Central Blue
Posts: 695
Joined: 8/20/2004 Status: offline
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In case you were wondering. I now think that just about everything I posted on 11/20 is probably wrong. Since I mentioned the 12.7mm mystery, and subsequently deleted it from the attached spread sheet by accident, I'll just say that it is very hard to get Ma Deuce to AP 27 by ROF or weight of fire if Ma Deuce is compared to the other machine guns in the .30 caliber range. If you want to scale it yourself before I get around to posting it, the methodology is to take the doctrinal rate of 40 RPM for sustained fire x the weight, followed by an AP modifier to get Ma to 27. Then you can compare Ma to the various 20, 37, and 40mm systems on a predictable scale and the results won't be too shocking. I am not wild about AP modifiers, but since one seems to be required here, I suppose that it could be conceived of as some combined effect of extended range and the kinetic energy to punch through many forms of cover available to troops above ground level. Since the attached spreadsheet is not well annotated, I'll just say that through trial and error converting grains to grams, I came to the conclusion that weight of fire from the squad is not much of a factor. A bullet is a bullet is a bullet. Divide by ten, and you're home free unless you think the Bren is only worth an AP of 6. A few comments about the rate of fire for the various automatic weapons seems in order if you wonder why Norm rates "early" MG's higher than the MMG when they are generally the same water-cooled machine guns as fought WWI. I skimmed a lot of pre-WWI and inter-war government stuff on MG's and I'll just say that the change seems mostly doctrinal to me. If you want your WWII water-cooled mg's to fire at a higher rate, they were certainly capable of it. But, for a variety of reasons, by the start of WWII, half a 250 cartridge belt a minute seemed pretty common for the Commmonwealth and Ami's at least. The Germans had something else going, and while I've seen some commonality on reported capability of the mg34 and mg42 on a bipod, I've seen a much wider swing when they get mounted on a tripod. So feel free to punch in your own numbers. Some fans of the Bren may note that I knocked it down a bit from the proclaimed four magazines per minute standard. I ran across a British training book on scribd that knocked that number down to 112, and then a reported War Office test that discovered few operators were even capable of achieving that if aimed fire was desirable. Your mileage may vary. And that's fine. I am really after a way to give modders something that will give them an idea of how weapons scale if they plug in different numbers, and ideally within the design parameters that the game engine will understand. At the very bottom of the attached spreadsheet is a small sample of building a weight of fire artillery scheme off the value of the US MK2 hand grenade. I haven't pushed it much since it involves an AP modifier. It tested OK with the weapons in the example -- except for the lighter mortars of course. I prefer the previously published spreadsheet because it doesn't appear to rely on any AP modifier.
Attachment (1)
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USS St. Louis firing on Guam, July 1944. The Cardinals and Browns faced each other in the World Series that year
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