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Neutrino 123

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Posts posted by Neutrino 123

  1. I've found the infantry 6mm ion cannon to be useful against the lighter vehicles, and would think that the 20mm HMG would be great for point defense against anything at close range.

    As for killing them, it seems a bit easy, but maybe that's because I was using the ION CANNON.

    To really see infantry shine, one probably needs to wait for the city map or the mountain map. A mostly forest map would also be good for infantry, but I don't think one of those exists...

  2. Haha. I killed a Thor with the 10mm gun. It doesn't penetrate the back hull armor, but it does get the back turret armor for some reason... smile.gif

    Also, there is a bug with infantry and tall buildings. If you jump jet to them in certain places (not the bottom), you instantly teleport to the top of the building, even if it is very tall...

    Edit: Another couple things I noticed with infantry: crawling seems to work incorrectly, with my guys sometimes randomly standing up near walls. On the ice map, I sometimes jump-jetted onto the walls, but then had a strange animation for the movement (sliding instead of walking I think).

    Otherwise, everything's swell with infantry. They will be a good addition to the game.

    [ July 22, 2006, 06:50 AM: Message edited by: Neutrino 123 ]

  3. I don't know the dynamics of armor penetration very well, but I would think that high tensile strength would tend affect armor penetration at all times. The rate of penetration decline vs. distance, however, would be more affected by the cross-section, air density, and total mass of the shell. Since the 20mm shells in dropteam are almost certainly more dense (from the uranium) then WWII 20mm shells and possible longer as well, they would retain their energy better as they fly about (so assuming they had the same muzzle velocity and normalized initial penetration, the WWII shell would lose penetrating ability more quickly). This can be calculated with a simple differential equation.

  4. Hello, here are my suggestions.

    One should be able to continuously fire the 10mm ion cannon without repeatedly clicking the mouse button. Holding down the mouse mutton should probably give continuous firing for all weapons.

    In all scenarios except capture-the-flag where no flags are captured, it seems that kills are not very important. The other points make the usefulness of kills small, except when depriving opponents of certain vehicles, usually the 120mm tank or the direct fire artillery unit. The points for kills should probably be increased to roughly 10 for light vehicles and 20 for heavy or otherwise important vehicles (the kills for turrets can remain the same).

    Armor penetration, armor and damage should be completely rebalanced. Penetrating hits should usually cause some sort of damage, and a handful should almost gurantee a kill. The 120mm should be able to kill or heavily damage with any hit except the front turret of the tank (I am assuming fairly small angles here). The 76mm should be able to penetrate all but the front of the tank and maybe its side turret at close range. The 20mm should only be able to penetrate the rear of the tank, sides or rear of the heavy hover unit, and maybe not the front armor of the light tracked vehicle. The 20mm should be able to penetrate the wheeled vehicle in the front, but this penetration should not be guranteed, even at low angles. Maybe a 50% chance each round penetrates at zero angle and short-medium range.

    Edit: I think the playable maps have gravity greater then that of Earth.

  5. Have you read the previous posts in this thread? From CIA.gov:

    Taiwan Ethnic Groups

    Taiwanese (including Hakka) 84%, mainland Chinese 14%, aborigine 2%

    Also, I don't think most American teenagers even know that Taiwan exists, so while they would not be lining up in droves, they would most probably support the Taiwanese side (having gotten their information from the news and government announcements), and there would be a noticible short-term increase in military volunteers if the U.S. intervened.

  6. Originally posted by Sixxkiller:

    Nuetrino,

    Well that sounds good the spending that the ROK spends on its national defense, but even with even double what they spend now I would absolutely state that among "civilized" nstions they have to be the worst man for man standing army in the world.

    Even if this were the case, that doesn't mean they're better then the North Koreans. If they are attacked an defending their homeland, I would think their morale would be high, at least.

