When a tank runs into something, that something should die.

[The Commissar]

I'll admitt I couldnt force myself to read half of the bickering going on in this thread, but from what I've seen no one mentioned some hard core evidence.

Since the next game is CM2, ramming was a helluva lot more common. Soviet tankers, devoid of good guns, sighting, and training got medals for ramming s@it to hell! One knocked out an entire Motorized company with a T-34!

Here's a webpage.

http://rkka.h1.ru/ramming.htm

Oh, and here's the exact smae thread from a while ago which BTS never answered.

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/010167-2.html

Cheers!

------------------

"...Every position, every meter of Soviet soil must be defended to the last drop of blood..."

- Segment from Order 227 "Not a step back"

[Leonidas]

Originally posted by CavScout:

With your view one reaction time, one wonders how I drive to work everyday....

Driving off-road with death breathing down your neck is not quite like driving to work.

When you drive to work, you are driving on pavement, with clear traffic rules and not worrying about people shooting at you. Driving in battle means looking out for enemy soldiers, mines and AFVs while also trying to avoid craters, tree stumps, big rocks and anything else that could damage or immobilize the jeep.

[jshandorf]

Originally posted by CavScout:

I agree. Just having jeep crews bail is silly.

How is it silly? If the tank has already hit your jeep and is shoving it backwards, you are telling me that the driver and the other guys in it would just stay in the jeep? THAT has to be the silliest thing I have heard. You can't just drive away from something like that.

Also, you are saying that the AI should be smart enough to avoid collisions? That HAS to be the dumbest thing I have heard. So in CM you want the AI to be programed so that NO vehicles EVER collide? Do you realize how stupid that sounds? On one had you want realism.. but then on the other you want it so that no vehicles ever run into each other?

REMEMBER PEOPLE! We ARE NOT talking about BEFORE IMPACT! We are talking about when the vehicles have ALREADY COLLIDED! Getting out of the way is MOOT after that. Kiiirist! Why does this ALWAYS happen with a discussion that Cavscout pokes his nose into? Suddenly we got TOTALLY off the point. I am not trying to address how to AVOID collisions but what the result should be AFTER they happen.

If a tank is smashing into a jeep and pushing it backwards with the possibility of the jeep flipping over a REAL possibility, you are telling me that the driver WOULDN'T bail out? Get real.

Jeff

------------------

When nuclear weapons are frozen then only freezers will have nuclear weapons.

[Croda]

So let me try to get a handle on this "discussion." What we are saying is that the accurate modelling of a 30 ton tank hitting a 1 ton jeep is for both of the vehicles drivers to politely excuse themselves and drive away?

That doesn't work for me.

If two vehicles hit there would be a collision. That collision can and most likely should be modelled better than it is. The rest of this is just bickering for the sake of bickering. Let's have the proponents of the SturmTiger, bicycles, and horse-drawn artillery comment. They are the ones craving realistic modelling, why is this so far from that?

[Kingfish]

If a tank is smashing into a jeep and pushing it backwards with the possibility of the jeep flipping over a REAL possibility, you are telling me that the driver WOULDN'T bail out? Get real.

You make a good point. However, wouldn't that reaction apply also if the tank was friendly and the collision was an accident? IMO, it would apply. Therefore, we can't have this feature until we have some type of collision avoidance coded into the vehicles.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by jshandorf:

REMEMBER PEOPLE! We ARE NOT talking about BEFORE IMPACT! We are talking about when the vehicles have ALREADY COLLIDED! Getting out of the way is MOOT after that. Kiiirist! Why does this ALWAYS happen with a discussion that Cavscout pokes his nose into? Suddenly we got TOTALLY off the point. I am not trying to address how to AVOID collisions but what the result should be AFTER they happen.

Please switch to decaf. The problem isn't Cavscout, the problem is YOU - ranting and raving and carrying on and letting people get under your skin. Either conduct yourself in a mature, rational manner or forget it. Telling people to "get real", no matter how irritating they are, is only going to get people's backs up. Perhaps you need a break from your computer for a while - this really isn't a life or death issue, you know. There will be no changes to CM1, CM2 is months away and for all we know has incorporated the changes you suggest already, the incidence of jeep/tank collisions in CM is pretty low anyway, and you really don't pass yourself off in a good light by getting suckered in to these long diatribes. Good grief, man, its obvious you are a dedicated CMer and quite bright to boot - so my advice to you is not to let people bug you. They also have a right to their own opinion, no matter how informed or misinformed it is.

