Ivanov

Fulga Gap!

Bye. 
Thanks for the offer but I've lost interest in another $50 game with new guys and new guns and little else different.  We can keep milking this 10-year old engine with a horribly clunky interface and terrible performance on newer hardware and blaming all the cool things we can't do on the engine that THEY CREATED.  I'm moving on...

I've posted Combat Mission on Pornhub. No one can stop me.

Fulda Gap!

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
I'm only 54, soon 55, but still in good health and fit as a fiddle, thanks to the Good Lord (and the Good Wife of course). And I'm not intending to become old in the traditional way. Age isn't that important a factor as it was in the generations before us. So stop talking about getting old, people! Burn!
Listen to Alan Watts;
 

I wouldn't draw any conclusions from the YT videos. They are not representative because they always show successful attacks from the ambush positions. I haven't seen many videos where the missile missed or malfunctioned. So the ATGM porn present online has to represent only small fraction of the actual launches. Of course the're ATGM systems like Spike NLOS with a range over 20km designed to be fired at the targets BVR. But they are designed for the helicopters or some future tank destroyers, that would be networked with drones or other observation systems.

Having said this, I'd love to see a little bigger CM maps. They don't have to be 10x10km, but maybe 5x5km, something more suitable for mechanized combat. The current maps are great for infantry combat or WW2. For modern mech warfare - not so much.

I wouldn't draw any conclusions from the YT videos. They are not representative because they always show successful attacks from the ambush positions. I haven't seen many videos where the missile missed or malfunctioned. So the ATGM porn present online has to represent only small fraction of the actual launches. Of course the're ATGM systems like Spike NLOS with a range over 20km designed to be fired at the targets BVR. But they are designed for the helicopters or some future tank destroyers, that would be networked with drones or other observation systems.

Having said this, I'd love to see a little bigger CM maps. They don't have to be 10x10km, but maybe 5x5km, something more suitable for mechanized combat. The current maps are great for infantry combat or WW2. For modern mech warfare - not so much.

Yeah, and how often will they have the opportunity to fire at such a long distances? On the European theatre, the average engagement distance for tanks or ATGMs is about 1km.

LMAO! You guys are so predictable. We made it to one answer before it devolved into off topic wars.
 
Mord: What's your favorite color?
Poster 1: Green
Poster 2: Fulda Gap!
 
Mord: What's your favorite food?
Poster 1: Pizza
Poster 2: Fulda Gap!
 
Mord: Who's your favorite porn star?
Poster 1: Fulda Gap!
Poster 2: Michael Emrys!
Mord: Steve, Emrys' made a sock puppet...
 
Mord.
 
P.S. Come to think of it, Fulda Gap does sound like a German porn actress.

Hello, Steve, and it's Good to hear from you, and throwing of these Bones...
I always thought the CMRT Basic Russian Infantry were a little over-generous with SMG's & SVT's...From I can remember a Basic Russian Infantry Squad should have around 5-6 Mosin Nagant Rifles, 1x SVT, 2x SMG, 1x LMG (something along those lines).

The (poor) sarcasm is doing you no favors. Jackass move.

They won´t release anything soon. Too busy with not talking to customers.

This is a bad argument. They keep all relevant information (sales figures, cash flow, etc.) secret ostensibly to "protect it from competition." Just pointing to longevity is ridiculous, for all you know they could have been limping along for 20 years, it's literally impossible to know how successful they are. 
I'll tell you what's not a sign of a good company, releasing an update with a game breaking bug (I consider it game breaking because it effectively makes the single player unplayable, unless you enjoy effortlessly gunning down fleeing AI troops) and charge $10 for it. Then going over a year and a half without any sign of a fix on the way. Bonus points for the fact that the update to fix 4.0 will also likely require you to pay for it because BFC loves its customers so much that they nickle and dime them for basic bug fixes. 
But hey, I gotta give some credit to BFC, they've clearly mastered the art of building up a dedicated fanbase. Paying customers are demanding some action to fix their game, and we got @IanL throwing out terms like snowflakes, because screw them for wanting to be able to play their $60 game without using janky workarounds. 
 

