Maj.Hans

For me, personally, I find that long range gunnery is completely different from medium or short range gunnery. For example, if I have a human gunner and we're engaging vehicles at ranges of say 2000m or less, I'm often times pretty happy to let my gunner blaze away rapid fire style as fast as the loader can load. As long as the targets aren't moving too fast laterally, this means lots of quick hits. Long range engagements are totally different. At 4000 meters I find it's often a case of having both gunner and TC observing the same target together. Fire a round, try to watch where it lands, talk about how to adjust, fire another round, etc.

Cheers guys! Here's to hoping that 2014 has even more tanks than 2013!

LOL...This video is gonna be hellarious! Let me go pop the first bowl of popcorn of 2014 before I sit down and watch this...

I don't think so. It sounds like your D-pad is bound to the arrow keys by default in the same way that a joystick hat switch normally does views. Unbind the view settings from the arrow keys and see if that works.

Yes, I understand the hotkey inflation problem, but you could always simply add them and not map them by default, unless they're really necessary to play.

Honestly I haven't put much time into the 1A2 yet. When I do use it, I find that it's easiest to get a good lase with the 12x zoom setting, then bump it up to 25x or 50x as needed to engage. Once I'm done engaging, I bump it back out to a lower zoom setting to get on the next target. Hey, eSim, I have a question for you! Might it be possible to allow us to assign hot-keys for specific zoom settings rather than just a toggle? I find that I don't often scan with 3x on the TIS as I find the 6x much more useful, and I'd like to be able to skip directly to 6x sometimes, etc.

If the fire control system, or lack of information about it, is a problem for modeling later T-72s, maybe we could get a compromise model in there for the red players? Add in a T-72M1V, should be little more than adding ERA to the existing T-72M1. Or, perhaps you could put in a "T-72S", the export version of the T-72B. Use the existing T-72M1 crew positions and fire control, and we'll all just pretend that the export version we're modeling got 'nerfed' with a cheap fire control system. Either way, while I think it's great to have high-realism models whenever possible, I think in the case of Red armor we should be more willing to compromise. Even if we know it's wrong, or it isn't perfect, if we all agree that the imperfect T-tank was put in simply to facilitate having intelligent opponents in multiplayer games...I could live with that. Meanwhile, I would like to request, although I admit both of them are things I can live without: 1. A new 3D model for the exterior of the turret for the M1 and IPM1. This might sound weird, but for some reason the 120mm fume extractor and barrel seem more out of place to me than the 120mm breech assembly on those tanks. 2. Some kind of way to see the outside when you're in the M113A4 TC's position. Be it simply giving you the same view as the driver, or a representation of the guy holding the hatch open just a crack and peeking out, or an external camera, whatever. I just noticed that if you slam the hatch on one of those, you're completely blind! 3. If possible, allow any vehicle loaded with MPAT to select the air/ground fuse mode, since the fuse is set by the nose cone and not an electronic system like the 3P (or the SlsGr95?). If it won't interfere with other things, that is!

I tried an M1A2, loaded up with M829A3, and set up some T-72s to move across the nose of my stationary tank at 3km. I didn't have trouble scoring hits with the 25x thermals, using the mouse as a controller. I wonder if you were just getting bad lases? I got a bad lase, and it made me miss.

Well, I'm interested in Merkava. Call me when it's in Pro PE, because there ARE NO OTHER TANK SIMS!

Just got mine yesterday! Thanks for the card, you don't usually see game developers doing this kind of thing. Now I'm just wondering whats going to be in the new version! 3.0 had tons of good stuff already!

Most of the group has gone and bought 4 month licenses. Two of them are planning to do it "soon", so I let them borrow a license occasionally. They're one group of guys in the same virtual fighter squadron from IL-2 Sturmovik, DCS A-10, etc, so I've been suggesting that if they like the sim they should buy the dongles. Or if $100 each is too steep, pool in together to buy enough dongles with secondary licenses to take care of the whole group.

See, I don't usually have to deal with this kind of thing. I have a dual boot of Windows XP 32bit with 2.654 on it, and 64bit with 3.0 on it. If I want a different version I just reboot. ETA: Also have more people asking to borrow licenses from me than I actually have licenses. Gonna have to buy another one or two with my tax return.

I do that all the time. I imagine it's probably pretty close to what the M900 is like too.

Let's say someone has a PC with 3.0 installed, and they would like to revert back to 2.654 in order to play with some guys who have copies of the older version. Would a simple uninstall of 3.0 followed by an install of 2.654 be enough, or would they need to search for leftover files to prevent conflicts?

