[The idea of making the enemy "deploy early"]

Cuirassier,

ah, i see. i was thinking about this more as a normal deliberate attack vs prematurely deployed attack. in your scenario attacker force densities are naturally equal in both cases.

compared to the actual MLR the defender at outpost line most likely has less artillery available and it is less effective because it's not fired at good targets. yes, attack densities are equal, but attacks are not fully developed and fires are not fully observed, as defenders withdraw from the outpost line before the actual assault, where as on MLR fires are directed on advancing assault groupings & with more shells.

i naturally agree that trading space for bonus arty fires is very useful, but i am not convinced that those arty fires at outpost line are more effective than those at MLR.

[New film - Forgotten Soldier]

what comes to total lack of dramatic plot & love story, bizarre documentary style of a director etc, don't forget the Finnish "Tali-Ihantala" movie.

a convenient full length preview is available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm9cjgR9WaQ

remember to buy the movie if you like it.

if nothing else, you see running WW2 gear like T-34s & StuGs. (EDIT: and perhaps learn bits of Finno-Soviet WW2 history)

[The idea of making the enemy "deploy early"]

I'm just using the Kursk example to help visualize how an opportunity -pull artillery system could gain fire effects by having previously forced the enemy to deploy early. The advantages of course being a more concentrated and visible enemy to shoot at.

could you explain the rationale of having a more concentrated enemy as a result of early deployment?

typically units move in columns during approach marches and have security elements in the lead. when forced to deploy early (e.g. by receiving arty fire), elements of the unit are scattered in depth & along various approach routes. if the unit still wishes to push forward in schedule it most likely has to commit its elements in less coordinated piecemeal hasty attacks. this favors defender specifically because he has less enemies to shoot at. he may also enjoy artillery superiority if his presence was unexpected and the attacker doesn't have artillery available for support.

if a deliberate attack is preferred new plans are drawn, contact between elements is established, support arms are deployed, elements concentrate to attack formations etc and are employed in a deliberate attack. this takes hours and the defender is happy because he has delayed enemy actions -- happy even if he now faces a more numerous, concentrated enemy. he most likely has withdrawn the main body of the delaying force from the positions a couple of hours ago anyway.

[The idea of making the enemy "deploy early"]

favorable fire effects come from limited range of artillery, not target density. when attacker is forced to deploy his arty prematurely against a fake position, that artillery may not be available against the actual main positions some km later (out of range, needs to redeploy). defending arty's role in the causality is mostly just that it makes the attacker deploy early by firing at his lead elements. similarily it is easy to mess causality in situations where defending arty fires at enemy assembly points and causes messed deployment.

the real effect of premature deployment is that it drains time and energy, breaks coordination, slows tempo and so forth.

[German Resource's.]

Lots of arguments in this post, though very little information.Zetterling has only two books that focus on east front. Is that it for well researched work on east front operations from the german perspective?

there are probably more books than you ever find time reading or money buying.

there's no single name like Glantz is for Soviets. if you want army group level stuff, look for example the series by Haupt. if you want army level stuff, look for example "Drama between Budabest and Vienna" by Maier. if you want accounts on single operations look for example Kurowski's "Bridgehead Kurlans" or Nipe's "Last Victory in Russia" or "Decision in Ukraine". if you want division level stuff there's quite a number of unit histories for various German units. if you want a single book about East Front from German perspective, that has "enough" depth for you, i'd start with "Germany in World War 2, Vol IV". don't hurt your back when you pick it up the first time.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

i deleted that post because after reading the post, and seeing it's basicly just the same old stuff, though perhaps explained a bit better, the discussion appeared so bogged that i felt frankly, Scarlet, i don't give a damn.

