panzersaurkrautwerfer

Military Operations on Urban Terrain. It might (emphasis on might) have started off in the Army but it's pretty much military-wide now.

This too. Given the vast difference in terrain, and the fact that only the US forces from CMBS would carry over it would be best served as CM: Land of the Morning Sun or something.

I'd buy the game, but Battlefront would have to be Very Generous to make the DPRK dangerous in a conventional force on force fight. Chinese forces could be interesting but the gap of information on what their "good" stuff can actually do is much worse than the information we have on Russian platforms.

There's only really two ways to prevent being acquired by sensors: 1. An airframe that is designed to give off a a very small, or even absolutely no radar return. This is stealth, and is expensive, places very strong design restrictions on the plane, so if a plane doesn't look like an F-22/F-117 or is a fairly well known unstealthy aircraft, it likely has a visible radar return. 2. Active jamming. Basically bombarding the target sensor with enough emissions that it cannot sort out the garbage transmissions, from the return from its own sensors. This is helpful when you're attacking because generally it causes issues with long range target acquisition, however at closer range it starts to fail (basically the sensor is usually more powerful than the jammer, so in practice it starts to burn through the backround noise), and it is amazingly brilliantly obvious there's something happening because your sensors are now full of garbage signals. You don't just magic sensors "off" and then sneak in. If there was such a potent capability it'd be the holy grail, you'd have the American version, the Chinese knockoff, the American and Russian countermeasure to this sort of system, and all sorts of folks flipping out about it. As the case is our resident conspiracy theorist on this board doesn't seem to buy it, and that is strongly telling. The more likely scenario is the American one, where a very annoying Russian plane is told to go away on a few occasions, plane does not, Americans roll their eyes and life generally goes on as always.

There's a lot of speculative weapons in the game. The T-90AM is actually an export model upgrade the Russians have not purchased, BMP-2Ms are not quite real yet, a lot of the top shelf Ukrainian stuff exists in numbers of like, 3-6 or so. It's all based on what reasonably could happen in about two years. APS mounted on Abrams is a pretty small leap. The APS it has in game already exists and in service elsewhere, and it is the sort of system that can just bolt on to the outside of an Abrams pretty easily. Tie to that the US Army has been looking at APS for tanks and Bradleys for several years, and historically has done similar purchases prior to going to war (see the M1A1HAs upgraded in Kuwait, same with the Bradley ODS, all the MRAPs and various anti-IED crap that was bought on short notice during 2003-2010), and if we're making speculation, it's a pretty modest leap.

I'd disagree very strongly. World War One did not render infantry obsolete because we saw millions of dead infantrymen, it just changed the way war was fought because we had to find ways to avoid getting millions of infantrymen killed. Killing a tank is a dicey proposition. I could go on and on about different weapons systems, but generally what we have is an evolutionary (vs revolutionary) arms race between tank and anti-tank. RPGs seem ultra cool and dangerous, except for realistically they're about as dangerous as panzerfausts were to tanks from the 40's as modern tanks are to RPGs (perhaps even less so). ATGMs are dangerous too, but again, increase protection against chemical warheads, ERA. investment in APS type systems, all show that the ability for a tank to kill, or be killed is pretty much locked in a very narrow seesawing. Sometimes the tank is more powerful (I would argue that to be the case now, outside of the Javelin most infantry AT weapons are a bit behind the times), sometimes the AT system is more powerful (see when HEAT was king in the 60's and the very early ATGM period). But saying the tank is obsolete at this rate is nearly equally likely to having a tank that renders all anti-tank obsolete.

It works better if you offer the crews of two of them as blood sacrifices to Baal.

I imagine it's just a matter of Ctrl+C from an undamaged model and then Ctrl+V. Experienced operators can have that fixed right up.

