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RWS Mk19 accuracy and RWS weapon reload


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Hi Battlefront, hi community,

at first I want to tell you that this isn´t one of these nitpicky gripe threads. I quite enjoy the game as it is 😀, and I´m always happy to sink my money in the new hot Battlefront product.

As I played Shock Force 2 the other day I came upon some things that raised a couple of questionmarks though, so I wanted to inquire about these here in this thread:

  1. The accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on RWS. Even at targets very close, 150m - 200m, the spray is enourmous. The circle in which the grenades fall is about 20m in radius at these short distance. They are about as inaccurate fired from a complete standstill as a ww2 tank firing its coaxial on the move. I was quite shocked when I saw the inability to cause any casualties on the enemy because of this. I don´t remember them from Shock Force 1 beeing this inaccurate, and after watching a couple of real videos with them beeing fired from the Stryker RWS on training excercises at roughly the same ranges and beeing almost pinpoint accurate at medium to close range (as I remember them), I wanted to ask if maybe I´m missing something.
  2. Reloading of weapons mounted on RWS. This is more of "wanted feature" than a observation: it would be awesome if the player could order the crew of said vehicle equipped with RWS mounted guns to not open the hatches and go outside to reload them while under heavy fire. Maybe code it in a way that they´re only reloading the guns while specifically ordered "hatches open". Because the crews are very liberate with their use of the guns, they often have to reload and I lost quite some crewmen to snipers and mg´s.

Thats all. Thank you for the great games!

Edited by Witchhaven
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1 hour ago, Witchhaven said:

 

  1. The accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on RWS. Even at targets very close, 150m - 200m, the spray is enourmous. The circle in which the grenades fall is about 20m in radius at these short distance. ... after watching a couple of real videos with them beeing fired from the Stryker RWS on training excercises at roughly the same ranges and beeing almost pinpoint accurate at medium to close range (as I remember them),

Well it is possible that adjustments need to be made. Can you point to the videos and maybe a game save showing things not behaving the same?

1 hour ago, Witchhaven said:
  1. Reloading of weapons mounted on RWS. This is more of "wanted feature" than a observation: it would be awesome if the player could order the crew of said vehicle equipped with RWS mounted guns to not open the hatches and go outside to reload them while under heavy fire. 

This is tricky. Whatever the game does has to work with the AI controlled units. So, having the player intervene directly is not good. How it works now is a compromise and likely what we will have to live with.

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what would be nice is if you could have a forced reload command.  Probably not likely, but what kills me is when I know the GL is down to a round but it won't reload until it fires that one round and of course will do so in front of the enemy after firing off that one round.  :P  

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4 hours ago, sburke said:

what would be nice is if you could have a forced reload command.  Probably not likely, but what kills me is when I know the GL is down to a round but it won't reload until it fires that one round and of course will do so in front of the enemy after firing off that one round.  :P  

Yes!  Cant count how many time this has happened in a firefight after there was a perfectly good lull in the action for a reload to take place.  Could the tacAI handle tactical reloads in future updates?  Or if it would be easier to add a reload command......

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9 hours ago, Witchhaven said:

Hi Battlefront, hi community,

at first I want to tell you that this isn´t one of these nitpicky gripe threads. I quite enjoy the game as it is 😀, and I´m always happy to sink my money in the new hot Battlefront product.

