Agiel

Steven Zaloga's works suggest that early ERA, like early '80s composite armour developed in Chobham and its derivatives, provided fantastic protection against CE while providing comparatively minimal additional protection against KE. Using the diagram for the early T-72B in the wiki, how much more protection does this translate into for KE and CE?

Back on topic: To give you an example, parts of the airframes of the A-10 and the AH-64 Apache were rated to be protected against up to 23mm autocannon fire (although taking sustained hits from these rounds at a rate of 800-1000 RPM from a Zeus certainly wasn't good news for both of these aircraft). Though my knowledge of the Hind isn't as extensive, its role of a fast-attack helicopter that would make repeated passes against enemy positions using rockets (it was rather poorly suited for hovering and bob-up attacks compared to the Apache, the Havoc, and the Hokum) meant it had to be able to take at least a fair amount of punishment from heavy caliber rounds.

http://youtu.be/UuZGX46X4Tg

I would think the Garand was a near-revolutionary weapon. Suddenly the Germans and the Japanese were faced with a squad of equal size that could put twice as many full-sized rifle rounds downrange in a given time as they could.

If the Republican Guard intends to blow it up as a demonstration to the Iranian people that it is capable of defending itself from US CVBGs then it's more of an insult to the intelligence of the Iranian people than anything. Try as the Ayatollahs might, Iranians by and large aren't North Koreans and there's enough cracks in the repression apparatus that it isn't difficult for most ordinary Iranians (or at least those in more cosmopolitan areas of Iran) to suss out that this show of force is an absolute farce.

Do those missions have a map of the area before you start the mission proper? You could print out the map, and I think radio contact reports give you a grid reference, so you could mark them on it with a pen just as tankers of yore might have done.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5528438/obsidian-entertainment-unveils-tank-centric-tactical-military-mmo Though Obisdian is a developer I hold in high regards in spite of the technical issues upon release for many of their games, if WoT and Warthunder were any indication there doesn't seem to be much in it for those of us who have our bookshelves lined with Jane's books and Paul Lakowski's exahustive armour calculations scribbled on the walls.

I think the only chance you have in that situation is hope that the bandit is too cocky... and stalls from trying to line you up in his gun pipper.

