dieseltaylor

Excellent. I am wondering if perhaps there are enough threads to do something on real TAC air power - but possibly as it is not CMWiki relevant : ) Glad the site is up

Play PBEMHelper trusted mode the game finishes in a third of the time : ) less likely to get bored and for the loser it gets the misery out of the way very quickly. Of course it does rely on trusted .... I find playing tournaments where someone sends a turn a week the most horrible exercise. Even if I am winning I just do not care as I lose the flow and enjoyment. Playing is the fun part so I endeavour that no e-mail ever waits more a couple of hours before being replied to --- set-ups excepted!

I do not know for sure but I always assumed rain etc was weather at that time of the battle etc. Ground conditions were more a function of the time of year - Winter snow, possible mud, Spring more likely mud etc.

In the dozen or so assault defenses I have played on medium maps over 32 turns with using the same parameters, regardless of ignoring the flags or not by the defence their forces are crushed almost totally. My belief is that there is a very delicate equation on non-ME battles and this map size/time/force restrictions/weather provides a lot of variables. In my experience and from the little feedback I have had from a poll I tried to carry out very few people have played assaults and virtually none have played probes and attacks. It is simpler for people to play scenarios and ME's. If anyone has any experience of the these rarer battles and flaws in balance it would be interesting to here. I do know that the break-off level is set higher but I was never au fait with that anyway.

Can I commend to all readers Bigduke6's gleanings from a Russian website which I found --- but could not read on the 87G film thread Excellent long post with believable info. RawRecruit -I agree with you regarding light tank survivability but now we have some statistics too! on the other thread.

Thanks Bigduke6 I feel I have hit the jackpot. So we have Western experience, Western statistics , and Eastern statistics. So with this information knitted together future discussion may well be a lot shorter and more to the point : ) The interesting thing now is the possibility whether the 87g was in fact an inordinately complex propaganda exercise - certainly as against tanks. There were a couple of points in Neumann's words that were !! "One time I destroyed three tanks in one pass. It was really an accident. The three tanks were lined up in a village and I lined up with the rear one. My captain came in from the side. I opened fire on the last and destroyed it but my guns would not stop firing, so I lined up on the next one, destroyed it, and then lined up on the front one and destroyed it also. My captain was pleased but upset because every time he would line up on a tank I would destroy it." I am slightly incredulous that his captain would be able to instantly recognise a destroyed tank and line up on another - simply seems unlikely. I was also impressed that in such a busy life he was able to meet Patton, and fit in the ME262 training ,the Mustang and the B17. Anyway Bd6 that site really seems to have come up trumps.

Apologies for being dense about TDI. I had read that piece when sturmelon mentioned it on page 7 and I thought I had mentioned in my post following that there would be a difference between 37mm tungsten and 30mm cannon in effectiveness. However I had duly noted the references to the records for the day and the personality of Rudel. From somewhere else I saw mention that he had been regarded as unfit for fighter service so it does lead one to wonder if he had a personal axe to bury. Contemplating the disparity between claims and actuality there are a number of thoughts that cross my mind : Soviet orders on reacting to air attack - was there the possibility of smoke being produced deliberately. How did the Soviets deal with crew casualties that occurred versus tanks ready for combat daily reports. Attacks being successful in that tanks were hit but the effects - burning external baggage, penetration but ineffective apart from killing crew. And this could also apply to the bomblets and the 37mm. Penetration with the chance to hit ammo very rare but possible and big explosion. For propaganda purposes that all hits were recorded as destroyed? I have worked in environments where the pressure to provide the results wanted as resulted in the twisting of or fabrication of figures. Points to mull over. Obviously more info on bomblets and the 37mm would help. JonS With regard to my comment on Rudel and nailing the lie I was not ignoring Dupuy or this thread and others on other boards. What I meant as apparently all the scores are over hyped then one would hope there was a site that whenever Rudel or Hartmann got typed in you could read the official blurb, repeated as nauseum over the web, and then have the nitty gritty on why they are overstated. As I said there apparently is not such a site - or that I have not found it. Therefore the casual wargamer who reads neither these threads or the Dupuy is likely to believe what is commonly posted.

