Anti-Tank Guided Missles

[Ivan Drago]

The ATGM wars will be something else...

From all this discussion I think it's safe to conclude that if you're playing as the Syrians and don't have any Kornets, your best bet is to hide from American heavy armor (M1A1).

However, even those aging Saggers should be able to feck up the day of a Stryker crew, right?

Err, that is if the guide wire doesn't snap and the crew isn't a Syrian version of Cleavus the bucktoothed hillbilly

[Tarquelne]

From all this discussion I think it's safe to conclude that if you're playing as the Syrians and don't have any Kornets, your best bet is to hide from American heavy armor (M1A1).

With a little luck the American player will be hiding his heavy armor from you, most of the time, because he doesn't know you don't have any Kornets.

[Bigduke6]

A Sagger is one of those great weapons in theory. The gunner can be either 30 or 50 meters from the launch box, and if he has a simple wide-field periscope technically he could sit in a hole in complete cover, and guide the missile to the target. The problem is that you have to fly the thing like a model airplane, meaning you have to track the missile and the target.

The further the gunner is from the missile, the greater the angle between the missile's line of flight and the gunner's LOS, and so the harder it is for him to fly it accurately.

The missile is usually rated with a minimum range of 500 meters not because the missile won't hurt something at a closer range, but rather because it takes about 500 meters of flight for the missile operator to "capture" the Sagger.

During Yom Kippur one of the things the Israelis noted was that Sagger's warhead was far from doomsday; it seemed to take about two good hits to KO an Israeli tank, on average. So if the missile hit the side of an M1 w/o reactive armor, maybe it would have penetration but it might well do a lot less than kill the M1.

OHH the Israelis lost something like three brigades of world-class armor, at that time, to Sagger missiles operated by Egyptian crewmen, so we're not talking about a weapon that requires an engineering degree and weekly training to get some battlefield effect out of.

My guess, if Syria was invaded, blowing off the Sagger threat would probably be a recipe for (limited) disaster. It's a primitive guided missile, but it is nevertheless a guided missile.

[Kwazydog]

Originally posted by Ivan Drago:

From all this discussion I think it's safe to conclude that if you're playing as the Syrians and don't have any Kornets, your best bet is to hide from American heavy armor (M1A1).

Well it depends what you have at hand really.

I saw a power point presentation a while back discussing the vulnerabilities of the M1 during the initial phase of the war in Iraq. If I recall correctly the summary was that they felt the armor on the front turret and hull proved sufficient, with no penetrations being made on any of the vehicles from this direction, but it was possible to penetrate the side and rear hull and turret of the vehicle (and of course top).

The examples they used were of 25mm rounds penetrating from the rear (from a Bradley Im guess) and of RPG's round penetrating from the sides. In fact one vehicle was penetrated through the side skirt and side armor with the round passing through the vehicle, several components inside (injuring the gunner I believe) and then imbedding itself in the opposite turret side. It wasn't known what did this at the time but I believe it was suspected to be a RPG-7V1.

Dan

[aka_tom_w]

That sounds like a huge breakthrough or the potential to be a fairly MAJOR bone. But its hard to tell exactly what you are telling us.

Is this really big news or just another comment about how the game code is coming along?

-tom w

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Does this mean that we will retain the "feature" from CM1 where a tank in motion could be hit while it was out of LOS because it was in LOS when the "hit" was calculated?

No, the opposite. Intermediate terrain will be a factor now thanks to several nights of late night coding by Charles. He as sure he couldn't do it and keep the hardware requirements low enough, but he found some 'trick' to get a realistic result without killing the hardware.

What I was talking about, specifically, is that if a missile is fire and forget or a controller that is "unmolsted" (in the case of Human guided), the missile will find and strike it's target regardless of a player's direction of the unit itself. I suppose there are some limited circumstances where the player might be able to trick avoid a missile hit, but these are so few and specialized that I don't think there will be problems with this. It also depends on some other stuff we might do/not do

Steve </font>

[Jasper 2x]

There is no significant difference between moving and non-moving accuracy on modern MBTS right that in itself is a significant difference for ww2.

[Renaud]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Redcon-5:

[snips]

P.S.- I wonder if you shoot a war sabot down the path of a incoming ATGM will the shock wave of the passing sabot screw in up?

In the good old days, when the basic M-1 carried the L7 105mm gun, I believe that there was an idea that the gunner might do some good by firing a beehive round down the missile bearing. If the Sagger gunner was close enough he might be at least distracted by the passage of large numbers of flechettes, and if not, then the missile or its guidance wire might suffer damage from one of them.

I have never heard of this sort of technique being used successfully either in training or in combat, and the modern way to do this is with an active DAS of some sort, like the fSov Arena or Shtora. I don't believe any Western powers will be fielding an active DAS by the year CM:SF is set in, but might the Syrians have a few DAS-equipped MBTs, just to annoy Javelin gunners?

All the best,

John. </font>

[Battlefront.com]

However, firing this toward incoming ATGM's would be a tactic of desperation.

Also a tactic of disregard for the safety of your own troops and civilians. In a billardtable flat, featureless, depopulated space there is no concern about where munitions wind up. But in most real world scenarios it matters a whole lot.

Steve

[Renaud]

You won't be encounting long range ATGM's in dense urban areas so that's moot. Sounds like just the thing to 'scratch-the-back' of the M1 200 meters up the street though. Hey, it worked for the Cav in Vietnam!

I know marine M1's will be firing cannister in urban environments once they get it. HE too, once that arrives. Right now they fire HEAT and it ain't pretty. It not only knocks out the baddies house, but punches through to the neighbors. Kind of like home defense with an M1 rifle instead of shotgun. Both HE and cannister will be superior to HEAT in MOUT - that's why they authorized the emergency procurement.

By using the example of spider holes I meant to imply an RPG ambush in open terrain, not MOUT.

[Kurtz]

If anyone is really interested in what the US Army thought of the Sagger 30 years ago, you can buy TRADOC Bulletin 2: Soviet ATGMs: Capabilities and Countermeasures.

I found Tradoc bulletin 3 about the the RPG-7 on the web for free, but this one isn't free.