Steve, again, that 1:800 comes from CM tests between "wet dirt road" and "wet open ground". actual figure is 1:792 -- i just didn't remember that last digit and rounded it up. yes, the ratio doubled because my tests gave twice the number of immobs as that old test in the linked thread.

i had to dig that XP computer from a closet and set it up on kitchen table to do those tests. wife was not pleased as you can imagine and the XP computer is now back in the closet.

i actually did two tests with "dry" conditions back when i did those tests. one with "fast" and one with "move". "fast" gave zero immobs, "move" gave one. i didn't post those figures, like i didn't post some other figures, because i didn't have time to do a proper number of tests. the margin of error is just too high even with a single test that has 100km worth of movement -- the randomness is potentially as large as the maximum effect. in any case, Vulture's tests on "damp dirt road" gave zero immobs so we would need even more extensive tests to be able to get a ratio for "dry" conditions. and then, in the end, it would change nothing.

i am not interested in reverse engineering CMBB, especially as there are no patches coming. my interest is in the historical stuff. rather than discussing "worthless" and "illogical" points to eternity, i use that time to read real world combat accounts and studies.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

BLAH, not worth it.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

You are correct that Wet isn't nearly as bad as Mud or Deep Mud. However, if there was no difference between Wet and Dry we wouldn't have included Wet, would we?

arhg. there's more to CM than tracked vehicles, such as T-34, move on open flat ground. stuff like a jeep towing AT-gun up a hill on wet open ground, arty fires etc.

Mother Nature just thought it would be funny to watch me spend an hour in the blazing sun trying to get a piece of tree out of my suspension system

exactly. the difference between "wet" and "dry" ground conditions wouldn't have really made a huge difference.

How much experience do you have driving vehicles, tracked or wheeled, off established trails in a variety of terrain conditions? I've got a pretty good amount and some of those with military experience have already chimed in long ago. It would appear that our opinions are shaped more by the differences in experience vs. theory.

yes, it's just because of my irrationality, insanity and naivety that 1:800 figures appear absurd to me. everyone else, especially those with military experience, think they are spot on right.

i believe our opinions are far more shaped by different interests.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Bollocks, forgot my password. And the email address I registered with has long gone.

Oh well. Here is an interesting lecture on military geography of Normandy:

http://www.esci.keele.ac.uk/geophysics/People/Jamie/MilitaryGeology/M_G_6_Notes.pdf

Some interesting grog facts that I didn't know before reading this:

- Choice of Normandy was influenced by its suitability to build airfields

- Much of the airfield surfacing needed to be shipped in (50% in UK sector, 75% in US sector)

- Allies had a whole quarrying (and presumably road resurfacing) organisation

Oh yes, and on topic, has examples of cross country movement maps, showing soil types, areas where tracks are likely to break etc.

that is almost sexy. the guy who run that course has his email listed in there. perhaps someone should drop him a mail.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

the maintenance stuff per km / hour can be found both from maintenance manuals and vehicle log books of tanks. should be trivial to find if you are willing to pay for the manuals. there are also all kinds of reports of what was the expected and actual life expectancy of various tank components.

if you are happy with modern data, there are extensive studies (due to having all the maintenance data on computers these days) about maintenance of various components of modern vehicles.

it's almost morbid how this type of stuff (e.g. five fast ways to tell when a specific bolt of Panzer IV tracks are starting to overheat) is quite easy to encounter, yet stuff like historical bogging frequencies are nowhere to be seen.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Steve,

i totally agree about what you say about CM test settings and i think there isn't much point about comparing that Soviet data to CM test data as long as we don't have more accurate information about the road march. people already have some opinion about the subject and further tests aren't likely to make any difference.

the rest of this post does not relate to that Soviet road march data at all.

what comes to the difference between "wet" and "dry", "open ground" and "dirt road", i unfortunately suppose it all depends on what those things mean.

since CM also contains "mud" and "deep mud" ground conditions, i always thought "wet" means just wet ground (not mud). if we think about T-34 driving, with something like CM's "move" order, on open flat terrain, i don't think it's going to matter that much wether the ground is "wet" (not "mud") or "dry" -- other things will be far more important.

i think the same is partly true to "wet dirt road" vs "wet open ground", but to a lesser degree. having more firm ground is of course one reason why dirt roads were preferrable to open ground. there are others as well though, like not having to deal with terrain recon (e.g. wonder what the terrain is like behind "that hill" -- is it still "open ground" or something else like "soft ground"), having more direct path of movement, having a "systematized" path between two points (which is important for both having a control of forces on the larger level and being able to direct troops on the level of the guy who tells to "turn left here") and so forth. but yes, the difference does exist, i agree about it. i just do not agree that the difference is so huge.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

read the article from the Russian tank commander who commanded the Sherman tanks. in it, he states the Sherman had better cross country performance then the T-34 which surprised me at first. It used to be on the red army site, and it was also stated in the q&a section where he answered questions. not that it has any impact on the conversation.