Re: Crews Definately the most important factor, but good kit and a good plan will carry you a fair ways. Re: Sherman Not to get too off track, so I'll keep it short Actually it caused a bit of a panic with the Germans in North Africa, and left quite a favorable impression with the British crews. The Sherman more or less endured largely unchanged until 1944 not because the Allies were total dumbys and did not know how to build tanks, but instead because crews and the command were quite happy with its performance vs everything they'd encountered. The first few hundred 76 MM equipped Shermans were simply left in England on D-Day because there was no perceived need for them. Once it became apparent the Panther was not a new heavy tank, but instead the new German medium though, things changed a bit and you see the rush to upgun. If you compare the T-34 and Sherman track to track, they're effectively identical. What killed a Sherman would kill a T-34. What would shrug off T-34 fire is the same sort of tank that feared not the Sherman. Ultimately the big differences were: 1. The T-34 had much lower ground pressure than the Sherman. 2. Sherman was much more reliable than the T-34 3. The Sherman was much easier on crewmen in terms of working space. 4. The late model Sherman's HVAP was superior by a decent margin to the later 85 MM type AT rounds. That's really about it. If it'd been Americans with M34s, and Soviets with T4A1s the ultimate result would have been largely the same (kind of. The attrition rates for T-34s on road marches makes the breakout from Normandy a less likely proposition if done with T-34s) It was post Normandy mostly. In a nutshell the Army numbermasters who calculated loss rates and required replacements did a very bad job at figuring out just how fast war would burn through infantrymen and tankers especially. As the war went on folks were replaced mostly one for one with non-tankers (although sometimes tanks might have been manned entirely by non-tankers, the disastrous results from those crews generally meant this was avoided in all but last ditch moments). Also at the same time there was a large number of "extra" soldiers from branches that had largely been sidelined or out of action. Plenty of towed AT gun battalion, anti-aircraft gunners, and similar folks found themselves suddenly infantry or armor crewmen in the winter of 44'. Re: Asian crewmen Prior to the K1 the standard ROK tank was the M48, and one of the biggest complaints about it from the Koreans was it was just too big, things were too spaced out, and on a whole it cut into crew performance because things were just designed to fit a much bigger soldier. When it came time to select another tank, the M1 was something the Koreans liked, but it was still too big, and they liked some of the Leo 2 features too (mostly the diesel engine), and thus opted to license the various pieces of the M1 and Leo 2 and then assemble them into a tank that was designed around your average Korean tanker of 1980. Of course with improved nutrition and larger Koreans these days I have to wonder if it's not going to be too cramped in a few decades. This is true with most military jobs. All the same tanks can do some pretty terrible mojo when they're brewing up.

I should have learned some basic 3d model computer software skills. I could have made bank in Russia making new tanks.

