John D Salt
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Posts posted by John D Salt
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As far as I can make out so far, "assault" means that troops are fighting through by fire and movement. I'm not entirely clear what the exact difference is between this and "advance", although one might assume more fire and less movement the closer one gets to the objective.Originally posted by benpark:I was wondering why the "run" command takes place instead of the "assault" command. I would assume that the point of the human wave allways ends in an all out attack?
"Human wave", on the other hand, appears to be what I would call a good old-fashioned screaming-Jesus bayonet charge. I'm a bit bewildered by the choice of title -- surely "Human wave" is a Korean-war phrase -- and I don't understand why the command is reserved to the Russians. Apart from anything else, this seems in direct contradiction to the policy of not having "national characteristics". I understand that a morale bonus is conferred on the chargers, but is there any morale effect on the target of the charge? That, I would have thought, would have been the means whereby such tactics could prove effective. If the defenders keep their nerve and keep firing, the morale of the attackers determines only how many of them get killed before they are driven to ground.
Pesonally, the infantry command I've found the biggest boon so far is "move to contact", especislly for movement in woods.
All the best,
John.
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Kip has been citing his sources in this discussion, which will doubtless cost me money for more books. Could you post a reference to these "AAR"s, please?Originally posted by JasonC:[snips]
Which you can find in the AARs over and over.
All the best,
John.
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Kip has been citing his sources in this discussion, which will doubtless cost me money for more books. Could you post a reference to these "AAR"s, please?Originally posted by JasonC:[snips]
Which you can find in the AARs over and over.
All the best,
John.
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Ok, that's fixed it. Downloading the latest driver from the (amazingly broken-looking in Opera) ATI support page atOriginally posted by Barleyman:Something's not working right
Does your Tweaker & driver versions match? Latest tweaker (3.5) only works with Catalyst drivers.
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
and installing it makes the demo work as fast as CM:BO did.
If only using an ordinary desktop PC to play games could be made as straightforward as Unix system administration was...
All the best,
John.
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</font>Originally posted by Barleyman:Oh, I'm using latest leaked Catalyst drivers (6143)
No reason to get excited, I already figured out a workaround:</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />I figured it out. There's a bug in CMBB and/or Radeon's drivers. If you're experiencing extreme slowdowns, disable "Z-Mask" feature.
Go grab a good Radeon tweaker. You'll find the setting under Direct3D stuff, right at the end. You might want to create a profile that runs every time you run CMBB demo.
Turning Anti-aliasing on helps as well.
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I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous answer:Originally posted by Scheer:Hi all,
well ?
"Soviet tanks and combat vehicles of World War Two", Steven J Zaloga and James Grandsen, A&AP, London, 1984, ISBN 0-85368-606- 8.
All the best,
John.
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"Soviet tanks and combat vehicles of World War Two", Steven J Zaloga and James Grandsen, A&AP, London, 1984, ISBN 0-85368-606-8.Originally posted by Little_Black_Devil:[snips]
I was wondering, if there was a comprehensive book - simillar to the "Encyclopedia of German Tanks fo World War II" by Peter Chamberlain and Hilary Doyle, which dealt with Soviet Armour.
their series on tanks.
If there's anything better, I'd like to hear of it.
All the best,
John.
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Yeah, right.Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:I think most of the professional soldiers that I've talked to (including Marines and Rangers) look at the OO-RAH nonsense the Marines, Rangers and etc. spout at each other as just that - juvenile. [snips]
However, I can vouch from personal experience that "Eat Plutonium Death, You Disgusting Alien Weirdos!" is a good deal more of an effort to shout accurately while attempting, for exercise, to deliver a properly grown-up bayonet charge.
All the best,
John.
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Many years ago, we ran a big Russian Front 1/76th miniatures game in which players were given a "silver bullet" each time they performed some act of note. A "silver bullet" is if my memory fails me correctly equal parts of schnapps and vodka. In our game, these were presented on a Queen's Regiment silver salver, and had to be downed in one.Originally posted by Andreas:[snips] what sort of alcoholic beverage do people look forward to partake in while dismembering the heroic defenders of the working class, or chopping up the steel-chinned defenders of the Fatherland?
All the best,
John.
