jasoncawley@ameritech.net

You specs don't dwell on the biggest problem with the French tanks, which wasn't kinks in their armor but that one-man turret. The short 75 in the hull is meant to shoot up infantry and guns with HE. Vs. tanks, the higher velocity 47 in the turret is supposed to do the job. But the tank commander has to load that gun, aim it, fire it, tell the driver where to go, find targets, rotate the turret itself, etc. Way too much work for one guy. And the turret is physically tiny, but must accomodate the commander, the recoiling gun, its breech block, room to load the ammo with the block open, etc. They also put only 1 radio in each tank platoon, thinking that would be enough. By comparison, the Germans used 2-3 man turrets (other than the Pz I MG tank), with at least distinct commander and gunner, and often a seperate loader too, with a smaller caliber gun thus easier ammo handling as well. The French tanks proved that heavy armor and high caliber armament were not the key to effective tanks. For their day, they had those things. The Germans had larger crews, faster rates of fire, more radios, and faster tanks, above all better tank doctrine of course - and beat the tar out of them. But they'd be fun to play with, of course. So long as whatever system is used models those over-tasked French tank commanders - now there is an unsung, impossible, and much put-upon job...

Probably. The Japanese fought a border war with the Russians in the late 30s, along the Manchurian border. The Russians trounced them. Tanks were certainly used, and the Russians used many light tanks at the time (as well as some reasonably armored T-26s if memory serves). I'd be surprised if a few BT-7s or whatever they were, weren't knocked out by the Japanese in the course of that fighting, some of them by their own tanks. Another possibility is that some Stuarts might have been knocked out by them. The army and marines both used some Stuarts, anmd particularly liked the canister rounds made for the 37 MA, and the protected MG nest effect. But I do not know of any documented case of one of those being knocked out by Japanese armor. The small guns on the Japanese tanks should have been up to it (unlike Shermans), but I just do not know if they every clashed enough for it to happen.

"there is absolutely no difference between FFE anywhere on the map and FFE on a TRP" As a former artilleryman, I have to disagree somewhat. A pre-registered TRP, before an engagement, is often chalked on the gun. The battery and the FO both know exactly where it is, and not just as "the direction the battery is now firing". With other FFEs, the battery does not know that/whether the shooting is hitting the desired location. When the FO wants to hit a TRP, he just gives the registration point, and the battery puts the guns on the chalked directions and fires. When he instead calls to drop 150 and continuing firing for effect, the battery commander quickly figures what that is in mils based on where he is (or remembers what that is), calls a new deflection or quadrant, and the guns adjust to it, and then fire. The first process, in practice, goes smoothly "in parallel" for all guns of the battery at once. The second doesn't, always. Unless they play the back and forth game of battery head calling the new coordinates, each gun responding with ready when on it, one of the gunners or AGs will screw it up and adjust the wrong way. The reason for the misunderstanding may be which end of the guns you are thinking from. To the FO or front commander calling for fire, there is no difference in how much he knows about where the shells are landing. But he is not the person making the adjustment, he is only telling the battery what that adjustment is. It is not his knowledge of the situation that matters. Yes, the battery commander knows pretty much the same. But that does not mean every E-3 on a hydraulic handle or elevation wheel knows. But he can see a chalk line with a big "A" next to it as plain as his sergeant's nose...

"not truly operational in the sense that the user had only limited control over theater level flow operations" He is talking about the automatic and abstract character of logistics in TOAW. The player can influence supply states by not moving too far or fighting too much, by keeping roads or rail lines open and staying near them, and by appropriate placement of HQ units and the like. But he is not in charge of any of the logistics operations proper. The comparison is something like PacWar, in which the player can put together individual convoys of merchant ships to adequately supply particular bases or units, and the like. In TOAW, the supply system effects everything your units can do, but its mechanics are completely out of player control and its rules are largely hidden from the player to boot. It is a trial and error matter just to figure out how far a motorized force can afford to move across a desert in North Africa in a day. You cannot plan such things by manipulating the real constraints on the logistic factors yourself, as in "I can get the 101st Motorized to Point 151 today, but only if I strip out these trucks and leave these infantry divisions on the defense, and I'll have lower artillery ammo for 3 days along this part of the line", etc. Instead, the game just does those things by its own procedure, which you cannot directly integrate with your military plans. Doing so is key to real operational warfighting. This is a drawback of TOAW that is particularly noticeable on some unit scales and in some theaters or environments. In the large scale Korean War scenario it doesn't matter much. In some others, e.g. in the desert, it is bread and butter stuff, the real story, and the game keeps it out of your hands. I suspect that is what the guy noticed. Incidentally, they are smart to use them and they should have supported these things more back in the board wargame days to boot. People like John Butterfield made designs that are extremely good at the sorts of things they are talking about, in terms of the demands made on players, what one learns, etc. By comparison Sid Meier is a kids game, not in the same league at all with the others they are talking about. One interesting item in their discussion is the difficulty level they apparently found in the games, PacWar in particular. That was indeed a fine game, though with a clumsy interface (originally designed in pre-mouse DOS days, with tons of menus hidding every which where). But it is not all that hard to master if you know the history reasonable well, and the AI is no great challenge compared to decent human play (unless you take the Japanese in the late war, I suppose).

