Re: Well, too interesting to drop all of the posts in this thread...

Indy wrote:

>Oerjan did a study (maybe is still doing a study in his copious spare
time;

"Copious" being the key word here :-/

>The idea of the study was to support a proposition to be able to
re-armor 
>vehicles to be more reflective of reality

More to serve as the basis for determining the points costs of 
differently-armoured sides; but of course allowing differently-armoured 
sides is an aspect of allowing DS2 to be more reflective of reality.

>In any event, in the DS2 games I ran and kept records for since then, I

>found that well over 70% of the shots fired at targets were directed at

>the fronts of targets, not the sides or rear (about 30% were aimed at
the 
>sides of targets; less than 1% at target rears).

Beth Fulton and David Stuckey also kept similar records, and got very 
similar results. Interestingly enough these values are also quite
similar 
to those from real-world studies made after WW2 and onwards, on which
the 
design of today's real-world MBT armours are based... that's another
thing 
DS2 gets right about combat in the 1980s ;-)

>Now, Oerjan was also collecting data on weapon types, sizes, and ranges
at 
>the same time, so he had larger fish to examine than just the 
>front/side/rear aspect of it all.

Very much so, yes.

>If anyone out there reading thinks my numbers are an aberration, and
that
>you think more shots are fired at sides/rear than what I was finding,
feel
>free to record which side units are firing against in your next set of
DS2
>games and report them. :-)  I would be interested in seeing if others
find
>significant differences or not.

So would I! Not only that; I'd be interesting in seeing data from other 
people regardless of whether or not they resemble Indy's... so far I
only 
have data from four player groups (my own, Indy's, David Stuckey's and
Beth 
Fulton's), and although we're literally spread out all over the world
it'd 
be nice to have a larger sample <g>

If any of you want to join in, what I'd like to see recorded for each
shot 
fired (not just each *hit*, but each *shot*) is:

- Target signature
(- Target size and armour rating)
- Weapon type and class for the firing weapon
(- FCS type for the firing weapon)
- Range
- Face of target attacked
- Outcome (miss, hit but no effect, damage/mobility/systems, or
destroyed)

IOW, essentially the same data as I've been recording and collecting for

Full Thrust over the past five or six years, but for DS.

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry