Triumvir

u r a torll, and eye cliam my two fifty.

Jason, as an ex-gunner, you should know quite well that men can carry significantly more than 60lbs of ammo across distances more than a room's length. If you've ever had to do laps of a deployment ground with round overhead (a particularly unpleasant haze), you recognize that a man can carry about 100 lbs at least 200m before onset of exhaustion. BTS has, I believe, incoporated an abstracted ferrying system into support weapons, which may reduce that load even further. If your assumptions are correct wrt the ammo firepower and all things are equal, then a modification to the ammo count is well justified. But if it is in fact SOP for each MG42 team member to carry approximately 4000 rounds, then things should stand. As an interjection, I believe that 7.62x51 isn't that much lighter than 7.92x57. When I was in the GPMG section of a platoon during training, along with the tripod the No 2 gunner carried 750 rounds of MG ammo on a frame (though the frame could hold 1000 rounds.) I submit that the following breakdown for a HMG42 team is not unreasonable: 3 x ammo carrier -- 750 rds each 1 x tripod carrier -- 500 rds each 1 x MG gunner -- 250 rds each 1 x section commander -- 250 rds each which comes to 3750 rds; not that far away from the 4000 rds you suggest. Does this make the MG1917 underpowerd? Perhaps; but if the MG1917 accurately reflects SOP, then perhaps we should call it overpriced. Anyone know any details about the organization of an HMG42 section? I can't find details in the Handbook of German Forces.

The beauty of firepower demonstrations is that they teach you _exactly_ how much to respect your weapons. A 50 round 7.62 NATO belt can cut a nice ragged foot wide hole through a 6-inch concrete wall. However, it is possible that a pistol round may be stopped by a car door, depending on the round. Not all the movie myths are completely ungrounded.

Yeah, but it happens about as often as it does in real life. Which is to say, not very. Which makes sense, since if you have ever been near a moving tank, you will know exactly how conscious an infantryman would be of the treads waiting to grab him and turn him into muddy strawberry jam.

I came from a Commonwealth pattern army, so I know just how much square bashing the Brits do. There is something to the idea of showing your best on parade -- but I prefer to think of armies as necessary evils, which should exist only to crush their enemies as quickly as possible, so that their soldiers can go back to being civilians. All the discipline you learn on parade can be taught in the field, and more -- is it harder to stand ramrod straight on a parade square for two hours, or is it harder to keep on going in the thirteenth kilometer of the sixteen klick route march? Which gives you more pride at the end? I've done both, and surviving the route march made me feel a lot better than the rest. As for relying on your pals, try setting up camouflage for any vehicle and I guarantee you that it takes more reliance on your pals than doing a perfect shoulder arms. I'd rather have instead of a parade a battle course where the new recruits come staggering back after their eight mile advance to contact, with their parents and friends looking on as they leap and bound up a hill, relying on each other's aim and ability. War is nasty, dirty, unpleasant, and recruits should be so damn good at it that they have to do it as little as possible -- and what better way to prove that to themselves and those that they will protect than to actually put that training into practice? The corporals stripes I got after a four klick forced march to the top of a hill meant a whole lot more to me than the beret I put on for passing out when I was a recruit. The "parade" we did at the top of the hill was sloppy compared to the perfection of our passing out; but it meant that I was a soldier, not a dressing dummy.

Aaargh, 24 hours sleeplessness plays bloody havoc with my spelling and grammar. Anyway, to respond to tero: No plan may survive contact intact, I believe is the saying. Plans can and do survive contact; standard battle drills are a perfect example of those. As for virtual force projections, I don't think that the Sierra Leonians hammered by Brit Paras felt that to be virtual at all. I don't see what ethnic cleansing has to do with using conscripts versus professionals in peacekeeping ops. As for vanishing, Stalin may have been a bastard, but he was right. The Serbs are always the bad guys in the US media, since the media's need for a simple Manichean dichotomy fits that well; not so many people think about what the Bosnian Muslims or the Croats did to the Serbs, and what they would have done had they been in the same position as the Serbs. This doesn't excuse the Serbs one bit; but it hopefully will make the picture a bit more rounded. Who decides whether victories are Pyrrhic? Historians... 8) As for change coming from the inside, the change was started by the bombings, in a classic Douhetian style. The effect of the bombings was probably the same as any other bombing campaign throughout the last century, but coupled with internal unrest, was enough to topple the government -- and good riddance to them too.

I'd like to see BTS expose the map format for CM II so that we can do cool stuff like stitching area of operation maps together, or taking a zoomed in view of one particular portion of a map. This would make meta-campaign programming _much_ easier.

