Centurian52
-
Posts
1,190 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
2
Posts posted by Centurian52
-
-
16 hours ago, Halmbarte said:
It’s always disheartening to be up against T55s with M60A1s only to be outshot at range and then realize that the T55s have the strap on laser range finders.
Wait do the T-55s have laser range finders? I thought it was the T-62 (specifically the 1975 version) that had the laser range finder fitted (though I'd still expect the 1972 version to outshoot the M60A1 just because it has a higher velocity gun).
-
16 hours ago, Halmbarte said:
When did Chieftain get laser range finding?
According to Wikipedia (so, grain of salt) the first version of the Chieftain to be fitted with the Barr & Stroud TLS (Tank Laser Sight) was the Mk 3/3 in 1971.
So I'm guessing they will have laser rangefinders in the 1976-1982 timeframe that we're concerned with. That might put them on par with the M60A3 in terms of accuracy against stationary targets. No mention of automatic lead on the Wiki page, so probably not as accurate as the M60A3 against moving targets.
-
11 hours ago, danfrodo said:
So the chieftain gun not any better than the M60 gun? Maybe some experts here have some insight on this?
The L23 APFSDS doesn't enter service until after CMCW's timeframe. So the Chieftain is still using the L15 APDS, which doesn't outperform any of the M60's AP ammo except perhaps the M728 APDS round at some ranges. Still, a larger caliber means it can fire a bigger HE round. And the Chieftain has a HESH round, while the M60 (at least in-game) only has HEAT for anti-personnel work. So the Chieftain will not outperform the M60 in this timeframe in anti-armor work*. But it should be much more impressive when performing anti-fortification and anti-personnel work.
The gun itself is probably better than the M60's gun. But a gun by itself produces no effect. It's the gun + ammo that actually has an effect.
*Excepting that it may be more accurate than the M60A1. Certainly more accurate than the base M60A1, though I'm not sure if that still applies after the assorted RISE, RISE+, and RISE Passive upgrades.
-
This has already been discussed to death over the last two years. There is no doubt that plenty of people would buy it, myself included. But Battlefront, and their partners at Slitherine, have decided that it would almost certainly be a bad PR move. However we feel about it, the matter has been decided and there is no point in us discussing it further.
-
As a Combat Mission player I would have liked for them to release the module. But from a business perspective the decision not to release it was probably a sound one. In any case, it's hardly worth discussing since the key decisionmakers have already made up their minds. It's not like this subject hasn't already been beaten to death over the last two years.
-
Ok I've just gotta say it once. A lot of people all over the forums (I really don't want to imply I'm picking on you specifically @waffelmann) have been typing 'loose' when they mean 'lose'. There's loose, as in loose an arrow or loosen a knot. And there's lose, as in to lose your keys or lose a fight.
I tried so hard not to say anything, because it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. I really don't want to be the sort of person who goes around correcting everyone's spelling (that could only come around and backfire on me if I did, because god knows I make far worse spelling mistakes all the time). But this isn't the first time I had to reread a sentence because my inner voice read 'loos' the first time when the intended pronunciation was 'looz'.
-
An abstraction meant to eliminate some unrealistic edge cases, which has unfortunately created some new unrealistic edge cases. I recall Steve mentioning something about this sort of thing a long long time ago. Something about tail chasing?
-
1 minute ago, Sven said:
This discussion isn't about firing mortar rounds. It's about using their handheld weapons.
Sorry. I guess that's what I get for skimming through the bulk of the thread. In your fist post you mentioned your mortar team had four rounds left, which led me to believe you were trying to fire the mortar's HE rounds. But you can order the mortar team to fire using their carbines. You just need to pack up the mortar. The carbines still have a shorter range than rifles though, so it's possible that they still won't shoot if the enemy is too far away.
-
1 hour ago, PEB14 said:
I think to remember that mortar teams will not fire "offensively". I mean that they will fire only through TacAI, not by player's order.
But I'm absolutely not sure of that...
They will fire on the player's orders. I use mortar teams a lot to deal with HMG teams or ATGs (or just massed infantry behind cover) without bringing in an HQ or FO as a middle man.
