Ultradave

You might want to read over again what I wrote. Two subjects - cutting off electrical supply FROM the plant to Ukraine's power grid, which was what I was originally replying about, and cutting off grid supply TO the power plant which they need for cooling, which I also addressed. Dave PS - the condescending tone is quite unnecessary, especially considering things change day by day. You could even go read the IAEA report I linked to YESTERDAY instead of cherry picking something from a few days ago.

Some more about the power plant. Russia seems more likely to cause a problem through stupidity or ignorance than through malice (IMO) Dave https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-94-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine

The USAF may not have but as a (at that time, when they were first introduced) US Army FIST Chief and "occasional controller when no FAC around" my response to it, as well as all my peers, was, "Holy *(%#&*, that thing is the BOMB!!" Of course that was quite a few years ago and the air environment has gotten more lethal. But man, when they first showed up..... Dave

Reduce power levels to very low level, disconnect from the grid, shutdown the plants, either leave them in hot standby for restart or cool them down to cold shutdown. Done. 20% of UKR electricity cut off. There is no danger to the plant, or to the environment to do that. None at all. Nuclear plants, and for that matter ANY electrical generation plant, do that ALL THE TIME. There's absolutely no reason to cut the plant off from the electric grid to stop it from operating and providing electricity. I would think by cutting it off they mean cut off IT from supplying electricity to the grid. It can still draw from the grid for it's own power loads. But if they did do that (cut off completely), there are backup diesel generators to supply power for cooling, unless of course someone blows those up. Fukushima was a problem because the DGs and their fuel were located above the design basis tsunami water level. They had what they call a "beyond design basis" accident. Dave

Here's a link to the latest IAEA statement on the nuclear power plant situation. Concern. Good that all the safeguards data is being received, but that's not really the major concern. For review, when they discuss safeguards, they aren't talking about the safety of the plant. What they are talking about is monitoring facilities to ensure that nuclear material (for example, spent fuel) is not diverted for "other" uses. All nuclear plants have them. Saying that, new fuel is a poor material for say, a dirty bomb, and impossible for a nuclear weapon. Spent fuel is so highly radioactive that while it might make material for a dirty bomb, handling it to do so would be incredibly difficult and dangerous, requiring a lot of special equipment and shielding. And while there is Pu in spent fuel, the processes to extract it are only owned by a few countries. The bigger danger by far is significant damage to the plant, which could cause a radiation leak. Breaching both the containment and the reactor vessel is not too probable. More likely disabling safety systems that control spent fuel pool cooling (a la Fukushima), leading to the breakdown of the fuel and radiation release. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-91-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine Dave

Exactly. Easy to come up with places where you can get by. I think it's the second scenario of KG Peiper? where you start out in a long road column in the woods with a large setup zone. The only way forward for a bit is down the road until you (I believe?) cross a bridge, then it opens up. It's waypoint tedium, and selecting all and clicking out of the set up zone is pretty much impossible. Waaaay too many paths to pick out the one you want to edit next. When I've played this one I just sat for one turn so there was no setup zone and then start the click fest. Less frustrating. This one would benefit hugely from a convoy order. Just to pick one example. Dave

Convoy feature was tried. In testing it worked sometimes, but didn't work enough times that it was decided that people would be more aggravated by it than helped. Maybe someday, because I (and many others) sure would like it too, especially where a force comes on map in road march. Dave

Asked on the beta forum and this is something that has been reported long ago that Charles looked at and was unable to remedy. I had not known about it or noticed it. Dave

But that might only affect the accuracy of the mission, and not the dispersion. The rounds shown are on-target but much more widely dispersed at short range than long. This seems counter-intuitive. This is possible in real life but just in very specific instances. If a mortar (or artillery high angle fire) is fired at an extreme high angle which corresponds to shorter range on map, it is going to fly a higher arc, IF it's fired at the same charge as the longer range off map ones. Wind direction varies at different levels and a high elevation round will pass through more layers. Artillery accounts for this by using the "Met" data and applying appropriate small corrections. I don't know if company mortars do that, and to get an evenly distributed wide dispersion you'd have to have winds moving at evenly distributed random directions at different levels of the atmosphere. 1) that's highly unlikely, 2) on map close range would probably use a lower charge and not fly has high, negating that argument, and 2) pretty sure that's not in CM's modeling, even abstractly. None of that helps answer the question of why it's happening in game, and it does look odd. I'm going to take those tests and see what others on the beta boards think about it. Thanks for the specific tests. Those should help to look at it. Dave

