bow machine gun

[fatehunter]

I've never seen the bow MG fire in any of the tanks I use. The co-ax fires, the main gun fires, the .50 fires when unbuttoned.

Is this similar to the aft MG on the M3 half-track that does not fire? just too difficult to model?

I noticed someone comment that they thought BF was probably happy that the M# Lee tank is not modeled.

Imagine a T-35!

[normannobrot]

I have seen them both go at it, but that was under 1.11, haven't really noticed any issue with that in 2.01

[YankeeDog]

I think you need to watch closer. IME, the bow MG will fire quite liberally if you put the tank in the right situation.

If you want to test, just give a tank an Area Target Light order across open ground so there are clearly no obstructions to LOF for any of the MGs, and you'll see the bow MG firing.

But there area few reasons why you may not see the bow MG fire in certain situations:

-- The bow MG is quite a bit lower than the turret weapons, so if you are in the habit of positioning your tanks in hull-down firing locations, the bow MG gunner may not have LOF. Hull down is generally a good idea, but this is one of the drawbacks.

-- Bow MGs generally have a pretty limited traverse, so the target has to be in a pretty narrow cone right in front of the tank for the bow MG to be able to target it.

-- The sighting equipment on a bow MGs is also usually pretty basic -- it's usually just a small hole for the gunner to peep through, and rudimentary iron sights. So the bow gunner will find hit harder to see and hit targets at long range compared to the turret, gunner who has optical sights to work with.

[Michael Emrys]

I've seen it fire in v2.0, haven't seen it in 2.01 yet but no reason why it shouldn't. Note carefully what YD said about being hull down or otherwise having its LOS/LOF blocked. BTW, for me the giveaway was watching one of my tanks from directly overhead and noticing that the bow and coax were engaging different targets.

:cool:

Michael

[fatehunter]

I was wrong. If fires fine. all the comments above are correct. Thanks!