[Jeff Heidman]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

You make a good point. However, wouldn't that reaction apply also if the tank was friendly and the collision was an accident? IMO, it would apply. Therefore, we can't have this feature until we have some type of collision avoidance coded into the vehicles.

Excellent point.

I think Jeff wants to have the colliosns modelled better, but you cannot look at only that portion of it.

Right now, there is no model for avoiding collisions. Therefore, you cannot model what will happen when they do collide, since you would be modelling something that happens too often.

Ideally, there would be a highly detailed model for how vehicles can attempt to ram and attempt to avoid, and a highly detailed model for what happens when the rammer succeeds, or when there is an accidental ramming.

But since there is no such avoidance/attempt model, it would, in the whole, result in a decrease in realism to only model what happens when the collision occures. We would then be modelling a result that happens much more often than what happened in real life.

The result would be people screaming about their idiot Jeep just sitting there while the gun damaged KT rolled over it.

Berkut

[Jasper]

Originally posted by The Commissar:

I'll admit I couldn't force myself to read half of the bickering going on in this thread, but from what I've seen no one mentioned some hard core evidence.

Cheers!

Time for rexford to come out with metallurgical analysis - not of projectile versus armor, but armor versus armor. I wonder if there's a "shatter gap" with ramming to. Hit the enemy tank just right - sets up internal resonance vibrations, amplified by the running motor . . . BOOM . . . Driver sitting on the ground - showered with pieces. The TC standing on top of a loose pile of metal. The gunner - squinting through nothing, pulls the trigger and shouts "BANG".

[SirOscar]

I agree with the idea that collisions are not very "real" in game now. However "if you build it they will come" What I mean by this is, if you model collision damage you will just turn CM into a demolition derby, you can count on people with gun damage, no AP ammo etc using this as a NORMAL tactic, now maybe it was a normal day to day thing in Russia( I bet it was a lot more rare then some are saying here) but in ETO I just don't think it was very often done. I can hear the cries of "GAMEY" now. Geeee just put the wrong force structure together in a QB and you get blasted, just imagine if you started running over everything in sight and DON'T tell me that people would NOT abuse this, I have played games with people all my life and when it comes down to being gamey or winning many if not most will be gamey.

[CavScout]

Originally posted by Leonidas:

When you drive to work, you are driving on pavement, with clear traffic rules and not worrying about people shooting at you. Driving in battle means looking out for enemy soldiers, mines and AFVs while also trying to avoid craters, tree stumps, big rocks and anything else that could damage or immobilize the jeep.

In essence, you are more alert. Makes it even more unlikely you'd run into an enemy vehicle.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by CavScout:

In essence, you are more alert. Makes it even more unlikely you'd run into an enemy vehicle.

I disagree; driving with 3 hours sleep in a 48 or 36 hour period is not conducive to being "more alert" than a civvie with 7 hours of sleep and 2 cups of coffee in him first thing on a Monday morning. Add panic and fear of death into the equation of reaction times.

There is the larger issue of how often jeeps and tanks on opposing sides were employed anywhere near each other, of course...

[CavScout]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I disagree; driving with 3 hours sleep in a 48 or 36 hour period is not conducive to being "more alert" than a civvie with 7 hours of sleep and 2 cups of coffee in him first thing on a Monday morning. Add panic and fear of death into the equation of reaction times.

You guys do know that tanks are loud, noisy machines, right?

[Leonidas]

Originally posted by jshandorf:

How is it silly? If the tank has already hit your jeep and is shoving it backwards, you are telling me that the driver and the other guys in it would just stay in the jeep? THAT has to be the silliest thing I have heard. You can't just drive away from something like that.

If a tank is smashing into a jeep and pushing it backwards with the possibility of the jeep flipping over a REAL possibility, you are telling me that the driver WOULDN'T bail out? Get real.

