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apd1004

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  1. Not sure if anything can be done about this but here goes. I understand that the conditions of this campaign are no replacements and no repairs between missions. Bottom Line Up Front: I got some core unit halftracks as normally scheduled reinforcement groups in the second mission of the campaign and when they appeared on the battlefield the halftracks had no drivers. During the first mission of Courage Conquers campaign, I embarked some units onto halftracks that were not part of their organic platoon transport (i.e. - they were halftracks from a different platoon and just happened to be parked near some infantry I wanted to load up). I do not recall whether or not those particular halftracks did or did not have drivers when I embarked the units onto them, they may have been unoccupied with no drivers. I didn't think anything of it at the time. The mission ends unexpectedly with total US victory before the time was up and I progress to the next scenario in the campaign. So far so good. Fast forward into the second mission and when the same platoon of infantry shows up as a reinforcement group, they appear on the map all mounted on halftracks as I would expect. The problem was that some of the halftracks were showing "disembarked" status with no inherent driver present, even though there were other infantry units embarked on the halftracks. These "disembarked" halftracks were not lighting up as being part of the same platoon as the embarked units, but due to their "disembarked" status there was no other info on what platoon the halftracks actually belonged to. I get it that there are no reinforcements or replacements, but it seems to me that to eliminate this problem, halftracks and other transport should still be re-crewed with drivers between missions to keep driverless transports from morphing into the next scenario. Is there any way to fix this or is it something I just have to deal with? If not then I think I would have rather received the infantry replacements in dismounted mode rather than inside a halftrack that isn't going anywhere for lack of a driver. Or is there a way to re-crew with a driver from an infantry unit? I had no luck with that in-game.
  2. Now that one I will agree sounds easy enough because it takes the human factor out of it. That way it could be done automatically by the ballistic computer according to what range the gunner has dialed in. I'll admit I'm surprised to see that as an ability on such a small round, especially a belted round. In the picture below is a Hungarian BTR-80A in Afghanistan circa 2009. If you can zoom in on the ammo it appears they have the two belts mixed HE/AP with AP being every 3rd or 4th round. The HE rounds look very similar to the ones in the photo further above, but I have no idea if the Hungarians might or might not have this type ammo. I've seen these on the range before and they must have had them set to impact or they were in fact just plain old HE rounds. IMG_2723 by apd1004, on Flickr
  3. Do I believe you can select a specific type of ammunition from the sight, being fed from a different ammunition bin? Absolutely. That's how you do it on the Bradley, you switch between AP and HE by flipping a switch and it feeds from a different storage bin. Do I believe you can automatically change the setting on belted ammunition stowed in a box? Maybe, if the feed/firing mechanism has a way of grabbing the round as it is fed and turning a ring on the round or something to that effect. I'm betting it's the former - they load one bin with regular ammunition and another bin with this type of ammunition, and you flip a switch to change feed between the two different bins. You could probably add a third or a fourth if you have the room for it in the turret. I can even see a different reticle appearing in the sights depending on what type of ammo is being fired. If that's what you mean by "programming", then we are in fact talking about the same thing.
  4. I'm more inclined to think the behavior of a type of round has been abstracted more than it has been modeled to true ballistic performance. Even for tank rounds. A real ballistic computer on a modern MBT takes into account many factors which I doubt are all being modeled in CMBS.
