Dietrich

Wait, didn't we already have a "FLIR ≠ 'I see you'" thread recently? Regarding grenade launchers being seemingly impossible to spot: I imagine that would be so, because unlike a DShK/M2HB, a grenade launcher doesn't have a muzzle flash (at least not a huge one) or an eardrum-shattering report.

This thread, perhaps?

Before someone cites the "house from hell" incident in Fallujah where a building was collapsed by a 20-pound satchel charge but then a live grenade rolled/bounced out of the rubble toward the Marines, let me surmise: The insurgent who apparently survived to toss the grenade may have been on the roof on the building and thus would not have been directly pulverized by the satchel charge's explosion or crushed by the collapse of the building. In CMSF, if I drop a dozen 155mm directly on a two-floor building (i.e., every shell hits the building; no near-misses) and it collapses entirely and two or three shells strike the rubble itself, I expect the six men who had been firing from the ground floor to be incapacitated or dead. But that's just me.

Isn't one factor precluding adoption of calibers to replace either 5.56 or 7.62 certain NATO-related treaties specifying said calibers? Or have I misheard/misread?

Looks like the abbreviation for the name of the forthcoming CMx2 pirate game.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I reckon I'll get pretty the same use out of them that I get from the turret-mounted 7.62mm MG on any MBT in CMSF. (But I'm sure some grogs will be along shortly to elucidate in excruciating detail how incorrect and unreasonable that reckoning is. ) And the Germans called them Tommykocher, "Tommy cookers".

What AKD said.

What's really at issue here, anyway? What is the OP arguing for/against? All too quickly what could have been (and yet partially is, somehow) a thought-provoking and perhaps even mutually enlightening discussion has devolved into a near argument due to merely suboptimal choice of words on both sides. making not-especially-specific statements with non-standard terminology (i.e., referring to AKMs as SMGs) + saying others are hostile and lack reading comprehension when they ask for clarification/elucidation = a recipe for confusion

I admit, I was puzzled and a little disappointed that both Dutch and German TACs and pilots communicate in English. Then I figured all speaking the same must be an aspect of the whole "joint fires" thing. Thanks for the confirmation.

Good point, Mord. However, in the situation I was describing, once my pixeltruppen were Hide-ing (prone) behind the low wall, they no longer had LOS/LOF to their front, i.e., to wherever the sniper was; the point was simply to keep them in a position where they couldn't get shot. For ambush-type situations, though, Hide + short-range cover arc works best.

Conversely, have any of y'all ever used the Hide command to get your pixeltruppen to stay down so they remain in cover? A few months ago I was playing a certain small-ish scenario ("OPPW", I think it's called) wherein a Stryker rifle squad of mine was behind a low wall on the edge of an orchard and kept taking near-miss sniper fire, and after several minutes and a couple casualties they couldn't locate the sniper, so I gave them a Hide command so they would stay down in cover.

As of v1.30, many times I've seen a Leopard 2A6 (of whichever army) pop smoke and traverse its turret in a certain direction well before any <?> appears or before any misfired ATGM augers in. However, as of v1.30 I haven't yet played with any non-NATO-module forces, so I don't know if this is an indication of the Leopard 2's sensor capabilities or a result of more dynamic tank-commander tacAI. Before v1.30, the T-90SA was (as far as I had observed) the only tank to behave similarly, apparently thanks to its partial Shtora countermeasures suite—when lazed, the tank pops smoke and begins evasive maneuvers, typically by reversing into cover. As far as I had noticed (in a little under two years of playing the game), in the vast majority of other cases, a tank would pop smoke after taking a hit from an unspotted enemy.

If you give a Fuchs a target order at something farther to the left than about 10 o'clock or farther than the right than about 2 o'clock, the gunner grabs his G36 and starts shooting at it.

Three months later and neither Bigduke6 nor JonS have weighed in on this? Must not have been as important as Wikileaks made it out to be.

