Tiger accuracy

[JasonC]

No weapon achieves in the field the accuracy it displays in training exercises. TOW missles in the gulf (first) - 99% accurate on ranges - were extremely effective because they hit their targets fully half the time.

A typical recruit is expected to hit man sized pop up targets on a rifle range 80% of the time with a single rifle round. In real combat, 10,000 rounds of small arms ammunition are needed, on average, to cause one enemy casualty. These are not tiny differences, they are multiple orders of magnitude.

Total Allied AFVs killed in WW II were about 125,000. At the most generous about overkills, reuse, undercounting breakdowns as likely to be repaired, etc, we are still talking about maybe 200,000 KOs. The Germans fielded 100,000 major AT weapons systems, meaning AFVs, heavy PAK, and army unit heavy FLAK. In reality, some of the AFVs were taken out by millions of infantry AT weapons and tens of millions of AT mines. But ignore that.

You still arrive at the conclusion that, at best, the average German AT weapon system got 2 tanks. With 1 a more likely figure. As the Germans did well tactically and had far fewer tanks for the allies to kill, and lost a significant portion of their own to breakdowns, none of the other powers reached even this level of 1-2 AFV kills per weapon system.

How much ammo did the Germans have to provide these weapon systems, to average 1-2 kills each? Millions of rounds of AP. 200 rounds per gun for towed heavy PAK. Perhaps lots of it was lost in dumps, or KOed at gun positions before it could be fired. Fine, say half was lost each of those ways. Say you had to hit things 2-3 times. You are still looking at achieved accuracy figures with 1 digit, in percent to hit terms. Not first round, all rounds, counting the later ones fully homed in.

This is not the only case where objective overall accounting figures debunk expectations of high per shot accuracy and exaggerated expectations of weapon effectiveness. It is as old as figures have been kept. Tanks carry 50-100 rounds onto battlefields, but most of them drive off those battlefields again. Soldiers carry 100s of rounds into a single afternoon's fight. But wars last years, casualties do not exceed participants, and most of them are caused by artillery anyway.

A platoon of Tigers goes into a given fight with perhaps 150 AP rounds, which they can send downrange in perhaps 7 minutes. Anybody think they regularly torched 100 tanks every 7 minutes? One platoon? The largest outlier successes, touted endlessly in uber-Tiger propaganda, are engagements that killed 14 enemy tanks each. Which happened so rarely you could count the times it did on your fingers. The average Tiger was lucky if it hit that many over its entire service life, on average almost a year, not 7 minutes.

High per shot accuracy is simply not necessary for an effective weapon system. They reload rapidly; they can fire 6 times a minute at least. Rounds are not scarce, they can carry dozens. Whole platoons engage enemy targets. When you can fire 10-20 rounds at one enemy in a matter of a minute or two, you don't need 80% first round hit probability. Nothing is going to be alive that exposed, a few minutes later.

[ February 10, 2004, 07:59 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Mr. Tittles]

Thats some interesting thinking there.

The whole analogy to rifle rounds is usually where people go astray. They throw up figures about so many rounds needed to cause a casualty. But rifle rounds are often fired not at targets but suspected targets. Its not really analagous.

Tank fire should not be confused with rifle fire. TOW missle fire, also, should not be confused with tank fire. On a range, the targets are not masked by smoke, explosions, etc. The very different nature that the missle needs, tracking while in flight, is so different and subject to human reaction/target effects/etc, that it is best left as a Jasonism at best.

[ February 10, 2004, 11:12 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Mr. Tittles]

I believe the Germans zeroed their tank guns at 1000m. This means they had to be able to repeatably hit the target and adjust the weapon at this range.

[Wisbech_lad]

I don't care about Tigers not being portrayed as suitably uber for some (hey bump it up to elite if toasting Shermans at long range floats your boat) but just want to second that little kitty killer the Valentine X.