Interesting point. In BoB we have been running assaults based on 1500 point defence and almost invariably the assault has won. I have looked at a couple where the defences won or drew and it is explicable why they were exceptions. Essentially experience wins out and in that I mean familiarity with the type of game, terrain, and tempo of the attack. There are two important things that add extra layers of complexity to your question. Time available in which to attack makes an enormous difference. Restriction on purchases - if the forces are say, Combined Arms only it makes it possible on 1500 points to predict how much armour, how much ATG, how much infantry, etc the defender can purchase. I any event it liiks as though Attacks and Probes would be interesting alternatives to Assaults. Thanks for highlighting the differences.

JasonC "But you should stop defending past errors in weapon effectiveness modeling, that have been shown to be wrong" I can only concur with BF. If you do not see the importance of morale then why have men go to ground when coming under rifle fire - after all bullets are shown to be less lethal to the PBI than mortars and artillery. You seem to ignore all elements of what people report at the time in favour of post war analysis. If you wish to design a game on post-war analysis fine but it would not replicate the actuality of WW2 as people would simply choose ahistoric weapon systems. BTW I never play a game without buying light flak except possibly if I play US. It is so ingrained that I tend to forget when no air power is available : )

I am using Google and Copernicus had have looked at about 20 sites. What is TDI?

ME It's statements like this that make it impossible for me to take your arguments on this subject seriously. Pilots are very conscious of their airspeed. If they aren't, they die. I think it possible Neumann could lie about it all. But you seem to be happy to support 300 kph to cast scorn on my lower figure .. of 160-180kph but ignore all other aspects of the interview as mainly bogus or explainable in another way. The reduction of the firing point to 100 metres and the deliberate choice of spot to aim for does suggest that they thought they could do the damage. It could be a total fabrication but then if the subject is in the air hopefully we may yet find someone to add knowledge to the debate. I am still hopeful of getting some more information on the effectiveness of the SD4HL. My apologies for missing Pamak1970's post at the bottom of page 7 which did mention their use. spec Lastly as the evidence as maintained by Jason C's post and the Western data is so damming of Rudel's ,and others claims, is there not a concerted effort to nail the lies. I have no problem with that and it seems surprising that on the entire web there is not such a thing - that I can see : )

Big Duke Thanks for the input. I do believe an individual aircraft is overmodelled and that is why I believe in a taxi rank abstraction. For game purposes players have to believe the threat is real and that is accomplished. As for your figures of an armoured vehicle per sortie I am somewhat surprised that the rate is so high. Certainly in my experience it is not that reliable. If it was I would certainly buy them more often than I do. If it was so I would expect to see far more airplanes in games than I do - they are positively rare. But then this may just be a reflection on the people I have played rather than anything else. I agree with your description of Northern Europe , the tundra , the taiga, the steppes etc as I did Northern Europe during physical geography of the world many decades ago. Am I right in thinking that the population of Russia was at the time I fairly broadly in many small villages often with mainly wooden houses. Given the road state the distance between villages and small towns was small by standards of the New Worlds? Basse Normandy is a total area of 18000sq kms of which only a fraction was fought over to start with. The amount of flak and very small fields, big hedges and small woods then compared to the rolling nature of northern Europe I suggest is more favourable to be an FB away from Normandy.I was hoping to find my detailed maps of Normandy to give the terrain specifics but that will have to wait. Therefore at this stage it is my opinion : ) but obviously if you graduate from flat plain to jagged narrow valleys there should be a corresponding decrease in FB effectiveness.

I think that the balance is right in the sense that in the game you would be a fool not to have Ackack. If we were to play to post war statistics people would spend little or nothing on AA Assets in the game which would then be ahistorical. As to their effectiveness in Normandy I had assumed a lot of TAF work was going out to shoot anything that moved. That pilots would like to go after the glory targets is understandable particularly if everything that should have been a target lay doggo whilst you were flying over. We have plenty of German accounts of how they felt under air attack, and the potential at any time during daylight for attack. We can assume that the Allied ground forces felt good about seeing the attacks going in. I would agree that all the fire and fury was not as effective as one might hope,[ and the Air Forces put out] But the overall morale effects must have been considerable --- but very difficult to work into a game : ) I think BF got it right.

