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Rundstedt Sends His Best - a CMFB Comic AAR


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If a Chaffee has a large chance of bogging, I'm sure the potential German tanks do as well.

I'm certain they are, yes. The Easy-8 suspension is really a huge plus, it rides much better over snow (that is to say, it doesn't get bogged/ immobilized as often) than the Chaffee, in my tests. 

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Bud_B,

Full and speedy recovery for your wife!  Glad the surgery went well and that she's back home where she can recuperate. Hospitals are pretty bad in this regard, with my "favorite" being waking you to take a sleeping pill!

Yet another great AAR-by-comic. Love this sort of thing and shall pass it on to my nephew, who digs graphic novels and such. His retired from the Army SFC Dad is big time into Bolt Action WW II rules for 15 mm these days. 

General remarks

The Sturmtiger is delivering a warhead of almost exactly the same explosive content as a WW II US AN-M57 250 pound GP bomb, which has 123 pounds/55.9 kg of TNT.  By contrast, the M102 HE shell fired by M114 155 mm howitzers had 15 pounds, 9 ounces of TNT (7.09 kg). Thus, the Sturmtiger put down the instantaneous HE weight of fire of two 155 mm howitzer battery volleys.

Regarding airbursting rifle grenades, one variety of US frag rifle grenade has a time fuze, just like the familiar pineapple type does. If the fuze detonates over the target, then it won't be pretty underneath! The other variety is impact fuzed. See official War Department training film "Infantry Weapons and Their Effects" at 2:37 for details. How the game models this stuff I don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr0ojGtsvCM

Regards,

John Kettler

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Bud_B,

You're welcome! Good to be back. The reason the shells have so little explosive in them has everything to do with the acceleration loads of 10,000 G on them, something neither the rocket nor the bomb faced. This is one of the major reasons why rockets are so nasty as bombardment weapons. They have a much higher HE payload for a given bore diameter than does tube artillery of that same diameter. And unless they are SAP or AP, bombs have the weakest structural loads on them of all, which is fully reflected in their high explosive fill percentage. By extreme contrast, a heavy naval AP shell's HE load runs about 3% of total projectile weight. All the rest of that goes into not just keeping the shell together during firing, but primarily to providing a stout enough case and nose caps to survive smashing though armor to deliver that small amount of explosive into the vitals of the enemy warship.  

Regards,

John Kettler

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Thanks Bud,

it's a very fun and entertaining reading.

all your images remind me of when I was a kid and during the summer time I read comic books from an old publisher (during the '90s)

 

Thanks, Kieme! Glad you're enjoying it! 

Those pictures you posted look a lot like some of the Commando comics I have in collected volumes. I bought those collections this summer as I started doing Apache (link below) because I wanted to improve my style and presentation. Some examples below:

 

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Nice Bud, could you tell me what's the period of publication of those comics? Which years mor or less?

They were first published in July 1961, and are still published today. I think it's a comic a week, or thereabouts. 

Wikipedia has a nice page here

Lower down that page you can see the collections, which are volumes with selected comics all out together. There is some overlap so one has to buy carefully to avoid duplication. 

 

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A couple more titles that bring back fond memories of childhood and beach-trip reading:

1501568-79.jpg

 

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I always wanted to order the giant battle sets of toy soldiers advertised in the back, but never did. I was young, but knew they were probably a rip. Did anybody here buy them?

Edited by Macisle
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I always wanted to order the giant battle sets of toy soldiers advertised in the back, but never did. I was young, but knew they were probably a rip. Did anybody here buy them?

Heh. When I was a kid I remember getting a massive collection of toy soldiers and some plastic vehicles to go with them. I don't know where my parents got them from, but I doubt it was from the comics. On the other hand I remember the ads, which were so...overstating the quality and capability of the goods! 

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