YankeeDog

This has been disputed in more recent research. It's definitely true that rapeseed was at one time thought to be bad for humans, but it's been consumed in e.g., some areas of the Indian subcontinent for millennia and there is no good evidence of adverse health effects in the populations that actually eat it. What is definitely true as that (non-Canola strain) rapeseed oil doesn't taste very good. High in acid and chlorophyll. Even cattle don't like it very much. The Canola Strain is much more palatable, to humans and animals alike. The non-Canola stuff also has a rather off-putting green color. This is an oft-cited myth. Don't know how it got started, but according to the originators of the Canola name (the Rapeseed Association of Canada), the name was simply derived from the words "Canada" and "Oil."

Technically, "Canola" refers to a particular strain of Rapeseed that was originally cultivated in Canada and is more suited to human and livestock consumption than older cultivars of rapeseed. These days, at least in North America, the vast majority of Rapeseed grown is of the Canola type. The name Canola (a mashup of "Canada" + "Oil") was deliberately chosen because it was better for marketing than "Rapeseed Oil." In the plant name, "Rape" comes from Latin "Rapum" simply meaning "Turnip", but brings obvious negative connotations in English. Since rapeseed oil makes a very good lubricant for e.g., industrial and nautical steam engines, it was actually a pretty important industrial crop in WWII.

Bridges of varying load capacities are indeed modeled. IIRC, we have light (infantry only), medium (all vehicles save heavy tanks) and heavy (everything). Easiest way to tell if a vehicle can cross any given bridge is simply to select the vehicle, start to plot a movement order, and put the cursor on top of the bridge. If the vehicle is too heavy for the bridge, the cursor will change to the "no go" icon. This is also a really good way to quickly scan terrain for where vehicles can pass, and also to quickly find fords in water.

You're assuming he just outright doesn't see it. Maybe he sees it, but he only sees the smoke plume above the bushes and so mis-gauges the distance. Or, maybe he sees the spotting rounds(s) but since he has poor visibility to the surrounding terrain, he mis-reads his location the map and so calls in an incorrect correction. Basically, humans are fallible. Maybe the FO thinks all is good and he's got the fire correctly dialed in, so he calls for FFE, but he's wrong. Even today with GPS and laser rangefinder whiz-bangs accurate down to single meters, fire missions still come in off target occasionally. That it happens sometimes in a WWII game is entirely realistic.

The spotter has to see the spotting rounds well enough to gauge their exact location in order to correct fire. Just hearing a bang and getting a vague glimpse of some smoke somewhere off in the woods isn't good enough. The way the game simulates this is that if you try to call in fire with a spotter who has only marginal LOS (i.e., can see the target point, but does not have LOS to a broad area around the target point), you're asking for trouble and the strike may go off target. Strikes under these conditions will come in on target sometimes, but not always.

Higher-level HQs like Company and Battalion HQs can exert local command over e.g., rifle squads and other teams of their formation in CMx2 similar to the way they did in CMx1. In other words, a Company HQ can "pick up" squads from its own Company, but not from a different Company. They can do this if the units immediate superior HQ hors de combat or simply too far away to maintain C2. However, the ability of higher-level to maintain C2 with non-organic teams is is limited, IIRC, to close visual and voice C2 range. Higher HQs are not able to exert C2 over distant visual as Platoon HQs are. This is done to simulate the fact that higher-level HQs generally have lots of things to worry about other than immediate command of combat teams. You will not get a command line between the infantry team and the higher level HQ when it has "picked up" command. However, you will notice that at least one of the "in command" icons (Voice and/or Close Visual) is shown for the unit that the higher-level HQ has picked up.

If you are a new player, I would advise NOT tackling the full campaigns right after you've finished the training campaign. The campaigns are really designed for intermediate to advanced level players. Campaigns also involve larger considerations like force preservation that aren't as significant in one-off scenarios so it's better to learn how to play individual battles well, and then tackle campaigns. Play some of the scenarios first, starting with smaller ones and working your way up to larger ones. You'll enjoy the campaigns much more this way.

No way; the impact point is in the rocks right at the base of that gun tower. Maybe not 15m, but a heck of a lot less than 100m from the closest guys manning that .50 BMG at the top. But I do agree the vertical separation, as well as all the rocks and sandbags, is what saved their asses. Note that the two guys closest appear to have been short-term combat ineffective due to stunning from the concussion; probably yellow "injured" status in CM terms.

