Kineas

I take it you're a fan of his?
I think even a cursory reading of the thread will highlight several important themes as to why this isn't a trivial subject. If you can't see it, we can't spoon feed you. Did you have anything else to add?

One of Rudel's greater known achievements: Being the only man to receive the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak leaves, swords and diamonds.

One of Rudel's lesser known achievements: Causing people to fret over his feats in a forum on the internet.

Tschüß!
Erich

Go here for an article from a Russian-language web site and forum for WW2 aviation, and a discussion on Herr Rudel.

http://allaces.ru/cgi-bin/s2.cgi/ge/publ/05.dat

Here are the some of the criticisms of Rudel's account of the attack on the Marat, by one Andrei Liubushkin, who purports to have read Soviet records like Baltic Front PVO, Soviet overall tank loss records,

1. Rudel reports his bomb sank the battleship Marat, while Soviet records show two bombs - Rudel's and his wing man's - sank the battleship.

2. Rudel says he dropped a 1000 kg bomb on the warship. The Soviets concluded the ship had been sunk by two 500 kg bombs.

2. Rudel reports there was no Soviet interceptor effort, the Soviet record shooting down Stukas.

3. Rudel claims he destroyed he destroyed 519 tanks - that is ten per cent of all tanks the Soviets knew they lost to air attacks, during the entire friggin' war.

4. Rudel reports he fired on tanks at targets at 100 - 200 meters. Given the speed of a Stuka and the fact diving a Stuka at a tank requires a good deal of a pilot's attention, this begs the question, how did Rudel manage to see what the rounds did?

5. Rudel reports at one point, his superior flying skill enabled him to avoid 20 Airacobras. Problem: 20 x P-39 is an entire fighter regiment, and the Soviets never operated an entire regiment in a single small airspace. Even if they tried, the chances of a regiment actually having 20 x P-39 functional at any one time are next to zero.

6. Rudel was an excellent pilot but also an egotistical bastard, self-centered, and a trophy hunter. Yet his diary for all its "today I destroyed 20 x T-34s" doesn't if you count them add up to 519 tanks.

7. Rudel's tank kills were confirmed not by people counting hulks on the ground, but by other pilots under fire like he was, and for practically all purposes under his direct command.

8. Rudel's book doesn't just toot his own horn, but describes kills by his wingmen etc. A reasonable reading of the effectiveness of his air unit, based on his description of his own kill rate, would make it logical to conclude somewhere between 15 and 50 per cent of all tanks lost by the Soviets during WW2, were destroyed by Rudel's unit.

9. Rudel says he was shot down 22 times - and not once by Soviet aircraft. Every time by ground fire. How reasonable is that, given that close to half of his missions took place in 43-45?

There is plenty more but you get the idea. People on the Russian side think Rudel's claims are laughable.

Here is the standard boilerplate, from the www.airwar.ru site:

"We should not that the claims of German pilots about the destruction of large numbers of Soviet tanks, as well as other ground targets, were usually not supported by anything else than their own words. On the majority of aircraft there were no gun cameras, and if there were they recorded at best shell strikes, rather than actual damage. As one would expect, real losses of Soviet tanks to bombs and aerial gunnery of German aviation was dramatically more modest, than was expressed in the reports of the German pilots."

So there you have it. Rudel says he was a stud, and the Russians say he was liar, and further that his claims don't have a leg to stand on.

JK - no subject is full of such sustained romantic mendacity as air to ground tank killing.

The most famous air strike at Kursk is often described as 68 Hs-129s with 30mm guns attacking a brigade or more of Russian tanks, and destroying 50 of them within an hour, turning back the Russian attack by air power alone.

But what actually happened is it is pretty much made up, as to scale of effect anyway. At least the attack actually happened.

There were 68 such planes in the area. Only 53 sorties were flown by them on the day, however. There was a Russian tank brigade attack. It had about 25 T-34s and about 15 T-70s. It was turned back - but at least as much due to running into a panzer regiment on the ground, as the intervention of the planes. There was a large scale air attack by the Hs-129s. But total Russian tank losses in that formation for that day, all causes, were 4 T-34s and 3 T-70s.

Probably the 30mm hail KOed a couple of the T-70s. Maybe it damaged one of the T-34s to the point of abandonment, but though that seems doubtful. The overclaiming is at a minimum 7 to one and probably more like 17-25 to 1. And this was the biggest outlier success on record.

As for Stuka Gs at Kursk, there were all of 8 in the entire theater. There is no sign they flew a single combat mission until August. The only claim anywhere that they did, is the solitary word of Rudel in his own memoire, which claims that he took off in one of them (assigned to a different squadron, his still had Ds) and knocked out 12 tanks. 12 is suspiciously the ammo load. It is not credible in the slightest, in any respect. There is no specificity as to date, place, units, etc. It has all the markings of a typical Baron Munchausen story. The only thing missing is a claim to have returned riding a Russian 152mm howitzer shell.

As for overall air effect, the Germans flew 27000 sorties all types in support of the battle of Kursk. The ground attack varieties flew over 5000 in a shorter period (to July 12). Theirs might have reached 9000 by the end. Call it 7000 and leave an error bar.

Air as a cause of loss typically runs single digit percent even under much heavier tac air. Estimates range from 2% to 5% in the west for Germans in Normandy and the Bulge, for example. It is extremely unlikely Russian rates of loss to air exceeded those figures, since they were not subject to thousands of FBs with full air supremacy etc, while they were subject to superior enemy PAK and tank guns, while the Germans for whom those figures are known, did not.

3.5% to 5% may therefore be considered a very generous upper bound to all Russian tank losses to air. Most of them will be to bombs, not dedicated cannon equipped types. Russian tank losses in Kursk defensive were 1614. That means the upper bound comes in at 55-80 tanks to air attack. Against the 7000 sorties, that puts the tank kills per ground attack sortie at around 0.01 - and it is an upper bound, because it is based on a rate of loss achieved elsewhere by more intense tac air. The real figure could easily be only half that.

There is every reason to believe modern smart weapons are at least an order of magnitude more effective than WW II dumb ones, and the real relation could be as much as 50 times as effective.

Tero - utterly clueless, still. If the Germans actually achieved 100 to 1 exchange ratios between 37mm stukas and Russian tanks, they would simply have made and fielded 1000 37mm gun stukas and won the war. If they had actually routinely achieved anything like Rudel's claims even with the size fleet they had, all Russian tank losses in 1943-4 would have been accounted for by the Luftwaffe. Instead losses to air were a handful of percent, all types.

The US destroyed thousands of tanks in the space of 40 days using approximately 200 aircraft for dedicated tank killing missions. The operational effect was total paralysis and entire tank armies evaporating. The Germans had a tank busting force of comparable size (within a factor of two at any one time, easily) and easily 10-20 times the time period to run up sorties. If they had routinely achieved kill rates even with a factor of 2 of US ones with smart weapons, even that tiny air arm would have KOed at least as many Russian tanks as Tigers and Panthers did.

This is falsified directly by the entire operational history of the war. The eastern front did not consist in the Luftwaffe working over the Russian tank force in a sustain air campaign leaving little for their ground forces to fight. It readily would have, if Rudel scale claims were readily achieved by tank busting aircraft.

They simply were not. It is not a matter that can be rendered doubtful by spin. The explanation is simple - the claimed kill rates per sortie simply did not happen.

Originally posted by JasonC:

A complete air supremacy B enemy fighters everywhere

Now, who is buying the propaganda line, hook and sinker ?

A total networked C3I B a radio

So ?

A J-Stars spotting targets B mark I eyeball

Both prone to all kinds of spoofing and misidentification.

A night vision and IR B dawn patrol

See above. Plus the camo discipline was undone by the early mufflers in the machines belching smoke and sometimes flames.

A stationary dumb targets B the Russian front

The difference being ?

A tightly packed target area B the Russian front

You are a selfproclaimed expert on EF technics, tactics and doctrine. Given the Red Army tactics and doctrine would you say (and deny your own axioms) that the Red Army deployment stressed dispersal of forces and loose deployment, especially when setting up an attack , thus denying the enemy a target rich environment ?

A desert terrain B some steppe, lots of forest

Which would mean the A-10 would have failed in Europe in case of a shooting war ?

A guided missiles B deflection shooting

Deflection shooting against (relatively) stationary targets ? Really ?

A HEAT warheads B plain AP

Composite armour vs plain steel plate.