The big difference, of course, is the Vickers was water cooled, while the others are air cooled. There is no question that water cooled allows longer sustained fire before overheating - in return for much heavier weight and a few extra things that can go wrong. But the rest of your comments seem slightly off to me. For instance, the figure of 8300 rounds on average from each gun, over 12 hours, hardly amounts to "firing continuously". That is 83 belts, or 7 per hour, while the cyclic rate of fire is more like that many rounds per minute. So it represents the usual use of machineguns, firing in short bursts on and off. Even the water cooled guns had to do that to keep from overheating, and also to avoid wasting ammo. The weight the Vickers packs in its water cooling jacket is made up for in an MG42 team (partially) by extra barrels and kit. Even in squad LMG use, the assistant gunner was issued two extra barrels and a pair of asbestos gloves to change barrels while hot. The only MGs in the game that can come even close to firing continuously are the vehicle mounted coaxial MGs on tanks and the like, which had several thousand round ammo supplies. But if the trigger were literally held down continually, they would #1 certainly jam and #2 exhaust even a several thousand round supply in about 5 CM game turns. The limit on MG fire simply is not how fast they can fire at the enemy. It is the available ammo and the heat of the barrel and the proper feed of the belts through the gun. Every CM MG is firing on and off, not continually, even if given a target to shoot at every turn. As for what a jam represents, it can mean any of a number of things. A twig in the ammo belt fed into the gun, or a twist in the belt breaking the ammo links, or the links and spent brass of the fired rounds clogging the feed or bolt return, or a "cook off" round in the chamber hammered but not fired, or changing barrels on an air-cooled gun, or leaking or steaming coolant on a water-cooled gun, or the tripod falling over. Sometimes clearing a jam is as simple as flipping the gun over and banging stuff loose. Sometimes it is a round stuck in the barrel or a broken firing pin or a pierced water case, etc, and the gun it out for good. The most common stoppages are not going to vary from one gun to another, since most of them are related to misfeeds. A crewed HMG on a tripod, especially inside a building or bunker, would realistically face fewer of those than a squad LMG, bipod mounted and fired prone from the dirt,sometimes without the AG-loader being where he is supposed to be. But it will happen, and the more often the gun is fired the more likely it becomes. I suspect CM just makes it random and equal for crew served MGs. There is definitely some abstraction in that. The US M2 50 cal, for instance, was much more reliable than the lighter types, largely because of its considerably lower rate of fire (more can go wrong in one bolt-return cycle if it happens fast). The MG42 with its highest ROF would generally "jam" more often, but it would also clear more easily since many problems can be fixed with a spare barrel, which they carried and the others generally did not. The crew quality should also certainly make a difference, especially in clearing jams and getting back to firing instead of breaking the gun or giving up. But also, more experienced crews should jam less to start with, because they learned to use shorter, more frequent and aimed bursts instead of long sprays, which kept the gun cooler and reduced jamming chances from feed problems (there usually isn't a twist in 10 rounds of a belt, but in 50 there can easily be - the AG-loader has more time to do his job with shorter bursts). For what it is worth...

TacOps is modern, Combat Mission is WW II. TacOps is 2-D (with some elevations, to be sure, like a standard contour map), while CM is 3-D. In TacOps, the areas covered and the ranges of the weapons, and their lethality, are much higher than in CM. A typical CM map is 800-1000 yards on a side, and individual map "squares" (which will hold several units) are 20 yards. TacOps uses 1000x1000 meter grid squares, with ~200 yards the fineness of the deployments typically, and overall maps up to 10 kilometers on a side. If you are familiar with the scales of older board wargames, TacOps is more like Panzerblitz scale, while CM is more like Squad Leader scale. The vehicle units in TacOps are platoons of 3-5 vehicles, although they can be split up into smaller individual units. Same with gun-like pieces. Each game modules things with 60 minute simultaneous execution turns, and loses of single vehicles or men. Many of the tactical principles are similar, although lots of things are changed by the presence of modern ATGMs, ICM artillery rounds, thermal sights etc. Infantry also tends to play a smaller role in TacOps, because of the scale and the power of modern weapons and the speed differentials. It ambushes, it sometimes redeploys on APCs to new locations and ambushes again. A dismounted infantry attack in TacOps rarely goes anywhere. By contrast, infantry fighting is the heart of CM, with vehicles supplimenting it but the basic pace and scale usually set by the infantry. CM also models command and morale effects in much greater detail for related reasons. If you think of TacOps as a modern version of Panzerblitz for the computer, made realistic rather than gamey, that is not far off. You can think of CM as 3-D Squad Leader. Both share certain Battlefront innovations that work very well with the computer, like simultaneous order execution in one minute turns, excellent line of sight tools, and detailed modeling of all types of fire. I happen to think highly of both systems, and I look forward to the planned CM2 covering the Russian front in WW II. The biggest "problem" I find with both is their proven ability to vaccum up time.

