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nikolas93TS -> RE: May I ask how the engineering units / tasks are described in this game? (8/5/2018 2:51:48 PM)
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A key note: mine-plows are not mine rollers. Latter are used to detect the minefield edge, and then after a lane is breached, to proof the lane's safety, not to clear mines. Trying to breach with rollers alone tends to fail because repeated mine explosions will demolish the roller. They can usually withstand only 2-3 AT mine detonations before the roller starts getting too much damage; it gets hard to push straight and starts missing mines, and then the pushing tank finds a mine the hard way. So, the point here is that even with the rollers on hand, armored commanders would have expected engineers to do the actual breaching. Until 1988 when MICLIC was finally fielded to USAEUR, that would have meant dismounted sappers hand-placing quarter-pound blocks of TNT next to mines detected mainly by sight.
As for US equipment, there was no plow for M60 Patton series tanks until MCBS in 1990. The M60 did have a roller set available, the "Track-width, Tank-mounted, Mine-clearing Roller System". Apparently, it was type-classified in early 1979 and went into production later that year, a mere 19 years after the tank itself was adopted because the mine problem was just not a priority to the leadership, which is strange since they'd had such trouble with mines in Vietnam and had found the need to develop a roller kit for the M48 during that conflict. When the Israelis acquired their M60A1s in 1971, they knew from experience that mine-clearing equipment was not optional, and so being the pragmatists that they are actually adapted a bunch of captured Soviet KMT-5 rollers for it. Eventually they designed their own plow, which was adopted by the US, and they also got hold of some of the surplus US TTMRS rollers. Ditto for Abrams, there was anti-mine equipment for the M1 tank until they type-classified the MCRS mine roller system in 1986, and didn't actually get them issued to the field until 1990 when the invasion of Kuwait made it a priority. It had been designed for the firm soils of Europe, and soon proved unsatisfactory when used in the Gulf; in training they found that the rollers tended to pile up soft sand and skip over spots. As a result of this dissatisfaction with the rollers, the Army rushed through development of the MCBS plow system in a few months, and that proved to work a lot better in sand than rollers.
Anyway, the initial production run of the TTMRS was for 90 rollers over 3 years. If divided evenly among the forces stationed full-time in Europe, that's enough to equip at the rate of one set per armored company with a handful of spares by late 1982. So, even though it existed, it apparently was never issued at an adequate rate. As mentioned previously, the US then developed the current MCRS roller system for the M1 and M60 to replace it in 1986, but again seemed to be in no hurry to get it issued until Desert Shield forced the issue.
Germans were not in a better shape. They were working on a so-called "indestructible" flail in the 1980s, but it seems like they only put it on PiPz engineer vehicles. There was a dozer blade kit for the Leopard 1 that the Dutch and Canadians used, but the Germans themselves apparently didn't use it, and again, it is not really a replacement for a mine plow.
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