Smoke Grenades and Buildings (v1.07)

[Brent Pollock]

Searching for smoke grenade threads didn't turn up anything like this so I thought I'd post.

The Building Assault thread got me playing around with tossing smoke as part of the SOP. I noticed that squads could toss their smoke grenades smack on target the usual 20 m away even if the tiny building was in the way. The grenades looked like they went straight through it. Granted, it’s a smallish shack, so I thought this was meant to represent guys chucking the grenades over the roof. They were even able to do it if they were in a building, although how they would get that kind of an angle is beyond me.

At any rate, I decided to do so more testing, using the 8-storey building and throwing in some BMPs to boot, due to their long range smoke deployment. Wind was ‘None’.

Here are some results:

Before, showing the 20m smoke targetting line for the squad. The buildings are the ‘slim 8-storey’ type.

After, notice the one grenade that passed straight through the first building and even went through the second (according to the movie graphics), landing past its far corner (red oval). Quite the throw!

This was atypical of smoke grenades thrown by two other squads in the test, which were situated in similar proximity to the same building type. Most of their grenades ended up on the second level almost immediately in front of them. Few made it through or hit the first or third floor. Nothing hit higher than the third in this very limited test (maybe 12 to 15 throws total).

Now on to the BMPs. I snuggled three of them up right behind a building like this. The yellow oval shows the three grenades right after launch.

All three gave this result, smacking immediately into the second or third level, with nothing making it past the front of the building (unlike the squads’ grenades, which went to various levels and depths).

This is what happened when I gave more space between the BMP (left hand oval) and the building hurdle (middle oval). One of them cleared the building and landed on the other side (right oval), the other two either went off map (it was the smallest possible size) or smacked into the building (middle oval).

The pinkish smoke is from some Strykers. Note that even though the wind was set to 'None', there is still some drift evident (for instance, the black cloud on the left originally was just on the building).

I also did some testing with High Walls - squad smoke grenades went right over.

[ March 13, 2008, 07:52 PM: Message edited by: Brent Pollock ]