ME I think you are being a little disingenuous here. Until we had Neumann's quote I was relying on Rudel statements and a fellow forum members calculation. I take it from your tone that we can believe Neumanns memory of his airspeed but not his description of tank-busting. Are you not being a little picky then. You might note that when attacking Stalin's they changed the way they attacked and that maybe because they were , apparently, flying so low they wanted to get the pass over quickly. That is pretty much the Stuka's max. level speed As for "spewing" out figures do you not find the term curiously emotive for a serious discussion. I have only ever said I did not think the figures could be extrapolated in toto and have given my reasons. " DT, in all your arguments you have made a lot of assumptions, all giving the best case (and often a lot more) for your side and expecting us to buy them. I think you misunderstand. I put up a hypothesis which if duly shot to pieces I discard. There is a possibility that whilst doing this that I and any other reader learns something new. For instances the hollow charge bomblets, how J87G's attacked etc. I am not asking anyone to buy in to my best views - I take best views as that is a far bigger target to expand the discussion on. In some respects my first tentative suspicions of how they would attack have been borne out by other people's helpful additions. That Rudel may have been a fantasist I rate a reasonable possibility. Please do not decide I am on side or the other I have no side I am just trying to tease all information and possibilities out so on a balance of probability the figures may be adjusted for claimed kills. If we look at Neumanns other statements we find the curious statement about the Stalin: "On top of its regular armor it had some metal studs with some light armor plate attached to it. Our ammunition would not actually hit through but melt through. Thus, when it would hit the light armor it would melt through it but would not be able to melt through the main armor. " That strangely sounds like hollow charge effect - is he talking about the bomblets and when talking about the other tanks killed by his bombs is this what he is talking about. With regard to CM I posted very early in the thread that I thought regardless of the actuality on the ground I thought Battlefront got it spot on for the game effect and I still believe it

MT is curious but the precedence in which it is posted suggests to me it might be Motorised? Tracked. A guess, but I reckon a good one : ) JOhn D. Salt Thanks for the info. I imagine that these figures reflect the same sort of attack as the Typhoons but at lower speeds. All useful though.

JonS. Do you owe me a turn? : ) My difficulty is that we have two different forms of attack in the west and east. The Typhoon would cruise at 530kph and top speed was 670kph. I have not yet found details of its attack speed but suspect it was near its top speed or even above it during a diving attack. Against this we have a Stuka attacking at 160-180kph with limited ammunition and slow firing rate. It is almost saying that Bren gunners, having a higher rate of fire, kill rate should be better than a snipers kill figures. Then we need to consider the terrain. I am familiar with the terrain of Normandy and believe I have a fair grasp of terrain in Eastern Europe though only having been to Rumania. Also consider the density of troops in Normandy and the actual area of combat. What I am saying is that I believe Normandy to be flak dense and also given the small area the overlap of flak would be common. The terrain is not hugely rolling and taken into account the small fields and wooded nature of the area it must have made long low approaches difficult to line up targets particularly given flak attention. Fortunately for the allies of course the major roads are dead straight : ) In eastern Europe their are vast areas of fairly flat country with gentle rolling nature to the land. Given the scale of terrain overlapping flak and generally flak density was probably lower. I refer back to Rudel saying that he would avoid flak rich areas and try to attack tank spearheads without AA support. Hermann Neumann article is very useful in this respect - tanks towing AA! Next it is said that the rockets were particularly inaccurate so that in a sense we would expect the success rate to be low. The 37mm if fired at ranges from 200- 100 metres could be relied upon to be extremely accurate! So not only do we have different flight characteristics but completely different weapons and I find it hard to do the extrapolation from Western success rates to Eastern rates. I am not saying that Rudel may not have been a fantasist but I do not accept that the extrapolation is necessarily valid. If you can tell me why with such different attack models that the success of one is precluded by the failure of the other ..... The question of Soviet silence is an interesting point. Though we have figures for an action showing considerable over statement it was using a different plane to the Stuka. I have no doubt the overclaims would have occurred if it had been Stuka's but the question would be would the 37mm tungsten rounds been more effective than the 30mm cannon. The silence may be that: 1. the effects were negligible 2. or the Soviets did not like to tell its enemies what was effective or ineffective 3. They really did not have a handle on the causes of losses. None of those reasons being particularly strong. But then again why allow a staunch Nazi get away with blatant lies? Curious. With greater access to military records and the plotting 87g's on the front perhaps this can be ascertained further : ). By Russian speakers. Incidentally I can find nothing much on the hollow charge bomblets so if anyone knows.....