And you can add the PACT act to the list, as a whole slew of Senators "changed their mind" after initially voting for it, then voting down the slightly changed House version. Nothing in it beyond expanded medical eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances. Clean bill. Sorry for the continued off-topic but as a veteran, I'm struggling to understand the logic here with the "we support the military" crowd. I'll shut up now. Dave

That "group" in the House seems to have one purpose in life. Make as much noise as possible and vote against EVERYTHING, no matter what the subject, no matter how beneficial it might be. Dave

While that is true many times, for this bill this was not the case at all. (and also for several other recent bills). I read the bill to see if there was some reason they might have voted against it. It's just a few pages and deals only with human trafficking prevention and survivor support. That's it. It really is that simple. Dave

I can provide some general info. Getting weapons grade Pu is a function of not keeping it in the reactor too long so that it minimizes the amount of Pu-239. You want pure Pu-238. Then you have to chemically separate it from the spent fuel (from leftover U and fission products). Russia has those processes, as do we and any other nuclear power (I think - not sure about Pakistan and India, but I think they probably do). The short fuel burn to minimize Pu-239 is easily controlled. So impurities could be Pu-239 or could be other isotopes from the spent fuel from inefficient Pu separation processes. Incidentally, ALL reactors produce Pu, however electric power reactors produce a LOT of Pu-239 in addition to Pu-239 making the Pu completely unsuitable for weapons use. And it's physically impossible to separate or enrich plutonium to eliminate the 239 or concentrate the 238. Cannot be done. Dave

The US spends a LOT on testing, both computer modeling and non-nuclear physical testing, plus the money spent on maintenance, to ensure the nuclear arsenal is "ready." This is because we also, while not ratifying the CTBT, abide by it and have not tested a nuclear weapons in a long time. I know that people who do that work will say the verification that they do assures the weapons will work. I don't know much about the Russians, unfortunately. Someone a bit back (sorry I didn't quote it), mentioned observer verification. What was said is correct. They are verifying launch vehicles and warheads, but not anything about whether they will work or not. That's a very involved process (see above about spending a LOT ) Part of the research work I did was to come up with better ways for inspectors to verify stored, disassembled warheads. Say you can't physically touch them, weigh them, take a sample, etc, but you CAN from a reasonably close distance read the gamma radiation they give off. Can you then verify that the entire warhead is there? You want to know that it hasn't been opened and the whole inside taken out and left only a shell so that it appears visually to be whole. Verifying non-diversion of nuclear material. Securing this material is something we (the US) spent quite a bit helping the Russians to improve. It's been a good investment. Turns out this is an extremely hard problem to solve and requires some sophisticated mathematical techniques to converge to a reasonable answer. One of my technical papers could be summarized as: "Here are 4 new ways we tried to solve this and none were completely satisfactory. One was sort of ok, but not great" It actually went over pretty well, because no one had tried these before but several in the audience had wondered. Negative data is still good data, and people won't waste time! Dave

Seems reasonable in real life. A VT fuze has a transmitter that fires the warhead when it reaches 7m above the ground. Firing over water and firing over highly irregular terrain (urban buildings, mixed with streets and parks, etc) can lead to unpredictable results, mostly fuzes firing before you intended them to. Dave

