salt solution, it will be able to continue generating electricity for more than 7 hours after sunset. In April, the Electric Power Research Institute in California released a report suggesting that adding up to 9 hours of energy storage with molten salts to a solar concentrator plant can reduce the cost of its electricity by up to 13 per cent. This cost could fall further if new experimental fluids containing nanoparticles outperform salts, says Mark Mehos, who manages the solar thermal power programme at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. "It's early days but this has the potential to be revolutionary," he says. AND WHAT IS GOING ON CURRENTLY One of the first towns to adopt a predominantly renewable supply, without compromising on its wealthy residents' modern lifestyle, was Three Rivers in Oregon. "We have everything - the internet, satellite TV, a washer and dryer - there is nothing I do without," says Elaine Budden, who has lived in Three Rivers for 12 years. Ever since the mid 1980s, when the town's first permanent houses were built, Three Rivers has used solar power. The nearest power lines are several kilometres away and extending the grid would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So instead, Three Rivers residents decided to purchase their own photovoltaic panels and battery storage packs. The panels provide up to 2 kilowatts (kW) of power, enough for 80 to 95 per cent of each household's electricity needs. The rest is supplied by propane or diesel generators. One community in Italy has got around the intermittent nature of solar power without the help of fossil fuels. In 2002, Varese Ligure, a village of 2400 people in northern Italy, became the first municipality in Europe to get all its electricity from renewable energy. Instead of relying entirely on one source, it uses a mix of solar, wind and small-scale hydropower. Four wind turbines on a ridge above the village provide 3.2 megawatts of electricity, 141 solar panels on the roofs of the town hall and the primary school provide 17 kW, and a small hydro station on a nearby river provides an additional 6 kW. Together, these sources now provide more than three times the community's electricity needs. If renewable energy is going to play a significant role worldwide, however, it will need to be employed on a much larger scale. Gussing, a town of 4000 in eastern Austria, recently went 100 per cent renewable in electricity production with a highly efficient 8-megawatt biomass gasification plant fuelled by the region's oak trees. By 2010, Gussing plans to use biomass to provide electricity to the rest of the district's 27,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, larger communities are also beginning to make the switch. Freiburg, a city of 200,000 in south-west Germany has invested €43 million in photovoltaics in the past 20 years and has set a goal of reducing CO2 emissions to 25 per cent below 1992 levels by 2010. And if all goes well, Masdar City, a planned development in Abu Dhabi that will be home to 50,000 people, will get all its electricity from the sun, wind and composted food waste when it is completed in 2016. New Zealand, which like Iceland also relies heavily on geothermal energy and hydropower, now gets 70 per cent of its electricity from renewables and, with the help of additional wind power, aims to increase this figure to 90 per cent by 2025.

i dont't know this guy from adam but here goesSome concerns -- No. Its where you use the money that makes the difference. Using loose credit to buy depreciating assets like chinese goods, cars and, in this case, houses does not actually give much gain. Putting liquidity into the system so Banks will honour the overdraft agreements etc for firms employing workers is definitely good use. If you believe a cut in corporate tax will increase business investment in capital goods in this climate I think you are being hopeful. It may for a few companies but I suspect most co.'s will defer capital investment until they are aware of the capacity required in the future economy. Now if there were big write-offs available for 2008 and 2009 only that might work for a few more companies. A reduction in tax for 95% ot taxpayers is obviously unfocused as to effect - but if you think the national psyche is important to peoples view on life and propensity to spend .... No. But the government might earn a few extra dollars that it can use strategically. You cannot rely on the tax donors to invest as wisely ! : ) Certainly yes. This economic downturn will give a brief respite from power shortage and should be grasped firmly by the throat. Whilst the Govt. is at it the highways and the bridges need a good going over also. These actions should prime the pump a bit. Name a lot of babies Obama? Obama seems intelligent and more importantly pragmatic so its probably a case of suck it and see - leaving Iraq for sure. Pakistan and Iran are interesting. Afghanistan will have to be left also as an unwinnable war - sorry unwinnable at a reasonable price. When I say that I mean in Afghan lives not US. However I hope the Allies have taken the opportunity to subvert sufficient Afghans that our intelligence will be first rate. It may be that given it is such a tribal country that we make use of tribal areas rather than the nonsense entity of Afghanistan. If we can do that the differential living standards over time may do the trick.