CMBB MG Lethality, Not So FAST!

[Archibald]

Thanks for such a cogent analysis YankeeDog. In practice the weight of the ammunition would be much greater due to the weight of link and the ammunition liners. However from bitter personal experience I can affirm that it's quite feasible to carry 800 rounds per man in addition to the gun, tripod, sight box, barrel bag, personal weapons and radios. This was the standard load per man when I commanded a machine gun platoon. It's not fun, but then neither is running out of ammo.

Given six men in a gun team, this would give 4,800 rounds per gun, or 96% of first line scales.

In action all the ammunition for the task in hand would be kept dug in on the gun line rather than to the immediate rear. Guns firing the FPF at near cyclic rates have an awesome appetite, and it would be impractical to keep it to the rear. Watch "Zulu Dawn" for an excellent example of what happens when ammunition can't get to the line!

A possible way of modelling large quantities of pre-dumped ammo in the game would be to link a gun's starting location to it's ammunition supply. If the gun leaves it's starting location it loses the extra ammo and is reduced to a certain amount per surviving man. The ammunition would remain there if they or another eligible friendly unit chose to return.

I've no idea whether this would be feasible or not, and just offer it as a suggestion. I sense I may be getting a little too involved in all this!

Another slight niggle about support weapons teams. Does anyone know if CMBB will include personal weapons for each member of the support weapons team. IRL every member carries (usually grudgingly) a personal weapon, giving a six man gun team the firepower in local defence of an understrength squad. They could even be used in the assault if it were made possible to dismount the gun. Then again I could be getting carried away again...

[YankeeDog]

Archibald -

Hey, I can see the recruitment campaign now:

"Join the Army!! Learn how to carry lots of heavy stuff!" Every straight-leg infantry grunt I've ever talked to whenever, wherever, and however they served has complained about how much stuff they carried on their backs while in the service. I guess your experience was no different.

I'm pulling this all out of my butt because searching for the thread it originally appeared is is fruitless - there's too many MG threads in the past of this forum!!

Anway, the standard ammo load of an HMG 42 team in CMBO 95 "shots". IIRC, this is meant to represent an actual number of rounds somewhere in the vicinity of the 4800 you mention; somewhere in the foggy recesses of my brain I remember a figure of 4500 rounds.

I'm guessing that the MG42 itself and it's accessories (tripod, sights, etc.) were a bit heavier in WWII than their equivalent nowadays what with the development of lightweight plastics and all, so assuming that German soldiers were as competent pack mules as the men in your outfit, they might of actually been able to carry a bit less ammo assuming an equal weight loading.

With rounding to get nice even numbers, dividing your 4800 rounds by CM's 95 'shots' for an HMG42 team, you get 50 rounds per 'shot'. Keep in mind that CM 'shots' are an abstracted thing used to resolve small arms fire - they don't necessarily represent one burst of aimed MG fire or anything like that, and one 'shot' for one MG may represent a different number of actual rounds fired than for another MG with a different ROF.

I did a very quick test, (just an open map, Regular HMG42s area firing at open ground 300m away), and under these simple conditions, anyway, HMG42s use about 7 'shots' per one-minute turn, or 350 rounds/min. If an HMG fires on an area target constantly until it runs out of ammo, then, in CM is will run out of ammo in about 13.5 minutes of firing (assuming no jams, of course).

So why the discrepancy between the 13.5 minutes for the HMG42 team and the 25 minutes rapid fire you mention from your military experience? Well, first of all, the test I did above more or less represents ideal firing range conditions - I really doubt an MG in acutal combat, even if heavily engaged, would maintain that ROF to a very long time - even if unsupressed, sooner or later, you're going to switch targets, etc.

I do think this test demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the MG42 design, though. As most on this forum are well aware, the MG42 had an incredibly high cyclic ROF. I've seen a variety of figures, but they're all around 1500 rounds/min. Apparently, it's a little difficult to peg the cyclic ROF for the MG42 because the MG's ROF actually accelerated over the course of a long burst. This is part of the reason why German gunners were trained to fire the MG42 is short bursts - it had a tendancy to jam on long bursts due to the ROF acceleration.

Anyway, most modern GP MGs have a cyclic ROF in the 800-900 rounds/min range. So why the decrease in ROF? Isn't more better? As it turns out, the answer is, "not necessarily". There are many reasons why a GP MG's ROF can be too high - excess barrel wear and high ammo usage are just a couple.

