Artkin

Incredible! Just incredible work!
Yesterday I completed all but the flavor objects for my Bénouville-Ranville master map. It now includes Blainville-sur-Orne, Bénouville, Le Port, Ranville, Le Bas de Ranville, Le Haut de Ranville, Longueville, Hérouvillette, le Lieu Haras, Le Home, Le Mariquet and the ring contour. That will allow me to attempt to recreated the situations of the British Oxf & Bucks 6th Airlanding Bde as well as those of the 7th, 12th and 13th Para Bns, 5th Parachute Bde.  It does not go south far enough to capture the action of the Ulster Rifles who on D+1 moved beyond the ring contour to Longueval (note the difference LongueVILLE vs LongueVAL) and got engaged with the Germans to the SE in St. Honorine. While this would make very intersting game play, it would mean expanding the map even more and right now my computer can barely manage my current map before even adding any troops.
Likewise the area and operations to the north that involved the British 3rd Para Bde and the Canadian 1st Para Bn (sorry boys) are not covered.'
With Kohlenklau's creation of the Horsa glider for my project, this is now a collaborative project by the two authors, 'WimO and Kohlenklau'.. Three cheers.
In the meantime I have added another Benouville building skin - the 1909 building.

Alrighty Mr. Wim, the Horsa Glider proceeds as usual for my Blender projects. Some areas I have capability to edit and "fix" and other areas are beyond my amateur skill level.
I used the British Bedford QLD GS truck as our host for the Horsa. I made a modtagged silhouette. I have edited the 3D model so the truck crew is up front as the pilots. You can if you want mod their helmets and uniforms to look more historical. The troops are in the glider having a smoke.
My memory failed me as usual and an immobilized truck cannot be an ammo dump.
There are a few "work-arounds" and you as the purchaser ($$$  ) can decide.
OPTION A is the gliders(trucks) status is purchased/edited as OK. So these gliders are not immobilized. To keep the driver AI from trying to avoid enemy fire by driving the glider (truck), you CAN play with heavy forest at the spot where they are initially deployed. (That might be a hassle with your Rembrandtian maps, I dunno). This did stop the movement. The Germans gain LOS to and fire at the gliders and some explosions and fire can occur and the gliders can be destroyed. Kind of cool.
OPTION B is you could go with immobilized gliders and the troops can no longer get into the glider and you no longer see the silhouette but you could purchase another unit of some other truck and set it as dismounted in the editor, deploy near the Horsa and it turns into an ammo crate flavor object that can be acquired by the troops. They would seem to be "near" the Horsa getting ammo.
EDIT: along with OPTION A or OPTION B, you might want to sprinkle some "inert" Horsa glider flavor objects on your map. These I will be trying to look crashed and damaged in a few ways. Nose wheel gone and maybe a wing ripped back a bit. I dunno. And maybe the ugliest situation of the upside down belly up crashed total write off.
Oh, note that in Option A above, you CAN purchase and set some glider (truck) status to burning or destroyed. The appearance is normal with no damage but you could deploy them into a wall or at an angle in a ditch.
@WimO Let me know your thoughts! By PM or whatever way...

 

I downloaded a free 3D model and the author is Mr Helijah. https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/airspeed-horsa-7febf28fb92a4189b71dd3796af78c51
It needed massive changes in Blender to get it to show as a flavor flave object. Just so you don't think it was plug n play 5 minutes.
Maybe 3 hours work I did renaming and editing. AND I still have a few things to fix.


 

No, I had to do the substitution and also substitute a 4th squad in my German platoons for my 1942 TOE. 
When will BFC get to 1942? Never? Give us mod support. 
Moving to CMx3? Give us mod support. 

Add it to CMBS!

I will soon be the proud owner of an RAF aerial recon photo from May 1940. Should I put it in a frame by my bedside?
The scenario presses nicely forward. The book "The Flames of Calais" should be here Monday. It has about 8 pages describing this action. I will examine every word.
Meanwhile, my German aufklarungs gruppe takes shape from my imagination.

 
 

About partially buried buildings. It is an  artifact of how buildings are placed on a sloping terrain. The building  floor always defaults to the lowest point of terrain with which it is in contact. This includes corner to corner contact with surrounding terrain tiles. The scenario designer can often, but not always, do a workaround by altering the elevation of each terrain tile that a buildings stands on or in in contact with, to the same elevation. This is what I usually do. However, as mentioned above, it is not always possible, notably on slopes with rapidly changing elevation. The problem is more challenging with diagonally positioned buildings because there are in contact with more terrain tiles.  Given that CM's map features are based on lego-like squares and map building is like working with lego blocks, I doubt that the issue will get any easier. In large measure it's up to the scenario designers to deal with it or ignore it.
By the way, you can fix this yourself too. Do you see a building whose submergence you don't like? Open the scenario in the Editor, go into the Elevation menu and level the buildings floor and surrounds.. Et Voila! 

