nsKb
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Posts posted by nsKb
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Yeah, this scenario is definitely one of the best in CMBS. But after playing it, I noticed that a certain "wish" had developed in me, regarding planes in the game.
The easiest and fastest way to acquire targets for a plane/chopper (but not necessarily the most helpful in terms of IDing the target), is to use their radar. The radar usually has a fast acquisition time and can cover a large area, which means that planes should be able to "see" more than the 700m radius they get in the game. Now, I do understand that the information is not necessarily easy to pass on to the ground commander (e.g. transferring FLIR imagery requires ROVER, etc.), but for the plane itself, it is more or less necessary for their situational awareness, and that, most of all, relates to threats. Right now, as it is, planes do not prioritise air defence threats, and it leads to them being shot down too much. An F-16 with its FLIR and RADAR and Mavericks is more than capable of detecting the Tunguska (let alone the fact that they could carry HARMs for self-defence) and killing it, but they don't do that, and they get shot down unnecessarily.
Therefore, I think planes should have some autonomy to detect targets outside their assigned attack area, and to engage them if they are considered high threat. Because I think it's more realistic than the current "completely obedient" planes which don't even look anywhere else.
Your post touches on some important things. As nice as CMBS is for ground combat the current way CAS is done is very unrealistic, there was a big discussion on this a while ago.
Apaches in CMBS tend to operate as if it were a COIN environment, they circle and shoot. As far as I can tell what they should be doing is flying on the friendly side of the FLOT while terrain masking and firing Hellfires from behind terrain or using popup attacks, this makes much more sense to me. The mast mounted Ka band radar would be used to find targets (moving targets would be very obvious using such a system). The AGM-114L is fire and forget since it has a MMW radar and can be fired in either LOBL or LOAL modes which means that it can either be fired behind terrain using the mast mounted radar or in a popup attack using the IR sight. Since the AGM-114L has an 8 km range it would outrange MANPADS.
The Tunguska has almost no capability to search for air targets while it's radar is off. The mast mounted radars on Apaches are equipped with radar frequency interferometers which would mean that in almost all cases the Apache would detect and locate the Tunguska before the Tunguska located the Apache.
Apaches equipped with the Ground Fire Acquisition system would detect missiles launches and ground fire and alert the crew to which direction the fire came from allowing them to bring their sensors onto the area. Apaches also have DIRCM and flares which spoof and seduce MANPADS.
Pretty much the same stuff applies to fixed wing aircraft, except they can fly at an altitude that makes them immune to short range air defenses and in pretty much every case the fixed wing would attack from a stand off distance outside the range of MANPANDS and SHORADS. I know that the story handwaves this away by saying a strong S-300 presence prevents high altitude flight but that isn't really realistic either since you wouldn't have much CAS available when SEAD still has to be done and after a few weeks most of the S-300 batteries would be destroyed.
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IR laser can be used to blind the seekers of IR missiles, the intensity at the seeker doesn't even have to be particualrly high. When you combine a DIRCM laser with the F-35's RCS reductions you get an aircraft that is very difficult to target. Fighter mounted lasers that can actually destroy things at a useful range are still a while off.
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center of the exposed vehicle
There might be a bug with this but I haven't tested enough to confirm. For example on a hull down T-90AM one of my M1s kept shooting right over the top or hitting the remote weapons system (I'm talking like 12+ shots here). What I'm thinking was happening is that the top bound of the tank was assumed to be the top of the T-90S remote weapon system while the bottom was assumed to be the turret ring (hull down so thats the lowest part that could be seen). The M1 was aiming vertically in between these to points which means air ball.
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Yeah you can get JDAMs and LGBs out of it, so it's as capable as any other jet we have in CMBS.