A cluster bombs B 37mm or dumb frag bomb

The Germans did have cluster ammunition available.

A 1000 rounds cannon B 12 rounds cannon


675 kmh vs 344 kmh max speed.

A 70 rounds per second B 2 rounds per second

See above.

A claim 0.25 tanks per sortie B claim 0.2 tanks per sortie

A actually got 0.1 to 0.15 B actually got jack

B got jack only because that is the only way to make the A-10 not look sucky ?

Now here is a little OR reality check on air to ground with armor, under the most favorable possible conditions and with modern smart weapons.

In Desert Storm, the Iraqis lost an estimated 4000 tanks and 2500 more lightly armored vehicles. A solid half of these were lost to ground action or abandoned. Air killed maybe half of it, or 3750 vehicles, certainly a very significant number. What was used to do it?

4 principle means, in which air to ground cannon fire hardly even rates.

Method one in importance was Maverick missiles, mostly fired by A-10s. 5400 of these were expended, 90% of them fired by A-10s. Roughly a third were TV guided models used in daylight, two thirds were IR and used at night.

Method two was 500 lb laser guided bombs, GBU-12s, mostly dropped by F-111s at night, using FLIR to scan for targets standing out by their heat retention in the cooler night air. 4500 of these were expended, over half by the F-111s.

Method three was Hellfire and TOW missiles from army and Marine helos. I've found the marine subtotal and it is around 500 expended. Far higher for the army of course. Low thousands the right order of magnitude.

Method four was duel purpose ICM cluster bombs, dropped in 1000 lb units. 10000 of these were expended on all types of targets, by F-15E, F-16, F-18, and A-10.

There were other weapons used against other target types primarily - acres of dumb bombs dropped by B-52s for example, also heavy 2000 lb laser guided bombs used mostly on infrastructure and C3I targets. But we can safely leave those out, and probably allocated 80-90% of the cluster bombs to non-tank targets. They probably did account for a portion of the lighter armor, though.

Simple math says the numerical average kill chance of the above weapons was under one in four.

Own side claims for the A-10s are 3000 armored vehicles. For the F-111s, 1000 to 1500 depending on the source. These are both undoubtedly high, as the Apaches also clearly scored, the CBUs etc less so but some, and losses to the air war were only on the order of half of overall Iraqi losses.

The claims deserve at least a 1/3rd haircut by the above math, and might deserve a conventional 1/2 haircut. This means

3000 or more 500 lb laser guided bombs KOed 500-1000 armored vehicles, or a specific kill chance of 1/6 to 1/3. The average F-111 expended 30-35 LBU-12s and may have accounted for 5-10 tanks.

5000 A-10 fired mavericks KOd 1500-2000 armored vehicles in the A-10 total includes nothing for guns or cluster munitions, or a specific kill chance upper bound of 0.3 to 0.4. The average A-10 fired 35 mavericks and may have accounted for 10-15 tanks.

If 1/3rd of A-10 kills came from guns and cluster munitions combined, maverick kills might be as low as 1000 and the specific kill chance as low as 1/5 or 1/4. If guns got 80% of the remainder (unlikely) that would mean 400-500, and it took over 8000 sorties to get to that figure.

It is more likely that mavericks account for 80-90% of A-10 armor kills, specific kill chance in the 1/4 to 1/3 range, and that the A-10 kill chance per sortie with the gun was single digit percent. This mostly reflects not engaging that way at all.

Note that the A-10s flew nearly 60 sorties per aircraft in theater, and took heavy ground fire. The head of the air campaign restricted their target areas and attack profiles because damage was so heavy. Basically, it was a bad idea to expose an A-10 to light flak in sustained low level attacks, if the loss or damage rate was going to hit even 1.5% per sortie doing so. Especially since they were far more valuable delivering mavericks from medium altitude or at night.

Although an A-10 can readily carry 4 mavericks per mission, mixed loads with only 2 were more typical (carried some CBUs etc). Since they flew 60 sorties each and expended only 35 mavericks each, they often went out without mavericks, or did not deliver them.

A plane that can carry 2-4 smart weapons each with a 1/4 to 1/3 chance of a clean vehicle kill (operational - on a test range mavericks kill 90-95% of the time), still only managed an average of 0.2 to 0.25 armor KOs per sortie. And that made it the most effective tank killer in the force. In the most successful air to ground armor killing campaign of all time. Using space age weaponry.