Jeff

We seem to be going in a loop here. I've already answered this, more than once, I think. This isn't a terribly important issue, AFAIK, but if you can lay off the caps lock key I'll try one more time to explain it.

It seems to me you're envisioning Hollywood-style wrecks with spectacular damage and flip-overs. Real wrecks are far less dramatic. As I've already explained, WWII tanks were not designed to climb over obstacles as tall as a jeep, so there's never going to be a Monster-Truck jeep crushing scene.

The key question in a real wreck is the relative speed of the wreck. In a head-on wreck you add the speeds together. In a rear-end wreck you subtract them. For other angles, you use vector addition from high school physics.

The major point, one more time, read this closely:

--WWII vehicles didn't move all that fast!--

Top speed on these tanks is in the 25-30 mph range. Without a lot of speed, neither the passengers nor the vehicles are going to take a lot of damage. Maybe in a head-on or near head-on with both vehicles moving at top speed you could get enough relative speed difference to really hurt something. But in most cases there isn't enough speed.

There are two ways things get hurt in wrecks. First, passengers often get hurt by being thrown forward into the dashboard or some other non-padded surface. These days we have fewer passenger fatalities than they would have in WWII, mostly because of our ubiquitous seat belts, but also because of air bags and a few other things. If we wanted collision realism, I think there would be a fair number of casualties from wrecks where any speed was involved, with more casualties being in the lighter vehicles. (On the other hand, I bet than a tank commander in a unbuttoned tank could take a fair bit of damage in a head-on collision with a jeep, because he's not well braced for an impact.)

As far as the passengers are concerned, the relative masses of the vehicles are relevant because they determine which vehicles suffers what proportion of the sudden acceleration/deceleration. The heavier car experiences less, and the lighter car experiences more.

The other damage in a wreck is to the vehicle itself. That is a function of the velocity differential and the sturdiness of the vehicle. Modern cars are very flimsy compared to WWII vehicles, including WWII jeeps. Today cars are largely made out of plastic (for fuel efficiency), whereas WWII vehicles were made entirely of metal AFAIK. If you start pushing on a jeep with a tank, I would bet that the jeep would start sliding across the ground before it would crumple, because it's so strong.

That's all I've got to say on the topic. If you want to keep insisting that WWII tanks should act like cars in movies or at the monster truck show, go ahead.

[Splinty]

One more thing to consider is that the spinning tracks on a tank will shred the sheet metal on the portions of the jeep that they make contact with.

------------------

Nicht Schiessen!!

[Lorak]

First: I think Jshandorf has a point.

Second :For Cavscouts uber german player ego. I'm sure we would want it modeled if a churchhill ran into a kubelwagon too. But Jeep is easy to use.

Third: Having been in convoys at night. I can assure you that wrecks happen, and guess what!? they knew people were in front and behind them. Hitting things in bad visibilty is just natural. I would like one of you to go out during the next night in heavy fog. and drive around with no headlights. (hint the euopean country side didn't have steet lamps.

Forth: I think the jeep/wagon being abandoned or even a half-track should be a possibility. NOT a given. Maybe have it do a bog/immobilized check like a tank in mud or damp ground.

Just my .02

Lorak

------------------

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."--William Butler Yeats

Cesspool

Combatmissionclub

and for Kitty's sake

=^..^=

[Simon Fox]

Bump

Let's keep this thread going guys.

Jeff goes feral.

Cavscout stirs him up.

Jeff goes more feral.

Dorosh spoils the fun as usual by sermonising left, right and centre.

Something completely obscure gets analysed to death.

No one get's too upset (except Jeff).

Jasper is bloody funny.

It's a regular microcosm of the CM board.

------------------

"Stand to your glasses steady,

This world is a world of lies,

Here's a toast to the dead already,

And here's to the next man to die."

-hymn of the "Double Reds"

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Simon Fox:

Bump

Dorosh spoils the fun as usual by sermonising left, right and centre.

Bah!

[Claytonious2]

"where a JpIV and a jeep collided head on and as the tank pushed the jeep backwards the little jeep fired away madly with the MG and somehow killed the JPIV."