I'm 100% biased for obvious reasons, but the Super Hornet and the Growler are very capable platforms. Maneuverable, high payload, great sensors, etc. They only lack in acceleration (which new engines could fix - and be a whole lot cheaper than a new fleet of jets) and their range is average. They are also the stealthiest non-stealth aircraft in the US arsenal (I'd claim the world but I won't go that far) incorporating a lot of RCS reducing features. And then you get the Advanced Super Hornet which adds a stealth weapons pod, conformal fuel tanks, and new engines to overcome all those weaknesses. And you could still buy 2-3 per F-35, on a new and proven airframe. Plus 2 engines is always better than one when your only alternative is swimming.
And it has a gun.
So yeah, the F-35C sucks.
Weird, I got the impression it was reasonably liked as an aircraft, maybe not as a program.
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I won't give a physics lecture but "all-weather" does not mean immune to the effects of atmospheric conditions.
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Maybe I'm wrong but the US soldiers in CMBS seem more likely to cower and less likely to return fire than they did CMSF. I don't know which behavior is more realistic.
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Agiel,
A great find, though I don't agree with a lot he says. According to him, the A-10 is meat on the table to fighters. This, based on my understanding of the systems involved, is by no means cut and dried. Finding something that looks like the ground from above isn't that easy to begin with. The A-10 is a highly maneuverable airplane which can turn inside most fighters without even trying. Big wings, lower speed, larger control surfaces. A-10s have pilots with their heads on swivels, plus rear view mirrors, RWR, chaff and flares and typically also have a jamming pod. Finding a low visibility target in the weeds is difficult for LD/SD geometry and gun attack, and if you're down there, you're likely in trouble, for the A-10 is also armed with the latest Sidewinder when it turns into you. With very little effort (Hughes designed it to fit Sidewinder launch rails; I know, because I counted every last one NATO had ), the A-10 could be set up to use the AIM-120 AMRAAM in active radar mode (missile radar used for acquisition, followed by a tone in the pilot's ears) off the rail, providing a lot more reach and capability than a Sidewinder. Survive the missile and it's GAU-8 time. Now, this may sound like some pipe dream, but there is historical precedent.
During the Vietnam War, three NVN MiG-17s bounced an A-1 Sky Raider CAS bird low over the DMZ. Theoretically, it should've been meat on the table. One engine. Prop. Slow. MiGs come whistling in, figuring it's lunch time. On the ball A-1pilot instantly reverses into them; the pilot salvoes pods of 2.75" rockets in their faces and lets fly with 4 x 20 mm cannon. The MiGs were persistent, to the tune of one destroyed outright, one damaged and one which fled to NVN.
Teal Group is a respected firm, and the estimable Steve Zaloga, author of dozens of Osprey weapon books, works/worked there. Respected, though, isn't any guarantee of correctness of conclusions.
Regards,
John Kettler
Since modern radars makes good use of Doppler shift to reject clutter what makes you think the A-10 has a good chance of staying undetected. I could be wrong but the proliferation of high off bore sights/missiles has made maneuverability less important.
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For an EMP weapon to successfully destroy military electronics it must have a fast rise time, create a large E field at a significant range, and be the correct frequency to couple through the front or back end of a device. Not even nuclear EMP satisfies all these conditions well. This explains why EMP weapons are not in widespread use and I don't see them as an emerging threat either (at least to US military electronics).
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Although it isn't quite clear to me how SOPs could solve this particular problem, I agree that they might make others run a lot more smoothly. BFC has adamantly refused to countenance them however, and after fifteen or more years of refusing to do so, I am still not clear on their reasons why. Maybe it was all spelt out at one point and I just missed that post. They usually have very good reasons for their choices of what to include or not include, but so far this one has eluded me.
Michael
You can instruct your units to position them themselves in areas that have good sight lines or you can instruct them to use more cover/concealment. Of course this level of micromanagement isn't entirely realistic but we have to realize that there are limits to the AI and the player must be able to control some things.
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I think SOPs would go a long way in solving this problem (and others).
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Must....... Not...... Post...... On...... Topic...... aarrrggghhhhhhh.