It is silly to pretend a few dozen pilots with 37mm flak guns under their wings were doing the like without the benefit of guided missiles with HEAT warheads sufficient to destroy anything they hit.

Side by side, let's compare

An A-10 in Desert Storm has A, a JU87 in Russia has B

A complete air supremacy B enemy fighters everywhere
A total networked C3I B a radio
A J-Stars spotting targets B mark I eyeball
A night vision and IR B dawn patrol
A stationary dumb targets B the Russian front
A tightly packed target area B the Russian front
A desert terrain B some steppe, lots of forest
A guided missiles B deflection shooting
A HEAT warheads B plain AP
A cluster bombs B 37mm or dumb frag bomb
A 1000 rounds cannon B 12 rounds cannon
A 70 rounds per second B 2 rounds per second

A claim 0.25 tanks per sortie B claim 0.2 tanks per sortie
A actually got 0.1 to 0.15 B actually got jack

Having spent a lot of time in the area depicted in this game, I can assure you there are plenty of places where you can see further than you can engage with direct fire weapons.  Having spent 6 years in the army of the Russian Federation I can assure you that every option other than crossing such an open area with out obscuring the force would be considered before risking that type exposure, I'm certain the same can be said for the Americans and any other serious military force.

It's very much an RTS rather than a tactical wargame. Credit where credit's due, it's a hell of a lot more realistic than a straight Starcraft clone with T-72's and a good handle on recon is key, but it's much more focused on RTS style play at speed than careful considered moves (e.g. there is no ability to give orders while paused). As for single player, Airland Battle includes a campaign mode (of sorts) but don't expect a deep story, rather a series of skirmishes.

IMHO it is a good RTS, but it's not a direct competitor for CMSF. That's not a criticism of either, but simply different styles of gameplay. If you are a strictly WEGO type, the Wargame series is probably not your bag.

I'd been mucking with 3D options, compatability options, all to no avail. I kept searching and found another thread here that mentioned pressing Alt-Tab.

So, I Alt-Tab'ed out of CMBB and then back into it. . and it's now working.

One would think that if Battlefront is still selling CMAK/CMBB, that they would provide a patch for that. . .

So, I guess we're stuck with 1.04 and the Alt-tab hack, which is better than the slideshow I was seeing.

That CMAK/CMBB bundle I bought a while back (which worked on Win 7) sure runs horribly on my (relatively new) Win 8.1 computer. That would be a 4770K CPU, 32G of RAM and an AMD7870 GPU. The graphics just chugs along. . . to the point of being unusable.

With the DRM issue's I've encountered, the effort in trying to install it on my 5 year old laptop (which also runs Win 8.1) is probably not worthwhile.



Ugh!

Update: Just upgraded video drivers and still no luck.

I have looked into this a little further. This bug affects any AT guns purchased as part of a formation in which they begin limbered to half tracks:

UK Antitank Battation (CMBN)
US Armored Infantry Battalion (CMBN)
GE Regimental Anti-tank Company (CMBN and CMRT)

(let me know if I missed any)

It also affects three half tracks when purchased as individual vehicles: UK M5, US M2A1 and US M3A1 (2 x MG). Other half tracks seem to work fine with AT guns as long as they are purchased individually.

What?

..

Really?

My post was intended as humor/irony/sarcasm.

Next time I will explain beforehand.

Perhaps, but that's a bit apples to oranges as there were a lot of 37mm, short-barrel 50mm and 2 pdr-armed tanks in North Africa. Engagement ranges in Northern Europe 1944-45 were well over that.



-- Zaloga, Panther vs Sherman



-- Tank Tactics: From Normandy to Lorraine, Roman Johann Jarymowycz

German panzer iv crews were trained to open fire at 1200 meters as that is the maximum range at which their mili-radian sights allowed them to "fire for effect" without use of bracketing.



http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=510734&postcount=1

Note: tank accuracy in CM is lower than the above numbers!

Panthers, Tigers and Allied tanks with similar high velocity cannon could engage at even longer ranges.



