20mm vs Thin Skinned Targets - A request

[Claymore]

Dear BTS,

I realize that the pronouncement that CM has taken its final form has been issued but in the thought that one last final tweak may be performed may I ask you to revisit one topic?

That is 20mm performance against thin skinned vehicles and infantry. The performance of the single barrel 20mm is completely off base in relation to the real world. For example, place a dozen jeeps on flat grass land and allow a dozen 20mm FLAK units to blaze away at them. Or again, have a platoon of infantry advance in lock-step across an open field against the 20mm battery. You will find that the weapon is IMPOTENT in the extreme! It's got that big-old phallic barrel out there...come on it's got to be doing something! I believe that CM models the weapon's effectiveness incorrectly low because it has a BLAST = 6 (hand grenade strength). This of course neglects that important fact that the aforementioned targets are sporting 1" diameter holes. In CM, MGs are more effective at destroying jeeps than 20mm!

Of course against beefier targets there is the possiblity that the 20mm will loose off its AP rounds and its performance skyrockets. I have personnally fired the 20mm FLAK as well as the 7.62mm GPMG, both are EQUALLY and wickedly effective and destroying soft targets quickly.

I am not one given to posting to the forum without due cause, as in the recent request for an examination of the close assault problems.

I await your response.

Sincerely

Claymore

[Jarmo]

Absolutely.

Spending a minute with a 20mm trying to kill a stationary

Jeep a hundred meters away is very frustrating.

I don't know what could be done though.

Increase the blast value? Wouldn't be right?

[Vanir]

Soft skinned vehicles are hard to kill with low blast rating weapons. That's a real problem.

But I think the 20mm is really quite effective against infantry. I've done a series of tests of both the 20mm quad and single barrel and found the 20mm single barrel to be better at killing infantry than the .50 cal MG. You can read the details of my tests here.

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You've never heard music until you've heard the bleating of a gut-shot cesspooler. -Mark IV

[Guest tero]

I agree, the 20mm AA gun is a potent AC and even tank killer but it does seem abysmal against soft targets.

I think the thing that should be done is to increase accuracy.

They are after all equipped with sights capable of tracking targets moving at 200+ mph. That is why I think hitting stationary (compared to the aircraft) targets on the ground should be very easy.

Is there any difference in the accuracy value of the 20mm gun when firing HE rounds compared to the 20mm gun firing AP rounds ?

[Guest Germanboy]

Originally posted by tero:

They are after all equipped with sights capable of tracking targets moving at 200+ mph. That is why I think hitting stationary (compared to the aircraft) targets on the ground should be very easy.

Not a realistic comparison - the manual sights are very basic. They basically just have three levels (today), allowing for lead on a fast target. The reason these guns are automatic and use HE/incendiary rounds is that you are not expected to hit a plane very well with them. Not sure how that would affect the game, but the sights for hitting planes are really irrelevant when shooting ground targets. I was trained on the modern version of the gun.

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Andreas

Der Kessel

Home of „Die Sturmgruppe“; Scenario Design Group for Combat Mission.

[KiwiJoe]

It seems to be modeled as a weapon that relys soley on its blast effect to do damage... just like HE from artillery or a tank HE round. Howeva it should be a cross between a tank HE round and a mg round. As it is there is no chance of damaging infantry, AT guns, etc from hitting them directly with a 20mm round. Just damage from the VERY small blast effect. I don't know if this could be changed, but I hope something is done to increase its effctiveness in CM2.

[Jarmo]

Originally posted by tero:

I think the thing that should be done is to increase accuracy.

That would make it far too deadly against lightly armored vehicles IMO.

The thing is, AFAIK unarmored vehicles are only damaged by the blast.

This leads to the weird effect of the 20mm being more effective

against halftracks than against trucks.

I'm not half sure about this, but:

Hitting infantry the gun seems to hit the position where the

unit was when the shot was fired. This gives a good effect if the

unit stays put. But if the unit is moving, the shot misses by a few

meters. This doesn't matter much with 75mm and above, but the 20mm

has so small blast that the unit often avoids the damege entirely.

I believe fixing these shortcomings would require a lot of coding.

Just increasing accuracy or the blast would fix these special

instances, but would also cause other problems elsewhere.

