panzersaurkrautwerfer

I think Russia leaving treaties would mean more if they followed them in the first place. Anyway. Nice to see some signs of military commitment in eastern europe.

For the US its more just remove all APS make the ERA a little uncommon and no airburst for Abrams. XM-25s and the M110 type DRM weapons are also uncommon. Rest is right on.

I think we're just looking at it from different ends. I really don't think of game stuff as collectible, but on the other hand the manuals and materials are on par with stuff that usually has "UNCLASSIFIED-FOUO" on the cover. I wish the DoD would wise up and start throwing money at Battlefront. I'm in no way making an official statement, but it's one of the better simulators I've used, and it's much better than most of the systems of record for platoon-company level tactics (it's a good Battalion level wargame, but I feel the player is too in the weeds compared to what an actual BC does during action to call it a good Battalion simulator).

I have to differ here. Here's two places they potentially fit in: 1. As available support for unconventional fighters. Both Russia, and NATO members have in the past used SOF as liaison/augmentation for friendly unconventional forces. Basically it'd be a way to give your Ukrainian National Force of Liberation in Donbass forces Predator or fixed wing support/Give separatist militias something similar. 2. As small supersquads intended for tiny scenarios. We've already seen a few platoon level (so like, three squads+HQ) scenarios that are both popular and well thought out. A SOF element of 2-3 squad sized (or 4-6 team seized) elements+JTAC kind of element is totally on line for that sort of scenario.

I wouldn't go as far to call it collectable, but the overall quality is excellent. It feels less like I've bought a very realistic game, and more like I picked up a very user friendly training aid.

When I was a mere college student aspiring to military service, I had the resident-creepy-special-forces-Sergeant who aspired to be a creepy special forces officer pull me aside, unsolicited and tell me if I knew I wasn't going to have time to heat my lunch, to stick it down my pants or under my undershirts. After a few hours of tromping around the woods, the body heat would warm it up enough to be palatable. He got less creepy, but the first year was sort of like that terrible Kurt Russel movie "Soldier" in that it took him a while to leave the spooky stuff behind and start talking to us like a normal human. No idea on the heaters, it sounds like you were eating the vintage of MRE that was designed and issued when I was still an earnest discussion between my parents if they wanted a second kid. The early 90's ones I've eaten had a heater though.

I've got a South Korean MRE, however the fact we could trade US MREs for anything short of ROK government property is likely indicative it's best left as a relic of my time overseas than actual foods.

In mother russia, rations **** you. Someone had to do it. I'm not proud of it. but there it is.

It's mostly the memory. I tend to remember things I've read, or events very well. Half the reason I hang out on these forums so much is as I depart the military, it's sort of nice to have one corner of the world where regurgitating MRE information is still a relevant set of data. I also need to generate enough taxpayer support for the Tuna MRE to ensure future generations are blessed by it, and it is not replaced with something obscene like the veggie omelet. Re: Jerky It is indeed in there. It is however tragically overwrapped, and you don't get much of it. Think of it like desert at a Mexican restaurant. It's nice to have, but it's not why you're there.

I prefer saboted. Loader's gunshield. It's more obvious with the MG installed, although I likely could have caused some havoc by claiming it's the radar system for the "eliminator" laser defense system before pnzldr or some other armor guy shut me down. No APS for now. There's supposed to be some sort of system called "quickkill" that's coming out on the Armata time scale of "SOON!" for the last three years. The CMBS assumption we just buy up as many Trophy units as possible seems like the most likely way we see M1s with APS soon though.