Cost - 90 points or so. Cost of your opponent's reaction when their Tiger gets KO'ed from the front in 1943 - Priceless

[JasonC]

Read the whole post. They issued 200 AP per gun and got 1-2 kills per gun. No that isn't the 1 per 10,000 of rifles. But it isn't 1 per 1.1 either.

[BadgerDog]

Originally posted by Ace Pilot:

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

It is only my opinion as an old Sherman gunner that the many of the up close engagements of tanks within the Combat Mission series, tend to be a bit gamey and the accuracy/hit ratio is far too low when engaging targets at less then 1,000 yards, but it's still a fantastic piece of entertainment software and I love every minute of it.

Regards,

Badger

Badger,

For these close range engagements, were you trained to to aim for specific points on enemy tanks, or just center of mass?

Also, did you have a different procedure for a "snapshot" as compared to a shot with plenty of prep time (like from an ambush position)?

Thanks,

Ace </font>

[Mr. Tittles]

I think Jason's top down analysis makes no sense. Here are production stats for German 75mm AP..

7,5-cm Pzgr. 39

(42)262,500

(43)1,924,000

(44)1,906,500

(45)82,000

There is no way to determine how many were fired from guns, on the battlefield, at live targets. So many were used in training, lost in transit, captured, destroyed by weather, blown up in vehicles, etc. It really is a weak argument.

It is my contention that HV guns 75mm+ when firing at hull up AFV targets (using solid shot) under 1000m are very accurate. If the target is not moving, then the chance of a hit is very good.

Jason's last paragraph makes no sense. Its like saying to a sniper, Just dont worry about accuracy, fire a lot, you will hit something (and dont worry about return fire).

[ February 11, 2004, 11:19 AM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Mr. Tittles]

Steel Inferno pg 86-87

Sherbrooke Fusiler lost 21 tanks with 7 more damaged..12thSS lost 9 MkIV.. Their fire discipline was of the highest order.. onl;y 40 rounds of AP fired.

A snippet but still revealing. In any regards, a much better indicator than Jason's production number crunchies.

Another AP usage factor is over-kill. In reality, you fire till the therat is burning. The first few rounds may have already damaged/destroyed/abandoned the vehicle but its best to absolutely destroy it (make it burn). This is especially true at longer ranges (which also requires extra ammo anyway).

The game under models hitting stationary targets. The game does not model hull down as it should be.

[ February 11, 2004, 11:52 AM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Mr. Tittles]

http://64.26.50.215/armorsite/tiger1.htm

This website has good info that was posted here but in easier to read tables, etc.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Mr. Tittles:

I believe the Germans zeroed their tank guns at 1000m. This means they had to be able to repeatably hit the target and adjust the weapon at this range.

Woah!

That is a totally wrong conclusion.

The adjustment of their optics is made at 1000m, but that is adjusting the optics to the gun, not the gunner to the terrain.

The estimation whether the freakin' target is at 1000m or 1200m is the problem for hit probability and this adjustment doesn't help with it at all.

[GoofyStance]

Going off on a tangent, how did the Panther with its 75mm L70 cannon compare to the Tiger I's 88mm L56 when it came to long-distance accuracy? I recall from my distant past that the board game Squad Leader assigned the Tiger's cannon an "L" rating and the Panther's cannon an "LL" rating, meaning the Panther was more accurate at greater ranges. Was this actually so?

[Mr. Tittles]

I am addressing the accuracy (precision) of the weapon. I made no comment about the accuracy of the range estimation. When zeroing a weapon, a known distance is surveyed. In the german case, 1000 m range is surveyed and used. Its got nothing to do with the gunners estimating abilities.

The point is that the weapon had the precision to repeatably hit a target (2m x 2.5 m) at that range. It could get a shot group on that target and the adjustments on the weapon system could move that shot group (predictably). The shot group is then zeroed in.