I've seen plunging fire/beaten zone creation been covered in our GPMG manuals (the MAG) but have never actually practiced it. Maybe the infantry does it, but the artillery already has a reasonable capability for indirect fire... 8)

Well, personally -- and you being an ex-conscript too, I think you have the same opinion as I do -- I think that professional militaries are overrated and legends in their own minds. Conscript Bundeswehr tankers have been able to compete and beat Canadian, British and US tankers; let's not even go into the adverse selection/moral hazard effect inherent in professional militaries. Nonetheless, for force projection purposes, professional militaries are far better suited than conscript armies; and as you rightly point out, the majority of military interventions have been force projections in response to political needs. Fewer people -- not to say no people, but fewer people -- mourn the loss of military professional when compared to the loss of conscripts because there is a sense of "well, that's what they're paid for" that isn't as applicable to conscripts. The Somalis may have achieved what they were after, but the cost they paid to do so was probably in excess of the gain from their achievement; much like that of the Vietnamese, who undisputedly won the war, but crippled themselves by doing so. Pyrrhic victories aren't. For Kosovo, I believe that the Danish and Norwegian battalions gave a good accounting of themselves; as for the "air war", it was as inflated as all other "air wars" are -- the latest BDAs are far less flattering than they were at the time (and correspondingly less publicised.) Arguably, the propaganda from the publicised BDAs was the key in persuading Serbians to back down, and not the actual damage done. I think that this is the first actual case where Douhetian practice came close to theory; and I don't think it's likely to be repeated.

Better than all that, have a master list of all units that the player can access so that they can jump to those units. That way you don't have to worry about coding formations into the game; they can be more quickly found by the user and can be found throughout the rest of the game. I hesitate to mention Steel Panthers...

Alas, I can't; the only info I've seen on it has been through the Beeb, for obvious reasons.

Calling any recent involvement with professional forces against guerillas an arsekicking for the professionals seems somewhat... shaded. I'd argue that losing 800 Somalians is a pretty piss-poor trade off for 30 odd Americans; the Americans simply weren't that valuable. Incidentally, the above is a very deliberate troll, and I'd like to see who is still stupid enough to take the hook, even when it's being quite so explicitly displayed. In Sierra Leone, the Brits did quite a number on the rebels, as did the NORBATs in the Balkans. Let's not even talk about East Timor; parts of the Indonesian army may be hard bastards, but the rabble they sponsored certainly wasn't. As for Chechnya, I don't suppose you're seriously going to call the Russian army professional.

You can do drills that don't involve crashing a left heel down on the parade square. We were taught many IA drills that were to be carried out without hesitation, from clearing a stoppage to, when being ambushed, charging into the sprung ambush. I've done my share of precision, and it can be fun -- but the amount of cohesion you get out of parade drill can be better found in the field, doing battle drills; and you feel more like a soldier when you're muddy and hefting a weapon, instead of being all dressed up with blackened boots and beret.

Berli, ooops, forgot the e in leMG. As for SdKfz, effectively for lcm's purposes those would be halftracks. As said, the tanks etc would get their own naming conventions. As far as I'm aware, no armoured vehicle had a Kfz number. As for FlaK, I'd always thought that it was Flieger Abwehr Kannon -- defence against fliers, not planes.

And from the other side: Pz -- Panzer (Tank) PzG -- PanzerGrenadier (Armoured Infantry) SdKfz -- Effectively, halftrack (actually, designation for all armoured vehicles, but tanks etc usually were called by their mark name) FlaK -- Anti-aircraft (literally, flier defence cannon) PaK -- Anti-tank (literally, tank defence cannon) Schwerepunkt -- Attack point (literally, heavy point, where all the mass of the attacker goes) Kessel -- Encirclement (literally cauldron/kettle) Schlacht -- Battle, engagement (also combined with kessel for encirclement battle) Stellung -- Position JagdPz -- Hunting tank (a tank that hunts, typically a well armoured low-silhouette tank destroyer) PzJager -- Tank hunter (typically a poorly armoured high-silhouette tank destroyer -- there is a key difference) Jabo -- Fighterbomber (contraction of jagd bomber) FaustPatrone -- literally fist cartridge, another name for the PzFaust lMG -- surprise, surprise, light machine gun sMG -- heavy machine gun (and the two aren't always the same weapon in German usage -- there were still Maxim 08s in the OOB of some stomach divisions as well as Vz26s)

I second Panzer76. Drill is good for parades and looking all pretty and military (read Norman Dixon for his opinions on what square bashers are) but pretty useless for modern combat -- even for WW2 combat. Honestly, though, I like the idea of having my opponent advance towards me parade ground style. Then I could snigger to myself <accent stereotype="German" heaviness="thick"> -- Hans! Look! Ze Amerikaners never learn, do zey? -- Ja, Karl, it's like cutting trees down mit chainsaw. -- Ooooh, Fritz! Look at zat one get cut in two! -- Nein, Karl, watch _zat_! Dress ranks _now_, you arschelochen! </accent> If they're British, then there's lots of Somme jokes too. As for order in chaos... I refer you to Clausewitz...

