Melchior
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Posts posted by Melchior
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Har. Whatever hole Russia is sitting in is one that it dug for itself with Polish-Ukrainian-etc slave labor. The key to success post Cold War has been globalization, and that isn't a "manipulation" it's just a practical reality of the world at large at this point (and it has certainly done its fair share of harm and benefit everywhere). The Russian state from Czar to Putin has uniquely established itself as quite possibly the least reliable, most exploitative partner you can select in international affairs, and that is really a matter of history. The fact that now in a world of fairly open trade and a declining set of "poles" countries can now choose where and how they align means Russia is bereft of friends through its historical behavior, and now must endeavor to create "friends" out of ethnic Russian parts of other countries.
Yeah you're a real appointee of the people's opinions worldwide. This "practical reality" you speak of is a very frightening concept to very many people who aren't American or European. Russia's problems in administration and its relationship with its former states are an internal affair, read: none of our damn business. Maybe now you'll explain to me how globalization hasn't been a sham deal with obvious beneficiaries and even more obvious losers. Shame really. Much like communism, sounds great on paper, doesn't do so well in practice.
If you aren't convinced that over twenty million dead and a wrecked country are worse than an economic depression, I don't know what to say.
If you think either one of those issues were/are as simple as you make them out to be, I don't know what to say. Well actually, I do. It's that precedent is in place for this sort of dilemma to turn out very badly for Slavs, and the west has frequently proven itself to be instrumental in the decline of its rivals. What it hasn't proven, at any point in history ever, is how this has been good for them and everyone else too.
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I didn't say it destroyed Russia. I said it was -- objectively, provably, -- a bigger setback by an order of magnitude compared to the nineties.
I'm not convinced. Their was much death but Russia emerged from WW2 with a bright future as a preeminent global superpower. Today? The East is in inexorable decline, with its condition being aggravated by the manipulations and machinations of the west. Who's right and who's wrong matters a lot less to me than who is getting hurt and who isn't. If you ask me, we're all going to pay for the forced breakup of the Slavic states. Just like we're paying today for 100 year old breakup of the Ottoman Turks. The exchange of prosperity, the cycle of rich and poor, it just goes back and forth. It never solves anything.
50 million Soviet Union dead and massive destruction. A large part of that in Ukraine and the Baltic States alhough also a not inconsiderable mount of fighting in Russia. I think everyone who has read a decent amount about the Russian Front understands something of the effect on Russian pstche. Barbarossa is seen as a stab in the back by Hitler. But NATO and the West are not Nazi Germany and some kind of Barbarrossa II isn't going to hppen. Which might be harder for Russians parnoid about the West to accept. Having said that the West lived for 45 years with the percieved threat of Soviet incasion of Western Europe so maybe we are a little paranoid about Russia too.
For all his faults Gorbachev was statesman enough to understand this. Unfortuneatly somewhere along the line we lost an opportunity to better reldtions and both Russia and the West must take their share of the blame. Maybe ne good thing about BS is that it gets peple with commin interests talking and that migh help reduce the possibility of something like the war depictedi the game actually happening for real. And perhaps what we see in the game warns us what such a war might cost. If t does that then BF have done their job.
Indeed. It's not accurate to hold the west 100% accountable for everyone's problems, just that it understands it has been a contributor too often. Far more success has been had in history by promoting the melding of cultures and peoples, but not by force or greed. We just need to overcome social stigmas and perceptions towards other peoples. We also need to stop acting as if international politics is a Game of Thrones episode or a Hearts of Iron campaign.
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It's super interesting to me how Poland's arsenal is a mix of old Warsaw Pact hardware with newer NATO stuff. Could be a very interesting dichotomy in a fight.
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Sometimes, but not always.
Man I find it tough *not* to use combat engineers once I have them. They're so useful I end up carefully deciding when I want to throw them into the action for fear of expending them too early. They're absolutely indispensable for clearing buildings and towns. So much so that I consider it plain cruelty when scenario designers doesn't give me any. You know who you are!
