VT shells penetrate floors?

[Juardis]

Reading in Citizen Soldiers about the fighting in Aachen and one strat employed by the Americans was to fire VT shells into buildings with the timer set to explode after it penetrated a couple of floors thereby killing the krauts on the ground floor. Great idea! Can VT shells in CM do this? Or are they strictly airburst ordnance? It should be the same shell, but I'm not sure how CM models this. I'd like to buy the stuff if it penetrates floors.

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Jeff Abbott

[Guest Martin Cracauer]

I thought the VT shells were using radar, not timers?

Anyway, other airburst shells might be able to do this, but I don't think you can model that in CMBO. There has been a thread recently about airburst shells where the possibilities for a control interface has been discussed. Basically, since you can give orders only once a minute, you cannot adjust the timer sufficiently well.

I also tend to doubt the whole story, since the timer and the flightpath is probably not exact enough to specify it by 2 meters (building level height), from what arty people told here. They probably tried and would have some shells timed right, and one 150mm shell in the right room is sufficient, but 98% of shells or so were probably wasted.

[John Kettler]

Juardis,

What you describe could easily be done by taking a conventional shell and setting the fuze for delay (.05 sec, I think, maybe more).

There is no need to use expensive radar proximity fuzes specifically designed for airburst for a common artillery task. Nor am I at all certain they could even be set this way. Please post the relevant sentence or sentences verbatim so that we can see what was originally said.

Thanks!

John Kettler

[Juardis]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Juardis,

What you describe could easily be done by taking a conventional shell and setting the fuze for delay (.05 sec, I think, maybe more).

John Kettler

I think that's what they did IRL. It was activated on contact and delayed to explode shortly thereafter. In that regards it is a form of Variable Timed fuses. Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse VT air bursts with delays, but in my mind, they perform the same type of function. I know ordinary shells in CM explode on contact.

I also know that VT shells burst in the air at some predefined point above the ground. I wouldn't expect those shells to penetrate a building in real life. I know also that in CM, VT shells burst in the air.

However, since CMBO is an abstraction and setting a delay is out of the ordinary, I'm thinking perhaps BTS could have lumped the two different types of shells (delayed fuse and VT) into the same category and called them VT shells. That way, if VT shells hit a building, then CMBO would explode them on the ground floor. Ohterwise, they explode in the air. The point is, to distinguish between shells that explode on contact and shells that explode prior to or after contact, the VT designation could be used. Whether it is or not, I don't know.