As I played Shock Force 2 the other day I came upon some things that raised a couple of questionmarks though, so I wanted to inquire about these here in this thread:

  1. The accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on RWS. Even at targets very close, 150m - 200m, the spray is enourmous. The circle in which the grenades fall is about 20m in radius at these short distance. They are about as inaccurate fired from a complete standstill as a ww2 tank firing its coaxial on the move. I was quite shocked when I saw the inability to cause any casualties on the enemy because of this. I don´t remember them from Shock Force 1 beeing this inaccurate, and after watching a couple of real videos with them beeing fired from the Stryker RWS on training excercises at roughly the same ranges and beeing almost pinpoint accurate at medium to close range (as I remember them), I wanted to ask if maybe I´m missing something.
  2. Reloading of weapons mounted on RWS. This is more of "wanted feature" than a observation: it would be awesome if the player could order the crew of said vehicle equipped with RWS mounted guns to not open the hatches and go outside to reload them while under heavy fire. Maybe code it in a way that they´re only reloading the guns while specifically ordered "hatches open". Because the crews are very liberate with their use of the guns, they often have to reload and I lost quite some crewmen to snipers and mg´s.

Thats all. Thank you for the great games!

Welcome to the forums and the game.

I agree with number 2 - it is an absolute ball ache when you get the click of death on AGLs/GMGs without being able to do anything about it. The only workarounds are to target briefly at something you don't need to shoot at or count your rounds and give your weapon system a short exposure to the target, fire the weapon and withdraw to cover. Neither are particularly satisfactory and I agree with others that it is probably something that we have to live with.

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+1 re #2.  Perhaps the main problem is that we all use these vehicles at way too short ranges to the enemy.  But, that's a map size issue.  (Would one use vehicles like a Stryker in a point blank range MOUT op?"

re #1 - I also find the (in)accuracy of the AGL's to be odd.  

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Thanks for the feedback 😊. Feels good when the Community welcomes you with good feedback!

 

On Mk19 RWS accuracy : I did some tests and made a small video of a Stryker ICV with Mk19 firing the weapon at 160m distance. Notice the spread, even firing way above the berm or hitting the ground right in front of the Stryker.

 

Here´s a clip I took from YouTube showing the same situation in RL. Though they´re practice rounds notice the tightness of the shot pattern.

 

Notice that this does seem to affect the AGS-17 30mm grenade launcher mounted in the BTR-4E in Black Sea as well. It´s very inaccurate in the same way as the Mk19.

 

On external weapon reload under fire: when thinking about it, it sure is a thing that keeps you on edge sometimes ingame. But rightly said it´s difficult to solve. After giving it some though I´m against reloading by player command, because the micro management involved in keeping track of weapon reloads would be more stressful than keeping your eye on your Stryker crews.

MAYBE it could be managed by TacAI, which deactivates the reload sequence for like 30 seconds in advance when one of the following variables is true:

  • There´s direct fire impacting the vehicle / direct fire recently impacted the vehicle
  • There´s artillery dropping close by at the moment
  • There´re MULTIPLE contacts IDENTIFIED by the vehicle crew

     

Edited by Witchhaven
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Looking at various videos around the web, the Mk19 tripod mount accuracy looks about right.  But the RWS mount looks like the accuracy of the tripod mount.  The video above looks like the RWS provides a very stable platform that improves accuracy, compared to the tripod mount.  I would have expected that.

Of course this is just an engineering guess.

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13 hours ago, sburke said:

The one problem with the test is you selected terrain and therefore area fire.  The unit is firing at an 8x8 meter area.  May want to try it with a specific target.  Not saying it will improve accuracy but the test would be a better baseline.

I have seen in-game Strykers firing automatically at specific units, and also when I issued a TARGET order on an enemy unit - and the AGL's still seemed quite inaccurate along the line of fire.  A lot of ammo is wasted.  

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Thank you for your tests. I built a small test range scenario to compare the accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on RWS vs. the accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on a tripod.

The result is that the Mk19 mounted on the tripod is considerable more accurate. I attached two clips, where you can see that the Stryker struggles to hit the trucks (400m distance), while the tripod mounted Mk19 has a much tighter spread and kills all 3 trucks in a matter of seconds. The Stryker scores hits too, but the miss rate is absolutely abyssmal.

