dan/california

Clay you guys are amazing. Now that I have told you what a great guy you are again, can I bring up those better bot handling tools. I saw the part about better drop control, but better formations would be great too. Also, if a player is leading a platoon of bots could you set it up to switch between vehicles like it works now with infantry. it would allow a player to deal with his worst problem without clicking through several screens and commands. Infantry drop pods will change tactics a lot. Knocking out AA defenses so that you can call infantry down on the base will become tactic #1. It should be great fun. Likewise it will make AA defenses a more strategic asset and should give a focus to game-play. Someone tell me how to shoot anti tank grenade in mid JJ burn, please?

See this link, very much what you are talking about and in active late stage development. http://www.strategypage.com/messageboards/messages/2-16551.asp

The link above may be the best sight i have seen for many of the questions that come up on this board. And trust me I have looked.

The article points out a major flaw in many Pentagon processes. They try far to hard to perfect in a decade rather that better tomorrow.

I, i say again, i am the worst speller in existence. Dark is a minorleager by comparison.

The ceramic layers negate heat rounds very effectively, M1s were given an outer coat of DU and steel alloy or something similar when the Russians improved their top line KE stuff and they were not sure the ceramics were adequate. If the KE penetrates at all in heavy armor it will make a mess on the inside.

Your right, but the look, excellent physics modeling, and basic apparent tech level are so similar that people have a hard time knowing when to quit. I wouldn't be one of people, not at all, not even a little bit.

Well there is this brand new Stryker thing. See the CMX2 Shockfront forum section of this website for more than you will ever want to know. It does have eight wheels. I am fairly certain that their are a couple of European exceptions on the 76mm thing as well. There is a trend to trade tactical durability for strategic speed, the Stryker can go several, maybe many, times as far as an M1 without needing heavy maintenance or new tracks. At one point right after Bagdad fell the army was filling up entire C5/C17s with replacement tracks, it can be a big problem. Also M1 class tracked vehicles destroy most road surfaces just by driving over them, once.

Everybody missed the real point, it was in a regular civilian house as near as I could tell from the interior views. Hezbollah doing things like that is why the IDF is systematically demolishing Southern Lenanon. You don't take fire many times from bunkers that look like houses before houses start to look like bunkers. I think the Israelis would be perfectly justified in cluster bombing it all. I think Bomber Harris called it de-housing.

I really do believ that it will get much better with more players on the servers, especially more good players. I have not noticed any one living very long in Yurch's line of sight. The tools are there once people get the hang of it.

Clay said somewhere that they knew the cutter model had issues, it is just such specialty peice that I don't see it making it to the top of the list for a while.

The cycle of armor vs penetration is very old, it is still going strong. [ August 11, 2006, 12:52 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Fixing the issue with the tire will increase the size of the Paladins sweet spot a lot, especially at long range. You will have far higher chance of getting the tire and the engine for instance. Would it be greedy to point out that, at a fairly large set of angles you would get more than one tire maybe. This is a subtle change that could have significant effects. many more hits would render the paladin almost completely immobile. Immobile paladins don't last long. Would it be really greedy to ask for a shotgun/flechtette round? Best game feed back/support ever, period. Thanks Clay.

As far as neat ricks with current hardware go, 20mm in vacuam is deadly. You can be 500 or a thousand meters from anythings side and shred them. The roundsdon't slow down in vacuam at all. It was the only thing I got right the whole game. :confused: [ August 10, 2006, 11:00 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Dark the damage is not just from spall, modern AP rounds, if they hit something thick enough turn into shower of molten flaming metal droplets, that go every where in a cone shaped pattern from the penetration. One of the reason that DU is so nasty is that it has an especially energetic burning reaction in this circumstance. If it hits something thin it doesn't experience enough heating and breakdown to make this happen. Bjarmson, I used a bigger number in my earlier post but dark's right about the round weight. It is a trade off between mass and muzzle velocity and that is the point the designers picked. Their are complicated limiting factors involving barrel strength, vehicle weight, recoil system, and god knows what else. Remember it all has to work over and over again. KE missiles that are under development do not have this limitation. The rocket motor body gives them superior performance against light vehicles as well.

If you want one hit kills on shrikes use HE, close most definetly counts. It is the agonizing decision about what to keep loaded that is tricky. Feedback like this is simply unheard by the way, thanks, really. I think AP penetrating through the tire would resolve a remarkable # of these issues. Right now it acts like a piece of armor if the wheeled vehicle is in a position to hurt you already and six seconds becomes a long time. and if it as an ATGM and you can see it...... [ August 10, 2006, 10:26 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

One additional fact, the shell /missile can't be going above some limiting velocity, otherwise the charges geometry is destroyed by impact before it can detonate properly/completely.