On the other part of this thread : ) there is an interesting link to overclaims on tankbusting at the Dupuyinstitute. BTW I hope you all enjoyed the film : )

Thanks sturmelon. It is good to see some extra opinions relating back to data. It does seem to make a large hole in the claims figures. It would be nice to see some more info on the effectiveness of the 37mm, compared to the 30mm, and the bomblets. Strange in a sense that this is not covered in the thread. The more the info comes out the better overall information can be collated.

Sorry Jason my post despite seeming to be 7 minutes later than yours was actually for Michael and Andreas. I follow the methodology and the logic. And I can understand that if we are thinking of Rudel then your figure would give a marker as to the extent of reasonable maximum kil score. I have no problem with that at all then. Any revisions would depend on subsequent tests as to the likelihood of hits on small targets dead ahead from a plane travelling at approx. 100m.p.h. If that pans out the deadliness might then become more refined if the light of penetration figures. etc. BTW I have posted on the other thread re. the bomblets which opens a new can of worms. Incidentally my belief that some men are just naturally gifted with high degrees of hand eye coordination makes it easy for me to believe that some people can achieve the seemingly impossible. Snipers being one area, professional dart players another, champion stunt pilots. If you consider say all the people who play tennis, all the professional players and then Federer you can easily believe a huge gap between the average and the outstanding. It would be interesting to see on the basis statistics how far you can prove him a statistical freak : )

http://www.acepilots.com/usaaf_eto_aces.html Ace Meyer got 24 kills in 200 missions. Imagine how many he might have had if he had flown 2500. Probably an unbelievable figure : )

I think that there has been a obscuration of the thread to general theories of warfare and utility of weapons without looking into more detail of the case in point. I have below a Russian link but as I do not read Russian it is a little wasted on me. It is lengthy and possibly has Russian information. http://www.airwar.ru/enc/bww2/ju87g.html Jason C was a little snide at my mention of flight sims as being of any assistance. I cannot help but feel he should be addressing his remarks to all those airlines and airforces who use them in training pilots. It not occur for many years but I am sure some coding will take place eventually for WW2 planes. Now back to proving negatives. It was Jason C who said the recorde were readily available but provided no helpful links - and I suspect that the records would be in Russian but it would be a start. In the meantime I am curious that with Rudel being the highest decorated Luftwaffe pilot of the war and a staunch Nazi that the Russians , or anybody else, has not rubbished his claims. I personally do not mind if they are rubbished : ). That the Cold War was on, or that he was giving info to the US Air Force also need consideration as to why the claims were not refuted. I am merely curious. Now for some info from the 15 worthwhile sites visited so far.: "Bombload If a target was close enough the Stuka could deliver a formidable bombload.The Ju 87 could carry a 1,800 kg (3,968 lb) bomb for a short range mission : the sort of bombload carried by twin-engined aircraft through World War II and not far off that carried by American four-engine bombers during the strategic bombing of Germany. Combat experience in Russia demonstrated that hitting a tank with a heavy bomb was next to impossible even for a Stuka.On the Russian front the standard anti-tank weapon was the SD-4-H1 a 4 kg hollow-charge bomblet.Seventy eight were carried inside a 500 kg bomb case.The bomblets could penetrate the thin top armour of any Allied tank-even the massive JS-2s used by the Red Army's in 1945. More spectacular but fraught with danger for the aircrew was one of the final Stuka models : the Ju 87G-1. Introduced in 1943 , this carried a pair of 37-mm cannon which could also penetrate the top armour of a tank but the weight and drag further reduced the Stuka's already marginal performance. This armament variant was tested for the first time on a modernized Ju-87 D-5 version in the summer of 1942. The trials demonstrated that the new aircraft was a more effective anti-tank weapon than many similar Luftwaffe planes such as the Henschel Hs-129 and Junkers Ju-88P. After successful trials were over, it was decided to start serial production of the Ju-87 G in two variants - the Ju-87 G-1 and the Ju-87 G-2. The Ju-87 G-1 aircraft was a remade Ju-87 D-3, and the Ju-87 G-2 was a remade Ju-87 D-5. Both variants had dismantled wing armament. However, some of the Ju-87 G-1 planes still had one wing machine-gun for aiming purposes. Tank-destroying Ju-87 G planes were widely used on the Eastern front, especially in the battles of Kursky Duga. The Ju-87 G-2 was the aircraft flown by the famous German pilot, Heintz Ulriech Rudel - he alone destroyed 519 units of enemy armored vehicles." Two points are interesting here. Firstly that the G was shown effective in trials. I assume this means it was able to hit tank targets. Secondly and more intriguing is the bomblets which I had never heard of yet appear to be the standard anti-tank loadout. Have we been barking up the wrong weapon system? In the interests of completeness I would mention that the pods could be replaced with pods carrying 6 MG81's - sounds a bit modern doesn't it. BTW the order of battle I think January 45 showed 30+ G's alive against scores of 87D's.

