Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Lemurs!

I tried to account for frontal slope as well in armour calc.
For all of the criticism levelled at the M4 it had excellent frontal armour slope near as good as a T34.

Mike

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ORIGINAL: JeffK

Take into efect the slope and distribution of Armour, the advantage the T34 had was better sloped armour.

I also beleive, as posted on another thread, that the armour rating should be an average of front, side, rear & mantlet armour. (Maybe weighted to certain areas)Not all AT gunners could always hit the vulnerable, or inpenetrable, spots on a charging Tank.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lemurs!

The problem with blanket changes like this is we do not know what effect ratings mean for AT weapons. Rating '6'. What is that? Is that at 100 yards? 100 feet? 1000 yards?

Big changes are dangerous without having a large staff to track effect. I have not noticed a problem with tank losses in game anyway, so why fix what isn't broken?

Mike

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ORIGINAL: spence

I played around with some tank to tank combat using the 1945 Scenario. T34s and JSU152s getting knocked out by 37mm guns on Japanese tanks seemed kind of unlikely but Japanese tank regiments consistently held their own against soviet tank brigades (1/3 mech corps) in both attack and defense.

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That seems quite wrong. The only case of a major tank battle between Japanese and Allied forces - on Luzon - never allowed the Japanese a single shot! We simply never permitted them in range. An awful battle it was - from the Japanese point of view. But it MAY imply we were afraid of low velocity 57mm and high velocity 47mm guns! Tanks are a lot more vulnerable than people think - and their battlefield impact is as much psychological as physical. Soldiers don't behave the same when the enemy has a tank - any tank!

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lemurs!

El Cid, I don't think i had it backwards, but i agree with your point, you took it further than i had.
I have not put as much of my time into the anti armour aspects of this game because it is such a small portion of the game. One thing i think needs a major rework is the Japanese 37mm gun should not bew capable of penetrating anything bigger than a Stuart. And then only on rare occasions.

First, a disclaimer: While there is only one 37mm gun in the game, IJA used no less than three different ones! Worse, the first and most numerous of these is a trench gun (think WWI trench warfare) - and not designed for AT use in the first place. [We have a battery of four of a US gun of the same vintage in my regiment - it is run by artillerymen and they are very proud of them - and similar weapons were used at Wounded Knee]. The second is the German PAK 38 - bought in small numbers. The third is a native and proper ATG - a typical bit of Japanese engineering using elements of several guns. So when we talk about a 37mm gun in Japanese service - we probably are talking about this weapon - but in fact it is not at all clear we are.

Second - there are a vast range of anti tank weapons and tactics NOT represented - and IJA may have led the world in these in WWII. It was the very first army to put an anti-tank team in every line infantry squad.
These teams would go hunting at night - when the tanks were unmanned -
in an era when US troops feared the night and did not attempt to engage - as a general rule. I do not have a good sense of how to deal with these weapons and tactics - but it is clear that they were a good deal more than nothing: often troops went to extreme measures to protect the tanks. For example, by midwar, US tanks were covered with wood! In spite of the adverse effect on heat dissipation and visibility! Because magnetic weapons were apparently more of a threat than either heat exhaustion or limiting visibility. But to the degree I have ideas about this, they lie down the road of "rate the few AT weapons slightly too high" to incorporate them.

Now - experience in the field indicated that 37mm guns were no longer effective in early WWII - no doubt about that. But that should not be taken to mean that it was wholly useless either. What happens is a function of range, target aspect, target armor at the point of impact, angle of impact, and shell ballistics. And the "bigger tanks" do not seem to have had anything like modern armor - either in composition or in quantity. I am astonished at the actual armor of the M4 - which was a highly regarded "medium" tank. The late war Japanese tank - the last production tank fielded by IJA - actually had about 10mm MORE frontal armor! [Not the way we usually think about Japanese tanks in comparison to Shermans]. Yet at point blank range a 37mm high velocity gun (firing 900 meters per second) can penetrate about 5 mm MORE armor than the Japanese tank I am thinking of - and about 15 MORE than a Sherman (assuming a normal angle hit - no effect for angle here). I admit that in practice it would be very unlikely ever to happen you would get a normal hit on sloped armor - but even so - you can see the weapon is more in the game than is usually understood.

One of the problems is how does this work into infantry anti armour values. Infantry has been shown to have no effect versus armour no matter what rockets it is equipped with in open terrain. However, in closed terrain infantry with no specific anti armour weapons manages to regularly knock out tanks.

I am confused by your remarks here? Are you talking about real life or the game system? I am not sure we know how the game works? And in real life you do not want to be moving with tanks in sight of good rockets - today at amazingly long ranges. But perhaps you mean "unguided WWII era rockets"??? The Israelis learned this lesson the hard way in the first attacks on Egyptians across the Canal - Russian AT rockets were much more effective than believed possible - and in wholly open terrain. I think a tank is a death trap - and I would not willingly sit in one - or stand beside one - on a battlefield - in any ear. Tanks attract enemy weapons - and they are noisy - and lots of things are dangerous to them - infantry probably much more than is realized. In 1956 Hungarians were able to kill 2000 tanks - almost entirely without soldiers or AT weapons - nice big modern tanks. They got it down to a science - "how much gas do you have in your car ? OK - that equals x tanks - lets divide it up"

Mike

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ORIGINAL: el cid again

Spence - I completely agree with your comments about how hard it is to test in this system. I don't think we know enough to test land combat - and I am skeptical the system is properly designed? One person with over 10,000 turns experience thinks it cannot be. But I believe this is going to be fixed soon. Of course, I am a religious man...

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lemurs!

El Cid, I don't think i had it backwards, but i agree with your point, you took it further than i had.
I have not put as much of my time into the anti armour aspects of this game because it is such a small portion of the game. One thing i think needs a major rework is the Japanese 37mm gun should not bew capable of penetrating anything bigger than a Stuart. And then only on rare occasions.

One of the problems is how does this work into infantry anti armour values. Infantry has been shown to have no effect versus armour no matter what rockets it is equipped with in open terrain. However, in closed terrain infantry with no specific anti armour weapons manages to regularly knock out tanks.

Mike