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Dietrich

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Everything posted by Dietrich

  1. Thanks very much for sharing this, Pete, and for creating this majestic map in the first place! =)
  2. Thanks very much for all these fine mods, Kieme!
  3. Would a NATO fast-mover on a SEAD sortie — say a USAF F-16CJ — use its ordinance on a mobile SAM/AAA asset like a Tunguska? Or would such not-necessarily-as-dangerous-as-full-fledged-SAMs assets be left for non-SEAD aircraft to tackle (presuming that, given threat from Tunguskas et al., NATO aircraft performing air-to-ground sorties would maintain a "deck" above, say, 12,000 feet and wouldn't necessarily be dissuaded by Tunguskas from using their own ordinance to knock out said Tunguskas)?
  4. I don't even have CMBS yet, but still: Thanks much, Battlefront, for the patch!
  5. Yeah… Where's Damian90 (whom I've seen post long and detailed info about modern MBTs in the CMSF sub-forum) when you need him?
  6. And—on March 19/20, 2003, anyway (as recounted in Osprey Publishing's "F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom")—flying an F-117 over Baghdad with F-16CJ SEAD escort despite the F-117 being a stealth aircraft and despite it being the dead of night at the time(!)
  7. I've read a little about USAF/USN/USMC air operations (especially CAS) from 2001 on. CMSF's (admittedly hypothetical) setting is basically the same as that of OIF in that the air force facing the NATO contingent is practically a non-factor, so the NATO air assets can concentrate on CAS, BAI, TST, SEAD, and other missions which are made much easier by the de facto absence of enemy fast-movers. Such wouldn't, I infer, be the case in CMBS's setting. So what I'm hoping to pick your various brains about is: —To what extent would NATO air superiority fighters be able to keep Russian ones away from whatever NATO aircraft would be seeking to perform CAS, BAI, SEAD, and other air-to-ground missions? —Would NATO SEAD operations be effective enough to significantly lessen the threat from Russian SAMs and such like, such that NATO air-to-ground sorties wouldn't be hindered much? I'm seeking a better sense of these matters so as have more understanding about the likelihood that NATO or Russian fast-movers would factor into a given CMBS scenario. Given the (as far as I know, anyway) much greater size and capability and size of the Russian Air Force compared to the Iraqi Air Force (circa 2003) or the Syrian Air Force (hypothetically circa 2008), I surmise that NATO air assets generally wouldn't have as much freedom of action in CMBS as they (depending on the scenario designer) tended to have in CMSF.
  8. Good news, waclaw. =) And OORAH for a fresh Mord voice mod! "Armor!! We got [bEEP] armor!!"
  9. Combatintman, don't lose heart. I very much appreciate the efforts of scenario designers, especially skilled ones like you. My problem is just that I forgot to un-license my CM games (including CMSF and CMBN) before reinstalling my OS a few months ago, and so my CM-playing has been (and remains) on indefinite hold. Still, keep up the great work!
  10. Ironically, that video is unavailable because the user closed their account. =/ Or at least that's what it said when I clicked the link just now.
  11. You can have as little as a single squad on each side in a given scenario. Let's say you want a single infantry squad for a given side. First you purchase the overall unit (say, an infantry battalion). Then you delete from that battalion every sub-formation and team except the one you want (say, the first infantry company in the battlion). Then you delete from that company all the platoons except the one which has the squad you want (say, the first platoon) plus the company-level units (CO, XO, etc.; but typically — yet not, for some reason, every time — you can't delete the CO unit at any level, so see below for how to make any given un-delete-able unit not appear in the scenario). Then you delete all the units in that platoon except the one you want (say, the first squad). Then you add any other un-delete-able units to a reinforcement group whose arrival time is set to beyond the time limit of the scenario (say your scenario is 1 hour long; set the arrival time of this odds-and-ends reinforcement group to 1:30 or some other higher time). Thus when you actually play the scenario, only the single desired squad will be on the map for the duration. Don't know if you have the Marines module, but if you do, check out GeorgeMC's "USMC To Ambush Or Not To Ambush", which features a single USMC infantry squad in a tense meeting engagement, and check it out in the editor to see how such a nothin'-but-one-squad scenario is set up.