I agree, facts are a pain in the arse. One of the facts, that incidentally also is a pain the arse, is that is has been 17 months since 4.0 was released, and still no patch.

I assure you I am no entitled snowflake and I think that is an easy defense of their lack of communication.
I understand the whole entitlement thing is real now a days but I cant see in any way how this is that.  Steve communicated that this is a problem back in Jan.?  Indicating that things were looking good or something to that effect? And we are entitled snowflakes 6 months later because we have issues with the total lack of communication since?  That is why I hesitated even making my original post because it doesn't seem to take long for the insults to come when one questions BF here.
I do not expect anyone to hold my hand nor do I feel entitled to anything other than decent customer service for a product that I have shelled out quite a bit of my hard earned money for.
And again my comments are just about some simple communication about what is going on.  The lack of that simple little piece of customer service shows a disrespect for the community and customer base that has kept them in business all these years.  Now I am sorry I was trying to be very respectful in my comments and concerns and if I get banned now then I guess so be it but I didn't take us down this road.
 
 

Did he wrote that is his memoirs after the war? If so, I'd take it with a big grain of salt. During the war, at the end of 1944 he said that the war would be lost, if the Upper Silesian Industrial Region was captured by the Soviets. BTW even by the end of 1944, none from the upper echelons of the Nazi elites, was seriously considering, that Third Reich would be defeated. Even the supposedly rational Speer was "working towards the Fuhrer", convinced that there could be a bloody draw, which would convince the Western Powers to ally with Germany against the Soviets. At some stage Himmler was even trying to suggest Hitler, that maybe a separate peace with Soviet Union would be possible. No rational thinking there in any case. It was really the failure of the Ardennes offensive which persuaded those who could be convinced, that there would be no German victory. According to Kersaw, half of German military dead were suffered during the war, died during the period from July of 1944 till the end of the war. Also half of the bombs dropped on Germany by the Allies account for the last nine months of the war. The efforts of Speer assured, that the Second World War agony would last for as long as it did.
The historians still study and debate this issue and they are very far from drawing the final conclusions. That's why a random guy from Youtube, who claims "it was oil" sounds so ridiculous. 
 
 
Ps. You really gotta love Dr Citino. 
 
 
 

Did he wrote that is his memoirs after the war? If so, I'd take it with a big grain of salt. During the war, at the end of 1944 he said that the war would be lost, if the Upper Silesian Industrial Region was captured by the Soviets. BTW even by the end of 1944, none from the upper echelons of the Nazi elites, was seriously considering, that Third Reich would be defeated. Even the supposedly rational Speer was "working towards the Fuhrer", convinced that there could be a bloody draw, which would convince the Western Powers to ally with Germany against the Soviets. At some stage Himmler was even trying to suggest Hitler, that maybe a separate peace with Soviet Union would be possible. No rational thinking there in any case. It was really the failure of the Ardennes offensive which persuaded those who could be convinced, that there would be no German victory. According to Kersaw, half of German military dead were suffered during the war, died during the period from July of 1944 till the end of the war. Also half of the bombs dropped on Germany by the Allies account for the last nine months of the war. The efforts of Speer assured, that the Second World War agony would last for as long as it did.
The historians still study and debate this issue and they are very far from drawing the final conclusions. That's why a random guy from Youtube, who claims "it was oil" sounds so ridiculous. 
 
 
Ps. You really gotta love Dr Citino. 
 
 
 

The real question is when did he say it, and in what context? Did he mean ALL armaments production, or FUEL production? Did he honestly think that Germany still had a chance of winning by 1944, but that chance was lost because of the loss of oil production?
The main complaint against the YouTube historian and these types of conversations is the tendency to remove historical fact from the context in which it is placed.
Is it necessary to have petroleum in order to make steel? Is it necessary to have petroleum to generate electricity? Can your railroads not run without it? Do you need oil to maintain a human workforce? What production was effected by the loss of oil? How severe was the effect? Were alternatives to petroleum available? Did it effect some production, but not others?
Context is important.
It could be, that the attack on the oil fields came at a critical time. That the loss of even a few months of fuel production had a key effect at the front, and turned the strategic situation for the worse. Perhaps a major enemy offensive kicked off at the same time as the raid on the oil fields, and thus the forces were lacking operational fuel to save themselves? Maybe the loss of oil production had some other effect, such as the loss of industrial chemicals?
If you're going to cut and paste a sentence fragment and base an entire argument on it, go ahead, but you've got a long way to go before you convince anyone.
By 1944, Germany had already lost the war. We know it. They knew it. Everyone knows it. What possible difference could have been made by the survival of the German oil industry?