An LMG is not a GPMG. A GPMG can be used as an LMG, but an LMG cannot be used as a GPMG. The Minimi is generally accepted to be an LMG. A MAG is a GPMG. Put the Minimi on a tripod and you still have an LMG; it cannot be used to create a decent sized beaten zone through sustained fire. Terminology may be important, but I suggest that your command of terminology is a tad sloppy, or at least a little vague. Could you define what an LMG means to you? To me, it means an automatic weapon that can change barrel, has firing support -- typically a bipod -- and a reasonably large supply of ready ammo. No modern Commonwealth pattern army that I am aware of ever practices firing a MG, whether L, GP or H in 20 round bursts when doing aimed fire. Perhaps -- perhaps -- for creating a beaten zone at 500m, long bursts of 10-20 rounds may be fired, but otherwise, aimed -- as in the gunner actually aiming at something instead of setting the traverse and elevation wheels -- fire is only done in 3-5 round bursts. SOP in American units may be different, but most of the rest of the world works on either Eastern Bloc or Commonwealth pattern. As for heat dispersion, the standard number of rounds that we were supposed to put through our LMGs before swapping barrels was 200 -- easy to remember because it was two full drum mags. I don't see that being that difficult on a Bren -- 7 mags doesn't seem that hard to fire off without wrecking a barrel.

The assault drums for the MG34/42 are based on the same principle as the assault magazine for the FN MAG; a snail drum which holds a few ready rounds so that the GPMG gunner can fire on the move. Once a good position is found, the GPMG gunner drops down, opens the bipod and lets the loader join rounds from the box to the rounds coming out from the drum. Like the drum for the MAG, the MG42 drums seriously affected the weight distribution of the MG, dragging it to the left. The MG34 had an evenly distributed 60 round dual-drum, but that was never converted for use with the MG42. Source -- some book I recently read on contemporary live firing of German automatic weapons. Pretty good read, covering all the auto weapons from the Mauser Schnellfeuer to the MP-44.

Ehhh... you know all these trolls. Always accusing others of their own failings...

The new Charlie Golf is only 8kg?! Damn, I'm glad I wasn't an infantryman, otherwise I'd be cursing and screaming after lugging its older brother over 48 klicks... I never got to fire it, but I got to play with it in one exercise; big, _ugly_ piece of metal.

Damn... I still remember seeing old, really hokey British training films about the dangers of misfires. I'm surprised you didn't see the misfire when you cleared the range... you never stared down into the chamber, did you? I learnt a _healthy_ respect for the weapon after a) seeing a firepower demonstration and having someone misfire blanks in the middle of my section. I can imagine _exactly_ what your squadmates must have looked like... 8)

Scipio, I think _most_ people are allergic to Zyklon B! By the way, when I was last in Frankfurt I saw La Traviata done up to be in 1940s Paris. I still remember shivering when I saw the General Staff officers pop onto stage...

Heh... I love trolling for pendants... 8) But to answer your understatement point... yes, it was a deliberate understatement; but I think that there could have been a decent place for the Valentine as an infantry support tank; but that the Sherman did a better job of it.

Slap, I have had the same problem with M16s too, but did you really turn the rifle over to make sure it wasn't a hang fire? The standard drill for that, at least the one I remember, was to eject the magazine, reload a fresh one and work the action. Besides, a single misfiring cartridge probably wouldn't be lethal outside of a chamber. The propellant wouldn't be able to send the round any great distance as there's no forcing cone to funnel the gas.

Stalin's Organ... by hitting the hook, you too have proved yourself a _pendant_... 8) as in that which is, well, pendulous. Back to the fire, I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the Valentine was not an optimal tank by 1944 standards. What detracts from its merits is its poor upgradability -- introduced in 1940 and voluntarily taken out of production in 1944. (Apparently the last Mark, the XI, had the same 75mm gun as the Churchill or Comet but that wasn't sufficient for 1944 needs) As for the infantry/cruiser divide, I don't think that the doctrine is all _that_ flawed; the Germans used the same principle throughout the war, or tried to at least, while the Russians did so throughout the war. An IS-2 is much more an infantry tank than a general tank; same goes for the SU series. As for Scipio, the victim mentality doesn't quite work here. Other countries may not have wanted to let Hitler build up a military, but to them that was a damn sight better than fighting another Somme; and Hitler himself didn't want to go to war till at least 1942. Britain spent a lot of money on the colonies, and I'm damn grateful for it. I'm happy as hell that we kicked the Brits out, but far better being ruled by the British, with all their classism and racism, than by the French or the Dutch, with their casual brutality. The British did (a little) more than paying lip service to the rule of law. Personally, I wonder how the Black Prince would have done, had it made it into Europe in CM scope. A Churchill's armour with a Firefly's punch; not to mention that the Centurion would have torn a huge hole in a Panther's, er, flanks.