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spotting AT mines?


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I just literally played a PBEM turn where i had two full squads of un-supressed pioneers sitting in cover and light buildings for two turns who failed to notice a minefield between them, unlike the armoured car that rolled between them a couple of turns later, then promptly blew up !...would have thought them being engineers they might have prodded the earth with their bayonets at least!? :rolleyes:

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Well-concealed AT mines are extremely difficult to detect without the use of specialized equipment like metal detectors & c., or very time consuming techinques like hand-probing - we're talking a few tens of meters/hour here. Such techiques are not generally conducted in combat zones, although there are execptions.

Well-concealed AP mines can actually be easier to detect (or at least infer thier presence) than AT mines because enemy units and soldiers (and animals) cannot traverse the area without setting off the mines either. Therefore, the presence of AP mines can sometimes be inferred by the lack of footprints, the existence of overgrown grass, etc. Not so with AT mines - it takes the much heavier weight of a vehicle to set them off. It's much harder to tell if an enemy vehicle has driven along a given length of road than it is whether or not anyone (or anything!) has walked across a specific field recently.

However, defending forces don't always have the time to lay "well-concealed" mines, AT or AP. Eventually (engine rewrite?), it would be a cool thing if CM could differentiate between 'hastily'-laid mines, and the kind of carefully-laid, well-concealed minefield that's part of a prepared defense. There should probably be a reasonable chance of detecting the former type given infantry in the immediate proximity with enough time to carefully observe the area, especially by specialized (i.e., engineers) or experienced troops. The latter should be virtually impossible to detect by anything but the most painstaking of probing. Such careful investigations are probably for the most part out of the pervue of the typical 30-60 minute CM battle.

A final note: If you're going to model visual spotting of minefields, then you also need to model the existence of 'dummy' minefields, which were also used, and the chance that an infantry unit will occasionally 'spot' a minefield that isn't really there. Rattled/inexperienced troops should probably have a higher chance of false spotting.

For now, I think the CM minefield model is very good considering the simplicity of the model. In the future, though, I would like to see a more complex model incorporating elements like hasty vs. careful laying, minefields in buildings (i.e., booby-traps), & c., but I think we'll have to wait for the engine rewrite for that.

Cheers,

YD

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Originally posted by Olle Petersson:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by tigger:

Is there a way to spot AT mines before you waste that tank by rolling over one?

Yes!

Send a couple of cheap vehicles, like jeep/kübelwagen/truck in front of the tanks. ;)

Cheers

Olle</font>

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I'm with YankeeDog.

I would love to place dummy minefields for half the cost. Disturbed and marked out ground is cheap. Visable minefields are not uncommon and would make another great addition. Sometimes, the mines are a lot more effective (for funneling purposes) if everyone knows where they are.

One more request is to make minefield spotting less accurate. You've just hit one mine. Even if you assume that everyone in your universe knows that all minefields are 20mX20m, why should you know where the exact center is? Somthing along the lines of a sound contact in the 5m vicinity of the real minefield center would make things much more interesting.

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Once when I was training (I'm a combat engineer) we had an exercise where one squad mined a strip of road (in the winter, snow etc..) and another squad tried to find the mines with the traditional spike(?)probe. It's simple basically. You just push the end of the probe to the ground very gently and try to find anything hard that could be a mine. We didn't have much time to mine the strip (3m x 5m) but still it took us two hours to search the ground (you stick the probe 5 times into 1" x 2" square) and still we missed 20% of the mines.

Hiding mines in the battlefield is even easier as the soil is usually already disturbed.

Just my 0.03 cents.

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On the subject of 'Dummy Mines'

I recall reading something about the use of dinner plates and pan lids as dummy a/t mines (In the Warsaw uprising I think).

Seems that tank drivers tended to be reluctant to drive over a row of strange flat circular objects in the middle of the road...

Of course, the evil thing to do would be to stuck an a/t mine under a sauce-pan lid and watch the 'seen this trick before' tank driver discover his mistake.

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