John D Salt

Call me a quaint old-fashioned thing if you must, but when I worked for DERA (the E stands for "Evaluation") the favoured place for testing weapons was on a test range. Quite strongly favoured, in fact. Doing the testing at a place other than a test range does tend to rather destroy the point, in that you can't collect the data which are the only reason for the test's existence. The French do nuke-testing-in-someone-else's-desert-with-worrying-political-overtones much better than this, or, at least, they did at the beginning of the sixties -- Gerboise Bleue, Blanche, Rouge and Verte, all let off in Algeria. But even then, it was at a properly instrumented test range, not some random patch of sand. And as "Gerboise" is the French for "Jerboa", we are getting perilously close to nuclear hamstertruppen. The most plausible motive for the US to let off an instant sunshine squib in the middle of MMFD is, IMO, to create a souvenir in the form of a giant radioactive glass ashtray. All the best, John.

Absolutely. And no need for anyone to explain what the motivation might be for nuking a tract of empty desert, either. All the best, John.

Back etymology. The SOED gives the origin as from the verb cop, meaning "to capture or catch". Police Constable, not Patrol Constable. Very rarely heard in the UK these past two or three decades. Say rather "scuffers", "fuzz", "The Babylon" if the fancy takes you, or, probably most frequent, "The Old Bill" (or simply "The Bill"). All the best, John.

[snips] Flying Officer Picklesworth says it's "archie", not "flak". All the best, John.

Mr. Picky would like to point out the difference between a "screen" and a "guard". The first observes and reports any enemy advance; the second fights it. Motorcycle scouts can screen, but they can't guard. I think this doctrinal difference is usually the second thing cavalrymen tell you, right after the bit about "Lending tone to what would otherwise be a mere vulgar brawl". All the best, John.

Having checked my own copy of Hogg's Encyclopaedia of Infantry Weapons of WW2, I can find no reference to the date of introduction of the Hawkins mine. Annoyingly, there also seems to be no indication in The British Army Handbook (either the Chaberlain & Ellis or the Forty ones), nor even in my trusty 1975 Jane's Infantry Weapons, which covers quite a few old items. The most believeable source I can find in five minutes with Google is David Boyd's page: http://www.wwiiequipment.com/grenades.aspx ...which would seem to indicate that John K is right is thinking any reference to Dunkirk mistaken. All the best, John.

Obviously, curved armour gives a greater variety than a flat plate of angles at which a projectile arriving from a given direction might strike -- parts of the cirve will present favourable angles, others much less favourable. So the answer is that curved armour might do both better and worse than a flat plate of comparable thickness. As a general rule, though, once you get to an angle of incidence of about 70 degrees or more, it is quite staggeringly hard to get a penetration without a hypervelocity impact. The trouble with arnour is that it's heavy, and the trouble with turrets is that they must rotate. With a decent-sized gun mounted at the front of the turret, there is already a pretty big rotating mass unbalancing things. While it would be good for protection to put bags of thick armour on the mantlet, too much unbalanced mass is likely to create engineering problems elsewhere. All the best, John.

I'm sure I've posted this before, but AIUI the guide to usage of "Yankee" is: Outside the United states, "Yankee" means an inhabitant of the USA. Inside the United States, "Yankee" means an inhabitant of the Northern states. Inside the Northern states, "Yankee" means an inhabitant of New England. Inside New England, "Yankee" means an inhabitant of Vermont. Inside Vermont, "Yankee" means somebody who eats apple pie for breakfast. All the best, John.

I'd suggest you might want to include light and general-purpose machine-guns, which are vastly more dangerous than rifles and vastly more numerous than HMGs. Given that it causes most casualties in combat, it also seems odd to try to leave out indirect HE fire (mortars, rockets and tube artillery). Then there's the modern fashion for grenade launchers and ATGWs. Quite a lot of weapons seem to merit inclusion before HMGs get a whole category to themselves. Take a look at the old WRG 1950-1975 or 1950-2000 rules, or GDW's "Team Yankee" or one of its derivatives, to see very successful ways of cramming the massive variety of modern weaponry into simple systems. You might also look at the draft rules for "The Sharp End" on Phil Barker's web site. All the best, John.

The proximity fuze, developed in the US, was given the designation "VT". This was an arbitrary project code. The abbreviation "Variable Time" was later back-formed from these letters, a rather silly name, since it is not a time fuze of any kind. VT fuzes were first used in action in 1944. They are modelled in the original CM:BO and in CM:AK for the appropriate time periods. They did not appear in Tunisia, although I believe that Rick Atkinson's otherwise admirable "An Army At Dawn" contains an erroneous reference to them. Before the arrival of the VT fuze, airbursts could be achieved, less reliably, by powder-train or clockwork time fuzes. At shallow angles on appropriate ground, airbursts could also be achieved by ricochet fire with a delay fuze. None of these aspects of artillery fire is modelled in the CM series. All the best, John.

Well now, I was going to complain about 1. Forum being crammed between nasty pointless borders 2. Starting at the bottom 3. Scrolling of alarming wonkitude but all these went away when I went to the full-screen version. So instead, I shall complain about 1. The lack of things to complain about BF please fix or do somefink. All the best, John.

