Pelican Pal

It’s been a while since I looked at the terrain but I also got the sense that Bahkmut wasn’t the optimal terrain to defend from. iirc it was in a depression and obviously being a destroyed city had significant cover and concealment opportunities.

The game has reduced HE effect to help out with some of the simulation problems. AFAIK this would be the first time Battlefront intentionally nerfed a weapons accuracy

Saw this Youtube short So tripod mounted in-game seem to be modeled correctly.

You've repeatedly bring out this wishy washy "well we don't know" despite. - DoD Mk19 gunnery qualification cards - video evidence - the clear discrepancy between vehicle and tripod mounted - service members pointing out issues with the weapon they used (assuming I'm reading Boche correctly) - Combat Mission itself having the weapon be more accurate historically The fact of the matter is that there is a clear problem with AGLs in CM. Another long running bug that was identified 5 years ago

Your argument falls apart when every vehicle mounted AGL fires like it’s been on a week long bender while every tripod mounted one fires with good accuracy. Like are you seriously arguing that a AGL mounted onto a many thousand lb vehicle is going to be less controllable than a man packed variant deployed on a tripod? You are going to be surprised by this but a RCWS isn't going to result in accuracy that would make a Brown Bess blush.

What we don't(?) have information on is exactly what kind of loss is being generated by artillery. Is it a irrecoverable loss or is it a vehicle that is beaten up and no one really wants to use it in combat right now? My suspicion is that its the latter. Vehicles that have been damaged in a variety of relatively minor ways that could operate in a fight but that the units wouldn't be excited to use. More broadly there has been a discounting of the impact artillery has on armor that the fighting in Ukraine has helped to reveal is a sort of bogus. They are fairly complex machines and chucking chunks of metal at a tank isn't good for them. Now tanks are obviously advantaged against artillery, but that has often turned into a "don't use artillery against tanks" which doesn't seem to hold water. Tanks are advantaged against artillery because they (1) cannot be pinned by artillery and (2) each artillery shell has fewer fragments of significant size to cause damage. So armor is able to maneuver away from/through artillery and this ability to avoid fire is key. Infantry and soft skinned vehicles cannot maneuver through artillery so if they are hit they become pinned and have to sustain the barrage. To get tanks to sustain the barrage you either need tanks that are static or the ability for the FO to adjust fire along the vehicles route of movement which is difficult (but apparently getting easier).

Did you confirm that the vehicle in question took no direct hits? people have a tendency to fast forward through the turns missing the outcomes of each individual shell. Which is part of why the bug has been with the titles for so long. this thread with the Capt has the same events. He initially didn’t see an issue because he was fast forwarding through the turn. And here is the original post the revealed the issue.

We’ve certainly seen a lot of vehicles that appear to be M-killed and killed outright by artillery but that could be anything from the vehicle ceasing to function to the crew saying “nope”. Did artillery kill the vehicle or did the crew have an issue that was exacerbated by arty causing them to abandon the vehicle? Especially in the context of Ukraine where a lot of dumb artillery seems drone spotted. So it’s clear that someone is watching you and they might be able to better direct dumb fire or bring in PGM for the kill if you sit around. The particular issue with CM being that near misses will only damage tracks. So APS, vehicle sights,ERA, smoke launchers, turret mounted HMGs, etc… all are invulnerable to fragments. The end result is that artillery does a bad job of doing chip damage that degrades the combat capability of the vehicles. also an additional quirk of this is that direct hits on ERA count as near misses.

Casualties of all kinds. I don't think Ukraine has 500 aircraft in total. Ukraine is rightly asking for F-16s now, and has been for a few months, as they appear to be looking towards their defense in a post-war environment. At least I suspect that by the time Ukraine could field F-16s the fighting will largely be over unless the war drags on for another 16 months. Retrofitting their existing Soviet stock to support western weaponry seems to be the battlefield expedient choice. But they did ask for A-10s the month after the invasion began and that timeline would probably give them enough time to have those flyable now. So really we're looking at post-war sustainable choice and a crisis unsustainable one. There is a difference between the vehicle being lost at a high rate and the vehicle being suicidal. Sherman tank losses were high, for example, but being a crewmen in one was anything but suicidal. So you need to look past equipment losses into crew losses.

