panzersaurkrautwerfer

As just a thought, if we really wanted to work in battlesighting, perhaps there could be a chance at shorter range, tied to troop quality that the tank wouldn't lase and would just fire without ranging the target. Tying it to troop quality would be important as green crews likely wouldn't have the experience or confidence to take that sort of intiative, while a crack crew knows exactly what a tank at 1200 meters vs 1500 meters looks like, and that they need to lead it about 20 mils judging from how fast it's going. It'd still be a variable, a crack crew might not be confident at this particular target, or a regular crew might be in the "zone" for that shot. Lower than regular just strikes me as doubtful. Too new at tanking to really have a feel for it, or the experience to futz with estimating range while someone is drawing down on them.

I usually use the same QB map against the AI. The enemy locations are not always the same, but the engagement areas tend to be similar. It's not really a "experiment" in the sense of being controlled, but it's a good tool to see how dissimilar tanks handle similar situations.

It's either surrounded by the Ukraine, which in the event of Dosbassian Republic of Putin will be ill-inclined to lift a finger to help it, and Russia which it will be the puppet of. That's not a lot to offer anyone. Further the greater crisis of the Ukraine in terms of East vs West revolved around either providing so-so industrial products to Russia or being the breadbasket of Western Europe. The stuff coming out of Donbass meant a lot to the Ukraine's ability to keep doing Ukrainian things, not so much to anyone who wasn't either the Ukraine, or Russia. Further the fact it has all those resources means that "reconquest of Donbass" will remain a Ukrainian national policy item until it occurs or we no longer have a Ukraine. If Russia has another bad spell, or we're looking at 1991 all over again, or even just the fact that post-Putin the Russian government is more interested in engaging with Ukraine than propping up Donbass, there's going to be some sad days to be in Donbass. Where you're losing sight is the separatist elements you're all citing had: 1. Viability of being separate from the mother country. Either functionally, or the mother country was unable or unwilling to pursue them post breakup (and even then, Russian nationalists still covet the Baltics) 2. The mother country was killing the heck out of the separatist body from more or less the get-go. This is why Kosovo is so different, there was a distinct Albanian element that was violently suppressed. Fighting back or dying was the only option left. The difference is the Russians in Donbass simply decided that the Ukrainians in Kiev were going to become Nazis so they violently carved off an eastern part of the country and tried to invite Russia in. This is escalation well and beyond a reasonable reaction to what Kiev did, and indeed looking at the fair, and reasonably effective elections held later in the rest of the Ukraine rather an interesting contrast to the actions of the "People's Republics"

Paging Dr. Godwin? There's a really interesting essay from the late 90's reflecting on conflict, namely resulting from the Bosnian conflicts called "Give War a Chance" I believe, and the underlying assumption is in terms of stability and long term viability, the absolute victory on the part of one party is the best option strictly talking in terms of the mentioned two dynamics. If resistance is out and out crushed, then there's little chance of it violating ceasefires later to add rail junctions and somesuch. The separatist parts of Ukraine lack any meaningful contribution to the world at large as the fictional people's republics they claim to be. They're going to be Russian satellites that will rely, much as the seized portions of Georgia do exclusively upon the stability and long term viability of a Russian foreign policy decision to be combative with the west. A weaker Russia would potentially either literally abandon those states, or perhaps just functionally abandon them in the future, meaning Ukraine will redress past grievances with a vengeance resulting in likely the same destruction that the idiots currently fighting in Donbass could have avoided in the first place instead of playing the "Ukrainians are all secretly Nazi" card. As demonstrated by recent fighting, a marginal or incomplete victory against the separatist elements will simply result in them being rearmed and augmented by Russian forces for another go at making Putintopia or whatever the end state is. As further demonstrated the cease fire largely existed to further separatist ends vs a meaningful attempt at coexistence. The Ukrainians are unlikely to accept the theft of part of their nation short of abject military defeat. This is also the case with the seperatists. However given the reality of the conflict, it is doubtful we would see the first, and the second is really the only reasonable way to ensure we're not revisiting this conflict again in ten years and shooting down more Malaysian Airliners. Re: American Revolt Of course, this is a stupid analogy if we're being frank. The lack of territorial integrity with the mother country, the several decades old sense of statehood, existing independent governmental functions, exhaustion of peaceful means of addressing grievances, and extreme viability of the American colonies as an independent country all make it historically a reasonable alternative to British rule. If it'd simply been Spain coming up from Florida or something, and more or less building a revolution to fit Spanish foreign policy ends to protect Spanish settlers elsewhere, and the 13 colonies were directly connected to the British Isles, then we'd be talking about a different set of circumstances. All the same your lack of knowledge on American history is interesting and noted.