On the subject of Germans in the Foreign Legion (not just SS by any means), see in particular Bernard Fall's books on the French in Vietnam, "Street Without Joy" and "Dien Bien Phu". There were entire battalions of this description, and the Viet Minh wiped many of them out. By the time of the Algeria war there were fewer, but they seem to have left a (black) mark on the French Paras in particular, after their service together in Vietnam. As for the fellows thoughts on what to do himself, a few pieces of advice. #1 is to understand that Napoleon was right when he said that the principle requirement of a soldier is a willingness to bear hardship. Be sure that is something you can do and will glory in doing, instead of suffering it as an affront. #2 is that I would advise you to concentrate most on fitness and conditioning and self-discipline. Young men interested in the military are often full of thoughts on tactics and want to make a study of it, and that is all to the good. But it is not soldiering, and the time for it will come later. Many young men find the idea of the calling attractive, then later find they do not have the temperment for real discipline and subordination to superiors and the extreme physical demands of service life. It also helps to be a neatness freak in every respect, polite, formal, and reserved to an extreme degree compared to civilian life. #3 is a practical fact about military organizations, which can prove disillusioning or act as a pitfall. Large bureaucracies do not care about your ambitions. If you expect a particular branch of service, program of training, rank after completing xyz, then have every i dotted and t crossed before you put your name to paper. Yes, you may want later to switch to another specialty, or to attend this or that school, which you will have to qualify for. But do not expect things to "work out later", or to bend to your desired career path. Plan ahead and insist on things before you get in. The bureaucracy is at its most reasonable when it still wants to recruit you; use that. ROTC is a fine start of that process, but plan it much farther ahead that that. Like, "I will be a jump-qualified captain in the airborne by this date of my career, with a company command", then work backward from that to everything else you need to make it so. Ask people what those "everythings" are, and not your recruiters or ROTC superiors, but vets who have done it or are in that position now. The last large item, #4, I would advise you about the thing that actually makes military life attractive and rewarding, at least to those with the temperment for it. The military runs on honor, on the known praise and high opinion of capable superiors for true ability. Honor is valuable in proportion to its scarcity, and the justice with which it is dispensed. The way the military makes men crave honor more than life itself, is to reduce the regular supply of honor and respect to starvation levels, then to hand out praise with an eye dropper. This is not to everyone's taste, to say the least. I have one other reading recommendation for you. It is a book on early fighting by the U.S. in Vietnam called "We were soldiers once and young", by General Moore and Joe Galloway. I particularly call your attention to chapter 15 "Night Fighters", and a young man (at the time) named Myron Diduryk, who was an infantry company captain in the 101st Airborne. Diduryk was Ukrainian. General Moore has this to say about him - "He was eager and aggressive yet totally professional; over the next three days and nights he would emerge as the finest battlefield company commander I had ever seen, bar none. He operated on the basic principle of maximum damage with minimum loss." You might find him an interesting character. Whatever you decide to do, the best of luck to you.

I mean starting from the very begining and going all the way through to mate, both sides trying. An upper bound on particles in the universe is around 10^90. If an average game of chess runs 45 moves on each side and at each move a player has 10 legal moves, you get that many legal games of chess, since the possibilities go as (possibilities per move) to the power of the number of moves. And in fact, 40-60 moves is quite typical for chess games, and the number of options is higher than 10 for most of the game (it is 20 on the first move and can be as high as 30 on the second). Incidentally, Go "blows up" even faster than chess. There is no complexity about how pieces move, but the larger board and higher number of moves more than makes up for it. Strategy games are for all intents and purposes arbitrarily complicated beasties, beyond the simplest (solvable) kids games. In fact, realism, following known working strategies, a limited number of dominant ideas that work in particular common situations, and other such rule-of-thumb means of lopping off huge parts of the "possibility tree", all simplify more than they complicate. The underlying complexity is still there, even when all those things aren't.

