Soviet Artillery Smoke Rounds

[Simcoe]

I’m playing the last mission of the Soviet campaign and the conditions are clear and dry but when I order smoke rounds from artillery they impact with no smoke. 
 

is this a bug?

[Howler]

Do you have smoke turned on? I think it's Alt+K....

[danfrodo]

I've done this a number of times, even after playing of years.  Dang it, where's my smoke fire mission?????  -- oh, I turned it off earlier to see something and forgot to turn it back on.

[Simcoe]

1 hour ago, Howler said:

Do you have smoke turned on? I think it's Alt+K....

That’s what it was. Thank you!

[Simcoe]

1 hour ago, danfrodo said:

I've done this a number of times, even after playing of years.  Dang it, where's my smoke fire mission?????  -- oh, I turned it off earlier to see something and forgot to turn it back on.

Kicking myself over here!

 

[Howler]

You play enough and everyone forgets to toggle the smoke back on at some point... welcome to the club!

[Simcoe]

1 hour ago, Howler said:

You play enough and everyone forgets to toggle the smoke back on at some point... welcome to the club!

True. I played the entire campaign without smoke up to this point! On the second mission I wanted to fire smoke rounds but when it didn't work I chalked it up to the wet/rainy weather. 

[Combatintman]

21 hours ago, Simcoe said:

Kicking myself over here!

 

Nobody noticed mate ... I think you got away with it  - I had similar with trees once ... "why can't I see a bloody thing from this open field?"

[Free Whisky]

So since we're on the topic of Soviet smoke... I noticed that the Soviet vehicles pop black smoke, rather than white smoke, when fired upon. I've never seen or heard of this before. Does anyone know what this is about? What were they using that produced black smoke and why did they prefer that?

[Grey_Fox]

1 hour ago, Free Whisky said:

So since we're on the topic of Soviet smoke... I noticed that the Soviet vehicles pop black smoke, rather than white smoke, when fired upon. I've never seen or heard of this before. Does anyone know what this is about? What were they using that produced black smoke and why did they prefer that?

I know that in the modern games it's to differentiate between normal smoke, which only blocks normal vision, and multispectral smoke, which blocks thermals. Idk if that was the rationale for CMCW.

Note that artillery smoke, despite being white, isn't multispectral in any title.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Grey_Fox

[Simcoe]

58 minutes ago, Grey_Fox said:

I know that in the modern games it's to differentiate between normal smoke, which only blocks normal vision, and multispectral smoke, which blocks thermals. Idk if that was the rationale for CMCW.

Note that artillery smoke, despite being white, isn't multispectral in any title.

This brings up one more question. Is smoke artillery rounds still useful against thermal sights? I've read that smoke can mess with thermal imaging at least in the Cold War.

[Grey_Fox]

3 hours ago, Simcoe said:

This brings up one more question. Is smoke artillery rounds still useful against thermal sights? I've read that smoke can mess with thermal imaging at least in the Cold War.

It won't affect the TTS or Dragons, but TOWs can't be fired through normal smoke even though the gunner can see you since the TOW in CW doesn't have the IR beacon that gets pit on later versions.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Grey_Fox

[Combatintman]

21 hours ago, Free Whisky said:

So since we're on the topic of Soviet smoke... I noticed that the Soviet vehicles pop black smoke, rather than white smoke, when fired upon. I've never seen or heard of this before. Does anyone know what this is about? What were they using that produced black smoke and why did they prefer that?

Soviet tanks are configured so that oil can be injected into the exhaust to create smoke.  In RL it seems to be white but that might be an explanation or a design decision was made to make it black to differentiate it between TI blocking smoke.

[Pelican Pal]

22 hours ago, Simcoe said:

Is smoke artillery rounds still useful against thermal sights?

No, iirc, most artillery smoke is WP which ought to have some window/amount of degradation against thermal sights but its not modeled in-game.

As far as the game is concerned there seems to be either IR blocking smoke or non-IR blocking smoke and its a binary label.

[Free Whisky]

On 4/22/2022 at 9:01 PM, Combatintman said:

Soviet tanks are configured so that oil can be injected into the exhaust to create smoke.  In RL it seems to be white but that might be an explanation or a design decision was made to make it black to differentiate it between TI blocking smoke.

Ah, that would be what is in this picture then.

Yet it seems to me that the black smoke is always in front of the soviet vehicles, same as when you give vehicles in Combat Mission the "pop smoke" command.

