Vanir Ausf B

I do intend to finish up my testing soon. I've been busy with other things. In light of the lack of shatter gap against the Panther mantlet I'm going to expand the testing to include the front turret armor as well. EDIT: Note that most US 76mm hits on the mantlet do fail to penetrate at 500 meters, but so far this appears to be due to the rounded shape of the armor rather than shatter gap.

You and AKD need to hash this out.

I think that is the reason for differences between vehicles. At least no one has suggested a better explanation to my knowledge. See MikeyD's post in the linked-to thread.

It does. That I don't know either.

A Thompson is not an "inferior" weapon to a Garand. It's a special purpose weapon that is very good at the role it is intended to fill. I agree with Bulletpoint that when the SMG is lost the squad loses some tactical flexibility. The fact that no one will pick it up is exacerbated by the fact that the guy who carries it is usually the first one to get hit. If CM is any indication then that was a spectacular failure. By the time my squads get close enough to the enemy to where the Thompson would shine it is usually lying in the dirt somewhere further back.

Yes, that is how it is supposed to work.

A quick update, as that is all I have time for. I did go back and do quite a bit more testing and I think I may have found the elusive higgs bo-, er, I mean shatter gap. I moved the Tiger test back to 500 meters and again used the Pz IV as a control. The results showed a very significant difference in favor of the Pz IV. I then tested at 800 meters and saw an even bigger difference, larger than I can explain by any factor I am aware of other than shatter gap. I then was getting a little excited and started testing against the Panther mantlet at 500m, which should be a slam dunk shatter gap scenario. I'm not done yet so the sample sizes are too small to be definitive but so far am see virtually identical results between the 2 tests, which is not at all what I expected after the Tiger tests and is a little disappointing. I'll finish up the testing tomorrow and post the results.

The only issue I have with machine guns deploying along bocage is that doing so tends to reduce their LOF because the machine gun sets up at on the back side of the action spot rather than up front with the rest of the team. This is especially noticeable with the US M1919.

I went ahead and expanded the sample size just for the hell of it. Totals now are: Tiger I mid vs M10 TD @ 300m and 10° lateral offset (roughly) Hits: 115 No damage: 0 Spalling: 16 (14%) Partial Penetration: 73 (63%) Penetration: 26 (23%) Tiger I mid vs Panzer IV H late @ 600m and 10° lateral offset (roughly) Hits: 109 No damage: 0 Spalling: 5 (5%) Partial penetration: 79 (72%) Penetration: 25 (23%) Again, the same general pattern. Full penetrations are identical, but there does seem to be a small but probably statistically significant difference in the proportion of spalling to partial penetrations. I don't know if this is our elusive shatter gap showing up in a very subtle way or if it's due to some other factor perhaps arising from the tests not being exactly apples-to-apples. I doubt I'll do any more with this since it's not going to make any difference anyways.

I don't know where Jason got his numbers, but the source I used says differently. Again, I point you towards the diagram I posted. In some circumstance we would indeed expect to see a mixture of penetrations and failures, but in others we would expect to see almost all failures. The 300m test is squarely in all failure territory. Which means... Larger sample sets will show us nothing we don't already know, because the expected failure rate in the 300m test is near 100% and our results are vastly different from that. A billion more samples will not change that.

Ok, for a control group I tested the Tigers against panzer IV Hs (late). The German 75L48 should have almost the same penetration vs. RHA at 600 meters as does the US 3" at 300 meters. Penetration KwK 40 L48: 123 @ 500m, 116 @ 750m, so about 120 at 600m 3" 76mm: 121 @ 250m, 115 @ 300m, so should be about the same. The obvious difference is that the German rounds are not expected to suffer shatter gap. Tiger I mid vs Panzer IV H late @ 600m and 10° lateral offset (roughly) 34 hits No damage: 0 Spalling: 1 Partial penetration: 24 Penetration: 10 By comparison here is the 3" @ 300m result from earlier: No damage: 0 Spalling: 5 Partial Penetration: 21 Penetration: 7 Not much difference. Again, I see no evidence of shatter gap in effect with regards to US 3" APCBC. Maybe the tests are set up wrong, or maybe I've misunderstood the source material or maybe the source material is wrong. Or maybe there's a bug.

I'm not sure what you mean by it's there in black and white. Are you referring to the manual (or would that be brown and dark brown)? From what I understand, if shatter gap were in effect there would be few if any penetrations at 300 meters as the shells would completely fail, since at that range it falls into the "shatter fail" portion of the diagram I posted. In testing most hits penetrate, albeit usually partially, which is more in-line with what I would expect in that situation with "normal" shells that were not flawed. If anyone can come up with another specific test that would demonstrate shatter gap in effect I'm all ears. EDIT: I just thought of a way to do a control group test. I'll be back... Location labeling may be flavor information, but penetrations are not. At least, I don't think the crews of my Tigers would call it flavoring But I'm glad to hear you think it deserves a look.

Do you have a source for that? Because that is far different than what I just posted.