I don't think the nazi-Ukrainian genocide of the Russian speaking population of Ukraine came to pass. I don't think the separatists have a legitimate claim, and they do not have a means to achieve a legitmate functioning country that could not simply be qualified as being a defacto Russian owned property. Given this assumption on my part, and the continued refusal of the separatists to even have talks that are simply not times for them to rearm and decide the cease fire doesn't apply in certain places because we crossed our fingers when we signed it, the only real reasonable end to the fighting in the Ukraine that does not result in a festering tumor in eastern europe is the catastrophic defeat of the separatists. This was going to happen until Russia intervened with significant aid because it's important that their pet tumor exist, regardless of how it affects the rest of Eastern Europe (or even Russia when you get down to it). Thus the most peaceful, and lasting end to this crisis is the separatists lining the bottom of a ditch, unless you think you can kill your way through enough Ukrainians that this issue will not be revisited again in the future.

Yeah maybe, but the premise of this whole post is in a nutshell, why can't my T-90's kill a M1A2 in an open field? The replays of .50 cal blowing through tank side armor were useful, but they're illustrative of behavior noted elsewhere. They're narrow focus experiments on a desired outcome. Simply placing two boxes in a field, and one box A out performs box B without much other context, it's sort of a silly exercise, especially when in the case of this experiment, there's a good reason for the M1 to stand a decent chance of shooting first, and knocking out the second tank while it's at it.

Dunno. Seems like the seperatists would all be rightfully lining the bottom of a ditch and life would have moved on if Russia hadn't insisted on getting involved. There's nothing inherently unstable with a western aligned Ukraine except for Russian objections to same.

Here's the thing. What Combat Mission tries to do is use unrealistic (in the military sense) systems to represent realistic outcomes. This is the basis for any wargame. The target/focus for this is to best represent the behaviors of military units operating within what is normal military practice. So in that regard, the spotting systems assume two units moving into contact are doing so tactically through terrain that offers some degree of concealment. It is not designed to properly simulate "and through the force of magic three tanks appear in a field 300 meters from each other." The M1 has much better sensors, and as it works through the spotting checks it is most likely to pass them faster, and kill one of the T-90s, and then acquire and kill the second T-90, while sometimes the T-90's spotting rolls go well and it gets to shoot first. This whole obsession with placing things more or less in the open and drawing conclusions from which is "better" is sort of....weird. The game is not designed to support this behavior. Nor is establishing it takes 1.34 T-90s to kill .56 Abrams especially helpful outside of measuring net trends over several battles.

It is a bit like arguing an abused wife should stay with the husband because she's his wife. Ukraine has gotten the really short end of the stick in being attached to Russia. Things have changed to the degree that Ukraine has the ability to make up its own mind, and Russia disagrees. Which is ironic as outside of Putin's pet Russians in the east, it's pretty much ensured Ukrainian independence from Russia (barring invasion) for the next few decades at the least. In any event it was hardly destabilizing, or no more destabilizing (and shooting down less airliners) than the current state of affairs, with a clear end state. Now? Russia has given Eastern Europe cancer. It's going to fester and damage the health of the region until it either kills the patient or someone kills the tumor.