    Originally posted by Sixxkiller:

    Also thier whole defensive structure is based on a joint defensive system with the US, they are already outmanned 2-1 by DPRK and about 3-1 in reserves. So techological advantages will not make much of a difference especially with the DPRK having by far the largest special operations force thought to be over 100 thousand or more. Thats more than double the US' capability in peace time, not to mention the levels being under deployment at any given time.

    Their defensive structure might be based on the presence of U.S. forces now, but if the U.S. pulled its ground forces out, I'm sure they could quickly reformulate their plans. In fact, I bet they already have updated plans for this contingency. In the initial stages of the conflict,t he U.S. ground froces really wouldn't be that large in proportion to the ROK Army, even if they are of higher quality with better equipment (just the 2nd division, I forget if it even has all its brigades there).

    How would being outnumbered make a technological advantage negated? If you mean they balance out, then there is still the fact that the north is attacking, and this traditionally requires a superior or very well-handled force.

    Also, if the special forces are 100,000 strong, then they are almost 10% of the total, meaning they are probably not that 'special'.

    Originally posted by Sixxkiller:

    What i think the largest disadvantage for the ROK is that the heart and soul of Korea has and always will be Seoul. That being said, the DPKR has the first strike option of using artillery strikes that could number a few hundred thousand shells per hour and could be sustained for a few hours. While the ROK has excellent evacuation options, the fleeing populace on the roadways would severely limit reinforcement for the first 2-3 days.

    Its actually pretty sobering to think about this. Hope we never have to see if this comes about.

    -Ray

    An artillery attack on Seoul would certainly be disasterous, even with a swift response, but assuming the U.S. left and the DPRK wanted to reunify, I doubt they would shell their main conquest and alienate the South Koreans just to buy some time.
  7. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the ratios, but there is no reason to assume that acceleration is constant in this scenario. In fact, quite to the contrary, one would expect the acceleration at the beginning of a gun tube to be signifigantly greater then at the end (the compressed gas has expanded by the time it has pushed the bullet to the end, thus exerting less pressure at that point). Meanwhile, the acceleration a bullet experiances when entering a person would vary wildly depending on what it happens to be going through in a given interval... :D

  8. Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

    Neutrino 123,

    According to the CIA world book Taiwan was Chinese before 1895 when Japan occupied it, but China got it back in 1945.

    Wikipedia states that it's been Chinese more or less constantly since before the 15th century, so i don't know how you can't claim it as traditionallly part of China.

    Wikipedia taiwan

    In the history section, the first paragraph says that the Chinese may have known about it in the Han dynasty, and that the explorer Zheng He visited in the early 1400s. So far, this certainly does not count as ownership. Up to this point, the entire population is composed of ethnically distinct peoples.

    The dutch then colonized Taiwan, and brought in some Chinese laborers, who mixed with the local population. Cheng Cheng-Kung defeated the Dutch, but he was considered a pirate to the Chinese, since he was a Ming loyalist, and the Chings had taken over.

    In the late 1600s the Chinese took the island back, and expelled most of the Chinese people living there. However, over the next two centuries, many Chinese migrated to Taiwan. The area was, however, outside of governemnt control. The Manchus tried to assert control, but the natives resisted fiercly (I think some immigrants did too, since they mixed with the native population in the western areas). The Taiwanese did alot of pirating, so China was forced to say that they had no control over Taiwan when some Western nations complained.

    Finally, in 1887, the Manchus declared Taiwan to be one of their provinces, but were kicked out eight years later, permantly ceding Taiwan to the Japanese.

    Thus, at this point, China gave up its recent claim to the island. The population of the island is alot like today, composed of mixed people of Chinese and native decent (considered ethnic Taiwanese) (though there are a portion of ethnic Chinese too due to the Chinese Nationalist conquest of the island). I really don't see how China could use any of the history to this point to claim Taiwan as their territory. At least, not anymore then European countries claiming their former colonies (especially Spain and Portugal in the Americas).

    Originally posted by Sixxkiller:

    Well I spent 4 years in South Korea training ROK troops and I beg to differ. Certain groups the ROK have are competent but they would have a major problem with any large scale invasion especially with the large size of what lies on the other side of the border.