Could the "weapon sounds are too light and high-pitched" problem be because the player's camera is at UAV height rather than eyebrow level? To my ear, weapons of all sorts sound different—similar to how I'd expected they'd sound from a distance—when heard from high above the map or from the opposite side of the map than when you have the camera hovering over the shooter's shoulder. To my ear, CM:SF's sound modelling is more sophisticated than one might expect from a game "with 1999-era graphics", though not as detailed as, say, some big-budget FPS-type games. Just the sound delay of distant explosions and gunfire—if you have the camera at eyebrow level, you hear the snap of an SVD's bullet before you hear the bang from its muzzle—is of greater verisimilitude than a lot of games. Not that I've ever been in combat or spent any time around military-grade firearms, but as I understand it, distant small-arms fire can sound not unlike a whole lot of firecrackers going off.

In my experience, Mr. Trigger-Happy virtually never rears his ugly head, so long as (1) the sniper team is sited more than 500 meters from the enemy and (2) the sniper team has a relatively close-range cover arc at all times except when a valuable target appears, at which time the cover arc is canceled or narrowed and lengthened to enclose the target, letting the sniper himself engage as appropriate.

Thanks very much, Webwing!

Thanks so much, Steve-O! I've been looking forward to these!

Webwing! Now that NATO is out, how 'bout those templates you mentioned?

After not quite a week's playing... 1. Having been on the receiving end of RPG-29s, and hating it every time, I'm glad some of my pixeltruppen can for once dish out similar punishment in the form of the PzF 3. After taking fire from a building, it's great to let fly and to hear the decisive bang and see the <?> marker disappear. ("That'll shut 'em up...") 2. The Rh202 (on Marder and Wiesel both): an upscaled MG3 with both HE and APDS rounds. I don't know what the German equivalent of "oo-rah" is, but it certainly applies. 3. The PzH 2000 is scary. I called for a Short/Armor mission from one on a lurking Shilka, and it scored, not the one hit which would have been necessary, but six or seven. My experience with the Brits' AS90 has been that it's so accurate, it can be used like a long-range indirect-fire anti-tank gun (on stationary targets), and the PzH 2000 is even better. 4. The MG3: it's great to get as many rounds on target in a single burst as it takes the M240 or FN MAG two or three bursts to achieve. 5. Having grown fond of USMC LAV-25, I rather like the Canadians' LAV III. Sure, it's not as stalwart as the other IFVs in the module, but it can dish out good firepower and carries more dismounts than the others. 6. Last but not least, the Leopard, specifically the Leopard 2A6. Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or does the Leo 2A6 have passive countermeasure capability not too dissimilar from the in-game T-90? The first indication I get that there are enemy ATGMs nearby is, not when one of my Leos takes a hit, but when one of them pops smoke and then I hear the explosion of an ATGM augering in. Evidently the Leo 2A6 has the capability to sense when it gets lased and can automatically pop smoke. When I played the first scenario of the German campaign, in a couple instances a Leo spotted and also knocked out an ATGM even before the missile was halfway to the tank, and this through its own smoke! And having two MG3s per tank with which to pour fire on enemy positions is great too.

[ben Stein-style deadpan] BFC, please fix or do sumfink. [/ben Stein-style deadpan]

I'm half expecting someone to come out with a "Shilka holds up column of Blue infantry who happen to not have air support or Javelins at the time" scenario any day now. In any case, I'll probably make such a scenario myself one of these days.

Obviously, that is an instance where the "NATO" prefix fits. After all, that scenario pertains to a multinational joint exercise, right?

"Feuer Frei" (the equivalent of "fire at will" in German) isn't the title of a Rammstein song fer nuthin'! "...gefährlich ist wer schmerzen kennt..." ("...dangerous is the one who knows pain...") P.S. Yes, I know "frei" ought not be capitalized; but actually it should, if only because it's part of a song title. (Just because I'm American doesn't mean I can't possibly know what I'm talking about when it comes to the German language, nor does it mean that I won't make mistakes thereabout.) And Celine Dion is comparable to Rammstein...how? What about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3hJ5-ngUow?!?!!1!?

Since I think of the new armies as distinct from one another rather than as elements of a supranational force, I've thought of renaming the "NATO"-prefixed scenarios according to nationality. Thus the Canadian scenarios would be prefixed "CA" (for Canada) or perhaps "CF" (for Canadian Forces); the German scenarios would be prefixed "DE" (for Deutschland); the Dutch scenarios would be prefixed "NL" (for Netherlands). Such would be nice and short (a la "UK" for British Army scenarios); and such would be in accord with standard abbreviating convention, correct?