That's cool and all, but I'm just leaving active service with the US Army, having served in both in armored cavalry (in the post BCT reorganization days), and combined arms battalions. I went to Iraq twice (with associated train-ups and exposure to CALL documents, NTC and JRTC rotations), and spent the last part of my career in South Korea. I was pretty well versed in threat/not a threat type systems both conventional and unconventional. As much as there's this image of the Army brainwashing us to be blind lemmings, convinced of how invulnerable we were, this really is not the case, we were all pretty well aware of our mortality and things that could ruin our day (sort of important in the sense of making intelligent choices in not getting killed). I could ramble on more about what I know, but that's the pertinent part. A near, fragmentation type round explosion from above would have me worried about: 1. My CROWS. It's not well armored and if it's well peppered there's a good chance of it being knocked out 2. BFT antenna. It's fairly flat, and unarmored from the top (which makes sense as it's sort of hard to transmit/receive through armored plate). 3. Loader's MG. 4. Personal gear on top of the tank and tools stored in the sponson boxes. 5. Radio antennas. Given the small size of the mounts, and the flexibility of the antenna itself, it'd take some very lucky fragments to get both of them, but a hit would be pretty annoying I'd worry a bit about the CITV but that's just because I'm protective of it. Open hatches would be super bad day, but against fragmentation effects they're pretty sturdy. All the same it's almost like arguing I should open an engagement under 1000 meters with canister, because that would do some pretty major damage to optics, ERA, possibly gun tube etc. Which is true, but none of those effects are especially sure, and my odds of killing the tank are pretty much zero. Even if Russian ERA worked as well as they claimed against sabots (which is another eeeeh conversation), I'd still feel safer firing a sabot as it stands a better chance of finishing the fight. On the other end of the stick, if I was using T-90s to face down Abrams, I would: 1. On the defense, select terrain that set my engagement areas at sub 1000 meter ranges, or if that was not possible, I would keep the tanks turret down, keep a scout/FO team observering the approach, then initiate with artillery and massed tank fire once the lethality gap was closed 2. On the offense is trickier. I would still lead with artillery if possible to suppress the tank. Again the optimal engagement is the sub-1000 meter range, so closing using terrain is usually a good idea. Also massing on part of the defense would be clever.

Oh I'm aware. I'm just being generous.

I'm operating under the theory that it is a modernized version of my screen name. Cabbage goes in, chemical weapons come out.

No. Hypersonic drones are still something that's closer to 2020-2025. The use of SOF in the middle east has less to do with "this is force projection!" and more to do with "This is force projection when we don't want a large western ground presence and we're trying to train the locals to do the heavy lifting" If Ukraine was getting hot and heavy SOF may show up, but things are going to involve a lot more heavy metal as it is.

Drive under your average American highway overpass/underpass and that's about spot on. Truck size is one of those universal logistical constraints, so they're all pretty much within a pretty narrow spectrum of height. In terms of composition, 100% your most common devices were simply some manner of explosive projectile, wired to a remote detonator until we found ways to deal with those (then it turned to command wire, and later various improvised pressure plates/IR triggers). Your projectile size varied, but 122 MM, 152 MM given their common status in the old Iraq Army were very common, as were various tank shells. Occasionally you'd see odd stuff (aircraft bombs) or old stuff (mortar rounds the insurgents didn't trust to shoot often became anti-personnel IEDs, or even simply decoy/distraction elements to draw attention from a larger device), but rest assured, if the Soviets sold some manner of HE device to the Iraqis, there's examples of it being used as an IED. Either way Apocal's comment is about right, those sort of fragmentation devices murdered externally stored coolers and baggage, spiderwebbed armored glass, but generally even fairly modest standoff was enough for heavier vehicles to just out and out shrug off if the IED was based around fragmentation effects, even from above. And that's cool and all, but it's like, I was an armor officer for eight years, but I could not tell you much at all about setting up an artillery PAA despite it being something related to my job field. You're talking about a lot of anti-tank systems, but they're all ones involving pretty massive, or very focused AT warheads. Additionally you've never really cleared up what you did with said systems, but from your other stories it sounds like you were not part of the warhead team, which is to say you might be able to tell us lots about an ATGM as a system, but in terms of specific anti-tank effects, you might not be as good as someone who has exposure to both tanks and at least access to some understanding of how said tanks deal with certain weapons effects. I concur with this statement.

