LtGeorge

The Viggens gave it away at the beginning. Hanging around saying "come get some" or to shoot at whatever is in sight is a great way to get shot down. They should have gone RTB and set up properly for the next sortie. Always engage on your own terms!

I had a similar issue, which went here with Gunslinger's report. By rights it should be in the Support forum. http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/10593-weird-sb-40-mouse-issue The solution was the same on mine - restart and it went away. I also fiddled with the controls settings but I can't say if it fixed it or not.

I also encountered this. When I first installed version 4, I jumped in really quick to the tank range and it worked just fine. Then a day later I went in and the mouse will not move the gunsight nor pan the player view when in a playable position. I went through the various combinations of Controls settings and also reset to default. After a computer restart it behaves normally now. During the problem, when I would right-click the mouse would snap to the center of the view and then turn back into the mouse arrow and not turn into the yellowish-black cross. It would behave normally in the Map screen. The right mouse button would still lase. I don't have a joystick attached to the PC, and it is a Win10 x64.

I think the infantry weapons renderings and selection are fine. But if the infantry could use urban cover better, it would be huge. The infantry seem programmed for techniques in the field (stay low & crawl). This doesn't come off well in urban areas, where it is more about staying behind objects and moving quickly from behind one object to behind another object. But the software required there would not be small, I imagine.

I guess I could probably answer my own question. It's probably a combination of after-effects, like fire shooting out of the orifices of the hit tank, and/or members of the crew bailing out. Until then I guess a real crew against a real target would keep engaging it. Makes it seem rather tricky with SB's western tanks, which usually just go still and maybe a trickle of smoke coming from the hatches.

In SB, the AI (including your CO and gunner) know instantly if the target is dead or or still living - even if the target has been completely and for all outward appearances to be disabled but still technically "alive." But actual combat is messier. Thanks to recent events in certain countries, I can watch hundreds of videos on youtube of ATGMs (usually TOW) delivering hits to Soviet-type tanks (usually T-72 and T-62) in actual combat conditions. This brought up an interesting skill that a real-life tanker would have - how do you know the tank you've just hit is finished from the fight? As I watch these videos, it was rare that a turret was popped and thrown into the air. I think the only ones I've seen popped were close-combat RPGs. It seems rare that a TOW or Spigot would pop a turret, although in SB it is pretty typical that a T-72 turret will get thrown when hit by one of these. There is the tell-tale fire flare that comes up from the two top hatches once the "furnace" gets going inside, but sometimes it takes some time until that conflagration gets going. In that time, you're probably intending to give the tank another shot while you're being reloaded, because in combat you must assume he's still fighting. One thing I found myself watching was the muzzle of the main gun. On several hits, you'd see a poof of smoke come out of the muzzle, and that seemed to be a sign of certain death. I was wondering if some tankers could answer why that occurs - was the breech open when the tank was hit? Or if the tank interior is being shredded by fire and explosions, does the breech closure assembly swing open (i.e., loss of hydraulics)?

You could tell the difference between hard-core "want to die" fighters and those who were trying to earn some pay (usually in the lull in farming between harvests). Those who wanted to live would take some poor shots and then split before they could be shot back at. Those who were suicide candidates were fewer and farther between and would go for special training. Generally, I didn't feel like most Afghans had much hostility toward us - it felt like the crazies in NW Pakistan were responsible for a lot of the problems. There was kind of a weariness in the Afghan side for having been at war for over 30 years. You see a lot of war damage there, old and new scars: damaged buildings, craters, amputees, etc. When I was in Afghanistan in the summer of 2012, we felt that the area was going to continue in war and it would probably get worse when ISAF left, probably to a multi-way Afghan civil war with the Taliban from NW Pakistan. Kind of a repeat of the mid/late 1990s. That is why the ISAF draw-down is going so slowly. Back to SB - there isn't much fun game play in SB for COIN ops. You could do procedural training, like proper response to an IED strike on your convoy. Maybe spawn a red troop in a crowd, have him fire a few rounds for a few seconds, then disappear him from the map. You can practice your 9-lines. Not much fun, if you ask me. However, there are current day ops that would make for a better time in SB - elements of Ukraine, Syria, etc, where you see larger ops and more hardware being used. Having a driveable T-72 becomes very relevant with these possibilities.

Regarding sources of information, there are plenty of publicly available sources. In my prep and deployment in Afghanistan, I became very acquainted with them. The best primer is "Counterinsurgency," by David Kilcullen. It contains a lot of theory and several recent case studies. In the back of the book is a primer if you are deploying as far as what to do and what to look for. The US Army/Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual is also public knowledge. The book "The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa" is a good one about being a local commander in CI, and has a nice throw-back to the Boer War. From these sources you can deduce what low level tactics will be and maybe try to simulate them in SB. These are great books but don't really help you in SB at all. CI is a lot of work - law enforcement, public relations, press relations, human intelligence, perception management, government relations, etc - and less on the shooting element. CI is far more than just military action, and it deeply frustrates those who just want military action. CI is usually from the standpoint of the following script: - A nation or region has a very ineffective government. - A sub-national group advances its agenda and is unable to be stopped by the local government. Both compete for control of the area and its population. - Violence occurs. - The violence gets out of hand and draws in a large foreign power as an occupying power. - The foreign power tries to prop up the local government so they can handle the problem in the long term, while simultaneously trying to get the violence under control. - Elements of the local entities form an insurgency against the foreign occupier. - The occupier now has an insurgency against them and is now engaged in counter-insurgency, while still trying to pursue security and getting a functional local government in place that can deal with the issues. A key of CI is that you need to understand the local groups - their gripes, aspirations, economics, culture and societal norms, etc. Things get very complex very quickly and it baffles outsiders, who often just want a simple solution and get out. The local issues that were present in Bosnia, the Middle East, etc are far more complex than most outsiders are equipped to deal with. I think Americans are particularly frustrated by this, as our society is fairly monolithic and we don't encounter deep cultural divides in close proximity - we are therefore untrained in that kind of thinking.

