dieseltaylor

I have these two which are very detailed Haynes/The Tank Museum Tiger Tank Panzerkamfwagen VI Tiger I Ausf. E {Sdkfz 181} Workshop Manual Tiger Tanks by Michael Green more info here http://www.alanhamby.com/tigerlinks.shtml

My reading of CMBN is that there are wide variances in spotting times and kills such that if I were running matched scenarios I would confidently expect these random factors to have an important bearing on the players results. Not necessarily decisive but sufficient to affect results in some battles. Going for a campaign means at a club level you can have several people playing on each side and the variation in each battle is not that important to the individual as he is not in competition directly with other players. We now war is luck, blood , sweat, and tears, Simply playing battles without a context is unsatisfying. There has always been a demand for a campaign side to CM and this may provide. Anyway WeBoB may be the place to give it a whirl. I will try to make some time for it but a bit hamstrung with ailing relatives. Send me an e-mail with your ideal going forward on this.

Great story. Thanks very much for reposting it now. Is there a Canadian archive for battle memoirs?

Nice going noob. It may make CMBN a more clubbable option.

Speed of traverse does get me slightly riled as the speed for 360 surely is totally irrelevant to actual combat. I may be a trifle under-read on WW2 tank engagements but I have great trouble wondering when you would ever in battle turn your turet 360 degrees. Surely you choose to turn the turret right and left taking the shortest turn to target. And 6 degrees in a second should be more than adequate. My car can beat a London bus 0-60mph but is it relevant meausre? Accelerating from 0-5mph may be far more relevant to London traffic and in that arena I suspect not much difference. Similarly with tank rotation. A couple more things. AFAIR the Sherman manual says you overshoot the target and come back manually to get rid of some technical looseness in the traverse. Also bear in mind the Tiger can swivel in its own length 3.44m to present an angled target so turret and hull movement together surely have to be a consideration? Also the Tiger has higher power to weight and lower ground pressure so is more agile and perhaps less reliant on the traverse.

I should explain that to me the restriction on how fast tanks can reverse actually has a very big effect on how a player can use them. If in real life you can rush up to a hedgeline at 25mph have some shots and reverse off at speed you are going to use them in that manner. Since Ver1.01 the speed is somwhere about 5.5mph I believe. Which I think is the compromise figure JonS refers to. The Tiger has the best reverse speed I have found which is about that. The Sherman is 3.5mph and the Churchill 2.5 mph. I think you would agree that if in RL you reverse back at a crawl then you are probably going to be a lot more careful how you position the tank than us players are. But as I said I can accept - if there is good reason- why there might be a generic for tanks. It certainly improves the realism for tanks.

Apparently JonS not only knows the inner workings of BF such as there can only be one speed, but he also knows my mind. However I have not been kicking up unduly over various tanks having the same reversing speeds though an explanation might be handy. After all if you can model forward speeds why cannot you model reversing speeds? And I accept there may be approximations. JonS I am confused as to the armoured car conundrum. If you are going to model them so their main benefit is removed why include them in the game? Eyecandy? And surely to code them that reverse = forward speed cannot be impossible! Perhaps someone from BF can advise what is going on here.

Grumpy today? I am surprised too as I thought inclines and different terrain was already modelled by BF for movement. Please confirm if this is not so. However I do know reverse is not modelled by BF for each tank and this is particularly astounding that no one realised that armoured cars would be a special case. Most WW2 grogs would be aware that armoured cars often had two drivers and the reasons why. The only two majors not to have them in their armoured cars were the USA and the USSR. And the M8 stunk as a recon vehicle.

Jon S. If I recall correctly I was suggesting special rules for buildings so that tanks immediately adjacent do not shoot the top stories. And therefore should move backwards. Other people may have other ideas but I am happy that tank to buildings is a different level coding problem from tank to tank. BTW clicking on the hyperlinks in the quote I provided works very well in opening the source.

Winkelried Do you have access to the French report on Le Panther [ I think dated 1947] derived from their experience in running them as part of the post-war armee.?