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...but people who have actually fired MG-42-like weapons consistently state that the weapon is quite controllable in burst fire from the bipod.Originally posted by Pak40:Since the cyclic rate of the MG42 is so high, you could imagine the recoil of 20 full size rounds being fired within 1 second. You would have very little control of the gun with just a bipod.
[snips]
All the best,
John.
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Well *I* want to see CM:BB feature the "Skumbria", the rocket-armed fire-support trawler that helped to shoot the landing force into "The Little Land". It's in the counter-mix for Jack Radey's "Black Sea*Black Death" boardgame.Originally posted by History Buff:[snips]
I honestly can't say though, never heard of any major engagement on the eastern front where naval guns had a devastating impact.
Of course, as it's off-table support, it will be indistinguishable from Katyushas fired off truck bodies, but never mind that.
All the best,
John.
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Well, of course, what the folks at BATUS are trying to do is chop up the sleeping bags of the tank crew. This will cause them considerable annoyance at laagering time, and also produce the spectacle of Chieftains/Challengers/Challenger 2s [adjust according to vintage] driving around shedding a coud of feathers.Originally posted by Determinant:But all that said in the post-war British Army there is a fine tradition, on the Prairie Block at Medicine Hat in Alberta, where our generous Canadian cousins allow us to train in armoured warfare, for the infantry to fire their MGs into their own passing tanks out of nothing more than ugly spite. And the effect: punctured external tank stores. No tank or tanker has yet been harmed.
[snips]
Seriously, you stick in enough tracers and the target AFV might have a stowage fire; and you might just have a bullet chop down a radio antenna. These are firmly in the "annoyance" rather than the "system kill" category, though.
All the best,
John.
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Errr, not quite.Originally posted by The ol one eye.:The M 16 was'nt in CMBO, but thanks to the lend-lease, the Russkies got lots of 'em.
The literal answer is "none" (see page 219 of "Soviet tanks and combat vehicles of WW2", Zaloga & Grandsen, A&Ap 1984, which gives the numbers of lend-lease armoured vehicles supplied to the USSR).Originally posted by The ol one eye.:BTW, how many did the Russians get through lend-lease?
What the Russians were sent was the MGMC M17, which used the same M45D quad 0.5" HMG mount as the M16. They were sent a thousand of these, plus a hundred of the MGMC M15A1, which had a single 37mm and two 0.5" HMGs in a combination mount M54.
The M17 was based on the M5 chassis, whereas the M16 used the M3 chassis. As a rule of thumb, M3 chassis types were kept for US service, and M5 or M9 chassis supplied for lend-lease. The M15A1 appears to be an exception, being based on the M3 chassis.
All the best,
John.
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This is not what we old-timey Panzerblitz player grognards meant when we were grogning about the "Panzerbush syndrome", but it sounds very similar.Originally posted by Farnz:Tank shrubs ?!?
Are we talking hanging baskets ?
When people used empty trucks as forward observers to call indirect fire on people hidden in woods, their opponents probably did feel a lot like hanging the baskets.
All the best,
John.
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I'd be prepared to guess that John Keegan is mildly misremembering or misinterpreting a traditional rule of designatino which, I think, was more popular with the Royal Navy than with the army. This was that rounds capable of penetrating an armour thickness equal to or greater than their calibre would be designated "armour piercing", and those that could only penetrate less than their calibre are called "semi-armour-piercing". A lot of naval SAP was what would later, in land service, have been called APHE.Originally posted by Chad Harrison:"It is a rule of thumb that armour is penetrable by rounds equal in diameter to its thickness" John Keegan, Author of "The Second World War".
[snips]
All the best,
John.
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I don't know how far west you have to go to qualify for "Western", but here on the Greenwich meridian the term "self-loading" is the traditional term. I believe that German uses a similar term.Originally posted by Foreigner:[snips]
The Russian/Soviet military terminology tradition generally stresses the distinction between "purely" automatic weapons (that can provide continuous fire as long as the trigger is depressed and ammunition is fed - full-auto in Western terminology) and self-loading weapons - "Samozaryadnoe oruzhie" - that feed ammunition automatically, but require the shooter to release the trigger before each subsequent shot - semi-automatics in Western terms).
All the best,
John.
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Leningrad! From Leningrad women to the front.Originally posted by Runyan99:What does that say on the turret of the KV-1?
All the best,
John.
