Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: muckmaw on April 11, 2004, 08:24:39 AM
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A few things I've noticed over the past few days...
Anyone else disappointed in the performance of the Apache helicopter and the M1A1 Abrams tank?
Seems the Iraqi insurgents have been able to take down and apache this morning. I never thought this aircraft was so vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't thing the Iraqis have more than RPGS but I guess I was mistaken in my belief that these helicopters were more durable. And what about the Abrams? Same deal here. I thought only anti-tank weapons or armor piercing shells would do it in.
Thank god we never fought the Soviets huh?
Final thought. Seems the Iraqi's are like a child with a new toy. They found the world is outraged if the set fire to people or corpses. Shooting or stabbing is not enough to get on CNN. Now the buzz word it "Burn". First, they treathen to burn the Japanese captives...not kill, Burn alive. Now they are threatening to kill, THEN burn the American captive. They really don't understand Americans, do they? We like revenge in this country.
And whats with Al-Jazeera? Can we just change the name of this station to Allah Ackbar or something else terrorist love. I mean, this is their target audience after all.
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I was a little surprised at the suseptability of the Abrams to the RPG also. I may not understand the power of the RPG or have a false sense of the impermiability of the Abrams.
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I rode around in the M1 series for 7 years before I reclassed to my new job. Bear in mind that I never took fire while in one, but overall I think it's still the best thing going MBT-wise (I'll explain my opinion shortly).
For the most part the "legend" of the Abrams was born during the first Gulf war vs. Iraqi armor (T-72 being their top of the line system). We could exploit a 2km+ standoff distance vs. their stuff while in the open desert. When they would actually score a hit vs. an M1, they would fail to penetrate for a couple of reasons:
1. In "tank country" i.e. the open desert, the crew has the luxury of always facing the enemy head-on, thus placing the most effective armor forward. The frontal armor on this and many other modern Chobham equipped tanks is virtually impossible to penetrate with a direct-fire weapon.
2. The Iraqi kinetic-energy ammo in use at the time had a penetrator made of (no kidding) scrap metal instead of a heavy metal. Most likely this was due to a lack of depleted uranium/tungsten etc. There was a much greater threat from their heat ammo than their sabot round, but due to velocity the heat ammo is more difficult to effectively employ at maximum range.
The M1 is anything but invulnerable. If you know where to hit it and can get close enough with the right kind of weapon you can disable it without too much trouble just like any other tank in the world. (Pardon me for not elaborating here.) It does, however, most likely have the highest crew survivability of any MBT out there. It also has a distinct advantage over the Iraqi stuff in the areas of fire control, automotives, serviceability, lethality and detection cababilities.
As for the Apache...same thing applies within the limits of the actual amount of armor you can put on an aircraft and still expect it to fly. I saw one last year that had taken a hit from an RPG that blew the left wing stub completely off and saw another that looked like swiss cheese from the *hundreds* of small arms hits it had taken. Both were able to RTB safely without injury to the crew.
Remember when the F117 was shot down over Serbia a couple years ago? After all, it's just an airplane powered by an engine flown by a pilot. It's not like the finger of "COD" is pushing it through the skies.
Anyway...hope this sheds a little light on the legend and brings things into perspective. Perfect? No. Better than the other guy's? Yes!
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The weapon systems in question were designed for conventional open country warfare vs the Warsaw pact - in operations similar to those conditions - ie Gulf War 1, they excelled.
The weapons are currently being used for close combat in a FIBUA battle where most of their advantages of range and frontal armour arc in the case of the mbt and manouverability in the case of the AH64 are negated.
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"The weapon systems in question were designed for conventional open country warfare vs the Warsaw pact..."
The Warsaw Pact had even superior weapons and much better training than what is being encountered in Iraq. So if small arms and rpg's can knock down Apache's and disable M1's think of how bad they would have faired in a European Theatre of war.
In all honesty I think the public is not getting the whole story about what the enemy has at thier disposal for weapons. In other words don't trust everything you hear and you can bank on being given propoganda to support moral- at home and the "front" - rther than the cold, hard truth.
An example; In the first Iraq war the US kept bragging about how fantastic the Patriot missile system was working when in fact the systems results were dismal.
Another; the IRaqui Repub Guard was an easy rollover because they were dumb and demoralized. Yet if you read the official AAR's you can see they were anything but and that "lady luck" had quite a lot to do with saving the arses of several groups of coalition forces.