Since Version ! I have been a bit peeved with the modelling of the vehicles in terms of terms of speed. I had thought that having correct speeds was a fairly fundamental part of the game. BF respondedd to a degree by having vehicles reverese more slowly than going forward though this seems to have been done generically rather than relating to individual tanks. Following the release of CW I have played with the Daimler II armoured car which is pretty speedy doing a flying 2 kilometres in 2 minutes so roughly 60kph/42mph. More impressively the speed builds over time with increasing speed at the first few 250metre marks. In reverse it takes roughly 4:40 for a kilometre which I think works out to the generic figure of 5-6 mph. There seems to be no difference whether the turret is facing forwards or back. One might think there should be. Anyway the Daimler II has two drivers facing opposite ways and a 5 speed gearbox which allows it to travel equally fast in either direction. A very neat trick used in a lot of armoured cars to get them out of trouble speedily. I think BF need to fix this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimler_Armoured_Car

From NZ I thought this interesting for a number of resaons.

Azimaur, it is nice to meet someone honest. However you appear to miss the point I am making and then proceed to explain what I am suggesting is naughty. In RL units did not know for certain that they would be blocked by a large ditch or solid hedge or wall. We already have a god-like view and to make it even better seems to be getting away from realism. In my evil way at the start of a game under some of the suggestions here I would plot my moves to my eenemies backline and eventually establish all the routes without ever leaving the first turn!

Ah! there is real life and in game information. I had a suspicion that Panzerschrek teams were identifiable but I am confused by what is known in which level.

As a nod to unrealism I hope that the introduction of the longer range anti-tank weapons is slightly randomised. I do so hate knowing exactly what date it is decided they become available and tailoring my tactics to suit - seems so gamey for what is essentially unknown at the time by the Allies.

Thanks Bradley for those useful tips. Useful to new and old players. VAB useful

Showing the track calculated would be best - though perhaps people would play games with the knowledge and misuse the power on a battlefield where often most of it would be unknown to them. As an alternative how about it gives you a distance say 100/200 metres and then you know something is not the 20 metres you thought. That means you do not get the "benefit" of the AI showing you the routes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33894481@N04/6134304488/ This collection has a couple of WO III graves. Approximately 3000+ photos in this set

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123736/Back-70-years-mighty-Tiger-tank-Only-surviving-example-works-restored-wartime-specification.html

I have not tried it but I supsect it will be slow progress and possibly wheel damage. But I don't know. Please advise how it turns out. : )

Jesuitical Erwin : )

I think YD could provide the game and relevant turn ... to as many wh are keen to find out what is going on. Lee - what Version are you playing?

My problem with your explanation YD is that from all that I have read on tanking in WW2 crews bailed when they got hits registering. I should make clear I am not suggesting that crew would bail when sat in a major tank but the MO for Shermans was if you got hit once by a major blow you bailed because the next shot would be fatal. For Tiger II crews a major hit would need to be a relative term, frontal hits being faintly concerning but hits to the rear very worrisome. Anyone floating around in smaller vehicles will have much lower standards as what calibre is a minor problem. For Puma crew penetrating hits from the rear is a near panic situation and it is crew reaction rather than the how long before the vehicle blows up is the concern. The crew morale area does seem a trifle wayward. Incidentally the Puma has a rear facing driveable position so is somewhat better off than most in terms of being surprised. I wonder if this is modelled. However if the radio-operator says hey boys there is a Greyhound behind us firing one might believe they have the extra time to evaluate their chances of swinging around the turret and shooting their enemy. Now if they correctly evaluate 10mm armours chance of defeating 37mm cannon at close range correctly they will realise that odds are bad and either they drive like buggery or bail. Given the rest of YD's experiments it suggests that bailing was a good idea as they lost 80% of the tests. There is an additional point that the Greyhound gunner probably knows that the turret is where the humans are and where the gun is and a good place to aim rather than the diesel engine block. I have a nasty suspicion that the game models centre of target even when for a human at close range shooting the vitals seems sensible. Perhaps YD can quantify how many were hull hits and the range and version number. From playing Version1 I speak as a man who nailed two members of a Sherman crew with separate hits from an 88mm decapitating the TC and then the radio operator that replaced him and poked his head out of the tank. All in the space of a minute which finally resulted in my 88mm dying to the Sherman. It seems to me that there are problems with casualties in tanks vapourising so that the remaining crew fight on as though nothing untoward is happening to their morale OR their physical ability to carry on at the same speed. Two dead bodies in the turret basket I think would make the job awkward for the gunner. At least in CM*1 we had a stunned effect. Incidentally YD refers us to a good point: YD has not proved it is colossal bad-luck as it might be as common as 1 in 10. It is a very valid case for more testing. : )

Is it the design feature that the gun commander can see an area but the gun being feet lower cannot? I have seen other posters suggest that visibility is not from the cannon mouth.

Great take on the story : )