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I've just run a few quick tests with a dug-in but ammoless Tiger about 270m from a line of 10 Daimlers, who then proceed to give it a vigorous ball-peening.Originally posted by BDW:Daimler AC just took out a tiger at range 270 - front turret penetration
In 10 replications, the Tiger got walloped three times; the other seven times the Daimlers ran out of ammunition without inflicting any damage.
I'm not sure what proportion of the ammo expended over these runs scored hits, but it must have been better than half. Assuming it was only half, then from these results it seems that you need something over three thousand 2-pdr hits to produce one kill.
You may regard a second-shot kill as pretty lucky.
All the best,
John.
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The Maxim PM-1910 was not the only MMG provided to infantry units; one might also meet the Goryunov SG-43 in the latter half of the war.Originally posted by Zitadelle:The Maxim was really the only infantry machine gun provided to infantry units. It was based upon the original German Maxim machine gun developed in the early 1900s which was the model MG for the Vickers, Browning, and others as well.
Sir Hiram Maxim was an American, working in England, who used the manufacturing facilities of the Vickers company at Crayford, in Kent, to make his gun. By 1890 he had supplied his gun to, among others, the British, German and Russian governments. The idea that the British and Russian guns were based on a German design is entirely wrong; and, although the US used some Colt-built Vickers guns in .30 calibre during WW1, I believe that the M1917 Browning does not even use the Maxim toggle action.
All the best,
John.
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Since it's 100 metres short of the battlesight range on the dear old SLR, I rather think it can. It would be hard not to count it as "close range" for anything other than thrown or projected grenades or weapons firing pistol bullets.Originally posted by Sergei:[snips]
Dorosh, 200 meters hardly can be defined as "close range".
All the best,
John.
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Steve Peek and S Craig Taylor were the folks behind initially Battleline, then Yaquinto. I don't know why, but I have never, ever been able to get on with any of their games, with one exception. This is odd, because the Battleline/Yaquinto/same people, different organisation games I've got in my collection are all about subjects I am very, very interested in -- "Air Force", "Submarine", "Commando Actions", "Mustangs", "Firepower", "MBT". All womderful subjects. All horrible games. The one exception, oddly, is "Machiavelli", a Battleline game entirely putside my normal area of historical interest, which I think is an absolute gem. I can't put my finger on what it is about Peek/Taylor games I can't stand. Part of it is probably to do with complexity, but "USN" was my first SPI game and "Air War" one of my favourites, so I don't think it's just that. More likely it's what I perceive as unnecessary or inappropriate complexity -- huge numbers of tables for cross-referencing huge numbers of factors smells of clunky design, and I cannot believe that, say, recording armament hits in "Airforce" or distinguishing between lots of different kinds of SMG in "Firepower" matters in the slightest.Originally posted by Old Dog:This nostalgic romp in tactical gaming wouldn't be complete without a nod to Yaquinto games and their (3) miniatures style games with the amazing little data cards on every counter in each game: Panzer, 88, and Armor.
Scale was 1 AFV or platoon per counter, movement was plotted and then simutaneously resolved. We played the crap out of those games when they came out (about 1980).
And wasn't Steve Peek the moving force behind Yaquinto?
- Old Dog
I never played "Panzer", "88" or "Armour", as I learned to dislike Yaquinto games early on. However, as far as I'm aware, they aren't really part of the "Panzerblitz" family, which was all I was concentrating on. If I'd been discussing modern land tactical boardgames in general, you can be sure I'd have mentioned "Tank!", "Sniper!", "Patrol", "Firefight", "Tobruk", "Grunt", "Hue", "Raid!", "Platoon",... {drones on for ten minutes before falling into a light slumber}
All the best,
John.
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So could you name a nation which participated in WW2 whose gunners were not capable of firing a TOT shoot?Originally posted by JasonC:No, "everybody" didn't master TOT shoots.
I would have thought that the point of a TOT shoot was plainly to get maximum intensity of bombardment for any given density. The number of tubes used is surely only relevant insofar as it helps deliver the required intensity -- as the old gunner saying goes, the shell is the weapon, not the gun. I expect the Germans may have regarded Nebelwerfers, when available, as a preferable means to achieving high intensity, which would explain a lesser fondness for TOT shoots, but this is merely speculation.Originally posted by JasonC:Everybody didn't have any cause to. The point of a TOT is not the split second, it is using many guns for very few rounds each instead of a few guns for many rounds each. It is one use of massing flexibility.