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Let's not either forget it's even more difficult when you can't just root out the enemy with an artillery barrage or shooting with mortars and cannons directly at the 'suspected' enemy... or you'll danger killing lots of civilians and get bad fame (and which would lead to exponential growth of the enemies)
So the enemy has all the advantage in initiating the fight, therefore most likely most of the losses are caused in the surprises rather than direct fights.
Just like when during "the war" few apaches flew into a well planned ambush, with the result of most choppers getting damaged and one chopper lost.
...and the weapons used were simplistic.
Everything can look nice and tandy, when suddenly a truck driver pulls over, grabs RPG, fires and drives away.
Not much use of the hi-tech.
Then you can't either blast every vehicle on the road you 'suspect' the fire came from.
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This sounds like an "I got hit by one ping and died!" AH thread.
US forces are shot at every day. It's not just one attempt a day either, it's hundreds or thousands of attempts every day. If even one in a thousand attempts succeeds, you get casualties. The same goes for helicopters. Nearly every single flight over there comes under fire of one sort or another, whether it's an 80 year old firing his WWI era rifle from his back porch, or a Syrian firing a smuggled SA-18 from the middle of a crowded marketplace. Add up enough attempts, and some of them are going to succeed.
Loudly proclaiming the ineffectiveness of a tank and helicopter because a couple of tanks were disabled and one helicopter got shot down shows a complete lack of understanding of the nature of combat. It's not just one guy with a gun vs. one helicopter in a dueling arena, where you can look at an isolated result and state that the loser sucks and the winner rules.
You'll probably never know what brought down that apache, but it probably wasn't just some guy with a rifle or even a single missile. Enough directed fire can take down any military system and sometimes the troops have to expose themselves to that kind of fire in order to achieve their objective. That's part of the nature of combat and the result of one engagement says little about the capability of either side. It can be noted however that in the fiercest fighting we've seen in a year, fighting that started off with a wave of ambushes, fighting that spans most of the country involving well over a hundred thousand combatants, we've lost a couple dozen troops, a couple of tanks, and one attack helicopter. The loss of any lives is tragic but an accountant might view that as not being too bad of a showing by US and allied troops.
Muckmaw, I'm not sure the Iraqi opponents would share your dim view of the Apache given the losses they're taking vs. their own record of successes. They're shooting at every one of our helicopters and usually not succeeding in shooting them down. That sounds like they're fairly durable to me.
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If you'd like to try gaming out any small scale conflict from 1945 to 2010 try this free game.....
http://linetap.com/www/drg/SPCamo-4.htm
They do WW2 too.....
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I was on a M1 in the first Gulf War, took numerous hits.
Outstanding weapon system.
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Think of it this way.
A helocopter is an expensive aircraft filled with tiny fragile pieces in tight spaces that like to break if someone sneezes wrong.
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There is no such thing as an invulnerable weapon system, period. Get out of the arcade game mentality when considering real world weaponry.
The weapons systems are performing in an admirable fashion but anything can be defeated especially in close quarters. Try comparing the losses in equipment to what happened during WW2 and you'll find that the current systems are far better performing than anything before. Urban fighting is the worst possible situation for modern combat systems.
As to the warsaw pact having better equipment. Pfuey. The SAME warsaw pact equipment is being used in Iraq right now. There isn't the variety that would have been available in a major European conflict but the same lighter weapons systems are being used.
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Originally posted by _Schadenfreude_
If you'd like to try gaming out any small scale conflict from 1945 to 2010 try this free game.....
They do WW2 too.....
nice, thanks.
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At the moment have Brit armoured recce squadron holding off probes of a Soviet Motor Rifle Regiment.........struggling a bit...run out of Milan's and I'm trying to fall back onto a second line of defence backed up by Striker atgms.....
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Maverick the weapons the Warsaw pact would have used would have been far superior to what the Iraqi's are currently using. I did not infer that it would be far superior to the US/UK's gear.
Most of what the Iraqi's have (based on what they are using)is old and consists of simple mortars, AK's, grnd-grnd rockets, your basic mg's, basic rpg's and some infra-red type portable missiles which they have fired several of at planes near the Baghdad airport. If they had the more modern missiles (anti-air and tank) that the Warsaw pact and Soviet Union/Russia had (have) then I believe planes would be shot down and alot more tanks would be being knocked out.
So while there are suspicions that the Iraqi's have a few pieces of modern equipment the Warsaw pact would also have had a hell of alot more of it than the Iraqui's do or did - even on the Iraqi's best day in the pre-1991 era.
