Skipper

I didnt say "they must" wear helmets. Only that they "should". Most did. Especially, in attack where you can find yourself an artillery target without any advanced warning. OTOH, if it was a march in winter time, then they would not wear helmets, of course. OTOH, it is hardly possible for some squad members to wear fur hats, caps and steel helmets simultaneously. I am not a uniform grog, I just wore the same uniform.

Defence... in the last two 1250 pts MEs I spent 150 pts on various guns. I figure, my return on investment is two nice victories.

> maybe to the point that additional > velocity doesn't increase accuracy a great > deal. There are factors that make a longer barrel more accurate, but there are other factors that make it LESS accurate. A long unsupported barrel vibrates during the shot and these vibrations mean shot dispersion. The longer the barrel - the wider dispersion.

Nice picture, but looking a bit closer... If they use those flags and TCOs are unbuttoned the way they are, it is a march. If infantry is disembarked and runs with tanks, it is an attack, less than 400 m to the 1st enemy trencheline, iirc. They should be wearing helmets then. Combat formation for infantry with AFVs is not "bunch of guys hiding behind the AFV. AFVs are not there to cover the infantry with their armor. On the contrary, grunts are there to cover AFVs with their fire. Some of them are in winter uniform, others - in summer uniform.

I am taking a position that one could see this sort of troop density throughout a sevral km x 100 m stripe at times (major infantry assault during the first stage of an operation. Ie, if there is a small patch of wood in the middle of a field, there is nothing gamey with having 40 men sitting there, IMHO. PS It is quite another story that most of the "open" terrain is not as flat as CM's. Normally (or, at least, often) there are plenty of ditches, craters, stones etc, that can provide 100% cover from small arms fire.

Is your question about this PPS, or about today's Stechkin? The latter is quite a different thing.

"Operational density" in Lvov-Sandomir operation was 6 km per division. NB: operational density here is the width of division's formation; actual density in the breakthrough corridor (counting second echelon and operational reserves) actually reached 1 km per division. Division is roughly 10,000 people. During the assault, about a third of these people is deployed at the firing line. That's 3,000 people at a 60,000 sq.meters area. Or 1 per 20 sq m. And this is NOT in a single patch of trees 20x20 m, but along the whole frontline.

From 800m away, that bunker will be nearly impossible to KO with tanks (IMHO). Look for a flanking passage. It may have a short gap or two, that your infantry can cross under fire. If you can't go around it, stop the attack and hope for the draw.

> Say hello to CRT tans and Carpal Tunnel > from hours of Britney gazing! There is an asymmetric reply to that evil imperialistic ploy ( ): discard your TV! I did that 6 years ago and never watched back. It will take Chinese some time to figure this out, but eventually they will. Like yours truly ( ), they are very smart chaps with an aptitude for asymmetric strategies. Trust me, I know a few.

Go low-tech! :cool:

ROFLMAO. > Interesting fact: the Panther MISSES > AGAIN!!! Speaking of memoirs veritability. Your Pic.3 is marked 11:16, Pic.4 11:21 and Pic.5 11:26. Given that Pz-V main gun is not shooting bursts, I can hardly believe that it managed to squeeze a miss between Pic.3 and Pic.5. Very nice comix, otherwise.

> Any chances for macusers? Write it yourself. How is that thing called on Mac that is like VisBasic? Smartcards or some such? Saw it on a Mac 14 years ago (the first and the last time I put my hands on a Mac). Without the interface and error handling routines, it shouldnt be more than 10 minutes job. Or you can roll the dice by hand. Ie, it is the idea itself that rocks, not the implementation. [ 05-25-2001: Message edited by: Skipper ]

If implemented as a part of game, I think, end of battle randomizer should somehow rely on morale level. IMHO.

What is so interesting about it? Tigers were brewed by 45mm AT guns regularly (side shots from 300 m or closer). They also could be taken out of battle (if not killed) by 14mm AT rifles (optics hit, TCO tower hit, track hit, gun hit etc).