I have shown at least a dozen people how to zero in a rifle. The first criteria is a shot group. If they cant get a shot group, then move the target closer till they can. There is no point in making sight adjustments till this is possible. If the shot group is not repeatable, then they cant shoot period. Once a shot group is obtained (and repeated several times), then adjustments are made and the shot group should move towards the center. Once this is obtained, move the target further away. At a point, your shot group gets dispersed. Its then not adjustable. hopefully, most strikes will still be on the target area in general.

Range estimation is a very real variable as is the target motion (in WWII). As others have pointed out, the precision in range estimation needed is decreased with higher velocitys. So a target at 1000 meters can be +/-200 m in some cases and the ability to get a hit is not substantially reduced. But the first step is to have a weapon zeroed at that range. This is basic stuff.

[ February 11, 2004, 02:19 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by GoofyStance:

Going off on a tangent, how did the Panther with its 75mm L70 cannon compare to the Tiger I's 88mm L56 when it came to long-distance accuracy? I recall from my distant past that the board game Squad Leader assigned the Tiger's cannon an "L" rating and the Panther's cannon an "LL" rating, meaning the Panther was more accurate at greater ranges. Was this actually so?

Not generally, it depends on the conditions.

The Tiger round is heavier but slower, the Panther round faster but lighter. I also think the "short" 88mm in the Tiger 1 has especially suitable rifling and/or projectile shape leading to better overall hit chances, that is what Rexford said lately.

Anyway, the effects:

1) the heavier but slower round will stray less if the reason of stray is side wind, barrel wear or other environmental effects

2) the lighter but faster round will stray less if the reason of stray is an error in range estimation or disadjusted optics

So it depends. Generally speaking, I am convinced that much of the reported deadlyness of the Tiger doesn't have to do anything with its first-shot hit probability.

IMHO, the reported messes the Tigers did comes from the fact that once they got the range they wouldn't miss anymore. If you pour hordes of T-34 or Shermans in, all of them passing halfway close to an optical reference point they all get shot up with very few rounds on average. That optical reference point can be very large, imagine a ride or a road or a line of houses. You can have a very accurate range estimation over hundreds of meters horizontally from a single zeroing in that way. And certainly veteran gunners are capable of keeping several ranges in their head, this is no problem at all.

CM models none of that. While it is huge improvement over CMBO that zeroing in is now applied to an area instead of just a point, that area is very very small, about 15m radius. You cannot model breaking a mass attack with that mechanism in place.

If you take 200 shots at 30 tanks coming roughly from the same direction in CM, with a base hit first-probability of -say- 30% you will shoot the majority of rounds with no zeroing in at all. In reality only the first rounds to the first hit would be done without zeroing in but then everything after them would have a much better idea of the range than restarting from scratch like CM does.

[Mr. Tittles]

The 75mm KwK 42 L70 was an excellent gun: it was very accurate thanks to his flat trajectory and hard hitting (it penetrated a vertical 170mm plate at 1,000 meters). The use of Pz.Gr.Patr. 40/42 (APCR round, initial muzzle speed of 1,120 m/s) gave excellent results against the heavist enemy tank. Lt. Berger, from Grossdeautschland remembered:

"At ranges of 1,000 meters we reckoned with 90 percent hits. Normally a hit, would result in the destruction of an enemy vehicle, even Stalin's' heavy tanks. We, however, had supply problems with the high performance Pz.Gr.Patr. 40/42 ... Firing with HE rounds gave similar accuracy, but the impact was significantly inferior to the 88mm rounds ..."

[Mr. Tittles]

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Capsule/2930/pzpanther/pzpanther-Charakteristics.html

This website has accuracy data for the Panther gun which can be compared with the website above.

The Panther gun is slightly better in these controlled tests. The Tiger did have a more effective HE round making it a better ATG destroyer.

Redrolfss claims about first round hits not being important, etc are wrong.

In short, medium ranges; first round hits are very important. It allows a tank to rapidly destroy an enemy. Tanks are mobile targets.

