Really, how far is 545m?

[Snake Eyes]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by dalem:

See, Pilgrim - almost a guaranteed hit there. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Now if we carry this ASL analogy through to its conclusion, if the M4 has an AF of 8 there is a 72% chance of a kill after the hit. Soooo, we see that there is about a 30% chance to kill the M4 with the first shot.

[pilgrim]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by dalem:

See, Pilgrim - almost a guaranteed hit there.

-dale<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Wow. Time to dig through mountains of dust in the basement to get to my ASL stuff. It sure never seemed like I got easy to-hit rolls like that.

Ok, you guys win. I'll have to change my thinking. When I said "Tell me if I'm wrong" I didn't think you all would take it so literally.

Seriously, thanks for all the responses. What a helpful group!!

[MikeyD]

I know more than one person that was disappointed when they first played CM because it wasn't the 'shooter' game they were expecting. The game just takes some mental adjustment. Start paying attention to hull-down positions, flanking maneuvers, terrain masking, aspects of the game that utilize the excellent 3D topography. Wait til the first time you get your JpzIV in a good hull-down position angled behind a hill and you see a 17 pounder shell glance off the hull front!

[Chad Harrison]

hey pilgrim, if it makes you feel any better ive been playing SL/ASL since i was 12 and it is deeply embedded in my mind. from what i know (and have read here), 500m was about what the gunners practiced at. it was a comfortable range for them. now in ASL, most tank engagements in open terrain occured (for me) between 10-15 hexes, which is between 400-600m (remember that SL is 40m per hex). so even at 15 hexes, thats 600m, and now your making me remember, in ASL the black to hit numbers for 12-16 hexes was an 8? for a sherman it was +1 (target size), so thats still a pretty good chance, as long as its not moving.

i still play ASL every once and awhile and there are many differences between the two, some good some bad. stick with it though, watching your sherman blow up into little pieces is much more fun than making a "boom" noise under your breath and turning over the cardboard counter. if you need someone to play agaisnt drop me a FTOALMA@msn.com !

[Triumvir]

Then again, there are the (probably) apocryphal stories of Israel Tal, Gen of Tank Troops and father of the Merkava, directing fire from Centurions at trucks 6km away and scoring first round hits.

Not to mention the (probably reliable) story of the 5000m Gulf War kill by a Challenger.

In one of the shooting galleries I've set up, a Nashorn scored a first round kill on a Sherman at 2000m with a 9% hit percentage.

[tss]

Username wrpte:

Then why did you say the following?

Because I made an exceptionally poor choice of words resulting in a different message than what I wanted to say. What I meant to say was:

"Shot accuracy in WWII ..."

And now a little elaboration that hopefully will make it more clear (though, I'm not certain about that since I should be sleeping already):

There are two main factors whether a direct-fire shot hits its target or not:

- inherent gun accuracy; and

- gun crew proficiency + psychological situation.

In my opinion, the second factor is by far more important than the first in usual combat conditions. That is why I believe that considering just the gun properties would lead into unrealistically accurate gun fire.

[somehow I managed to destroy the following paragraph last evening:]

In all of the above misses that I mentioned, the range was well within the accurate range of just about any gun manufactured since mid-14th century. At the 15 m range it is enough to have the gun pointing in the general direction of the tank-sized target, but still the crew managed to miss.

Some people seem to think that WWII soldiers were like robots and could always keep their calm and perform rationally under fire. Sure, there were people like that, and many of them are mentioned in the lists of Congressional Medal of Honor, George's Cross, Knights Cross, or Mannerheim's Cross recipients or were made Heroes of Soviet Union. However, a large portion (some might say that a majority) of men were scared stiff and consequently did stupid things.

All the shots that I mentioned were outliers so you (obviously) can't generalize them to "all first shots at <40m will miss and all first shots >1800m will hit". They were meant to be examples on the freaky stuff that happened on the real war in an (partial) answer to the original poster's accuracy question.

Now, I'm not certain whether that above makes any sense, but I'm too tired to write a better reply now.

Are all Finns like the Finns that post here on the CM board

Well, my girlfriend has repeatedly stated that she thinks that I'm actually an alien (most recently when I spent large chunks of my vacation creating a logic program to solve logical puzzles). Does this answer to your question?

- Tommi

[ 08-03-2001: Message edited by: tss ]

[Fenno]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Username:

Are all Finns like the Finns that post here on the CM board?

Lewis<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, actually all Finns are very much alike, lacking absolutely all amatory skills every Finn is nowadays produced in a secret EU-laboratory by method of cloning. In the production procedure Finns are deviously given national characteristics that especially irritate Americans.

Now this board has more readers than anybody could guess, even Dobya himself lurks here from time to time, and this is the real reasen he decided to ban human cloning: to get every Finn of the board by the time of CM13...

What's your problem, really?

[Col Deadmarsh]

Pilgrim, you are forgetting two factors in calculating the percentage to hit: Those are Time Of Day and Weather. With what you told us, I would assume that it's high noon on a clear day. I think you'll find though that by playing under some heavy cloud conditions or at dawn/dusk, those first shot hits will be seen much less.

With that said, I would actually vote for BTS to go back to thier original statistics where tanks are less accurate. I don't know if this would make things more real or less real, but in my opinion it would make the game more fun. My reasoning for this is that it would allow for more manuvarability with one's tanks to attack infantry and not have to worry about constantly putting one's tank at a great risk when you need to move it from skirmish to skirmish.

As it is right now, I'm always worried about making a break for a ridge line or trying to scoot from one patch of woods to another with my tanks because too often I've seen the enemy take me out with one shot.