The MG42 was certainly the best rifle-caliber MG of WWII, but it actually wasn't a particularly accurate gun. Accounts I've read by soldiers who used both German GP MGs (i.e., German war vets) are all consistent in stating that the MG34 was a more accurate gun. The MG42 made up for this by simply firing more bullets in less time - a quantity approach to firepower effectiveness rather than a quality one.

This, I think, is the is the biggest single reason why the CM HMG42 teams might not get as much firing time out of their ammo loads as a modern GP MG team - they may be carrying close to the same number of rounds, but the nature of the MG42 as a weapon means that they're going to go through those rounds more quickly.

So the 95 'shot' ammo load for a German HMG 42 team seems about right to me. I'd have to sit down and do research and math about the other MG teams in CMBO to see if their ammo loads make sense - you have to take into account the number of men (from 2 to 6), the weight and mounting of the MG as well as it's ROF, etc, but at quick inspection, none of them seem wildly off base.

Eventually, in some future iteration, a resupply, or an 'extra' ammo feature for prepared positions (i.e., more than the team can carry) in CM would be a nice treat. Like I said, though, I don't often run out of MG ammo in my battles right now, so I wouldn't classify this as a high-priority improvement.

Your point about personal weapons is well taken. I'm talking off the top of my head again, but I'm pretty sure everyone of the various MG teams represented in CM carried a personal firarm of some sort - I think just a pistol for the gunner himself, but rifles, carbines or SMGs for most of the rest. They probably didn't carry much ammo for these weapons, but I'm sure they would use them if the MG position was in danger of being overrun.

There's acutally a similar problem with Mortar teams and HQs - Mortar teams in CMBO are modeled as having pistols (incaccrate because many of them would have at least carbines or SMGs), and they can't even fire the pistols unless they abandon the mortar. Platoon and Company HQs in model at least one member of the HQ unit as being armed with a pistol (presumably the Lieutenant or Captain himself). I don't know what the official TOE was, but I have never seen a photo of a combat infantry Lieutenant or Captain from WWII taken in a combat zone where the officer isn't carrying a rifle, carbine or SMG of some sort.

I guess BFC modeled the mortar crews and HQs with pistols, and MG crews with no personal weapons is because their primary job is not shooting their personal firearms at the enemy, but rather supporting their crew-served weapon, or in the case if HQs, issuing orders and the like. 95% of the time I think this simplification works fine - I generally avoid using my MG crews and mortar crews as rifle infantry because they're much more useful in the support roles they're designed for. I generally try to keep my HQs from getting too involved in a firefight because I need their command capabilities and I really don't want them to get panicked or knocked out.

Ultimately, though, it seems to me that a better model would be to give the units their proper weapons and then be careful about how you model their usage. MG and mortar crews probably wouldn't use their personal firearms until the enemy got really close and was threatening to overrun their position; HQ units probably didn't put out as much fire in most situations IRL because they were busy commanding their troops and trying to communicate with other officers on the battlefield. I dunno, maybe HQs should have a reduced firepower until they're in very close proximity to an enemy unit.

As I understand it, CMBB is going to model personal firearms for mortar and gun crews, but not MG crews.

[Austrian Strategist]

Originally posted by kump:

Should suppress, and once suppress, the MG should move to another unsuppressed exposed target, increasing its chance of getting more kills and causing further suppression.

Maybe I am extreme here, but I think they should be 'area effect weapons', bad at hitting any target in particular, but good at spraying suppression over a wide arc. My .02.

[kump]

Austrian Strategist,

I think its in there. The CM engine must have the MG target individual units, but there is a radius from the target that gets effected as well, I think to a lesser extent. I believe I saw Steve write that it will be increased in size for CMBB. Besides that, I don't think you can do much else. The MG will still target individual units. And it looks like for CMBB, it won't linger on a suppressed unit either, but "rake the field" more effectively by targetting more targets in a set amount of time compared to CMBO. We'll just wait and see.

[ July 02, 2002, 03:42 PM: Message edited by: kump ]

[Barleyman]

One would think the problem of doing vectored fire instead of point-based ought to be less than Steve argues in his post. You don't actually have to do honest-to-god ballistic arc for each and every bullet like it's done with the guns. LOS check already has the info of which units are visible to/from a given unit and a simple 2D check will tell you if any are actually lined up close enough for some garden hosing. You can use simplistic ballistics for small arms in any case, nobody sane will be complaining if the Kar98 arc is the same as the LMG42 arc..

In any case, I'm all for modeling invidual weapons and ammo loads instead of catch-all firepower. Not a huge change to the existing model and it'd help to deal with different ROF of full auto stuff vs Kar98 etc.