The velocity of any particular type of round out of a particular gun varies with a number of factors. It may help to go through the actual physical process to understand these. The round is loaded into the breech of the gun, which is then closed and sealed with a rotating lock, like on a safe. Except for larger artillery pieces, the ammo comes in one piece with powder already inside the shell - larger artillery (155mm and up, generally) varies the powder charge with seperately loading powder, depending on the range. Intermediate artillery pieces like 105mm sometimes have the powder charge varied by the loaders (at the same time they add the fuse to the shell), by literally opening the round and removing some of the full charge if necessary. Those exceptions are basically only important for indirect fire, but it gives you an idea of the factors the long range arty has to play with, in order to get a fire mission to the right grid square on the map, 5-10 miles away. After the shell is in the tube and the breech is closed, the round is primed to be ready to fire (on smaller cannons this isn't necessary). Small shells will be fired by a firing pin directly, just like a bullet out of a rifle - the impact of the firing pin sets off a detonator cap at the back of the round. Larger cannons use a priming round, like a small shotgun shell, inserted into a hole in the breech (itself then locked off) which is fired by the pin (itself pulled by a trigger or lanyard). The explosion from the primer hits the back of the shell or powder to set it off. By one of the mechanisms mentioned, the powder charge at the back of the shell is ignited. It then burns, chemically reacting. The burning ignites the portions of the powder charge adjacent to the existing fire, and rapidly (microseconds) spreads forward through the rest of the charge. As this burning is taking place, the material of the powder charge and the air packed in with it is tranformed into a hot gas, vaporized by the heat of the exploding powder. Ahead of the powder charge sits the payload of the shell, or the shell proper. This is the part being thrown at the enemy. It is meant to rest snugly in the tube it sits in, and sometimes its width will change very slightly in the course of the shot. Normally, this is a slight expansion of the round which causes it to "grip" the grooves cut in the side of the tube, the "rifling", which will impart spin to the round as it moves down the tube. Some special rounds narrowed as they went down the tube, by collapsible fins on the side of the round getting squeezed down to a narrower exit opening than the breech at the back of the gun, a technique meant to raise the final velocity imparted to the shell. What is pushing the shell down the tube is the expansion of the hot gas behind. Just like the force of a car's piston, the underlying phenomenon is a hot gas creating a strong pressure on one side of a moving part, stronger than the pressure on the other side. The difference creates the force that drives the shell forward. That is the thermodynamic description. At the molecular physics level, what is happening is that the molecules of the gas in the firing chamber are moving extremely rapidly - that is the high temperature. They hit the back of the shell and push it forward, rebounding off of all the other walls of the chamber and breech-block and hitting the back of the shell over and over again. The shell is the only wall that is moving easily, but the barrel as a whole will also recoil from the "equal and opposite" reaction, created by these many little collisions. The barrel is very heavy and only moves back a few feet, with a recoil mechanism transfering much of the recoil force to the entire tank or gun, which is held in place by its weight, spiked-in trails for field guns, etc. As the gas expands in the chamber behind the shell, it loses pressure. The same number of molecules are flying about, but they have more space to roam so they hit the back of the shell less often each. The powder charge of the round is designed to burn progressively up the charge as the expansion continues (it starts right away), to keep up the pressure behind the shell as long as possible. See, more space behind the shell is lowering the pressure. But more powder having burned is raising the temperature to match. The maximum overpressure behind the shell will occur while it is still in the tube, some ways down the tube, when the powder is all burned. As soon as the shell leaves the muzzle, other stuff starts mattering. The pressure of the gas behind the shell drops enourmously, as now it can "vent" around the shell - since each little molecule in the gas is moving much, much faster than the round itself. Some guns, especially larger ones, have a "muzzle brake" just before the exit of the barrel, to channel this venting to the sides. This reduces the recoil from the whole shot. Oops, one other thing to understand while the round is still going down the barrel. For many antitank rounds, the round goes supersonic inside the tube. That means that the air in front of it is not pushed out of the way by a preceeding wave of force from the shell through air, but is instead being pushed by the shell itself. (Sonic, the speed of sound, just means the speed waves of force can travel in the air by air pushing on air). So when the round finally leaves the tube, it is often going several times the speed of sound, and is therefore preceeded by a bow shockwave just like that which creates sonic booms from jet planes (though smaller). As the overpressure behind the shell drops, it instead starts to decelerate as it meets air resistence, plowing through the air - the pressure in front of the shell is now much higher than the pressure behind it, so it begins to slow down just about the instant it leaves the tube. The "muzzle velocity" is therefore (usually) the peak velocity of the round. Some special ammo types also change again on clearing the barrel. These are rare in WW II, used by Brit TD units in particular, but much more common today as the kinks have been worked out of the idea. These are called "sabot" rounds, APDS or varieties thereof. A sabot round sheds the outside of the round just after leaving the barrel, leaving a much thinner, long, arrow-like core of denser metal as a penetrator. Like shooting a metal arrow at somebody. The narrower cross section after leaving the barrel means less air resistence in front of the round - while the full width of the round while still in the barrel means full "push" from the pressure of the gas before leaving the barrel. Early sabot rounds had problems with the aim, as the sabot exterior falling away did not always happen uniformly on all sides, which could deflect the direction of the remaining "arrow" and thus throw off the aim. But APDS is rare in WW II anyway. That is the basic physical process. The length of the barrel enters because how long the pushing is going on, before the slowing down after clearly the