-- Commander of the III Panzer Korps General der Panzertruppe Hermann Breith, 21 July 1943

Vanir - yeah I get all that, but those numbers are simply far too high to reflect actual combat performance, rather than firing range performance. The initial shots are already too high (I will substantiate that below), and over 50% for a 2nd shot at 1.8 km is just crazy, even for a stationary target let alone a moving one.

Firing opportunities in real combat are not scarce and the duels are not over in 15 seconds. They last minutes at a time, between entire firing companies. The rounds actually fired in such engagements hit the low triple digits. The tanks KOed stay in the single digits. Even with some repeated hitting to make sure, the average AP round fired only hits roughly 10% of the time. That can and does include shots with a significantly higher chance to hit, and those may account for a majority of the actual kills. But in the nature of averages, if some shots are 30 and 50% to hit, then others are down in the single digits and the low single digits at that. And lots of them.

The idea that single digit achieved accuracy only ever applies to the first shot in falsified by that data. There are not enough first shots in the whole population of shots to pull the averages back down to the observed shot to killed ratio. Ergo, there must be shots after the first that have a low chance to hit. There are only a few other significant factors that can cause low chances to hit on follow on shots - and long range and target movement are the main such factors. (Crew panic is the only other one that could theoretically make the cut).

We know from detailed battlefield OR that there isn't a large ratio of hits to kills when the target is an Allied tank and the shooter is a Panther or Tiger. Those German tanks have powerful enough guns that they rarely needed second and almost never needed 3rd or 4th hits to achieve knock outs. The average hits per kill observed is well under 2, basically. Combined with known facts on the order of magnitude difference between shots fired and tanks killed this puts very strict limits on average achieved accuracy.

Take your first set of numbers above and trace this through. With 6% first and 30% subsequent hit chances and 1.5 hits per kill, what is the predicted ratio of shots fired to tanks killed? The answer is "under 6". With 13% and 59%, the answer is "under 4". With mixed movements, those figures thus predict a shot to kill ratio of 5 to 1 *at ranges of 1.8 kilometers*. We know the average engagement takes place closer than that, so it winds up forming an upper bound for shots to kills.

These figures predict that when a tank goes out in the morning with a full ammo load and comes back nearly empty, it will have killed during one day in action far more tanks than we know each was actually able to account for over their entire operational lives. Worse, for all but the most front-invulnerable heavies, it predicts that all tanks on each side will die 5 times over or more in each day in action.

Tanks almost certainly don't achieve 13 and 59 against stationary targets inside 1 km, in real combat. Let alone vs moving ones at 1.8 km. They probably do achieve 6 and 30 vs stationary targets inside 1 km, even in real combat. But motion alone is likely enough to cut the gain on second and following shots to half that improvement (15% not 30%), and at range you can cut those in half again.

Tactical thinkers and range firing leave the impression that only shots nearing 50% chance to hit are effective, but this is not remotely the case. A tank company in 5 minutes can send 500 shots downrange if it has continually exposed targets. Even 10% average accuracy and 3 hits per kill suffice to destroy a formation of equal size with that much firing time available.

What more commonly happens is that the hottest and best placed shooter gets effect like that to a couple times that at most, and the rest of the firing formation gets a fraction of what that best shooter gets (because they don't all see the enemy for the whole time, etc). The enemy then breaks off, mauled but rarely completely wiped out.

The bit of that tactical games get wrong is they don't realize that even a very modest hit change per shot suffices between the whole units; they model that hit chance too high and give duels that end too quickly with too few shots fired as a result. (Which in part stems from excessive focus on one vs one dueling etc).

Again, firing opportunities are not that scarce in combat; we know that because the shots are actually fired, and from the AARs we know how long the actions take.

Oddball E8 - at short range all that is true. At long range is it not - motion makes it hard for the last reason you gave, even with the target moving toward you. When the flight time of the shell is 2 full seconds, it arcs 16 feet in the air above the target and back down again. If between one shot and the next, enemy movement changes the range by 100 yards, you can easily send false signals to the over and under range homing routine and keep getting the range wrong, shot after shot. It is not like you can tell by how much over or under the shot was at such distances. And you aren't "bowling" - only need to get the deflection correct. You are "golfing" - a wrong range estimate sends the shot clear over or too low for the target.

