panzersaurkrautwerfer

It's a niche company that makes niche games with a fairly small staff. I don't know why folks get all bent out of shape when things take longer, or vastly different campaigns aren't released as ten dollar modules to three to four year old games. I wouldn't exactly donate money, but my margin of purchase is a lot lower, like if CMFB was another company's product I'd wait on reviews before buying it, but there's sort of a, if CMFB is broken, I'm confident it'll get fixed, and the product itself will be pretty darn good to begin with. I don't exactly need to be killing Nazis RIGHT NOW OR ELSE.

FOB Falcon briefly had a pizza joint*. The Turkish guy doing the cooking insisted Pizza always had mayonnaise on it. Getting him to not include mayo was frankly impossible, and the place folded pretty soon afterwards as a result of the mayo and unspecified health reasons (really think it was the mayo though). *FOB Falcon circa 2010-2011 was a shadow of its own self, down to a single Battalion minus's worth of troops, but it maintained a small area with some shops mostly run by local Iraqis and some Turks as sort of carry over from when it was a Brigade FOB. Besides the Pizza there was a really good falafel stand that also did bootleg movies and energy drinks, a barbershop, a straight up bootleg movies and nothing more stand, and then a really feeble AAFES trailer.

AK-15 Glock assault weapons with military spec bayonet grips.

Late to the party, but if this is for an American media project they're all AR-15 type assault rifles.

This. Especially the Czech tanks, there wasn't a bounty of spare parts and they got rode hard in conditions they were poorly designed for. Most of the early war tanks were simply driven until they were broken/destroyed, or scrapped when the time came. Some might have survived in ones and twos in junkyards, or as the especially cast-off training tank that's main reason for existing is to give poorly performing recruits something to scrap rust off of. Some of the French tanks certainly remained in service, but even when German training tanks got sent to the front, they seemed to be chiefly Panzer IIIs vs anything truly dinosaur.

If the Greeks could get over the fact the Turks are Turks, and the Turks manage to forget the Greeks are Greek, I imagine they'd just unify, and world cuisine would never better the outcome. Except for pizza. Never trust the Turks to do a pizza.

It'll be interesting to see what falls by the wayside. There's a lot of ways this can pan out, about the only unreasonable outcome is "all programs fully funded and on time."

Somewhat fresh from the AUSA, the US Army's "Big Eight" priorities: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/show-daily/ausa-global-force/2016/03/16/us-army-unveils-its-big-8-initiatives/81882852/ Some summary: It's a pretty big grab bag of the usual vague milspeak for fancy stuff. Some of it is very unhelpful like "Combat Vehicles" which could be taken in a few different ways* but active protection is certainly in there. I'm not sure about Quickkill. Quickkill was supposed to be just around the corner when I left Armor school and we'd all hop aboard our awesome amazing FCSes that could dodge bullets and do everything. Every now and then you catch some reference to it still being funded, or as part of products being developed...but very little has actually emerged. The rosey trust your contractor perspective might be after the amount of leaking that has effected other high profile DoD projects, this one is being kept buried super-deep under lock and key. If it does what it's supposed to do then it could be a major leap forward in what active defense can do. On the other hand, this is a DoD project by the usual suspects. I'm more inclined to believe that it's more likely that it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, there's some giant pile of problems we can't quite get over, and someone is making too much money on it as a trouble program for us to cut sling load, reopen the contract and see if we can't have a Trophy/Trophy-like system today, while waiting for the troubled program to mature. At the very least having a few BCTs worth of Trophy/Trophy-like as bolt on kits (much the same way TUSK/BUSK exists) available would be a good interim step, and it's the sort of thing that can get straight across the board transferred to National Guard units if it never gets used/get transferred with less ease if someone takes it out of the original wrapping. *Like, Tracked Vehicle funding is remaining steady, there's increased funding for Stryker upgrades and Paladins, but does that mean that we're keeping with M1A2 SEP v2s and M2A3s, and new Strykers/Paladins, or does it mean that the funding remains the same but we're changing the output from Lima Ohio to the SEP v3 for less tanks, and we're never buying another Bradley, all the money is going to keeping the type functional until someone figures out how to make a GCV that isn't crap.

Pretty much every manual ever written was designed a guide to good ideas but not exactly as a this must be so or everyone will die. A tank platoon could cover a 1 KM frontage fairly well in open more or less flat desert. Often Objective SPOONMAN will need to be cleared and frankly all we have is TF D Co 1-18 INF despite the fact the manual says it should be 2-3 Companies. Often these guidelines are also used sort of like, instead of imagining them as something set into stone they're there to prompt questions and thought. I'm sending a Company to do a Battalion's frontage. What else do they need to be successful in spite of being a Company? I might give that unit absolute priority of fires for artillery, a platoon of Apaches for their assault phase of the operation, and direct Shadow support (this is where the phrase "combat multipliers" comes from to a large degree). It's also worth keeping in mind that CMBS is still a game. And a lot of the missions are not designed to be strictly "correct", but instead present a challenging mission for the player.