i think it's directly related to what Redwolf wrote about cross country mobility. usually when US tankers say Sherman's mobility was worse than that of German tanks, it's when ground conditions are bad, like mud or snow. they report stuff like they first observe German tanks cross a muddy field, but when they try to pass the same field they get bogged. this is related to "floatation", something in which tanks like T-34 or Panther really excel. when US tankers say Sherman's moblity was better than that of German tanks, it's usually when ground conditions are good but the terrain is a bit rough or contains strong elevation differences. compared to T-34 in the same conditions the ride is certainly going to be a lot more bumpy, harder (driving itself) and generally unpleasant inside the noisy and cramped tank.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

That is not quite true.

it's hard to find a source discussing T-34 that doesn't say its good cross country mobility was one of its key strengths.

T-34 ground clearance is just the same as with Panzer IV etc. yes, modified Christie suspension. yes, great floatation on soft ground due to good MMP values.

i'd rather not get sidetracked with this. if you really want, perhaps open up new thread at CMBB forum?

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

It makes a difference what you're comparing the number against. Since you are not comparing the wet ground numbers to relevant real world numbers (i.e. not the Soviet data), then it's numbers in a vacuum. That's what I detailed on the previous page.

So... does someone want to test on dry open ground and compare those numbers to the Soviet figures? Without further clarifications the comparison is utterly meaningless, but with some extremely rough guesswork I think we can at least have a better comparison than we've been able to have so far with bad ingame data.

sorry for confusion, but for some posts already i have talked about CM test vs CM test comparison. thus the misconnect.

i still haven't found more detailed information about that Soviet road march (the precise terrain travelled, weather and ground conditions etc), so i am not sure there is a justification to choose one ground setting over another in CM tests if we want to be really accurate.

there had been heavy rains on the region which turned large areas in the mud, but the actual dates of the march were mostly dry at least at Kursk itself. (yes i repeat myself endlessly)

Kursk belongs to the so called "black earth region", which caused rains to turn ground to mud very easily. it's hard to say how quickly the ground would dry up, as it's dependant on quite a number of factors like you yourself wrote.

the condition of roads on the march route is unknown. it's the rear of the Kursk salient so it might have seen considerable amout of traffic.

i'm still hoping to get some Soviet studies of this type of stuff on my hands. there are references to these studies on a number of books and some of the studies are apparently quite detailed. e.g. there's a study about the maintenance stuff about the 6th GTA's march thru Mongolian desert & mountains.

perhaps someone encounters a study by some other nationality.

then there are ordinary unit diaries and reports, from which we might, with hard work and good luck, collect some interesting data ourselves.

then of course there are all sorts of algorithms about ground pressure and such.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Looking at something three times and basing your conclusions on that doesn't seem very representative, even if that turns out to be the general trend.

yes, like i said myself in the post you quoted, i didn't have time to make as many tests as i'd have liked to. still, like i said a bit later, i actually did more than those three tests (with a bit different settings).

the trend appeared established with all the tests, so the numbers were good enough to post just to have some initial numbers. not least because my tests were still a lot larger than those tests i could find with forum search functions.

what comes to the issue itself, it hardly makes a difference if the actual numbers turned to be just, say, half or twice that of my numbers.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Perhaps URC should try running two miles in wet sand and (after resting) running two miles on paved road for an example of just why his analysis doesn't hold merit?

har har har. ok, let's make this easier for the bypassers:

- these are T-34 tests. T-34 is universally considered to have exceptionally good cross country mobility.

- it's not wet sand, it's "open ground" CM tiles. it's not crop fields, rocky ground, soft ground, swamp, scattered trees or even just bushes.

- it's compared to dirt road, which specifically is not paved road in CM.

- ground conditions for both "open ground" and "dirt road" tests are "wet". it's not "deep mud" or "mud" or "snow" or "deep snow". for those interested, yes, T-34s were regularly and succesfully operated in worse conditions than "wet open ground in summer".

- these CM tests show that for each single T-34 immobilization on wet "dirt road" you get around 800 immobilization on wet "open ground".