Funny that no one really seems to be sure; would be interresting to know why the design decision was made. First time I saw it I thought that some destroyed vehicle was smoking up the place and that this was a new feature.

[domfluff]

No tanks in CM have the ability to generate smoke by injecting oil into their exhaust. A lot of them should, and it might be nice if they could.

The bmp smoke rounds are black because they are in real life:

They will be black because of the chemistry involved. I'm not a chemist, but from memory, thats the bitumen content, since the intent of Soviet smokes isn't to maximize speed of development, but instead to increase how long the thing burns and hangs around for. The tar presumably acts to retard that reaction. It's also going to be quite cheap and unpleasant to be around.

Having slower-burning, forward-firing smoke is because the Soviet concept was that the thing was designed to be used offensively, so firing smoke this way gives you a screen to manoeuvre behind. That's in contrast to the Western priorities, where quick development is vitally important, since you need to pop smoke and pull back under cover, to evade an atgm or the like.

[domfluff]

In terms of the chemistry involved, finding sources for that is pretty hard, but the ww2 Soviet smoke grenade (rgd-1) was a combination of potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride and bitumen, in some relatively coarse grains. I suspect that basic formula may not have changed that much.

Not a chemist, but going by how solid fuel rocket design works (Ignition! is a wonderful book) coarse grained fuel will burn slower and messier, which is ideal if you want to spread this reaction out as much as possible, rather than a faster, cleaner burn.

[Free Whisky]

Fantastic, I love how no question here is too obscure . Also very interesting to see how even things like how far forward you fire your smoke tie into the doctrine of your nation/time.

That's a great video. Also, I thought another video from the same channel was quite interesting. Here you can see them pop smoke grenades towards a target area at 1:20. The target area is obscured until 8:20. A very long range and very effective smoke grenades indeed...

 

 

[domfluff]

Yeah, that's unusually long lasting for the BMP, and longer than you'll see in-game. Still, it'll create a longer laster, slower-developing cloud in CM. I wonder if they fired more than once. I think the range is a bit deceptive - they throw 100m-120m or so, and it can be very hard to contextualise real-world ranges from CM, given the perspective.

In terms of smoke - we're missing the tank-generated smoke screens, as well as the purpose-built large-scale smoke creators. Both might actually be above scale to really matter - the latter would be employed to get a division across a river, for example, and I wonder if the engine-generated screens actually have a similar utility.

Edited April 25, 2022 by domfluff

[Pelican Pal]

From a player perspective engine generated screens would be useful to allow follow on elements to cross exposed terrain.

Pushing tanks first across terrain and then following with BMPs/BTRs/AAA you need to keep them fairly close behind to avoid the enemy from refilling the gap. E.G. pulling back as your armor rolls through and then pushing up to engage follow on forces. Tank generated smoke screens would seem an obvious way to provide concealment for that follow on force.

[domfluff]

Yeah, I was looking into intended usage:

Protection for the trailing APCs is one, as well as this kind of thing in retreat:

It's something which most militaries have moved away from, so I suspect it's a fairly bad or limited idea. For the above Challenger, there are two other methods of generating smoke (the smoke launchers and the main gun can fire smoke rounds), so I suspect that an engine-created smoke screen is a firm third-best option. I'm pretty sure the above represents an ideal situation as well (or would if it stopped behind the berm).

[Chibot Mk IX]

On 4/21/2022 at 6:43 PM, Grey_Fox said:

I know that in the modern games it's to differentiate between normal smoke, which only blocks normal vision, and multispectral smoke, which blocks thermals. Idk if that was the rationale for CMCW.

Note that artillery smoke, despite being white, isn't multispectral in any title.

in CMSF and CMBS, the white smoke generated from AFV's smoke discharger is IR Blocking smoke. But that's not the case in CMCW.

 

 

[Stardekk]

On 4/30/2022 at 4:24 AM, Chibot Mk IX said:

in CMSF and CMBS, the white smoke generated from AFV's smoke discharger is IR Blocking smoke. But that's not the case in CMCW.

 

 

Correct. A lot of times when i start to loses engagments with TTS and M1s i just pop smoke and they start firing through the smoke tghe enemy can do absolutly nothing about it. If i'm not wrong it shouldn't be like that or at least damage your vision with thermals, at least with 1st gen thermals in the cold war.