panzersaurkrautwerfer

Re: Kimchi Ugh. I spent two years in Korea. I love Bulgoggi with a passion, Soju is good (I'm otherwise a beer drinker so the fact I kind of like it is a big deal), would voluneteer to go back to Korea in a heartbeat if I was staying in, but no Kimchi please. Ever. Re: A-10 Firstly here's a good informational clip on the performance of the A-10 in a high threat environment: Secondly: I'm not arguing that bravely and well the A-10 will plunge past SA-19 and SA-6's alike to dump bombs in Red Square. I'm simply saying that clearly CMBS allows for a permissive environment for CAS type platforms to not be shot down after entering range of an ADA or fixed wing air superiority asset/a Very Angry And Lucky Helicopter Pilot. If there's scenarios designed around the assumption that Russia can achieve this sort of environment, which is frankly the only way the SU-25 is getting to the target, then I would like a similar ability from the US side. And to that end the A-10 is distinctive in the US inventory with its ability to strafe IFV type targets into little pieces. Further to that end, the USAF might not commit A-10s to this sort of fighter because of their vulnerability. The Russians might commit their SU-25s but the hostile environment will ensure the same net outcome assuming neither side is dramatically degraded: No A-10s or SU-25s over the target. Personally I would like the A-10 because while Black Sea is a good setting, it's not something I'm entirely tied to. So having a wider range of US fixed wing CAS (which really right now is "bombs in slightly different flavor and Mavericks") surely would not result in the world collapsing with zero survivors in terms of allowing for some interesting QB or user made scenarios that include conditions for the A-10 to be useful or even authentic. It's not like the plane has to be modeled anything beyond the gun attack that's already in the game, the bombs and missiles that are already in, Battlefront already has workable sound for the plane from CMSF. Re: Luftwaffles The Germans did from time to time manage to fly missions in the West. However they did not manage to conduct anything resembling CAS, did not use planes that were generally unable to handle fighter contact, and mostly focused on operational-strategic type targets, because by god if you're only going to get one or two strikes through today, you're going for something more relevant than roughing up a US tank company. You're not going to trade a dozen airframes for four or five tanks and come out ahead. Statement: CAS There really should be a system in the game that simulates a high threat environment beyond simply having MANPADS and ADA assets on map. The SU-25 orbiting for 45 minutes example I used is really a good illustration of something that shouldn't happen, it's too valuable, too vunlderable, and likely needs to get a run in and leave before F-22s/F-15s/F-16s show up/the seven or eight AWACS in the area concentrate their radars to flashfry the SU-25 pilot in his cockpit. Having some user/scenario writer selected level* that determines chance of strike abort/asset rescinded/asset lost results based on relative air control levels would go a long way in terms of making CAS something a bit more realistic. *So if you wanted a QB that was just totally fair and above board, you could select no air control settings, and CAS would be unaffected. If you're building something to simulate the hectic first few hours of engagement, selecting "air parity" would make both the blue and red CAS highly unreliable, while simulating the NATO counter offensive in the last week of August you could dial it to Blue Air dominance or something and have enough friction to keep the air strikes from being 100% certain, but more or less likely to complete attack. Still not cheap, it's a very high value asset. We're not going to put them anywhere that it stands a good chance of being intercepted or shot down.

It gets down to one of two arguments: 1. The airspace would be simply too lethal. This is not a bad argument. It would be a bad place to be an airplane, especially a slow heavily laden strike platform. If there was no A-10 for this reason I would understand. But with the inclusion of the SU-25 this is clearly not the case, as the SU-25 is equally likely to be just as dead or honestly withheld from theater. 2. Forces included reflect equipment likely in service in 2017 regardless of utility. This is the only way including the SU-25 makes sense, as it is certainly available but operating against NATO it is not going to do much short of further inflate fighter pilot egos. If this is the criteria for inclusion then sticking in the A-10 makes equal sense. What annoys me the most about this discussion is the sort of "A-10 cannot survive" but hey look its an SU-25 doing gun runs for 40+ minutes in the face of the largest air force on earth, that's totally legit! They're both effectively the same platform with some quirks (Frogfoot is faster, A-10 has better ecm and standoff weapons), the airspace is mutually lethal and both platforms will be in service 2017.

See, that I'll buy for a dollar. On the other hand looks like that might be incorrect. Seems like the sort of thing that could slip in as a special bonus in a module.