Reading "Yellow Green Beret" which is about a an Asian former Army Special Forces operator. He initially served in Armour before moving on to Ranger School and finally to Special Forces, so here's a relevant passage: -------------------------------------------------------------- In tank warfare, there’s a concept called an “IV line,” and I can’t remember for the life of me what it stands for, but it basically refers to a hill and its horizon, which you’re hidden behind. So, you have to remember that tank warfare is on big masses of land because tanks can drive really fast and stuff, so to hide behind a wall, or a tree, like how an infantryman would, doesn’t really work for seventy-ton tanks. Instead, you have to hide behind really big land formations—like hills and sand dunes. So, as a tank, you don’t really want to just willy-nilly cruise right up a hill in order to peek over it and see if there is an enemy tank or attack helicopter on the other side, because you’re exposing yourself to get shot, right? And when you crest the hill, you expose the underbelly of the tank to the bad guys, and they even get to shoot you in your tummy, which is where you, as a tank, are weakest and softest. Bad juju. So, what you do is you find the most expendable guy in your platoon to jump off his tank, run like two hundred meters up the hill, peek over it like a ninja, and see if there are any dragons or bad guys over the hill. Then, he can run back, report to the platoon leader, and he’ll decide what to do next. At least you know. Of course, the idea of enemy tanks coming across the hill as this lone expendable peon is running up to check it out crosses everybody’s mind, which is why you find the lowest-ranking dude to sacrifice. In this scenario, that happened to be me, because I was Asian (just kidding, it was a rotating position). Still feeling pretty pissed off, I grabbed a rifle and the binoculars and in a huff, jumped off of the M1A1 Abrams and started full sprinting at the hill like I was Matthew Broderick taking that hill in the movie Glory. I was so mad I was just like, I’ll show you. I’ll run really hard! Anyway, I never said I was that smart. But it just felt good to do something energetically and kind of violently. So, maybe sprinting isn’t descriptive—I was “running violently.” Well, a funny by-product of tank training is that since tanks are seventy-ton behemoths with giant treads and can turn on a dime, the ground that tanks train on gets churned up quite a bit, and soon, it becomes a giant mudpit. The entire area is a giant mud cesspool. If you can imagine female giants in bikinis, this would be their mud-wrestling pit. Well, just as you might have thought, without planning a good non-mud route, I basically ran directly into the deepest mud, and even as it got deeper and deeper, I was so flipping out in my own mind that I just keep charging through, trying to power through. Soon, I successfully got myself stuck about thigh-high. Just as I was desperately trying to free myself, all the while knowing that four tanks were about 150 meters behind me and everybody was just watching me through various optically enhancing viewers sprinting like hell into a pile of mud, of course, the enemy tanks start rolling over the hill. So, in a real-world tank battle with the then-dead Soviet Union whom we were still training to fight in 2001, I’d probably be dead with ruptured eardrums from being caught in between supersonic 120-millimeter uranium-depleted rounds being fired back and forth at two-hundred-meter distances between M1A1 Abrams tanks. But since they were firing lasers at each other, which also worked less than 50 percent of the time, I was totally alive. Remembering what that jerk head instructor said about “no heart,” I aimed my rifle and started trying to fire at one of the tanks. First off, just so you know, even an M1A1 Abrams 120-millimeter sabot armor-piercing round—pretty much the best in the world—won’t even pierce an M1A1 Abrams’ armor, so you might imagine what peashooter-like 5.56-millimeter rounds would do from an M16—nothing. I don’t even know if you could hear 5.56-millimeter rounds hitting the tank from the inside, to be honest. Well, on top of that, I was at least expecting to be shooting blanks that make loud noises, but our instructor had secretly unloaded our M16 before we went out because he didn’t want to do the thirty-second paperwork for any expended blank 5.56-millimeter rounds (like I said, bottom-of-the-barrel professionals at this school). I fired, but just: click, click. So, I elected to add my own vocal sounds to simulate firing, which was what they told us to do at West Point since we never really had the money for blank rounds there: Me: Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! When I got tired of yelling that, while stuck in the mud with the enemy M1A1 Abrams just cruising around back and forth in front of me firing nonworking lasers at my platoon’s tanks, which were probably also firing nonworking lasers back: Me: Bang! Bang! Bang! Boom? Ka-boom? Bang, bang, bang! Of course, this gets tiring, yelling “pow” and “bang” over and over, and definitely since nobody seemed to be noticing my Medal of Honor actions, the tanks just kept maneuvering back and forth, firing those silent, nonworking lasers at each other. I remembered somebody at West Point basic training saying that you could grab any object and yell “grenade” (this turned out to just be a West Point thing and maybe just with that particular upperclass cadet), and then it would “count” as a grenade. I happened to have eight or nine oranges in my cargo pockets because I really liked eating them in the field to help pass the time, and those seemed like pretty good grenade substitutes. So, I started pulling out oranges and yelling, “Grenade!” and hurling them at the nearest enemy tank. I thought maybe I could get them to drop just inside the turret. But, of course, they were all falling well short of the nearest tank, so, basically, I was just stuck in the mud throwing oranges into the mud about thirty to forty meters away, while yelling “Grenade!” each time to absolutely no discernable effect. Finally, an instructor mercifully called the end of the mock battle, and my buddies cruised over pretty close to me and pulled me out of the mud onto the tank—a little embarrassing. But what was more embarrassing was that I had calmed down from my little flip-out, and my instructor had recorded all my “irregular behavior” in that scenario and sent me immediately to report to the commander, a captain. Captain: Let me get this straight—the instructor has written here that you jumped off the tank, sprinted into the mud, and immediately got stuck, began yelling gun noises while pointing a rifle at a tank, and then basically just threw several oranges around you? Damn straight that’s what I did. That’s what Hell Knox will do to an Asian man.

Aw hell, just when we thought we got the latest and greatest in American Armour for Steel Beasts they come out with this.

“So I’m sitting down about to open a package from Germany when I hear some rumbling. Thinking it was my chair I stood up and looked at it, not finding anything unusual. I sat down and turned back and saw myself staring face-to-face with a Tiger tank. I have no idea how that got there, it must’ve taken some sort of tactical genius to… NIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLS!”

Here I was thinking Germany was one of the more innocuous places a package could come from in this day and age.