Bracketing (which he calls zeroing..which is different) is important for longer ranges (which eats up ammo and will not, by the way, assure a hit). Platoon fire at long range is needed for a couple of reasons. One is to rapidly destroy the target through shared information. The other is to destroy the target before it starts moving, which is the best defense a target can take when under long range fire.

If tigers had ammo to burn, they could engage in long range fires against stationary targets. But to open fire at moving targets at long range is wasteful. A moving tank is very little threat as it can not use its weapons effectively.

[ February 11, 2004, 03:32 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Redwolf]

Mr. Tittles, you absorb too much data and don't apply basic measures to make sense out of the data or to put different pieces into relationship of each other.

That's all fine, I just have to ask you for one thing: please don't mix me up with rexford (Lorrin Bird). Not that there is a problem with rexford, in fact I feel honored, but it's a bad thing nontheless.

[Mr. Tittles]

Red

Me thinks you are Heavy on guessing/opinion and light on data/facts. I will take much of what you say as unsupported opinion.

And maybe you need to worry about all the data (presented here) that contradicts your guessing.

The battlefield basics (in order) are:

1. Is the weapon zeroed? (not bracketed which is different).

2. Is the range estimation close?

3. Is the target fully exposed (hull up) or moving.

4. If the target is stationary, and there is a miss, can the error be judged? (long/short or right/left). Can rounds bracket the target?

[ February 11, 2004, 03:52 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Mr. Tittles]

Bracketing means the following:

When firing at a target, rounds are seen to go short and long. This is usually at long range beyond the flat trajectory of the weapon. This is usually at a range that there is round to round dispersion (from many factors or 'stack-up'). Even in controlled tests, 88mm/75mmL70 would not hit a tank sized target repeatably at 2000m. They would, probably, miss by a very small distance. And the AP round missing the target probably still had damaging effects but a miss by a foot was as good as a mile.

A platoon drill would be for one vehicle to get a bracket on a target, relay the range to the other platoon vehicles and then platoon fire would commence.

This would then bring the target under concentrated probability (since many near-misses can translate to some hits instead). The main thing is that the target stay stationary. Platoon fire would often cause enemy vehicles to pull back or find a new position.

Depending on ammunition supply available, this type of engagement may be prohibited. It could easily use up a dozen rounds for a single long range hit.

[ February 11, 2004, 04:06 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[Mr. Tittles]

IMHO, the reported messes the Tigers did comes from the fact that once they got the range they wouldn't miss anymore.

This is a silly statemment and goes against even the test data posted.

At long range, even if a Tiger got a BOT (burst on Target), that is no assurance that a followup round (even on the same vehicle) will guarantee a another hit.

I think you fully fail to grasp the simple physical/engineering problems being discussed.

[Determinant]

'Came the dawn and the ground looked frightful. The Bosche started shooting flares over us, and then came in the 3/4 light the dreaded bouncing, gleaming "white tennis ball", the fastest I've ever seen, shot from the 88mm gun. Very quickly our friends on the left started to blow up and catch fire. Guy saved us ... He put us all right. The tennis balls came very close to us all and too close to one or two, but Guy maneouvred us so that we got into a good position for retaliation and could not get into serious trouble.'

Capt C B Stoddart 25 Oct 42, El Alamein, letter to his father.

Not all of those tennis balls seemed to be getting their first round hits under battle conditions. Is this due to the incompetence of the 88mm Flak crews in the A/Tk role as opposed to the invincible Tiger crews? Or is it all a bit harder than it looks from my armchair?

[Mr. Tittles]

Originally posted by Determinant:

'Came the dawn and the ground looked frightful. The Bosche started shooting flares over us, and then came in the 3/4 light the dreaded bouncing, gleaming "white tennis ball", the fastest I've ever seen, shot from the 88mm gun. Very quickly our friends on the left started to blow up and catch fire. Guy saved us ... He put us all right. The tennis balls came very close to us all and too close to one or two, but Guy maneouvred us so that we got into a good position for retaliation and could not get into serious trouble.'