The Tabasco thing actually dates back to the fact the family that owns the Tabasco company are pretty serious USMC alumni. If I recall correctly the family member who ran the company post World War Two was a Navy Cross holder. The sauce itself is really helpful because pretty much any preservation means takes away some of the flavor to a certain degree, so hot sauce is always a welcome commodity to bringing flavor back. Even without MREs I know guys who simply carried their own hotsauce. It's likely going to keep on being Tabasco for heritage reasons, although Louisiana Hot Sauce and Texas Pete both show up pretty often in mess halls or more established field kitchens. I'm partial to Texas Pete myself. For MREs: Entrees: Pasta is rarely bad, meat is rarely good (I mean it's edible, but it's not that good). Exception for me is the chicken fajita which is quite serviceable. Always ask yourself "if I put their meal in a bag, would it end well?" if the answer is no, then generally the MRE version is not going to be the optimal choice. Sides: Same as above for the bag rule. The rice is never that good, but since it's more or less in a brick form you can just kinda open it up and treat it like a crumbly rice bar. The Mexican variety is okay. Always, always take the fruit though, it's no worse than anything you'd get from a can, and because it tastes fine cold, warm, or anything in between it's great for eating on the go. Breads: Crackers, and wheat bread are both great. Can't go wrong with them, just be sure you have water or a beverage to go with them. Spread order of merit is Jalapeno Cheese, Cheese, Cheese with bacon, peanut butter. Cookies/muffin tops/pound cake: Best thing ever. They all lend themselves to still tasting good despite being made sometime during the Clinton presidency. None of them are really bad, just not as good (the creamcicle cookie is still edible) Other honorable mentions: Tortillas (stiff and small, but taste is about right, and works well as an edible spoon!), pretzels (if you're lucky sometimes it's just out and out a bag of Combos), candy, "Ranger" and "Hurrah/Oorah" bars (the first is like the old school cookie-breadish power bar, sort of hard but soak it in coffee for a second and it's amazing, the second is sort of like a chocolate or sweet apple flavored thing with crispy bits in it. Sticky but tasty) and the unnerving cobbler (most "good" MRE items taste almost like they should, but not quite. The cobbler just tastes like cobbler. Nothing weird or upsetting, which is what makes it unnerving because surely there's something terrible about it to make it taste so normal).. The best MRE was the Tuna one. It was just a commercial packet of tuna (usually starkist), packet of tortillas, mint chocolate chip cookie, packet of pretzels and then relish and mayo for the tuna. When you get down to it, when judging MREs the usual criteria is "how much of this can I eat straight from the bag without it being gross." The answer for "how much of this can I eat straight from the bag" is "all of it" but there's a far gap between a choking down a cold enchilada or semi-warmed noodles. Tuna wins in this because literally every piece of it is entirely edible (and even "good") at all temperatures, any climate.

It's a SEP V2. You can see the CITV on the left side of the turret and the CROWS in the transit stowed position. There's no HAs left on active duty too. Most of the Army tanks are either SEP v1 or SEP v2 M1A2s, minus some M1A1SAs, Marine tanks are M1A1HC FEP I believe.

In terms of "I see it" to "it has died" this is entirely possible. The only really long part of a tank engagement is finding the target as it could be anywhere within a range of frontal arcs*. This is actually where the Abrams shines, because unlike many other tanks, its commander's optics are as powerful as the gunner's optics, which really lets you employ full-on two sets of eyes looking with late model thermal optics, which can make for very short engagement times (indeed, in a "waves of tanks" situation, the idea is the commander already has the next target ready while the gunner is shooting the last one, and he can lay the tank's gun right on whatever he's looking at with a button press). I also have to wonder if some of the earlier Soviet tables made allowances for having to manually input data into the FCS. *Different ranges, different standards. Combat is obviously pretty much all vairable, but gunnery at Fort Irwin in the middle of the California Desert is all looking right or left because it's otherwise pretty flat. Warrior Valley range in Korea is narrow, but deep and going up a mountain range, so you're looking up and down tons. Edit: Yup. And that was done with earlier generation sensors. With more modern thermals you've got a lot better target discrimination, and the various FCS upgrades make the whole process pretty much two button presses* from the gunner (and a lever from the loader) *Sort of buttons, more like, triggery-button things.

The current generation of HMMWV is protected against up to MMG type fire but anything larger than that is no go. I imagine the first HMMWV had everywhere empty on the vehicle shot up or something along those lines.

I had my first MRE circa 2005. Some MREs include various commercially available candy items. They have no special labeling, it's just a bag of skittles or something*. I pulled out my M&Ms with a wrapper celebrating the upcoming summer Olympics. Athens had happened, so I figured I was looking at a pretty recent production MRE. Then I noticed it was for Barcelona. Not quite eating food for "The Big One" several wars down the road, but still a bit of an extensional moment realizing the chicken for the chicken Alfredo had met its fate when I was in second grade or so. *Except for tootsie rolls. They're still in their original wrapper placed inside a brown package with no other markings. At least sometimes.

Pretty much. The M1/M2's hatches are pretty doubtful to get open without some doing*, but there's some things a very lucky guy might be able to figure out in terms of doing damage. I imagine this is the case with all AFVs. *As in beyond what some random dude hopping up on the tank could do

I think either: 1. He thought you meant either of those military forces showing up to help in the Ukraine 2. Or just a general purpose statement about the effectiveness of those two military forces. Either of which can be seen as a reason for humor.

In terms of HEAT the real killer is the aerodynamics, the sabot is a murderous dart. The HEAT round looks sort of like a giant potato masher grenade (handle being the offset probe). It loses momentum a lot faster. If I recall, battlesight for sabot from an Abrams is 1200 meters. I want to say it was 850 or something for HEAT*. You can still do it, just at a lot shorter range. *I'm genuinely not sure. It might be even shorter. Keep in mind I didn't work for a living as an officer so some details like the battlesight range are not on the top of my brain. Looking at the GAS sight reticle though 800-850 looks like the right figure.