I wore the OCP in Afghanistan in 2012. I was Air Force attached to Army, so we got to ditch our ABUs (which doesn't have a hot weather option!) and go with OCPs instead, and we thought they were fantastic. The OCP/Multicam was very comfortable and light. So long as I had water and my boonie hat, 100-110 deg F was okay. Wearing it under armor was no problem, although they gave us combat shirts specifically for that. The main closure is zipper and breast pockets and zipper flap are velcro (err, I should have said "hook and loop"). My only gripe was that the uniforms wore out rather quickly. They didn't like repeated washing. You could tell how long a person was there based on how ragged the uniform appeared - Velcro splaying out, the material getting frayed and lighter color, etc. We were issued 4 sets for a 6 month tour. I tried to stick to 2 sets and keep the other 2 sets in reserve. The first set was looking about shot by the end of the tour.

Just upgraded my win7 64b PC and win8 32b Asus tablet to win10. So far it's ok. Upgrade was seamless and easy. For one it was a 2 GB download, while the other was 2.5 GB download. The installer wants 5 GB of space to work with before it downloads and installs. Since both of these machines have 64 GB SSDs for C drive, space is at a premium and I had to clean stuff off. Once the upgrade was done, there was some more space available on C:, so that was nice. Still waiting for when Microsoft will support moving the Users and ProgramData folders to a non-C: location. For the user experience, I think it is slightly worse than win7 and slightly better than win8. I really only upgraded to maintain currency and to get it while it's free. It really wants you to use your Live account to login, and that's a major crux for the privacy issues. I keep a local account. It cripples some functionality, but it's nothing big, and my LAN storage is based off my local ID, so it's better that way. SB works.

No sooner than I ask then I found the solution. The turret is disabled when the troops in back are unbuttoned. The lights change on the power panel when this happens, although I'm not sure if I can manually override the disabled turret when troops are unbuttoned. Kind of a tactical limitation to lose the turret when you want more observation, but I guess it's better than squishing the unbuttoned troops.

After some time trying to figure this out, I'm reaching out to the forum: It seems that the Ulan turret goes dead periodically. After some time in a scenario, I'll jump between vehicles and find the turret to be dead. Both traverse and gun elevation are not responsive. Sights and ammo selects are still working. I'll check through the controls and nothing fixes it. I'll try to power down and power up the turret to no effect (using the power panel to the upper left of the gunner). Last night, I had a company of 4 Ulans and after about 2-4 minutes time, three had stuck turrets, all at different azimuths and gun elevations. Periodically one would come active again, but I'm not sure what AI did to get it working again. There was no enemy contact or shots fired in that time. I tried multiple scenarios and it doesn't seem to be dependent on the scenarios - just the Ulan model itself. I think it has happened a couple times when I was in control, but usually it seems that it happens when AI is in control. I'm sure I'm missing something - has anyone else seen this? FYI, this is 3.011, just now upgraded to 3.025 and will see if it persists.

Thanks. It's a process. The roads are still the first placement from when I was looking at various maps and trying to find their approximate locations and routing. I do see a bunch of the issues you mention, especially as I was playing a test scenario. I am hoping that I am close to some tools that may cause me to try a rev 2, with better results. We'll see. The exercise was also to learn about the area. I'm a history buff and was reading a book on the Yom Kippur War, and studying the terrain like this has really helped to understand what it may have been like on the ground. And I was playing the SB Egyptian campaign as well, which validated that playing in that time period is now viable in SB.

Interesting in the video that the TC's huge RWS obscures so much of their forward view. The one TC was trying to look around it from both sides.

But in the absence of that, I went for it anyway. I did learn a lot about the terrain and features, and I think that when you hop in a tank and start a scenario, it passes off fairly well except for the lack of minor roads. For a Tapline Road scenario southeast of Nafekh, I think the terrain is in good shape for a really fun and immersive scenario. I think that when you get tactical, the nit-noidal details pass away and you have fun dealing with what you have in front of you. I was certainly trying to avoid the "golf course" effect of a plain map. I do wish there were map editor tools that could splatter a mix of terrain, as well as make village and city block construction easier. I wish that as well as having individual buildings, there could be pre-made city blocks. Better yet, the scenario artist could create and save a terrain and object snippet which could be pulled into different scenarios. A snippet could be like a city block, or a country farm, etc.