Re: DS3 design (long)

At 9:08 AM +0200 9/24/04, John Atkinson wrote:
>
>On the other hand, any military operation includes a significant
>amount of time sitting around doing very little.  I am always amused

I think you guys call this "hurry up and wait?"

>Vehicles don't have the same limits, but anyone who has ever done a
>field exercise knows how much time vehicles spend sitting around
>waiting for something else to happen, then they move to another point
>and wait some more, and another point and wait a bit more.  In a
>six-turn DSII scenario the action probably totals 6 minutes, but the
>total time taken from start to finish is probably even more than an
>hour and a half.

I've always thought that the turns represented anything from 5-15
minutes.

Any how, you get this kind of sense of waiting 
for something and nothing from a good number of 
WWII, Vietnam and Korean battle accounts that 
follow units closely. Some unit will move up to a 
start line wait for a bit, move forward, wait for 
a bit while their flanking unit moves up to stay 
even, then engage something, then move some more 
then wait for the infantry to catch up. Even now 
days, you'll have individual units moved and then 
set in a place for a while to keep eyes on a 
terrain feature or hold a particular flank. One 
big thing that the small tables really don't give 
a sense of is threats from your flanks. Very 
rarely does one have to worry about what your 
flanks are resting on and what will appear on 
them to screw your day up. In reality, there are 
friendly units there or if Murphy has reared his 
ugly head, there aren't units there.

Of course there are other instances where you 
have bloody fast movement. Convoy escorts or some 
of the armor vs insurgent type engagements in 
ARVN. Or the FRT type forces that the Cav Troops 
worked at zipping around trying to pull someone 
else's bacon from the fire. The same could be 
said about WWII route Recce forces (armored 
cars). They'd zip down a road so fast that even 
an element sitting waiting (88) was surprised and 
didn't have a chance to get into action. Often 
times the 88 or Pak would be ready and the first 
car would eat a round through the front. Pricy 
way to find Germans, but it's cheaper than a 
Cromwell.

Of course then there is also that bloody fast 
movement that 3rd ID, the USMC units and some 
other Army, Guard and reserve units made on 
Bagdad. Outstanding work and a pretty far 
distance to move in such a short time. Gott, 
Patton, Guderian and of course Hobart would have 
been pleased as punch to have been able to watch 
that deep striking thrust in action either in 
person or on the maps, charts, and screens of the 
command posts.

>
>Again, this is where actually going out an dinking around cross
>country would be helpful.  Microterrain can hide fairly significant
>things (as anyone who's ever come over what looks like a slight rise
>and gone headlong into a huge ditch can attest).  We play on billards
>tables because no one wants the headache of producing something
>accurate.  But even in NTC there are small rises which are significant
>enough to block line of sight.

And you're not kidding, at Camp Gruber there were 
some big flat fields with tall grass that when 
you walked along, you'd suddenly find a great 
bloody deep ditch that was only visible at about 
10 feet away. A vehicle moving at 25mph would 
have been nose into the ditch before the driver 
could stop. It was big enough to swallow one of 
our carriers or a halftrack and in a few spots a 
good bit of a Sherman. These folds will tend to 
limit movement to a walking pace in some places 
if visibility of the vehicle crews is limited. 
Infantry also had a similar kind of issue. There 
are similar cuts on the post at Ft Gilliem. Given 
how I've seen such cuts in fields in various 
parts of souther Georgia too, It's a thing that 
should be somehow represented as well. Perhaps an 
ability to go IP in armor (or softskins and of 
course dismounts) in DS3?

I'm glad I wasn't driving a carrier through that 
grass when we found it. I'd have had a broken 
nose and kit and all sorts of crap raining down 
from the back compartment.

>  > to 15 mph if they're GRAV or FAST GEV, otherwise 10 or 12 mph". In
today's
>>  real world rear-area HMWs can road-march at 60 mph, and FTR can
road-march
>>  at 45-50 mph.
>
>Uh, that I have to disagree with.  Can road march in theory and can
>road march safely are two seperate concepts.  Even if you accept that
>an M113 is slow tracked, we did NOT race around at 45-50 mph.	At
>least in US practice,	45mph is what the governor on the M-1 is set at
>for the maximum.  Realistic road march speeds are closer to 30-40 mph
>even for a wheeled convoy.

Its also going to depend on the instance. My 
buddy Alex in Aussie would race their M113 
fitters track around between elements in their 
Brigade trying to respond to repair issues as 
they cropped up. Sit at a repair spot for an hour 
fixing a problem, load up, race to the forward 
area to the next downed vehicle and un-arse to 
fix it. Certainly not the rule, but liaison 
vehicles, spotters, commanders and other units 
would move like this.

-- 
--
Ryan Gill	       rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
----------------------------------------------------------
      |        |		   |	     -==----	  
      | O--=-  |		   |	    /_8[*]°_\	   
      |_/|o|_\_|       | _________ |	    /_[===]_\	  
      / 00DA61 \       |/---------\|	 __/	     \--- 
   _w/|=_[__]_= \w_    // [_]  o[]\\   _oO_\	     /_O|_
  |: O(4) ==	O :|  _Oo\=======/_O_  |____\	    /____|
  |---\________/---|  [__O_______W__]	|x||_\	   /_||x| 
   |s|\        /|s|   |s|/BSV 575\|s|	|x|-\|	   |/-|x| 
   |s|=\______/=|s|   |s|=|_____|=|s|	|x|--|_____|--|x| 
   |s|		|s|   |s|	  |s|	|x|	      |x| 
'60 Daimler Ferret '42 Daimler Dingo '42 Humber MkIV (1/3)
----------------------------------------------------------