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I'd like to throw my .02 in here. I really beleive the main reason that the comache was cancled was because lawmakers and bean counters looked at its price tag and looked at the amount of helos we've lost in iraq so far and said NO FRIGGIN WAY. The apache is a good weapons system but keep in mind we lost (and i'm quoting my dad here) somthing like 5000 helicopters in veitnam. I think the costs for the camanchee were like 50 mil a piece (dont qote me on that please)
now as far as the abrams goes. I was far superior to the t-72. It faught better at night and in the open battle field. Those mixed with air superiority and constant bombardment made the iraqi tank corps (first GW) seem like a bunch of ameturs.
as far as WWIII w/ russia was concerned IRC the soviets have allways had 3 times as many tanks as us and the only way to defend the (cant remember the name) Gap was w/ tacticle nukes. same concept with air defense, F-102s stayed on stand by with Genie missles around the clock for years to take out formations of badgers and bear cats.
I could be inaccurate about alot of this stuff and i'm just reciting what i've read from memory so please dont ripp me too badly
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Originally posted by muckmaw
Thank god we never fought the Soviets huh?
Well said.
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A properly trained Ninja can take out an M1 tank using nothing but a rolled up newspaper.
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There is always the Leopard II
and thank cod we never attacked russian massive unslaught type of army
And tanks aint all btw they all are driving metal coffins.
seems the us r using em in the citys wich is always a big mistake.
Oh and thank cod it's tracks are strong enough to drive over a mujehaddin warrior.
Burn them terrorists
They really getting annoying now
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OH MY COD!
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BUG_EAF322
we are getting leo2's from your country to replace some of our older tanks. The once we are getting now are A4 variants but next year we will get alot of newly upgraded A6's from you.
in return you get some armored engeneer type tanks and tank rescue vehicles + a NASAMS battery. Norway and the Netherlands are setting up a joint expeditionary force so it made sence to swap equipment that one had a surplus of and the other lacked :)
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_Schadenfreude_
thanks for the game link :)
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Sounds promising :)
Only political winds chance the army about every 3-4 years
I left the army at the end of the cold war.
Sadly our navy is losing it's last fixed wing aircraft the lockheed orion
A big contrast to the past when our navy had at least 1 carrier and a lot of different type of fixed wing aircraft.
like the tracker.
(http://www.onpoi.net/ah/pics/users/277_1081711156_grumman-1.jpg)
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Try a couple of scenario's or a campaign to start with - then try vs a human opponent.
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Yeah...most militarys are downsizing but its good that we can exchange modern equipment rather than just scrapping it when another country has a need for it. We are also giving alot of brand new and upgraded equipment and systems to our new NATO members.
The tracker is a good looking plane...we have used orions since they came out and they have been upgraded to the latest version everytime updates came. The US used to pay for half of those upgrades in return for intel gathered by them on the movement of the russian northern fleet.
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When i look at the screenies (dl game atm)i realise that i have played it or something similar before.... Is it a game that used to cost money but is now a free game maintained by enthusiasts?
It came in ww2, vietnam and modern version i belive.
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Comanche was up to 60 mil a copy and years past the original scheduled timeline. This was due to a lot of things, not the least of which was the Army continually changing it's requirements. The Comanche was asked to do pretty much everything and got bogged down in the technical implementation of a difficult requirements document that was itself a moving target.
In the end, the Comanche was taking up some 40% of the Army's aviation budget and would have resulted in a production run well under 200 helicopters. By canceling the project, many hundreds of current helos can get needed upgrades, production can restart to boost existing fleets that are reaching end of lifecycle airframe retirements or suffering from simple airframe shortages, and the Army can also focus more on their next generation networked and integrated force structure. Needy projects include the next generation heavy lift helicopter and possibly a stealthy UCAV that can accomplish the first-day stealthy attack role that drove a lot of the Comanche's expensive development.
Of course, the Pentagon and Congress still need to agree on what that money will be used for, since the war on terrorism is underfunded by some 20 billion dollars. In the worst case, the money from Comanche may get put back into the general fund instead of being redirected to other underfunded Army aviation programs.
According to Aviation Week and Space Technology that is.
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I would think that the super-cobra would be the best value for money system vs the commanche and apache but im not a helo expert. I know they have restarted the production of brand new cobras in the super-cobra config and the once already in service are beeing upgraded.
http://www.army-technology.com/projects/supcobra/index.html
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That thing is damn ugly!
Thanks for the link, btw. Is it more intuitive than TacOps?
