Grey_Fox
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Posts posted by Grey_Fox
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18 hours ago, The_Capt said:
pre-WW1 clung to bayonets and the cult of the offensive.
Just a nitpick, but this is largely debunked. The main trench-clearing tools used by the British were bayonets and bombs (what we today would call hand grenades) due to the close-quarter nature of the fighting.
The "cult of the offensive" is also a myth. If you look at the RUSI archives, between 1905 and 1914 there is only 1 article about infantry maneuver warfare, written by JFC Fuller, who went on to pollute discourse on WW1 in the English language for the next 50+years.
Why was this? Because military institutions in the west very closely watched the events of the Russo-Japanese War, embedding observers on both sides, and saw what the next European war would look like. They spent the next decade trying to figure out how to fight trench warfare, to which there was no good answer until technology advanced enough and gave us aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at low levels.
So, military planners were faced with a terrible choice: attack as hard as possible before the enemy can dig in, or eat the casualties to kick them out of their defenses and prevent them from digging in again.
There were no better options as the technology simply didn't exist.
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6 hours ago, Artkin said:
enough said.
I have no idea what you're referring to, so I really do think you need to say more.
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7 hours ago, Sgt Joch said:
These are not modelled in the game, but would normally be outside the scope of a typical CM battle in any event.
155mm cluster is a battlefield munition and would be in the scope of CM.
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6 hours ago, Armorgunner said:
And now even several upparmored M2A2 ODS-SA Bradlys, and a Leo 2A6
I believe a number of those vehicles struck mines and ATGMs. Most of the vehicles looked relatively intact, and it looks like at least some have been recovered and are being repaired.
What I'm getting at is that immobilizing armoured vehicles with artillery already happens in CMBS.
There is some idea that shrapnel does less subsystem damage than perhaps it should, but I don't know about that.
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I'd say some of the top things are that:
1. They're going to try to kill people
2. At some point they're going to have to look a subordinate in the eye and give them an order that they and the subordinate know will probably end in their death.
3. How to help their subordinates continue in their duty despite the stresses they'll face.
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18 minutes ago, Dr.Fusselpulli said:
I really wonder how they were able to get the Russian equipment for the video? Did the Brits just had a bunch of BTR-60, T-62 and BMP-1 in their service? Even Hollywood movies had bad mock ups, but those vehicles are genuine. That really puzzles me.
They may have come from the Israelis after the 1973 war.
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3 hours ago, Casual_Insanity said:
This makes me wonder how the helicopter models work in the game, i could easily be wrong but it always seems like they attack from higher in the air than how they are portrayed in this film. Anyways its very interesting how close to the ground they were flying, some of the scenes from the WWIII books i have been reading make a bit more sense now.
The model used for aircraft doesn't seem to have changed from the WW2 games. They're still essentially P-47s doing gun runs, just with TOW missiles, Mavericks, Hellfires, and CBUs.
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1 hour ago, Centurian52 said:
Thank you for pointing this out.
I'm finally less than 24 hours away from catching up on this thread (or was when I started typing), and I hope that's good enough because I really do want to say a few things about the A-10.
Frankly, I just don't understand why people still think it's a good aircraft. What mission do people imagine it performing that an F-16 couldn't do better? Maybe it was a good aircraft in the 70s. But not today. Sure, it's far from useless. It has hard points, so it can carry missiles. And I'm sure someone will be able to find a use for any airframe that can still carry missiles. But that doesn't set it apart from any other aircraft.
Most of the meme culture around it seems to focus on the cannon, which really has me scratching my head. The cannon is basically useless. No one is getting close enough in any aircraft to make gun runs on a modern battlefield. Even if there are opportunities to use the cannon, the 20mm cannon on the F-16 can take out any target that the A-10's cannon can (neither are likely to take out a tank, both with shred IFVs (if they can somehow get close enough)).
People applaud its survivability. Why? Does anyone really believe that having a tough airframe will protect it against missiles? Being able to take a few hits from a cannon might have helped back when AA guns were the main threat. But against modern missiles? Even if it does manage to survive a hit from a missile (which may be about as likely as an M60 bouncing an APFSDS round, for all the CMCW players out there), wouldn't it be better to have an aircraft that can avoid getting hit in the first place? Don't over-focus on how few A-10s were shot down in the last few decades of operations. Few aircraft of any kind were shot down in the last few decades. Sure, only 5 or 6 A-10s were shot down in the 1991 Gulf War (disagreement between sources on whether it was 5 or 6). But remember that the Coalition only lost 52 fixed wing aircraft in that whole war. The A-10 accounts for 10% of those losses. More A-10s were lost than any other kind of Coalition aircraft (the source which listed 6 A-10s shot down also listed 5 Harriers (making it the 2nd most shot down), with the A-6E Intruder and F-16 tied at 3 each).