That's about right. And since the construction of the structures was not robust, there was probably more than if the same sized weapon was detonated over a similar size US city. You can see in some of the aftermath pictures there are some more substantial structures still standing, even though gutted. I don't know what was around those before the bombing, but I imagine they were probably unusual compared to the majority. You can see in many photos the absence of rubble, which would make you think a lot of wooden structures that were completely vaporized or burned. At Nagasaki, there is more rubble visible in pics I've seen, but still almost total destruction. The blast and heat sets off the firestorm though, so really it's all part of the same overall effect. The air comes rushing back into the center and feeds the fire with massive quantities of oxygen. Not sure if that's any help. Thankfully, we don't have others to compare to and these are our only two examples. Tests set up to test blast effects used few and isolated objects/buildings so not much to compare to. Dave

CM is not available for Mac OS X on Steam. CM is PC only on Steam, as is the PBEM++ feature. I think that's what MikeyD meant. You're right, though - plenty of other titles on Mac OS X on Steam, just not CM. I've tried running Black Sea using Parallels Desktop and the results were unsatisfying. It works to a fashion, but the graphics are horrible, and it lags (a LOT). If I had a separated graphics card it would probably be better. That's not an issue on the Mac side, but Intel on board graphics don't work well enough on the PC side. I suspect the same would be true in Bootcamp (I haven't personally tried that), and that the issue is the lack of a separate GPU. Dave

The issues Artkin had were due to the friendly map edge being incorrectly defined in the scenario. If you have any saves from this that show the behavior - preferably from just before it happened so I can run ahead - I'd be happy to take a look. I did check the same thing and the map edge appears correct in Chaumont, part 2. Dave

For everyone else's info, I've submitted a bug report based on the saved games that Artkin provided for a CMBN game. There are two instances of German units bolting from hedgerow cover towards the enemy. One of those could be an odd case where the unit is taking fire through the hedge but is also about to be flanked on its right, but the other is clearly wrong. Proper behavior for the second one would be to cover/cower behind the hedge. Morale of these units was ok. They are Regular troops and were only "cautious" when they ran into the open. It's possible that Charles has done as much as he can, and that we may have to live with a few isolated instances. We'll just have to see. Thanks to @Artkin for providing good examples in saved game files. This makes troubleshooting bugs so much easier. Dave

Yes, our current game has a LOT of hedgerows and a lot of small arms and MG fire going through 2 hedgerow sides (so far). But the comment was on FB and I've not even heard of this happening there. Of course I hadn't in RT until it happened to the opposing Russians testing the FR German campaign. Dave

If this is true and you have the latest patch applied, please provide some specific details and saved games so that it can be reproduced. This charging the enemy through hedgerows instead of retreating was "fixed" with the newest patches. It was pretty thoroughly tested on a number of scenarios that had always had problems, and also the beginning of the Scottish Corridor campaign (Germans including AT gun crews had a bad habit of charging into the open under fire). It had showed up in FR as well, and the behavior was changed much for the better. I don't recall ever seeing it in FB but the same fix was added across all the titles. If there is still a problem, AND it shows in games with the latest patch applied, then please provide details. Dave

Interesting. I never saw or heard of a M551 being air-dropped while I was in the 82d. They were either air landed after a DZ was secured (C-130 on an improvised flight strip), or LAPES (Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System) - C-130 flies a couple feet off the ground with wheels down and the M551 is drogue chuted out the back on the same kind of platform used for a heavy drop parachute drop, skids to a stop. It's a tricky maneuver because of the low altitude and the shift of weight (and then loss of weight) in the aircraft. Looks like an interesting vehicle. Some direct fire support for infantry units could be very useful, as long as they are used so that they are not exposed. But then, that's not any worse than "exposing" your IFVs to AT fire, I suppose. Dave

This is the best advice! The theater/time period that interests you the most is the one you'll have the most fun with. You'll get hooked and buy them all eventually anyway though! Dave

It could also be a similar arrangement to NATO. The Russians could send the missiles but maintain control of the warheads at bases with Russian troops. The US has done that. "Giving" them the nuclear weapons openly. No one has done that (at least that we are aware of - relevant technology, yes, actual weapons, no) and would be a grievous violation of the NPT.

This is correct, unfortunately. PBEM++ is a Windows PC only function. I've tried running CM games using Parallels Desktop but the performance was painful. I don't know if it would be better in Bootcamp - haven't tried. Might be worth a try. Yes, same as always. Dave