gunnergoz

Hubert, considering your devotion to the game and to the consumer base, I can see why the BTS guys decided to take you into the fold...I'm impressed! What's more, I look forward to your future projects. Regards Ed

CMBB is going to everything but boring, eh? I may need to go on tranquilizers if the demo is any indication...

Valid question, but it was a bit more complex than that, going into the politics of generalship, congressional cronyism and lots more arcane stuff that would curl our hair for sure if we knew the details. The short answer: MacArthur had quite a following in Congress, including some who really wanted him to eventually press for the US presidency. The Navy (and hence, the Marines) had the ear of a President who was a fan of the Navy and things maritime. Rather than get bogged down in seeing who would be top dog in the strategic arena in the Pacific, FDR (I think wisely) just let each have enough leash and resources to do the job that they wanted to do. It worked out well in that the Japanese had to deal with dual offensives against them. It was wasteful, to some degree. Both Nimitz and MacArthur ended up making some less-than-great decisions, but overall both contributed to the eventual US victory. Had the war gone on the the Japanese mainland, MacArthur would probably have overshadowed Nimitz as the ground war took up the headlines. Interservice rivalries are nothing new, and "dumb" is just a tad too strong a word in my mind to describe FDR's handling of a very sticky situation. Certainly he did a lot better than his rivals!

Dang, they're nice. If I could afford a Humvee and a real tank, etc, then I'd buy a bunch of those toys as coffee table decorations... As it is, I can afford to print the illustrations from the HMTL link.

No, I mean the IS-IV Heavy Tank. I'd never known of it before reading "Soviet/Russian Armor and Artillery Design Practices: 1945 to Present" by Hull, Markov and Zaloga (ISBN 1-892848-01-5). There's Russian stuff there I'd never even imagined. Can you see the JS/IS series going all the way up to IS-VII? They did, if only in prototype or limited series production. Photos and facts abound in all their glory. Lots of photos of Russian armor at Kubinka's museum sheds. Buy it, you'll lose lots of sleep...

Nice bit of research, Bastables, I must hand it to you for doing your homework. My figures were hypothetical, given only to make a point. I've never seen the data you cite, which is indeed very indicative of the tank vs tank weighing of the losses. I was only going on old presumptions that were clearly wrong. One wonders if air could have had a greater impact if Korean weather were more favorable, or if the country were so mountainous? IIRC, air had a hard time dealing with armor in the Balkans during the latest unpleasantness in the Balkans. One thing seems certain...Desert Storm's conditions have to have been some of the most ideal ever imagined for air power to go tank busting!

One of my less-lucky T-34's apparently knocked itself out in Yelnia by firing downslope into what seemed to be a sort of ravine, and suffering backblast. Whatever, the crew bailed right after they fired. No Fritzs within a country mile with the means to even dent the bugger. Oops.

I KNEW all along that you guys were FRAUDS. Here I am waiting patiently for BTS to come out with "World War Two in 3-D with the Original Cast and Smell-O-Rama" and you drop this bomb upon us quavering groupies. Harrumph. I'm going now, I have to re-tune my tin anti-radiation beanie, you guys really messed up my reception.

The 105mm AP rounds were, naturally enough, fired by 105mm howitzers. I think they only got a couple of kills with them, though. Michael</font>

The Soviets did pretty well, considering they'd cut themselves off at the knees with Stalin's officer corps purges (actually incited by clever German deception measures meant to feed Stalin's paranoi). One thing that also contributed to the "no or few weapons" issue was the tendency of Soviets to let units melt away to near nothingness, at least in the opening months of the war. The chaos of those days must be unimaginable to us, even those of us who have read much and have seen what documentaries as there are. I respect the people greatly, and the professional officer corps as well. We don't often give them the credit they are due. BTW, as an example of one family's sacrifice, my wife's Ukrainian kin sent 9 men of various ages to war and saw only two come back alive. I've also read that upwards of 90 per cent of the Soviet men who were 16 years old in 1941, did not live through the war years.

Landshark! Landshark alert! Lock up your daughters and T-bills! Actually, I liked the post and echo the wishes.