And it should be emphasized that flying low and slow is a bad thing. It was designed to fly low and slow because modern sensors didn't exist at the time it was designed. The Mk1 eyeball was the only way to spot ground targets, and that works best if it isn't too far from the ground and has plenty of time to look. But we have modern sensors and ground radar now. You can fly high and fast and still spot, identify, and accurately engage ground targets. Flying low and slow does nothing but make you vulnerable to everything.
Yeah, the whole argument is bonkers.
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1 hour ago, Pelican Pal said:
Vehicle heights are assigned per vehicle
I think this is the key, if what Steve said is accurate. It may correspond with driver/bow gunner, gunner, and commander. As it is vehicle-specific it would explain the differences in fields of view of the different vehicles.
It would also indicate that the T-84 may in fact have a bug, as @Millien has suggested.
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12 minutes ago, Pelican Pal said:
Your point seems to be that if losses are incurred then it can't be done which we've seen over the last year isn't true.
Thanks for editing in a real argument.
My point is not that they can't perform the mission with **zero** losses. That would be as stupid as claiming that tanks are obsolete because they can be killed by ATGMs.
My point is that they can't sustain the mission even when pitted against limited third world air defense systems consisting of MANPADs and AAA, and would perform far far worse against a peer who has a full blown IADS.
That's why the USAF keeps trying to kill the airframe and focus resources on effective platforms like the F-35.
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2 minutes ago, Pelican Pal said:
Just because you have high airframe losses doesn't mean you can't fly the mission
They didn't fly the missions after a few experiments. That's the entire point. They tried, saw that the couldn't sustain those missions, and stopped doing them pretty quickly.
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8 minutes ago, Pelican Pal said:
While I do think the A-10 has developed a cult of personality around it. I'm not sure I would describe the A-10s as a death trap. Looking here and Desert Storm saw 20 A-10 casualties with 6 being lost and 14 being damaged. That is significantly more than any other airframe but as far as I can find only two pilots were actually killed in combat with 3 being captured.
So while there are 20 airframe losses effective pilot losses amount to 25% of that. For any U.S. flown ship that is significant but Ukraine clearly is willing/must suffer higher loss rates. So, assuming they had the logistics tail (a very big assumption), flying a bunch of A-10s wouldn't necessarily be the worst even if airframe losses were high.You can't look at raw numbers without looking at how they were used. The A-10 is built around a great big cannon, and when they flew the sort of missions where they could use the cannon they tended to take a lot of damage from air defenses before being restricted to high altitude missions.
Ergo, the airframe can't be used for the mission it is designed to perform - low level CAS in contested airspace. Every time they try it, they take so much damage that they are told to perform safer missions that other airframes would probably be better at.
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6 hours ago, Kraft said:
The same could be said about the Su-25, yet it still flies on both sides daily combat missions a year+ into the war.
Have you seen the kind of missions they perform? They act as standoff missile trucks and are pretty much incapable of penetrating enemy air defenses.
The fact is that CAS missions are not being performed in Ukraine to any great extent because the environment is far too lethal.
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7 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
It would approach from below the long and medium range SAM envelope and would have to contest only with the MANPADS and AA guns. With plenty of flares and IR jamming pods, could work. Could help Ukrainians to use tons of iron bombs and unguided rocket pods which they have in storage.
This is the kind of mission that was attempted in 2003 Iraq, and which led to some A-10s being severely damaged before they were forbidden from low-level missions. They became missile trucks restricted to high altitude, and that's a mission damn near any airframe can perform.
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7 hours ago, Seminole said:
How do you reconcile it with the utilization and lack of loss in the Kosovo bombing campaign?
They were ordered to stay at high altitude. It was the same in 2003 after some got absolutely shredded by Iraqi air defenses early on in the invasion attempting the low-level missions they were designed to perform.
It's widely acknowledged that the Kosovo aerial campaign abjectly failed to degrade Serb forces in Kosovo, with only a few dozen armoured vehicles damaged or destroyed.