- yes, difference between results is of course expected. but this kind of difference is certainly not expected.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Steve,

i don't believe for a second that you'd think i don't realize the difference between driving on road and cross country. or that there are dozens of other variables to consider, that not all CM immobilizations would show as daily losses, not all tanks would be abandoned by Soviets in 1941, that you can't directly compare road march stats to CM stats etc etc. it's stating the obvious. it's as if you are just trying to cover the actual data in meanigless discussion about the obvious.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

I did notice in my tests that a fair number occured almost immediately as the tanks started moving. From memory, 3 or 4 tanks bogged wiothin the first tile, out of the 60 or so total boggings observed. Since the map was 200 tiles long, you'd expect 0.3 tanks to bog in the first tile - 10 times higher is pretty significant.

Recollection isn't great data though, so might be worth testing. But it raises the possibility that tanks have a higher probability of bogging when accelerating, or just starting a new movement order from a waypoint (or, indeed, when turning). Since precious few tank movements in game involve single 4 km fast moves along a straight road, the bog rates for tanks doing stop-start moves, multiple waypoints, turning etc. may be considerably higher.

i ended up using both 1 km and 2 km tests maps because i thought something like this might be happening. so per 4 km travelled there would be either 2 or 4 orders and turns.

a bit disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, i didn't see a single bogging when tanks were rotating at place. i thought about giving rotating orders per every 100 meter travelled, or something like it, but simply didn't have time for it yet.

from my limited tests i didn't see any clear statistical evidence that results between 1, 2 and 4 km maps would be different, but i did observe the possibility.

i guess there might be something into stuff like this. perhaps it's not just statistical noise. it would be tough to find by testing though, especially if there are some counters that are set when a battle is started (so that you couldn't use save games and had to plot complex move orders every single time).

BTW in those other tests i also observed quite large differences in results between test runs (each started as a new battle, no save games used), but again took it just as statistical noise. for example i did two tests with fast orders on wet open ground and the other gave 1 immob (with subjective impression that there were barely no boggings at all) and the other 8 (with subjective impression that there were a lot of boggings).

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Incidentally I do wonder if very large number tests - 100 tanks per time actually obscure the average effect in battle. I have used dozen, tens and twenties and it seems to me that low figures record higher. Not logical but then in coding who knows what gremlins occur. : )

I also find the immobs. are front loaded. Arguably with less tanks going further into the game the problem would be less anyway but allowing for that perception it does appear front-loading exists.

i actually made more tests than just the wet ground ones, but didn't find time to make enough of them just yet. when doing those tests i also felt there was something strange about how immobs and boggings happened, but didn't have time to investigate it further and just took it as my mind doing tricks on me.

i wonder if there is something in the code that is made on a turn or battle level instead of calculating all the stuf "as it happens" during any given single turn for any given vehicle.

when i was searching for old CM bogging tests i encountered a couple of posts which dealed with a bug that was apparently fixed later. the bug was that the number of boggings / immobilizations was directly tied to the number of vehicles moving at the same time (or something like that). perhaps the bogging / immobilization code works in a way that we are not expecting at all, and thus we see some "statistical noise".

[German Resource's.]

a Finn reading Glantz is easily disillusioned about the level of accuracy.

when he writes about Finno-Soviet stuff he at places clearly just parrots Stalinist wartime propaganda (which was debunked by Soviet historians already during Soviet era). and then there are some absurd mistakes (e.g. mixing Winter War & Continuation War numbers).

Finno-Soviet stuff isn't of course his main focus, and the whole thing was a marginal side show, but it's a bit disappointing to read stuff that is little more than garbage in his books, even if the whole point is to just translate Soviet sources.

Glantz is as good as it gets in general, though.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

Or put another way, the logic of the comparison is fine, the numbers (input) you're using is the part I take issue with.

i agree and it would be great to have better numbers.

what comes to historical terrain & weather conditions it's a bit hard. weather information for Kursk itself is relatively easy to find (muddy still in 6th, 7-9th mostly dry, then again shower rains on 10th). it's harder to find precise weather and terrain information on 5th GTA's march route.

i think it's fair to assume the ground conditions (on CM terms) was something between damp and muddy, possibly leaning towards wet or worse because all those hundreds of vehicles have made an impact on the march terrain.

what comes to CM, it would be interesting to find time to do extensive tests on the effect made by both weather and ground condition settings. (e.g. is damp ground + rain equal to wet ground + overcast).