There is a very good rule of thumb, first I believe enunciated by my pal Paul Syms, that simplifications made in combat models tend always to favour the attacker. One might naively assume that there is an evens chance of any given simplifcation favouring one or the other, but it turns out not to be so. The reason is that the attacker is trying to change the situation, but the defender is happy if it stays the same. Generally, more complications make it harder to change things. In Real Life[tm], the complications mean that just arranging for everyone to cross the start-line at Zero (with adequate rest, food, ammo and clue as to what is happening) is so brain-buggeringly difficult that it's quite hard to do even when there is no enemy at all. Does Borg spotting favour the attacker? It seems to me that it certainly does. It removes the complication of one element of a force indicating targets for another. Target indication -- fire orders, the clock-ray method, "watch my tracer", mucking about with tank telephones to try to tell the tank gunner where to look, sending grid references accurately over the radio -- is something real military training devotes a fantastic amount of time to. In wargames, it is all achieved as if by magic. That's why you see your ATk guns die under a massive salvo of HE the instant the first spotter gets a sniff of them. All the best, John.

Mr. Picky isn't at all sure you can have that flavour of exhaust with the three-return-roller chassis. Anyone got a huge Jentz or Spielberger tome on Pz IV variants to check for sure? All the best, John.

Good luck finding them -- please let us know if you turn anything up. I assume from the mention of P(hit) that it's direct-fire weapons you're interested in. Apart from a very vague mention in a PRO file from the post-war interrogation of a German scientist (who said that an average dispersion at the muzzle of about a mil is what was epxected for anti-tank guns) the only source I have is Bird & Livingston's "World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery", 2nd edn. This shows values ranging from about 0.75 to 2 minutes for the lateral dispersion of 68.26% of shots (a figure chosen I imagine to correspond with one standard deviation of the Gaussian distribution). I'd be interested to know what P(hit) data you've managed to find for Russian (especially) and German weapons, aside from what's in "Panzertruppen". All the best, John.

PaK43 could fire faster than was otherwise practicable (the dust kicked up would block the vision and so forth). the rate of fire was thus officially limited to 10 rounds / minute. heavy PakS and especially FlaKs had large crews and they thus could fire as rapidly as 20 rounds / minute. </font>

...which is interesting. In Real Life[tm], an avtomatchik would carry maybe 200 rounds at most, enough for five minutes of rooty-toot at the very conservative rate of 40 rds/min. All the best, John.

The whole country was completely devastated. There wasn't even enough food and domestic fuel to go round, never mind about military production. There were no German armed forces to make the things for, anyway. The Bundeswehr was not formed until 1955 (the para-military Bundesgrenchutz had been formed in 1951) and the National Volksarmee in 1956. Victor Gollancz' "In Darkest Germany" paints a grim picture of the state of West Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. All the best, John.

This is all fantastically good tactical advice. Unfortunately some of it reminds me of some good old NATO ideas from the 1970s, like "How to fight outnumbered 3:1 and win", "Why it is a good idea to use the armoured division's reserve brigade as a forward screen" and "Fighting in a chemical warfare environment without any replacement filters". All the best, John.

Bugger.

As far as I can make out from Joslen, 11H were Army Group troops, and no longer in the orbat by 15 May 45. This would make me suspect that they were still, as they were in the desert, an armoured car regiment, as distinct from an armoured recce regiment, and so should have no tanks on the strength. The page at http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.a.paterson/battles1945.htm seems to confirm that they were in armoured cars, but says that they were subordinate to 7th Armd Div. This disagrees with Joslen, whos says that the div recce regt at the time was 8H. All the best, John. [ May 14, 2008, 02:14 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]

I don't usually find it realistic, because I am too old and wily a buzzard to suspend my disbelief for a computer-based entertainment. I expect that the callow youth who do willingly suspend their belief for computer-based entertainment would expect more in the way of flashy high-end CGI to help them do so, because, never having spent too much time outdoors, they imagine that that is what real life is like. The one flash of "realism" I had was when I first looked at the ground for a CM:BO scenario set at Chef du Pont; having been at Chef du Pont on a battlefield tour a few weeks previously, I was struck by the superb job the scenario designer had done of representing the terrain. The game does more or less encourage tactics like those used in real life, and so succeeds very well indeed as a tactical wargame -- probably better than any other computer-based tactical wargame I have ever seen, not excluding professional ones. It succeeds best of all as a model of WW2 direct-fire combat, giving the intelligent user plenty to think about and rewarding long study. However, like all working models, it doesn't need to be very realistic to be useful. All the best, John.

Mr. Picky points out that the Royal Marines are not part of the Army, and that you mean 3 Commando Brigade, not 3 Commando (which like all Army Commandos was disbanded shorty after the end of WW2). All the best, John.

Oooh, viscous ognesmesi, they sound nasty. All the best, John.

You can also refuse to use an OS that insists on such an insane rule as the one you describe. Can I suggest you address a request to M$, instead of Battlefront? Maybe if a quarter of one per cent of the people who are annoyed with the idiotic design of their fifth-rate products wrote to him, even Bonehead Ballmer would realise that it's long past time for M$ to do better. All the best, John.

The difficulty I have with this is that "anti-tank shell" and "panzergranate" are not in conflict. They are the English and German words for exactly the same thing. I can't remember who it was who said "The Germans call it a messer, the French call it a couteau, and we call it a knife, which, after all, is what it actually is", but unless you believe him there is no conflict here. The simplest explanation that requires us to believe in the fewest fairies at the bottom of anyone's garden is that the person writing the caption for the Pentland painting has made a mistake in recounting the incident. He has already made one mistake in glossing "panzergranate" incorrectly. I wonder, has anyone in the forum ever mentioned the principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? All the best, John.