The longer the range, the faster the shot is falling from its apex (Y component of the shell velocity), and the shorter the "correct enough" range window is. At 2 seconds flight time, that range window is only about 160 meters long along the axis of flight. If the target is moving 80 meters between each shot (which is a 12 second shot spacing if the target is moving 15 mph), half the "good enough" range window just scooted out from under you before you pulled the trigger the second time. That's harder - quite significantly harder than stationary. Even moving straight along the axis of fire. Notice, this isn't a matter of the *lead* - the change in the range in the 2 seconds between trigger pull and shell arrival. It is a matter of the range *estimate* - the change in the range since the last time you saw whether the previous shot went over or went under. (A longer period of time, and a bigger change in the range).

This Kauz pretender, he wants to be a Grog, he struts like a Grog and has all the itty-bitty Grog-like factoids that wobble on Grog-like sticks and he sort of almost sounds like a Grog.

Except he can't quite reach the Grog-like Titan heights of Grogology. No reverse-ferreting, no seamless dissembling with the agile, adept prowl of a hungry jungle kitty needing fresh non-Grog meat and quite obviously doesn't have the complete command over the subject matter that could punch holes in hard cows' cheese. AND if that wasn't enough, non-capitalisation at the start of sentences. I mean, newb Grog wannabe error or wot! Why not wave a flag, "Grog-kitty, gobble me up, I'm frying tonight"?

It would do wonders if you actually quoted the post you are referring to.

I think I had a thread like this 7 years ago lol.

CMx2 games have never had swivel fire/spraying so all the mg's shoot lines instead of ellipses. This means ROF won't increase your hit rate much.

People unclear on the concept --- a million rounds fired. Over 12 hours. No, they didn't catch anyone by surprise in hour 2, or 4, or 12. Or after the first ten minutes. Even that long would only matter if people were trying to get out of the area hit. On how unclear on the concept JonS is, ammo actually is scarce, and firing it on one occasion actually does mean not firing it on other occasions. The mission described probably saved the lives of about 1000 German soldiers. There is such a thing as being epically stupid in the misuse of weapons, and no, just using every possible tool any way you can think of to secure command goal X is not command or intelligence.

But this is exactly the same sort of thing that gave use 3 million shell prep fires lasting a week that just ensured the enemy had plenty of reserves behind the threatened sector - while throwing away the shells, which would have cut the defenders in half if fired anytime *except* when they were all deep in their dugouts. Dumb commanders force their tools to obey The Plan, without any regard to whether those tools are actually any good at it or The Plan makes the slightest sense. Smart ones make their plans in the first place in a manner that lets their tools operate under their best conditions, to maximum effect.

It is the difference between just demanding that things happen and knowing what actually brings them about...

Gents,

The OP put up a statement, right or wrong. There is no need to conduct Ad hominem attacks. He is participating in the conversation. There is a clear mob mentality here as many of you are ****-storming all over him. This is unnecessary.

Higher ROF does not do what you think it does. It does not conjure bullets from the vasty deep. It does not make them any lighter or easier to get to a forward position, to fire them at the enemy. It does not make each more accurate - it does the reverse, in fact.

It does let you concentrate you volume of fire (which is unchanged, see previous) into narrower time windows, at a cost in lower per round accuracy. Whether that trade off is worth it depends entirely on the *time profile of target exposure*, assuming you manage to exploit said ROF perfectly, to shift your available volume into the narrow time slices with highest target exposure.

When it won't help one lick is whenever the target is continuously exposed, for as long or longer than any alternative weapon needs to fire the equivalent ammo. Higher ROF is completely useless in that case. And may detract from total delivered firepower, due to lower accuracy per round.

To see how obvious this is, ignore machineguns and compete with one rifleman. The MG fires off 5000 at peak cyclic ROF at a continually exposed target. The target remains there for four days, anyway. One rifleman takes 5000 aimed single shots. It doesn't matter how long that takes him because the target is sitting there, completely exposed for days, and he can certainly fire his aimed shots within that time. Which weapon gets more hits? Speed has nothing to do with the answer. Only accuracy per shot influences that answer. And the accuracy per shot is clearly higher with the singles, each individually aimed, for rifle.

Faster is not straighter. Faster is not more. If there isn't a sea change in target exposure, that the fast shooting can exploit and the slow shooting cannot, faster isn't worth diddly.