So it sounds to me like the guys in the jeep did the right thing. If they had run off they would have been cut down, but being elite Jeep Tank Hunters, they knew the best thing was to cling to the AFV like moss on a rock and slowly wear it down with the trusty MG until it burst into flames.

Seriously, if you think that kind of thing makes you mad now, wait until this happens to you: on the first turn of the game, your buttoned up sherman is driving and, because of no fault of your own, but only because of that notoriously goofy pathfinding AI, collides with another one of your shermans and they are both immobilized. You will probably lose the game now because something stupid happened that you had no way to prevent. Is that fun? Is that historical? Do you want to play Car Wars or Combat Mission?

[Shandorf]

Originally posted by Leonidas:

We seem to be going in a loop here. I've already answered this, more than once, I think. This isn't a terribly important issue, AFAIK, but if you can lay off the caps lock key I'll try one more time to explain it.

It seems to me you're envisioning Hollywood-style wrecks with spectacular damage and flip-overs. Real wrecks are far less dramatic. As I've already explained, WWII tanks were not designed to climb over obstacles as tall as a jeep, so there's never going to be a Monster-Truck jeep crushing scene.

The key question in a real wreck is the relative speed of the wreck. In a head-on wreck you add the speeds together. In a rear-end wreck you subtract them. For other angles, you use vector addition from high school physics.

The major point, one more time, read this closely:

--WWII vehicles didn't move all that fast!--

Top speed on these tanks is in the 25-30 mph range. Without a lot of speed, neither the passengers nor the vehicles are going to take a lot of damage. Maybe in a head-on or near head-on with both vehicles moving at top speed you could get enough relative speed difference to really hurt something. But in most cases there isn't enough speed.

There are two ways things get hurt in wrecks. First, passengers often get hurt by being thrown forward into the dashboard or some other non-padded surface. These days we have fewer passenger fatalities than they would have in WWII, mostly because of our ubiquitous seat belts, but also because of air bags and a few other things. If we wanted collision realism, I think there would be a fair number of casualties from wrecks where any speed was involved, with more casualties being in the lighter vehicles. (On the other hand, I bet than a tank commander in a unbuttoned tank could take a fair bit of damage in a head-on collision with a jeep, because he's not well braced for an impact.)

As far as the passengers are concerned, the relative masses of the vehicles are relevant because they determine which vehicles suffers what proportion of the sudden acceleration/deceleration. The heavier car experiences less, and the lighter car experiences more.

The other damage in a wreck is to the vehicle itself. That is a function of the velocity differential and the sturdiness of the vehicle. Modern cars are very flimsy compared to WWII vehicles, including WWII jeeps. Today cars are largely made out of plastic (for fuel efficiency), whereas WWII vehicles were made entirely of metal AFAIK. If you start pushing on a jeep with a tank, I would bet that the jeep would start sliding across the ground before it would crumple, because it's so strong.

That's all I've got to say on the topic. If you want to keep insisting that WWII tanks should act like cars in movies or at the monster truck show, go ahead.

Wrong. I am not talking about Monster car stuff. If you read my post I actually mention that.

Point of fact. Tanks can and have drove into and over things in combat. That was intended in the design so that they can bypass obstacles. But that is not my point so I digress.

It doesn't take much to knock over a jeep or even a HT when it is being PUSHED by a tank. A rut in the road... a hole in the ground... a ditch.. a log... a stump.. anything that would impede the sliding of the jeep or HT. Then 1 of 2 things will happen. The vehicle will stop sliding and proceed to roll over OR the tank will drive OVER it. That is if the tank keeps going forward.

Regardless of what happens what I am pointing out is that the people who once occupied said jeep or HT would EVACUATE fast!

Why is that so hard to comprehend? I am not talking about fiery crashes and explosions which DID happen. If you read the article that is attached to the provided link at the top you can read for yourself. I don't think this kind of modeling is necessary at the moment though... But we do need something a little more realistic to happen when a tank runs into a smaller and lighter vehicle.

We don't need to get all complicated and theoretical in discussing wether the driver had 2 or 10 cups of coffee. Sheesh.

Jeff

[deanco]

Originally posted by Leonidas:

As I've already explained, WWII tanks were not designed to climb over obstacles as tall as a jeep, so there's never going to be a Monster-Truck jeep crushing scene.

