Some thoughts about the AFVS as weapons systems

[bjarmson]

There has been a great deal of talk about the various AFVs and their weapons systems lately, so I thought I'd get a thread going.

Shrike: This seems to be a weapons system mainly suited for the computer to use (I've tried, but can't hit anything and crash a lot). Looks to me like one of those remote-controlled monster trucks you see kids playing with in parking lots. It would be easy to disregard it completely if it wasn't armed with the most dangerous weapon system in the game, the rightfully feared ATGM. Luckily, it's so prone to damage from merely moving around at high rates of speed (my guess would be about 50% suicide after self-induced disablement). While it has a feared weapons system (if I was a liveship weapons engineer/designer, I'd put the ATGM on a Thor chassis), it's just to fragile to be really useful. It needs a wider, lower design to make it more stable.

Paladins: First of all, getting rid of the tires and putting tracks on them would improve them immensely. One bad tire and they are virtually useless. With tracks this problem disappears (ever get one of the things stuck on something and be unable to get off). It would also help with the instability problem (they sit so high on tires that they seem to roll over on the slightest whim). For some uses (personnel carrier, ATGM, AAD) it's okay. To put a 76mm on this thing, strikes me as insane. Put the 76mm on a Mercury chassis and you probably have a vehicle worth using. Does it strike you that these things look a lot like armed and armored Dodge Caravans? Not exactly how I'd design a combat vehicle.

Mercury: Haven't used them much. Could use a little better armor. And please get the 76mm on this chassis and off that ridiculous Paladin chassis.

Apollo: The 120mm version is a favorite. I suggest a wider track, a lower profile, and a bit more frontal armor. These things excel where there is room to get up to full speed and shoot at things from a distance. Keep moving.

Hurricane: Now here's a weapons system in need of a chassis. Puttting it on this ridiculous hover thingie is insane. It's impossible to steer, balks at going up the slightest incline, and flips iself over when fired. Thank you weapons designer wacko! But put that marvelous cannon on a Thor chassis, and voila, the ugly frog turns into a beautiful prince. I occasionally use it at the beginning of a territory game. Land it way out, use it on manual ranging (vary each shot a hundred meters front and back, left and right), press the Xkey to make it sit on the ground, and lob it's 10 rounds into a nonAAD defended area (wonder how AAD would do with massed cannon fire?), extract from game and get a usable vehicle. Oh, for a Thor chassis.

Cutter: An unarmored combat engineering vehicle, heh, even the Israelis use armored bulldozers and the biggest weapons they usually face is RPGs.

Thors: The 120mm is probably the best total package in the game. Good survivability, great kill ability. Though if I was a weapons designer, I'd maybe check out the M1A1 Abrams. The Thor has too many flat sides for stopping rounds. Let's start sloping those sides and turret for better deflection, less penetration.

One other AFV I'd like to see is a Thor mounted plasma bolt, for defensive purposes. It would make a good weapon for city fighting.

[ August 09, 2006, 09:20 PM: Message edited by: bjarmson ]

[Hub]

[ October 21, 2006, 07:58 AM: Message edited by: Hub ]

[aittam]

ask Jung what you can do with a 76mm paladin jumping out of nowhere in the middle of an advancing enemy formation......

with some well placed smoke + sand dust out of two cutters, one apollo, one hermes and two thor only a thor and the apollo made it unscattered;

one thor w/o turret (and to me that's like a kill in a hot drop zone)

hermes and cutters gone for good

if a paladin is the price to pay well i'm happy to pay for it!

wheels give you speed, that's what you need when you drive around without much of an armour, the advatage of the 76mm would be completly lost on a slower platform, you will be a sitting duck at the distance before be able to get close enough!

sorry but i've got a fondness for the 76, i would like to see a shrike 76, may be it's time for me to mess around with XLM files......

[Mace]

Originally posted by bjarmson:

Hurricane: Now here's a weapons system in need of a chassis. Puttting it on this ridiculous hover thingie is insane. It's impossible to steer, balks at going up the slightest incline, and flips iself over when fired.

I love the Hurricane. It's my vehicle of choice always.

You can build up momentum in one particular direction, rotate the chassis while still travelling on that vector, and fire obliquely.

And you can work a hurricane up slightly sloped terrain, but there is a trick to it.

