Stryker/LAV Tow vehicles overmodelled?

[2ndMDRebel]

The US anti-tank assets like the TOW Stryker and LAV vehicles... they always have their turrets up. Is this something new because back "in the day" we couldn't move our M901s with the hammer heads up at more than 5mph and the turret structure looks the same. One of the drawbacks we faced when trying to assist on the offense was we would have to maneuver into position, raise the turret, spin it around to cover the frontal arc. When moving again we had to spin the turret back to the rear, satisfy the azimuth and elevation lights for the stow position manually, then lower the turret in order to move out. Combine that factor with having to redo the boresight and colimate the thermal sight to maintain zero over rough terrain and you can see why I am questioning the offensive capability of these vehicles. The game allows you to roll it along, stop, and be firing in seconds which is a gross misrepresentation of this weapon system. Is this simply a gameplay concession because of the coding and animations involved? Can there be a "deploy weapon" option for these vehicles or a programmed in delay between stopping and firing or after firing when they can move again?

As a point, during the first GW my little Echo company was attached to a pure armor battalion as their dismounted infantry support because we were absolutely useless in our primary role amongst the Bradleys and Abrams combined task forces.

Back to enjoying the game...

[Battlefront.com]

Is this simply a gameplay concession because of the coding and animations involved?

Simply put, yup. The worst sort of TacAI to write is that which must anticipate something that is not explicitly evident and really simple to qualify. The real bear of it is that to get imperfect TacAI we have to do a ton of programming and testing to get something that will definitely get people's knickers in a twist, which then gets us into a cycle of diminishing returns on coding investment. I don't mean that from a Dollars and Cents standpoint, rather from a "if we are spending a week trying to get a 5% improvement out of this one narrow behavior, we aren't spending a week doing something else" standpoint.

Having it be user designated isn't really an option. People will scream bloody murder when they go to use the TOW after forgetting to prep it. Either it just sits there (which prompts bug reports!) or it reverses out of LOS/LOF while deploying the hammerhead. This in turn will lead to demands that we not require micromanagement and instead add the costly and flawed TacAI be coded and we're right back in the same boat as I just described.

The problem is that the unrealistic use depends greatly on the circumstances. I made a scenario for the Campaign, for example, that uses LAV-ATs in a static overwatch position. They would obviously have their TOWs at the ready, therefore in that situation there's nothing unrealistic about our portrayal. Likewise, someone that moves a Stryker ATGM at top speed to a location and it sits there for a few minutes before engaging could also be presumed to be realistic. Obviously there are other situations where it can be said to be unrealistically responsive.

On balance, at least the way I play, I think they turn out mostly realistic. I tend to use my TOW vehicles for overwatch and therefore they spend most of their time stationary or doing bounding overwatch.

Hopefully someone here with experience with the modern systems in Strykers, LAVs, and Bradleys can comment about the problems associated with moving. My understanding is many of the bore sighting issues that used to exist are no longer relevant due to upgraded systems. But I could be mistaken!

Steve

[Imperial Grunt]

The US anti-tank assets like the TOW Stryker and LAV vehicles... they always have their turrets up. Is this something new because back "in the day" we couldn't move our M901s with the hammer heads up at more than 5mph and the turret structure looks the same. One of the drawbacks we faced when trying to assist on the offense was we would have to maneuver into position, raise the turret, spin it around to cover the frontal arc. When moving again we had to spin the turret back to the rear, satisfy the azimuth and elevation lights for the stow position manually, then lower the turret in order to move out. Combine that factor with having to redo the boresight and colimate the thermal sight to maintain zero over rough terrain and you can see why I am questioning the offensive capability of these vehicles. The game allows you to roll it along, stop, and be firing in seconds which is a gross misrepresentation of this weapon system. Is this simply a gameplay concession because of the coding and animations involved? Can there be a "deploy weapon" option for these vehicles or a programmed in delay between stopping and firing or after firing when they can move again?

As a point, during the first GW my little Echo company was attached to a pure armor battalion as their dismounted infantry support because we were absolutely useless in our primary role amongst the Bradleys and Abrams combined task forces.

Back to enjoying the game...

As long at the animations can be made, I definitely support this feature.

[purpheart23]

Don't think anybody complained about the bradley having it's tow launcher permanently at the ready.....why start now?

[Huntarr]

Trust me, we bitch'd and moaned about animation on various platforms.

Hi-Rez LAV link

[2ndMDRebel]

Thank you for that precise and prompt explanation! I was kind of figuring that and its no game-buster by any stretch of the imagination. Looking back and re-reading it, "gross misrepresentation" is a tad bit heavy and I apologize for that comment.

I'm sure the weapon system has matured greatly since my years in the Army (85-92) and it would be interesting to hear from a young buck on how things are today.

When you think about it, if all we have to gripe and nit-pick are these petty things then that means you've done one helluva job.

[Battlefront.com]

Oh, if it were as easy as having some animations in there we would have done it already Remember, looks are generally the easy part of any feature that has actual gameplay ramifications. Animating a TOW missile in flight, for example, took almost no time at all to do. Getting the TOW to have a realistic flightpath and error tolerance... THAT was the hard part. Animating a tracer is nothing but a streak of color, but the physics of small arms trajectories based on a large handful of variables took a lot of time to get right. Having a soldier swivel his head didn't take much time, but getting spotting to work was huge. So on and so forth.

Same thing in this case. Animating the hammerhead or Bradley TOW arm is a piece of cake because it is straight forward and largely controlled by the model itself (done by KwazyDog). It's the TacAI requirements that killed it.

No need to apologize 2ndMDRebel... your point was very well made and quite right. No offense taken.

And yeah, nitpicking is definitely a sign that we've got the important stuff taken care of

Steve

[Inkompetent]

Well, at least my Bradleys were very, very slow in using their TOWs in vanilla. I spotted a stationary T-54 and halted my pair of Bradleys who immediately engaged with AP rounds at about 600-800 meters range. I waited and waited for that TOW to come, had to pop smoke after about 30 seconds since I feared the tank would shoot back (which it finally swivelled its turret to do. Good timing by me). Not until the smoke dissolved one of the Bradleys finally let off a TOW, just before my emergency-disembarked infantry got their Javelin gunner ready.

How is it with the Humvees, by the way? Are those under the same limitations as the APCs? Just asking since I did, after failing mission 3 in Marines, using my TOW-equipped Humvees very aggressively, both racing through housed areas and down into defilades, distracting tanks with Mk 19s and .50 HMGs, and then speeding up with 'Fast' orders to get into LOS with the TOWs, shoot them to pieces, and immediately reversing down into the defilade again to reload.

[MikeyD]

I found a document from '06(?) on the web saying due to dissatisfaction with LAV-AT the vehicle was slated to be rebuilt mounting a LAV-25 turret with 'saddlebag' TOW launchers on either side. Absolutely zero info after that, I guess funding's either been slowed or halted. I did find later mention of LAV-AT being slated for the A2 armor upgrade. Haven't seen an actual pict of an upgraded vehicle yet, though I did discover a fuzzy LAV-M A2 mortar vehicle photo recently. Huntarr does have a pict up above of a LAV-AT that had gone through the Service Life Extension Program upgrades, most obvious change being the wider tires.

[Battlefront.com]

Humvee TOW is a different beast. That one has the TOW in position 100% of the time, though of course it may not be loaded at any given moment. The optics on it are far more simple than the vehicle based systems, since these are the same optics used when the TOW is used in ground mode. This means the vehicle and launcher don't need to be synched do to jostling around.

Steve

[SgtMuhammed]

Basically the TOW Hummer is a Humvee with a ground mount system strapped on the top. If you lean against the vehicle while the gunner is guiding the missile you will disturb his aim.

[teeps]

I haven't had much experience yet with the LAV TOW vehicle, but from what I've seen so far I think it's a heap of junk! In the 'Just around the Bend' scenario my TOW LAVs cannot seem to hit a thing, but are good at exploding spectacularly when receiving fire. Is there some particular tactic I should be applying to make these things work better?

[jjhouston]

Don't think anybody complained about the bradley having it's tow launcher permanently at the ready.....why start now?

It's been an issue for a while.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=76718&page=3

See post #22.

I've crewed Bradleys and M901 ITVs (which have the same hammerhead as the LAV-AT). It takes a fair amount of time to erect a Bradley's launcher, and almost an eternity, or so it seems when a target is downrange, to erect the hammerhead. Because of the greater length of time to erect the hammerhead, failure to model this is a bigger issue than the failure to properly model the Bradley. Driving around with either erected would fairly quickly render them inoperable; they're not that stable and tend to bounce around when moving -- that bouncing would brake the chains and gears that hold them up .

Accordingly, IRL, the decision to move from a firing position is going to account for the fact of a significant time delay to fire a missile if a target appears while the vehicle is in transit. This, of course, effects the employment tactics of such vehicles, e.g., bounding overwatch is REQUIRED where armor targets are likely.

Realistic reproduction of situations that would require appropriate tactics does seem to be the point. An analogy of the failure to model the time delay to erect these launchers would be the failure of a 'realistic' first-person-shooter to model weapon reload times. It would certainly effect gameplay and result in 'gamey' tactics.

[Flanker15]

If it could be done, I'd do it the way all the other games with it do: If the vehicle is below a certain speed (5km/h, stopped, whatever) it deploys and if it's over that speed it retracts. So a brad, LAV-AT etc... will have its launcher deployed if the vehicle is stopped or moving "slow", if it goes over that speed it retracts until the vehicle is stopped or moving slow again.

On the note of the launcher deploy times not being modeled, I thought they were modeled in the coding but not visualy modeled?

[Marwek77 aka Red Reporter]

The US anti-tank assets like the TOW Stryker and LAV vehicles... they always have their turrets up. Is this something new because back "in the day" we couldn't move our M901s with the hammer heads up at more than 5mph and the turret structure looks the same. One of the drawbacks we faced when trying to assist on the offense was we would have to maneuver into position, raise the turret, spin it around to cover the frontal arc. When moving again we had to spin the turret back to the rear, satisfy the azimuth and elevation lights for the stow position manually, then lower the turret in order to move out. Combine that factor with having to redo the boresight and colimate the thermal sight to maintain zero over rough terrain and you can see why I am questioning the offensive capability of these vehicles. The game allows you to roll it along, stop, and be firing in seconds which is a gross misrepresentation of this weapon system. Is this simply a gameplay concession because of the coding and animations involved? Can there be a "deploy weapon" option for these vehicles or a programmed in delay between stopping and firing or after firing when they can move again?

As a point, during the first GW my little Echo company was attached to a pure armor battalion as their dismounted infantry support because we were absolutely useless in our primary role amongst the Bradleys and Abrams combined task forces.

Back to enjoying the game...

Nice to hear that propaganda is sometimes bigger than the reality I remember be aware of TOW propaganda and now i hear, that it was working like this... Lucky boys