Re: [GZG] Vehicle Recognition

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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lMurphy's law 13, 
"Freindly fire isn't, and is always accurate"

Thomas Barclay <kaladorn@magma.ca> wrote:Speaking of AFV/miltech
recognition.... 

I always get burned when I see the media talking about 'tanks' and
realize it is just an
APC or AIFV that they are refering to (often not even tracked). And you
hear them talking
about 'machine-guns' - and I go looking for someone toting a MAG or RPK
and find out it is
some fellow with an M4, AK or MP5. 

I one took a local journalist to task on this (calling the C7 a machine
gun). His defence
was that the paper shoots for about a grade eight audience and saying
'assault rifle'
wasn't meaningful to everyone. If he said 'machine gun' then he
communicated by way of the
popular common knowledge that the machine gun fires lots of bullets in
quick succession
(in other words, is capable of burst or fully automatic fire). I still
maintain that's
doing the readers a disservice and perpetuating and spreading
misinformation, but I wasn't
going to win that battle....

The ones I worry about are pilots that can't tell Scimitars from BMPs or
Hinds from
Blackhawks. Mistakes about the particular class of vehicle are bad, but
mistakes about
nationality can be quite terminal. Even with the marking they put on
vehicles that are
supposed to be very very obvious to pilots... 

It's amazing how people learn to differentiate the vehicles though. My
friend the former
AFV recognition instructor can look at types and patterns of bogey
wheels or road wheels
on a tank and tell you the type of vehicle. He can look at the presence
of things like
vision blocks, bore evacuators, and other such minutae and distinguish
between model
variants. I find it quite uncanny, and I have a fairly sizeable
background in modern and
WW2 AFVs from my gaming hobby and former days in the CF infantry
reserves. His ability to
see a fragmentary image of a vehicle and identify it from that is quite
startling. 

Yet, as pointed out, many folks can't even make critical friend-foe
designations. I
remember members of our unit, deployed on excercise (Reforger?) to
Europe being told to
take a large square of yellow cardboard and go 'wave it at those stupid
b@&tards in the
town' (who happened to be members of the Royal 22ieme Regiment) who were
firing a
recoilless rifle (Carl Gustav) at us. And they were on *our* side.
Eventually we convinced
them to stop before a ref noticed and marked our guys (and the EW
vehicle we were
defending) very dead. I've also had friends in the unit relate stories
of a Grizzly 6x6
APC trying to force a barricade and they took it out - only to find out
it was one of ours
(who was in a rush, didn't know the passwords, tried to stupidly force
the barricade to
get somewhere.... so it wasn't our fault...). 

Very few games really capture this inability to correctly identify the
target. I'm sure a
conniving DS2 GM could come up with some nasty way to harness this
confusion... putting
down the wrong minis... putting down the wrong number of minis, etc. 

Tomb

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