I'd be interested in knowing your source for this. It does not seem to agree very well with the following passage, taken from page 139 of Bruce Gudmundsson's "On Artillery" (Praeger, 1993):Originally posted by JasonC:The German system of dedicated support of a few firing battalions to maneuver battalions was not conducive to doing this. What you need for it is a generalized pool of guns available to anybody who calls (1), plus a lot of lead time to plan the shoot (2). Which normally don't go together, but can with advanced planning.
Since a front line German battalion could not order supporting fire from every gun in the corps, he could not tap 8 battalions for a TOT. [snips]
"The only area in which American artillerists seem to have failed to catch up with the Germans was the massing of fire of many divisions. The culprit here seems to have been the relatively inflexible nature of American command arrangements. Whereas the Germans were perfectly happy to put divisional artillery under the direct operational control of another artillery headquarters (whether artillery division headquarters, Arko, independent regimental headquarters, observation battalion, or 18th Artillery Division), the Americans seem to have resisted such infringement of on the autonomy of division commanders. As with the French, there remained a wall between division and corps artillery that prevented the kind of unitary leadership that had been central to German artillery practice since the days of Bruchmuller."
As for needing "a lot of lead time" to plan the shoot, I suppose that depends on what you mean by "a lot". During the breaching of the Hitler Line by 1st Canadian Corps in May 1944, one target was engaged with 3,509 rounds (92 tons) fired by 668 tubes (19 field, 9 medium and 2 heavy regiments). The time from the request being received by CRA 1st Cdn Div to the first rounds impacting was 33 minutes. (Source: "The development of artillery tactics and equipment", Brigadier A L Pemberton MC, The War Office, 1950 -- thanks, JonS).
All the best,
John.
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Well, quite. That is why I mentioned that in the only case I could find where FOV differed appreciably between monocular and binocular versions of a sight, it was the binocular version that had the wider FOV.Originally posted by YankeeDog:As far as magnification optics in general, binocular magnification devices do not necessarily have narrower FOV.
That seems pretty unlikely to me. I understand that the stereoscopic effect of human vision vanishes above about 30 metres.Originally posted by YankeeDog:In general, the biggest single advantage of binocular devices over monocular ones is that they afford much better depth perception. [snips]
With binoculars, the lieutenant is going to get a much better picture of the 3-D nature of the terrain in front of him.
Now that seems to make good sense.Originally posted by YankeeDog:Another minor advantage of binoculars is reduced eyestrain; looking through monocular eyepieces for long periods of time gives most people a splitting headache.
All the best,
John.
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But there's no correlation between binocularity, field-of-view (FOV) and magnification, is there? Surely it's FOV and mag that matter, not the number of eyepieces.Originally posted by tools4fools:[snips -- I asked what difference binocular sights would make]
Only guessing here, but
"Narrow field of view making tracking of moving targets more difficult for some tanks(especially at close ranges), for example"
as stated by Moon might be a problem with binocular optics. Advantage for those could be magnification on long range then.
The only case I can find, on the very limited information available to me, of binocular and monocular sights having important differences in these respects is the case of the TZF12 and 12a, as mounted in the Panther. In this case the binocular version has a greater FOV than the monocular, although the same magnification. However, the monocular sight relaced the binocular one in service.
All the best,
John.
No reason to get excited, I already figured out a workaround:
KV - IS Heavy Tank
in Combat Mission Archive #4 (2002)
Posted
Having bulldozed my way through the Sov defences for the loss of 1 Mk III and 1 Mk IV, I took the Russkies, and was not a little disappointed at what a pathetic little popgun the 45mm is, when executing massed fire into the flanks of Panzers at two or three hundred metres. At least the anti-tank rifle is so bedwettingly impuissant that tanks you have been shooting at for three or four turns don't take any notice of you.
My first KV-1S got waxed by a PzIV at 1000m or so. Sezhant Batsanov in the other tank decided that there was no future in this, and so decided to fight from a flank. Emerging gently over a small hummuck on the Russian right as the Germans straggled over the last ridge before the riverbed, he plugged 2 Pz IVs and 3 Pz IIIs -- the last of these with HE rounds after all his AP had been expended. The 12 45mms between them managed an equivalent score for the loss of every gun; Batsanov survived the battle, and I should think ought to be in line for an Order of the Red Banner at least.
All the best,
John.