The US went into GW I with not merely with superlative intel on Iraq's IADS, it went into battle with a direct conduit right into the IADS situation center, thanks to a physical hack into the fiber optic trunk line from the front, a hack put into place by a brilliant US SpecOps mission. Reportedly, the US was able to show, or not show, IADS HQ whatever it desired, but the hack is believed to have been used as a generator of enormous numbers of false targets. I firmly believe it's dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions without a fundamental understanding of what was going on to begin with. I recall the mighty MOD himself came out from Russia with his experts to figure exactly this out. One such insight was a demand for a weapon capable of downing a HARM attacking a defending SAM site. Pantsir, anyone? Tunguska itself has substantial capabilities vs things like GBU-15, LGBs, JDAM, JSOW and Tomahawks.
Pantsir and Tunguska cost 15 million USD+ and are only available in limited numbers, if wikipedia is to be believed Russian less than 300 Pantsirs and Tunguskas total. The systems have very small radars which means the engagement distance vs PGMs and HARM is small (~10 km or so, maybe even less against weapons like JSOW and JASSM), they can only engage something like 2 targets simultaneously. These two facts mean they can be saturated pretty easily.
For a more informed view of Russian SAM operational effectiveness than what I've seen in this thread, please see Carlo Kopp's analysis here. Kopp has some scathing things to say about how the Arabs not only fundamentally disregarded a throughly thought out Russian doctrine, but did some things which would've been comedic had they not been so hurtful to the using force! Suggest interested parties also look at what specific threats the newer generation SAMs were designed to defeat, what their tactical-technical characteristics are and how that applies to the ability to detect, localize, engage and kill them. Makes rather sobering reading. A Serbian captain with his ancient SA-6 unit not only survived a major SEAD/DEAD campaign, but also cost the US the stunning loss of an F-117, damage to a second one and an F-16.
Lets be real, Carlo lost his mind sometime in 2002. His work was pretty good before that (go read his original AIM-120 article), now he descends into incoherent rants where Su-35s somehow detect F-35s at 100 km and shoot them with R-77s. But since this is Carlo they are probably fantasy ramjet R-77s that have finally made the small and insignificant leap from being a scribble on a napkin to being a fully operational weapon. Seriously did anyone see those simulations they had up on youtube, it's too bad they took them down because that was some funny stuff, the Su-35s had like a 10:1 exchange rate against F-35s. Pretty sure they even presented that stuff to the Australian government.
Riddle me this, how many sorties did the F-117 fly before one was shot down? Every time the F-117 shootdown is brought up I think of the internet stories I have read about the brilliant Serbian captain who modified his X-band SA-3 FCR to work in the L-band or something. It inspired my to modify my CBR 600 to be a submarine.
US AAA threat is risible, so there's no real dense AAG penalty for operating in the weeds to make it really hard vs both fighters and Patriot to engage it, and SU-25s have survived hits by things much worse than MANPADS. Russia's not going to sit idly by and let the US/NATO gin up its air power before striking, so the force ratios, for a time, at least, are not going to be pretty. Contrary to popular opinion, the AWACS supply is quite limited, and people need to remember that these vital birds can stay aloft only so long before they have to be replaced to keep a given area in coverage.
Really hard seems like a bit of an exaggeration, at least when it comes to fighters and AEW&C vs NOE aircraft.
The numbers seem to be on the side of popular opinion. panzersaurkrautwerfer already posted the numbers but lets recap, USAF has 32 E-3s and the USN has 52 E-2Cs plus some number of E-2Ds. This is without counting the AEW&C aircraft of other nations.
Jammers vs the E-3A, the TR-1's SAR, JSTARs. I used to have some SECRET diagrams of the E-3A radar display under jamming. Thanks to steerable antenna nulls, the system performed very well in the face of one or two jammers, but after that things progressively fell apart. It was entirely possible to jam the E-3A so effectively that entire (pizza slice wide) sectors were blind. Additionally, the more jamming energy received, the shorter detection range becomes, totally compromising the vast volumetric region a Sentry ordinarily controls.
