HerrTom
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Posts posted by HerrTom
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How do you mean? I use Photoshop to make the maps and if I ever feel inclined to add other information. Or are you talking about manipulating the screenshots? In which case all I do is crop them.
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Time for another adventure in Southern Ukraine! Best read while humming Strauss.
We return to the same AO at dusk the day of the invasion. The Russian advance has been amazingly swift. By the end of the first day, Kherson is already under threat of Russian forces. The Ukrainian defence is in shambles and is prepared to make another heroic stand at the small town of Prydniprovs'ke just to the west of Kherson.
From the briefing:
SITUATION
Thanks to the successful battle and crossing of the canals near Pryvitnoe by 2nd Battalion, we have been tasked with exploiting the gap in the Ukrainian lines.
We have one final barrier to cross before the total colapse of the Ukrainian defenses occurs on the southern flank: the river Dniepr. Ukrainian forces are dug in deep alon the major crossings near Kherson and 1st Battalion has encountered stiff resistance further north of us.
Intelligence has identified a weak spot by the town of Prydinprovs'ke. This will be a tough one, since there is only one bridge in the area. We'll have to force a river crossing. Thankfully, the Ukrainian units have only just arrived and not had time to dig in properly.
MISSION
Our job is to cross the Dniepr and move troops further north to further stress the fragile Ukrainian defense. Thus, we have two main objectives for this engagement:
1. Cross the river and penetrate the enemy lines and continue to Kherson
2. Eliminate the defenders on the river crossing for follow on forces to continue at speed
3. Minimize casualties. It should go without saying that sacrificing too many of our boys will reduce the effectiveness of our crossing, and no one wants to write those letters.
FRIENDLY FORCES
Our 2nd Battalion, 18 Motor Rifle Regiment has the following assets in the area:
- Reconnaisance platoon
- ATGM platoon
- Grenade launcher platoon
- 2 combined arms companies
- 3 platoons of BTR-82 mounted infantry (amphibious)
- 1 platoon of T-72B3 tanks
Support assets are as follows:
- 3 platoons of 2S3M2 152mm howitzers, a total of 18 guns on call for this crossing
- 1 platoon of 2S7M2 203mm howitzers, a total of 4 guns on call from the divisional resources. We're lucky to have these, so use them wisely.
- 1 flight of Mi-24PN gunships from frontal aviationENEMY FORCES
Enemy forces consist of elements of the 28 Mechanised Brigade that our sister battalion previously faced at Pryvitnoe. These guys are tough, so be careful!
PLAN
There are three crossing points that we have identified.
The first, and most dangerous is the bridge leading into Prydinprovs'ke. This is a long and wide open approach so should be considered only a last resort until the overlooking areas are cleared.
The second and primary crossing point is Landing Zone Boris, across from the Dachas at point Elena. The dachas provide decent cover for the approach to the river and point Boris is a fairly flat area also covered by trees.
The final crossing point is to Landing Zone Vasiliy. There is a narrow path up through the area, but it may be an unexpected direction.
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And finally, the map of the area:
Coming next, initial disposition, further briefing, and terrain reconnaissance. I also just realised that it is not highway E97 that leads here - bah, I'll fix it tomorrow
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2 hours ago, Chudacabra said:
Great DAR! Thanks for taking the time to make the scenario and document the game. Do you think you'll change the Ukrainian forces for the scenario? They seem to be pretty undergunned against so many Russians.
Seems I was able to trade fairly evenly with the Russians - my plan for improvements is to add more fortifications on the Ukrainian side of the canal and probably move reinforcements and the Su-24 flight to arrive sooner.
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Finally, after almost a year! Little happened the final few turns before I decided to throw the towel in. 2nd Company command was about to be assaulted by a whole platoon of BMP-3s and the few forces I had holed up in the forest were facing an entire company lined up in the treeline along the canal!
Final say:
Russian major victory - they licked me good and I doubt the extra company would be able to stand well against the Russians I let cross the river.