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Wow, stuff gets blown up and shot down in a war? How horrible! Our military must be practically useless if it's equipment is not invulnerable to any type of weapons system. How do we turn on the invincibility hack?
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Military contracts that are popular in the US usually involve fancy toys with all kinds of cool gizmos and stuff. Usually these are very expensive.
The Comanche was some fancy toy built for a "deep penetration" tactic -- where groups of helos, supported by TACMS and other mid-range toys, would range well behind the MLR and trash stuff. Unfortunately, the inaugural "Deep penetration" raid in Iraq was the one where the Apaches came back shot to hell, thanks to low-tech toys.
Now, you look at a project that's been on the books for what? a decade? the requirements have been changing, the funding already chopped, and in the end, it's gonna be expensive and vulnerable.
No weapons system is invulnerable.
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Nilson,
The game is based on Steel panthers, an old SSI game, there were three version.
Steel Panthers, it was WW2 only.
Steel Panthers 2, it was 1950 to 2000.
Steel panthers 3 Brigade comand. It was 39 to 2000, but larger scale, instead of single tanks it was platoons.
The one _Schadenfreude_ linked it good for modern stuff, but their is a much better WW2 version.
You can find it here Matrixgames. (http://www.matrixgames.com)
It is a free download, but like 424 megs. MUCH better system the the MBT version in my opinion.
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Muck..and the rest..
I just read about our good friends the russians and other commies making a variety of new RPGS... Armor Piercing ect...
nice...kind of liks the AKs...everyfrikn nut and nut counrty has them...
so now we will see a wider variety of stronger CHEAPASSS RPgs rounds:(
kill them quik boys,,,,,salute
BiGB
xoxo
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Originally posted by hawker238
That thing is damn ugly!
Thanks for the link, btw. Is it more intuitive than TacOps?
yep it's quite easy to play - start with one of the small scenario's or the campaign - ai is now quite good, it will scout, do helicopter drops in your rear area, use sead missions before air strikes, try playing a defence game vs Russia in 2005 - can get very tough.
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Originally posted by GtoRA2
Nilson,
The game is based on Steel panthers, an old SSI game, there were three version.
Steel Panthers, it was WW2 only.
Steel Panthers 2, it was 1950 to 2000.
Steel panthers 3 Brigade comand. It was 39 to 2000, but larger scale, instead of single tanks it was platoons.
The one _Schadenfreude_ linked it good for modern stuff, but their is a much better WW2 version.
You can find it here Matrixgames. (http://www.matrixgames.com)
It is a free download, but like 424 megs. MUCH better system the the MBT version in my opinion.
There are 2 ww2 versions - I prefer the version found at the same site to the one Matrix did but it's personal choice - it's too easy to over use mines and tank traps in Matrix's version and force the ai into a killing ground - try both and see which you like.
If you prefer ultra modern though MBT is awesome - I was playing vs another guy and dropped 3 Soviet para regiments into his rear area before the main attack - he was deeply unhappy!!
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From GS link: "penetrability of up to 600 mm of rolled homogeneous steel. The PG-7VR is a tandem warhead designed to penetrate explosive reactive armor and the armor underneath" ...... no wonder it CAN defeat any tank if it hits a soft spot. ALthough rolled homogeneous steel is not as strong as modern tank armor, it still sounds like a potent warhead.
The crap thing agout the MBT game is the graphics.....the resolution is so small that it gets very blurry on my LCD with 1280*1024 native res.... is there a way to change the game res that i have not found? I cant seem to get my soundcard to work with it either and i think i used to
:)
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excellent Link Sholz..thnk u
but what is Min arming distance...20 feet?
and..electric fuzes? hmm..short out on wire contact..thats a bit suprising
I liek the part where it says..In Iraq that disadvantage is diminished because the attacker is often willing to give up his life in an effort to create casualties and political unrest. Superior planning and execution against this system is the key to success. This is not a first use throw-away weapon system. Training and expertise have to be developed with the RPG-7, and once attackers are killed, new soldiers must be found, motivated, trained, and rearmed to make the system effective.
well that does give me a bettr feeling..atleast to use them really succefully you cant be a complete civilian...
Salute
BiGB
xoxo
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ok..well how the hell does it get shorted out? i guess typical crappy insulation done in less then "technical" Soviet Blok style?
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BTW..MUCK!!! u Golly-gee Lefty...so are u implying the Apaches are performing badly?..
im hopn it just sounded liek that...
btw..GET BACK TO WORK!!!
Love
BiGB
xoxo
P.S. Lefty is not implying your left wing wacked...but u know...