First, it was a small sample and even the guy who did it can't remember what the exact conditions were. Therefore, we have no idea if the results from this small test actually portray. This invalidates the sample completely IMHO, especially because new samples can be so easily obtained. Therefore, from the very start I've been saying that the numbers you were using to compare against the Soviet figures weren't good enough to draw any conclusions from.

i installed CMBB on XP machine yesterday and did some tests. not as many as i would have liked, but still better than those available previously.

CM test setting: July 1943, wet open ground, regular T-34s. 25 x T-34, 4 km distance, all on move orders (for crews to be as careful as possible). run it three times, with 8 (32%), 6 (24%) and 5 (20%) immobilizations as a result. average loss rate was thus 6.3333% per km.

master Vulture's extensive CM tests on wet dirt road gave losses of 0.008% per km.

the ratio, based on these numbers, between CM wet dirt road and CM wet open terrain immobilizations for T-34s would thus be 1:792.

so these tests give actually twice as bad result as that earlier linked test. if this ratio can be established by further tests to be about right, i think you will agree that the ratio is not too realistic.

Second, you can not compare road march numbers to off road combat numbers at all. They simply aren't in the same class, therefore you can not extrapolate data from one set (based on KM travelled) with data from the other set (based on KM travelled). In order to do that you'd need to know such things as what is the average length of off road travel at one time? How often is maintenance performed per KM when using a vehicle off road vs. on road? Is there a difference between cutting across a field without being shot at vs. evasive maneuvers because of enemy activity? There are lots of variables here which need to be accounted for and yet we don't have that sort of data. Therefore, it is pointless to compare on road march data to off road game tests.

yes, there are a lot of variables but i don't think it's all pointless.

i'm not sure i understand the combat conditions stuff, because there is no combat going in CM tests and it seems that CM doesn't simulate stress caused by combat conditions as such (for example zero immobs on dry roads). but i'll see if i can find some worthwhile numbers about combat vs non-combat losses.

i agree that road vs cross country travel is subject worth looking at, though i don't believe at all that it could lead in real world to such differences as seen in CM tests.

i am still semi-actively looking for good Soviet data (i have a couple of good pointers already, but it's a bitch to try to find old Soviet documents about these types of marginal subjects).

i'll see if i can find some good numbers about cross country stuff in combat conditions as well. something with measurable distances and clear loss numbers.

Third, we have to remember the differences that come about from using small samples. The example of the Marines bogging down in one battle in OIF 1 is a perfect illustration of that and I've already explained that in detail.

So it comes back to the requirement of needing to stick to apples to apples and oranges to oranges comparisons. Therefore, any conclusions (1:400 or otherwise) you try to draw from an apples to oranges comparison is going to fail to impress me because it's statistically invalid. And it's so very, very easy to show that it is.

i guess you are talking about small samples in CM tests?

Absolutely. And the Korean numbers we just were exposed to shows the same thing for the UN forces when they were on the defensive.

Soviets are the ones attacking, though. all the stuff i have seen about Soviet studies would seem to indicate that it's almost totally about losses when attacking.

tank attrition not caused by enemy would be around 0.5% per km for early war (from 1941 up till early 1943). by the end of war it would drop to around 0.15% per km, mostly due to improved repair & recovery, maintenance, logistical and road repair assets.

Glantz talks about this in a number of his books, so it seems he thinks it's important. it's presented as something the Soviet higher ups spend a lot of time investigating (and learning lessons from) and the resulting changes made quite a difference for Red Army tank forces.

I find it impossible to believe that there was "zero" recovery in the context of bogging/immobilization as discussed in this thread.

yes it would not be zero, but it most likely would not be very high number either.

BTW don't take this stuff as bashing of CM. it's hands down the best game of its kind and personally i haven't been annoyed by bogging or immobilizations. if something, i have often wished there to be more of them. all too often i have driven a heavy vehicle up a relatively steep slope and frequently have made sharp high speed turns which almost certainly would have lead to throwing of a track in real world. quite often i have been forced by circumstanced to cross bad terrain with tanks and have wished, with no luck, that the tanks would get stuck.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

excellent find pamak1970! (the ORO report)

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

No, but you're saying that B can be derived from A and I've made the case that you can not.

i'm not suggesting such derivation.

at one point it was argued that the difference in numbers would exist because most CM immobilizations would be fixed soon after battle and thus would not show in daily loss statistics. so if there was a difference of, say, 10:1 in CM immobs vs daily report losses, it would just mean that 9 out of 10 immobilizations would be fixed after the battle. it then just turned out that the difference in numbers was so huge that it would have been physically impossible there to be so many temporary immobilizations as required by that logic. this stuff probably confused you to think i was trying to speak for "B from A" derivation.