On the flip side - I disabled enough vehicles on the crossing that some of the heavy assets still haven't crossed over. In addition to the 6 tanks I destroyed, another 3 were immobilized. Two BMP-3s were also immobilized in the initial hostilities on the other side of the canal.
The final situation. There's a lot more red than I have blue. 2nd Company HQ is located with the FOs in the lower left corner, with their single BMP. The Russian platoon is exiting Pryvitnoe in the middle. That big clump in the upper middle is the company prepared to march across the field. In the upper left corner is the remains of 1st platoon and my only other operational BMP.
A couple of Russian tanks were still stranded on the other side of the bridge. Mines blocked one side and the other is an obstacle since I blew a BMP and later a truck attempting to cross it.
One of the immobilized tanks. Struck a mine, along with the BMP that's not smoking. Two of the dead BMPs were killed by my artillery fire and the final one by the T-64.
Overall, I think the Russians managed to cross two T-72B3s - one was knocked out by my RPG team in the last few minutes, and the other was sitting comfortably in the treeline.
Finally, the BMP company. Quite the intimidating sight, and I have no illusions about being able to stop them long enough for 3rd Company to arrive!
Cheers for the great game and comments! I hope to eventually figure out AI to the point where this could be a scenario beyond a devil of an H2H scenario. In the meantime, I think I'll have my own crossing the Dneipr DAR coming soon.
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19 minutes ago, Armorgunner said:
Before i read more of your post. What is NTC that you and the drunk/chiled ones speaking about all the time?
It's Fort Irwin in Nevada (National Training Center -NTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Irwin_National_Training_Center
A lot of large exercises happen there from ground training to the Red Flag aerial exercises.
Edit: sburke beat me, and Micheal almost did! Haha!
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Set off ultra high altitude nuclear explosions to fool the sensor that the stars aren't really where they are! And nuke the moon while you're at it. Just to show those Soviets we own it!
As far as I know they use inertial navigation corrected by celestial readings. They also have the advantage that their inertial sensors don't have to survive (and read) thousands of G's when they're shot out of a howitzer.
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11 hours ago, Apocal said:
Unintentional repeat? What was the other thing, besides the engine compartment?
Excalibur has INS as well and if it is anything like JDAM, the GPS set is effectively backup to the INS, not the other way around. In other words, if you spoof the GPS, the weapon just ignores it and goes pure INS.
2 hits to the CREW compartment! My bad!
INS isn't particularly accurate and if TFO is right about the 10m CEP with GPS guidance I'd be surprised if you could hit close to that purely inertially!
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32 minutes ago, Michael Emrys said:
I've been assuming that the Excaliber round is GPS guided (I think I read something to that effect a few years ago). Looks like I was right.
Michael
I imagine if you're talking about a range of a few meters - laser guided is going to be more accurate than GPS. The four meter figure from above is already impressive!
On 9/3/2017 at 0:09 AM, Michael Emrys said:But when the miss was close enough that the vehicle is sitting in a crater, I figure that it should be at least showing some critical damage, like an M-kill, with the crew abandoning it.
Definitely! A hit 4 meters away is going to absolutely ruin the road wheels (at least). I simulated an Abrams hit by a shell at about 4 meters, towards the engine compartment.
16 penetrations into the engine compartment (40mm RHAe) and 2 into the engine compartment. The road wheels and tracks took about 120 dangerous hits.
2 hours ago, rocketman said:Yes, in the case I stated above, tanks got their tracks and optics destroyed by near misses
Good to know the game matches what you'd expect!
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Still plugging away at this. Found an interesting tidbit while researching tinkering around with war simulations in MATLAB.
http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/v1n6.pdf
Pages 26-29 talk about tank loss rates from artillery fire in WWII. Through 7 cases studied, they found that an average of 12.8 percent (!) of tank losses were due to artillery fire. It's an interesting and short read.
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On 8/18/2017 at 6:27 AM, Rinaldi said:
A big thanks to Herr Tom for giving us an example of good vehicle fighting positions, which I use heavily.
Hah! I stole them from Ian, I think. I forget... One of these days I'll finish Road to Odessa. In the meantime it looks like you've given me something to distract me...