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"Stop being violent!" Said the most violent people on Earth.
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I believe there was a certain German summertime party crash that was just a wee bit more a setback than the nineties were...
Barbarossa failed. It killed many Slavs, but did not destroy the Russian state or the Soviet Union.
Given the history and the great price paid by Russia one can understand such fears but we also knowhat those who invade Russia don' tend to fare too well.No, but they usually do quite a bit of damage before they leave. (Let's also not forget the time in 1917 a western invasion of Russia succeeded.) Russians know that the greatest threat to their existence is in the west, regardless of what western media blathers on about Putin being a bad man and an oppressor. The fact is many Russians see him much more favorably than they see the west. Because Europe has done a bang up job establishing a history of treachery and violence towards Slavs.
It'd be nice if we could finally break that chain peacefully, but i'm worried that's going to be very hard now too. Because yet again the west has established a history of using peaceful relations to carry out financial invasions via corporate interest. This is a big reason why Yeltsin was so despised in Russia and it actually marks some of Putin's legacy too. Though Putin has done a much better job re-asserting Russian influence in Russian interests. Their are many, many less fortunate powers in South America and Africa that have traded the boot of Empire for the debt of De Beers, Goodyear, and ExxonMobil. At least they massacre fewer villages.
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Hmm.... Gorbachev is one of most hated persons in Russia, as well as Yeltsin :-)
EDIT:
It is instance of Russian/Western misunderstating.
In the West Gorbachev and Yeltsin are praised for what they've did.
In Russia, however, most of people passionately hate them
I feel bad for Gorbachev. The seeds for the eastern blocs' fall were laid long before he became Premier and their wasn't much he could do to stop it. Brezhnev really could've confronted the problems that were eating away at the Soviet Union's core but chose stability so as to avoid "rocking the boat". The price he paid for a few more years of stability were the biggest setback in Russian history arguably since the Mongols conquered The Rus'.
Yeltsin well, I know enough about him to know that he was a huge thug. "Shock Therapy" didn't do any good for Russians but it did a lot of good for his pockets and the pockets his cronies.
Maybe I don't have much faith in humanity. Human nature does not change much and it is not just the West or Russia. It is humanity as a whole. We are always going to have some leaders of ;large countries in particular who throw their weight around. Great powers rise and fall, have done so throughout hstory and will continue to do so.And the West will be one those falling powers if it continues to base politics and thinking around multiplying enemies rather than ending the antagonism.
Some find it harder to accept decline than others. Russia has had a time as a leading world powerunder the Tsars and then under th Communists. The end of that should have been when the Soviet Union fell. Though Russia was still considered an important country by everyone it was no longer a superpower. Putin wants that superpower role back.What he wants to avoid is the death-by-slow bleed the west has subjected every one of its enemies to historically. The Turks, the Chinese, Africa, the Native Americans, etc. The west hasn't conquered its enemies through war that often, but they have very frequently conquered them through economics. The writing is on the wall.
Most European countries and the US don't want that.Of course they don't. Western dominion is at stake.
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Yeah and the fixin they need just happens to be the one rich, white westerners will deliver right? The 18th century called, they want the White Man's Burden back plz.
When we humans stop being such wankers.Seriously look around the globe. For being the species on the planet that is supposedly self aware and at the apex of the intelligence ladder we are amazingly stupid.
That's such a hopeless, and bleak outlook. Especially considering humanity has already survived much worse, during much harsher times. We just need to stop viewing other cultures as aliens living on the planet we happen to be living on too. We in the west have this perception that our culture is the *default* culture of human civilization. All others are to be judged by our bar. They know it too, that's why a lot of their own leaders have (often foolishly) tried to enforce western standards on non-western cultures in hope of aping the financial and martial success of the west. The alternative is domination either by the gun or the dollar.
Change to all this starts as soon as people accept it needs to change.
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Let's all pretend for a moment that economic and social isolation of Russia will somehow fix Russia and its problems. Or compel Russians to somehow stop viewing the west as a major rival to their interests. Just like the Middle East, or Asia.