  12. George, thanks very much for making this scenario! =) ***** FILMED IN SPOILER-VISION!!! ***** In my initial go at the scenario (of which I only played 21 turns, because by that time my force and the enemy's were decimated and scattered), it wasn't a case of Wittmann earning the Swords to his Knight's Cross but rather of Stief getting a Knight's Cross. Having just browsed the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Villers-Bocage (as recommended in the designer's notes of this scenario), I left my various units more or less in their default positions and gave my initial orders to reflect how the battle historically began. From Montbrocq-la Cidrerie Wittmann drove west onto RN 175 and then turned north. No sooner had his Tiger knocked out two Cromwell IVs than it was itself knocked out by one of the tanks up closer to Point 213 (probably one of the Fireflies), losing the driver in the process. Wittmann and the remaining three crewers escaped to find refuge in a building at Montbrocq-la Cidrerie. As the would-be Swords-earner's crew was fleeing to (relative) safety, Brandt, Sowa and Stief followed Wittmann's route of attack, turning north onto RN 175 in quick succession and knocking out a Firefly and a couple other vehicles south of Point 213. Meanwhile Lotzsch and Wieland moved in to attack. Wieland hadn't actually gotten onto RN 175 when his Tiger came under fire from multiple vehicles on Point 213 and was immobilized by infantry close attacks. (Wieland — or rather his crew, since he himself caught a burst of MG fire while having his head out the hatch — eventually accounted for two Cromwell IVs and a dozen enemy personnel but got shot up so much that only one crewer got out of the tank to end up dead in a ditch on the far side of the road.) Lotzsch's Tiger also knocked out two Cromwell IVs, but it was knocked out by a Firefly on Point 213 and lost its driver while maneuvering to attack from the west. By the time Lotzsch and his crew were bailing out of their Tiger, Brandt, Sowa and Stief had turned around in response to fire from the British forces strung along RN 175 in and near the outskirts of Villers-Bocage. As the three Tigers began heading slowly but steadily toward the town, firing on the move, the gun of Sowa's Tiger was damaged (but not before it had destroyed a halftrack and a mortar carrier); and Brandt's Tiger got immobilized with its flank turned mostly toward the line of vehicles firing on it but still knocked out a Cromwell IV, a Sherman I and two Stuart IIIs. With Brandt's Tiger stuck and Sowa's much de-fanged, Stief's Tiger lumbered on down the length of RN 175. Stief's Tiger took fire (but received no damage) from an AT gun set up on the edge of the road, which the Tiger promptly knocked out, along with another shortly thereafter. Stief's Tiger went ponderously weaving past and through a line of tanks and other armored vehicles knocked out mere minutes earlier, and the Tiger engaged more tanks and armored cars as it moved into the outskirts of the town — it cruised deeper into town (reaching the touch objective), having accounted for three tanks, two carriers, a halftrack and two 6-pdrs. Then, with the scenario clock reading just 01:39:00, I hit "cease fire" and surveyed the battlefield. I had lost 3 tanks and 10 men (3 of them infantry). The enemy force had lost 95 men WIA/KIA, 3 men missing (bailed-out tank crewers captured), 13 tanks and 7 armored vehicles. A scrutiny of the enemy forces revealed Dyas' Cromwell sitting undamaged amid some trees about 50 meters east of RN 175. It could well have engaged and knocked out Stief's Tiger if it had at all halted during its destructive cruise along Rue Georges Clemenceau. So Wittmann got his Tiger shot out from under him mere minutes into the action (and would have to find a new driver), while Stief (with critical help from Brandt and Sowa) ended up being the one whose Tiger cruised quasi-triumphantly into Villers-Bocage itself.
  13. Star Wars: Because it's popular enough that through snidely picking it apart and mocking any and every element thereof, one is therefore proven smarter and cooler than most people.™ Star Wars: Because everyone knows that all the really smart people are Trekkies.™ Star Wars: Because the Episodes I through III happened.™ …ad nauseum. I'd like to see a battle from one of the Star Trek movies subjected to a similar type of "see how ludicrous this is when you really break it down?" treatment. Picking apart a battle from a ~30-year-old space opera (not sci-fi) movie according to 21st-century real-world strategic and tactical theory makes for an interesting read. But if I wanted to read such a breakdown, I'd rather it be of a battle in a movie which at least had pretensions of reflecting reality. The "for being so vaunted, these Stormtroopers kinda suck" thing can be (in a manner of speaking) explained thus: (1a) If they didn't "kinda suck", in A New Hope they would have gunned down or captured any/all of the main characters while they were aboard the Death Star, and then the movie would be over, and there'd be no subsequent movies (with those characters, anyway); (1b) when fighting characters who were not the heroes (and not "Muppets"), they demonstrated combat effectiveness of a degree more or less realistically superior to those of their opponents; (2) it's a space opera, not a sci-fi military-action movie—clearly it wasn't written with thoroughly realistic technology and tactics in mind. That said, I'd certainly be interested in a Star Wars story/novel that depicted Rebel and Imperial military forces using good tactics and so on—and I surmise there are some such stories/novels; I just can't recall any specific examples at the moment. Reckon it's time to re-read Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels.