He stated a weapons system literally did not miss because at 3-5 KM it was 100% accurate. If I'd claimed the same effects from a Javelin or M1 you'd be right there doubting I knew what I was talking about. I have to differ in that by and large that if we're really talking about bias, even if you're merely taking conservative estimates of what the Russians are capable of vs actual total bias, it could be so much worse. Both sides get some rosy estimate stuff. As the case is as actual testing vs "WAH MY T-90AM CANNOT KILL EVERYTHING " from the original post, the T-90AM's spotting ability appears certainly to be at least somewhat capable against a moving Abrams at range.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Re: K1A1 It's a pretty good tank. The thing that takes getting used to is while the M1 was scaled to fit a 6'1 American type person without discomfort, the K1 was built around a 5'7 Korean tanker as the average crewman, so it looks, and feels tiny if you're a yankee imperialist like myself. It's still big when you're out and walking around it because it's a tank after all, but once you get up close, or even on top of the tank and around the hatches you realize you're dealing with a compact. In terms of performance it's by easiest and most direct comparisons, about on par with a late 90's early 00's M1A1HC. It does suffer from a lower ammo count due to smaller vehicle size, although the suspension will let you do some cool tricks (like letting the tank lean backwards to shoot higher up, or drop to get behind lower cover). Optics and weapons package are again around that vintage, it lacks the crazy-heavy armor of the Abrams but has more than enough protection to ward off the 115/100 MM guns that represent the primary weapons of the DPRK's armor branch. Nice tank, appears popular with the crews. K2 is a bit more squirrely. It offers some amazing capabilities on paper, but when I was active in Korea they were still having major issues with the drive train, both in reliability and longevity that kept it out of mainline service. I used to ask our ROK counterparts if they were going to see a K2 in their battalion soon, and they'd just laugh. It could also be their BN was the literal bottom of the upgrade order though. Re: Type 99 I'd like to have a chance to operate one, and then hit it with various weapons systems. Chinese claims and internet dwellers seem to think it's the mightiest tank on the planet, but what is known smells fishy (claims of 1000 RHA against KE, the ERA panels are HUGE for real ERA, there's a mysterious "magnum" ammo they claim is in operation that somehow still uses the same basic weapon and autoloader from a T-72). If I was giving an educated guess I'd put in on par with late model pre-B3 T-72s, but from what I've heard/seen of Chinese hardware (one of our exchange officers from Ghana back at Career Course refered to the APCs he'd used from China as "utter garbage" and other choice words, from what I've seen it looked really good, but usually concealed some crippling QA/QC faults) I'm not unconvinced it won't fall apart if it leaves the motorpool. Re:Arjun Everything I've seen indicates it's "INSAS Rifle: The tank!" which is why the Indians are heavily invested in T-90s. Re: Challenger Not often seen due to budget cuts, but one of my soldiers got to mess with one during the pre-2003 Iraq invasion build up. He described it as...like to summarize it's like getting into an opposite to your normal drive sided car. Everything is 100% in the wrong spot, or in a way that is somehow painful or awkward if your heart doesn't flutter a bit when someone says "bangers and mash" Combat record is good though so I imagine it's fine so long as you're properly English Re: Leclerc I was part of an exercise with the French. It was a command post exercise so no actual vehicles, but being the tanknerd I am, I picked people's brains for information about AFVs. Any positive comment I made about the Leclerc agreed to with "if she runs" or "when she works" following. I get the impression it needs more love than normal. Re: Merkava The troop bay isn't really a troop bay, it's where something like 75% of the main gun rounds live. The ammo racks can be removed to make room for troops. All accounts are it's amazingly cramped even at just 3-4 soldiers. The frontal engine is interesting too. It does place some pretty major constraints on frontal armor though (as it liimts the amount of "dead space" you can include, and the practical weight of the portion covering the engine). Good for crew survival. It's really a tank designed for Israel, top to bottom. I can't think of anyone else who'd get much mileage out of her at this point. Re: T-34 It amuses me that despite being effectively just as "good" as the Sherman that it gets remembered as some sort of wondertank while the Sherman is panned as a rolling deathtrap. Losses of both vehicles in Soviet use are entirely comparable, and the T-34/85 vs M4A3E8 fights in Korea all indicate the advantage is with the better crew rather than one of those tank being better.

