Vanir Ausf B

The difference between these two images fills me with hope for the future of Ukraine after this war.

You have LOS, it's just that your spotting checks are being heavily penalized. If you wait long enough the units may spot each other. Even when the target line shows no LOS through trees units can sometimes spot each other. That's why you shouldn't  trust trees to hide your units unless there is a LOT of foliage between you and the enemy.
At least that's what I think is most likely happening. The lack of 1 to 1 graphical representation of tree canopies make it difficult to know for certain how LOS is being affected in any situation.

There is some wackiness going on but it is due to the way foliage affects spotting. Judging from your screen shots I suspect LOS is being degraded by tree branches, despite appearances to the contrary and despite what the LOS line says.
In Combat Mission tree trunks are accurately represented visually but tree canopies are significantly abstracted. In my experience tree canopies are both less opaque and lower to the ground "under the hood" than their visual representation suggests.
This unintuitiveness is compounded by the target line lacking LOS context. When checking LOS with the target command the LOS line is binary -- you either have it or you don't. But under the hood LOS through trees is non-binary. Tree branches and leaves degrade LOS proportional to how much tree canopy the line passes through "under the hood". The target command line will show clear LOS up to a certain amount of degradation, then at some point will change to show LOS blocked even though spotting is still possible.

Absolutely asinine. Take Telenko with boulders of salt unless he's talking about wooden pallets.

You have LOS, it's just that your spotting checks are being heavily penalized. If you wait long enough the units may spot each other. Even when the target line shows no LOS through trees units can sometimes spot each other. That's why you shouldn't  trust trees to hide your units unless there is a LOT of foliage between you and the enemy.
At least that's what I think is most likely happening. The lack of 1 to 1 graphical representation of tree canopies make it difficult to know for certain how LOS is being affected in any situation.

There is some wackiness going on but it is due to the way foliage affects spotting. Judging from your screen shots I suspect LOS is being degraded by tree branches, despite appearances to the contrary and despite what the LOS line says.
In Combat Mission tree trunks are accurately represented visually but tree canopies are significantly abstracted. In my experience tree canopies are both less opaque and lower to the ground "under the hood" than their visual representation suggests.
This unintuitiveness is compounded by the target line lacking LOS context. When checking LOS with the target command the LOS line is binary -- you either have it or you don't. But under the hood LOS through trees is non-binary. Tree branches and leaves degrade LOS proportional to how much tree canopy the line passes through "under the hood". The target command line will show clear LOS up to a certain amount of degradation, then at some point will change to show LOS blocked even though spotting is still possible.

Buttoned up.
Why do you think this is odd? It's really more like a too small sample size. I'm not claiming that what I say is exactly true - in fact, back at university I'd have been flogged for making such bold statements with so little data. I did a "simulation", meaning, "made a dice roll", i.e. I generated a random number, repeatedly, until it was < 0.01 or 0.02, respectively. That is about the order of magnitude (very roughly! I don't know the exact values!) for the spotting probability in the scenario I described (0.02, or 2% for the "simulated" M60). I repeated this 50 times for each "tank". The result looked like this:

Different histogram but same phenomenon. Long tail for orange and seemingly no tail for blue. Now, exactly same parameters and setup but 5000 "experiments" for each tank.

Here you see that both have long tails, and if I were to repeat the experiment a million times each, you would probably see that both get events out to 700. Only that orange gets way, way, way more of them. Just by having 1% instead of 2% probability for each dice roll.
Wish I was the statistics expert, I'm a particle physicist and some statistical data analysis was part of my PhD and later in my job. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I guess. 😉 What you describe may be unlikely (though that depends on what the actual parameters governing this situation are) but remember this: There are thousands of players out there making thousand upon thousands of dice rolls each day. The probability that someone observes such a situation (and then makes a frustrated post on the forums) is actually not that small.

They are not comparable. On paper Aegis is supposed to have far better performance. See the pic below. Patriot PAC3 is a terminal phase interceptor with very short window of opportunity to intercept SRBM and MRBM (see the blue dots there?), Patriot's speed is too low to work on an IRBM.

 
The yellow Aegis BMD line in the graphic seems to be representing RIM-161 SM3,  an Exo-atmospheric interceptor.
As you can see , the right end of the yellow line does not extend to the x-axis, because SM3 doesn’t work in Endo-atmospheric. That makes this graphic a little misleading as the SM2 and SM6, two Endo-atmospheric interceptors deal with terminal phase interception also belong to Aegis BMD. They have better performance compared to Patriot PAC3, although they will have trouble to deal with IRBM.
 