Address the arguments I put forward if you want to argue with my reasoning (that's what discussions are about). Just to be clear: I mean TIK all the best and am happy people enjoy his video's. He does come up with arguments from other (more nuanced) studies, but he presents them in a poor way. At least that's my opinion, I found his video's not worthy of my time while I am interested in the subject. That's not a personal attack.
I don't challenge that oil was an important factor. Trying to single out oil as the single reason Germany lost the war isn't the same as professional historians spending years studying and debating how important the availability of (vast resources of) oil actually was as a strategic factor when waging a global war. TIKs video is trying to make a bold claim to attract viewers. In the video's than he presents a bunch of supportive arguments towards his claim, but it doesn't excel in critical thinking (imho). It's a biased plea towards a simple answer for a complex question. I can advise on the book 'Asking the right questions, a guide to critical thinking' with regards to this matter.
In my first post I asked a question: if during 1937 or so, Germany happened to discover an oilfield the size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves right inside Bavaria, would that have won them the war? Please address that question if you believe that Oil is THE factor why Germany couldn't win any war against the allies.
If I was to make a bold statement like that and post in on youtube, I'd first ask myself a couple of these questions. It's not just this video in which he performs this type of presentation.
Clickbait is bad. How would you feel if you bought a book for it's title only to discover that the inside of the book doesn't correspondent with the cover, title and preface? At least, the claim on the cover isn't properly substantiated in the book. I would feel 'fooled'. That's why I compare him to politicians that do the same: make a bold claim, present some supportive evidence and voila: a new 'fact' has been born. Some politicians like to rinse and repeat their own 'supportive evidence', while calling anyone that presents different evidence 'liars', 'ridiculous', etc. Asking the 'well how about X' question, without actually addressing the counter evidence is a common tactic as well. Now TIK's video's are quite innocent when compared to state propaganda, but it's still misinformation in my book.
Regarding winning or losing wars: (limited) wars are a state of affairs invented by humans. Someone once called them 'the continuation of politics by other means'. Wars are started by groups of people, or factions, that decide that they have a grudge with another faction, to be settled by violence. Usually wars end when one of the parties decides it's been enough and negotiates a ceasefire or surrender. The existence of matter doesn't win or lose wars. Failure to grasp the implications of the availability of matter can sort of lose you a war, or better render a decision to start a war as a stupid decision. In which case the reason you lost the war would have been incompetence; why start a war you can't win? A factor isn't the same concept as a reason. That might be semantics, but to me it's important especially when you claim to have found some spectacular reason for a well known event, that has been researched, documented and discussed for decades, like Germany losing WWII and their access to oil. 
Regarding Speer: I can think of a motive as to why the guy in charge of Germany's entire armanents and war production said that the Allies oil campaign meant the end of German armaments production. That means that he wasn't responsible for the failure regarding outproducing the enemy ;-) That's just pure speculation though, there's people on this forum that probably have more insight into this subject than me.
Just to be sure: I don't think I have a monopoly on wisdom and I may be wrong. If you spot any fallacies in my reasoning, please let me know so I can learn.

