Affentitten

Exactly. Camouflage is never going to make you invisible. It's there to avoid detection from a sweeping glance, aerial photo or other long distance scrutiny. Moving will break your camouflage anyway, so then the game becomes breaking up the exact outline and perhaps making specific vehicle identification difficult.

Brian, My brother-in-law is in the RAN. They get one set of dress uniform issued when they join. That has to last them until whenever they quit. If you get too fat, too thin, too dirty or the stuff gets too worn, then any subsequent clothing has to be purchased. My BIL has been in 13 years now and got commissioned a couple of years ago. The parade with all his fellow up-from-the-ranks-now-behind-a-desk boys was hilarious, with half of them barely fitting into the dress jackets they'd been issued as 17 year olds. I'm not sure what the story is with everyday uniform, like overalls and so forth.

I understand that for a large aircraft, paint can add up. It's also why they don't paint the main booster tank of the Space Shuttle any more. There are performance issues, but I don't think that matters as much for something small like a P-51. Surely the weight saved by leaving portions of the fuselage bare metal would be pretty much negated by weight variations in an individual pilot. Since bomb and MG ammo loads were fixed by space and hardpoint strenght anyway, I think leaving off the paint had more to do with time and money than substantial performance increases, at least in the case of single seat fighters. As for the use of natural vegetation and cammo nets in today's warfare, here's an interesting article I wrote a couple of years ago on the use of LIDAR to see through camouflage. Light Fantastic

Thanks so much for re-phrasing me.

AS far as infantry camouflage goes, I think it was mainly an expense thing. Pattern printing processes and dye quality of the day were not what they are now. It would have been prohibitive to issue individual uniforms with woven cammo patterns to all and sundry. For vehicles, it's a different story. The Germans were, for example, brilliant at aircraft camouflage. But they had to be, because they lost control of the skies early on, and their airfields were subject to bombing. Towards the end of the war, the Americans didn't even bother to camouflage most of their planes, just leaving the bare metal finish. That was because their aircraft were under very little threat from fighter opposition or bombing at home. The same could be said of German tanks. Ruthlessly hunted by fighter bombers and often used in static ambushes, the need for camouflage was greater than that of the Allies, advancing across the open in mass-produced waves.

No AI is perfect. Remember what the the "A" stands for. I think Combat Mission is pretty good as far as AI goes. Look how crap the AI is in games like Close Combat. You have friendly AI troops that come under fire whilst crossing a road and instead of sprinting the 2 meters to safety, they stop, move two meters up the road, two meters to the left, two meters back down and then just keep going in a circle whilst getting cut to pieces in the open. Another problem with CC was that the friendly AI was handicapped as a means of making the game more even against the computer. So your tanks would get a clear rear or side shot at a Tiger, but for some reason the tank commander would insist on firing his main weapon only when it was perfectly aligned with the tracks. So you'd get this seconds long "dance of death" as your tank body swivelled slowly, over-swivelled, began to swivel back.....too late. Dead. Meanwhile the enemy AI tanks are snapping off shots from three o'clock to 6 o'clock and taking out a vehicle with every single shot. Enemy accuracy and penetration of their ammo was again beefed up in the name of "fairness". Be grateful for CM.

My interactions with Canadian women have led me to believe that the Skank is a more commonly deployed variant.

I think if you're talking about a Falaise style situation, all the elements would have been there for such a break-out battle....except the massed artillery. Given the massive attrition on German vehicles, supplies and guns taken by Allied arty and fighter bombers during the Normandy campaign, I don't think any German commanding a scratch battle group would have been able to call on artillery strikes like you're imagining.

In the jungle war, the Brits specifically used Bofors guns a lot to knock out Japanese bunkers, especially when they had been outflanked. (I suppose it's much easier to that in the jungle than in a Rheinland meadow. There was a standard joke that the Bofors boys had special 4 round magazines for the job, with the first 3 being rubber shells, and the last one HE. Firing the first three rounds at the door of the bunker would make the Japs think someone was knocking, and they'd open up just in time for the real shell. 2 pounder field pieces were also used specifically to collapse in the firing slits of Jap bunkers.

Right.. .But there are also plenty of real life examples such as the rail bridge over the Waal in Nijmegan that was unusable by anything other than rolling stock until modified. </font>

mike8g: Something like that! My mate used to laugh about it all the time. He loved saying it to English speakers when they asked him what he did. Is the kapitänspatentinhaber suffix historically valid, or is it just a bit of fun?

Compound nouns? Of course. I really had no idea that was the correct term after years as an English grammar teacher and journalist. The longest example that is commonly given as an actual German noun and title is "Donaudampschiffartsgeselleschaftsbeamter". There may be a couple of rogue letters in my rendering, but it translates as "Officer of the Donau Steamship Company".