SACLOS guidance type weapons are still valid on the battlefield. That said they're just as much of a gamble as they've always been, and especially when engaging armor within the 4ish KM envelope (basically within the range of the tank's main gun). It also obligates you to sit still during time you might rather be doing something else. As an example, imagine you're a scout Bradley sitting on a screen line. With a TOW, you can snipe at the enemy as the main body shows up, but then you need to stay in one spot for the 30ish seconds it takes the missile to hit the 3750 meter range. With some sort of Javelin ER, or F&F TOW, you could dump the missiles* out, pop smoke and then haul to the rearward passage of lines point while the enemy is still working through the OODA loop involved with not being missiled. *I imagine it'd be possible to acquire more than one target, or at the least, acquire with both the gunner's GPS, then within seconds shift to a target the commader has on the CITV, so in that regard instead of one TOW per vehicle in a volley fire, having two in the air at a time, and tracking on their own would be something to write home about.

So why is it plausible for the SU-25 to fly? Is the Russian Air Force looking to rapidly downsize it's SU-25 fleet and pilots and just not care if they survive?

And again, the SU-25 would be a hole in the ground just as fast against a NATO force. If we're including CAS centric airframes for the Ukraine and Russia, why not the A-10?

Or the M9 that dumped all its hydraulics fluids because LOL I AM AN ACE. Valid point though.

I'm sort of curious why we don't have tank fighting positions. I guess the coding would be tricky but it'd be a welcome addition

For me it was sitting in a classroom out on Wilson range at Fort Knox. The US Army Armor school trains (trained? I'm not sure if post move to Benning it stayed the same) both Army and Marine armor officers, so as a result it has both Army and Marine instructors. Minus the two crews on the range, we were all being more or less baby sat by our resident Marine Staff Sergeant who was showing off his various "this is what I did in Iraq" photos on his computer. He mentioned that they'd run over an Iraqi after shooting him (if I recall the guy had been trying to attack the tank and strongly underestimated the ability a tank has to kill dismounts when he rabbited) Being the special kind of stupid 2LTs are, we were all suitably impressed at this slaying of an insurgent and a grinding of him into the dirt. The Staff Sergeant shook his head and said something along the lines of how it took them hours to get enough of the Iraqi out of the tracks to be passable, and that the friction on the tracks themselves heats up and cooks the remains. He said it smells sort of like pork. Doesn't really sound that cool. I know of other folks that have run over someone in a tank, but more or less as a rule it was "intense firefight, some Iraqi gets wasted, and then the tanks have to go through the same space occupying said dead Iraqi" vs "we will crush them with our panzers!" Re: Running Friendlies over It's best if just abstracted not to happen. Whenever my tanks worked around infantry guys we'd always take them aside and show them where to stand to not get run over, or make it clear how much of them we could actually see. I think it's pretty standard, and usual tank speeds are slow enough that troops will have some time to move before said tank grinds them over.

That's because you're a pure newb and not thinking about the OG Command and Conquer with amazing FMV cutscenes. ALL HAIL KANE!

Re: Kettler Command and Conquer was (is?) a very unrealistic strategy game, in which tank shots did next to nothing against infantry, but driving tanks over infantry was pretty much the fastest way to be rid of them. Infantry was a serious threat because enough riflemen firing at once could sandblast hitpoints off the tank. In terms of running people over IRL, it's strongly discouraged because of the mess it makes and the toll it takes on the crew.

Junior Uberdouche, 3rd Order of the Second house of Douchedom. I hearby use the fact I once accidentally sat next to a Chaplain on the plane to declare you absolved of all reputation based sins, and to cure you of the affliction of hockey hair.

And the only effective way to kill infantry is to run them over with a tank.

I think it's a bit like when Germans point out that Americans shot some POWs too in World War Two. Yeah. It's a bad thing. However compared to the other bad things going on from the claimant party, it tends to get ignored or remains as a footnote. So to that end that there's some wackjobs in the Ukrainian forces certainly is a thing, but the number of airliners they've shot down is pretty negligible, and all and all outside of giving something for Russia to point at and squeal like thoe guys from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they're a footnote to the fact we have a lot of badmojo speaking Russian and not officially existing going on.