I mean I don't doubt the direction this is all going. The West Wins. It usually does, everyone else just has to make due with whatever they're left with in the aftermath. Somehow though the antagonism never stops, and the enemies never really disappear. You'd think NATO would've matured into a greater entity than the Triple Entente Part Deux after the wall fell, but I guess we'd all rather relive the tough-guy politics of 1914 that did the world so much good.
Where does the circle break guys?
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Their are very few situations the tac ai models that would be unusual in real life because the infantry-play is heavily abstracted. Their is a lot that could be happening down in that action square that is simply outside the scope of the game. If it really offends someone so much that they aren't in control of that kind of minutia, then imo, you're (not you explicitly) playing the wrong game.
It's easy for me and you to go "omfg don't run out the building into the machine gun" because we, from our god-view, know that. The pixeltruppen don't, their only link to situational awareness on the battlefield has been their eyes and maybe a radio.
Professional pilots make mistakes and not-the-right-thing when under heavy stress or panic situations (many time killing themselves and passengers as result).Yeah, anybody is susceptible to panic. Training has the value of making it a lot less likely but it's never impossible.
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Really ?
I hope you dont complain about your new car if it has malfunctions, i mean, could you build a better car ?
I already knew the forums here are full of people that will defend even the most flawed aspect of the game, even the most stupid and obliviously buggy TacAI behavior but i did not expect it at that scale, sorry.
Apples to oranges. Look, I hate to break it to you, but you're another sad, entitled dweeb complaining about non-issues because of your blatent sense of entitlement brought on by mommy telling you how special you were for years has really skewed your perspectives.
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The issue is, currently there is no real logic behind the panic behavior, its completely random !
Some think that realistic but for me thats just a excuse for a non existing or very bad TacAI in such situations !
You will of course explain now how your own background qualifies you as an authority about how people should behave in dangerous, highly stressful situations.
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omfg troops bunching up fix that right now battlefront.
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It's risky but bold. Which strikes me as the sort of thing you'd want more of in the game rather than rules and arbitrary limits.
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I think this would be pretty interesting too, and yes damage should accrue w/possible immobilization.
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"In CMX1, infantry ruled. Cheap and lethal against tanks up close."
Sounds to me like "overpowered against tanks". Listen I hate to break it to you, but realistically an encounter with an armored vehicle is a pretty frightening experience. Your reply options are limited, the tank's aren't. Just because it's at a disadvantage in some environments doesn't mean it should ever be treated as a cakewalk. Literally the only people i've ever seen who think that are way are internet forumites. Calling upon the vast and varied experience of their long days as denizens of the military history community.
"They seem less stealthy than tanks even when they approach the tanks from the sides and rear."
Duh. Countries mount literally the best optical equipment they produce on MBTs. It's not inaccurate for tank to be very good at spotting in this era. How many soldiers carry 20x zoom thermal scopes/w range finders I wonder?
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Sadly the Germans have already sewn up the tradition of naming tanks after big, dangerous animals.
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RE: Germany's foreign volunteers.
The Allies experienced the "value" of polyglot forces fighting in the Pacific and the Germans did themselves with their Romanian and Hungarian Allies in 1942. The reality was in the era of socially entrenched racism few did well blending racially dissimilar units on the same front. I simply do not believe the Nazis of all people would've been able to turn the war around simply by placing guns in the hands of Slavs and Poles in 1942 instead of 1944. The same people they had been systemically murdering and blathering about the genetic inferiority of since the war started. In order to make these people real effective soldiers you'd have to integrate them into German society in a way totally 180 degrees to the Nazi mindset. The end result was only to create troops of secondary value with middling to petering interest in fighting after a very short time in the Wehrmacht. Look at how great the Ostbattalions *weren't* in Normandy.