NK tanks in Korea were really only a threat when facing unready, inexperienced US troops first rushed there, as well as the equivalent South Korean troops. These intital forces were armed only with 2.36 bazookas (the anemic WW2 version), the M-24 and very little 105mm AT ammo. Later, follow on forces brought with them M-4's and M-26's and even M-46's. By then, the NK armor had been vanquished, a great deal of it by UN airpower. Had the Soviets intervened, however, things would have been much more in doubt. Stalin had sent tank armies equipped with 200 new JS-4's (the follow on to the IS-2, actully coming after the JS-3) to the Far Eastern borders. Imagine what the US would have had to do facing tanks whose armor basia for hull/turret was 160mm/250mm? As it happened, the US deployed nukes into the area and let drop the word that, if Stalin intervened, we were prepared to use them. End of intervention threat.

Hmm, I wonder if that number series started this year, last year, 5 years ago, or what...?

I think that may be a bit of hyperbole. Yes the units initally sent were pretty sucky. As the war went on, though, units filled up with a lot of recalled WW2 vets and things changed quite a bit. As far as the initial deployment goes (i.e. the hapless, helpless TF Smith) you're unfortunately correct.

Loza, in his book "Fighting for the Soviet Motherland" makes a point of praising the radios found in the Shermans. First - they all had them; second - they worked. IIRC some tanks may have had the radios cannibalized to use for artillery spotters, etc. Check the book out on Amazon.com, it's really good, esp. about the Sherman as that was his favorite wartime mount.

Flesh- Thank you for the kind words and BTW you may have more of the Gunnergoz grass files now than I do...my IBM "Deathstar" 60mb HD failed and took all my CMBO files and mods with it... :mad: I'll try to pick up the pieces from the sites that may still have the better ones, like fieldgrass drab, so I can try to see how they'll work with CMBB. The BTS boys are giving us modders a hard run for our money from the outset with BB, aren't they? Not that I mind much.

Have you looked carefully in between the tank track links? For grease spots and bits of uniform, say?

Flesh- Thanks, really appreciate the warm offer.

No it does not. I would not lick Australian wine off the leggy Australian blonde sitting opposite me at work, and it is not because of her. snip </font>

Salve, Audace- My great uncle was an Italian Army general who, when I was a kid in the 50's, got me a front seat for the big annual Italian military parade in Rome which is led off by the Bersaglieri band running by playing La Fanfara dei Bersaglieri...(my grand-dad was an Italian WWI era military band leader BTW). A big, big thrill, still gives me goosebumps when I see them or hear the music. Corragio!

Nice idea, Pvt Ryan...we could simplify even more with "urrah" and "aw****ski". [ September 11, 2002, 02:15 AM: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

Grisha- Almost 10 per cent lost before they got to the battlefield...says something, doesn't it? I hear the losses in Matildas and Valentines were as high or higher as to loss in transit.

Someone's going to have to come up with an English language mod for the imaginationally challenged...(and for those of us who would like to know what the heck the troops are really saying.) Actually, when I was an officer in the military, I could have sworn the NCO's and EM spoke a different language...because half the time they acted like they couldn't understand a word this O-1 said.

For an underdog, the old Sherman sure had some positive points, didn't it? I always wonder how many of the darn things still rest at the bottom of the Artic Sea, still in the bellies of the freighters that didn't make the Murmansk run. It still says "tank" to me, when I see one. Nostalgia aside, I'm going to love to see them work out in CMBB, in Russian hands. And too bad the Sherman's pappy, the old M-3 couldn't make the cut, I've always wanted to field that monstrosity since I saw the film "Sahara" as a kid.

Thanks for the answer, Steve. It then occurs to me that some programming and processing efficiencies might be gained with relative spotting, because the computer will only need to calculate potential fire exchanges between units known to be sighted. For instance, with relative spotting, if A is seen only by X and B is seen only by Y, we only have to calculate two possible shots: one each for A to X and for B to Y. With absolute spotting, the computer -- in addition to the above -- also has to examine the possible shots between A and Y, then for B and X as well, because it must assume that A may see Y and B may see X. To my untutored mind, this looks like 2 times the calculation work for absolute sighting. In some ways it strikes me that you have a more complicated database with relative spotting, but the greater number of computational cycles to relolve a given turn might lie with absolute spotting. Or am I totally off base with this intuitive view? (PS you other programmers out there can chime in any time, BTW)