Ssnake

Western tanks are no miracle machines. But disputing that is refuting a claim that very few people (and certainly no experts) ever made. To make a true difference we'd have to send them in the hundreds, not by the dozen - along with a sufficient allocation of (primarily) HE rounds. We'd need to send 2.5 million 155mm rounds every year, minimum, and the means to cut the flow of supplies to Crimea. But that's the operational picture; these clips are always tactical incidents that get dispersed to the public to influence public perception of the war.

1980s M1s had about ten tons less mass than M1A2SEP as shown in this video. There is a penalty for lugging all that extra armor around.

We tried the generic approach so we don't lose ourselves in a myriad of nation-specific markings that would clutter up the GUI. I could imagine that in the future we'd first set a "configure party" dialog where you'd set camo schemes, affiliations, and possibly select things like specific artwork, and then you'd have a reduced selection when placing panels etc. But this would also mean that someone had to research, and then create such custom artwork for about two dozen different nations, minimum. That's not exactly a top priority for me, to be perfectly honest. But I appreciate the input.

You may be suffering from a bug that will be fixed by a patch later this year.

Yes, unfortunately mass editing assigned colors is a comfort function that we haven't found the time to work on yet. Then again, it's not about precision. Just moving all three slider closer to 255 while approximately maintaining the relative distance between them is enough; alternatively, use one alarmingly red or blue-ish color for the one or two swampy terrain types, but then you'll continue to have the eye squinting issue to some degree whenever they are sprinkled, and there's lots of contour lines around. Things will get better, pinky swear.

One option is to edit the map's terrain theme and to reduce the theme's color saturation except for difficult types of terrain; these, in turn, should be made darker overall. That should make it more obvious which parts of the map to avoid. You keep the mobility parameters, you just change the colors. In the Mission Editor, you extract the theme. In the Map Editor, you open the default (blank) map, save as a new delta, then load the extrated THM file. Edit that file, export it (and overwrite the original THM file), then close the Map Editor (no need to save that delta map). Now, back in the Mission Editor, go to Map > Replace Theme... and pick the just edited file. Badaboom, badabing.

A definitive "maybe". 😜 It's not entirely trivial. You need to consider a vehicle's power-to-mass ratio, traction, ground resistance, and slope angle (which is notoriously fickle to use, as there's going to be a high degree of variation at the triangle level, so we'd need to implement some low pass filtering; but if you build a moving average for every triangle, that would require massive CPU loads). Then, depending on rain in a scenario, ground conditions are variable, so we could make a terrain analysis only for the starting conditions. For the moment, I recommend editing your scenario with the "Theme Colors Enabled" option for the map display. That will give you a better insight to where difficult ground is that isn't difficult enough to be shown in the regular map.

Thank you for supporting our work.

Thanks for the correction; I was actually not quite sure if I remembered it right when writing my nonsense. If I had thought about it a bit longer it would have become obvious that the important fixes in gunnery training must have been done prior to the Six Day War.

Computer-owned units cannot be player-controlled, not even if you're in test mode. Computer-controlled is any unit not under the direct command of a human player. E.g. from the external observer's position, the unit would be in a hybrid state of being computer-controlled while the player gives no commands, but (partially) human-controlled while the user gives direct commands to this unit.

The important point here being that in prior skirmishes with the Syrian Army, the Israelis turned out to be terrible shooters. But General Tal recognized this, and took corrective measures to improve the overall training level - an investment that yielded immeasurable return during and after Yom Kippur 1973.

Even if it was (and I didn't perceive it that way), our egos aren't so frail that they couldn't handle criticism.

We've gone to great lengths to implement other command input options than the map screen - the command interface from the external observer's position, and the bird's eye view - to allow you to give commands while assessing the "ground truth" with a direct view to the combat situation. Note that the map screen deliberately omits details (no map is ever completely up-to-date), and updates the positions of units with a delay (the delay is generously short; that's marked for change).

Ah, sorry. Why don't they add distinguishing punctuation? Well, that was a rhetorical question.

Date modified 1954 and 1949 seems to set a new record... Either way, I think the way to resolve it is to first check the map UIDs of both maps and then see which of them is in actual use. We did create an internal tool to analyze which scenarios use which map; not sure at this point if it's included in any of your installations and if it works with the new map packages; I'll have to check with the guys, maybe they also have an idea whether these modification dates indicate some form of data corruption.

As long as areas are being added, at some point I'd simply delete old versions. Where a scenario requires a deleted one, you can replace it with the latest variant, at no loss whatsoever. It's not a winning stategy when areas are being changed for a specific multiplayer scenario. Some accumulation of redundant maps is probably unavoidable. This might emphasize the need to keep the meta data of every map up to date before publishing.