For me it seems that the accuracy of crew served weapons and vehicle mounted weapons is reversed or at least some off in some way. Testing this one further revealed that this is true for every automatic grenade launcher in the game (GMG mounted on German Fennek, British L134A1 mounted on Land Rovers, AGS-17 mounted in BTR4E). I found that all of these weapons suffer from poor accuracy compared to crew served variants which should not be imho.

RWS:

Tripod:

 

 

I´ll do more tests if you wish.

I clearly remember the RWS mounted automatic grenade launchers from Shock Force 1 were beasts in causing many casualties to the enemy with accurate fire even over longer ranges.

Thank you all

 

Edited by Witchhaven
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Just re-ran my tests and yes, the vehicle mounted Mk19 is hugely inaccurate compared to the ground mounted one.  I 1-3 grenades in a 5-6 round burst go as far as 25m from the center of the aimpoint.  The ground mount tends to stay with 5-6m, with an odd one may 10m away now and then.  These are just estimates.

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2 hours ago, Witchhaven said:

Thank you for your tests. I built a small test range scenario to compare the accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on RWS vs. the accuracy of the Mk19 mounted on a tripod.

The result is that the Mk19 mounted on the tripod is considerable more accurate. I attached two clips, where you can see that the Stryker struggles to hit the trucks (400m distance), while the tripod mounted Mk19 has a much tighter spread and kills all 3 trucks in a matter of seconds. The Stryker scores hits too, but the miss rate is absolutely abyssmal.

For me it seems that the accuracy of crew served weapons and vehicle mounted weapons is reversed or at least some off in some way. Testing this one further revealed that this is true for every automatic grenade launcher in the game (GMG mounted on German Fennek, British L134A1 mounted on Land Rovers, AGS-17 mounted in BTR4E). I found that all of these weapons suffer from poor accuracy compared to crew served variants which should not be imho.

RWS:

 

I´ll do more tests if you wish.

I clearly remember the RWS mounted automatic grenade launchers from Shock Force 1 were beasts in causing many casualties to the enemy with accurate fire even over longer ranges.

Thank you all

 

nice work

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  • 10 months later...
On 1/7/2019 at 5:04 AM, IanL said:

Well it is possible that adjustments need to be made. Can you point to the videos and maybe a game save showing things not behaving the same?

IanL, BFC can use DoD Mk19 gunnery qualification grades (Grenade Machine Gun MK 19 MOD 3 Training Circular No. 3-22.19, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN3241_TC 3-22x19 FINAL WEB.pdf). Table I is for hull targets and Table III is for personnel targets. Range and % of hits to pass at a certain grade are given. This level of accuracy is expected both from dismounted and manually operated (i.e. non-RWS) mounted AGLs. I can't find the numbers for CROWS Mk19 - just multiple statements in DoD papers that it's considerably more accurate than mounted manually operated AGL.

We can see from the tables that at distances of 400m and under at least 50% of the rounds should hit a hull target and 25% of the rounds should hit a pop-up personnel target at the same distance. It makes sense to note that's HIT not KILL as in kill radius for the personnel target. It's also important to note that since these are qualification criteria for single pass testing I guess it means that's the WORST case how Mk19 should perform given normal level of stress and operator proficiency.

Mk19 accuracy.gif

Mk19 accuracy psnl.gif

Edited by IMHO
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So I made a quick test of CMBS Stryker MK19 CROWS: regular/fit/zero leadership modifier for 10 Strykers plus 5 empty BTR targets at 400m and 5 BTRs at 1'500m. DoD standard for 400m is 2 hits out of first 4 shots. The actual was just one mere hit out of "first four" shots. Means none of the CMBS Strykers/crews pass DoD test. The same was for 1'500m - just one hit. Again - either Stryker Mk19 malfunctions or Stryker crews are not qualified to use Mk19.

PS I wonder what was the reasoning for Mk19 accuracy degradation from CMSF1 to CMSF2. Game "balancing"? Clearly Mk19 was an wunderwaffe in CMSF1.

Edited by IMHO
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  • 1 year later...

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