  5. Ok, going to take a stab at this. Re: A670 fuze in CMBS. Do you really believe that the developers have gotten so far down in the weeds and perfected their ballistics model to the point that they have been able to faithfully reproduce a specific type of fuze for a specific type of round? If they have, then I'll eat my slice of humble pie. Re: Programmable timed fuzing on 30mm/25mm HE rounds. I don't buy it for a minute that anyone is taking a belt of several hundred or even a few thousand rounds of 30mm/25mm ammunition and setting time fuzes. First of all, when they load the belt into the ammo box of the vehicle at the resupply point, how do they know what to set the fuzes for? Second of all, for a weapon with max effective range of around 2500m you're talking milliseconds to try to get an airburst. I know for a fact on the M242 Bushmaster HEI round there is no "time fuzing" on that ammo. You load the belt into the ammo box and go. I've been on the range when the 30mm BTR rounds were fired and nobody there was setting time fuzes on anything. 20-100m arming is a safety feature to prevent rounds from arming in the weapon. The 9-14 sec self destruct you are talking about is most likely for when the ammunition is used in AA mode like with the Tunguska, so the rounds fired at high angle aren't coming back down to the ground and killing friendlies. At the typical ranges the 30mm is going to be used in ground mode, the round has long since detonated before 9-14 seconds transpires. And, .002-.004 seconds (that's 2-4 thousandths of a second) is going to look and act like an impact burst. Programmable distance input on a sighting unit is so you can manually enter range to target. Pretty much any sighting unit on an AFV is going to have that feature, or at least a sight reticle with a range scale on it. It doesn't set a time fuze on the ammo. Time fuzing is for artillery type rounds where somebody puts the ballistics dope into a computer and it tells you how many seconds to set the fuze for the desired effect. Some modern time fuzing can be set to go off at a specific height from the ground or a specific depth of foliage penetration, thus eliminating the need for the time computation. Back in the day the old 105mm flechette or "beehive" tank round on the M48/M60 series tanks could be set to detonate at a certain distance. Bottom line is in CMBS when we see "airbursts", we are probably seeing impact bursts in foliage or something. I don't think I've seen small caliber airbursts in open ground in my CMBS experience. If it does happen, it's a bug.
  6. If CMBS is just the first step towards a modern-era "construction set", I don't see how you can possibly omit USMC or other NATO countries. There are so many scenario possibilities in and around the Black Sea region besides just the Ukraine that to OMIT USMC and NATO would be overlooking a huge resource for scenario builders. I have never owned CMSF nor do I plan on purchasing it. It came out what, 7 or 8 years ago? So to say "they're already in CMSF" is not a valid argument for others like me who are in the same situation.
  7. In that situation then the CO is the vehicle crew and upon spotting a target he would have issued a fire command to the gunner. CITV is part of the fire control system so in CMBS terms that should count as the crew spotting. In my situation from the first post, the scenario is the first campaign scenario from the 3-69 campaign and the BFV in question is the scout section leader (rank SSG). There needs to be immediate hand-off to the vehicle crew when a passenger spots something. A buttoned up passenger shouldn't even be spotting anything but lets give them the benefit of maybe spotting something out one of the vision blocks. Still, you get on the intercom and alert the crew.
  8. Not sure I get how an infantry unit mounted on a closed Bradley can see enemy dismounted infantry, but the Bradley itself can't see them? Capture7 by apd1004, on Flickr
  9. Heh, from the mountains of northern Afghanistan it would take a constant loop of an RTO saying "negative contact, out" with squelch OFF followed by several expletives and "are you sure we have the right keys?" for me to be fully immersed. Iridium phone ringer would be a good one, that was the only semi-reliable thing we had. I called in CAS requests by email from a global Blackberry on more than one occasion, so "You've got mail" would be another good one for me. JTAC to aircraft overhead chatter would be the only one resembling what Mord has provided so I would also need some background F-15 or A-10 jet noise. Speaking of which... the distinct ripping of a GAU-8 would make a good mix into the background loop... Glad I saw that, I was also spending way too much time trying to figure out what they were saying.
  10. First Clash is a great scenario to get the long range spotting & detection experience. I'm in my very first playing of it right now and have yet to lose an M1 (knocking on wood). I've been wondering about the spotting & detection thing myself because like the OP I'm wondering how most of the time the first time one of my tanks finds out about the enemy is after he gets hit by something. With that being said, I'm still trying to figure out how in First Clash my M1's spotted two Khrizan at 2500m+ and killed both of them before the Khrizans could even launch. Maybe the Khrizans were just moving into position and got spotted first.