Indepth article from a group of military analysts who spent time recently on the front lines. Quite specific takeaways from the larger article are below, in case you don’t want to read the full piece. Perhaps not as optimistic in tone as many posts, but good grist for the mill:
Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow with the Institute for International Strategic Studies and the Center for New American Security, says after his visit to Ukraine it's clear the country is struggling with how to employ its forces.…Gady visited Ukraine with a group including Konrad Muzyka, an independent defense analyst focusing on Russia and Belarus and director of Rochan Consulting; Rob Lee, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment and Principal Research Scientist, CNA.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/a-sobering-analysis-of-ukraines-counteroffensive-from-the-front
1.) By and large this is an infantryman’s fight (squad, platoon and company level) supported by artillery along most of the frontline. This has several implications.
1st: Progress is measured by yards/meters and not km/miles given reduced mobility. 
2nd: Mechanized formations are rarely deployed due to lack of enablers for maneuver. This includes insufficient quantities of de-mining equipment, air defenses, ATGMs etc. 
2.) Ukrainian forces have still not mastered combined arms operations at scale. Operations are more sequential than synchronized. This creates various problems for the offense and IMO [in my opinion] is the main cause for slow progress. 
3.) Ukrainian forces by default have switched to a strategy of attrition relying on sequential fires rather than maneuver. This is the reason why cluster munitions are critical to extend current fire rates into the fall: weakening Russian defenses to a degree that enables maneuver. 
4.) Minefields are a problem as most observers know. They confine maneuver space and slow advances. But much more impactful than the minefields per se on Ukraine’s ability to break through Russian defenses is Ukraine's inability to conduct complex combined arms operations at scale. Lack of a comprehensive combined arms approach at scale makes Ukrainian forces more vulnerable to Russian ATGMs, artillery etc. while advancing. So it's not just about equipment. There’s simply no systematic pulling apart of the Russian defensive system that I could observe. 
5.) The character of this offensive will only likely change if there is a more systematic approach to breaking through Russian defenses, perhaps paired with or causing a severe degradation of Russian morale, that will lead to a sudden or gradual collapse of Russian defenses. Absent a sudden collapse of Russian defenses, I suspect this will remain a bloody attritional fight with reserve units being fed in incrementally in the coming weeks and months. 
6.) There is limited evidence of a systematic deep battle that methodically degrades Russian C2 [command and control]/munitions. Despite rationing on the Russian side, ammunition is available and Russians appear to have fairly good battlefield ISR [information, surveillance, reconnaissance] coverage. 
Russians also had no need to deploy operational reserves yet to fend off Ukrainian attacks. There is also evidence of reduced impact of HIMARS strikes due to effective Russian countermeasures. (This is important to keep in mind regarding any potential tactical impact of delivery of ATACMs [U.S.-produced Army Tactical Missile System]).
Russian forces, even if severely degraded and lacking ammo, are likely capable of delaying, containing or repulsing individual platoon or company-sized Ukrainian advances unless these attacks are better coordinated and synchronized along the broader frontline. 
7.) Quality of Russian forces varies. Attrition is hitting them hard but they are defending their positions well, according to Ukrainians we spoke to. They have been quite adaptable at the tactical level and are broadly defending according to Soviet/Russian doctrine. 
8.) Russian artillery rationing is real and happening. Ukraine has established fire superiority in tube artillery while Russia retains superiority in MRLSs in the South. Localized fire superiority in some calibers alone does not suffice, however, to break through Russian defenses. 
9.) An additional influx of weapons systems (e.g., ATACMs, air defense systems, MBTs, IFVs etc.) while important to sustain the war effort, will likely not have a decisive tactical impact without adaptation and more effective integration. 
Ukraine will have to better synchronize and adapt current tactics, without which western equipment will not prove tactically decisive in the long run. This is happening but it is slow work in progress. (Most NATO-style militaries would struggle with this even more than the Ukrainians IMO). 
10.) The above is also true for breaching operations. Additional mine clearing equipment is needed and will be helpful (especially man-portable mine-clearing systems) but not decisive without better integration of fire and maneuver at scale. 
Again, I cannot emphasize enough how difficult this is to pull off in wartime.
Monocausal explanations for failure (like lack of de-mining equipment) do not reflect reality. E.g., some Ukrainian assaults were stopped by Russian ATGMs even before reaching the 1st Russian minefield. 
11.) There is a dearth of artillery barrels that is difficult to address given production rates and delivery timelines.
12.) So far Ukraine’s approach in this counteroffensive has been first and foremost direct assaults on Russian positions supported by a rudimentary deep battle approach. And no, these direct assaults are not mere probing attacks. 
13.) There is evidence of tactical cyber operations supporting closing of kinetic kill-chains. That is cyber ISR contributing to identifying and tracking targets on the battlefield. Starlink remains absolutely key for Ukrainian command and control.
14.) Quality of Ukrainian officers and NCOs we met appears excellent and morale remains high. However, there are some force quality issues emerging with less able bodied and older men called up for service now. 
15.) The narrative that Ukrainian progress thus far is slow just because of a lack of weapons deliveries and support is monocausal and is not shared by those we spoke to actually fighting and exercising command on the frontline. 
16.) It goes without saying that in a war of attrition, more artillery ammunition and hardware is always needed and needs to be steadily supplied. Western support of Ukraine certainly should continue as there is still the prospect that the counteroffensive will make gains. But soldiers fighting on the frontline we spoke to are all too aware that lack of progress is often more due to force employment, poor tactics, lack of coordination between units, bureaucratic red tape/infighting, Soviet style thinking etc. ... and Russians putting up stiff resistance. 
We asked Gady to drill a little deeper into a couple of the points he made.
On Tuesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told reporters that the U.S. and allies have trained 17 brigade combat teams - 63,000 Ukrainian troops - in combined arms maneuver. More are in the pipeline.
But Ukraine is having trouble on the battlefield executing those coordinated maneuvers on a large scale because of the compressed training timelines while facing off against “one of the world’s most powerful militaries,” Gady told us.
Ukraine “is probably doing a lot of combined arms operations at smaller-unit levels, but I think it needs to scale this up,” he said. 
The U.S. is "probably expecting some sort of results with all the aid and the military hardware that it has provided," said Gady. "The basic idea here was to train Western-equipped mechanized arms brigades in combined arms maneuver. I think this approach has had some setbacks. I'm not sure that it has been a failure across the board. I think it just requires a more concerted effort."
Gady however was quick to emphasize that “no Western type of military can really do this sort of combined arms operations at scale, with the exception of the United States. But even the United States Armed Forces would have a very difficult time breaking through these defensive layers because no Western military in the world currently has any experience in breaching the types of defenses in depth that the Russians put up, in the south and east of Ukraine.”