It rules! :cool:

[CrimsonDestiny]

Originally posted by bjarmson:

Cutter: An unarmored combat engineering vehicle, heh, even the Israelis use armored bulldozers and the biggest weapons they usually face is RPGs.

The cutter needs nothing. It's tough destroy with all its empty space. AP does little and it holds its own against HEAT and ATGs.

Mercury: Haven't used them much. Could use a little better armor. And please get the 76mm on this chassis and off that ridiculous Paladin chassis.

The Mercury isn't a fist-fighter. It's meant to stay away from the action and call in support and deployables. The front armor shrugs off 120mm AP at distance with its slope, and you can usually see HEAT rounds coming in time to scoot out of the way. The 20mm suits it, since it's real threats are only those it can't outrun: Shrikes, Paladins, and Infantry. All of which die more effciently with the 20mm.

[yurch]

The mercury has terrible front armor.

The cutter is odd, the engine is in the high back and the battery is in the low middle. You can kill the engine by arcing over the shovel, and the battery by going underneath. It didn't get the additional ammo given to the other 20mm carriers, and can run out very fast in an infantry battle.

I don't think it's quite fair to demand huge changes to the chassis designs. If I recall these models are from another source - really, the best we should be going for is an accurate internal arrangement, first. If we're messing with models, we may as well make new units instead.

We're also using many of these vehicles for roles they obviously aren't intended for, like the paladins in close combat...

[bboyle]

Originally posted by yurch:

The mercury has terrible front armor.

The cutter is odd, the engine is in the high back and the battery is in the low middle. You can kill the engine by arcing over the shovel, and the battery by going underneath. It didn't get the additional ammo given to the other 20mm carriers, and can run out very fast in an infantry battle.

I don't think it's quite fair to demand huge changes to the chassis designs. If I recall these models are from another source - really, the best we should be going for is an accurate internal arrangement, first. If we're messing with models, we may as well make new units instead.

We're also using many of these vehicles for roles they obviously aren't intended for, like the paladins in close combat...

The cutter is the one vehicle that drives me nuts. I've put 30 or 40 20mm rounds into it (Crimson, was that you yesterday?) without effect. I would't have a problem with that if all of the shots were in one place but as I wasn't sure of the internals I evenly split the rounds by quadrant (from the side)into the chassis. How was it possible that I didn't kill it?

[bjarmson]

My point in stating my opinions was to get some talk going about the good and bad of various AFVs. Remember combat vehicles undergo almost constant refinement and redesign. In WWII the tank started as a poorly armored, poorly gunned little thing (Panzer II and IIIs, for instance), which morphed into highly armored, big gunned behemoths (think German Panther and Tigers, Russian T-34xx and Stalins) in only a few years. What I'm suggesting is combat experience refinement, not making unkillable superweapons.

As far as the wheels versus tracks argument, no serious front line combat vehicle (other than light recon) uses wheels. I've had Paladins get hung up going across a ditch or on a building abutment, they flip easily when taking a turn a little too fast, and they die too quickly. The 76mm is a tank weapon and deserves a tank chassis. The Mercury chassis is fairly quick, very stable and has a low profile, it deserves to have a 76mm version. Give me a Mercury chassis 76mm and I'd easily kill Paladin 76mms at about a 3-1 rate.

As far as the Hurricane goes, I love the cannon, but really the hovercraft it's on is a piece of junk. If you had a choice between the original version and one on a Thor chassis, I'm pretty confident you'd soon be using the Thor version.

As a soldier you expect crap weapons systems to be scrapped and constant refinement and upgrading of those that work (the "over the top, charge those machine guns" mentality ended, justifiably, during WWI). The T-34 is a great example of a good weapons system that was refined and upgraded over about 4 years (their debut forced the Germans to design the Panther and Tigers). Its first versions were relatively lightly armed, but by 1944 they'd been upgraded to 85mm and thicker armor. Time to start refining the good systems and getting rid of the crap (and really anyone who's played the game for awhile, knows there is some real crap).

[yurch]

Unfortunately, being a game, some of the weaknesses can be patched right up without a thought.

Take the thor, add more top armor for ATGM, make it faster, lower the shrike center of gravity, less recoil on the hurricane, ect. We aren't really limited to constraints or phyisics.

It is our responsibility to not just make things 'better' for the sake of doing so, and to place the constraints ourselves. I do have some chassis musings I'd like to try out, but I want them to fit in with the rest of our motley crew of units.