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Wow, Kino! Looks super modern! I wish I had the graphic design skill you have. I'll have to stick to just using your awesome UI when it's done.
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45 minutes ago, Michael Emrys said:
I used to use this tactic in playing TacOps which was depicting combat in the 1990s, before the Russians got thermals. If I was defending, which was most of the time in TacOps, I would put the smoke down in front of my positions so that the opfor would not achieve an early penetration of the smokescreen. If I were attacking, I would lay the smokescreen down in front of the opfor positions so that I would not penetrate it too early. As long as the screen held up, I was shooting fish in a barrel while invulnerable to counter fire.
Michael
I just read Steven Zaloga's Red Thrust: Attack on the Central Front, Soviet Tactics and Capabilities in the 1990s. In his third chapter "Tank Attack: The Charge at Pressbach" NATO does exactly this - a Soviet tank battalion attacks the small village of Pressbach expected demoralized German reservists but instead run into a company of M1A1s - The T-80Bs lack thermal sights and the defenders pop obscurants to degrade the Soviet capabilities and give those Commies a good wringing!
So it definitely isn't a new idea - the inklings of using smoke to degrade non-thermal equipped enemies by the very least were there in 1989!
(I also admit to doing that in TacOps, too! Though my experience there was that Zaloga was optimistic about the gap in capabilities!)
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The 82mm isn't quite the armor-shredder it may have appeared. If you land VERY close it can do some damage.
This is an airburst at 5 meters, 30 degrees in to aim the frags more or less directly at the BTR. 247 fragments hit the BTR, and 16 penetrated in this case. One of those may have jammed the turret, and a couple may have wounded passengers, though most missed vital areas of the vehicle. This is the best case scenario you can get for this shell, too. Spray is aimed right at the side armor, and the side armor is normal to the burst, making it very vulnerable.
Compare that to the ground burst, shell coming in at 30 degrees still, just hitting the ground. Here we have 8 penetrations from 330 hits! The armor is sloped from this angle and prevents many penetrations from occurring. Of those 8 penetrations, a number were also on the wheels, which likely would be relatively fine.
Where the 82 mm shell really shines is if it scores a direct hit on the BTR. Then it receives 1,500 hits with over 200 penetrations.
Good to know my 10mm estimate was not far from the truth here! I've been choosing the BTR as my target for this whole thread since it's relatively easy to analyse because of its relative homogeneity. Thanks for the info John!
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Thanks for the discussion everyone! Good to learn new things!
6 hours ago, c3k said:Fantastic!
Obviously, the armor thickness/hardness/angle you're using in the models are going to be important. If you include that information in your final results, well, hmm, I'm not sure if I'd have any other wishes.
Great stuff...especially the analysis of how the incoming artillery angle and offset at time of detonation makes such a critical difference in airburst effectiveness against armor. (Don't have the nose of the shell pointing at the target when the shell goes "boom"; better to have the target perpendicular to the shell's line of flight.)
Angle is all there - I calculate the normals of all the polygon faces in the model to get the "angle of attack" of the fragments. Thickness is the one that's currently 10mm all around for the BTR (which I think is fairly accurate specifically for the BTR).
1 hour ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:Just a thought, but wouldn't an average of armour thickness over broad areas suffice, I'm presuming this model does not take into account the variable mass of the fragments? This would add 'fuzz' to the numbers which might actually be advantageous for gaming?
Oh, I definitely take into account the variable mass of the fragments! That was one of my hardest-fought victories!
To shed some light on it - I use a couple of arrays of random numbers to figure out if there was a hit, and what the mass of the fragment was. Programmatically:
%%%% Figure out vertices that received a hit %%%%
% Roll a random number to check for hits
roll = rand(length(V),1);
% Ignore any rolls for angles of attack greater than 90 degrees!