WHY ARE WE USING ALL CAPS? This actually came up in a very lengthy discussion in a different thread, but the short of it is the SU-25 in all practical sense is just as vulnerable as the A-10 (it's not super-sonic, and the agility of a fully loaded strike platform is marginal), and whatever Russian ability to prevent NATO penetration of Russian air space exists, they're still vastly outnumbered by the NATO fighterswarm as it is. The question asked by serious observers has been "how long will it take NATO to achieve air superiority over Russian forces?" never "can the Russians achieve effective CAS?" And to that end, to argue the very modest difference in capabilities of the SU-25 somehow makes it immune to quite possibly the most lethal air force ever assembled, and still very robust larger SAM systems (not to mention it's not like the various Ukrainian ADA platforms simply vanished) is just stupid. The A-10 and SU-25 operate more or less in the same threat window, with the same level of vulnerability, and neither would be committed in contested airspace outside of as part of a massive strike package for a short window (Codename Duchess gave a great breakdown on what this looks like in reality). Also what sort of uberdouche give themselves reputation votes?

In practice the only thing the TOW is supposed to be used on is tanks, and tank-like targets. Anything less than a tank is something the 25 MM will eat up. You see them get shot at buildings a fair bit in Iraq, but that was more of a lack of any other use for TOWs and availability of platform and munition than a standard use.

Then neither would an SU-25 survive in a war against NATO, and yet, there it is in the game.

Narp. Equipment arriving new to Korea got painted green, you could still see the tan poking through scuff marks on the M1A2 SEP v2s we had. Stands to reason a force deploying to Europe would see the same. The stuff in the Baltics now might be a short rotation so it won't be painted, or more practically, there's some Estonian car painting company that's about to make a lot of money once it gets cleared to use CARC. re: Bradleys As already pointed it, it's the CITV. The whole point of the BFIST is to blend in with all the other Bradleys around it (which was the same logic for the old FIST-V being built to look like an M901, it wan't obviously an artillery spotter).

It won't need maintenance, St Putin of Novorussia has blessed it with his Holy Hands of Power, so like all Russian equipment, it will run without so much as a hiccup.

Concur on underpants gnome planning cycle. It isn't like there's a ready AI waiting to be dropped in.

And know what it does with some level of credibility. I'm sure whatever armor it has according to the Russians can defeat smaller nuclear explosions and resist Captain America's sheild but combat mission thus far has well modeled what we know about vehicles vs propoganda claims.

1. Pyotr. Stalin was already taken, so rock will do for now. 2. Taylor Swift (she just doesn't know it yet) 3. The secret hero of defeat of HATO in the Novorussia front will reveal himself to both exist and be the spawn of Putin at the proper time, astride two Armatas, each driven by bears fed only with the most tender of the homosexuals.

The presence of 'Uussican SOF within the separatist ranks seems to indicate otherwise. And the recent admissions of Putin seem to indicate they are used in that sort of role as policy, regardless of title or stated mission. Either way, if we're simply going above board, US Army SOF, and Delta both do extensive operations with host nation forces in both a training/advising*, and technical support role. For future modules, the UK operates much the same way, and there's some strong smells of Deutchland in places. Including those teams as a defacto Ukrainian uncon JTAC node is in my opinion, a given *In the sense they attach themselves to the host nation force. We already see the "regular" forces version of this with US liaison teams, but those are not the sort of elements we'd commit to non-uniformed allies.

re: heaters Nah, Kettler was talking about not having the heating pouches in his MRE which sounds like one of the early 80's ones. I don't know if those were separate in the early models, or perhaps not even part of the package, I never had the chance to eat one older than I'm guessing 1992ish. You know they finally disconnected the smoke plate actually. Everything now is pretty much JP8 or bust, which won't smoke like diesel used to. Older tanks will still have all the switches for it, but the new M1A2s don't even have it. That said one of my PSGs used to heat up his shaving water with an ammo can using the exhaust heat on his track, imagine you could do the same with an MRE (detach lid, stick in grill to make a shelf, fill can with water. Can on lid. Go make sure platoon is awake. By the time you're back it's quite warm).

This to the max. I don't think there's too much in scenarios. To a large degree if we're going for more grounded vs more futuristic, there should be much less APS all around, no T-90AMs, BMP-2Ms, etc, etc. Of the included future stuff, some manner of yankee imperialist purchased APS is pretty modest. Looking at the Trophy installation, it's something that could fit pretty easily onto the Abrams turret, and folks forget how fast stuff that was "needed" got bought for 1991 and 2003 in terms of conventional equipment. Having a higher rarity cost for it, and for some of the "maybe in 2017" gear would be best imo.