  11. There are a lot of professionally written articles on how Russia has invested a lot of time, money, and effort in upgraded and new AD systems to counter western (read that as US primarily) capability in ISR, Stealth, and PGM. Russia actually has some very capable systems for dealing with those 3 concepts which US military strategy relies upon. Many of their newer systems have impressive shoot-n-scoot capability that didn't exist back in 1991 when most of their longer range systems were almost permanent terrain features. Fortunately Russia isn't swimming in cash these days so I would imagine the more capable systems are not forming an impenetrable barrier from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea and will instead be used in most likely engagement areas. Still, I think we have the capability to overcome but it definitely won't be a repeat of 1991 Iraq.
  12. More recently but before CMBS came out, I've been playing around with Command: Modern Air & Naval Operations to game out just those types of encounters. Not much in the way of graphics but the realism is definitely there. It only takes a few minutes to set up a simple scenario to test out different systems and tactics. The database of platforms, weapons, and sensors is incredible.
  13. I had such high hopes for DCS World to get into a tank but when you get down to the ground (be it in a helo or a tank) you can definitely tell the graphics were designed for a flight sim. Ground vehicles were barely more than notional when they finally made some of them playable, at least back in the beginning. Maybe it's better now. The graphics a year and a half ago anyway were meant to be viewed more for when you would be at some sort of altitude or at least flying over it fast enough to not smell the roses. I played Blackshark for a while when it first came out and later I picked up the Thrustmaster HOTAS rig for A-10, but the learning curve on both was so steep just to get the engines started that I stopped playing both. Feeling a little old now. When Longbow 2 & iM1A2 came out I was a 1LT tank company XO. I played the heck out of Longbow 2, not so much iM1A2. There was something about iM1A2 that rubbed me wrong and I can't remember what it was. The first version of Steel Beasts came out just a couple years later and I put way more time into that than I did iM1A2. I think we've totally hijacked this thread by now.
  14. My idea for a DLC expansion: At the US Army CGSC they use a fictional scenario for the culminating exercise. It takes place in the Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan/Turkey (known as GAAT) area and revolves around the Iranian government collapsing and the northern 2/3 of the country with the bulk of the former Iranian military splitting off into a new regime called Ahuristan. Basically Ahuristan invades Azerbaijan to "reunite the people" common to both areas and the wargame centers on the US response. I went through it before I knew about CMBS but I couldn't stop thinking the entire time about how it would make a great wargame. I tried with Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, but the ground forces in that game are pretty much just there for targets and are not really modeled, so I gave up on it. The amount of material CGSC has written about the backstory is incredible, everything from ethnic/economic/political/military overviews of each area in the region to complete orders of battle and equipment lists. We almost have the tools now in CMBS to start making scenarios for it, but we would need some USMC and more of the legacy Russian equipment used by just about everyone in the region along with the Iranian reverse-engineered equipment to really dig into it.
  15. Interesting video, and while the launch sequences look authentic, there is no way of knowing if the target hits are actually from the same missile and I would suspect that they are file footage from other systems. The tank and the bunker almost looked like it could have been placed explosive charges detonating rather than the missile. This is a pretty new system and there aren't a lot of them fielded yet. Russia undoubtedly has similar issues to any other military which is a reluctance to live fire a lot of real missiles because they ain't cheap. The two different versions you see are actually the launcher vehicle and the battery command vehicle, both of which are on the BMP-3 chassis. The launcher vehicle itself is the 9P157-2. The vehicle that comes out first in the beginning of the video is probably the 9P157-4 which is the battery command vehicle. It is also visible at the very end. The launcher has the turret removed and has that stowable radar dish but the command vehicle still has a modified BMP-3 turret on it with only the coax machine gun as armament. The other bling items on the command vehicle are battlefield surveillance radar, daytime TV camera, and jamming suites.
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