roll(abs(incAngle) > pi/2) = 1;
% The probabilty of a hit is the density of fragments at the vertex scaled by the area of the vertex
probHit = fragDensTgt .* areaVert;%%%% Now we want the mass of each fragment that hit %%%%
% Convert the "number of fragments of greater mass" to a list of fragment numbers and their mass
listN = cumsum((NOverall));
% Roll a number from 1 to N_frags to figure out what fragment number would hit each vertex (V)
massRoll = rand(length(V),1) .* max(listN);
% Interpolate against the frag mass (mx,listN) list to figure out what the mass of the fragment was
% This is "fuzzed" in that I didn't pull an integer, and instead interpolated the fragment number
% I also extrapolate to prevent it from failing if it rolls a zero (which actually happened!)
fragMassTgt = interp1(listN,mx,massRoll,'linear','extrap');1 hour ago, Armorgunner said:What kind of hardnes of the armour are you using? From the 350 Bmp's Sweden bought in the the late, first half of the 90's. I know they had a high brinell hardness of 350-400 IIRC. Which is quite high. Makes the armour strong, but brittle. As a comparison, the Swedish PBV 302 had a brinell hardness of 250-270 IIRC. I know that soviet used high brinell hardness steel on their Apc/ifv's at the time of BMP/BTR/MT-LB.
That's good to know. I made the assumption of face-hardened steel, rather than high hardness steel or mild steel. I can't specifically set the hardness of the steel since the THOR equations for penetration take a set of coefficients that are curve fit to a specific steel. I'm limited to "high strength" "mild" and "face hardened" in addition to other metals like magnesium or aluminium.
1 hour ago, Armorgunner said:And I can add to that. That the armor on the BMP resisted the .50 AP bullets of the time, even in the side. We (Sweden) belived that the .50 should be able to penetrate the side armor. At weakspots it did of Course. But the armor was tougher than expected against smallarms, and HMG. But brittle when the limitation was met.
The BMPs do have much better armor than the BTRs do though. If I remember correctly the sides are protected by fuel tanks as well as the armor plating, all acting kind of like spaced armor. That's another pair of things I don't take into account with this model. To do spaced armor I'd probably have to do some raytracing or something which is a lot more complexity that I don't want to get myself into. After all, I'm not a programmer!
I might be able to generate a special set of coefficients to use from a curve fit of various spaced armor geometries...
It's worth mentioning at this point that the model as it stands is far from being real-time enough to use, for example, in black sea. It could be significantly sped up if a lot of the tables I generated were simply presaved and read in when needed, but it's still pretty slow. Some of the slowness comes from poor programming on my part, I'm sure, as well as making the plots and things. But it still takes 2.99 seconds to run - too slow even if a CS person could probably speed it up 10x.
But never fear! I do intend on simplifying or building a schematic algorithm that would easily work real-time. We'll lose a lot of specifically simulated detail in the armor facet angles and all these other goodies, but I think we'll all be happy if we can get a reasonable result and still be able to play a game! My plan is to devolve everything into relatively small look up tables and interpolate along the surfaces - including turning a vehicle into a few numbers describing its resistance at certain angles. If I can make it so that we only have to look up a few things at once I'll be happy!
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And the work continues... I've added a couple of cool features to the 3d code:
I draw the fragment velocity plot around the burst point so we can get a better idea of where the fragments are heading.
I also made the arrow a bit more visible and introduced rotations in addition to the translations that I am able to do when I load in the model. This means I can rotate the model any which way I want when I load it in! I also rotate the shell impact along the Y axis when I do the penetration model to make it easier for me to play around with it after I've loaded in the model.
One of the things I really want to do in the future is introduce variable armor thickness - something which I'm not quite at yet. The only way I see to do it right now is to manually input each of the several thousand vertices an armor value... which I'm not inclined to do right now!
I also vectorised some code and it now runs 50% faster! It's amazing how much faster things are when you do them once rather than a few thousand times! This doesn't affect you guys all that much but it made me happy - some of the things you can't think could be done in parallel really can! My tuition for becoming an engineer is paying off! Oh, wait... that's my job...
Anyway, here's the result of the recent "build" of the target simulation:
This kills the BTR. Transparent so you can see just how screwed the BTR is.
And an airburst angled perfectly. Those 152's will get you if you're close up!