[dan/california]

As far as neat ricks with current hardware go, 20mm in vacuam is deadly. You can be 500 or a thousand meters from anythings side and shred them. The roundsdon't slow down in vacuam at all. It was the only thing I got right the whole game. :confused:

[ August 10, 2006, 11:00 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

[yurch]

20mm Apollo makes a very nice AA platform in the vacuum maps.

One of the few uses I have for it.

[dan/california]

Clay said somewhere that they knew the cutter model had issues, it is just such specialty peice that I don't see it making it to the top of the list for a while.

[bjarmson]

I understand what you're saying yurch. I don't want to ruin the game with unkillable super AFVs. Let the 14 years olds do that if they want. What I'm trying to do is to get some minor mods and upgrades going to make the game more playable and more fun. And to improve some weapons systems (a tank chassis 76mm, and a Thor mounted artillery piece).

I do have a definite opinion against tires on combat vehicles. Even the WWII AFVs with tires had 6 or 8 of them, 4 is ridiculous. One tire loss makes maneuvering difficult, 2 is a useless vehicle. As far as I know, all modern armored personnel carriers are tracked. Nothing with wheels carries a 76mm weapon.

I thought I'd like the hovercrafts (well to be truthful I've never used the Tempest, but then I think the ion weapon vehicles are virtually useless), but the Hurricane is a joke. You can hardly control it, it has trouble climbing the gentlest slope (and without constant forward movement slids back down), and often flips itself over if fired while hovering (the only way I ever fire it is when X braked-ie. sitting on the ground). But I love that cannon.

Thors, Apollos and Mercurys are fine (a few refinements would be nice, but I won't be bothered if they're left as they are). Even the Shrike and Cutter are okay (though I'd like to see the Shrike made more stable, since bots tend to end up disabling themselves about 50% of the time-I've seen some truly amazing cartwheels from bot driven Shrikes, though even driving into a ditch often puts them out of action).

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by bjarmson:

I do have a definite opinion against tires on combat vehicles. Even the WWII AFVs with tires had 6 or 8 of them, 4 is ridiculous. One tire loss makes maneuvering difficult, 2 is a useless vehicle. As far as I know, all modern armored personnel carriers are tracked.

If you mean IFV:s you might be right but awfully many APC:s are still wheeled. There are typically 6 or 8 of those and I agree that 4 is ridiculous unless the wheels are sturdy enough to take punishment without being the most fragile thing in the vehicle.

In comparison a MBT has only two tracks, loss of either will disable it. Thing is that with current technology track is much stronger compared to wheel. In the backround story you get that picture that these wheels aren't any aluminum alloy/rubber wheels but very durable affairs on their own.

in practise the wheels are rather fragile, but that is just tradeoff for speed.

[dan/california]

Well there is this brand new Stryker thing. See the CMX2 Shockfront forum section of this website for more than you will ever want to know. It does have eight wheels.

I am fairly certain that their are a couple of European exceptions on the 76mm thing as well. There is a trend to trade tactical durability for strategic speed, the Stryker can go several, maybe many, times as far as an M1 without needing heavy maintenance or new tracks. At one point right after Bagdad fell the army was filling up entire C5/C17s with replacement tracks, it can be a big problem. Also M1 class tracked vehicles destroy most road surfaces just by driving over them, once.

[CrimsonDestiny]

Originally posted by bboyle:

The cutter is the one vehicle that drives me nuts. I've put 30 or 40 20mm rounds into it (Crimson, was that you yesterday?) without effect. I would't have a problem with that if all of the shots were in one place but as I wasn't sure of the internals I evenly split the rounds by quadrant (from the side)into the chassis. How was it possible that I didn't kill it?

It was. I finally got killed by someone else with infantry.

Originally posted by bjmarson:

I do have a definite opinion against tires on combat vehicles. Even the WWII AFVs with tires had 6 or 8 of them, 4 is ridiculous. One tire loss makes maneuvering difficult, 2 is a useless vehicle.

I agree with upping the amount of wheels, yet it depends on which two wheels are out that makes the Paladin useless. With both back wheels or a back and a front on different sides, the thing is still combat effective. With the front wheels gone, it's useless. With two wheels on the same side gone, they only seem to want to turn when not accelerating, making for some... creative driving.