We're not even sure there is a 1:400 ratio since the data you used to come to that conclusion isn't properly documented.

i realize the docs are corps level stuff, but i doubt lower level stats give any more proper documentation unless we find studies based on log books of the individual T-34s. there are of course written remarks in Soviet unit diaries, but i can't remember reading about bogging other than losing tanks to craters, AT ditches, swamps or particularly muddy terrain (which doesn't mean that other bogging didn't happen or was rare, just that it wasn't something to be mentioned in those diaries).

then there's of course stuff like 6th GTA against Japanese in 1945, marching hundreds of km thru Mongolian desert & mountains, also during night in rain, in a couple of days -- but then again i don't have daily loss stats for 6th GTA for that period and it of course changes nothing because it wouldn't show temporary boggings (just awful terrain and weather conditions).

what comes to the CM part of the 1:400 ratio, it seems established that it's not accurate and the error was apparently caused by the huge difference in CM between dirt road and open ground immobilizations. some of Vulture's test results pretty much match 5th GTA results, though if something CM may see too few immobilizations (which itself is probably to be expected if CM does not simulate mechanical breakdowns).

the old linked CM test (apparently on open wet ground) gives 3.33% per km while Vulture's test on wet dirt road gives 0.008% per km. so CM open vs dirt road ratio on wet ground conditions would be, based on that available data, 416:1.

the other tests i talked about in the other post were CM tests i found with forum search. these non-Vulture tests don't have as high test run count as Vulture's tests so there's bound to be too much randomness in them. anyway, their 2.5% wet open ground losses give 323:1 ratio if compared to Vulture's dirt road tests.

it would be interesting to know what the dirt road:open ground ratio would be on larger test sets, and perhaps with damp or dry conditions as well. perhaps i'll try to install CMBB on a XP machine of mine so that i can run some tests myself (hopefully it won't mess the license).

needless to say the 1:300-400 ratio between dirt road and open ground is not realistic for a tracked vehicle (and T-34 is not just some vehicle what comes to cross country mobility). hopefully further tests will prove the numbers wrong.

Since better data can be got from the game by anybody caring to get it I don't find it even remotely productive to continue using questionable data.

like said, if your game would work properly on my Vista computers i would have done the tests myself.

You're saying that if a T-34 got stuck, the second that happened the crews got out and walked away? There was no attempt to do anything, even simple things, like fix a broken track link or have another tank give it a push? I find that hard to believe so I find your absolute statement to be a mischaracterization of reality. Reality may be that Soviet recovery and repair capabilities were extremely poor, but they weren't absolutely non-existent.

like said already a couple of times the Soviets were forced by circumstances to voluntarily abandon vehicles. ability to recover and repair is just one part of it -- it's as much caused by things like lack of fuel, ammo and spares.

a simplified example of the rationale is that if you have fuel for 1000 T-34 kilometers and your oders are to travel 40 km and you have 50 T-34s (so that you would need 2000 T-34 kilometers worth of fuel), instead of having all tanks run out of fuel after 20 km you simply abandon half of the tanks so that you have enough fuel to move the other half those full required 40 km. of course in the real world it's as much about other things as fuel, but the basic rationale of cannibalization is the same.

it's the result of the whole way Soviet tank industry, Red Army and Stalinist USSR were run those days. e.g. those running the factories were responsible to their life that given tank manufacturing goals were met (so they just make tanks, and care less about things like spare parts, tools etc). likewise, at the other end, a mech corps, tank corps or tank division commander would answer with his life that his unit would arrive at location X by time Y. the stuff in between the two result in recovery & repair assets to be in practice zero (as much due to simply missing equipment as missing training and general fubar caused by having untrained yes men run the show).

yeah, it may be an illogical position to reach, but what else do you do in those conditions? become a "trotskyite defeatist" shot without further questions?

anyway, it's not limited to early war Soviets. for example late war Germans at Ardennes do almost the same stuff; they could recover & repair tanks but they choose not to because they need to save fuel (at that point they also do stuff like tow fully working tanks with other tanks for the same reason).