Put hypersonic weapon hypothesis, Kh-47 kinzhal is just an air launched Iskander SRBM with a limited maneuverability MaRV . It’s flight profile might be very similar to DF-21D and YJ-21 ASBM, but I guess DF-21D is the hardest to be intercepted due to its terminal speed. There is no way for Patriot PAC3 to intercept a DF-26B, an IRBM with anti-ship roles. That’s when you need SM3 to intercept before the RV from the IRBM dive into the terminal phase.
 
So far there is no indication that the HGV from DF-17 has the anti-ship capability. But due to the HGV’s flight profile, it will make the detection very very hard, and it is also operating on upper edge of the atmosphere so SM3 is useless in the face of this threat. Also due to its flight profile, HGV won’t have a great potential energy to convert into speed at terminal phase, so THAAD and SM6 should be able to intercept that but it is still too fast and maneuver for Patriot PAC3. We don’t have any open source to study on this, this is just my guess
 
Anyway, the key to successfully intercept a ballistic missile is not about the interceptor missile’s performance, its more about early warning, detection and classification.  There are some discussions on this topic in Matrix game forum CMO section, I can see if I can find the discussion.

Back when I was doing this for beta testing I would not submit a result to BFC with less than n=300, but I don't have the patience for it anymore. There is a guy who wrote a program in Python to automate it and would do n=1000 but that's not a skill set I possess.
Exactly right. I also make sure all spotters are looking at the same thing, i.e. rather than timing the test groups spotting each other I time them spotting an identical third group (I use T-72As as my "target" group in all tests). I also eliminate C2 information sharing by making every unit of the test group in a different battalion and spacing them by more than 32 meters from each other.
I've never noticed that before, but it would make sense given CM spotting cycles are in 7 second intervals, most of the time.
BFC has never commented on the long right tails, but they are a consistent feature of the CM spotting model across titles. I mentioned earlier that I have seen results longer than 10 minutes at ranges up to 1000m in CMBN but they are very rare.
Thanks for running the tests! I would not have been surprised by an even larger M60 advantage given the thermal imager. I picked the RISE+ in my test as I felt that was more apples to apples vis-a-vis the T-72A.

I have explained why that is a contrived number. I'm done talking about it.
Sturm-S vs M60 RISE+ @800 meters. Outliers not excluded.
Median M60: 29 seconds Sturm: 17.5 seconds Average M60: 29.8 seconds Sturm: 25.5 seconds Since you attach so much meaning to the single largest time, for the Sturm it was 88 seconds.
That's a 49.4% advantage in median spot time for the Sturm-S. WTF @The_Capt, how do you sleep at night? 😡😡  😡

What’s our escalation space?
For air defense, it would just be more missiles, unless we have friggin space lasers or something.
For aircraft, it would be modern NATO aircraft or flying tigers (which we should have had in month 3).
For tanks and ifvs, we are already doing that, though perhaps not in desired quantity.
For artillery and standoff weapons, already doing but not in quantity and range desired.
For information, it’s not clear Russians are super vulnerable to information warfare.
For diplomacy, obvs Transnistria, Belarus, Chechnya, Dagestan etc are very interesting.
For navy… now there we have some options. Why don’t we lease a Walrus to Ukraine, or have letters of the marque to pursue Russian oil tankers? I could easily rustle up some fellow idiot boaters to go chase tankers off the Barbary coast on a RIB with some RPGs.
EDIT: Open Wagner Safari would also be an option in Africa, and hurt their cashflow.

Mate… you haven’t lived!

A spunky name for an impotent weapon.

Well, there is no reason to assume a T-62 has any better spotting than a T-72.
If you don't like my data, get your own. Otherwise, good luck with your rant.

I did share an opinion. You just didn't like it. Too bad.
Personal experience? Well, I have actually done some testing in the past. Nothing extensive, but enough to suggest that the differences in spotting between M60 and T-62 are in the 10-20% range, at least under the testing conditions...
... which would be reasonable given the real-world differences I have documented (albeit for T-72):
 
Thank you. I agree 😆

The TC had to piss, and no it could not wait.