U.S. Lend Lease became law in March 1941, and the first shipments of over 300,000 tons of supplies (in 1941) began on June 22.
Granted, the total amount of Lend-Lease to the Soviets in 1941 was very small, only about 2% of the total wartime shipments; 1942 amounted to about 2.5 Million tons, or about 14% of total. The British delivered weapons in 1941 on the back of American credit, in fact, almost all British supplies sent to the USSR were paid for with American credit.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=mdp.39015004950914
 
1. I've heard it took until early 1942 (February or March) to get production up to the levels of 1941 before the factories moved, but I haven't seen anything specific yet. (Citation Needed)

2. Post-war, the Soviets had an almost fanatical censorship campaign in place which systematically devalued the contributions of the other nations in WW2. It got so bad that battle records of campaigns were literally burned in order to cover up the full scale of Soviet defeats early in the war.
David M. Glantz has written extensively on this topic, and an interesting yet abbreviated lecture for the U.S. Army War College is on YouTube: 
 
3. I think the evidence is conclusive that Germany did not plan for a campaign against the Soviet Union lasting longer than one year. I'm reminded of an anecdote from Vietnam I once heard: In the basement of the Pentagon, the Department of Defense wanted to know how long it would take to win the Vietnam War. So they compiled all statistical data they had available, fed it into a supercomputer, and went home for the weekend while they waited for it to spit out the answer. When they arrived Monday morning, the computer had spat out a card with one sentence on it: "You won the war in 1965, but the enemy also gets a vote."
 
4. I think it's relatively simple. Hitler and the Nazis did not possess a rational worldview. In fact, Dan Carlin recently released a video where he speculates the overall reason Germany lost World War Two is because of the Nazis themselves:
I know Dan Carlin is not a historian, but he makes a very compelling argument. Based on my own reading of Mein Kampf, I have to agree. Hitler was not a rational individual.
 
It has been said elsewhere in this thread, but I agree completely. Wars are not fought by individuals.
If they were, we could simply mobilize our wargamers to command legions of unmanned weapon systems and conquer the world...
 
> I disagree. The Germans acted quickly to secure the Balkan oil fields specifically because they knew the blockade would not end. After their experience with the British blockade in WW1, I refuse to believe they would not anticipate such an eventuality from happening again. Things like "The Turnip Winter" will stick in the memory of people for generations.
 
> Indeed, and when you see things like the Detroit Tank Arsenal ALONE out-producing the entire German Tank-Building Industry during WW2, you realize oil alone is not the deciding factor in that equation. Overall, the Germans did not fully mobilize their economy and industry towards war production until 1942. Hitler was adamant about not encumbering the German population with things like rationing and shortages like they faced in WW1. Like I said, "The Turnip Winter" tends to stick in the minds of the people who went through it.
As far as manpower goes, where do you get the idea the Axis and Allied manpower were close? They weren't even in the same hemisphere.
Even a simple wiki search shows the extraordinary gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#Historical_context
 
> Is it oil, or is it the fact the United States had vast amounts of natural resources, food, strategic minerals, steel production, etc. and simply gave it all away with the understanding that the cost for everything would only be counted after the war was over? It wasn't just war materiel that got sent through lend-lease, but things like raw steel, coal, oil, gas, food, etc.
Meanwhile, Germany had a chronic inability to fully mobilize and take advantage of the strategic resources and production facilities they took over. Not planning for a long war led them to simply disregard the ideas of re-tooling captured factories for war production until it was too late. French factories mostly sat idle in the occupied territories, and while Germany did take over the entire Czech tank force, they made relatively little use of the excellent arms production facilities available. If every scrap of resources had been put towards the war fighting effort from the very beginning... well, we'll never know the answer to that question...
 
> From June 1941, to the end of 1942, the Soviets produced some 30,000 tanks, and received several thousand lend-lease tanks. Which is at least four times as many as the Germans produced in the same time period. Just because your enemy doesn't have as many tanks, is no reason to not produce them in staggering numbers. Even in June 1941, the Soviets had a 2:1 advantage in tanks, and made ruthless efforts at increasing production all throughout the war, to the point they used substandard metals and far looser tolerances than were seen as standard in the western nations.
"The Red Army categorized tank readiness in five categories, from 1 to 5, with 1 being new and 5 being retired for scrapping. In the western military districts that bore the brunt of the 1941 fighting, there were 12,782 tanks, of which 2,157 (17 percent) were new (Category 1), 8,383 (66 percent) were operational with minor maintenance issues (Category 2), and the rest (18 percent) in need medium maintenance or capital rebuilding." - Zaloga, Steven. Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II (Kindle Locations 1491-1494). Stackpole Books. Kindle Edition.
Weapons production is a question of DOCTRINE, not statistical analysis. Soviet doctrine emphasized the use of light, highly mobile artillery, and so they built large numbers of mortars.
Soviet doctrine also emphasized the breakthrough role of tanks and mechanized infantry, and so they build many thousands of them too.
http://armchairgeneral.com/deep-battle-the-vision-of-marshall-tukhachevskii.htm
 