I suspect its because it photographs well, flies slow, has a loud gun. Its a very visual aircraft that makes it easy to love. Taking one out in DCS (or even Warthunder) ought to pretty quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that its good in a modern environment. The only sustainable use I could possibly conceive is a brush fire war and while I can vaguely understand extending their lifespan during Iraq/Afghanistan I'm not entirely sure why they are in service today. The only particularly interesting thing about them is that the U.S. still, unfathomably, has 200+ in service. But while its a real POS Ukraine essentially has no means of regenerating its air arm outside of donations and from what I've seen they've been at maybe replacement levels of Soviet-era craft. There appears to have been a request for 100 A-10s in March of 2022. So theoretically Ukraine could have its ~100 existing Soviet-era aircraft + 100 A-10s ready for whatever summer offensive they appear to be cooking up. At this point they are no longer asking for A-10s and instead are requesting F-16s which is the right choice for May 2023 but these simple arguments about U.S. experience in the Gulf War aren't convincing when considering the A-10 in March of 2022. And yea these theoretical A-10s would get knocked out but so what? Its a war and you can treat the airframes as consumables. Ukraine is taking north of 500+casualties daily, they are using Cold War era kit on the front line, one of their prime infantry carrying vehicles is the M113! Edit: If anyone wants to continue this we can probably take it to another thread or PMs.

As @Kinophile said Ukraine has shown inventiveness with a lot of weapons systems so I wouldn't put it past them to figure out a way to make any additional aircraft work for them. But obviously, as Kinophile also said, this is a moot point given that they don't have them and aren't getting them. The point I was trying to make though was two-fold. 1: From what I can find A-10 loss rates are relatively high when doing low level ground attack, but pilot loss rates don't match airframe loss rates. 2: Ukraine is in a situation where they must stomach losses Western forces wouldn't so the fact that A-10s were pulled from ground attack roles by the U.S. doesn't necessarily map to how a country in Ukraine's position might use them. The conclusion being that the U.S. pulling them from ground attack just means that they aren't fit for that role within a U.S. context (limiting losses and looking towards fighting a U.S. peer enemy), but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be useful for Ukraine in its context.

@Millien My comments are all drawn from some old posts I have saved mostly from Steve commenting about a decade+ ago. So incidentally around the release time period of CM:BN and CM:BS. You can probably search for these sections in the forums to find the full threads. But they lead me to believe that there are preset heights of some kind although its possible I'm misinterpreting them or that the original comments were incorrect. LOS: LOF: Spotting:

What the argument turns on isn't sustainment but opportunity costs. Does Ukraine have spare pilots, is receiving these airframes going to deny them other more useful equipment from its Western partners? You are saying that the airframes cannot be used when they very much could assuming the opportunity cost was worth it. Sure Ukraine would lose them fairly quickly once employed but theoretically if Ukraine were to get like 100 A-10s and had 100 spare pilots to train on them there isn't anything saying they can't use them in combat for 14-28 days until they are used up. Perhaps supporting a major push to the Azov. What you seem to fundamentally not understand is that the airframe are a resource and you can use the resource up for some battlefield result. ----- ----- The sustainment argument is really core for any western equipment that Ukraine would potentially receive. - Does getting an item deny them other more useful resources from their western partners? - Do they have sufficient trained personnel, if not is there sufficient training capacity in friendly nations? - Do they have the logistics capacity to ship them to the front along with whatever is needed to keep them in the fight until they are consumed?

@Grey_Fox My overall point here is that contextually Ukraine is in a much different situation and has been shown repeatedly far more willing(and forced) to accept risks and losses that no Western military has since Vietnam. Your point seems to be that if losses are incurred then it can't be done which we've seen over the last year isn't true. No western military would have sustained the casualties taken by Ukraine to liberate a geographic area the size of Kherson it would be mind boggling, but Ukraine is in a position where it must take risks and losses. So applying experience from Coalition forces in wars of choice doesn't map neatly to the Ukrainian context.

I don't see how this follows. Just because you have high airframe losses doesn't mean you can't fly the mission. You just need to accept that you will lose a certain percentage of aircraft/pilots that are flying that mission. Ukraine has, for months, been fighting an attritional ground campaign that no Western military would even think about fighting. Yet despite mounting losses they continue to fight it. This bit from the linked article is useful in this context