RE: The U-Boats
I was pretty sure this issue was over and done with by 1962. The U-boats were not a cheap investment. Submarine hulls require very specialized labor to build and the crews aren't just average sailors either. You can't operate a sub fleet cheaply because submarines by their nature are very sophisticated weapons. Those 700+ U-boats the Allies sunk during the war were not a 1:1 trade in ships and manpower. More like 3:1 with the Germans on the losing end. All those sailors the Kriegsmarine lost could have been funneled into the Wehrmacht and made a few more Panzer Divisions that might have made an actual difference when it mattered most in the East. (This of course, would've been a pre-war decision, not a hasty attempt to replace losses by simply putting a K98 in a sailor's hands and telling him to shoot toward the East.)
The whole Kriegsmarine was little more than a propaganda exercise during the war. Something to disinterest the British in the war. The far bigger and better run Kaiserliche Marine couldn't beat Britain in the last war, the smaller, Nazi permeated Kriegsmarine sure as hell wasn't going to do it this time. Not when they were designing ships with AAA batteries so broken they couldn't hit a single wooden biplane because it was flying too slow.
Meanwhile, the Allies dropped shipping losses to acceptable levels simply by re instituting the convoy system. The Wolf Packs were designed as a counter to convoys, but became a liability once the convoys could be escorted by lots of inexpensive corvettes. Wolf Packs were absolutely out of the question once the Allies sewed up the last airspace gaps over the Atlantic.
The point with all this was the Allies were able to solve every crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic inexpensively while the Germans had to come up with increasingly contrived gimmicks just to keep the situation at "suicide" levels. By 1944 most of the U-boats were getting bombed before they could even sortie and their only tangible effect was throw off invasion time-tables by delays.
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Limited redo for mulligans over unintended pathfinding would be pretty reasonable I think.
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Ya mean like they did in 1944? Whole SS Divisions were being comprised of Ukrainian and Polish volunteers. The fact was this "resentment" to Stalin never materialized in a way meaningful enough to affect the war's outcome. German planning hinged quite a bit on anti-Soviet flare ups, hence Hitler's belief they only needed to "kick in the door". Well they damn well blew the door off the hinges, and Stalin's house still stood strong.
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I just use this digression to say that the overlap between coexistence and obsolescence is generally a large one. And that is assuming someone (anyone) tells me how exactly the infantry lugging these super-ATGMs around are supposed to counter artillery and machine guns that ended their practical battlefield dominance a century ago...
Yes it was for thousands for of years. Things have changed very much though in the last 200 years or so where the coexistence/obsolescence cycle can now be measured in decades rather than hundreds of years.
Again, artillery and the machine gun ended the dominance of *dismounted* infantry in lines bumrushing enemy positions. They have failed to make the rifleman disappear.
Re: AT Guns.
You're tying it to a war. All those 25, 37 and 40 mm guns were supposed to be the definitive infantry answer to armor circa 20s-30s. It lingered in some quarters a bit longer.
True enough, but the thing is what people often *think* about the relationship weapons will have does not often stack up to reality. If you'd asked everyone how'd they use tanks in 1930 almost everyone except for Guderian and Liddel Hart would've give you the wrong answer. If the point you're making here was that the tank was dominant throughout the 20th century than I agree completely. Nothing was going to stop a Golden Horde of T-72s rushing through the Fulda Gap in 1970. Anti-tank weapons never stopped an attack ever, often inflicted casualties yes, but often ended up as casualties themselves. Simply too few of them covering battlefield arcs too narrowly. Infantry used to be unable to do much except point defense but now things are different because the anti-tank options infantry now have access to are just so much more lethal, common, and most importantly, can reach out at targets. No longer requiring specialized formations.
One thing to keep in mind is that in Iraq the Stryker brigades got their asses kicked when they ran into tanks and couldn't get out of the way fast enough. All the maneuverability and sensors won't save you when there's a tougher enemy standing right in front of you. And APS is not going to stop a 125mm shell coming your way.
I don't expect infantry to stop tank attacks every time still, but now the question is can they inflict heavy casualties on armor reliably? If an SBCT did that as a screening arm then i'd think the solution would be to have more Stryker Brigades or just attach Abrams Companies to them if you think they're going to encounter armor. You need to reach a critical-mass point of inflicting enough casualties reliably enough to make the MBT a real question. I think we're reaching that point.
