dan/california

There is a real need for a laser based weapon system that swat small drones right out too the horizon, and swat them very quickly if they try to close. The air force can handle the Global Hawk sized stuff. But their are intelligent people on the other side who have seen the specs for things like the switchblade drone/missile and concluded it is a a lot cheaper and easier to copy than any of the bigger systems. Look at the recent incident at the White House. If you resisted mission creep and built it to do this one thing I think it would be doable with current, or very near term tech. http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/2012/06/pentagon_to_soon_deploy_pint-s/ 50 0f theses things at once would present a real problem, and fit on a truck or two.

It truly would be a new and unique addition to the game.

I think all the direct fire airburst rounds are programmed either in the breach, or as the are loaded in the breach. The round actually counts its rotations, which is mapped to distance. Presto zappo, unhappy infantry

Given the ability of small UAVs to be deployed very close to the front lines, and the fact that a UAV and a mortar team can pretty much ruin your day, it seems like a problem that needs to be addressed.

Can you fire Excalibur at the bottom floor of a taller building?

There is a single big decision with a TRP. Do you set so you can blind fire somewhere? If there is an obvious spot on the map that you can't see, put the TRP there. When you think the time is right ruin his day.

If you don't have more or less overwhelming force clearing gets very expensive, very quickly. If you have the artillery, and there not some large overriding reason why not, you should just level them. Remember if are relatively sure a building is going to be a problem your arty is far easier to use in the set up phase. Only clear if you can't level it or bypass it. The same goes for woods mostly.

How many latrines did the crew have to dig?

"Whose Turn Is It" is working perfectly for me. It is moving turns in and out of Dropbox and everything.

Should a Styrker be able to take a more or less full burst of fire from a Tunguska at less than a thousand meters? I had built my entire plan on the assumption that it couldn't. More or less Frontal aspect. If that seems reasonable to those in the know, I will just file it under lesson learned. But I would like second opinion.

You do realize that both of those things have a survival time rated in seconds?

You have Javelins, Abrams, and various things that really need to be kept out of the way, and lof. Remember this, at all times, and in all scenarios. Its worse when the APS swats it, and then it kills you. It really drives home that TOW is more or less obsolete. At least if BFCs modeling is even close.

I will buy any module for Black Sea, period. I have been playing it A LOT! I would buy a scenario pack for the base game that just had more H2H scenarios.

The moral of this story is simple, get the crack abrams with APS, even if it takes every point you have. They just drive around and kill things.

Hence the near demise of aircraft if beam weapons really come on line. Current conversion efficiencies are at best a few percent for high power electrically pumped lasers so you are putting megawatts in to get a few kilowatts out. in addition to the power generation you have to deal with the waste heat, which is not a trivial problem. A LOT of money is being thrown at this problem though and it will get solved sooner or later. When two or three megawatts of electrical power can put out a megawatt beam you just won't be able to fly into line of sight of the system.

Clearly there are going to be more choices in the APS area pretty soon. If a helicopter can carry it an Abrahms sure as heck can as well.

I just try to play other people almost exclusively. It is way more interesting anyway, and the back and forth means your unlikely to blow three straight hours, usually.

I am reiterating a point made by several people. If you have to advance against defenders in a low visibility, and/or complicated LOS situation you will take casualties. The only way to reduce these casualties beyond an unpleasantly high minimum is to use massive amounts of suppressive fire support. If you don't have that support assaulting certain kinds of positions is nearly suicide. If you have the arty just shell the relevant bits and avoid them if you possibly can. leave a team to greet anyone who moves to the edge of whatever it is.

Holding the technology short end in a given battle against a human is just devastating. once somebody figures out they are holding a reusable ace, they play it a lot. The Ukrainians have lot of very stubby sticks, alas. The AI just can't be that selectively ruthless for the most part.

I agree with you that directed energy weapons are very important to the future of military aircraft. But I think the basic physics of flying objects vs ground based ones mean that if beam weapons become sufficiently capable aircraft are just done. You can put a bigger laser, and a bigger generator on a ground based platform, and least some armor. The navy will be the first beneficiary of course, they have some LARGE power plants to play with. If the conversion efficiency of electricity into beam power is high enough then things are just going to start falling out of the sky like they mean it.

I mean the real AT systems, not the infantry one shots that might inconvenience a BTR-2 from 50 meters if you are very lucky. The programming really is dead simple. the first if-then statement is the cover armor arc, the second is a list of AT weapons. You are not asking the AI to determine if this is a good idea, that is the players job. It is even close to perfect, but it is codeable.

If they would just take a knee they have an AT weapon, and have a target armor cover arc, it would cover eighty or ninety percent of the problem cases. I admit there would still be some hair pullers, but the above is very straight forward to program.

The vehicle mounted Krystemzema is the closest they get. Javelin comes in above the engagement envelope of Russian APS. Trophy doesn't have that blind spot, and the Russians don't really have a diving attack profile missile anyway. AT-13, and AT-14 are pretty much day wrecking in the absence of APS though.

Russian APS is nearly magical as well against missiles in it envelope, try playing as the Ukrainians if you don't believe me. I agree that fully stopping Maverick sized missiles is a bug absent real proof otherwise. The larger point though is that APS is about to become the default standard for first line armoured vehicles. The only question is who learns this lesson the easy way, and who has to watching an armored brigade or two evaporate unnecessarily. I assume the Russians are working frantically on overhead coverage.

Nobody brought up the computer controlled airburst rounds. These COMEPLETLY change the tank infantry equation, spotted equals dead, period. Its not quite as bad once you get past a thousand meters, but still, its fire one missile and leave. If you're lucky, otherwise its fire one and die.