-
I would like to see more of the French. I think Steve announced that the focus will be on the oddball forces, so possibly not a specific timeframe. And the French seem to have the most unique equipment of any of the oddball factions, with most of the other Allied armies using the same organization and equipment as either the British or Americans. Specifically I would be thrilled if there was a campaign dedicated specifically to the French actions around Cassino (the Polish actions around Cassino are also pretty interesting, but they are already represented in the Gustav Line module). I also think the Brazilians are pretty interesting. They're organized like the Americans, but without the Garand to carry them, making them possibly the most firepower challenged faction in any of the games.
-
I have five going right now. One CMFI, one CMCW, and three CMBN.
-
5 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:
I'm believe that this Trump Truth Social post, that Matt Gaetz appears to be misconstruing, is also very wrong on the facts:
I recall ISW pointing out a couple months ago that while the US is the largest single doner (and Ukraine does desperately need the US to resume donating), Europe overall has donated more than the US. I think it was something like $160-$170 billion.
-
4 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Any chance you actually looked at the the other refs:
This has been about a 20 year trend depending on how one measures "democracy". Your stated point was:
"I actually think the jury is in. Loads of countries other than the US are democracies. It's obvious at this point that there are much better implementations of democracy than the US system (downsides of being first). But almost universally, people living in democracies (including the US) are better off than people living in autocracies. Democracies do collapse and revert to autocracies (and it feels like the US is currently skirting the danger zone on that). But autocracies also collapse and become democracies. And so far it appears that autocracies collapse at a higher rate than democracies. The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization."
1. There is at best around 8 percent of the planet with true liberal democracies. And democracy is not in the majority by any stretch.
2. Democracies are not on the rise, they are in fact in decline and have been for some time. Liberal democracies have been on decline for nearly 20 years. Flawed democracies - like India and Pakistan - are also starting to decline.
More bluntly put...the data does not match your initial opinion/position - which now seems to have shifted to "sure we are in a decline but can recover as we have in the past".
Sure we might see a surge in democracies globally but likely not if the US continues a downward spiral. We definitely saw a Post-Cold War bump but the party appears to be over. This is why this war is an important test and has a lot at stake.
Yes, I did take a look at the other links. The part of my point that is in question here is "The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization". And I stand by that. I don't think a 20 year decline constitutes a trend in democratization any more than a one year decline represents a trend in the stock market. When you zoom out the overall trend is still clearly upwards.
-
And a quick follow up with an article talking about the recent dip in democratization.: https://ourworldindata.org/less-democratic
This bit seems to be the core of what the article is saying. I've added some bold.
QuoteDemocracy is in decline, whether we look at big changes in the number of democracies and the people living in them; at small changes in the extent of democratic rights; or at medium-sized changes in the number of, and people living in, countries that are autocratizing.2
The extent of this decline is substantial, but it is also uncertain and limited. We can see it clearly across democracy metrics: the world has fallen from all-time democratic highs to a level similar to earlier decades. But the extent of this decline depends on which democracy measure we use. And it is limited in the sense that the world remains much more democratic than it was even half a century ago.
Finally, the recent democratic decline is precedented, and past declines were reversed. The world underwent phases of autocratization in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people fought to turn the tide, and pushed democratic rights to unprecedented heights. We can do the same again.
-
3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
And on this one, the data really does not support:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-state-of-global-democracy-2022/
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-people-live-in-a-political-democracy-today/
Now taking a big picture we are definitely in an era of experimentation:
https://ourworldindata.org/democracy
But those lines are looking downward.
Alright, I had to restart my browser in order to open these links for some reason. I'm not seeing the downward lines you're referring to. In fact these all look pretty darn upwards to me. We are in the middle of a dip starting ~15 years ago. But dips and rises are pretty normal on any graph, and I don't think there's any reason to think that this one is any more significant than the dips in democratization at the end of the 19th century, in the 20s-40s, or in the 60s and 70s (anyone living in the 20s-40s with access to a similar graph really would have had good reason to be pessimistic about the future of democracy). My guess is that it'll continue going down for another decade or two and then either level off or start rising again, just like the last three dips. Let's check back on this in 20 years.
-
1 hour ago, Thewood1 said:
The tactical maps look an awful lot like Armored Brigade. With some overlays.