How long do you expect those jammers to survive, Russian airspace will be significantly more porous in 2017 than in 1987 due to US's use of stealth technology which means those expensive jammers are going to be shot down or blown up.
No doubt an E-3 can be jammed, but anything can be jammed, the tactical usefulness of this depends on the details.
The Russians also have the Il-76 MAINSTAY, their Gen 2 AWACS. Nor, as a look at page 3, #46 in that thread will show, is that by any means the limits of what's going to be faced. The Russians are building a combined function aircraft able to handle everything but undersea warfare from an AWACS perspective. I'd argue that Russian force effectiveness will be greatly enhanced by even the vanilla MAINSTAY of the Cold War period, never mind what it's evolved into since.Speaking of Russian AEW&C, how will the Russians protect their AEW&C from super cruising F-22s? By the time they realize what is happening the AIM-120s would have hit and F-22s will be hauling ass in the opposite direction.
What are the MCRs (Mission Capable Rates) for the F-22A under high sortie conditions? We already know the F-35 is compromised practically across the board when it comes to just about every combat metric, so why should MCR or sortie generation rate be any better? It'll probably break a lot, not least because it'll be anything but a mature system. We know how those tend to be. As a mature system, the F-14 Tomcat was running ~65% MCR. This meant a two-carrier CVBG could use only one CVN on a given day for strike--because the other could do nothing but conduct FAD to keep both alive! Doubtless the numbers these days are better, bit I think they nicely illustrate the main issue. Complex things, and the F-35 is super complex and broken to start, are iffy at best to depend upon. The more you stress a complicated system, the faster it breaks, not necessarily in ways anticipated, either. Given this incredibly important issue, does it really make sense to make campaign success dependent on breaking the Russian Air Force via aerial combat, as seems to be the general expectation?
What are the MCRs for the Russian birds under high sortie conditions? I would be very surprised if they were higher than NATO's.
Don't turn this into an F-35 thread, we don't need any backseat engineers coming on here to show us how much smarter they are than the boys at Lockmart.
Summing up, I believe the expectation that the US would almost immediately own the skies over Ukraine to be on the scale somewhere from delusional clear up to clinically insane. Such expectations seem to be predicated on a largely incompetent opponent who hasn't a prayer of prevailing vs western military might and training. Additionally, this seems to be predicated on the notion that Russian pilots are no better than Arab pilots and would be flying planes just about as capable relative to US combat aircraft. Does the US have some nice toys? Absolutely. But how many will actually be usable--and stay usable--over the course of the envisioned campaign? Is it reasonable to assume that other US foes are going to lie doggo so the US/NATO can fight Russia absent other military crises? I think not. And has anyone here bothered to look at the Russian approach to BVR aerial warfare in a very heavy jamming and rapidly maneuvering target environment? Once you have, consider this notional engagement, but with as many as 4 x AAMs targeted on each Raptor. This engagement presumes, too, that AWACS isn't attacked and downed or badly crippled. Nor does it recognize the existence of a technology called forward pass, in which missile shooters simply salvo missiles on command of aircraft whose far superior sensors allows guidance of those weapons even though the shooters can't see the target. All of a sudden those numerous not Stealth planes become a real threat, making the already enormous missile loads of Russian Stealth fighters many times larger than can be carried.It's pretty clear that NATO has massive advantage in training, equipment, and numbers. How many modern aircraft are in the VVS? Original MiG-29s and Su-27s with their 1970s at best electronics don't count as modern.
That Kopp article is a nice mix of extremely basic statistics, super sketchy assumptions, and fanboy fantasy numbers. If the statistics on the R-27's combat performance in the Ethiopian Eritrean war are true than its a pretty crap missile. From what I understand India is unhappy with the R-77. Is the R-77 deployed in any sort of significant numbers by the VVS?