[Pascal DI FOLCO]

Eh eh, this problem had been neatly solved in *not to be named WW 2 tac game* ...

Very small calibers with high ROF are given an Infantry-equivalent Firepower to use "directly" against unarmoured/soft targets, instead of tracking effects on a round by round basis. So in CM an HMG as ,say, 100 FP, a 20mm could have 80...instead of 6/round !

If that is not done, and rounds are tracked individually, CM should then gives this weapon their "real" ROF, stg about a hundred shots/min IIRC...Now they just fire say a score of times per turn ...

[Guest tero]

>Not a realistic comparison - the manual sights are very basic. They basically just have three levels (today), allowing for lead on a fast target.

Yes. But the use of tracer ammo as a means of aiming is not modelled in CM, is it ? The difference in shooting againts ground and air targets is fundamental in that the ground target does not need to be lead the way the air target. Against a groun target you just fire a few rounds, adjust, fire and adjust again until your aim is true and then you just let it rip. Against the air target you need to mentally calculate the direction, speed etc. etc. just to line up the gun to point even that way before you start adjusting your fire.

>The reason these guns are automatic and use HE/incendiary rounds is that you are not expected to hit a plane very well with them.

.... but when the fire does it it must do the maximum damage. That is why the high ROF HE against the ground target should be more effective than it currently is. Were there any AP shots for the FLAK guns distributed ?

>Not sure how that would affect the game, but the sights for hitting planes are really irrelevant when shooting ground targets.

I on the other hand think target aquisition and hit chance should be greater for FLAK.

>I was trained on the modern version of the gun.

Don't the modern guns have different sights/scales for ground targets ?

I was trained in leading the air target with your RK-62 (Finnish copy of the Kalashnikov) in platoon level anti aircraft fire.

[Guest tero]

>That would make it far too deadly against lightly armored vehicles IMO.

If it is that against not hitting it no where near effectively enough I accept that.

>The thing is, AFAIK unarmored vehicles are only damaged by the blast.

Which is a coding problem with the HE modelling. There is no provision for impacts as such elsewhere except when firing at trees. Should the soft skinned vehicles be classified as trees ? Or should they get a default tree-like perimeter around them that would detonate the shells as tree bursts ?

>This leads to the weird effect of the 20mm being more effective against halftracks than against trucks.

Not in my oppinion. Against HT's the 20mm FLAK uses AP shots, not HE. I think. With increased accuracy the trucks and the jeeps would get killed more effectively whereas the HT's stand roughly the same chance as they do now.

>Hitting infantry the gun seems to hit the position where the unit was when the shot was fired. This gives a good effect if the unit stays put. But if the unit is moving, the shot misses by a few meters. This doesn't matter much with 75mm and above, but the 20mm

has so small blast that the unit often avoids the damege entirely.

Come to think of it this might be true. If artillery indeed uses only area fire against soft targets. The mortars at least do not accept units as targets..... hence they will not shift fire automatically to keep the target under fire.

I would call this feature a bug. Or this bug a feature.

>I believe fixing these shortcomings would require a lot of coding.

Some fundamental changes would be needed.

>Just increasing accuracy or the blast would fix these special instances, but would also cause other problems elsewhere.

I think that if it was increased blast against increased accuracy the increased accuracy would be less troublesome. Since, according to BTS, CAS is not worth the points getting them shot up a bit more often than they now do get shot does not affect game play as much as increased blast radius would.

[Abteilung]

Originally posted by KiwiJoe:

It seems to be modeled as a weapon that relys soley on its blast effect to do damage... just like HE from artillery or a tank HE round. Howeva it should be a cross between a tank HE round and a mg round. As it is there is no chance of damaging infantry, AT guns, etc from hitting them directly with a 20mm round. Just damage from the VERY small blast effect. I don't know if this could be changed, but I hope something is done to increase its effctiveness in CM2.

You're kidding right ? A direct hit from a 20mm FLAK is going to absolutely shred a man. That is BEFORE the round explodes. Even a dud would blow a man in two should it hit. Think of it as a high velocity grenade launcher....One or two hits is all it takes to bring down a 4 engined bomber.....

[Guest Germanboy]

Originally posted by tero:

>I was trained on the modern version of the gun.

Don't the modern guns have different sights/scales for ground targets ?