Fu...k!!!! Sh...t!!! Damn!!! What a hell I just heard at 3:00 of night?! 22 loud explosions not far from of us! And about dozen distant boo-boom... Sh...t!!! Reportedly series of Kinzhals on Kyiv, also there were reports about Kalibrs launches. Well, I want to read good news at the morning

Heh well we definitely saw this argument coming.  It comes back to how much was a result of “Russia sucking” and how much is due to the impact of modern technology on the battlefield?  Of course conventional militaries are doubling down on what they have, the alternative is truly frightening.  But clearly the politicians can even see what is happening.  
I am not fully in the “abandon conventional stuff” (e.g tanks p, mech etc) we are likely to see what it can still do once conditions have been properly set.  But I am also not a fan of spending billions on more conventional mass when we really have no idea of it will even work, or worse we have to layer so much defence on it that it prices itself out of existence.  
I also would not be looking for deep savings or spending cuts, in fact it may very well take spending increases however that money needs to go into the right capabilities, the ones that can ensure wins up to and including peer opponents.  These arguments are going to continue for some time and each side is going to see what they want in what happens next.  I think it will be some time until things become fully clear, but to my eyes after watching this thing at very high resolution for over a year, it is clear that some fundamentals shifted.  Now how much is just a result of this specific war and how much are enduring?
I will put down very good money that C4ISR, PGM, unmanned and denial systems  are major growth areas no matter what the post game report comes up with.

It's interesting to watch this debate play out in the UK.
________
In 2021 the defence secretary announced plans to reduce the number of tanks from 227 to 148 and shrink the army to 73,000 troops, its smallest size since the Napoleonic era.
The decision was made before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and proved controversial with Tory MPs. General Sir Patrick Sanders, the chief of the general staff, said that pursuing the cuts at a time of war in Europe would be “perverse”.
But with Nato allies including Poland, Germany and Finland increasing spending on their land armies, ministers believe that Britain is not under significant pressure to change course and can modernise the armed forces with investments elsewhere.
Senior figures in the MoD believe the war in Ukraine has exposed the vulnerability of tanks to shoulder-launched weapons such as Nlaws and Javelins, justifying the original decision in 2021 to upgrade only 148 Challenger 2s to Challenger 3s.
“We have too much infantry — a legacy of the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need more artillery. The jury is out on whether you need main battle tanks,” a Whitehall source said.
There are 75,710 full-time and fully trained troops in the army, and Wallace has previously admitted that it is unable to deploy a war-fighting division. In a private meeting last autumn, the US commander of Nato forces in Europe warned that the British army was no longer regarded as a tier-one fighting force. Senior army figures have argued that planned cuts to the number of tanks and troops would be a mistake.
“The main lesson from Ukraine is you need mass,” one army source said. “The truth is we don’t have enough infantry and we don’t have enough artillery.” The source also said it was naive to think that the war in Ukraine justified the decision to cut tanks and suggested poor Russian tactics explained why the Kremlin had lost over half its operational fleet in Ukraine.
“If you’re being hit by Nlaws in an urban environment, your tank is probably in the wrong place,” the source said.
As part of the military overhaul the army is expected to field more assault groups armed with drones, reflecting the important role played by artillery spotters in Ukraine.
_______
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-wallace-resist-reverse-british-army-cuts-gd9pzd62j (paywalled)

I just ran a better test than the one I did a few years back, since that one was at 150 meters. This one is a more typical 800 meters. T-72A vs M60A1 RISE+. It unsurprisingly shows a larger difference in spotting, although  not massively. The biggest difference was in the number and magnitude of outliers produced. A quirk of the CM spotting system is that it can produce huge outliers from time to time, which probably account for most of the "my tank is totally blind!" anecdotes. For example, the median spotting time for T-72 was 36.5 seconds but the single longest time recorded was 270 seconds. Because of that the average changes a lot depending on if you include outliers or exclude them, although the median doesn't change much.
n=50
Outliers excluded median
M60: 27.5 seconds T-72: 34 seconds Outliers excluded average
M60: 26.9 seconds T-72: 39 seconds Outliers included median
M60: 29 seconds T-72: 36.5 seconds Outliers included average
M60: 29.8 seconds T-72: 53.7 seconds  
What does this tell us? Nothing we didn't already know, frankly. But #1, and perhaps most importantly, CM spotting is highly variable and the result of any given encounter is usually a function of the situation combined with sheer dumb luck rather than the vehicle characteristics. For example, the fastest spot time for the T-72 was 8 seconds and the longest spot time for the M60 was 101 seconds. Second, while the difference in spotting ability in identical situations is around 21-23% most of the time the M60 is more consistent and therefore less likely to throw out an extreme result.

I did share an opinion. You just didn't like it. Too bad.
Personal experience? Well, I have actually done some testing in the past. Nothing extensive, but enough to suggest that the differences in spotting between M60 and T-62 are in the 10-20% range, at least under the testing conditions...
... which would be reasonable given the real-world differences I have documented (albeit for T-72):
 
Thank you. I agree 😆