barrel, will certainly change with different barrel lengths. That does not mean, however, that the longer the barrel the higher the velocity without limit, as though a 1 mile barrel would shoot super-fast. There is a point down the barrel where maximum overpressure is achieved, as explained before. The shell is still speeding up, but not by much after that. If the barrel is too long, it can even slow down as the friction with the sides of the barrel outweighs the remaining overpressure behind in the expanded space. So getting the right length was and is an engineering problem, not a simple more-is-better affair. But generally, the guns designed for longer lengths are higher velocity guns. They may be using larger charges behind the shells (diameter the same, but length different e.g.) - they may change the composition of the powder to time how it burns down the tube better, to meet a designed length - the barrel itself, or the breech block to close it, or the recoil mechanism to withstand the discharge, may be different and thus allow a heavier or a lighter powder charge for the same diameter of shell, without wrecking the gun or dismounting it. Tighter rifling can impart more spin to stabilise the round in flight, and it can "fly" better by wobbling less, like a tight spiral in football, and thus keep more of its muzzle velocity farther into its range. There are enough factors that the ballistics question is basically an empirical one. You have some gun, and some round, and you see what they in fact achieve together. In the design process they are certainly doing more than that, and trying to find the right length, rifling, powder charge, and other gun characteristics to get the best performance. You only know the result of their efforts by testing, but the general principles are enough to see that longer, physically heavier barrels of the same diameter will have been designed to achieve, and usually will achieve, much higher muzzle velocities than shorter, physically lighter barrels. Indeed, to a gun designer the overall gun weight is more of a constraint than the caliber. He can pick between a larger diameter and greater length and other features that equally increase the weight, and allow higher velocities to be achieved. That is a trade off, with both heavier options able to provide increased hitting power if the overall weight can go up. The designer picks the one he thinks will work better in practice. So do not be surprised that a long 75 on a 40+ ton late-war tank is a more serious weapon than a short, light 75 on a 20 ton early-war tank. The caliber may be the only thing they have in common. I hope this is helpful.

The Archer is a beautiful weapon, because it can knock out just about anything the Germans have. But it is easy to knock out in return. The trick to using it effectively is "keyhole" sighting. By that I mean, you want to peep out of some small gap between or around blocking terrain, so that only a small portion of the enemy-held area can "see and be seen". Then you out-shoot whatever is in that little area, after which you move and find another spot to peep from. If you put them behind woods, ridges, or buildings you can often get this effect by picking the angle, how far you are behind the obstacle, which side you peek out behind, and the like. It also helps enourmously to have men on the ground in (or in front of) the obstacle, hiding, with their full field of view forward to "tell you" about potential targets. Incidentally, this is a useful tactic for all tank destroyers, all sides. But it is especially useful for the types with big guns but limited armor (Nashorn, Jackson, etc).

Computers can be built and programmed to do several tasks at a time. Supercomputers like the "connection machine" prototype were built to explore this idea, with one computer able to access hundreds of CPU chips in parallel. But the problem is that programming a massively parallel computer is rather difficult. Unless it is doing pretty simple things over and over (and comparing results, e.g.), it can quickly become more trouble than it is worth, compared to fast central processing and loads of memory to store results. But it is useful for some problems (estimating fluid flows with dynamic models, modeling a crystal lattice of atoms to investigate stresses and cracking). These days one can do some similar things with networks of seperate computers, if the connections are fast enough. The programming problem is still there, so serious uses of the idea have not grown much. It has stayed a super-computer for special cases thing so far, and there is reason to believe it will remain so. Brains on the other hand are massively parallel in a way that makes even computers built that way look centralized. Each neuron is much slower than chips, with less it can do. But everything is wired higgedly piggly to everything else, making the number of connections rise extremely fast as you look at more and more neurons (and there are billions of 'em). No engineer could tell such a structure what to do, because he wouldn't know how. That is why it is a hard problem just to figure out how the brain even works in the first place. We understand the basic idea, which is the same one that computers exploit - that the number of arrangements of a limited number of things is enourmously larger than the number of items (plus some other more complicated things, to be sure). As an example of that fact, there are more distinct, legal games of chess than particles in the universe. Without using lots of parts, or making more than one move at a time. For what it is worth...

Germans, use mortars. The 81s are fine, but it can be nice to have the punch of the 120s. Use them mid to late, when the enemy is bunching up to bring firepower to bear on your key positions (you did choose key positions he couldn't hit from the entire map, right?) It is pointless to fire on spread out units or units that can easily move off, and recover from morale breaks. You want a bunched up target that has been stopped by your own guys. Another way they often wind up paying off exploits a common, predictable attacker's approach. Human players love to avoid open ground and take the covered approach, at that is almost always woods, and it strips the tanks off of the infantry. Then they meet airburst mortars, panic, and SMG-armed reserves may be able to rush them in terrain where all shooting is point-blank. Nothing is bloodier when it works. For the Americans, I like the 81mm still for similar uses and for masking smoke. But on the attack I like have some of the heavier stuff too, because 81mm doesn't do buildings or even foxholes or gun positions very effectively. It is not a matter of trying to destroy tanks, but of being able to knock out common, identified defensive positions that cannot or will not move. 105s are fine for those roles. Be careful with the length of the fire missions with the 105s, though. You usually only need the first 2 minutes of firing, at most.