No, it's the one we announced as downloadable in the Version 4.3 release notes, but not everybody may have actually downloaded it, so I included the UID in the first post.

The map is available (UID bb104aa2-be76-4587-87ed-2c4cd3bca5a9), here's reading material for inspiration: https://issuu.com/chacr_camberley/docs/wip_-_bar_special?fr=xKAE9_zU1NQ

I guess this makes sense. Not everybody is adept using the search function. And at this point, it's also probably pretty solid what needs to be done and what should be avoided.

Of course, adding an auxiliary sight also means to add a perforation to the mantlet ... which inevitably is a weak point; maybe the primary additional reason why Soviet designers decided against it (T-64, designed with few cost restraints, doesn't have one either). But the two examples in the thread show that it's not just about armor perforation. Damages can also occur from comparatively weak rounds (1st Bradley was shooting HE only), if only enough hits occur, or one hits a particularly vulnerable spot. Tank protection is much a matter of armor thickness as it is a matter of chance. You put armor where hits are most frequently occurring (more than 60% are usually in the turret front area) and reduce protection in other places as a trade-off to find a good overall balance. A GAS allows you to keep fighting after you've been hit, if with reduced effectiveness. But it can also increase the chance of receiving a hit that perforates the armor (which is why it was relocated between Leopard 2A4 and 2A5). So, is it worth it? Depending on one's line of thinking a tank designer may opt against it. Russia may have lost between 2,500 and 3,000 MBTs in the last two years. How many of them would have survived if there had been an auxiliary sight - maybe less than a dozen. Of course I have no specific data, but we do know that the vast majority of tanks were lost chiefly to artillery, to mines as a distant second, then to anti-tank weapons (RPG, missiles, drones), and only very few in duel situations (and there, maybe surprisingly, most were KO'd by HE-frag rounds). Western tanks have been tailored to maximum advantage in a duel situation. It was envisioned as the primary threat between the mid 1960s and mid 1980s when they were all designed. Arguably, as it turns out, that's the least of your worries in contemporary combat.

It's difficult to isolate the discussion of an ongoing war from the reasons why the war is fought; nevertheless, let this be a call to order to maintain the communication discipline as established by the forum rules of conduct. Neither Bradley nor T-90 are invincible machines. A duel between the two will have a lot of advantages on the side of the T-90. But the nature of tactical engagements incurs an element of chance as anyone who has played a number of non-trivial scenarios in Steel Beasts will have experienced first-hand. It should also be mentioned that Steel Beasts does not invoke reaction modifiers for psychological conditions (although they most certainly will play a role whenever humans are involved), just as it doesn't involve at least one other element of this engagement, armed FOV drones. Specifically, the T-90 might have easily prevailed had it been in the company of dismounted infantry or at least one or two other combat vehicles. As it was, it found itself isolated inside an urban area, which most certainly diminishes its combat value. One might argue that these are one of the few constellations when a Bradley has a survival chance at all in a duel situation (and it still took two Bradleys and an FPV to bring the T-90 into a situation where the crew decided to bail). If the video shows one thing, it is that it's not "easy" for a Bradley to defeat a T-90 (but the chance is greater than zero).

In all fairness, side hulls of Leo 2 and M1 are rather thin. They are no wonder weapons. And Russian tank designs aren't quite as bad as many people would have you think in the mid 1990s. The question is maybe not so much whether the numbers they are working with are very different, but what the model is when a perforation occurs.

Yes.

I'd love to add the Wisel 20mm MK; sadly, we never found the time for it. Also, doctrinally it was a bit harder to justify as long as SB Pro was a vehicle-centric ground simulation since the Wisel platform is designated as a "weapons carrier" to provide mobile fire support for light infantry (paratroopers, mostly). So, you wouldn't normally see it fighting other IFVs, but rather in the fire support role for a type of combat that Steel Beasts currently does not simulate in an optimal way. The Milan on Marder ... it's complicated. I decided that we'd postpone that development until we have a code base that's more flexible. The SB V1 ...V4 code architecture was devised when we had little idea in which direction Steel Beasts would develop, and for how long. After we made the decision to enter the military training market (2002) I had always hoped for a 25+ year future, but it was very uncertain. Now that we can be relatively certain about the market in which we're operating, we are developing a new code architecture that will ensure that this software can be developed for decades to come, giving us more flexibility and ease of code maintenance at the same time, and certain performance bonuses. Hopefully, that will then also free up the time for small side jobs such as adding a dismountable missile launcher half of the vehicles in a platoon - which currently would be a big side job.

Much simpler.