True; technically a "collapsed lung" is what you get from a sucking chest wound. What thermobarics cause is massive pulmonary edema due to internal hemorrhaging. Normal fire can also cause pulmonary edema if e.g., the person breathes in hot gases that sear the internal membranes of the lung, but the mechanism is different.

With the kind of fire caused by "Normal" flame weapons, even in an enclosed space people more typically die from smoke and other toxin inhalation rather than oxygen deprivation. Actually, technically, they *do* die of oxygen deprivation, but it's because the chemicals in the smoke damage the lining of the lungs and the lungs lose their ability to exchange oxygen, not due to lack of oxygen in the air, as such. It takes a really big fire to actually suck all of the oxygen out of the air and if you're that close to a fire that big, you're cooked anyway. Collapsed lungs is something that happens due to a sudden pressure differential, not lack of oxygen as such. Thermobarics are all about pressure (hence the name), so this is one of their primary casualty mechanisms.

Exactly. "Sucking all the air out" and "collapsing lungs" is more description of what thermobaric warheads do. And while in many ways thermobarics fill a role on the modern battlefield that used to be filled by flamethrower weapons, but actually work by a very different mechanism.

We have already established that the ratio of claimed vs. actual kills with aircraft vs. Heavy AFV is well below 2:1, probably more in the ballpark of 10:1. And well over half of Rudel's claimed AFV kills were cannon kills while flying Ju-87G, making his numbers rather worthless for discussing bomb kills.

Actually, no. Directly on top of the target is a singular point. 50m is a ring around the target. As such, assuming even distribution of impacts, an impact somewhere around the 50m ring is considerably more likely than an impact exactly on the bulls-eye. Of course, impacts probabilities actually aren't usually aren't evenly distributed but form a complex probability field, which ordnance and conditions dependent. But I digress... Anyway, except for the "direct hit" the figures, everything I have been citing are a 50% CEP figures -- 50% of the ordnance lands < this distance from the target, 50% lands > this distance. Looks like most other people in this thread are using 50% CEP as well.

Agreed, but my SWAG is that 15 meters is a pretty good threshold distance for how close a bomb in the 220-440 kg range has to land in order to have a decent chance of causing at least some substantial damage to a fully armored AFV. IOW, excepting lucky flukes I wouldn't expect to see any outright KOs at ~15m impact distance, but I would expect to sometimes see incremental track/running gear damage, etc.

All this speculation based on computer games and training films is unnecessary; there is good actual combat data on dive bombing accuracy in WWII. I am aware of several studies, but the one I find most useful is a study done by the U.S. Navy of Bombing accuracy in attacks by the 4th Marine Air Wing in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands in 1944. A little background: After the Marines captured Tarawa and a few other islands in very bloody fights, the remaining Japanese Garrisons in Marshall and Gilbert Islands were simply cut off and left to rot on the vine. But the U.S. Navy wanted to ensure that the bypassed garrisons remained weak and unable to harrass the American logistics lines nearby. So the 4th Marine Air Wing, flying mostly SBD Dauntlesses and F4U Corsairs off of airbases at Tarawa, was assigned the task of periodically visiting the bypassed Japanese garrisons to bomb and strafe the crap out of them. These were carefully planned attacks against known, well recon'd enemy targets. The pilots were well trained and very experienced. Further, enemy defensive air was virtually nonexistent and AAA defense was weak. Japan was occasionally able to get small shipments of supplies to the garrisons by submarine or small, fast surface ships, but the garrisons were cut off from consistent resupply so they quickly ran low on heavier ordnance like AAA rounds. Under these conditions, this is what the U.S. Navy found the 4th MAW attacks were able to achieve: 50% CEP for SBD Dive Bombers was 175ft./53m. 50% CEP for F4U Corsairs was 195ft/59m. The "Direct Hit" percentage (bomb impacts <50ft/15m from target point) was 5.4% for SBDs. Direct Hit percentage (same conditions as above) was 4.5% for Corsairs.Bear in mind the above results only measure how close the bombers came to hitting their assigned target point. They don't account for other miss causes (for example, attacks that hit the assigned target point, but the intel was faulty and the bomb was directed at e.g., a decoy target set up by the Japanese). IMHO, this is a pretty good benchmark figure for what bombing accuracy should look like in CM: Under combat conditions but against light opposition, attacking a known target, dedicated dive bombers like the SBD should be able to get about 1 in 20 bombs to fall close enough that they might cause serious damage to a hardened target like a tank or bunker. A 220kg bomb detonating ~50 ft. from a tank might cause some damage, and would certainly rattle the crew, but would not be a guaranteed kill; so the actual "hard kill" % should be somewhere under 1 in 20. How much under is difficult to quantify.