Capt C B Stoddart 25 Oct 42, El Alamein, letter to his father.

Not all of those tennis balls seemed to be getting their first round hits under battle conditions. Is this due to the incompetence of the 88mm Flak crews in the A/Tk role as opposed to the invincible Tiger crews? Or is it all a bit harder than it looks from my armchair?

1. Its dark

2. Whats the range?

3. Whats the target height/width?

4. Are they moving?

5. they were close misses?

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Mr. Tittles:

I think you fully fail to grasp the simple physical/engineering problems being discussed. [/QB]

I was about to say the same thing to you

Your posted test data is all great, but they never give all the precise environment definitions. You will have to live with the fact that you have to apply some physics in addition to test data.

[Mr. Tittles]

But you said that nothing matters once a Tiger gets a hit, its all over 'cause they can't miss after they get a hit. Why would you need any environmental conditions or anything else?

[JasonC]

"was of the highest order"

That means, was an outlier and not the usual thing.

As for overkill, we have a tolerable grasp on the issue in the form of examined dead tanks. There are particularly good surveys in Normandy. The average number of hits per kill is right around 2. It rises to 4-5 for tanks that can't be killed through most plates, like Panthers and Tigers vs. Shermans.

The latter is not a consideration with the better portion of the German AT weapon force, so 2 hits per kill is a reasonable estimate. The farthest you can stretch it is half a million hits, with 100-200k much more likely. That gives the order of magnitude, fixing it well below the order of magnitude of rounds provided.

You compare the comment to telling snipers to just fire a lot. Armies aren't snipers, and they do just fire a lot. If sniper accuracy were the basis of how armies actually fight, they could issue everyone 1-2 clips of ammo and it would be enough to wipe out the enemy force. Tanks could carry half a dozen rounds.

Instead they hose, with 4 orders of magnitude more bullets than hits, and 10 heavy HE shells fired per casualty, and hundreds of rounds of heavy AP per enemy tank KOed. Industrial quantities of ammo are fired over long periods of time through a much smaller number of tubes. In consequence, logistics considerations matter - not a trivial result.

We also have a good handle on engagement ranges. In the west, roughly a third occurred at short, a third at medium, and a third at longer range, with those corresponding to 500, 1000, and over 1000m windows. Ranges might have been somewhat longer in the east, on average. There definitely were engagements at 2 km. But enough AARs speak of opening fire at 800m, or 1000m, or 1200m, that a km can be seen as a typical range.

Ammo expenditure may be skewed, however, compared to engagements or kills. The accuracy of the average shot might be 10%, while the range to the average kill might be 1 km, without accuracy at 1 km being 10%. 20% of the kills (the longest ones) might use 80% of the ammo - it would be a typical result for this sort of thing.

But there is no close mapping from shots to kills. Shots vastly exceed kills. Dispassionate top down analysis establishes definite order of magnitude gradations for battlefield variables, and debunks pictures of supposedly typical combat that get them wrong. The errors people make about these things are astonishing and extremely widespread.

Killing hits are the rarest battlefield variable. Above them comes actual force totals, which are close over an entire war but 1-2 orders of magnitude lower in single engagements. (They also differ by a single order of magnitude or less, between the two sides - otherwise it is over). This order can't be reversed, or wars would end immediately. And this already implies that most forces in engagements do not score killing hits on the enemy. Please note - not "don't score multiple killing hits", it is "don't score any". The average participant - infantryman or tank - does not succeed in taking out even *one* comparable enemy, in a typical engagement.

Army structures are nearly reciprocal in all wars of any serious size or duration. (Outliers like Brits with magazine rifles against spearmen in the Sudan are limited exceptions, which illustrate the point by their rariety). Even the limited portions which brush each other on any given tactical occasion usually survive (the majority do, I mean), "melting" only slowly against the attrition "heat" the other side puts out.