    Also you are looking at a fanatical enemy invading a country where many do not wish to fight but to reunify. I think many people underestimate the North Koreans because of how silly thier leader looks to the outside world.

    -Ray

    You say the South Koreans are not always very good, but is this compared to the U.S., or North Korea? I would think that, though the North Koreans are indoctrinated to be fanatical, their troop quality would be inferior to the south due to their economy combined with the size of their military. Remember also, the South Koreans want to unify, but not under the north! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the general opinion of the south is assuming that the north would eventually join them, not the other way around.

    The south spends thrice the amount the north does on the military, and they have access to better equipment too. Meanwhile, in terms of numbers, the army of the north does not outnumber the South Korean army by even 2:1. The terrain in South Korea is also fairly rugged, making for good defense.

  9. Originally posted by acrashb:

    Now, regarding meson guns, the damage mechanism is the decay, not the impact (I think that ordinary matter is largely transparent to mesons), so they might or might not have a lot of recoil depending on the mass of mesons you send downrange. It would be interesting to do the math, since the mechanism that gets the mesons on the target before decay is relativistic velocities (to extend the apparent lifespan), and 'relativistic' implies increased mass. But I don't know how many mesons you'd need for a given useful (not counting, eg, the neutrinos) energy release or what they'd mass. For that matter (pun intended), I don't know how fast you'd have to get them going to get any significant range, not knowing the decay time (or the distribution of same) and being rusty on observer time effects near the speed of light - I think if the stationary decay time is 'sdt', the total distance travelled ('d') at a given speed 'v', with the speed of light being 'c', would be

    d=v*sdt*(1/(1-(v^2/c^2))^(.5))

    Feel free to correct me smile.gif

    Meson guns showed up in 'Traveller', and are now in various offshoots.

    As flexible as CMx2 is touted to be, we will need at least a patch to do meson-gun-armed space lobster grav tanks.

    You've got the decay time right (from time dilation), and the decay time for a charged pi-meson at rest according to my particle data book, is 2.6*10^(-8) seconds and for a neutral pi-meson 8.4*10^(-17) seconds. However, a meson gun would really be an extremely inefficient weapon if the decay was what caused the damage. This is because these deay times are AVERAGE times. For a group of mesons, this means that half of the starting mesons would decay after this time (if they were at rest). The decay is continuous, so mesons from a gun would give a continuous stream of decay, with the decay the most intense at the gun barrel. Only the part of the beam overlapping with the target would do damage. I have no clue how the meson gun works in any games, though...

    Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

    Given that we are talking about near enugh in the future to be within 100 years, anything that could coss stellar distances would probably wipe the floor with us.

    Judgeing by the current rate of human technology developement, that is undoubtedly true, but there is no reason to assume that technology advances the same between species ;) . Besides [ smile.gif FRIENDLY QUIP ALERT smile.gif ], it couldn't be much worse then U.S. vs. Syria...

    Originally posted by Bruce70:

    That's like saying that distance isn't v*t. You are 100% correct, but it is also just being pedantic.

    I guess it's sort of pedantic, though 't' is commonly associated with the variable time and not a time interval. Also, in the problems classes I've taught and taken, impulse is normally used in integral form, while acceleration or velocity are normally constant.

    Originally posted by Bruce70:

    [QB] Now I conceed that if you know that the bullet is lodged in the body, that is one of those special cases, but if the bullet bounces off, then there are many possibilities. The problem can only be solved by considering KE (assuming you know the coefficient of elasticity), and the fact that it is a scalar is completely irrelevant. [QB]

    Bullet bouncing off of a person? In the previous examples, the bullet entered the target, and came to rest in the body, making it essentially a perfectly inelastic collision (if the bullet went through, the momentum transfer would be even less). In the general case, there are many possible things to consider in collsions that are not elastic or perfectly inelastic.