As of about a year ago. Since then several Brigades have completed M1A2 SEP v2 fieldings. The end state for M1 fleet status is all active duty units, and National Guard ABCTs to be outfitted with M1A2 SEP v2 type tanks. The only part of that fielding that is uncertain is the National Guard fielding party because of the difference in maintenance expenses. it might simply be delayed until the regular Army's spares stock is switched over to M1A2 SEP v2 type parts. There's only one remaining M1A1 equipped regular Army unit last time I checked, which is the 11th ACR which is not really a deployable unit* Additionally the preoposition ("training") stocks to Europe are currently M1A2 SEP v2, the units slated to go to Europe in the event of a conflict are M1A2 SEP v2 units today. Which gets to the reality that in 2017, if there's a US tank, it is going to be an M1A2 SEP v2 unless we include National Guard units. This also contrasts to the fact that there's already more M1A2s in the US inventory than T90As in the Russian inventory, and we're already looking at Russian vehicles that do not exist in number at all being available as if they were in fully fielded service. So, yeah, no rarity value for "standard" tanks. *It's primary mission is providing the opposing force element for training at the National Training Center. It has deployed piecemeal to support other operations, but effectively it is unlikely to actually go to war unless Mexico is invading. It'd really help every tank, but as I suggested in the lasing thread, should be tied to crew quality.

Addendum: Totally support rarity boosts for APS though. They're not super-common on anything quite yet. Having a higher rarity cost for US systems would be good too given the super-speculative nature of that system.

Re: Rarity Rarity makes sense in the regards of it being a weapons system that is uncommon IRL. Basically it's designed less for balancing more for keeping the game "honest" (think World War Two, if you want a big tank battle, it's there to keeping one opponent from simply buying as many King Tigers as possible, rare tank, less common). The M1A2 SEP V2 is already quite common in the US inventory. It is indisputably the MBT of the US Army, and there's a few thousand of them. Re: Dealing with Abrams Achieve local superiority. Use good recon (if you've got UAVs, guess what? The US can't shoot them down most of the time). You should also have a general idea of how many tanks the enemy has based on the points going into the match which should let you know how worried you should be. Look at the objective and think about how you would defend it. Then look at the best way to approach these defenses. In so many words, you're trying to account for where his tanks are, where your tanks are best able to fight. If he's got 14 Abrams, that's pretty scary, but if he's defending three objectives, then all 14 of those Abrams are not likely sitting on one objective. If one of those objectives as two ways to approach it, then the fourish tanks he's allocated to it are not all likely facing the same approach. So say two approaches he's likely to have two tanks on each. So once you've figured out where he's got those two tank defending you take all twenty of yours and pile on. When you're simply going tank to tank on a flat field, you're missing out on this. The technical capability of the armored vehicle is only a small part of the overall picture. When you're testing two things sitting on a flat spot it's not a circumstance you're likely to encounter, it's not so much a solution in finding out which machine is optimal, it's discovering which tactic is optimal.

What I'm trying to say is that the game simulates behavior vs replicates behavior. There's a certain degree of fuzzy elements built into the game designed to include the influence of variables not specifically replicated by the game engine. And you remove the source for these variables by making the map flat and the tanks 300 meters apart, the simulation is still including them. The LOS coming to contact would be best. That's how the simulator is best designed to simulate making contact. It won't likely change the result especially much, but it's better illustrative. That said, Abrams is a much better sensor platform, so it acquiring and getting the first shot in is pretty realistic. It can also much more effectively shoot while still searching, so getting the second kill isn't unreasonable either. At 300 meters most of your sabot type rounds are going to be very hard to stop, so the weapons/armor combination is more or less out of the question. The sensor difference is really what sets the Abrams above the T-90 line of vehicles. The T-90 is not a one for one competitor to the Abrams (especially the T-90A), and the T-90AM is pretty good at closing the gap, but it's still a pretty good vs equal tank.

Clearly this is why Battlefront should hire me as a consultant and pay me lots of money to make obvious statements and use words I might not actually know the definition of. Synergize those primary assets!

Sort of. One of the things that's positively nerve wracking about long shots is the amount of time from shot to hit is just long enough for you to wonder if you've missed or not. While stopping or swerving when you see muzzle flash isn't going to save you, firing at targets around 3 KM+ there's just enough time that if the target was stopping as you fired, or starting to change directions you might miss. A GLATGM can adjust for that sort of movement. That said, it really is not a major factor until we have drivers who can see 4-5 seconds into the future. Oh totally. Not to mention the simplicity of tank rounds make them pretty hard to stop through anything but armor plate. The loader's armor set is also pretty good for letting loaders hide their smart phones on top of the tank from causal observation. Sneaky privateses.

But it makes him hip and edgy! But it loses the "who's bullet gets there first" race. At very long range this is negated by the difficulty of long range shooting by non-missile tanks, but generally sabot is a preferred round for tank vs tank at ranges below 3 KM or so. I mean the GLATGM might be your only choice if you're in certain vehicles, but it's still inferior to a good sabot.