Really good talk about how Active Defense came to be & why it was replaced with Air Land Battle. 
H

A couple of recent related podcast episodes:
John Spencer is joined by retired Maj. Gen. Yom Tov Tamir. He served a long career in the Israel Defense Forces as an armor officer holding positions from tank commander to division commander. In 1973, he was an armor battalion commander during the Yom Kippur War. In part one of the conversations, he reflects on his career as an armor officer from a secret trip to Germany in 1964 to learn about American tanks, through his service in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the Yom Kippur War. The discussion lays the foundation for part two, which covers the role of tanks in urban warfare, including drawing lessons from the 1973 Battle of Suez City.

Going to upload two versions of the my expanded Tonga master map today. One is without any flavour objects except cemetery gravestones in the two church yards. The other includes thousands of flavour objects and thousands more Rommel's asparagus. In fact, I stopped placing the latter imagining that Todt had a work in progress. The map is very tasking on my computer with a few minutes to load. The map without flavor objects should be a quicker load and will allow you, the user, to cut it up in the Scenario Editor to make smaller maps without the crazy random redeployment of flavour objects.
When I started the Operation Tonga Map I intended only to improve the historical accuracy of three existing CM scenarios and focus solely on the British Airlanding assault on the Bénouville bridge. Almost immediately it grew to include both bridges of Operation Deadstick, the Bénouville bridge across the Canal de Caen and the "pont tournant" across the Orne.
When I researched the historical events, I decided that this was not going to be a very interesting scenario due to the overwhelming force that the Brits were able to bring to bear (5:1 + surprise). Most of the under-strength German platoon were asleep and its commander was at a dinner party in Ranville.
Only one active MMG was encountered and a second captured fully supplied but unmanned as was also the old French A/Tk gun in the Tobruk. At the pont tournant, there was only brief resistance by a single German with a Schmeiser. Others were seen to be running away. Again, not much of a game.
Having already spent too much time on the map I thought that perhaps a short campaign might create some interest since there was a game-worthy small action in the south edge of Bénouville involving 7th Para. Apart from that there was only minor skirmishing and sniping around the buildings near the Bénouville bridge and in Le Port.
I found that the Brit. 12th Para Bn had a busier time in and around Le Bas de Ranville and the ring contour, sufficient to create another scenario or two. This required extending the map further south and east and that would also bring in the Brit. 13th para. This would also bring into play another small action.
The largest actions were fought in areas off-map. One to south-east in Longueval and Ste. Honorine started on D+1 that involved the Royal Ulster Rifles who had moved up from Sword Beach the night before and not any airborne elements. The most intense battles occurred north-west when the Germans attempted to punch through and  the Brits and Canadians to close, the Bréville gap.
Overall the situation does not lend itself very well to a campaign format for a variety of reasons; the size of the area, the large number of battalions crammed into the space and diverse actions all over the map in all directions. I think maybe a series of individual scenarios captures it best. Maybe two very short (two scenario) campaigns. The situation is too large for CMBN and breaking it into pieces just does not tell the coherent story. Taking a pause to read and think.

