Other Means Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 Commander up or commander buttoned? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poesel Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 Up - if you are sure the enemy is at least ~300m away. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Other Means Posted January 4, 2014 Author Share Posted January 4, 2014 Seems counter productive. Up gives you the best SA, but surely buttoned means you have access to better optics? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 What superior optics does the commander have that he can't use while unbuttoned? Buttoned up he lacks all peripheral vision, so spotting new targets should take longer. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Combatintman Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 Seems counter productive. Up gives you the best SA, but surely buttoned means you have access to better optics? To replicate the experience - see who's coming up your drive by looking through your letter box. Vision blocks are painful for situational awareness. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zmoney Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 To replicate the experience - see who's coming up your drive by looking through your letter box. Vision blocks are painful for situational awareness. That's pretty funny. Sounds like someone spent some time in an armored vehicle. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sburke Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Lol my letter box has an outside door that drops the mail in a chute reached via an interior door. If I look in my letterbox I see the interior of a chute inside the wall. That will totally screw with my situational awareness. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chocice Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 just took a peep through my letter box, no one there, should i open the door now??? :confused: 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freyberg Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 just took a peep through my letter box, no one there, should i open the door now??? :confused: I'd give a burst of machine gun fire, just to be sure... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 just took a peep through my letter box, no one there, should i open the door now??? :confused: Depends. Do you have a way to look to see if someone is standing to the side waiting for you to open your door before they throw a grenade inside? If you don't have a trainable surveillance camera or a guard dog in the yard, your best bet is to grab a riot gun, go out the back door, and sneak around the side to see if somebody is out there. Of course, there is always the possibility that there is an MG sited to cut you down as you come around the corner. Maybe you should play it safe and just call down some artillery to lay down some WP to sanitize the area. Life is such a crap shoot. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sburke Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Screw that just fire off the claymores and send out the bomb disposal robot. The back door is probably zeroed in by enemy mortars anyway. Besides the back door is on a half AS and exiting there will force you into LOF. Pathing issues can be a b***h. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oddball_E8 Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Or just don't open the door... I know I'm a bit different than most here maby, but the best way to win a war is to prevent it from starting. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sburke Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Or just don't open the door... I know I'm a bit different than most here maby, but the best way to win a war is to prevent it from starting. Ha bet you never watched Mars Attacks! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chocice Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Depends. Do you have a way to look to see if someone is standing to the side waiting for you to open your door before they throw a grenade inside? If you don't have a trainable surveillance camera or a guard dog in the yard, your best bet is to grab a riot gun, go out the back door, and sneak around the side to see if somebody is out there. Of course, there is always the possibility that there is an MG sited to cut you down as you come around the corner. Maybe you should play it safe and just call down some artillery to lay down some WP to sanitize the area. Life is such a crap shoot. Michael Right ho Micheal, i,ll try sending our 13 yr old Labrador out first, will take him a bit of time tho, cos his back legs are going, but if he doesn,t get it, it should be safe. I only want to put the milk bottle,s out!!! :eek: 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Other Means Posted January 5, 2014 Author Share Posted January 5, 2014 What superior optics does the commander have that he can't use while unbuttoned? Buttoned up he lacks all peripheral vision, so spotting new targets should take longer. That was kind of my question Sergei. Modern AFVs I'd keep buttoned but did WWII era ones have anything similar. So would we have a situation where if you expect long range contacts to the front of the AFV would it be worth being buttoned, whereas if you have no such expectation you're better to be unbuttoned so you have better all-round SA? With the front door situation, I'd just use my short range porch mortar - why take chances? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanir Ausf B Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Unbuttoned tank commanders do have access to long range optics. They're called binoculars 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Other Means, Up. As high as possible. If you do some looking (inadvertent joke), you can find a pic of a U.S. TC standing atop the turret roof of his Sherman in Normandy so he can peer into the next hedgerow. I particularly like the one (Stalingrad, maybe) where the Panzer IV TC is standing on the edges of the near vertical ears of his split hatch. He's way up there and obviously has better balance than I ever had. LOS is a function of elevation, as you can see for yourself from this little online horizon calculator. http://members.home.nl/7seas/radcalc.htm Since I don't know the height of the episcope, and binos would be used for long range spotting anyway in most German tanks, let's say the TC's eyeballs are 3 meters off the ground with his head out of the open hatch. With an observer elevation of 3 meters (IV is 2.68 or 2.7 in sig figs high), the calculator shows the TC's visual horizon/maximimum LOS is 6.186 or 6.2 km. Now, if we raise those eyeballs 2 meters more (1.8 m TC + hatch ear add-on), the new horizon/LOS is 7.986 or 8 km. A worthwhile improvement! Mind, these are how far he can theoretically see. Target detection AKA Spotting is something else again, and I've previously provided extracts from and links to studies done by and for the U.S. miiltary on that topic. Even so, I think that such things as 5 km 88 engagements on massed Russian armor or Chally kills from around the same range are now understandable, yet are still Direct Fire engagements. All it takes are sharp eyes, great optics, a suitable weapon and above all, LOS friendly terrain. I suspect you have this notion of great TC optics based on such things as the TC hunter-killer sights on such tanks as the Abrams, LeClerc and others. Those not only feature powerful optics but thermal imaging and laser rangefinding as well. Such sights are in a different universe from what we're discussing here. Michael Emrys, On what basis do you determine whether or not your camera is trainable? Does it come when you call it, or is merely shaking hands (quite a feat, that) sufficient? Sergei, Nice pic. Is it a still from that Seelowe Heights footage? Regards, John Kettler 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Combatintman Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 That's pretty funny. Sounds like someone spent some time in an armored vehicle. Not much time to be honest but enough to know that my preference was to be unbuttoned, I crewed an FV436 in Gulf War 1. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Michael Emrys, On what basis do you determine whether or not your camera is trainable? Does it come when you call it, or is merely shaking hands (quite a feat, that) sufficient? I always found it of interest that on a Bofors crew two men were required to aim the gun. One was called the pointer and the other the trainer. I guess the trainer was that to make sure the pointer didn't flush the birds too soon. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YankeeDog Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Seems counter productive. Up gives you the best SA, but surely buttoned means you have access to better optics? Not necessarily. In some tanks there was a magnified periscope or similar for the tc, but not all. And Tcs usually carried binoculars, so they would have magnified optics to use when buttoned that weren't necessarily any worse than what was mounted on the tank. Also, as I've commented before, I spend a lot of time looking through magnified optics doing wildlife photography, and IME magnified optics are most useful for confirming and identifying. Initial spotting is usually better done with the Mk. 1 eyeball. You look around with the naked eye until something catches your attention, at which point you use your optics to get a better look. Scanning through high-power optics is actually very disorienting; it's very easy to "get lost" visually doing this. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 So would we have a situation where if you expect long range contacts to the front of the AFV would it be worth being buttoned, whereas if you have no such expectation you're better to be unbuttoned so you have better all-round SA? No, I don't see why. I'm not aware of any WW2 tanks where the commander could access long range optics from his seat without at least partially opening his hatch - it's the gunner that possesses the best optics in the AFV, and those are already facing toward the front. Buttoned or not? It's not always that clear cut! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akd Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Here's a question: what would be the typical magnification for a tank commander's binoculars in WWII era? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YankeeDog Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 Standard bino for U.S. forces was the M3, which was 6x30 -- 6x magnification, 30mm front element (all other things being equal, larger front element = better low light performance). Fairly mediocre, though bear in mind anything higher than 8x is difficult to hand-hold -- you generally need something to stabilize the optics beyond this as otherwise the image will be very shaky. I don't know for certain if the official issue for tank commanders was the M3 6x30; it's possible they got something else. But I've seen lots of images of U.S. tcs using these, so I think probably this is what most tcs had. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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