Others have already given some fine answers to your questions, but I thought I'd add my two cents and try to explain some of the effective differences in weapon types in CM terms. Rifles are plain vanilla weapons, but in CM what is noteworthy about them is their better range than the light automatic weapons that are the main alternatives. Rifles in CM can fire out to 500 yards, but are effective at ranges of 100-250 yards. The American M-1 is the best of the rifles. Semi-automatic means one round is fired for each pull of the trigger, but without the shooter needing to do anything else between shots. The M-1 is an example, and used a small clip of ammo, 5 rounds usually. The rifles of the other nations (Brit and German) are bolt action, meaning the shooter recocks the weapon manually by operating the bolt - pulling back ejects the spent case of the previous round, pushing forward again to load the next round. The semi-auto thus had a higher rate of fire, for short periods anyway. Over longer periods there wasn't much difference as ammo and aim are the real limits in the long run. The alternate weapon of most infantry is a submachinegun. For the Germans, that is the MP40, for the US the Thompson SMG, for the Brits the Sten. Compared to the rifles, the SMGs are less accurate and much shorter range, firing a pistol-sized round at a lower muzzle velocity than a rifle. But they make up for it by firing often, a burst for each pull of the trigger, from 20-32 round clips. In CM, the SMGs of all types have much higher firepower than rifles at 40 yards distance, and the two weapons are comparable in firepower at about 100 yards. In the 100-250 yard range, the rifles pass the SMGs again, and the SMGs can't fire at all beyond 250 meters. The later-war german units also have a few MP44s, which was the first "assault rifle", firing a rifle round at high muzzle velocity but fully automatic. That gun is the forerunner of the Russian AK-47, which was copied off of it, if that helps give an idea of what it is. In CM terms it is a compromise between an SMG and a rifle, useful, but no squad is fully equipped with them so they make only a minor improvement, compared to mixed rifles and SMGs. You will also find some carbines in the US forces (HQ units in particular). They too are a compromise of sorts, but more like the worst of SMG range and rifle firepower instead of the best of both. Crews and leaders will have pistols, which are nearly useless, a weapon for inside one building at best and much worse than an SMG in that case. All of the above are the "line" weapons used by privates, individual soldiers. But the firepower of many squads and teams is built around heavier weapons, light machineguns of one variety or another. The best of these is the German MG42 LMG, which incidentally is the forerunner of most modern LMGs. Most German squads pack one, and some of them have two. The Americans use the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), and the Brits the Bren light machinegun, for the same job. These all have far more firepower than the other weapon types and better range as well. They are generally effective to 500 meters. The limits on how much they dish out were based on the ammo that could be carried, and problems with sustained fire by them to a lesser extent. All of these were equipped with a bipod at the end to stabilize the weapon when firing, and had extra men in the squad helping to carry their ammo. At long range, 1/2 to 2/3rds of a squad's firepower comes from just this one (or two) heavier weapon(s). The most noticeable effects of the difference small arm mixes are SMG-heavy vs. rifle-heavy squad types, with the Germans having a mix of those depending on the kind of troops involved, and the others generally being rifle heavy, except for Allied Paratroops who also use many SMGs. An SMG heavy squad will tend to win a firefight at 40-80 yards, other things being equal (which they rarely are, to be sure). It will tend to lose a firefight at 150-250 yards. In between, the types are reasonably close in the mixes typically found, with the MGs thrown in, etc. One result of this is that the SMG squads can be deadlier in tight terrain, like large forests or inside towns (not on the perimeter), while the rifle squads can do better in more open country, especially on the defense. A rifle-heavy force will generally find it easier to pin attackers down in the open before they manage to get close, when the terrain is open. All infantry gets much deadlier when it gets close, of course, but this is an even sharper rise at very close ranges for the SMG-heavy squad types. It is also worth keeping an eye on your small arm compositions when using the split feature to create half-squad teams. If a squad has only one MG or BAR in it, as most do, then after the split one of the teams will still have it and the other won't. The one with the MG will have most of the firepower, especially at long range. Squads with 2 MGs (some German units, 1945 US infantry with 2 BARs, etc), will naturally create teams that each have a light machine gun. This is a good way to make machinegun nests, get enough shooters with decent range to cover your ground, and the like. Be advised, though, that the BAR is less of a step-up from the standard rifles than an MG42 is. To understand why, a BAR is firing a 20 round magazine (up from the M-1's 5 rounds), while the MG42 is firing 100-round belt-fed machine gun ammo (up from a bolt action rifle's 1 round). All of the above are "small arms", in the sense that they are meant to deal with enemy infantry and that is it. The cumulative effect of all of the above is that SMG squads are effective to 100 yards, rifles squads to 250 yards, and the MGs of most squads (or teams with LMGs in them) can reach out to 500 yards with enough firepower to pin somebody down in the open. Sometimes you will see a German Volksgrenadier squad with just 8 MP40s, pure SMG. That means it isn't going to bother anybody beyond 100 yards, but it can really chew up people at close 40 yard range. An American 