> When the vast majority of your major industrial base is powered by coal, which the Germans had in abundance, then the lack of production of war materiel cannot be summarized as:
"They didn't have enough oil."
The Germans needed oil for OPERATIONS, not PRODUCTION. If World War Two is a battle of production (as has often been stated), then the Germans did not lose it because of a lack of oil.
They lost it because they didn't want to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a fully mobilized wartime economy. At least, not until it was clear they were losing, and then their utilization of forced labor tells a clear and understandable story. Not only did they lack production, but they also lacked manpower. They couldn't meet the manpower needs of the military, and also run their factories at their maximum rate. They had to utilize forced labor to ensure their production could meet it's goals, and even then, a chunk of their dwindling production capacity was spent on projects that would not prove to be of any benefit. Vengeance Weapons for example. Their incompetence in the realm of strategic planning is obvious.
Compare Germany to the United States, which had a clearly defined production plan, immediate and effective national mobilization, a well-organized industrial base, and highly competent businessmen and army personnel in charge of planning, design, development, and production.
 
But this brings me back to the Dan Carlin video I posted up above: Why were such incompetent people in charge of the German war effort?
Because of the Nazis...
Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.
Thanks for the thread, it went down well with lunch.

Well sure. Without fuel the Luftwaffe cannot fly, which would have been a serious concern for Galland.
Michael

Seriously - wow. Steve is working hard on the products, as are other people. Another of his concerns is maintaining the relatively good atmosphere on these forums. In fact it is a necessary business strategy IMHO. If people here would refrain from trolling and other bad behaviour Steve could spend more time working on product. As is stands keeping poor behaviour in check *is* part of his job. Personally I find Steve to be *very* forgiving. If it was up to me there would be more banned people bad mouthing me on other forums

I must say I'm confused by your use of component in this sentence, what do you mean haha ? Very intesresting anecdotes though, always funny to have the other side views !
-----
To get back on the previous discussion,
I agree with the fact that most of German Armed forces problems don't come from money. Even though they could definitely invest a lot more in defense considering their GDP and general wealth.
When you look at the actual budgets, German, French and UK budgets are more or less in the same league, but there is a huge capability/readiness gap between France and UK and Germany. And it is even more striking when you consider that German armed forces have a much smaller navy, no nuclear detterent forces, no bases abroad and a lot fewer deployments. So with this level of expenditures and comitment, they should really have a much capable force.
I really thing the problems comes from an organisational/cultural standpoint, and that before giving it more money, those problems shoud be fixed first otherwise it would just be wasted. If you were increasing the French and German budget in the same amount, probably the French/Brits would get twice the Germans return.
I think it is very much link to how the German army spends its money and how it is organised.
That was my take on the issue.

Now you can provide some hard data to back up this claim. I mean the supposedly low numbers, that are devoted to maintain the equipment readiness. BW is not a big army and it doesn't have thousands of tanks and hundreds of planes to maintain like it was during the Cold War. Do they spend all the cash on salaries and kindergartens for soldier families?  You can convince me if you show me the numbers ( I don't have them ). In my opinion the current situation is caused by organizational and maybe cultural issues, not by insufficient funds.

In your meal example the ratio matters. But in the world military expenditure the hard currency is more important. Modern military equipment cost the same for Germany and for Baltic States. That's why Germans have combat aircraft, tanks and air defence and the Balts don't. The problem with Bundeswehr, is not that it has obsolete equipment but it's low readiness. And this is mostly a matter of bad management.