They have two targeting mechanisms - a sight on the gun for visual, and an electronic system. The sight is changed from the WW2 version in the sense that it has two lead levels, 'fast' and 'slow', for modern planes and helicopters, respectively. They also have a no-lead aim for ground targets.

I am not contending whether the in-game accuracy should be amended or not, since I have no idea what would be correct. All I am saying is that the fact that these guns had sights allowing them to target planes is irrelevant when it comes to determine their hit probability for ground targets, as the AA sights could not be used for firing on ground targets.

49th UK ID LAA Rgt Bofors guns were given special ground-fire sights after Le Havre in 1944, suggesting to me that even in WW2 this was the case.

Tracer and all that were not mentioned in your original post.

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Andreas

Der Kessel

Home of „Die Sturmgruppe“; Scenario Design Group for Combat Mission.

[KiwiJoe]

I think u need to read what I said agian. I agree with you, direct hits SHOULD rip infantry apart. As it is CURRENTLY I don't think direct hits are modeled, only blast effects.

[Abteilung]

The flak guns seem to have a great deal of difficulty leading a moving target. Not just the 20mm, but all of them. Perhaps it is the same reason the Bismarck's flak guns were ineffective against the stringbags that torpedoed her. The guns were set to lead a FAST moving target, they couldn't slow their traverse and elevation down enough to track the slow Fairey biplanes. It seems that in CM they tend to overcompensate when firing on a moving land based target. I will test this out when I get home more thoroughly.

[Guest tero]

>They also have a no-lead aim for ground targets.

That was my impression. And I know there were different firing methods (air targets and land targets respectively) for the 88 at least. That is why I suspect there should have been methods like that for the other FLAK guns as well.

>All I am saying is that the fact that these guns had sights allowing them to target planes is irrelevant when it comes to determine their hit probability for ground targets, as the AA sights could not be used for firing on ground targets.

But you do agree that hit propability against land targets should be higher than against air targets ?

>49th UK ID LAA Rgt Bofors guns were given special ground-fire sights after Le Havre in 1944, suggesting to me that even in WW2 this was the case.

As I stated there were proviosions for the 88 to fire against ground targets. And the German SOP was to use them as dual purpose guns.

>Tracer and all that were not mentioned in your original post.

That came to me only later. Sorry.

[This message has been edited by tero (edited 02-15-2001).]

[Jeff Heidman]

This is an interesting problem.

IIRC, Steel Panthers was the same way. It was often the case that it was easier to kill a tank than it was to kill a truck, since the tank got an AP round and the truck just got an HE blast.

As someone pointed out, squad leader had a differnt kind of solution using the "Infantry Fire Equivalent" rating for small caliber, high ROF guns.

Jeff Heidman

[Guest wwb_99]

IIRC Steel panthers handled it differently. Instead of using he blast, a truck was just a vehicle with 0 armor, penetrable by both nearby blasts and direct hits. 20mm FLAK does do a good job of hitting targets. . .

WWB

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Before battle, my digital soldiers turn to me and say,

Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutamus.

[Terence]

Originally posted by tero:

>

Yes. But the use of tracer ammo as a means of aiming is not modelled in CM, is it ? The difference in shooting againts ground and air targets is fundamental in that the ground target does not need to be lead the way the air target. Against a groun target you just fire a few rounds, adjust, fire and adjust again until your aim is true and then you just let it rip. Against the air target you need to mentally calculate the direction, speed etc. etc. just to line up the gun to point even that way before you start adjusting your fire.

I read somewhere that tracer makes your shooting less accurate cause the tracer rounds have different ballistics than the regular rounds. When units had their tracer taken away, their kill rating went up. Ill try to track this down somewhere. But no promises.

[Claymore]

Vanir,

Thanks for the pointer to the previous discussion regarding the 20mm. I do however get different results than you for the 20mm vs infantry. Last night (before your response) I was running tests to submit to this thread where I ran 3 platoons of VET infantry over OPEN TERRAIN at 250m distance from 6 VET Single barrelled 20mm. Movement of the infantry was first perpendicular and then directly towards (then away) from the 20mm battery.