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

searched for other T-34 results. T-34 on damp ground, open terrain, 2-2.5% immobs per km. that potential wet ground test gives 2-3.3% immobs per km.

[Normandy: Immobilisations]

But again, it's an apples to oranges comparison. You are comparing a statistic for a type of immobilization that CM doesn't actually bother to simulate. Specifically, in CM an immobilization that would last long enough to be noted in a unit status report isn't explicitly simulated. That means in CM there is no difference between an immobilization that took 1 hour to extract or (like in that Tiger Battalion report) 3 days. What you're doing is treating all immobilizations you see in CM as if they are all of the latter type and not even one of them of the former type. That simply doesn't work.

that is not what i am doing. i have one number that is historical number for type B. i have another number that is CM test result for type A. thus i have difference between two different types in given numbers, A:B. i am not suggeting that A should be B.

yes, i don't factor between 1 hour or 3 day extractions, like i don't factor in historical losses that would not show as CM immobilizations (damages that don't result in immobilization or "gun damage").

Immobilizations, however, do have an impact on the Campaign. You get most of your immobilized vehicles back for future battles.

cool

You are also, once again, forgetting that you are mixing road marches with off road use. You can not compare the average for an entire large period of time, which is disproportionally road marching, with a very small slice of non-road marching combat time. It is statistically impossible to take a large abstract set of data and compare it to a specific set when one of the most fundamental variables is completely skewed.

that is what Operational Research guys actually do. collect a huge dataset, generate numbers from it and then start looking for these fundamental variables by comparing details in differences.

at the moment, according to Vulture's test, we have data which would indicate that "combat conditions" is not a variable that matters (because no losses on paved roads). it would also seem that "random mechanical breakdowns" is not a variable that matters (because no losses on paved roads).

thus the variables are probably down to vehicles (differences between T-34 variants), vehicle crews (differences in quality of), HQs (quality of & wether in command or not), terrain tile types (difference between) and terrain and scenario settings (dry vs other, time of day, date etc...).

currently, accroding to Vulture's test, the differences in latter result in higher than the earlier 1:400 ratio. common sense would hint that most likely the differences come from terrain tile types, ground conditions, vehicle crew quality and T-34 variants. finding the weight of these variables should be relatively easy, considering the extreme difference in results.

To illustrate my point (since apparently you still don't understand it), here is what you could do to better figure out if those higher level numbers are proportionally similar to what CM simulates. Take a bunch of tanks and put them on roads in weather conditions similar to the report you're comparing to. Drive those tanks on roads in 2km increments. Do that a couple hundred times and then count how many vehicles became immobilized. Then take that number and divide by an arbitrary number like 5 or 10 to represent the number that could be fixed or unstuck within 24 hours.

i would naturally do my own tests if CMBB worked fully on my Vista computers. :\

Then, and only then, will you have a set of CM game data that is more-or-less approximating those higher level numbers. Still, it's a very dodgy comparison because we don't know how much of the higher level numbers had offroad combat included, nor do we know if they ran into some sort of local terrain that was better/worse than average. However, the resulting data from CM tests as I laid out would be radically more accurate than the small sample you're using from offroad driving.

of course. i could also collect all sort of data for all sort of conditions. but as long as there's stuff like 1:400 difference i don't see much need for. i have read enough low level stuff to know that the figure between road:cross country movement isn't 1:400+.

luckily Vulture did tests and we now know better where those high immobilization numbers come from; or rather we know that they don't apply to road movement on dry ground conditions.

They had some recovery and repair capabilities, although obviously not very good due to a host of factors. But their record keeping and honesty of numbers were also quite poor. So I'm not sure what early war Soviet stuff has to so with this discussion.

yeah, perhaps they just lied.

though if it's worth it, i could waste time by creating number from e.g. Ardennes that are cross country in real crappy terrain conditions with orders to abandon vehicles that become bogged or suffer mechanical problems. the problem for motivating myself to do that is that i am 99% certain the numbers won't be 1:400. i wouldn't be surprised if it was more like 2:1 in favour of cross country movement.

though, perhaps Germans lied as well.

what all this has to do with the discussion is that in those conditions many of those "1 hour extraction" cases were very likely to lead to marks in daily losses statistics.