I think he's coming onto me. This makes me very uncomfortable. Interesting idea. That said no. Your average tank engagement range will favor the gun round. Russian anti-robot plans are actually pretty well documented. In terms of how they'd react to an APS based enemy, again if there was something showing a pattern of thought away from the forum, cool, got it. On the other hand if we start backseat tanking everything, we start wandering into trying to figure out how TOWs would be employed in an APS environment, and we're seeing less "this is a reasonable guess at how a tank crew behaves" and more "this is how the forum thinks a crew should behave"

Re: WP It had to do with causing the ventilation system on the target tank to ingest the special happy fun super-thick smoke WP produces. Given the nature of fires in tanks, the decision cycle to bail out of the tank is usually truncated without the proper inquiry to if the outside of the tank is the on fire part or not. Also a hit going off on the frontal slope would totally ruin whatever aim the German tank had, crew evacuation our not. Re: Oh god why are we still talking about this There's two separate issues to discuss: Why airbursts are not the tank eliminator, and why replicating tactics that don't exist based on internet warrior ideas is bad. a. As stated, the impact of a PD fused weapon on the tank apparently is not able to knock out a tank. This is pretty well established, and agreed on. The question is however, why a much smaller explosive charge exploding away from the vehicle will result in anything but inferior effects. Here's some things to consider: 1. The Precision type artillery rounds (which have much larger warheads and destructive potential than the HE type tank rounds) have all been tested, and indeed to some degree designed to be capable against armor type targets. None of them use this apparently tank blinding/crushing/better than PD airburst attack. They all point detonate because people who are still paid to do these things have determined point, or point delayed type fuze are the only rounds that really are worthwhile shooting at tank type targets. 2. VT can be set for different altitudes. If airburst is a highly lethal tank maimer, why are anti-vehicle missions still this inferior PD system? 3. Abrams especially has been hit by close airburst analogs. In Iraq for a time the insurgents were strapping IEDs to overpasses because Jubul Al Kettlar or something told them it would render the tank a mission kill. In practice it shredded topside gear, but did not effect the tank significantly. It was a different story with truck type targets obviously, but outside of EFPs, massive IEDs (like aviation bomb derived ones), and RPG-29 from flank/top shots, there wasn't much that was reliable against M1s. Either way as a tangent, we all place way too much emphasis on max range standoff shoots. It's not a realistic representation of engagements, and even further down the road, engagement with marginal tactics at long range is....dumb. The better tactic is to use what you have to force the enemy to fight at your optimal range, rather than trying to figure out if you strap enough tinfoil to a AT-14, it'll convince the APS sensors that it's actually a low flying commercial jetliner (Which of course subjects it to BUK intercept) b. Making up tactics that troops might, or might not try based upon backseat quarterback opinions from the internet is questionable. If the Russian manuals advocated a airburst over the tank and a sabot chaser, then bam, should be in the game, but we go down a slippery slope when we start including behaviors based on player "if I was a tankman!" ideas. We're playing this game to see broadly realistic behavior, not what forum user #120 would do if he was a T-90 commander.

I'm just going to keep it short and say: No. You'll stand an okay chance at inflicting some damage to the CROWS, simply because it's a lot of not especially well armored stuff, loader's M240 too maybe. Hatches can take that, and the GPS/CITV (GPS ironically by both armor, and the fact the CROW itself is bolted on top of it) are pretty well proofed against airbursts, even pretty weak near ones. Some of the anenntas might get mauled, I think the radio ones unless it's a direct hit on the mount ought to be fine, but the sat stuff is not especially protected from the top for obvious reasons. On the other hand because you need to lase the target to get that first shot in, you've likely alerted the Abrams, and he's now trying to murder you with a round that does have high lethality. If near airbursts were: Things like the US STAFF round, or other AT weapons that rely on overflight wouldn't require such precision to achieve effects. As the case is the maturation of airburst is a good reason to have another go at STAFF....but airbursting a fairly small charge is not going to do it.

