76mm -> RE: How realistic is this? (3/15/2011 8:33:42 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: IdahoNYer Very few pieces of terrain are truly "tank proof" - especially if lightly defended or undefended. Witness the Ardennes in 1940, the jungles of Vietnam, or the Thunder Run in Bagdhad in 2003. I've maneuvered M1s during REFORGER exercises through "impassible" forests of then West Germany through spider trails of forrester trails - not on maps, barely wide enough for tanks to pass - but ultimately pass without problem. Obviously I haven't been to this part of the world maneuvering tanks, but if there are forest roadways, railroads and other farm/logging roads, mechanized forces can pass - perhasp slowly, but can pass. Wow, I really disagree. I also served as an armor officer in Germany and in Desert Storm, and to compare your average Russian forest to the Ardennes, the "impassable" forests of Germany, or Iraq is just not right. Morever, we are not talking about where a tank can go, but whether the horse-drawn and truck logistics tail can follow. As previously mentioned, I found some topo maps of this part of Russia, although they are from later than I thought, namely the late eighties: http://mapo36.narod.ru/map2/indext.html Look, for instance, at maps 0-36-XV through 0-36-XVIII [MAP NUMBER CORRECTED, NOT GOOD WITH ROMAN NUMERALS!], which show some of the areas that we are discussing. A glance at the maps will show that: 1)at least in the eighties, there seems to be some roads, but whether they existed at all in 1941, and if so, whether they could support several mechanized corp and the logistic tail moving through, is subject to doubt; and 2) the terrain basically consists of forest, bogs, and lakes; if not "tank-proof" probably awfully close. Look, for instance, at the lower half of map 0-36-XVII. No meaningful roads there. And to the extent that single roads existed, they could be easily blocked by simple log barriers and rifle squads armed with molotov cocktails. Knock out the lead tank, and the rest of the column comes to a halt, at least temporarily. In my opinion, the mobility the Germans have in this region--panzers basically swooping through at will--is wildly unrealistic, and it has very significant game play consequences because it makes it much harder to defend Lgrad by forcing the defender to spread out his already thin troops. I don't mean this as an overly harsh criticism of the game--I would hardly expect them to do an exacting survey of every ten mile hex depicted on the map--but I believe that in this area the "abstraction" should be revisited, and most of this area should be heavy forest and/or swamp.
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