I think you need to look into the conflict in question. With mobilization and units in storage, they're relevant if we are really sitting on the verge of 1989 warmed over. In terms of a CMBS scenerio, which is a war neither party really expected, wanted, or has the national will to fight through to anything but a reasonable ceasefire, or even just enough space to go to antebellum status. Here's a few things to keep in mind though: 1. While Korea is a vastly different problemset from the Ukraine, the interaction between US and host nation would likely be the same. The primary US contribution would be aviation, and similar higher level assets (intelligence gathering systems, EW and battle management equipment, missile/rocket artillery), while the ground force would serve a sort of fire brigade role. Rather than offering the target for the Russians to mass on (much as the DPRK prioritized US forces), US Forces would remain concentrated, and be committed to mass on Russian penetrations were numerical parity and Russian vulnerability would be maximized. This also would allow deploying US units to be preserved for future operations rather than being deployed piecemeal and attritted accordingly. 2. It's also noteworthy that we are actually talking about the US military plus NATO in this scenerio. While the German army is not as big as it once was, if you start calling in the rest of NATO, plus the Ukrainian, plus the US you start dealing with a much closer parity in forces, with in the case of NATO, a pretty sizable advantage in hardware (while a T-80U coming out of storage isn't a bad tank, it is grossly outmatched by Leclerc, Leo 2A6s and the like), and especially when you start including the various air wings, things get pretty lopsided. 3. US preposition stocks are proving to be...slippery. Not all of the US tanks in storage are in storage in the US, and there's some pretty serious rumblings about: a. Restoration of western European preposition stocks b. Upgrading the vehicle fleets attached to the preposition ship stocks Both of these are interesting. The preposition ship stuff is already prepacked and ready for war, and not only that, a lot of it is already within pretty short sailing distance of Europe. The whole point of a preop ship is minimum turnaround, so something steaming from the middle eastern area to say, Italy straight to a rail movement wouldn't be much harder than some of the Russian mobilization efforts (as it would simply be flying in the Brigades to meet their hardware in port, mount up on trains and to the front if you will). The European prepo stocks....well, there's already US tanks arriving in the Baltics for exercises from overseas, Norway's USMC prepo stocks just received tanks, and given recent events it's reasonable to expect there might be a return to something similar to the 90's at least. So moving from that, it isn't simply just a numbers game of Russian tanks vs US tanks. If CMBS came to pass, even assuming a NATO win branch, there's Russian Soldiers who'd never see a NATO soldier or ground system, and even then they might not see Americans, but instead Germans, French, Brits, or even some weirdo Dutch-Belgium-Danish task force supported by the requisite Norwegian hospital. The US has the global reach for fighting a whole host of wars, but in a conventional European war, it is simply the biggest member of a larger team. Re: Sheridans Just some notes in brief: 1. The missile system by the 90's was actually quite effective. By all accounts I've heard from that timeframe it was accurate, and reliable (and this includes someone who was part of the last "spendex" in which they simply shot as many Shillelaghs as they had in the depot as they were getting rid of the tank, and the missile at that point). 2. Folks who served on it in Europe and in "conventional" training environments liked it lots. Fast, agile, with a fair amount of available firepower. Folks who rode it in Vietnam were a bit more mixed, it was straight up murderous with the canister round, but did not handle mines or RPGs well at all, and the heat and humidity was bad news for the casings on the round. It also was too light to plow through dense brush, unlike the M48 which was well liked for it's ability to just grind through anything short of anti-tank mines, and deep water. 3. Amphibious capabilities are largely.....eh. Most places that support river crossings by amphibious tanks also tend to have bridges or fords. What makes a good exit bank for a floating crossing usually also makes a good place for a bridge, or is so remote as to be irrelevant to the operation (yay you crossed the river 20 miles upstream! Now you've got to break brush for 20 miles to get back to where the fight is). 4. M48 operators are surprisingly attached to their tanks. Doesn't matter if they're USMC or Army.

I meant less information and more if we start talking about rarity the T-90AM is pretty much hypothetical at this point in terms of Russian use.

In the AAR I'd really like a CSI mode that would highlight the penetrations (maybe with a colored "pole" showing the axis of the strike) and the damage inflicted. Sort of helpful in determining why one tank was destroyed, or just because I'm bored figuring out of if it's a total loss, or just a mission kill.

But again, that sort of gets to the heart of the problem, is the issue tanks against tanks, or having to realistically look at what tools you have on hand, and making them work? We wouldn't be asking if the IS-2 or Tiger should be toned down to better let Shermans/Panzer IVs shine in one of the World War Two titles. As the case is, the Abrams holds a commanding advantage in optics by most accounts and it's really something you just rather have to deal with, just as much as any other asymmetrical vehicle vs vehicle engagement in the series. This also is not a game that just throws you against random people in a lobby, so if you really want a low Abrams count game against a human, find someone who wants to do that, or alternately if you're QBing the AI, just use the human selects forces options for the AI and not fill up on Abrams. Further from that if we're getting into tank types that should be uncommon, the T-90AM sort of tops the list there no?

At this point, can we just vote Russia off the island?

