Leather Suitcase

Another vote for The Immortal Battalion, known in Blighty as The Way Ahead. Top stuff. Ice Cold in Alex also was superb, and now available on DVD compilation. Grogs will want to have a bucket handy or avoid it completely though, due to the 3-second shot which features a Land Rover in the background. Sylvia Syms is simply divine.

The threat of "six of the best" for the loser would certainly sharpen the competitive spirit. Obviously for the English players we'd have to think of something else.

I recently read "Freyberg's Circus", the reminiscences of, yes, a Kiwi, in a four-gun Vickers unit. He talks about the aforementioned technique for patterning an area, on this occasion to support a tank assault: "We fired over and between the tanks; their back vents had been pulled shut as arranged...Early in their training the Number Ones had learnt to repeat certain sayings to themselves, the better to control their fire, and many were repeating these to themselves incessantly as they blazed away: 'Fire...tap...check,' for firing and 'Crank-handle on to the roller, belt to the left front' for loading. And there were many more such sayings as occasion demanded. Before they were fired, the guns were paralleled, the target was described and the range determined. Then came the balance of the fire order which went something like this: 'Right and left - one tap - Fire!' The Number One would loose off a burst, then take his right hand off the handle and give it one tap to the right. This would move the sighting of the gun 15 minutes or one quarter of a degree to the right. Then he pressed the trigger and fired off another burst before traversing (by tapping) back to the left and firing again. In the event of the orders being three taps he would continue on to the right for two more bursts, taps and checks, and so on... By firing and traversing our guns as described we were able to pattern a whole area. This is because the bullets of a machine-gun don't all fall in the same spot, but in an elongated ellipse, which gets larger as the range increases, rather like water squirting from a hosepipe. To complete the patterning, the tapping ensures that each ellipse hits the ground immediately alongside the previous one. So it didn't matter if you were firing in daylight or at night, you could effectively pattern the area you were trying to neutralise...we could go on as long as the ammunition lasted with our water-cooled guns, even if they bubbled, boiled and spurted, which of course they frequently did." On that occasion, being in a long term dug-in position, they effectively had an unlimited amount of ammunition. He mentions that in WWI the gun had a range of about 3000 metres but early in WWII they received new, streamlined ammunition (the Mk VIIIZ bullet) which almost doubled that. He says "the uses of the Vickers with the new ammunition and its longer range were many. Roads in the enemy back area could be covered at night by indirect fire, causing the enemy considerable trouble as they could not use the roads while we were splattering them. The enemy called our guns "whispering death" because the sound of the Vickers' rapid fire was not audible at a distance and the only warning was a faint shizzing, before the crushing impact of the Mark VIIIZ bullet". On another occasion their target was a battery of 25pdrs that the Germans had captured, but he does not mention the range.

I'm sure great consideration is being given to the spotting rules for desert conditions. I read recently (in an account about New Zealanders I think) that the heat haze in the desert magnified everything above three feet and completely obscured everything below it. Combine that with the deep gun pits for the 88mms that Rommel himself prescribed, where there was only, well, 88mm showing above ground level, and it is easy to see how a battery of these things could halt an entire tank brigade (not only halt: decimate). A more general point is that there should be a flag you can set for each tank to say whether it should stop to fire or whether it should fire on the move. The former was apparently the most common. At the moment (at least in CMBO) if my tanks are advancing on the enemy they suffer a severe disadvantage in that they are deemed to be firing on the move when, for improved effectiveness (and the sake of reality), they should be stopping before engaging, then continuing the advance once the threat has been destroyed. Oh, and finally, I still think that my title suggestion: Combat Mission: Tobruk to Tobruk, is best. And you can have it.

I remember when I stumbled on CMBO. It was the game I always wanted but didn't think I'd ever see on a PC. As a lad I used to play around with 1/300 scale tanks, but the rules were extremely crude and the landscape I could create even more so. And as for finding an opponent, think again. I had just spent a few short months playing CMBO when CMBB came out. I bought it immediately but at that time I was in the process of moving half way round the world from Europe to New Zealand (where people go shopping in bare feet, by the way, like Hobbits) so have not had any money to splash out on a computer. You can't imagine what it has been like with the CMBB CD in the cupboard but no PC to play it on. No-one will ever really know what I've gone through. I've become sullen and withdrawn. The thought of using Panthers and Tigers "en masse", rather than in ones and twos, is simply outrageous! I don't think I'll ever get used to that. It looks like I'll be in the market for a PC in the next few weeks. I'll really only be buying it for CM, but it's a bargain even if you have to buy the PC specifically for it.

Very welcome, but perhaps even more so would be a strategy guide for Airborne Assault. Anyone who's seen a couple of war movies has got a reasonable grounding for CM, whereas when I played the demo scenarios for AA I really hadn't got a clue and ended up just pushing my chits in the general direction of the enemy. Being so clueless meant that not a great deal of fun was had.

...of course, this would not be the case if we had them locked in the cellar of a remote house, with only development tools and research material for company... I said "if"... [ November 13, 2002, 07:06 PM: Message edited by: Leather Suitcase ]

Akin perhaps to the so called Spitfire Snobbery of the Battle of Britain, where captured German pilots refused to concede they'd been shot down by Hurricanes.

Like others I understand that the next release will be set in the North African desert, and will be called Combat Mission: Tobruk to Tobruk (CMTT). After that my suggestion is that BTS revisit those surreal PC video games of a few years back when we could race little speed boats around the kitchen sink or drive miniature cars around a cluttered desktop. Imagine an armoured assault on a strongly defended bread bin, or the skillful and desperate defence of the hob (I imagine those T34s would have quite an advantage in that treacherous chip fat).

If space on the CD is too tight how about a 2-CD distribution? It'd probably be the first double album I buy which would actually be worth the money ("Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" excepted, of course).

Apparently nVidia will be releasing its next generation chip maybe as early as December, so it might be worth hanging on a bit if you can in the hope of even more bangs for the buck.