"one side those besotted with the romance of air power" I do not know if that was aimed at me but in case you were wondering I am not mad on air power and fully accepted in the other thread the figures provided. I agree that in effect it was very good for terrorising the Germans and quoted from their records. What I found irritating was the extrapolation of the relative ineffectiveness of the Western Allies air against tanks to in some way prove that it could not be done on the Eastern Front in Stuka's. Jason C. inadvertantly has raised the bar by saying he did not see how, with so few shots, the pilots hit anything. If they therefore could hit neither soft vehicles or tanks then you have to ask why where they in action at all. If you say they can shoot up soft vehicles by the same token they must be able to hit tanks. The arguement then comes down to the penetration of and target area on the tank. These I have raised on the other thread - apparently without drawing any further discussion. I do not care what the claimed scores were I am simply not prepared to take West Front figures to the East and declare something is impossible. If someone has more information then let us see it. I am endeavouring to get to the truth and I care not a jot whether tank-killing is proved effective or not. Either there was a huge conspiracy to make up figures involving many pilots or it could be done and then we are in the realm of how often. I would suggest that looking at WW1 aces [who operated at the same sort of speeds] and see that some people where much better pilots than others and had a killer instinct. The first Canadian VC winner in WW1 for instance. Please do not feel I am defending the stated figures, I am asking for more evidence that they are baloney and if so by how much.

Should I mention me and Sandy have finished Bear and I reckon Tiger will end this weekend?. I suppose you will be wanting scores and things for the record .... : )

Jason C "A certain amount of dogmatism and pigheadedness is necessary in science." - Karl Popper "The only informative part about it, for me, was the rounds fired. 3-4 at each pass. Most unlikely to hit with so few rounds, it seems to me." You seem to carry your motto into the realms of WW2 history also. If it was really that unlikely that 87G's hit anything with so few rounds do you really think they would have gone on producing them? Perhaps it can be explained as a conspiracy by pilots to talk them up so they could loaf around the battlefield. Your opinion sixty years later does not seem to weigh as much as the probability that in fact it did hit and kill targets. Thanks for the link.

"What I find surprising here is how apparently counterintuitive the simple cross check of asking for the target side report seems to be for some people. There is no a priori reason to believe anything the shooter side says. There is no lack of reports from the shot side, about any of it. They are much more realistic and readily available, but for some reason people don't do the obvious thing and simply consult the targets about their experiences. " If the information is available from the Russians please post accordingly. I am always a great believer in the facts. "But the average rifleman did not take out one enemy with his rifle over the entire war." I assume you are admitting then that some men killed plenty then. Therefore we both agree that there will be people who are above average and rack up good scores. What is your view on Wittman ? Has his efforts beem checked on the Eastern Front?