In the Operations Room video? Yeah, I suppose it does look a bit like Armored Brigade. Both The Operations Room and Armored Brigade use 2d maps with a similar balance of detail/abstraction and what looks to me like a similar art style. But I doubt they're actually using AB to generate their maps. The locations depicted in most Operations Room videos aren't present in any of the stock AB maps. So that would mean they would have to be creating custom AB maps for each video. Possible, but it's probably easier to just use a dedicated graphics program at that point.
-
13 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Regardless, the underlying point is still valid - we have never tried a political power sharing system at the scope and scale of the US, as imperfect as its democracy is. At no time in history has this many people from a single collective construct ever tried this before. There is no guarantees that it will work any more than communism in the Soviet Union. Now this could be a factor of social evolution, but if you are indeed correct in that we really are not physically or psychologically evolving fast enough, then a social evolution on this scale may simply be doomed.
In fact one could say that large scale human civilization is in itself a large scale experiment of only around 7000 short years. It may also be doomed, we just do not know it yet. Or conversely, perhaps humans need a burst of artificial evolution (eg AI) to allow these larger social constructs to work.
I remain optimistic. Regardless of how fast our genes are evolving, I think our memes are evolving plenty fast enough to allow us to tackle the challenges ahead. I'll say nothing further on evolution, except to recommend A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford (I just finished the audiobook, narrated by Adam Rutherford, on my commutes to work). It gives an excellent overview of the current state of the field of human genomics. He explains things in a way that is easy to understand, without falling into the all too common trap of oversimplifying things to the point of being misleading.
-
17 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
This part really makes no sense to me. How can physiological and social evolution be disconnected from psychological evolution? We know we have seen significant physical evolution over the last 10k years - eg our brains are smaller. We also have seen dramatic social evolution with the creation of complex societies to sustain much larger populations than we were ever designed for. We have seen macro-social evolutions such as the introduction of monotheistic religions and ideologies on a global scale. And we have seen micro-social evolutions in areas such as male-female pairings. And yet we somehow have had our psychologies existing in glorious isolation from all this change?
I'm not disconnecting physiological and psychological evolution. We aren't changing biologically on politically relevant timescales. The biological changes that can be traced to within the last 10,000 years are minor and have no way of effecting which political systems would work (I don't think the ability to digest milk as an adult has much effect on the efficacy of democracy). Where did you hear that our brains have gotten smaller within the last 10,000 years? I have heard that homo-sapien brains are probably smaller than homo-neanderthalensis brains. But Neandertals died out 30,000 years ago. Homo-sapiens haven't visibly changed in the last 100,000 years.
As to social evolution, that's the same as technological development. We are developing better methods of organizing ourselves socially just as we develop better tools for any other task. It has nothing to do with biological evolution. I'll admit that social evolution does behave a bit like biological evolution. Ideas go through a similar natural selection process as genes. This is actually why the word "meme" was coined. A meme is an idea that undergoes a natural selection process similar to a gene. An important difference is that memes evolve far more rapidly than genes.
-
1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
A friend of mine, smart and truly a good person, believes that the only way to fix the REAL problems with our government (and for sure the list of REAL problems is very lengthy) is to "tear it all down". This is why he supports Trump. What he doesn't realize is that is equivalent to someone in debt and trying to raise a family advocating demolishing their home, with everything still in side, because the toilette backs up every so often. He really doesn't understand the ramifications of what he's advocating for.
Steve
I'm always a bit concerned whenever I see any of my friends online advocating "tearing it all down". They never have any suggestions about what to replace it with. And anything you could replace it with would either be worse, or mostly the same but for a few modifications. The system as it is actually has the framework of a pretty good system. It just needs some tweaking. Rather that screaming into the void about tearing it all down, I think we'd do ourselves a lot more good by having constructive arguments over which tweaks would improve the system.
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:The American Experiment is, at its roots, a massive social test. A test to see if our species has evolved to the point where a power sharing scheme like democracy can survive at scale.
I'd avoid using terms like "evolution" and "species". There is evidence that our species has evolved measurably in the recent past (as in "within the last 10,000 years"). The most notable sign of recent evolution being the evolution of lactase persistence in European populations (clearly a post-agriculture development, probably as a reaction to dairy farming). But there is no evidence at all that our psychology has evolved since the rise of the first civilizations (about 6,000 years ago) in a way that would have any influence on which political systems would be most effective. It's our systems that are changing to better suite the brains we have. It isn't our brains changing to allow us to use better systems. We are certainly still evolving. But the timescales involved are so long compared to the timescales on which we refine our political systems that it just isn't relevant.