Not by as much as you'd think. WWII Soviet manpack flamethrowers only held 9-10 liters of fuel, which was expected to last for 6-8 short "blasts". So it's not a heck of a lot of fuel per blast. And unlike with a molotov cocktail broken directly onto the engine deck, there's a lot of wastage with a flamethrower blast -- significant amount of the fuel either burns on the way to the target, or misses the target entirely, especially if shot at the tank from longer range (bearing in mind that "long range" for a manpack flamethrower is anything over about 20m). Precision weapons, they are not. Now, if you want to posit a a guy with flamethrower actually running right up to the tank and hosing it down, you'd probably would be looking at a lot more actually hitting the tank. But again, for this kind of event to actually happen you're probably talking about a coup de gras on a disabled vehicle and CM's regular infantry close assault routine handles this just fine.

Eh... assuming "disabled" means "immobilized", then that's a coup de gras against a stationary turretless AFV without so much as a bow machine gun to defend itself. Once they cleared the immediate area of enemy infantry, they could have walked up, poured the gasoline into whatever convenient crevice they could find, and lit it with a match. Heck, you don't even need the gasoline, just gather some wood and build a bonfire under the Ferd. It'd take awhile, but sooner or later you'd smoke the crew out. "Pretty effective"... yeah; I guess. But in that situation a decent toolbox could be considered an effective AT weapon -- almost could have simply dismantled the thing piece by piece...

Try putting the gun in foxholes or a trench section (to protect the crew) with a sandbag wall (to protect the gun. Under these conditions, you'll find the crew and gun are often remarkably resistant to artillery & mortar fire...

Early war tanks were MUCH more vulnerable to attack by incendiary liquid than later war designs, so e.g., the occasional success of molotov attacks against German Panzers during the defense of Moscow in 1941 isn't particularly useful in trying to figure out how effective flamethrowers should be against tanks in 1944. What would be helpful is if we actually had records of tank(s) being successfully attacked and destroyed by flamethrowers. As noted, we did a fair amount of discussing and digging regarding this on the beta forums, and came up with basically nothing in the way of real-world incidents or data to back up our speculation.

As noted, ordering a crew to abandon a gun is mostly a measure to save the crew's lives when they are clearly outmatched and no longer useful; you may not be able to save the gun, but at least you can save the crew. You can try to use them as infantry after they've abandoned, though personally I find them only marginally useful in this role. I have done this a few times in extremis, though. In addition to coding challenges with getting guns to re-crew, crews would also often (but not always) disable a gun when abandoning in order to prevent the gun from being captured and used by the enemy. So when and if BFC can get around to adding gun re-crewing, some kind of consideration needed to be made to when a crew should "spike" the gun, and when they shouldn't. Tricky thing to model.

Good point; it could be 6 teams/Battalion, organized on paper at the Company or even Battalion level, but often assigned down to the Platoon level, based on where they were most needed. Easy to see how that could lead to confusion...

I'm not sure what you're suggesting... that the platoon sniper teams in CMRT remain in the TOE, be of reasonable quality (i.e., trained marksman speciality) but not have scopes, while the Company-level team be of good quality AND have two scopes? Remember, not enough scopes to have 4 x 2-man sniper teams/Rifle Company AND give each team two scopes, at least not as the default. To equip even the majority of Red Army rifle formations this way would require significantly more scopes than the Soviets produced during the war. Another thought: The first person accounts you cited seem to indicate that the Soviet sniper teams were organized as a sort of Teacher-Apprentice arrangement, with a trained but less experienced sniper in the assistant role paired with a more experienced lead sniper. CMx2 can't exactly model this -- all soldiers within a team must be of the same quality in CMx2 so there's no way to make one man in a team, say, Veteran, while the other guy is only Regular or Green. As such, I think you can argue that removing the "Marksman" specialty from the second man in the sniper team, and not giving him a scope, is a reasonable fudge to represent this kind of thing.

Taken in concert with other sources, first person accounts can be useful, but by themselves, first person accounts are a notoriously unreliable source of information. Soviet TOEs, both on paper and in implementation, also varied a lot from time period to time period and also from front to front so you have to know exactly what time range and region you're dealing with to make any useful comparisons between first person accounts and official TOEs. But regardless, I don't actually have issue with what the source you cite describes. The source seems to indicate the presence of just one (double) sniper team at the rifle Company level, and none at the platoon level. This would mean (as you note) six snipers (organized in pairs) per rifle battalion, all with scoped rifles. Six rifle scopes per rifle battalion is within the possible range when compared to the rifle scope production figures JasonC cites. But what CM currently depicts is twelve sniper teams per rifle battalion; one per rifle platoon, and another three attached directly to the rifle company HQs. It's simply not possible that all of these teams could have two scopes/team. Maybe the TOE as the game depicts it has too many sniper teams, and the platoon-level teams should be eliminated from the game. Or maybe the platoon "sniper" teams were lower priority in training and equipment allotment, and typically didn't have any scoped rifles, while the Company teams did actually have two scopes/team. I have no idea. But universal two scopes/team *and* 12 teams/battalion is not possible. Just not enough scopes.

[emphasis added] This is true, but is also the critical qualifier; many attack profiles like dive bomb and torpedo run only skim the edge of the 20mm range, so it barely gets to fire at all. And of course, against the kamikazes the problem with the 20mm AA was that hits which might have been "kills" of ordinary attacks often didn't break up the airframe enough to stop it from hitting the ship. But this is rather a special case and in any event not relevant to CMRT. The longer range of the 37-40mm also means there's greater chance that installations or ships in proximity can offer mutual support. For the most part, 20mm AA defends whatever is right next to it and that's it. But it is true it 20mm AA wasn't worthless; it still had enough value that they kept using it where 37-40mm wouldn't fit. It also had value in making very low, nap-of-the-earth radar avoidance flight paths dangerous to the enemy; once targets get extremely low and fast, even 37-40mm AA can have difficulty tracking them. But since these approach profiles aren't detected much in advance by radar, it required a very good fast-response system and good gun placement (or simply lots and lots of light guns, dispersed to cover all possible approaches) to execute an effective low-level AAA defense. If there wasn't at least a few minutes' warning, the planes would often simply be gone before the gunners could man their guns and get a bead on them. Mosquito pilots, for example, got remarkably good at avoiding German light AAA on their flight paths, much to Goering's consternation. For these reasons, the USN did conclude that is was useful to keep at least some 20mm tubes on the ships; while weight of 40mm fire was given higher priority, 20mm had value as the "final defense" component of the AAA plan.

Most combatants concluded by mid-war that 20mm AA was less effective per unit system weight than 37mm-40mm. IOW, if you could fit one or two tubes of 37-40mm AA in the same place you could fit four tubes of 20mm system, it was generally better to go with the 37-40mm. For example, by 1943, the U.S. Navy was replacing 20mm Oerlikons with any of the various 40mm Bofors mounts wherever they could; the 20mm mounts stayed where a 40mm mount simply wouldn't fit (they still used substantial numbers of 20mm; something is always than nothing). Note this transition starts to happen before the Japanese begin using Kamikaze tactics in 1944, so cannot be attributed to this. Similarly, the Germans viewed the single 37mm Ostwind as an *upgrade* to the quad 20mm Wirblewind, not a complement -- the plan was to end production of the Wirblewind entirely, and switch over to Ostwind. The big issue with the 20mm systems wasn't so much hitting power as it was range -- the smaller, lighter 20mm shell loses velocity much more quickly with range, which means longer time of flight, and time of flight is a critical factor in hitting a fast-moving target at distance. Most combatants concluded that 20mm AA had an effective range of only about 1000mm, maybe 1500m at the uppermost. Against an attacking plane moving at least 100m/s, and usually closer to 150 m/s, this meant that a plane was only in the target envelope of 20mm AA for a very brief time. Bear in mind that a plane on a strafing run usually starts to break off at a slant range of about 400m, and dive or shallow glide bombers usually start pullout at a slant range of no less than 800m. So a dive bomber spends a very brief time indeed in the range envelope of 20mm and in fact the bomb is often already released before a dive bomber enters 20mm AA's threat envelope. In contrast, the 37-40mm shells carried much further, and were considered effective out to at least 2,000m, and in many cases as far as 4,000m, depending on the details of the weapons system and the target profile. This compensates for their lower rate of fire -- they spend more time shooting at the target. It also means that more 37-40mm guns can be brought to bear on a given target if the guns are dispersed over a wide area (which they generally are, to defend multiple targets and attack vectors).