And imagine what if APS will be able to intercept top attack missiles...
The thing to me about all these new intercept systems is that they don't seem weight intensive. I don't know for sure but how long until we start seeing intercept systems on Strykers? Yeah no intercept system will stop a 125mm round for sure that's why when something carrying a gun that big shows up, you dismount and grab the Javs.
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Well, if not a MBT, then what exactly? So, what's your idea on how the MBT will evolve?
I think we'll probably see more emphasis on high-mobility infantry formations like the Stryker Brigades. I'm not certain though since i'm not in the military and all i'm basing this on historic trends that came before. In the Medieval era we essentially saw a situation very similar to the one that prevailed through most of the 20th century in warfare. Tough, mobile, and deadly core units screened by infantry. That system disappeared around the time of the Hundred Year War and it seems rather conspicuous to me that the musket happened to start showing up more and more around the same time. Granted correlation is not causation, social change probably played a big role in the decline of armored cavalry too.
I expect the tanks that are around will be pushed further into infantry support roles a-la 1917 while more nations turn to mechanized infantry for everything.
I have to differ on the tank being on the way out. There's not really a viable tank alternative, or a technology that tank alternatives can use, that tanks cannot. And there's no "musket" as much as ATGMs were supposed to herald the end of the tank (as were mobile AT guns in the 1930's) the two systems are very much locked in a evolutionary arm's race, but neither really claims a massive advantage.The problem with anti-tank guns is that they were usually either too heavy to be practical or too light to be useful. People saw this trend as far back as 1936 which is why everyone had started working on middle-caliber guns before the war even broke out. Once you get to around 75mm or so an anti-tank gun becomes so heavy it typically needs a vehicle to push it around. Any heavier and you need a dedicated prime-mover, an unarmed tank basically. At which point you might as well just build a tank. A "big gun" arms race always favors the heavyweight. That's why battleships were the apex predator of navies until the airplane.
Now I agree everyone thought the ATGM was going to be end of the tank, then the attack chopper. All of these systems plus the above had a big limitation though, and it was that they were simply never very common. They were limited to dedicated formations or branches rather than made organic to Pvt. Redshirt.
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I read somewhere that pilots were being soloed in the BF109 after only 10 hours of flight time in 1944. I've found the majority of flight students are unable to solo a Cessna 172 until around 20 hours, sometimes more, sometimes never. The Luftwaffe which used to have some of the toughest training in the whole world back in 1938 had been reduced to this. By 1944 they were putting basically student pilots into an airplane with a 1500hp engine and a notorious tendency to ground loop and suffer catastrophic control loss on takeoff and landing.
Partly I think Galland and the rest of the Luftwaffe like to blame Hitler for delaying the project, when actually getting the kinks out of all aircraft production actually took much longer than expected.That's nothing new. Though Napoleon he was not, post-war the "Honorable Prussian Officer Corp" scapegoated Hitler to no end. He was both an easy target for blame and a hate sink for them to play all their own moral dilemmas off of after the war. These same people who had every opportunity to derail the Nazi Party and end Hitler's ambitions at any point in the 1930s instead aided and supported the regime at every turn. Then acted post-war as if they had been the victims. Never sounded like the honorable and brave "Prussian Officers" to me.
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Graviteam Tactics Operation Star
Role of the Baltic States
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by CaptHawkeye
Look if you're only interested in comparing events in history by body count, than you're missing some much bigger than Operation Barbarossa. Try the Russian Civil War and subsequent famine. Events which were indeed big setbacks but in the overall context of Russian history, were eclipsed by the gradual rise and successes of later decades. Don't try to be smug and assume i'm downplaying the horrible loss of life that accompanied these events. That's not what i'm saying. What i'm saying is that Russian society succeeded and grew in spite of these horrors. Why do you think?
Their is a big picture here.