---------

Oh No!!! I had this great idea for a new scenario, and this blows it to hell....

------------------

DeanCo--

CM interface mods: http://mapage.cybercable.fr/deanco/

so many games...so little time

[illo]

Leonidas btw. Jeep was driving full speed and Jpz-IV was hunting. Together it should make enough speed to crush the Jeep

Try this.

1. Take Jeep

2. Get it travel max speed.

3. drive against wall or 40ton object.

only immobilisation? ...heh

[jshandorf]

Originally posted by Leonidas:

[sNIP]

WWII tanks were not designed to climb over obstacles as tall as a jeep, [sNIP]

I didn't notice this before...

You are NOT serious right? Are you kidding? For the love of all that is good and right tanks were meant to scale obstacles that were not scalable by wheeled vehicles.

Also.. Do you really think that a soft skinned vehicle, like a jeep, is going to retain it's height and size when being hit and slowly crushed by a tank? Nope... Once that tank gets ANY kind of weight on top of the jeep it is going to flatten like a pancake. Are you able to fathom how heavy 30-40 tons is?

Regardless, this is not what I am saying needs to happen in CM. What I am concerned with is the crews continue operation of said vehicle when a tank IS in the process of smashing into and bearing down on them.

Jeff

------------------

When nuclear weapons are frozen then only freezers will have nuclear weapons.

[Ibenholt]

I do agree that it seems highly unlikely that any vehicle hit by a tank would continue to operate as if nothing happened.

I mean come on! Not even shocked!? Imagine sitting in a little open jeep that is unmercifully being pushed backwards by a Tiger I tank!

I'm not even talking about the jeep being crushed by the tank, but surely if the Tiger is pushing you back, your close enough to reach out and touch it and you can even hear the German commander in the tank shouting orders, surely you would be seriously shocked and most likely jump out of the jeep before the tank finds something to crush you up against like a little insect.

A giant steel box of death with a huge gun pushing your tin can all over the place cannot be good for your psyche.

[Sgt. Beavis]

(1/2)*M*V^2 gives you kinetic energy. ok...

Jeep is about 1 ton or so. PzIV/70 is...30 tons? maybe. In the example cited, jeep is traveling at a fast pace, let's say 20mph. PzIV/70 is hunting at 5mph.

jeep ke = 200 tons*mph^2. which isnt a unit. but the numbers still apply. so

Jeep KE = 200

M(Jeep)*V(Jeep) = 20

PzIV/70 KE = 375

M(PzIV)*V(PzIV) = 150

the jeep would disintegrate upon impact...the crew wouldnt get a chance to bail out, they'd be in pieces. the tank crew

would feel it, but the 30 tons they have surrounding them creates considerably more inertia than the jeep.

Now this sort of thing didn't happen all that often, 'tis true. But tank crews did run over stuff, and i've read accounts of russian and german tanks in close range fighting resorting to ramming. Whether or not that's true, I'm not sure.

the catastrophic effects of vehicles hitting each other should be modeled though, and i do believe that tanks or other AFVs should be able to run down infantry in the open, or mortars, field pieces, etc. since it probably happened from time to time.

Now a few of you have mentioned that while on road marches the AI will ensure that tanks run into each other... well, that should be improved if the game is to calculate effects of collisions so that you don't lose half your armored force due to accidents.

anyway, i'm done for now. bye bye

[Guest captain,ro]

ok here goes...

as a former jeep driver, i think that if i hit a enemy tank going at speeds over 20MPH i seem to think that the jeep would be FUBARed. i seem to remember that the jeep was not that hi off the ground...altho the jeep did have hi ground clearence its not that big. when i was doing the uncle sam thingie i was assained to a AT team. i was a TOW gunner. as the gunner i also drove the jeep. now when we went on night marches, using only blackout lites to drive by...you couldnt see ten ft in front of the hood. it was quite common for us to have accidents.

and this was in peace time...i can not even imageine what it would be like in a real war.

i know that given the dark and low visableity, if i hit a tank, i would bail and run like hell

just my .02

ro

ps if you want to see the pictures of my unit (jeep and all) just email me and i will send them to ya