Oh lets not exclude the King...lol

Mandatory.

For the dirty half-dozen who follow my half-baked efforts, I report that I just had a damn fun time acting out the "Green Jacket's Bridge" scenario using CMRT. I played it hot seat versus myself. It had an awesome BEF1940 vibe to it. A few Russian voices leaked in and I figured out that I have that Red Orchestra R.O. enhanced Russian voice pack in my z. I had moved it up front in my z thinking it would be overwritten as my bef1940 mod loaded but I guess R.O. probably has more file numbers. Lesson learned. 
I again used an "SMG filter" exit zone to drain off my SMG's from the Allied side. I think I ended up with just one Thompson SMG on the allied OOB held by the Troop Commander 2nd Lieutenant Barr. Uhhh, let's see. The officer won it in a poker game? Uhhh, he found it at the loading dock at Lester-sheister-sister-shire? Some semi-plausible reason.  The Brens were firing away and a Vickers as well. The 2 Boys and Girls ATR's didn't nail any of the German AFV's in my test. The 2" mortars were firing away nicely. 
I will continue with the mods associated with this project and also continue polishing the scenario. Maybe next is a play against a buddy in PBEM. If I ever do an AI plan it would just be for the German attack I guess.
I have asked for a quote from the UK air recon website out of Edinburgh for an aerial photo from May of 1940 that covers Les Attaques. My current CM map is based on GE google earth and old photos and just looking in GE to see what looks newer and would not be there in 1940. I also found a cheap used book about the battle. It is on the way. The guy who wrote it survived the battle but was assassinated by the IRA years later. Not a political comment, just a sad fact.
 
 
 

Nove village - 11 km south from Robotyne. JDAM hit ?
 

Two days ago the video is appeared as Slovenian M-55S was "destroyed or taken out" by direct hit of Krasnopol guided shell. It's turned out the tank survived, and even saved capability of driving. The shell hit in the gunner's sight and beat in a piece of top turret armor. On the video the damage and burning marks can be seen
So, not each HE shell hit is 100 % destroying of the tank. Top turret armor can in some cases resist to HE shells, but if this shell hit engine compartment from the top, the tank would be at least heavy damaged. Original T-55 has 30 mm of turret's top armor thickness

 

What a day. I hopped to various chores and back to blender many times with many failures. But as usual I did have an idea and I successfully got it into the game. The animation of how the soldier holds the weapon is not exactly historical. I don't know how to swap that without messing up something else. Screenshot of work in progress for the texture uv mapping...
Boys ATR for CMRT BEF 1940 Mod

 
 

The other option would be to break down the campaign into scenarios with uncam and then you could replace the units in each scenario.
It wouldn't be a campaign, you'd have to manually enter the remaining forces from each scenario into the next one.

This is the technology behind it. It's actually quite simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsejet

Hello,
for those who are curiously awaiting the release. Like I am. Two links which I find interesting about the topic Mogilev 1944.
https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ops/mogilevskaya-nastupatelnaya-operatsiya-operatsiya-5-go-udara/
https://luftbild.1871.by/overlay/mogilev/#lat=53.9003&lng=30.3333&zoom=15
Regards,
M.Herm
 

It aint changed too much!


Required forces:
Squads: A:7.0 😧5.0 AFVs: A:5 PzKpfw IVA x 2
PzKpfw IIA x 3
  AFVs: D:3 Carrier B x 2
Carrier MMG A
30-cwt Lorry
  Guns: A:0 D:0 OML 2-in. Mortar
Boys ATR  

 
 
 
 

Trying to bring in the British Boys ATR in place of the Soviet ATR.

Credit: 3D model by TastyTony at SketchFab
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/low-poly-boys-anti-tank-rifle-f71a7d303dae410ab98db3d4b019ca7a
 

Fine not in Western Europe but they certainly would have been next. The point is that even peaceful and neutral countries are subject to random invasion by the Soviet Union. 

Besides.. you know... Finland and Romania
Oh right Poland too, forgot about them.
Oh yeah and the Baltics too.