> Upside: in 50 years, Russia will be "Zaire > with permafrost." Two corrections: 1. The right quote is not Zaire without permafrost, it is Upper Volta with missiles. 2. Europe have jolly good chances to get there first. What with all the immigration from Africa proper. 3. As far as permafrost is concerned, in 50 years there may be none. What with all the global warming. > Downside: without the much-desired > secession of the "blue zone", we'll all be > living under the American Hegemony. Bleh. One more correction. The way it goes, in 50 years American Hegemony will be a history. And it will not be even mentioned as such in the history textbooks. How is "evil war-mongering imperialist" pronounced in Chinese?

Since when, approximately?

> Are you claiming that Soviet combat losses > were more than 50% of their total > population? RKKA lost ~13 million KIA+POW, including ~6 million in the first four months of 1941. After that, they also had to go back from Moscow to Berlin. If this sounds too boring already, sorry. > I find it hard to believe all the soldiers > of every unit the SS fielded were bad men. There is no such thing as a "bad man". "Good vs bad" is a very misleading concept, in general. These guys, however, VOLUNTEERED to join a CRIMINAL organisation. > SS, which was a small section of the > German military in general Small??? Wow!

Problem with the stuart is that it kills the Stuart first. I am talking about 7/2 version, and talking from personal, painful (ouch!) experience. Problem with infantry is that properly deployed 7/2 is covered by infantry. It has a very decent rate of fire and firepower. [ 05-05-2001: Message edited by: Skipper ]

I've played two tcp games where my opponent had these things. He placed them on top of a hill overlooking the field and fired away. Light tanks dont cut it. Riflemen from afar dont cut it. MGs from afar - well, two MG1917 shooting from the top floor position, 700 m took 4 or 5 turns and wasted about a third of their ammo to kill one of those. They are also easy pickings for mortars, firing indirect (mortars firing direct are, in turn, easy pickings for them).

The skirts were designed against soviet anti-tank rifle. We have it on Guderian's word. I guess, inspector general of Panzerwaffe knew what he was talking about.

You know, 45 sec was a norm for regulars. Crack crews could do it all in 25 sec. Moreover, in the situation when you have an enemy tank rolling your way, you tend to do it faster, rather than slower.

> but there were still battles which III's > and IV's defeated T-34's pff... and there were battles where T34s defeated IIIs and IVs. Which doesnt tell much of anything. And then, most german IIIs and IVs were defeated by AT assets, as well as most T34s that made it to the battlefield were defeated by AT assets. And then, there were much less T34s in RKKA, than in german combat reports. > Why were they panicked in the first place > then? Because they were encircled. > As for those Matildas, maybe the Germans > were scared straight, but they didn't run > away and give up. Germans knew about Matildas and knew the answer. 88s were not an on-site improvisation. RKKA did not run away and give up, either. Even germans dont say that. They were defeated piecemeal and encircled. To fully explain this, it would be necessary to go into some detail about an art of military operation. To put it briefly, germans mastered a deep breakthrough (originally developed by the british in WWI). RKKA found an answer to that. The cost of finding that answer was the regular army. Were Wehrmacht as a whole "the best" in 1941? Probably, yes. Were they able to stop soviets if the latter mobilised and started earlier than germans? Probably, no.

To dismount a gun, it takes a minute or even two (!) in CM. Modern russian army has the following exercise: tow starts 50 m away from the firing position; tow gets to the firing position, makes an U-turn and stops; the gun's crew disembarks from tow, dismounts the gun, loads, aims and fires. To pass the exercise, the crew had to hit the target within 45 seconds.

As I've read someplace, "Big powerful Soviet Union won the war; small, proud Finland took the honourable second place". This joke was attributed to finns, though. Another tidbit. According to Churchill, in 1941 Britain threatened to declare war on Finland if finns go further than 1918 border. Just wonder how big this factor was?

> What are the numbers again for any Red > Army soldiers captured by the Germans? See above in the thread. The numbers are cited there. > "Enemy at the Gates" The movie was made after "The war of rats", not after "Enemy at the gate". I've seen the movie just recently. If you ask me, the movie director is bastard, short and simple.