Back off topic
Did anyone here play on the United Operations ARMA2 ACE server, had some good times there. It is too bad they switched to ARMA3 since there is no ACE mod for that. Red vs Red scenarios were so much fun.
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If you can't get an accurate grid from the observer (due to GPS jamming intefering with his target location equipment), then the round will still miss it's target. That is what it is most likely representing. Excal may be a precise round, but it will just miss it's target very precisiely if your target location is not accurate.
Correct, had a brainfart and totally forgot the GPS coordinates were not know ahead of time (like a strike against a fixed target).
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Excal does have an IMU that performs only bit worse than GPS guidance. It only kicks in once the GPS signal gets jammed, so the error is minimized.
One has to wonder why excals can't be used in ECM environments in CMBS then?
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Things would have to be going incredibly, ridiculously over the top wrong for someone to successfully blow all 2000+ of tactical aircraft into irrelevance. And if they did so, there isn't a battalion-level air defense system in the world that would stop them from rolling us, given the limitations on those systems.
The fact that these systems actually work and consistently down aircraft in CMBS is about the most unrealistic thing in the game.
There is very little realistic or simulation-like about CMBS' depiction of air defense.
I think this is something Battlefront needs to address. ADA vs Helicopter needs a defiant "re balancing" in order to be realistic, AH-64s specifically are way way too vulnerable. Adding the option to make fast jets immune to ADA during scenario creation is also sorely needed.
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Wars, always hard to predict the future and what will happen. but a enemy that is preparing for battle is always looking for the weaknesses of their enemy to use to their own advantage.
I think of pearl harbor - America was cocky with the power that they held and did not think the enemy could challenge their power in the sea.
Well History shows how that worked out and the cost it involved.
I for one think we Americans are again cocky and think we have a Military that is unchallengable from without, but if we were to look at it more closely. There is many signs of weakness . ( Our present strength comes from the Techno advantages we have, more than anything else..)
Now the question is, if a enemy was planning and preparing somehow to take that away in some type of high tech warfare that had not been planned on. Would we really be all that strong.
And if you have any real knowledge of how this high tech stuff is being made, it is sad to say it is not within the control of our country. Much is being done from other Nato countries also.
And if one thing is for sure, with how fast things can change in our days and times. I can see any country for the right price get the latest new gismo. So is it far fetched to think that a enemy could get the jump on the next new technology that could swing the advantage to them. Not in my mind.
There is plenty of greed and hate in the world still, much of it pointed at America. I for one just think we rely too heavy on our tecno advantage and we are cutting corners and items and size of our forces and that we are becoming more and more dependent on outside sources for creating our war machine.
Only the future will tell if our present decisions will be costly in that point of time.
I have real knowledge of how tech stuff is made and I'm telling that the US is better than good in this department, I would say the level of self sufficiency in the US is higher than in any other nation.
Quantity over quality does not make any sense for the US military, wages are much too high. The US has far and away the largest R&D budget in the world and the greatest ability to produce new tech. The US should (and does) focus on have the best training and cutting edge equipment to maximize it's advantages.
But wouldn't a helicopter be able to slip by those sensors? And even if it doesn't slip by the sensors, a sensor won't kill the helicopter, right? You still need a weapon to kill it.
Probably would't be able to slip by, some of those sensors are good at detecting low flying targets and there are a lot of them.
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I agree that Russian infantry should probably have more optics on their weapons.
How common are suppressors in the Russian armed forces?
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I get about 20 FPS on the low end but the game is not even close to fully utilizing my CPU or GPU, guessing that it's a multiprocessing thing? SweetFX on and off only changes my FPS by 1 even with HDR and Bloom.
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Would a NATO fast-mover on a SEAD sortie — say a USAF F-16CJ — use its ordinance on a mobile SAM/AAA asset like a Tunguska? Or would such not-necessarily-as-dangerous-as-full-fledged-SAMs assets be left for non-SEAD aircraft to tackle (presuming that, given threat from Tunguskas et al., NATO aircraft performing air-to-ground sorties would maintain a "deck" above, say, 12,000 feet and wouldn't necessarily be dissuaded by Tunguskas from using their own ordinance to knock out said Tunguskas)?
I'm not saying it would use a AARGM on it but something like an AGM-65. These SHORADS are very dangerous to rotary wing and would be high on the hit list. Once your ESM detects a search radar (nessiary to find targets quickly, IR search is much too slow and often too short ranged) you can use your radar or IR pod (or both) to scan the area.
The developers debated this and said in the end NATO would win the air war, but not right away. It is entirely valid for Russia to gain moments of parity or superiority, hence the presence of Russian aircraft. I think any serious analysis will yield the same conclusion, as much as some people will want to counter. It wouldn't be an easy or cheap fight, but in the end it's true.
As for SEAD missions against local AD like Tunguska, they'd be doctrinally unlikely until there were no more major threats (S-400, etc) present, or used as an opportunity target on an egress. A maverick or a LGB from altitude would do the job just fine for those threats.
SHORADS would be high on the hit list due to the danger the pose rotary wing.
I think alot of the issue is that there'd be S-300/S-400's going active sporadically, so operating at that altitude wouldnt be feasible for most strikes. Their presence would force altitudes to go much lower, and into the envelope of the shorter range stuff.
Hell, in Falcon isnt the standard procedure versus S-300's to fly low-level strike popup strikes with HARM's? If the Grumble (and now the Growler) perform anything IRL like they do in that sim, then I'd sure as hell not want to operate anywhere near where the "<10>" is on my RWR!
But without the assumed presence of those systems, I agree totally about the unrealistic vulnerability. Maybe it'd be best to just have an option for the mission maker for "High/Low" ceiling for aircraft, with High being pretty much untouchable and Low being how they are here?
The S-300/400 are limited in number, each time one goes active it would be detected by various ESM assets, geolocated (with any combination of ESM, radar, and IR/Vis), then attacked. The US has a number of options to attack these from stand off ranges. F-22's or F-35's with SDB II will make short work of any SA-10/20/21 site, even ones with terminal defense can be saturated by the small and cheap SDB II. Pretty much any missile that is TVM or SARH is going to be useless attacking aircraft at standoff ranges anyways since they will just dive below the radar horizon.
The "High/Low" idea is perfect.
DCS called, it want's its discussion back.
Don't get me started on their hilarious missile modeling, and who does't love a good argument about air combat.
It qas discussed in another thread that the conflict in BS is limited to Ukraine and NATO ROE might be that targets on Russian soil are off limits to avoid nuclear retaliation. That would allow Russia to operate long range SAMs without return fire essentially denying higher altitudes. Just one way to rationalize the limitations of the simulation.
Pretty much Russia's only advantage here, even then a tenuous one. The FLOT is something like 160 km from the closest Russian soil, this is longer than the effective range of any of their missiles except the 40N6 which I'm not convinced even exists (no photos or video). Even if the 40N6 exists there are a number of problems with a 400 km ranged SAM, it might not be particularly effective against fighter aircraft, it is blood huge (probably a bit smaller than Iskander) and expensive, it would fly a ballistic trajectory for much if it's flight and look like an SRBM.If any SAM site in Russia proper gets particularly annoying I'm sure an exception could be made and the USAF could send some ordinance "on vacation". -
The left side of the turret is 920mm .. Right side much less because of vision equipment but around 750mm against KE. The svinets-2 the russians are using in the game can penetrate around 750mm (some say 780mm) at 2000 meters. Do the math. M829A4 penetrates 880mm at 2000 meters. Still 130mm more than the russian round because of longer length That still leaves the right turret slab of the M1A2 vulnerable to the russian round at under 1500 meters.
Max projectile assembly length for modified autoloader is somewhere in the 750mm region (The tank is something like 2.2m at its widest point between the roadwheels and you need room for autoloader parts), the projectile itself is generally a bit smaller at 720mm, due to the aerodynamic cap and tracer the penetrating rod itself is even smaller likely no longer than 640mm if other rounds are anything to go by. There are no pictures of Svinets-2 but the autoloader limitation is very much a problem for Russian ammo designers.
Compare to the M829A3 projectile which is around 930mm with a penetrating rod of around 800-830mm.
Given the autoloader limitations the chance of Svinets-2 perforating 900+mm of RHAe is very small if you ask me.
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I've read a little about USAF/USN/USMC air operations (especially CAS) from 2001 on. CMSF's (admittedly hypothetical) setting is basically the same as that of OIF in that the air force facing the NATO contingent is practically a non-factor, so the NATO air assets can concentrate on CAS, BAI, TST, SEAD, and other missions which are made much easier by the de facto absence of enemy fast-movers. Such wouldn't, I infer, be the case in CMBS's setting. So what I'm hoping to pick your various brains about is:
—To what extent would NATO air superiority fighters be able to keep Russian ones away from whatever NATO aircraft would be seeking to perform CAS, BAI, SEAD, and other air-to-ground missions?
—Would NATO SEAD operations be effective enough to significantly lessen the threat from Russian SAMs and such like, such that NATO air-to-ground sorties wouldn't be hindered much?
I'm seeking a better sense of these matters so as have more understanding about the likelihood that NATO or Russian fast-movers would factor into a given CMBS scenario. Given the (as far as I know, anyway) much greater size and capability and size of the Russian Air Force compared to the Iraqi Air Force (circa 2003) or the Syrian Air Force (hypothetically circa 2008), I surmise that NATO air assets generally wouldn't have as much freedom of action in CMBS as they (depending on the scenario designer) tended to have in CMSF.
NATO would be able to defeat the VVS but at the cost of having less strike missions while the air battle is raging. Pretty much every single advantage is with the NATO forces, superior training, superior weapons, superior aircraft, larger numbers. Russian pilots fly much less than NATO pilots and don't conduct realistic air combat training exercises on the scale NATO does.
Russian SAMs and fighters would require NATO to dedicate large amount of aircraft to counter them and would mean less aircraft available for other missions, eventually NATO would secure the skies though. This doesn't mean that NATO pilots would collectively lose their minds and start making sub 10k feet attacks against areas where Tunguskas are know to be operating/emitting. A Tunguska would probably be the first thing that gets hit by a Paveway, Maverick, or SDB II.
The PAK-FA will likely never be deployed in large numbers, last I checked the Russians were shooting for 60 aircraft by 2021. Not that it matters really, in it's current iteration the PAK-FA is still a 4.5th gen aircraft and no match for the F-22 or F-35.
Anyone who thinks Russia has a chance of coming close to the US or NATO technologically needs to go look at their respective military and civilian R&D expenditures.
CMBS is by and large a great game and lots of fun but the vulnerability of some air assets is unrealistic and seems a bit like"balancing" to me.
There is at least one 50 post + thread where this has been argued to exhaustion. For the purposes of a given scenario the designer gets to decide who gets what, the rationale is irrelavent.
The effectiveness of AAA is hard coded so its all or nothing, so it is either shoot down everything or no AAA at all. Limits scenario design. I know that air power is significantly abstracted but right now the survivability of NATO fixed and rotary wing assets is pretty nerfed.
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I get regular partial penetrations knocking out the tank or even setting it on fire on the right front turret at 1300 meters in some of the tests i've made. That leaves only the left frontal turret and upper front hull as effective protection at that range.
What sort of ammo are the Russian tanks supposed to be using in Black Sea? I'm not sure an M1A2 could perforate it's own front turret (excluding weak points) with an M829A3 which is be superior to anything the Russians could field (due to ammo size limitations). The front left and right turret slabs in addition to the front left and right lower and upper hull (on both sides of the driver's compartment between the tracks) would likely be impervious to any Russian APFSDS save for a lucky shot or an odd angle.
Range should play a minor role in perforation calcs, the M829A3 would still be doing 1500m/s at 1000 m (1555 m/s at 0m), probably more. These have spectacular BC and lose velocity very slowly.
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I think they did that for a combination of game balance, and to reflect a variety of real world threats to helicopters they didn't want to directly simulate. The real world complexity of ECM, HARM missiles, and god knows what else in both directions must be staggering.
If Apaches had a reasonable probability of dumping all sixteen missiles unopposed it would be a clean game winner in almost all scenarios. Doubly so when the Hellfire trajectory gets fixed and it usually comes in above APS. You can test this, don't give the Russians any AA. Fortunately the Tunguska is so useful against ground targets it almost always worth buying one.
I don't like the game balance excuses, it has no place in a game like CMSF. Currently the way Apaches operate in CMBS is extremely ineffective if SHORADS are present and the Tunguska is too good at shooting them down. From what I understand the best way for Apaches to operate in this type of environment is to hang around the FLOT (to avoid SHORADS ambush) and do popup attacks using their mast mounted radars and the AGM-114L or a buddy lase from a OH-58 with a MMS. Currently the Apaches do none of this and operate like it is COIN. I'm sure someone here knows more about how to use Apaches in high intesnity warfare and can correct me if I'm wrong. The way fast jets operate makes even less sense.
Snip
How exactly does the GSR discriminate between targets and non-targets, it's easy if the target has a high radial velocity or the GSR is on an airborne platform. How does the radar solve the clutter problem especially for stationary targets, I imagine that image recognition techniques are quite difficult if targets are stationary, in a complex environment, and the radar is not airborne.
For example an IR imager has a much easier time staying "locked" onto a target designated by a human operator than automatically finding targets. A AGM-114L might have LOAL capability but that does not mean it can execute a wide area search.
M1A2 SEP should have a much greater then 1200 mm CE protection on much of it's front turret if various sources are to be believed.
This sounds like a great concept for putting in a scenario. I would love to see a few scenarios where the Americans get their heads handed to them. I get tired of people thinking they are so powerful. I feel there is some real fragile concepts as to how they rely too much on certain aspects of what they are expecting to do in combat.
(Like if they somehow lost control of the sky. It is not pretty. )
Gave you a -rep by accident but I +rep one of your other posts to balance it out. Sorry man. -
The radar is supposed to work in an abstracted sort of way. But it is also assumed to be not always turned on. But even with a not-always-on radar the Khriz is supposed to be one of the best spotting vehicles in the game. Unfortunately, because of the highly random nature of spotting in CMx2 how good or bad anything is at spotting is difficult to tell from a small number of examples, particularly outside of a test environment where factors other than the vehicle's attributes are at play.
This is odd because the IR footage in the 9P157-2 marketing videos is of very low quality, you can tell the IR sensor is simple no where near western standards and has a lot of bloom, very "washed out", poor contrast, low resolution, a part of this may be attributed to the conditions during the test. I also see no evidence the radar has any sort of search functionality, it seems only capable of track and missile guidance. Even if the 9P157-2 is using an upgraded IR sensor in CMBS it would probably still be worse than whatever the Western standard is in 2017.
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The US military is currently keeping to the spirit of recent international accords forbidding the use of cluster munitions. Basically the only treason why the didn't sign was they have the special case of the DMZ border with North Korea to contend with. Watching Israel sew some 2 million cluster bomb mines across southern Lebanese villages and farms back in 2006 soured everybody on the use of cluster munitions.
I don't think the US is complying with these international accords, they don't make much sense anyways. The UXO requirements are becoming more strict and the old bomblets don't meet those requirements, the game takes place in 2017 and the new requirement is set to take effect in 2018 so there is also that.
DPICM would be highly effective in CMBS and it's a pity that it is not included, maybe M898 as well.
Arena intercepted Tank shells
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by nsKb
Has anyone confirmed that Arena is actually useful against TOW-2B? I'm pretty skeptical.