  14. Yesterday I opened a pre-v2.0 (and pre-v1.11) save and noticed that "Barkmann's" headgear not only was a Wikingerschiff (I forget the non-slang name for it) but also had texture wonkiness.
  15. My view is that one of the elements of the best-designed scenarios is taking into account things like penalties for collateral damage (here used, not as a whitewashing euphemism, but as a blanket term for destruction of civilian structures, casualty infliction on noncombatants, etc.). To elaborate on what Mord and MikeyD have said, in the early days of CMSF (and thereby also of CMx2) scenario designers didn't understand the scenario editor's potential the way they do now. That said, I surmise that the implication of the NATO scenarios'/campaigns' briefings that US forces are (to put it hyperbolically) "callous, cold-hearted bastards" in terms of ROE actually is a not-all-that-inaccurate reflection of how some in the British/Canadian/etc. militaries view their US counterparts. Unlike others on this forum, I myself am not ex-military, nor have I read hundreds of books about modern military stuff (only a few dozen), nor do I keep close contact with individuals in active service; but the impression I get from what I've read and viewed is that US forces tend to be somewhat more profligate with firepower than their allied counterparts. The differences in culture and military philosophy between the US and other North American/Western European nations are illustrated pretty well by the reaction to and fallout of the Kunduz airstrike—multiple high-ranking officials (including the German Army's Chief of Staff, General Wolfgang Schneiderhan, and then defense minister Franz Josef Jung) resigned over allegations relating to the incident. (When's the last time even one similarly high-ranking individual in the US military resigned because of mistakes front-line US military personnel made?) Yet the ordinance-delivering aircraft in this instance were not Luftwaffe Tornados, but rather USAF F-15Es. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to surmise that if the only available on-call aircraft were from one of the other (i.e. non-American) air forces providing air support for ISAF ground troops, the airstrike wouldn't have happened.
  16. "Rise of the Machines"? Menacing techno music? Oh brother. I was about to type "TL;DW", but then eight and a half minutes in the docu gets to showing some of the not-necessarily-negative applications for drone technology. It'll be interesting to read about the first instance in the US of a police drone getting shot down by the same suspects on whom it had been performing surveillance. Then again, for all I know such an instance has already been reported on. So if, sometime in the near future, someone misflies their livestreaming-webcam-fitted mini-UAV and crashes it into my face as I'm walking to/from the grocery store, will I be able to sue the pilot of said mini-UAV? From the video (at 12:47): Calling it now: said first guy will be Ted Nugent. Won't it be ironic when some tech-head uses a small, cheap, agile drone to kamikaze into and thereby take down a larger, less maneuverable, and much more expensive government-agency drone? Actually, tis a pretty nuanced video. Thanks for the link.
  17. Meanwhile, a weekly newspaper inspires a major Western country to close its embassies in about 20 countries: Reuters: Magazine’s nude Mohammad cartoons prompt France to shut embassies, schools in 20 countries If "wagging the dog" is when a government uses falsehood and spin to make its citizenry believe what it wants them to, what's a/tthe term for when a small element of a country forces the government to take unusual action in response to (but not toward) actions by said element?
  18. *clears throat* If I may be so bold as to refer back to the topic of this thread... If insurgents can score a propaganda victory and cost their enemy hundreds of millions of dollars in hard-to-replace equipment for the loss of only 15 lives (however much those 15 may have been the Taliban equivalent of SEALs and thereby far less disposable than the run-o'-the-mill RPG-wielder)… actually, I'm not sure where I was going with that. Guess I'm just taken aback. Isn't Camp Bastion supposed to be one of the safest places in Afghanistan (for a military base, that is)? I'd be interested to know how they're going to beef up security in and around Camp Bastion. If VMA-211 got kinda sorta crippled by just 15 crafty insurgents, I wonder what the Devil Dogs over at Camp Leatherneck are gonna be up to in the coming days/weeks.
  19. Despite visiting Wikipedia pretty much every day, and always starting from the main page—with the search window right above the news panel—I saw no mention of Keegan's death. Color me sheepish. On the other hand, in the past week Neil Armstrong's death has overshadowed other recent passings. On the other other hand, if Keegan's death—despite happening on 2 August—wasn't mentioned in Wikipedia's news section till last week, then it was indeed overlooked. Even if Keegan had been the most important military historian in history, his death would garner hardly a footnote amid the various scandals, political turmoil, sporting events, celebrity trivia and incidents of violence that come so thick and fast these days.
  20. This thread reminds me of what I imagine a Peng thread would be like without "Peng" in the thread title and without said thread's usual denizens. Some anticipated retorts to the above: "You mean totally boring?" "'What the PCT would be like with its denizes'... in other words, wholly lacking in wit and even basic intelligence." "Who/what is Peng?"
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