AT gun bailing out ....

[bankroot]

I wonder why it is impossible to come back to the AT gun after bailing out (unlike in "tank case")?

Is it realistic indeed ?

I think, that will be great if for instance HQ soldiers can use AT guns after their crew death.

[womble]

That's been answered half a dozen times. Gun crews were trained to 'spike' (make inoperable) their guns before abandoning them, to deny their use to the enemy. BFC have decided that the outlier cases where troops failed to do this are not worth the extra effort of modelling an uncrewed gun. So yes, it's realistic.

Even tanks can only be recrewed by their own crew (though transport vehicles have at least some exceptions). Distinguishing between units which might have the capacity to operate the equipment is something that's not provided for, AFAIK (based on the fact that interchangeability isn't there, and it'd be almost trivial to allow if you could be sure that the troops were appropriate). So that's not going to happen for game engine reasons.

[bankroot]

Thanks for an answer.

Everything is clear now.

[YankeeDog]

Just to keep the record clear, if I understand Steve's comments correctly, not allowing gun crews to re-man was partially a design decision, but also partially a practical allocation of coding resources decision.

Apparently, it would be difficult and time-consuming (but not impossible) to code re-crewing for ATGs -- Something about the way that ATGs are seen by the game as a infantry team with one really big weapon, whereas vehicles are modeled differently. As a secondary issue, there was also the problem of designing things in such a way that the player couldn't overly abuse such a feature, by doing things like bouncing a crew on and off a gun repeatedly. Again, not impossible to solve, but something that would definitely require design, coding, and playtest time.

So, given that there were other game features considered more important which were in need of coding time, and given the fact that gun crews would probably often (but not necessarily always) spike or otherwise disable a gun when leaving it, BFC decided to give us what they could in this area. So we can abandon guns to save the crew, but we can't re-crew.

I choose to view this as a glass half-full thing. I'd like to see gun re-crewing in the game eventually, and I especially hope it's in by the time we get to the East Front as it's a tactic the Russians apparently used fairly often on defense -- setting up ATGs in hidden forward locations, and then rushing forward to man them after an artillery barrage lifted.

But for now, I'm happy that we at least get the ability to abandon guns when the position has become untenable, to try to reduce the casualty count.

[Dingchavez]

A player reported that his crew went back at the gun after having suffered casualties and abandonned the AC gun, but h didn't isued the order, that's odd.

[Redwolf]

Actually it seemed to have been pretty common to retreat from the gun during incoming indirect fire (go into better foxholes) and then re-man the gun when ground forces approach.

At least that book written by that German 37mm (later pak40) gunner also specifically mentioned being driven off the gun by smallarms fire and returning later to shoot at tanks.