I think it's better to call it a "jammer" because it's more descriptive of what it's accomplishing. It also qualifies as a soft kill APS in that indeed, it is a soft-killing active protection system, but it's very out of place when talking about hard-kill systems, and in any event the article infers it's Drozd stopping the missile which is a hard kill system, and also not widely fielded and deployed (especially not on T-90s as far as anyone can tell). Again the article is a bit of a mess. Hezbollah had pretty much everything but Javelin and late model TOW missiles. But yes, they had some AT-14s.

Anyone who could be called the intellectual father of the FCS should be slapped with a semi-frozen herring. Just saying. Also some of the article smells strongly of...like it's not very good. There's plenty of non-state actors that can fire massed ATGMs, like the 2006 Lebanon war should be taken as the example in regards to what a non-state group does with a lot of ATGMs. It also mixed Ukrainian gunner's reports of missiles losing track (which would be a jammer's effects) and then attributes them to an APS strike instead. Also while T-90s have shown up in the Ukraine, they certainly are not the primary armor platform for the Russian forces there, and really at least time I checked most of what they do offer in anti-missile equipment is jammers not what we would describe as APS. Sharp shooting the article aside it does present the sort of situation that makes for having APS equipped vehicles in CMBS.

Truffles is a mighty warrior* Re: .50 cal I think of it this way, there's a lot that's "loud" vs "louder" but the actual perception once something is very loud is fairly limited. Mortars landing also sounds about spot on for someone dropping a trashcan off of a second story balcony. The real difference I contend between "loud" and "massively loud" is how it feels and with that the M2 sounds quite loud, while the the 120 MM if you're within a certain distance of it (mostly towards the front, like you're 90 degrees to the muzzle), feels disconcertingly like someone is shoving your spine from the front). Could be just me though. Last I checked Israel still has several thousand M113s they use for their anything but urban operations APCs. More likely than not they'd just rely more on supporting armor than US/Russian formations do for fire support (which is to say, all of them use tanks extensively, but the Israeli mech infantry platoon would need perhaps direct armor support in full spectrum conflict while a US/RU formation might retain the armor at a company-battalion level). But that rather gets back to my original point, the "heavy is better" crowd wanted an MBT level IFV as the primary infantry carrier for US forces in 1979 and the GCV was supposed to replace all Bradley vehicles despite weighing in at 70+ tons. None of these are especially workable. *he's actually undercut by the fact virtually everything he does that's supposed to be intimidating is sort of precious. Even when he growls when the dog passes his cage it's just a tiny little rrrrrr noise.

His names is Truffles. You will learn to fear him.

Doublepost for a cause: Here's some random videos of: D Co 2-9 IN 1 ABCT 2 ID doing it's Table XII platoon level live fires with accompanying Apaches Some videos from Tankfest 2015 at the Flying Heritage Collection Our family hedgehog at maximum armor mode. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp8ol1Y1QcAJuhn4GlYgD3A/videos?sort=dd&shelf_id=0&view=0 Here's some footage from one of the tank crewmen featured in the Table XII shoots I posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hbXnlVE1AA I lied as far as the M2A3s, I took that footage on my very dead iphone, may pull the memory card one of these days though.

But riddle me this, how do they move their troops on the battlefield? Also the Merkava's troop bay is pretty tiny, I think you're looking more at their Achzarit or some of their converted T-55 hull variants. A large heavy MBT based IFV makes a lot of sense if you've got a urban AO and that is your primary focus. A lot of the logistical constraints go out the window if you're not looking at road marching, or maneuvering a large unit across a battlespace. However if those constraints are still in play, and you have to worry about deploying across oceans, a 70 ton IFV becomes entirely impractical and would require a massive increase in the logistics train for an ABCT type formation. So to clarify my previous position, a heavy IFV/APC as the main troop transport of your military is not the best idea. Having them for a narrower mission might not be. Having troop capacity on a tank is something I'll still eyeroll at unless that space and that hatch was going to be there anyway. Anyway. I'll see if I can't get some of my old shaky cam stuff from my tablet uploaded. It's just gunnery and live fire footage, but it's M1A2 SEP v2s, some M2A3s and maybe some AH-64s.

Would gunnery footage suffice?

I think if that's the worst book you've read in a year or so you've been pretty lucky. From a process based perspective, or having had to work/been around similar problem solving complexes, it seemed pretty good to me. Perhaps my overuse of the word "awesome" is to blame but you can't really separate the problem from the solutions process as they're intertwined. Greatest book ever? Not really it is pretty dry at times. It is however at the least a bunch of topics that usually are glossed over to a much higher degree, or simply taken for granted that suddenly there's P-51s everywhere.