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5 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:
This is absolutely the reason. The Army LOVES the Hog (there’s nothing like a good”Brrrrrrt” for close air support, except USMC F/A-18 Super hornets), and the Air Force “Fighter Mafia” has been trying to get it cancelled and later obsoleted so they can use that funding for more “glamorous” and dazzling fighters. It has been a very public, bitter, and long running fight. The Hog does have some every strong Air Force, Army, and Congressional supporters though.
The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.
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7 hours ago, Artkin said:
Right but it has clear LOS.
From a fixed and arbitrary height, and not necessarily from where the optics are.
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23 hours ago, Artkin said:
So I ran a very quick test with sturms at 2km. They did well and spotted tanks almost instantly. Now, I put them inside "Tree A" and their spotting quickly suffers. They have good LOS and are unable to spot the tanks after 3 minutes. This is exactly how I had them set up when the "blob of us vehicles" was coming toward me. Since the shturms sights are low to the ground I didn't expect Tree A to have such a debilitating effect on spotting.
At the end of the range there are 3 pattons facing opposite my three shturms (I've yet to turn the pattons around and see what they see). one patton was killed already, you can see the smoke. This shturm has good LOS but is unable to see the pattons. I'll continue running the test scenario and see what happens. It's been a few minutes since I've restarted it and the shturms failed to see a single patton this time.
Flat grass tests only tell so much, IMO. And what you see apparently isn't what you get, still.
When have you seen a forest that didn't have a shedload of undergrowth and bushes?
We *know* that there is undergrowth modeled and abstracted away.
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25 minutes ago, Artkin said:
You're the first person I've ever heard this from. In my experience they're utterly useless at all times in CMCW
Were they opened-up?
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51 minutes ago, Pelican Pal said:
So here is probably the most pertinent post on the issue:
There are some additional posts in the thread so I recommend you read it. but they key points seem to be:
- Having multiple points of LOS generation (per crew member) is problematic- The game has issues with spotting routines when it comes to just sensors (i'd describe the CITV as a sensor)
My guess is that the Brad and Stryker are just getting the hull down concealment bonus applied to them but there isn't a system for a turret down concealment bonus so you can't do that. FWIW this used to be pretty common knowledge, or at least I recall it being fairly well known about a decade ago. There aren't any vehicles (that I know of) that you can go turret down in.
Good to hear that nothing has changed in 13 years, and that it's now 3 games that have the same issue not just 1.
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Following a round of testing done primarily by @Millien on the unofficial CM discord server (link in signature I believe), it appears that the CITV on an abrams is not drawn from the CROWS viewer:
Nor is the Primary Gunner's Sight used to draw line of sight from:
Instead, it appears that the line of sight for both the PGS and the CITV is drawn from the main gun barrel.
Additionally, the CITV does not provide a 270 degree field of view - instead it would appear to effectively act as a repeater for the gunner's thermal imager. Unless the turret is facing towards an enemy, the CITV does not appear to be used. Testing instructions are to use non-multispectral smoke between tank and hostiles, hostiles should be at a 90 degree angle, and wait.
As such, this would appear to throw into doubt the perceived wisdom that Abrams should be used turned-in to take advantage of the tank's thermal imagers.
Thanks to @Millien for performing the tests.
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2 minutes ago, Artkin said:
Wartime production T-34s having similar optics to a T-72 made in peacetime 39 years later?
Nah.
Also think hard - who are the additional two crew members? Lmfao they dont have optics do they?
T34/85 had a bow gunner and believe it or not the bow gunner has a pair of eyes that they can see out of. So that's 4 people looking out of a tank, versus 3 in a T-72.
Neither the t-34 nor the t-72 had thermal viewers or CITV, so yeah they're still limited to eyeballs and binoculars.
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10 hours ago, Artkin said:
Yep once I picked up CMCW I noted how t-34/85s spot better than the cold war tanks.
I even went bezerk complaining about the ridiculous spotting.
T34/85 has a crew of 5, T-72 has a crew of 3, and the technology difference in optics probably wouldn't have been that different.
CMCW for many cases is modern weapons (ATGMs, etcs) with WW2-era optics (mk.1 eyeball and binoculars).
Shall try to start an unofficial screenshots thread?
in Combat Mission Fortress Italy
Posted · Edited by Grey_Fox
Streaming Smokey's Challenge now: