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Wooden bunkers


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I ran in to some difficulty confronting bunkers...strangely of the wood variety. I brought up a Priest 105 knowing that in a moment I would have a completely leveled log cabin. But not so. The bunker absorbed 7 rounds (!) before taking one through the slot killing all inside. I would've expected that a wood structure wouldn't stand a chance against direct fire HE...what gives?

Also after running some tests it seems wood bunkers do not cooperate with cover arcs and fire freely.

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Ironwood? :D

Seriously, you saw every round hit the bunker? That does sound a bit funky but that's what you get when you buy artillery fuzes from the lowest bidder.

I'll have to try that myself and see what gives.

As to the cover arc - the bunker is not allowing them to be set, or is it allowing them to be set and then ignoring them?

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I ran into a couple of those bad boys last night. I didn't have any direct HE on them though but found that small arms works ok to suppress the occupants.

At one point, the the only target I had on the map for troops to shoot at was the last bunker (other enemy troops had broke and pulled back). I had literally 7-8 squads, 2 HQ's and 3 MG's open up on it for 2 minutes solid. I put myself in the bunker for a whole WeGo minute to see what it was like and had a laugh fest. Boy--were those Germans ever chattering away at each other!!! I don't think the things they were saying began to cover their state of mind! Maybe Battle Front should have put in an audio file that says "I should've joined the U-Boot service" for situations like that! The amount of fire was horrific.

:D

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Just ran a test with M7s at 1000m, 4 guns all focused on the bunker, about 25 rounds were fired. The wood bunker took 8 rounds unharmed until 1 found the vision slit finishing it off, but they spent the better part of their time engaging with the 50 cal which caused all but the final casualty in the bunker. The impression I got was that the bunkers are indestructible to heavy weapons unless the round flies through the 8x1 vision slot.

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There could be a debate about what the wood bunker 'represents'. Is it 'what you see is what you get' - a simple log fort? Or is it an 'abstracted representation' of a properly-built German bunker? German field manuals show double-walled construction with a thick layer of earth fill between, partially submerged into the ground, earth embankments, earth-covered roofs.

BFC wasn't entirely clear, even to the Beta guys, what the log bunker's supposed to represent. Able to stand up to big HE while vulnerable to AP points to a slightly abstracted log bunker, more sustantial than the lincoln log construction we see. :)

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Has anybody had any luck with infantry attacking bunker occupants? I just had trouble with this in the Brecourt Manor scenario.

I tried blasting with demo charges and targeting from door side, the rear, in front and every other angle I could think of with no damage done to the happy occupants, even though the bunker itself was listed as "knocked out", IIRC.

I got a penetration result with a bazooka, but the officer inside shrugged it off and kept popping away at my guys with his pistol, and the amount of 9mm ammo in the bunker never went down. I could get my riflemen to fire at him from short range when in front of the slit, but they couldn't hit him and he couldn't hit them.

Nobody in the bunkers seemed inclined to surrender, and after several turns of trying to kill or capture them I just left, as all the other Germans had skedaddled.

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A log bunker is not a wooden hut.

The standard construction of a log bunker uses 2 crosslaid layers of 6 inch to foot thick logs, between which is sandwiched 2 feet of rammed earth or filled sandbags, to create a field fortification meant to be proof against a direct hit by 105mm HE. The overhead cover is typically 2 feet of rammed earth or sandbags. The logs are providing a frame for the sandbags, and they provide some "give", but they are definitely not the only protection involved.

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Has anybody had any luck with infantry attacking bunker occupants? I just had trouble with this in the Brecourt Manor scenario.

I tried blasting with demo charges and targeting from door side, the rear, in front and every other angle I could think of with no damage done to the happy occupants, even though the bunker itself was listed as "knocked out", IIRC.

I got a penetration result with a bazooka, but the officer inside shrugged it off and kept popping away at my guys with his pistol, and the amount of 9mm ammo in the bunker never went down. I could get my riflemen to fire at him from short range when in front of the slit, but they couldn't hit him and he couldn't hit them.

Nobody in the bunkers seemed inclined to surrender, and after several turns of trying to kill or capture them I just left, as all the other Germans had skedaddled.

I had a similar experience...I am thinking maybe with it being placed in the bocage something may be up?...But I put a hurtin' big time on the first bunker and knocked it out but the guys inside stayed standing looking out the slit...seeing these things are kinda like vehicles the way they are manned and represented (There were tons of red penetration shots going on), I would've expected them to bail or something after all that abuse.

The second bunker I ended up killing everyone, I think...at least I didn't see anybody inside afterward.

Mord.

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I wasn't expecting them to be the house of sticks and blow them down by huffing and puffing if the Germans wouldn't let me in by the hair of their chinny chin chins. :-)

I'd say it's reasonable to expect that a bunker occupied by three men armed with rifles, or one armed with a pistol, would be vulnerable to a group of a dozen men with demolition charges and grenades.

My father used to tell some gruesome stories about the effect of several satchel charges inserted through firing slits on the occupants of multilevel concrete bunkers.

I don't think they should be easily demolished, but I think once the attackers outside it are free to move about due to a lack of fire from other positions, they should be vulnerable to grenades and demolition charges, or even prolonged small arms attack through the slits.

It's quite possible I'm simply going about it the wrong way in game.

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Bunkers are indeed pretty tough (I consider them more like pillboxes, since they aren't part of the terrain, but that's another subject).

I put a fusilier battalion (less 1 company) into about 24 bunker/shelters (2 concrete, the rest wood) in heavy woods and pounded them with a pre-plotted maximum/heavy barrage from 3 105 and 3 155 batteries. At the end of the bombardment (all batteries empty) the company had suffered not quite 50% casualties, 2 bunkers were burning and 4-5 had been totally destroyed by penetrating top hits. Many other casualties were caused by shrapnel through the firing slits (I guess). A lot of additional men were lightly wounded as well.

The problem was that the entire company was shaken, nervous or broken and very fragile after that, though they were able to exit the bunkers and man a trench system 100 meters away quickly enough (but not under fire).

One oddity was that I placed 3 bunkers close together, and somehow 1 of them got walled off on both the door and firing slit side, even though it wasn't abutting another bunker on those sides. So that team couldn't exit the bunker or even see out of it. On the plus side they suffered no casualties, hehe.

A footnote is that heavy woods apparently provides extra protection to bunkers by increasing airbursts (which never caused any casualties - i watched every turn) and preventing the groundbursts which shot shrapnel through the firing slits or worse got a top penetration and wiped out everyone inside.

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Bunkers are indeed pretty tough (snip)

A footnote is that heavy woods apparently provides extra protection to bunkers by increasing airbursts (which never caused any casualties - i watched every turn) and preventing the groundbursts which shot shrapnel through the firing slits or worse got a top penetration and wiped out everyone inside.

Which tells me that the engine is fully up to doing the Hurtgen campaign when someone gets around to it. :D

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