There are more than one DM63 http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/index.php/Ammunition_Data 105mm L7: PPTFS DM 63C LS 4000 600 1455

Of course, that could mean all sorts of things. I'm far more familiar with small arms than I am with anti tank weapons, but, perhaps they decreased the weight of the sabot assembly by switching to a composite material like the M829A2. Normally that would allow for better performance, but if you're already at the limit I suppose you could also reduce the powder charge a little bit, and get the same performance with lower chamber pressures. Like I said before, my purely uneducated "gut feeling" on the subject is that both M900 and DM63 are very close to or right at the very limit of what the 105mm L7 / M68 can do.

I need a little help with infantry. I seem to recall that in the previous versions of Pro PE, if you took a mechanized infantry unit and gave them an order to do something like march to a waypoint, then to engage at slow speed to another waypoint, the troops would dismount and run or jog ahead of the APCs who would advance in concert with the troops. Currently, the only way I seem to be able to make this happen is by using the "slow" speed setting. This is great, however the infantry seem to only want to crawl the entire distance which takes FOREVER... Is there an easy way to make them get up and run, in coordination with APCs moving behind them?

Well, everything is a trade off. I imagine if you start pushing things to the limit in order to get more performance out of your existing gun, you're going to have a trade off. Then again, when that round was in development in the 1980s, excessive barrel wear might not have been seen as a real problem. Punching holes in Soviet tanks at the cost of wearing the barrel out might have seemed like a good option compared to bouncing outdated ammunition off their turrets. Edit: Plus, let's consider the fact that the M900 is/was restricted to only certain batches of M68s, and only to be fired from the M1/M1IP. I haven't heard about any restriction on the use of M833 in those guns or in M60s, so that also makes me think that M900 is a very "hot" load.

IMHO, they could probably just clone the existing DM63, increase penetration a little bit, adjust the muzzle velocity a bit, rename it to "M900 APFSDS" and call it good. How much more could you possibly squeeze out of a 105mm gun?

The AI does some strange things with long range gunnery. Sometimes it hurts you, but sometimes it helps you too. They might be quite accurate "mechanically" speaking, but for some reason I feel like they don't observe the way their rounds land the same way humans do and that causes them problems when aiming at tanks that were carefully positioned to minimize their exposure. Just a few nights ago I was running a scenario with a new player in the gunner's seat. We found ourselves on a reverse slope about 3500m away from a T-64 behind a small hill, swapping shots. After firing a few rounds we realized the T-64 was hitting short. It was firing HEAT or HE and they were landing 10-15 yards short, in the exact same spot, every single time. So we just ceased firing, closed the GPS doors, buttoned up, watched him with the CWS scope and waited a few minutes for him to run out of ammo, then rolled up on top of the hill and engaged. Couldn't get a good lase so I told the gunner to enter 3500 and fire. We watched it land short, so we added 200, that one went over, so we split the difference and got a solid hit. Then pumped two more into him to be sure.

I think that it basically comes down to a lack of information about it. I brought this subject up before and was told that if I could find some firing tables or measurements of velocity at various ranges, they could work on it, but that info doesn't seem to be available on the net. They could, of course, make an educated guess or simply take an existing round and tweak it's performance a bit, but they seem to prefer only working on things when they have some hard data in their hands. Until/If it gets added, I suggest just using the DM63 PPTFS or CMC105 round as a substitute. The DM63 has some 600mm of penetration, which is equivalent to a 120mm DM33 or M829. I have the strange feeling that 600mm is getting very close to squeezing everything you possibly can out of the L7 / M68, so even if we did get M900 it would only be slightly better, and at the end of the day NATO made the switch to the M256 for a reason - the L7 / M68 wasn't quite cutting it any more.

Hell, I'd be perfectly happy to accept a "lol we took a guess!" fire control system if it meant we could crew it!

I think this might fall into one of those "no big deal" type problems. The M1064 shouldn't get close enough to anything to get shot at anyway, and it only happened because I goofed when making waypoints for a new scenario. If it can be fixed, that's great. If not, the vehicle winds up getting behind the smoke screen after a few seconds anyway, and again, a mortar carrier shouldn't be on the front lines anyway.

If you manage to sneak up on (or blunder into) an M1064 and it decides to pop smoke and retreat, the smoke screen appears behind the vehicle rather than in front.

Pretty sure the AI will still engage targets with the TC's MG on the Tow/113 even if the launcher is in a position that blocks the hatch. On a semi related question, according to wikipedia the Belgian version of the YPR-765 has a .50 MG in a "CWS Cupola"...Does that mean an M1 Abrams style CWS system like I'm thinking?