So, I would agree with your first instinct and say that during the day with clear conditions, tanks are still a little bit too accurate for my own taste.

[RCHRD]

I'm starting to come around to the view that combat mission, and in fact all wargames, magnify lethality in order to allow the players to reach a decision. I hope, when I have more time, to substantiate my claim with anecdotal evidence. Does anyone else feel that this is the case?

[dalem]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RCHRD:

I'm starting to come around to the view that combat mission, and in fact all wargames, magnify lethality in order to allow the players to reach a decision. I hope, when I have more time, to substantiate my claim with anecdotal evidence. Does anyone else feel that this is the case?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I feel this is more of a valid point of view when a wargame has to compress or inflate time scales, and in that case is probably a reasonable thing, as long as it averages out correctly over time.

In CM's case I think that, as long as you stick to small- to medium- sized battles (300-800 pts) then you're probably not giving up too much to such abstraction. In larger battles however, our exaggerated ability to control the minutiae of huge forces has the effect of compressing the time scale, so the immediate lethality of a 30 to 60 turn/minute battle is very much increased.

-dale

[Tero]

>Are all Finns like the Finns that post here

>on the CM board?

We use examples based on the Finnish experiences during the war. That is our frame of reference. These examples are sometimes grossly out of whack from the experiences of the forces that fought the "real" WWII. Some examples: a PAK40 manned by Finns would need anything from 1 to 20 rounds to kill a single T-34 during the summer of 1944. And it would survive the engagement after firing those 20 rounds at a single target. (A Finnish 50mm PAK38 used up to 40 rounds to kill a single T-34). There is a recorded incident when a crew lifted the back of a PAK40 carriage to allow the gunner to engage tanks below the lowest possible depression allowed by the gun in that particular position. A Pzfaust or Pzschreck used by the Finns would consistently get confirmed first shot kills against T-34's and IS-2's during the summer of 1944. And some of them were first ever training shots at live targets with untranslated instructions being read to the firer as he was going through the motions.

And please stowe the über-Finn crap. These are cold facts based on the Finnish war experiences.

We are not native speakers so while our English may seem perfect compared to the average American high school student it still means that our terminology is sometimes based on Finglish. Hence the apparent lack of cohesion in our statements.

[Patgod]

It's all about the zeis optics man.

they let you "guestarange" from the actual gun sight. @ the calibrated range(usually 1000m) a 4m wide target will be 4mils in the center triangle(which is 4mils itself)

a 4m tall target will be....well you guessed it 4 mils tall, and fit inside the 4mil tall triangle.

your sherman was sighted, then optics were calibrated down to 500m, centered, and then wasted.

as for the american....lucky shot.

P.S. i dont suggest buying it, but wwiiol can give you a good idea of gun ranges. despite the fact the gunsights are not correctly done yet. i can get first hit kills out to and far beyond 700m. though the magnification is too high at the moment.

[Jager]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by tss:

Username wrpte:

Are all Finns like the Finns that post here on the CM board

Well, my girlfriend has repeatedly stated that she thinks that I'm actually an alien (most recently when I spent large chunks of my vacation creating a logic program to solve logical puzzles). Does this answer to your question?

- Tommi<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Tommi's girlfriend is absolutely right there Tommi, are you getting my mails, is the game still going on?

[aka_tom_w]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Patgod:

It's all about the zeis optics man.

they let you "guestarange" from the actual gun sight. @ the calibrated range(usually 1000m) a 4m wide target will be 4mils in the center triangle(which is 4mils itself)

a 4m tall target will be....well you guessed it 4 mils tall, and fit inside the 4mil tall triangle.

your sherman was sighted, then optics were calibrated down to 500m, centered, and then wasted.

as for the american....lucky shot.

P.S. i dont suggest buying it, but wwiiol can give you a good idea of gun ranges. despite the fact the gunsights are not correctly done yet. i can get first hit kills out to and far beyond 700m. though the magnification is too high at the moment.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Don't get Me Started about Zeiss optics!!

(NOT modeled here!)

See this Thread if you want more.....

http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=009258

And this thread is Specifically about German Gunnery optics (appear Lacking)....

http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=010850

Good luck!

-tom w

[ 08-03-2001: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]

[tss]

tero wrote:

We use examples based on the Finnish experiences during the war.

For me the main reason for using Finnish examples is that I have ~60 books about Finland and WWII on my bookshelf, compared with ~10 books on the East Front in general, and only one book specifically about infantry warfare on the Western Front ("The Longest Day").

These examples are sometimes grossly out of whack from the experiences of the forces that fought the "real" WWII.

Also, I would like to point out that there are also a lot of cases where Finns fared really bad (I've been trying to post also these examples to keep some perspective). [i recently read about the first two months of combat of the Finnish 19th Division. It made me gnash my teeth. One batallion (II/JR37) was practically destroyed because nobody remebered to cancel its attack when timetables crumbled. This happened twice... By middle August pretty much every men (including the commander) of JR16 were certain that the division commander wanted to get them killed...]

it would survive the engagement after firing those 20 rounds at a single target.

And then there was that one BT-42 that hit an enemy heavy tank (either KV-I or IS-II) 18 times with no noticeable effect and survived the combat.

Jager wrote:

Tommi, are you getting my mails, is the game still going on?

Made the turns and will send your turn this evening. I didn't read my mail once when I was on vacation because I wanted it to stay that way, and now I've been busy preparing for a work trip to Seattle. (Any bets where my luggage ends? I'm having a one-hour plane change at Chigago O'Hare on Friday afternoon.)

- Tommi