1945 squad, by contrast, has 2 BARs and lots of M-1s, so it shoots very well at 250 yards and can pin people down out to 500 yards pretty well. But don't tangle with those SMGs in the middle of the woods if you can help it (e.g., in the demo "Chance Encounter" scenario). There are three important factors to understand about the role of infantry in WW II combat. The first is that only infantry can go anywhere, while armor finds it difficult or impossible to negotiate most terrain except open ground and wheatfields. (Grinding through scattered trees will often work, but sometimes you will get stuck and immobilized). The second point is that infantry may seem poorly armored, but inside a stone house, a bunker, or a foxhole, they are "armored" rather well by terrain. In historical reality, infantry made their own "armor" with a shovel, wherever they were. And the third point is that infantry is much stealthier than armor. It does not announce that it is coming half a mile off by engine noise, uses concealment, short movements, masking by small pieces of terrain, and the like. The best place for infantry is dug in where tanks can't go with nobody knowing they are there. One other highly important tactic for infantry in CM, or WW II era fighting generally, is to make use of cover to break line of sight completely. You will sometimes face assymetrical situations where e.g. enemy armor is hitting your men beyond range of reply. If you sit inside a building an enemy tank is shooting at, you will quickly get clobbered. But put the house between yourself and the tank, and it becomes better cover even while outside than it was while inside. Similarly, you can often avoid fire by moving to the back of a building, or to the ground floor, or deeper into a forest away from the treeline. Sneak a small unit back into line of sight somewhere else to maintain your view of the enemy, and bring your force back to the forward, firing positions when they have a useful target. Ride out the fire of heavier arms away from the spots the enemy can see. Always try to position larger bodies of infantry (platoons, companies) in locations where they can back away in this fashion, if needed. As for the misleading term "recoilless rifle", one of Murphy's Laws of Combat puts it briefly - "recoilless" rifles, ain't. The RR is a further development of the bazooka idea, basically. Bazookas fire rockets through a smooth hollow tube, carrying a small anti-tank warhead. But their range is quite limited - 200 yards maximum with more like 100 yards effective range. The idea of an RR is the "rifling" part, which means grooves inside a tube to spin the projectile to stabilize it in flight, just like a rifle compared to a smoothbore or shotgun. The result is RRs had much longer effective ranges than bazookas. But they were also much heavier and harder to use, a little shoulder-carried artillery piece in effect. They are also rare. The standard infantry anti-tank weapons of all sides are variants of the bazooka or something like it. The US uses the Bazooka, the Germans two types, Panzerschreck and Panzerfaust, and the Brits the PIAT. The Panzerfaust is a one-shot disposable, shorter range weapon. It is listed in CM squads when present, 1 or 2 of them in a squad, or none. They get used automatically if the squad is close enough to enemy armor - 40-100 meters depending on the model carried, quite close. The US uses rifle grenades the same way (a grenade launched from the tip on an M-1 rifle using a special cartridge), but they are not nearly as effective, only being useful against half-tracks and the like. All the other types can kill real tanks, but side and rear shots and getting close are essential. The Germans are somewhat better off in this respect, as their infantry Anti-tank weapons tend to have bigger warheads and the Allied targets tend to have thinner front armor. Another infantry support arm is the mortar, which comes in various sizes from 50mm (2 inches basically) up to 120mm (~5 inches). 2 inch, 50mm and 60mm mortars are "light" mortars, 76mm / 3 inch (Brit) and 81mm mortars are "medium" mortars, and 4.2 inch and 120mm mortars are "heavy" mortars. All are fin-guided, not rifled, rocket-based rounds that fire nearly straight up, then drop onto their target. You can think of the light ones as throwing hand grenades a long, long way - that is about the effect. The medium ones are light artillery, useful for lots of things and perhaps the most common form of artillery support in CM and in WW reality. The heavy ones are usually off-map artillery, the mediums can show up either way. Mortars have high rates of fire but tend to have relatively small blasts for each detonation. They are thus not very effective against heavy cover - bunkers or buildings - nor are they effective against tanks. But they can chew up people in woods, pin people in foxholes, knock out or suppress crewed guns, and might get lucky against half-tracks or other light, open-topped vehicles. An important trick in CM when using light mortars is to let their Headquarters spot for them. If the mortar units are close enough to an HQ that you get the red lines for proper command, they can fire at anything the HQ can see, even if they can't see it themselves. This is important, because it means you can #1 put the mortars behind a hill or farther back into some woods, out of sight, and then #2 put the HQ on the crest or treeline, but hiding, so it can't easily be seen. The HQ isn't firing and the mortars aren't in line of sight, so you can fire on your targets without detection or reply. Sometimes your light mortars will have smoke, which is useful in lots of ways. The standard HE rounds are for killing (or pinning) infantry mostly. Check the rounds used in one minute of firing, because the rate of fire is high enough you probably only have ~3-4 minutes of shooting from each mortar unit. Use them when you need them. Once they are out, just keep the men safe - they are useless for combat afterward. Off map artillery, which sometimes includes the medium or heavy mortars, is