    Originally posted by Bruce70:

    [QB] But for the turret example momentum will not give you a conclusive answer. However, in that case it makes more sense to consider the forces involved and hence the impulses as has been pointed out already.[QB]

    In the turret case, we can approximate a perfectly inelastic collision if the shell penetrates and does not go out the back of the turret. If the shell breaks up or better yet, ricochets, then the momentum transfer can be greater (depending on the angle of ricochet), but if the shell doesn't penetrate, I don't think it would have much chance of blowing off the turret. Again, I am thinking that blowing the turret off requires something blowing up inside the tank, HE explosives or somesuch.

    Originally posted by Bruce70:

    [QB] And in fact it is probably easier to consider impulses in both cases. If the bullet accelerates over a distance of 1m and decelerates over a distance of 0.1m (lodging somewhere inside the body) then the firer will experience a force 10 times less than the target, but for 10 times longer... simple. I think that could easily be enough to make you lose balance if you weren't expecting it (in fact my grandfather was often knocked over by the recoil in his old age, let alone the impact), but not enough to send you flying through the air. No idea about a moose, but I would guess that it would barely notice it, if it wasn't for the damage caused. [QB]

    I think you may be confusing distance with time in the example here. If the acceleration took place over 1sec and deceleration over .1sec, then the average force would be 10 times greater (though it would peak at a point higher then this since the force isn't distributed evenly in time). You example is roughly correct in it's conclusions, but is irrelevant. In each case, the time over which the force is transfered is practically instantaneous.

    There is not enough momentum to send someone flying backward, but there is enough force to cause torque, tipping someone over, knocking them down. In the case of torque knockdown, how well the target is braced for the force is extremely important. This is why a prepared firer is far less prone to knockdown then a surprised, unprepared target unable to immediately try to recover due to the pain. Thus, the total angular impulse is the best factor when determining knockdown. This means that you have a much greater chance of knocking someone over is you hit in the head then in the torso.

  10. Impulse is the integral of force over a time period, not just F*t. That will only work if F is constant during your interval, and it usually isn't. You could take the average F and multiply by the time period, though to determine impulse.

    Originally posted by acrashb:

    </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Bruce70:

    I didn't say KE was conserved, I just said energy.

    [...]

    As for angular momentum, I was just being facetious.

    [...]

    If you are catching a baseball without a glove, there is a huge difference between catching it with "soft" hands and catching it with firm hands.

    1) KE is the only kind that matters for 'knock down', as it is the only kind with a vector (direction coupled with magnitude), so there was a) a reasonable assumption that you were referring to it and B) the necessity that you were if it was to matter.

    2) Oh... I should have caught that.

    3) Drusus has taken care of the last statement.

    Originally posted by Bruce70:

    btw, Have we finalised the Space Lobster Weapons as being projectile based rather than energy weapons?

    No, and I would imagine that they would use meson guns, bypassing armour altogether and mostly eliminating recoil in the first place. </font>
  11. Originally posted by John D Salt:

    And no doubt these folks can also explain why I have seen a single 7.62mm round hitting a water-filled 50-gallon oil drum knock it right over (it was explained to us before the demonstration that a 50-gal drum full of water was about the same mass and density as a human target).

    Muscular spasm in the oil-drum, perhaps? Or was it surprised?

    I look forward to the amateur physicists explaining why a 122mm round can knock the turret off a target tank without knocking the turret off the firing tank.

    I think the word "impulse" might need to feature more in the physical explanations before they become entirely convincing.

    All the best,

    John.

    Impulse basically describes transfer of momentum, and is not needed in the simple models presented here.

    To knock someone down, you need to consider torque and angular momentum. To knock someone backward parallel to the ground, one considers momentum, but that is different then knocking someone down. In a frictionless environment, even a tiny slow bullet is enough to tip someone over, and gravity does the rest. During the second after the bullet impact, the target is probably not going to be trying to stabilize itself.

    I would guess that the reason good guns can blow the turret off of certain tanks would be detonation of explosives in the turret, giving the turret upward momentum.