Edit: Forgot the other half of that one:
The picture drastically changes if the shell comes in from the other direction. Only 4 penetrations here compared to 101 from the previous one.
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Quick little teaser before I head to work:
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Another teaser of the 3d representation as I continue to work it:
I'm a little limited by the quality of the model I have for the BTR right now. I might work on getting a better one with more polygons.
I'm trying to create a geometry-based roll on penetration chances so I can integrate over the entire surface of the vehicle to get essentially a number of penetrations based on an arbitrary impact point for the shell.
... And this includes airbursts! One of the real points of contention:
Anyway, I'll try to answer any questions as best as I can and will otherwise keep you all posted!
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I use Imgur too.
I insert images one of two ways
1. I'm lazy and "copy image address" from the image on imgur and paste it here. The forum software converts it to an image embed automagically.
2. I'm not lazy and "copy image address" from the image on imgur and insert an "h" "l" [Lima] "m" or "s" at the end of the filename to use the thumbnail.
E.g. "http://i.imgur.com/NwQOIk6.png" pasted will automatically turn into an embedded full-size image hotlinked to Imgur.
http://i.imgur.com/NwQOIk6h.png displays a huge thumbnail, while http://i.imgur.com/NwQOIk6m.png shows a medium thumbnail. I can then edit it in the editor here to link to the full res image like the first link
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6 hours ago, cool breeze said:
I think that if BFC does ever change the artillery/tank and especially airburst/tank relationship, at this point they probably owe HerrTom a line in the credits and at least a free copy of the next game
Its amazing how close your results were to the test.
I wouldn't complain haha! I think @TheForwardObserver would deserve one too, for without him I wouldn't have even thought to do this.
Thanks for the kind words, though. I haven't forgotten about this! Just got a bit busy what with work and dogs and a different personal project in translating portions of a Soviet textbook.
A little teaser of the next module I'm working on to better present the data I've assembled:
And, perhaps the best way to compile all of this thread in an easy-to-read way (still very WIP)
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5 hours ago, Erwin said:
You are forgetting the density of population. 18.68 million in LA area!
The freeways and main arteries in LA are already the most jammed up in the world. Add panic and you can forget about driving anywhere. Sure... some may know backroads thru the mountains with a 4x4. But that won't help much.
Oh god 101 and 405 kill me every day. And probably literally to others... I feel like one has to spend a few days in LA to truly grasp how bad the traffic is. Depending on the time of day, certain areas of the city are completely inaccessible due to car accidents and traffic.
Combine all of that with panic and more car accidents and congestion and it's going to be a bad day - even if no real attack takes place I could easily see thousands of casualties from the panic alone on the roadways.
Not to mention that LA has no resources to speak of to actually keep its citizens alive if the vast infrastructure bringing basic needs in from outside.
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On 6/24/2017 at 7:23 PM, John Kettler said:
Herr Tom,
Great image. Looks like the depiction of air power has improved dramatically. Almost missed the addition.
If only! The helicopters are post-processed, as it were. I'm glad my photo trickery was good enough to fool you though!
@Sophist_13 that looks more like Call of Duty than CM - in a good way! Wonderfully dynamic!
Also @Kaunitz beautiful editing, and I like the explosions!
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Thanks! First real map in Combat Mission, too. Got a bit lazy and I still need to figure out how AI programming works. Hell if I know right now
0826
Enemy artillery lands nearby the surprisingly unspotted artillery observation vehicle and the remains of 1st Company. Beyond that, all is quiet on the western front...
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I have always been amazed at the variety and utility in mat'. You can get a hell of a lot more creative than in English or German. For the latter we have to rely on precision engineered dry wit!
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I agree with the common codebase. We have a fair number of modules in WWII - BN, FI, FB, and RT. Having them all under one hood would be immensely nice. Not just for the crosstalk (Unthinkable, much?) but also for the footprint - don't have to duplicate textures and models 4x between modules.
CAS (mis)representation
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
To add, I don't believe Soviet or Russian doctrine ever really emphasized CAS missions. That was a job for artillery or helicopters which can pick their own targets. Fixed wing aviation was for strike, escort and interception missions.