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:I would say the jury is still out.
I actually think the jury is in. Loads of countries other than the US are democracies. It's obvious at this point that there are much better implementations of democracy than the US system (downsides of being first). But almost universally, people living in democracies (including the US) are better off than people living in autocracies. Democracies do collapse and revert to autocracies (and it feels like the US is currently skirting the danger zone on that). But autocracies also collapse and become democracies. And so far it appears that autocracies collapse at a higher rate than democracies. The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization.
-
I do think the Battle of Bure is worth covering if any scenario designers are up to it. The British had a relatively small part to play in the Battle of the Bulge. But some of the fighting they were involved in, such as Bure, was pretty interesting. It doesn't strictly speaking fall into the Downfall timeframe. But it does fall into the wider CMFB timeframe, and requires assets that only became available in CMFB with the addition of the Downfall module. Here's The Operations Room's video on the battle:
-
1 hour ago, MikeyD said:
it could be 700m or more downrange before the gunner got the missile in the crosshairs.
I can see that being a bit of an issue in some circumstances
-
20 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:
While squads (and fireteams, if we want to go lower) wouldn't move and fight in a literal line or always physically in a set formation
The formations aren't parade-ground rigid. Intervals and alignment are flexible in order to take advantage of the terrain. But they do fight in formations, of which a literal line is one (in fact it is the default formation for engaging an enemy to your front). The best you can do to mimic squad formations in Combat Mission is to break the squad into teams and arrange those teams into a line, column, or wedge (there are never enough teams to form a diamond unfortunately). A better representation of formations is on my wishlist for future improvements to Combat Mission.
-
2 minutes ago, A Canadian Cat said:
Sure but will they come here for that based on this thread title?
I don't know. Perhaps not. My reading of "what battles were left out" was "what battles that have not already been covered can be covered now that Downfall has provided more resources". But I don't know how other people will read it.
-
56 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:
Is this going anywhere, folks? Or has gotten to the point that it should be locked up?
I think this thread still has the potential to go somewhere. Provided that everyone can remember to avoid further personal attacks and insults. I think there is value in having a thread dedicated to discussing what we'd like some of the scenario designers out there to tackle. Give it one more chance.
Which is better, the Bren or MG42? A debate almost as old as the weapons themselves
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
I support reminding people that reality is more complicated than they think. I oppose using that as an excuse to not have a discussion.
Frankly no two weapons are exactly the same, have exactly the same role, or exactly the same doctrine for their use. So taken to an extreme this means that no two pieces of equipment can ever be compared. It's worth reminding people that fair and meaningful comparisons are far more difficult and complicated than they assume. But we don't want those reminders to become a way of hand waving any attempt at making comparisons. The complexity involved in making a fair comparison between such different weapons requires digging deeper into the technical characteristics, design philosophies and tradeoffs, the theoretical doctrine, and the real world tactics of the weapons. All of which I think makes for an inherently valuable discussion even if no conclusion is actually reached about which one is better.
In any case, the issue of "different roles" is exactly why I limited the discussion to the LMG configuration of the MG42. The MG42's "role" is different in that it can be configured for a number of different roles. In its LMG configuration the MG42 is not filling a different role from the Bren at all. It is filling the role of the squad LMG, which is precisely the same role as the Bren.
Your point about different doctrines is precisely one of the things that I think is worth exploring in greater detail. It is entirely possible that one of these doctrines ended up being a better fit for the reality of 1940s infantry combat than the other. If so, why? If not, why not?
But I think you have made an important point. No weapon in any army is a perfect counterpart to any weapon in any other army. Ultimately we fight with formations, not with individual pieces of equipment. Each individual weapon is designed to fit into its respective formation in a certain way. So in the long run we really want to be comparing whole formations. But that's an even more complicated question, of which this thread's question is only a very small subcomponent. Every piece of equipment, every point of doctrine, the full organizational structure, the logistics, communications, repair, and replacement systems, everything that effects the capability of the formations would need to be compared. All of that is well worth doing, but it probably can't all be done at once. That's the sort of thing you work your way through over a lifetime.