That's kinda why I chipped in. Every now and then you get folks treating it like it's gospel so I as an overly uptight person like to head that off at the pass. It's not really a bad/wrong movie at all in regards to the whole procurement process, it's just the Bradley wasn't as cut and dry good guys vs bad guys* *Or as an extended commentary, the questions of vehicle survival were a lot less straight forward. There were a variety of different ideals of what the Bradley should be, with some folks advocating an almost Soviet level "everything is simple, cheap, and expendable" design philosophy, to folks who expected the Bradley to be virtually a MBT with a troop bay, along with the more middle route the vehicle ultimately took. The folks who wanted the full Bradley shot at as part of the testing hoped more or less that it would show the sheer folly of not armoring a IFV to the point of being as tough as a tank, while the folks who did not were unsure why exploding a very expensive piece of hardware to confirm it exploded when shot by something well outmatching its armor was a good idea. In practice they both had a point, the full scale tests allowed for some improvements to make it more likely for a crew to survive the vehicle being totally destroyed, while on the other hand it sure did verify that the Bradley was not armored to go head to head with a tank like everyone knew already, and massive heavy IFVs are still pretty dumb (see GCV). Take this all with the caveat it's how I remember it from stuff I've read. It's not like I was around for the whole M2/M3 procurement mess.

The grumpy side of my brain feels obligated to point out Pentagon Wars is a movie first and a documentary not at all.

Putin's anti-homosexual crackdown backfires in the worst possible way.

Awesome for me covers the range of "worth reading" through "life changing." It's a bit dry, but it serves as a good starting point if you're starting at a greater void of knowledge in terms of the engineering-organizational efforts of the allies.

Re: Revenge of the Nerds There is an awesome book called "Engineers of Victory" that is exactly all about the nerds who won World War Two. Highly recommended. I do think it's interesting in many ways the classic stereotype of inexperienced draftee GIs vs battle hardened Deutchtroopers is in many ways flipped on it's head by the Bulge, as many US units had been blooded and indeed were what we'd consider quite skilled (see 2 ID's performance at the Twin Villages, 2 and 4 AD's performance in general) while many German units were simply all the sailors and airmen they could spare K98s to, or were "veteran" in that their logistics train had escaped France and little else.

Huh. Well I'll admit to being wrong about the T-90A vs T-782B3 in game for sure, as it certainly sounds like I am.

Which looks about on par with the 1992 vintage M1A1 I trained on. You can see where the top of the tank blurs into the treeline off and on. This would not be the case with more modern western equipment. When the US ordinance dudes looked over more or less the entire allotment of T-34/85s operated by the DPRK during the original invasion, they found on average 75% of crewmen were KIA. I checked up on the report itself and it refers specifically to tank on tank kills so it would have been largely 76 MM HVAP or 90 MM AP of various models. Now perhaps North Koreans are just weak inferior race of not good comrade stock, but this seems to indicate a certain degree of crew member risk. The fact 90 MM would simply drive through the frontal slope, into the driver/assistant driver, through most of the turret crew, and out the engine seems to highlight the problem with small interior volume. While I'm not an expert on the eastern front, nor do I have the inclination to learn Russian, there would appear to be problems with the T-34 and crew survival when penetrated by tank caliber rounds. Re: Chechnya Again, mostly RPG-7, RPG-18 and a few odd smaller projectiles. The performance of Syrian T-72s when struck by TOWs, or T-72Ms in 1991 seems to indicate that making crew survival claims based on smaller infantry point defense type AT systems is likely misguided. It is interesting to see how readily Russian crewmen depart their tanks given a chance however!

I think it gets to the fact that at the wargamer level: 1. A Panther by itself is a very powerful tool. If you're looking for a very powerful thing to shoot the other things, it's good. However once we get further away from the physical tank on the ground, the worse it gets, and I'd contend it is a lot worse than the Sherman/T-34 in terms of winning a war vs a battle. But if all the wargame is worried about is armor width and gun size, the Germans tended to win out there even if it was at the expense of building smarter pieces of equipment. Not to mention the Germans cranked out dozens of sub-types and variants of things, while often if you're American leaning it's like, do you want the Sherman with the 75 MM or the 76 MM? and that's about for variety. 2. There's a certain level of mystique about it, like forbidden fruit and all. 3. There's less sexiness to winning historically vs ahistorically. If you lose France as the Germans, well crap, I'm no worse than they were, but man if you held onto Paris until 1945 that must mean you're a military genius! Dunno. I prefer Americans because I am a cold hearted Yankee Imperialist myself.