I love the German ability make huge long nouns and then strange abbreviations from them. When I lived in Germany I had a friend in the Luftwaffe who had a title that was about 40 letters long. It translated to something like "Officer in charge of squadron anti-aircraft missile maintenance".

Regarding the high fire, I had the same thing happen a number of times on an Arnhem bridge scenario. I also got craters that extended skywards. It's something to do with the effects being mapped onto the vertical bridge side tiles.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Abn_Ranger87: Interesting statistics of allied BDA, what about the axis losses? Other thing I'm wondering is how many of those German assetts mentioned actually were engaged. Maintenance losses and CAS most assuredly kept quite a few out of the fighting...<hr></blockquote> Not to mention how many of them were blown apart before even getting a shot off by tac air, naval guns and the big carpet bombing raids like Cobra.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Affentitten: Anybody remember those "Adventure" books from when they were a kid? There was "Gorilla Adventure", "South Seas Adventure" and so on. About these 2 brothers who went all round the world collecting animals for their dad's zoo? One of the bad guys in those books used the pseudonym "Spike Marlin". That's where I learnt about what the tool was for.<hr></blockquote> Just remembered. The author was Willard Price.

The Marlin Spike was originally a nautical tool. It was meant for piercing canvas when repairing sails. Anybody remember those "Adventure" books from when they were a kid? There was "Gorilla Adventure", "South Seas Adventure" and so on. About these 2 brothers who went all round the world collecting animals for their dad's zoo? One of the bad guys in those books used the pseudonym "Spike Marlin". That's where I learnt about what the tool was for.

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Eric Young: I submit that the German's really had the better all propose knife. The Mercator Kat knife was one heck of a fine blade. Its locking high carbon blade made by Solingin is a fine piece of steel. My 1944 model still cuts like new. E [ 01-08-2002: Message edited by: Eric Young ]<hr></blockquote> I used to live in Solingen, in the same street as many of the blade factories. I ate a lot of potatoes whilst there.

But in my first post I was trying to point out the fact that it was far harder to accommodate change in US production, even when mistakes like the 75mm were uncovered. The sheer scale of US production and its farming out to so many producers made incoporating change very difficult, and the very nature of the mass-produced and interchangeable fighting formations made providing different models to different units impractical. German industrial production tended to be a bit more bespoke, not to mention the fact that they were desperate enough to seek outside the square. I guess the Americans were comfortable in the fact that they were going to win on numbers and that there would always be a third Sherman to pick off the lone Panther that had just nailed two of his buddies.

I believe that the Belgian contribution to the potato world is neglible, and indeed I think the underperformance of both the Dutch and Belgian armies in stopping the Nazi advnace has more to do with condiments than their peeling techniques. For what do both the Dutch and the Flemish dump on top of their fries? Mayonnaise! This effete practice not only clogs arteries and thickens waistlines, it also entails a whole new area of logistical support, that is to say the procurement of factory-made mayo or else vast volumes of eggs and oil. Not to mention the need for proper refrigeration. Burdened by diverting troops to an excessive mayonnaise support chain, the Dutch and Belgians could not stand in the face of the leaner Germans, marching relentlessly forward with their boiled spuds.

I think the main difference between the Allied and German approaches was that the Allies, and especially the USA with their massive auto production lines, tended to modify and compromise guns to fit inside a given tank body, whereas the Germans tended to build a tank body around a certain gun.

I think part of the issue with the USA not producing Firefly's was not wanting to dick around with their mass-production philosophy. Contracts had been awarded and lines tooled up to produce the 76mm Shermans on a massive, integrated scale, and it would have been too expensive and difficult to have changed over to produce Fireflys in anything like the numbers needed to make them a standard force component.

Here is a little demonstration video: Marine Sniper School demo

How are zones of control figured after a battle in a scenario campaign? I ask because I've been both the beneficiary and victim of lines being radically re-set after a battle. I'm playing a Monte Cassino scenario at the moment. After a last turn rush, I got only a couple of squads across the river and into town. I was dreading the next battle, where I would have had to make my way up the hill through all the fixed fortifications to the monastery. Yet when it came time to set up for round 2, my territory lines extended all the way up the hill and into the monastery itself, where I was able to position units behind the dreaded AT bunkers. Not only that, but there were no Axis troops at all on the monsatery hill except for the two bunkers. On a nearby, higher hill, I had surrounded a sizeable German force on top, but had not fully "conquered" the crest. But on the 2nd round I was gifted the entire hill. On the flip side, in playing the Carentan scenario as the Germans, I was continually pushed back at the beginning of each round, depite having untis at the far edge of the map each time. The set-up line was always a straight east-west (or something) line running right across the map. So how are these things calculated?

Yeah OK. I read a bit about recovery and repair in the manual, but I can't say that I've ever been aware of it happening. God, even if I don't get the tank back again, it's depressing to see a mobile vehicle listed as abandoned in a subsequent battle when I knew it had only sutained a gun hit.