You're just factoring the gunner's optics into the equation. The CITV on the Abrams is as I keep mentioning, just as capable as the Gunner's Primary Sight, and usually is used to scan independently of the gunner's optics meaning a much faster acquisition cycle.

That's pretty far beyond what the system is capable of. I doubt it being simply built for Russia makes it several times more powerful. Not to mention doubtful at the magnification the system is known to have at 2 km

At the sort of resolution offered by a Catherine FC, yeah, in daylight he would. Especially in "complex" environments with buildings and terrain more diverse than open desert, you're going to have a lot of material that radiates heat as the sun warms it, and at 2.5 KM it'll all look pretty similar even at nFOV or something. You switch to daylight to verify that this is something that needs to be shot because it is much clearer. The thermal imaging systems on the Abrams are advanced enough to do without the daysight verification, you just drop into whatever magnification you like shooting with (I used to dial it up for the commander's engagement because I wanted to be sure my crosshairs were dead-on, while my gunner stuck to the 12-16ish range because he'd grown up shooting from M1A1s and that's what he felt comfortable with) confirm target, and then let fly.

I think this might not be an unfair assessment. Or at the least, failing that this is something that brings a strange, but generally inoffensive dude some sort of happiness. This thread wouldn't be the worst thing to happen. It'd be sort of like Coast to Coast, in that yeah it's sort of a marginal place of sometimes dubious statements, but you have to tune in to encounter it, and it keeps the rest of the airwaves a bit more grounded. Addendum: However a Kettler coast to coast thread would be better off in general discussion.

1. Those aren't Spanish trails. They're a tech demo the Peruvians ran. It's not a realistic test, it was shooting targets in an empty desert under optimal conditions, nor is a total of six missiles a good sample size for performance. 2. I operated M1A2s for a while, and trained on both the M1A1HC and M3A2. I'm pretty familar with what thermal optics are capable of. 3. This is what thales claims the Catherine can do: https://www.thalesgroup.com/sites/default/files/asset/document/catherinefc_uk_071005.pdf You'll note the ranges listed, I have never claimed the optic could not detect (or "find") a target, the difference is the Catherine FC, its just in wFOV it doesn't have great resolution so a lot of things are going to look like a tank, and then at nFOV it's still going to have issues at 2.5 KM or so figuring out what its looking at. I've used similar generation thermal optics, and that's about how it runs down. The newer M1A2 optics are something else entirely, and I've located "hostile" tanks during training exercises by the glowsticks* strapped to their antennas at combat range. *During night live fire training glowsticks are attached to the antenna, green and red so that an observer without night optics can figure out turret orientation at a glance. The crew in question did not remove their glowsticks for a few days, and despite hiding behind a berm, I was able to figure out where they were hiding at range because of the glowsticks on their antennas were a different temperature than the air around them, and were slightly above the berm itself This is not something a Catherine FC, or even earlier generation M1 is capable of in the slightest.

Statements like this make me question your expertise tbh.

From the manufacturer's specs, it will see something, but does not have the resolution to tell you quite what it is. Basically it'll need a bit longer to go from "there is something out there" to "this is a legitimate target" than the M1, while the M1 is more able to go from "I see something/I should shoot this" a lot faster. It also helps that effectively with thermals that the M1A2 has two spotters with equally powerful optics, while the T-90AM does not.

Even using the daysight. When you're "scanning" in thermals (which is to say moving the optics back and forth looking for a target), a tank will be pretty obvious, hey look a bright spot, better look at that now. When you're doing it in daylight, even with moving targets it can be tricky You're looking at something like 8 degrees of area at a time, with the optic in motion, unless the tank is hauling and throwing up a roostertail, at 2.5+ KM you might not see it. If we're in a race between spotters, the one that has effectively illuminated "hullo! I am a tank!" type targets vs "I'm looking for something green in a field of green." the thermal will tend to win, and the thermal equipped platform will shoot first, and given the nature of AT weapons kill first. Really the abject last thing you want to do against an Abrams if you're using Russian MBTs is get in a fight at ranges over 1 KM.