For the Hinds, their best offensive weapons are their missiles, of which they need quite a bit of standoff to use effectively. Station your Cavalry Bradleys in favourable terrain (hilly areas, in woods) so that they can ambush them. You will find the Hinds' considerable armour (for slicks) doesn't stack up terribly well to 25mm autocannon fire. Despite the seemingly large front you have to cover (I've read somewhere a real-life tanker said the front you cover in that scenario was twice as wide as a force of the size you are given was expected to cover), there are in reality two chokepoints (the valley to the north that's a perfect kill-zone, and a road that is the only way to climb up a steep incline in the center) to cover and one relatively wide plain to the south which is perfect terrain for the lion's share of your Abrams and Bradleys to cover from hull-down. Do not commit your entire force to defending a single phaseline; use leapfrogging overwatch in reverse as you retreat back to Eischenzell (as one sections or platoon is retreating to another favourable position after firing one or two salvos, the one behind them gives them covering fire, then repeat). Displacing after a few salvos bears repeating as the REDFOR is pretty good with with its artillery spotting... And I'm sure Ssnake is about to put me on a high chair with a dunce hat. These are the best I can offer, and I only make a comfortable amount of progress in that scenario half the times I play it and I only manage a victory about a third of the time. I'm sure there are tons of people smarter than me can offer more viable tips.

Wasn't it a one in a thousand HESH shell that bounced off the open commander's hatch and into the interior of the turret?

Well the only plausible military threat to the Netherlands is two, potentially three countries away, so there is that, and that eventuality is only barely more likely than Germany or France invading them.

There was a "Trains vs Zombie" Halloween DLC for "Train Simulator 20-something or other," so let's not be too presumptuous and think our beloved dry study sims are totally exempt from this phenomenon :mrgreen:

For the M1A2 go to the commander's station and press alt-f3. For M1s that are not the M1A2, the M2 cannot be fired manually. Instead, it must be controlled via the Commander's Weapon System from within the tank. It has electronic traverse and a hand-cranked elevation/depression, which translates to the mouse controlling traverse and the up and down arrow keys controlling elevation and depression. For the Leos, the pintle-mounted MG-3 is used only by the loader, whose station is not modeled in the game.

I like to think that the armies of NATO have a deep respect for the equipment and capabilities of their allies. Were they to be involved in a conflict with large scale armoured maneuvers, the tank crews of each nation would be glad to have well-trained crews at the helm of tanks like the M1A2, the Leopard 2A6, the Challenger 2, and the Leclerc at their side against whatever foe they come up against.

While I'm a PC gamer to the core, I always shake my head when my fellow PC gamers harp on about how our platform "will always be more powerful" than a console. To me that is not the PC's greatest strength; it's greatest strength is its ubiquity, that just about everybody who cares about gaming *has* one. Practically any off-the-shelf, pre-built PC made in the last 5-6 years can play some of the most popular PC games out there, from WoW to Team Fortress 2 to League of Legends. In fact, I've said since 2011 that if the best-looking games made in the next 3-5 years still looked as good as Battlefield 3, then I'd still be totally happy.

There is a very well-done D-Apache mod for Arma 2 that was released not too long ago that I would say is somewhere between Enemy Engaged and DCS: Black Shark levels of fidelity. That said, given that it's a vehicle mod for a game whose forte is infantry combat and the devs had to resort to some witchcraft to get around the limitations of the VBS engine (and not always terribly successful), it is still every bit as cumbersome to play this mod as ArmA 2 is. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?162767-AH-64D-Apache-Longbow-for-ArmA2-by-Nodunit-and-Franze

My guess is that you'll still want to restrict yourself to engaging targets up to 2500m, as at ranges any longer than that the problem isn't the ballistics computer but ballistic and target deviation, and even the M-829A3 will struggle to penetrate a T-80U or T-90A. I'd say the biggest boone of the 50x zoom is that it allows me to engage targets in hull-down or prepared defenses. It also makes it possible to aim for specific portions of a tank, so aim for the mantlet and send that T-80's head flying all the way back to Omsk.

The gunner as the one who is "deepest" inside the turret has the TC between him and the loader's position, so if anything the TC would take the place of the loader in the event that he is incapacitated.

Been wondering a few things for a scenario idea that's been stewing in my head for a mid-late 80's scenario: - In the event of the Cold War gone hot, would Turkey be drawn into the conflict and attempt to push into the Georgian SSR so as to convince the Soviets to divert forces from the European theater? - At this stage, what kind of vehicles did they use, and does Steel Beasts at the moment have these vehicles modeled or are there equivalents in the game? - How prepared were the Soviets for this scenario? What were the forces that would have been committed to this front equipped with? - Would the United States send forces to this theater? Would they be Army or Marines? As this would inform what kind of equipment would be in the scenario.

So an opportunity to bring those M8 AGSes out again? Except this time put an M256 on top.

I'm all for this idea. With respect to our Spanish community members, scenarios involving a German Leo 2A6 are a bit more plausible, and at the moment the "Bundeswehr-isation" mods for the Leopardo 2E are currently incompatible with 3.0. In addition, there is a need for proper ballistic solutions for the German DM-12 HEAT round. May be real nit-picky, but putting it out there.