The best example I have seen to explain the way a shaped charge works is the linear charges they use to cut the big beams in building for controlled explosive demolition. It is just a strip of copper bent bent into a V shape. They attach it to the beams and add when detonated the the copper ling cuts the beam cleaner than most welders could. Check picture below http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LinearShapedCharge.png Wikipedia has a very through article. When the Pentagon starts talking about building high performance ones it gets stupid complicated, supercomputer simulations, DU and other fancy liner materials, the whole nine yards.

Call Comcast, or Verizon.

Dark you are correct that some of my number are off, that is why I put them up for inspection, so people could check. Also my calculations are for momentum, not energy. Momentum is more useful for things like how billiard(pool) ball bounce off of each other. It is also more useful for car crashes and the like in many circumstances. I used it instead of energy in this case because I was curious if Paladins should be rolled over by impact on a regular basis, as well as my driving. :confused: The theoretical equivalent of running into a truly large bridge support type of concrete wall is to hit a vehicle with the same momentum(mass*velocity) going the other way. That is the general idea was trying to expound upon. Abrams APDSect. rounds have an energy of six to eight megajoules shortly after leaving the muzzle according to public sources, but the calculations about how much of it go into melting the tip of the sabot and how much into melting the armor, and, and, and quickly get insane. Momentum is easier. Sabot/KE based missiles that will have 4 to 10 time this amount of energy are in late stage development, by the way.

I made the following assumptions in regards to the momentum, not energy, of a 120 AP round. They are based on approximate Abrams equivalents. vehicle mass 35000 kg ,AP round mass 50 kg( that is probably high but kept the math simple), and muzzle velocity 1750 mps. The muzzle velocity is the unclassified Abrams number. Some basic calcs spit out that the round has the same momentum as the tank when it is going approximately 9 kmh. Its not quite 50 mph but, still a heck of a punch, for lighter vehicles it would be like running into a brick wall. Literally if the round penetrated the armor, bouncing off is complicated, either it is like running into the target with a tank moving a few kph or the round makes another hole in the other side. There are no other choices. What does a paladin mass/weigh again Clay? They probably should be flipping over in some circumstances This is at the muzzle, it would trail off in atmosphere depending on air density.

For shrikes the problem has gotten much better with both HE, and coax available. Either one shreds them. Paladins are too hard to kill. For starters 120 Ap should go through the tires without slowing down enough to matter, so anything but a grazing corner shot should proceed right on through the vehicle. 120 AP that breaches the armor should proceed straight through the vehicle making progressively bigger holes as it goes. What the heck is the motor made out of that it stops a round that size? When a lightly armored vehicle is struck by a penetrating large caliber heat round it should die. When a heavily armored vehicle is struck by a penetrating large caliber AP round , it should die, There are just too many things to get broken. Wiring and fuel lines and so on, both rounds have large incendiary effects. The rational design decision if you have a given amount of armor available is to put it on the outside of the vehicle so that unpleasantness inside is avoided. There is a two small hole effect with light armor and an AP round, but a paladin is not a lightly armored vehicle. It has about half as much armor as a thor or more Some tanks use blow out panel on their ammo storage, but that just keeps the crew alive, it is still out of action.

I would even take an 8 second reload, I think it is 6 seconds right now, if it got me a higher kill probability.

Included, I almost feel like I am taking advantage of you guys. Almost. Now we can geek out with real historical data! :eek:

The mighty SquidLord just combined 5 threads in one, I am awed, not shocked, but definitely awed. If they come up with the ability to slave bots to players so that they will target the same unit or at least general area this whole sitting still problem will get much better. Rather it will get much worse for the people sitting still. One the issues with the game right now is that each sides firepower is very diffuse. As that gets better and players can focus more barrels on the high priority threats it will get much better. For that matter if you could just tell one 20mm paladin to follow you around and shoot at the same target it would roll point defense back almost completely. The trick with the atgm vehicle sending bullets after its own missile also works extremely well. The missiles near vertical launch even means I can't complain about trying to shoot down my own missile. However their is this little graphical oddity between the angle the launcher sits at and the angle the missile appears to leave at. i am working on a suitably complicated explanation. [ August 09, 2006, 12:23 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]