I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but based on my rudimentary understanding of shatter gap I don't think I am seeing evidence of it in the game. -- World War 2 Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery pg 33 T/D ratio vs Tiger driver plate is either 1.32 or 1.34 depending on whether the game uses the official 100m thickness or 102mm actual typical thickness. A few test results here. The sample sizes are not large but they don't need to be for our purposes. Done on CMBN v 2.01 Tiger I mid vs M10 TD @ 300m and 10° lateral offset (roughly) P/AR ratio ~ 1.16 if 100mm plate (failure predicted) P/AR ratio ~ 1.13 if 102mm plate (failure predicted) Total hits: 33 No damage: 0 Spalling: 5 Partial Penetration: 21 Penetration: 7 Tiger I mid vs M10 TD @ 750m and 10° lateral offset (roughly) P/AR ratio: 1.05 if 100mm plate (normal penetration predicted) P/AR ratio: 1.03 if 102mm plate (normal penetration predicted) Total hits: 38 No damage: 4 Spalling: 14 Partial Penetration: 20 Penetration: 0 Interpretations are welcome. There is a much higher proportion of hits that do damage to the "Front Turret" than there is to the mantlet, so we know there is an actual difference in the armor thickness. It cannot be explained away as simply a labeling issue.

I've tested both

Combat Mission's ballistics model is pretty good in most respects, but it does not model reality perfectly. With regards to the Tiger specifically, there are two factors in play that make it somewhat more vulnerable in the game than it was in reality. Firstly, CM does not appear to model shatter gap, despite frequent claims that it does. At the very least it does not with the US 76mm. On paper the US 76mm can penetrate the Tiger I driver plate out to 1125 meters. But flawed US rounds tended to shatter and fail at ranges at which they should have penetrated on paper. Flawed US 76mm rounds were made by one of the 3 manufacturers of those rounds. Against the Tiger driver plate flawed 76mm rounds would penetrate out to 50 meters, shatter between 50 and 900 meters, then start penetrating again between 900 and 1125 meters. In the game 76mm penetrates all the way out to 1125. This is because the game always assumes highest quality ammunition. We see this also in the modeling of British 17 pdr APDS rounds that always fly straight and true in the game despite testing during WW2 that revealed a manufacturing flaw that severely affected accuracy. CM isn't exactly wrong in this regard so much as it is much more consistent than reality. This also affects the Panther since it allows penetration of the mantlet out past 500m when flawed rounds would have shattered past 200 meters. One other factor is that there seems to be an issue with how the Tiger's front turret armor is modeled. The game allows rounds to penetrate more often than they should (as far as I can tell). I'm hoping this gets fixed eventually.

A new product every 6 months is "a snail pace"? Since you like to talk about how much better the CMx1 games are perhaps we should take a look at their development schedule and see how much less work they required. CMBO: June 2000 CMBB: September 2002 CMAK: December 2003 Well what do you know. CMBB was over 2 years in the making and CMAK 15 months. If CMx2 development is proceeding at a snails pace, what would you call the CMx1 schedule? Glacial? "Multiplayer per side" is a feature that would be used by a very small number of people and only appeals to the hard core segment. It is also the hard core wargamers that didn't mind the 3 man squads. It is odd that you earlier bemoaned the shrinking of the wargame hobby and lack of appeal the CMBB demo had to the casual segment, yet now you propose a development path targeted to the existing hard core segment as if that were somehow going to grow the customer base. There is an abstract cover value associated with terrain in CMx2. You seem to be aware of that but for some reason ignore it. If the amount of cover in CMx2 is too low, and I think it probably is, the quickest and easiest way to remedy that is to increase the abstract values that are already there.

I originally thought you were referring to area fire, but if you are saying this is typically what happens when directly targeting enemy units then I'm afraid the ghost of Madmatt is indeed haunting your computer. Accuracy after first hit is easily testable and has been tested many times. One example shows Sherman 75s scoring 27 consecutive hits on Panthers at 500 meters. Misses after the first hit are rare. If you are firing through trees then yes, sometimes following rounds will hit them. And there is the paused-with-move-order bug Womble mentioned which will presumably be fixed.

End the ban on firing rockets from buildings, please!

With the exception of the Gustov Line module, every game BFC has ever made has shipped late, including all 3 CMx1 games. It's not a CMx2 thing or even a BFC thing, it's a software development thing. The timeline Moon posted was a much accelerated schedule compared to what BFC has previously stated as their goal: By that measure their current pace of some new product every six months is about on schedule. Why they planned more recently to release 4 in one year I don't know. That is an insane pace. What other wargame developer, or any game developer, puts out stuff that fast? I question if it would be a good idea even if they could.

What law is that, specifically?

Units given area fire orders target the action spots surrounding the target spot as well. This is by design and I'm sure BFC could change it if there was a public outcry for it.

What was that release frequency?

I have some ideas...

Allowing Bazookas, Schrecks and Fausts to fire from buildings would help the defender too.