This observed phenomenon already puts severe limits on the expected lethality of typical fire. You can make estimates of expected lethality and see whether they are consistent with this observation. And most of the time you will find they are high, that they predict far more rapid destruction and collapse than is actually seen. Used ammo is quite abundant, compared to things actually hit with it.

Firing opportunities are also not scarce. No army in history has ever been supplied with so much ammo, that it could afford to expend it as fast as it could be fired, whenever enemy presented themselves within range. There are always more chances to fire than there are rounds to fire, over whole battle scales.

Which incidentally severely limits the overall importance of maximum rate of fire considerations. High maximum ROF can matter because of its interaction with "exposure measure" variation. That is, it can help concentrate fire in short time periods when the enemy is somewhat more exposed than they are for the average shot. But it cannot "multiply through" to fire effects, because it cannot be sustained in ammo terms.

Armor engagements in which even 50 tanks were destroyed on a single occasion are relatively rare, from one end of the war to the other. They do happen. They generally take half a hour or more. The force sizes doing the shooting are typically comparable to the size of the losses.

For example, when a full US tank battalion was destroyed in a few hours trying to counterattack at Kasserine, there were 100 plus shooters in front of them. At Knightsbridge and similar disasters in the western desert, the gun lines and enemy tanks that managed to destroy whole armor brigades in an afternoon were within a factor of 2 of the forces they KOed. You often see a unit repeal a force an echelon higher in size, but typically with less than total losses, about equal to the number of shooters.

In Goodwood, the Brits lose hundreds of tanks in a day. There are several hundred tanks on the other side of the line. At Kursk, the Russians lose thousands of tanks, a high ratio compared to German total losses. But about 1-2 per heavy AT system the Germans brought to the fight - over the course of a couple of weeks.

What these examples show is that any picture of combat in which a single AT weapon system *typically* destroys numerous comparable enemy systems in a single short engagement and survives, is going to be wrong. Can that sometimes happen, yes of course. Is it a typical average result, no it cannot be typical. If it were, you could "multiply up" to larger scales. And that makes predictions about loss rates (compared to unit sizes, time, ammo supplied, etc) that are false, empirically.

The primary reason for unit survival for long periods has to be, first and foremost, that units simply avoid each other's lethal zones, and the small portions that get into them don't last long (theirs, or the other guys - either way, separating the two sides once again).

But if this happened in "seen=killed" quick-draw fashion, then dead enemy and firing opportunities and ammo used would be of the same scale - with at most a slight increase for each. This isn't the case, empirically. There are two to four orders of magnitudes between them, not small factors of 1.1 or 2. There is no real way to get this outcome, without allowing that most shots simply miss.

[ February 11, 2004, 11:49 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Mr. Tittles:

But you said that nothing matters once a Tiger gets a hit, its all over 'cause they can't miss after they get a hit. Why would you need any environmental conditions or anything else?

Gahonga.

What I said is that once Tigers were zeroed in they would have better followup hit probabilities, in fact very good ones.

And that means "better" not as better as a Panther (I think the theoretical difference between those two can pretty much be neglected when we are talking about actual combat situations), but "better" as compared to CM right now.

The effect of zeroing in in CM is much too limited right now. That factor overshades everything else when you do the "half tank battalion storms Tiger platoon position" scenario.

Note that I don't say Tigers or AT guns generally would have perfect zeroed in range when switching to a target 100m on the same ridge. But neither would it restart from an estimation as if it never fired at that ridge at all, which is what it does in CM. Furthermore, zeroing in is limited by frequent target changes performed by the TacAI. I don't say you can fix the TacAI to stop dropping targets, that is too hard. But you could give the previous benefit back when switching back to a target it already visited, or even better, you could give it back when switching back to an area (not individual unit).

If you calculate out what kind of difference that makes for the whole assault I am sure you will forget about minor points like Tiger versus Panther and whether optics are adjusted for 1000m or 1500m.