represented in CM by an artillery forward observor team (FO for short). That is basically two guys with a radio and a pair of binoculars, telling a whole battery of guns way back behind your side of the line where to shoot and radioing back corrections after they see where the shells land. An FO unit can be good for 3-5 fire missions before they run out of ammo. Off map artillery takes a while to land, though - 2 minutes is typical, sometimes faster for battalion mortars and sometimes slower for green FOs or big guns, etc. An HQ can spot for the FO team, the same as with the mortars above, by calling back the corrections to them. Heavier artillery can hurt troops in buildings or heavier cover, but is still most effective at troops in the open or in the woods, and against infantry not armor. It is not a precision instrument. The shells can fall 50-100 meters from your point of aim, so be careful calling in fire missions right next to your own guys. Another kind of artillery you will encounter in CM is better called a gun - a direct fire piece usually with some special role. Anti-tank guns are the most common, and after them probably anti-aircraft guns. Unlike the off-map artillery, these are not meant to lob shells at a high angle to fall on the general area where the enemy is, but instead are meant to point at a particular target very carefully and hit it with flat-trajectory fire. An anti-tank gun, as the name implies, is meant to do this to enemy armor in particular, firing solid metal rounds at very high speeds to penetrate enemy armor plate. They can also fire high explosive (HE) rounds against infantry targets, however, as long as they can see them directly. These guns can be very effective, but they are vunerable to fire themselves unless protected by a bunker or some-such. Another useful tactic with them can be to use them in "keyhole sighting" deployments, meaning on spots on the map where only a few of the enemy can see them (like peeping through a keyhole, say between two buildings or a building and a woodline, etc), then they out-shoot those few and stay alive that way. The drawback to that idea is that you have to be right about where the enemy is coming. Anti-aircraft guns can interfer with enemy air support if he has any, but they can also shoot at guys on the ground of course. These tend to be smaller guns with high rates of fire, which can make them sort of like machine guns against enemy infantry, and can also make them deadly against enemy half-tracks, trucks, and other light-armored vehicles. Against full-fledged tanks they will have trouble, though, as the penetrating power of a 20mm-40mm cannon just isn't up to punching a hole in the front of a tank. They have the same problems with vunerability to fire themselves as the anti-tank guns, with the same sorts of solutions possible. Tank destroyer as a term can cause some confusion, because it means so many different things. To Joe off the street, it might include a bazooka since that can destroy a tank, but the proper term for that is "anti-tank weapon" or anti-tank capable. A tank destroyer is a kind of tank, but a somewhat different kind for Germans than for the Allies. A basic idea to keep in mind is that "TD"s were meant to be as effective as tanks on defense, without necessarily being as useful on the attack. The Germans use tank destroyers that have no turrets - they are a tank gun mounted on a tank chassis, but without the turret. This has one obvious disadvantage - you have to point the whole vehicle at the target to aim. But it has two advantages - it is cheaper to make (doesn't matter much in CM), and the whole vehicle is shorter off of the ground, which can make it harder to spot. The Germans used these behind the crest of hills or behind walls, trying to get situations in which only the gun and the very top of the vehicle was visible to the enemy, making a tiny target. This makes them perfect for ambushes, but no turret makes them more vunerable to moves around a flank, attacks from two directions, etc. The Allies also have tank destroyers, but they retain turrets. What the Allies gave up on their TDs was weight of armor, especially on the turret (the chassis was often a tank chassis, so it often had the same armor as a tank) - often the Allied TDs have open tops like half-tracks, as well as thin turret armor. In return for the lighter weight, though, the TDs carry heavier guns than Allied tanks or the vehicles are faster, or both. The same idea of use in ambush situations is behind the differences, but the Allies needed the heavier guns to knock out better German tanks, and put more stock in mobility for protection, while the Germans prefered stealth and full armor. Compared to the TD designs with their design differences, tanks are more uniform and meant to balance attack and defense, able to be used in any reasonable manner and in any situation. The Allied tanks tend to be undergunned and underarmored compared to the better German models (Panther and Tiger), but also more numerous. All tanks are fully protected against small arms and most effects of off-map artillery, and except for side and rear shots in close, don't have too much to fear from enemy light AA guns and the like. They can be killed by infantry that gets close enough, by other tanks and TDs, and by the anti-tank guns. They themselves can kill anything. There are also a wide variety of lighter armored vehicles used by both sides. The most common types are halftracks and light "recon" armor. Halftracks are essentially armored trucks with machineguns mounted, used to support infantry and to move them around. Light recon armor comes in many varieties - halftracks with extra guns mounted on them, armor cars, light tanks, etc. What all have in common is pop-shooter guns and thin armor, which do not enable them to stand up to real tanks in front-to-front slugging, but can smash up each other and shrug off small arms fire. Many real tanks are vunerable to some of their guns if caught from a flank and up close, too. I hope these comments are helpful.