For Brevity the results were: CM(latest patch)

Elapsed time:50 turns of runtime

Total salvos: 6 guns x 50 turns x ~8 bursts/turn

Casualties/turn: 1 +/- 0.5

Interestingly enough the direction of infantry movement made little difference in the casualty rate. I note that these rates are much less than you noted in the previous posting. Either the decreased deflection at your test range of 700m increases the 20mm effectiveness or something in our tests are not capturing the true results because of poor statistics.

Cheers

Murray

[CavScout]

Originally posted by tero:

I think the thing that should be done is to increase accuracy.

They are after all equipped with sights capable of tracking targets moving at 200+ mph. That is why I think hitting stationary (compared to the aircraft) targets on the ground should be very easy.

I think one needs to be careful when comparing aircraft speeds to ground speeds. An aircraft may indeed be moving 200+ miles an hour but the movement may fast but relative to a ground unit it may be slow. For example, what is easy for you to keep a bead on: 1)A 747 moving hundreds of miles an hour across the sky at 15,000 feet or a car zooming by your position at 65 mph?

[Vanir]

Claymore:

I reran my tests at 250m. 1 Platoon of elite British troops running across from 3 regular 20mm for 1 turn. Each squad is manually targeted by one gun. I ran 5 times and got results of 4,3,3,7 and 7 casualties total. 4.8 per turn average, 1.6 per gun. So I'm somehow getting many times more casualties than you using half as many guns.

Are you specificly targeting squads with the 20mm or do you let them pick their own targets? I target them.

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You've never heard music until you've heard the bleating of a gut-shot cesspooler. -Mark IV

[This message has been edited by Vanir (edited 02-15-2001).]

[ASL Veteran]

I would be curious to know if the blast rating of six is the blast rating for just one round or if the blast rating represents the blast effects of multiple rounds. Each burst the the Flak gun fires is going to be a burst of multiple rounds, so if the blast effect is for one round only, then the effectiveness is greatly reduced since more than one round would actually be hitting the target at one time. The blast effect would need to be something like 6 (blast) x 20 (rounds per burst)- or whatever would be appropriate as the number of rounds per burst.

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When we were in the Bocage country we were assaulted by them Tigers ... you know what I mean by assaulted huh? WELL I MEAN ASSAULTED!!!!

[Claymore]

Vanir,

Could you please email me your setup?

[address: mrdarrach@skyweb.com]

I repeated my tests using a completely new setup. It comprised 6 platoons of Vet infantry in OPEN, SCATTERED and FULL woods given zero ammo. They are targeted by 6 x MG42s and 6 x 20mm FLAKs from about 250m. At time t=0 the infantry start running (either perpendicularly or back and forth).

I will send you my setup as well if you want.

Fog of War is OFF

MGs and 20mm are TARGETTED manually

The setup gives a direct comparison between MG42 and single 20mm FLAK against infantry in the different terrain types.

Results: Open Terrain Casualty rate

MG42 = ~3/turn

20mm = >1/turn

Scattered Trees Casualty rate

MG42 = ~3/turn

20mm = ~1/turn

Full Trees Casualty rate

MG42 = ~4/turn

20mm = ~1.5/turn

I have only run this for about 50 turns but the results seem very repeatable. The casualty rate goes up as the woods gets thicker mainly because the soldiers move slower. In OPEN terrain the 20mm typically misses the targetted squads by about 5-8m, whereas in the FULL WOODs it only misses by half that.

Cheers

Murray

[Claymore]

Damn...

The OPEN TERRAIN casualty rate for 20mm should be r < 1/turn

Cheers

Murray

[Guest tero]

>I read somewhere that tracer makes your shooting less accurate cause the tracer rounds have different ballistics than the regular rounds. When units had their tracer taken away, their kill rating went up. Ill try to track this down somewhere. But no promises.

I think this was done (at least) in the Pacific to USMC/Navy fighter aicraft. They lost the tracers and the intended target lost the advance warning benefit given by the tracer ammo = kill rate rose dramatically. The same effect can be seen in land based weapons but I think the only real benefit you get is you do not broadcast your position to every unit in LOS. With a big arsed gun like the 20mm FLAK that is not much of a problem since you tend to draw fire the minute you open up.

At some point the tracers were given to squad leaders to direct fire but I think that was discontinued because of you tend to lose a disproportionate amount of squad leaders IF they are the only people firing tracers in a fire fight.