  12. Originally posted by juan_gigante:

    </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Moronic Max:

    How long would the nuke fuel supply last if we start slapping reactors into all sorts of things in the manner that concept suggests?

    Essentially forever, IIRC. The question is, how long will our supply of places to put extremely dangerous waste last if we start slapping reactors into all sorts of things in the manner that concept suggests? </font>
  13. Here’s my list of ones I can think of off the top of my head. First things to add (that haven’t been discussed or that I might be able to offer more insight to smile.gif ):

    1. Better command and control system.

    Ideally and for maximum realism, this would be real time [with plenty of pausing since the player will have to represent multiple commanders (until technology become more advanced leading to a far, far, better AI)], with delays depending on the number of commands issued by each HQ at (about) the same time (eg, a ‘queue’ for issuing orders, with the associated delay displayed, of course).

    If it can’t be real-time (I doubt you made it real time since you were talking about turns in another thread ;) ! Maybe for CMx3 when technology improves…) (I admit that a realistic real-time game would be very, very difficult to implement, and maybe not practicable with large maps/unit sizes since in these cases, a player can’t see everything at once), a 30-second or so turn would help. Other ways to improve realism would be for individual HQs to have a more complex delay system, depending on various realistic factors such as the complexity of orders (for example, “moved around on the right flank and take a covered route” might have several waypoints, but is not a very complex order. “run to those woods, then slow down to normal speed, and start crawling when you get to the end” might have only three waypoints, but is more complex). In addition to the regular pause command, there should be a variable time pause option (maybe a menu that scrolls out when you move the curser over ‘pause’), so one could coordinate attacks more effectively.

    2. Improved road movement.

    This has been mentioned as something that you will defiantly do, but I want to clarify a point just in case. With the current system, simply a ‘follow’ command would help, but it would not be enough. Right now, there is additional delay for each little bend in the road. Moving along a road should only have delays for the initial order, and for intersections (this sort of goes with #1).

    3. Improved artillery system.

    For both on-map and off map artillery, anyone on the battlefield that could historically call on those assets for indirect fire should be able to do so. Perhaps different levels of command could have different delay times (this would be a good reason to have a forward command post). Spotters should be included, but should not be more common then their historical counterparts.

    More artillery firing options would definitely be good. More options does not have to increase complexity for those that don’t want it to. After you target a spot, you could access a menu to give realistic options for more detailed fire plans if you want to, or have the automatic default if you don’t.

    4. Fallback command(s).

    In the current Combat Mission, I often find myself wanting my guys to make a platoon/squad-level fighting withdrawal. As of now, the only good options for moving away under fire are running like hell, and crawling away. I would like to tell my squads to slowly fall back, taking appropriate cover along the way and occasionally shooting some covering fire. This movement (this is an estimate) should be as slow as crawl, but should be difficult to pin, take fewer casualties then running like hell, and sometimes inflict some casualties on the enemy. It would also be nice to tell my guys to try to start falling back after enemy fire on them starts becoming intense and hopefully before it pins them (this type of command could reduce certain aspects of micromanagement even though it would need to be ordered in advance).

    5.An improved and expanded set of cover arc commands (if these are to be kept and not replaced with something better).

    For starters, when placing covered arcs, one should have the first two clicks be as they are now, but then, have another click for minimum range. This will allow a player to set up proper ambush zones without having to worry about enemies passing in front of it.

    Also, instead of only two commands for covered arc, there should be four: one for everything, one for all vehicles, one for combat vehicles with cannons (everything above 50cal machine gun), and one for medium/heavy tanks.

    I assume things such as the LOS being what one actually sees with the camera at ground level (no tanks with a tiny bit of their left track covered getting hull down!) will be corrected. Also, there is always encouragement to improve the TacAI (an essay of 10 pages or even a book could be written on this). Commands sort of like ‘fast hunt’ could help…

    Now some key things to keep:

    1. Quick battle generator.

    This greatly increases replayability, and sometimes it’s fun to pick your own forces, even if some players abuse this. Maybe you could add more customization to it (no slider selection for total points, allow a customizable point value to be imputed for armor, infantry, vehicle purchaces, etc.).

