Nikademus
Posts: 25684
Joined: 5/27/2000
From: Alien spacecraft
Status: offline
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Mounting infantry onto your tanks was intended as an ad-hoc way of transporting your ground pounders into the combat area, or beyond it in the absence of dedicated motorized or preferably, mechanized transport.
As a defensive measure it does'nt work very well in practice for several reason, not the least of which is, as others have mentioned, its really hard to hang on to a pitching bouncing tank 'and' look for the enemy at the same time much less raise your rifle and aim it.
Earlier incarnations of SP allowed players to use unrealistic tactic of mounting infantry on tanks to use them litterally as 'defensive' shields that more times than not, would aborb a close assault, leaving the tank intact and somtimes the infantry unit itself depending on experience and luck. This became one of 'the' most abused tactics in SP history, one in which i myself would sometimes employ, i mean its hard to justify following the tanks with halftracks or infantry on foot when the game engine allowed you to combine the best of both worlds by having the infantry ride on the tanks "and" still preform their close support role.
WAW addressed this "tactic" by one, lowering the capacity of all the tanks to 8 men or under (a typical squad is 11 to 19 men in WAW and by making the infantry aborb factor a far less likely thing. It caused alot of protest amoung veteran players who were used to the 'old' way of doing things but it was far more realistic and i for one, applauded the decision.
IIRC only the Soviets employed the 'tank desant' as they called it into battle because they simply had no other means of rapidly moving their infantry into the battle. Soviet ground industry focused almost entirely on the production of tanks (as opposed to say Germany, which split up it's AFV production evenly into thirds, (1/3 tank 1/3 assault gun 1/3 halftracks)
it was'nt until around the late 44 offensives that they got enough halftracks (all from the US i believe) to start employing the 'standard' combined arms tactics.
The Soviet solution in the interm was a cheap workaround but it was a extremely costly in human terms, but given their tendancy to use mass attacks to begin with, this would'nt have seemed alien to them.
This should not be confused with the Western Allies using their tanks to give some of their soldiers piggy back rides from the rear lines to the new front lines. Once combat was expected they'd get off so that the tanks would'nt be impeded in battle.
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2 questions I need answered - 
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I am there Tuesday to Saturday, 9:00-5:00 daily. I leave early Wednesday(2:30), and eat lunch from 11:00-12:00, but if you don't see me, ask my wife, or sister, they can buzz me! Did you find out from the bulletin board in my store, about SPWAW? There was someone in, that wrote down the info from there, but didn't get to ask where they were from.
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