Which is sort of ironic when you think about it. In general there's just not much reason to bring back the T-80 though. In the wider sense as we look at all 80's vintage tanks, they have mostly become more or less things in which we hang more modern equipment on until they're sufficiently new to make it another 5-10 years. And looking at the state of the T-80 fleet, and comparing it to the T-72/90 branch, effectively the only way the T-80 becomes economical: 1. Simply any tank will do, the Germans have already taken St Petersburg this time! 2. There's some inherent advantage to the T-80 that offsets the cost and difficulty of bringing sufficient numbers back to operational status. Neither one of these are true at the moment,and the various upgrades post 2000 or so have almost universally been oriented on the T-72/90 range, and there is money in cranking out more of those upgrades, even if the Russian government doesn't bite, there's still dozens of users for things that'll work on a T-72 or T-90, which underwrites a lot of the design of such systems, even if they're not entirely satisfactory for Russian models, interim designs are totally something that can be offered for export. There just isn't much to recommend putting more time and effort into the T-80 except in the absence of more modern T-72/90 platforms (as cited in the "receiving T-72Bs" example, although that says interesting things about the ability of the Russian military to arm itself, and the level of politics in hardware).

Re: 200-500 meters I think he's quoting max lethal effects range, or basically the distance at which fragmentation effects become entirely safe. If it was possible to get such results from 3 KG of explosives and a special fuze, we'd be seeing a lot more flipping out about this/single artillery shells sweeping 4 KM clear of all life

Of course. Is impossible tank of massive expense, weight, and battlefield record of being pretty hard to kill is as good as advertised! Must be 'murica. Now let me tell you about this T-72 with fuzzy dice in the turret and how it's pretty much the king of murder mountain.

Again, narrow aperture optics, sweeping a frontal arc. You'll miss lots of things even with fairly advanced optics given you're only seeing so much of the battlefield at once. Simply having something in front of the vehicle doesn't ensure instantspot. Given that yankee imperialists have FLIR type optics for the commander, gunner, and even the driver, there's more, and more advanced optics covering the battlefield which makes it pretty reasonable they'll find targets faster. There's simply no logical reason less eyes, with less optics should be able to cover an area as well as more, and better "eyes." The occasional BMP shoots first instances cover the gunner being well oriented quite well. But again, just because someone is in front of the vehicle, it doesn't mean instantspot.

The T-80 sort of lost its chance to be what the late model T-72/T-90s are today. It was a handy thing to blame for terribad tank employment in Chechnya, had it rather than the T-72 been better loved it'd have seen more use, but barring some pretty outlandish circumstances, it looks likely to be simply the emblem of back when the Soviets were strong and the specter of global warfare seemed as close as it's been since 1945. Re: T-64 Yeah but it's not really...like the history of the T-34/Sherman/MK IV tanks was most relevant circa 1940ish-1955. After that point they're more or less relevant because they're a tank in places/services that lack other tanks, vs something that's notable because of its good performance. If you swapped the T-64 for similar vintage T-72s, or even very late model T-55 upgrades, the history would be more or less the same.

Thought there was an earlier round without DU but again not exactly my field of direct exposure. Either case is the modern US AP has DU.

Narp. I don't think the DU round is listed for sale and the earlier generation tungsten ones are quite common on the export market. Think its M791 in US use.

The first one is utlra-Dead. It went into development hell, and never came out after budget cuts. The second one I believe is a technology demonstrator for a ship to shore transporter, but isn't indented as a frontline vehicle (sort of like, a less landworthy version of the WW2 DUWK).