    2. Grand Scale.

    It seems the scale of the CMx2 games will be reduced, but this is okay to a certain extent. The number of tactical possibilities between say, “The Western Allies in Europe” has and, “Americans from Overlord through Cobra” is significant, but the difference between them is much smaller then the total possibilities of the smaller hypothetical game.

    3. Time period.

    If the game is to remain at the tactical level, then the most interesting forces with the widest variety of tactical possibilities will be modern wars (by tactical possibilities, I mean great varieties of distinct equipment and the lowest maneuver unit element). This, of course, isn’t just WWII, but would cover, say, various things from the 30s to the present (though not all battles and wars in that time period, of course!). In times such as the civil war, the lowest maneuver element was usually the regiment, which would entail a significantly larger scale then the present CM games.

    4.Tactical Scale.

    I don’t need to command a regiment, but I would like my two year old 3GHz machine to be able to handle reinforced battalion (on each side) sized engagements.

    5. Can’t think of anything specific at the moment, so I’ll just use one of those cheap excuses for a numbering bullet smile.gif .

    Keep realism as the primary design pillar. However, I give you the sage advice that in some situations, if you make things more realistic for the player, the overall realism of the battle may decrease since AIs are still not too good compared to humans in most things.

  14. The newer Kontakt-5 reactive armor can cut the rear end off of a 120mm APFSDS and upset its trajectory, signifigantly reducing its penetrating power. Test fire on a tank equipped with the armor failed to penetrate due to the Kontakt-5 effect (I am unsure of the exact circumstances, but I think it was a slightly older round in a mid-90s test).

  15. Does anyone know of any battles or operations in CMBB (besides for the in-box scenarios) where one side has complete fire superiority?

    By this, I mean a situation where one side has armor that cannot be effectively attacked from the front or side (or even rear) by the opposing forces guns and armor.

    Thanks for any assistance.

  16. No, Neutrino, for WW2 rounds you cannot just take angled armor thickness as the line-of-sight thickness, by applying sin/cosine.
    Hmmm, I will quote myself.

    The effectivness of this armor should be a bit more then 80.5mm since it is sloped.
    That should answer your question. I did make a small mistake in that I used sin instead of cos for the calculation. I will edit that mistake, so I don't give the wrong impression.

    As for the situation at hand, we are given (at 1000m) values for 0, 30, and 60 degrees for penetration that are 116, 91, and 43 millimeters respectivly. We can change these to actual thickness values, which give 116, 105, and 86 millimeters. Extrapolating the curve linearly (a decent approximation in this case) for 45 degrees gives an actual thinkness penetration of 96.5mm compared to the actual armor thickness of 80.5mm. That means that there is a ~50 degree arc in front of the M10 turret that the 75mmL/48 should have a very good chance of penetrating.

  17. The Panther turret has 100mm curved, so that is 100mm at minimum.

    The M10 turret has 57mm at 45 degrees. Cos(45degrees)=sqrt(2)=~1.41, so the actual thickness of the M10 turret is about 80.5mm. The effectivness of this armor should be a bit more then 80.5mm since it is sloped.

    The 75mmL/48 should be able to penetrate at least 110mm flat at 1000m, so I am surprised that it was ineffictive against M10 turrets.

    [ September 03, 2004, 10:25 PM: Message edited by: Neutrino 123 ]

  18. There are certainly some feasible weapons here, but anti-gravity? I think not. :D

    If the U.S. has anti-gravity then it would have all it needs to manufacture fleet of warp-capable starships to go on a continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilazation, to boldly go where no one has gone before... :D

    Anti-gravity is now theoretically possible (and may one day be utilized or it may be determined to be definatly impossible). However, it would not make an object 'inertialess'. A starshipship that utilizes antigravity would be able to fire photon torpedoes with the normal amount of recoil.

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