Steel Beasts: Content Wish List

[Ssnake]

What I was trying to say, if you or any other reader of this thread has a good idea under which circumstances one of our existing movement tactics could be used for passage of line ("keep your turret opposite to your travel vector"), I'll be happy to assign the job to one of the programmers. I have thought about the subject on several occasions in the last twenty years, but haven't yet had an epiphany.

[Gibsonm]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

What I was trying to say, if you or any other reader of this thread has a good idea under which circumstances one of our existing movement tactics could be used for passage of line ("keep your turret opposite to your travel vector"), I'll be happy to assign the job to one of the programmers. I have thought about the subject on several occasions in the last twenty years, but haven't yet had an epiphany.

 

Would it be possible to have it as the behaviour for say a retreat route but in column formation?

 

Retreat in say wedge, line, etc. could be used for the initial movement cross country keeping the vehicle facing the enemy, but once in column it might a safe assumption to make that the unit had made a "clean break"?

 

I'm not sure if this would also apply for say a single vehicle where formations become a bit redundant?

 

[Ssnake]

Don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I think I just had an idea.

[Bond_Villian]

Perhaps the 'observe here' tactic could be applied to units moving on routes somehow?

[Ssnake]

Much simpler.

[Hedgehog]

I second Gibsonm's traverse wish

I'd recommend a flag/setting like the Smoke Generator tick HMI/GUI feature

Specific to the retreat & march tactics?

 

Seems the simplest way to me, the "hardware" is there already

 

[Parachuteprone]

How about 4 hot keys for the commander ?

1) follow road (in your current direction)

2) turn next right

3) turn next left

4) reverse, back down the road

 

This would free up time for the commander to observe instead of following the road or setting up a waypoint.

More of a "on the fly" option.

 

[Stuart666]

On 1/25/2024 at 11:08 PM, Major duck said:

Which by the way is the same Range finder , Thermic sight and Ballistic computer as on the German Leopard 1
The 84/105 was equipped with a Ranging gun as far as i know and i quote "The main gun was aimed using a coaxially mounted .50-caliber machine gun that fired tracers in three-round bursts up to a range of 1,968 yards. The gunner watched the tracer rounds through a periscope gun sight and set the range on a drum device linked to the main gun."
I might be wrong cause it was even before my time.

So Mark you are both right and wrong. That's why i specifically asked for 3 different versions of the Danish ones and 2 of the Swedish ones so the ones designing the scen have a choice. 
And since its already in the game and since the whole Range finder , Thermic sight and Ballistic computer was taken from the same source and had identical performance it should be at least partly/Some copy paste in the code.
I seem to remember that there might be a limitation with the ranging MG. 
Also could we try to get the speed of the centurion right i know it could only drive 35 kmh but it could do so all over the place and we had trouble as FOs in our M113 to keep up as soon as we were of the road.
And i haven't even taken the speed of the Israeli upgraded ones into account that might also be relevant.
 

MD

 

I would have to check, but the RMG I think was a latter mod, after tanks had aldeady been fitted with 105mm. Though Interestingly the Centurions in Vietnam had RMGs, even though they had 20pdr. I'm not sure why, perhaps they wanted more firepower for shooting in the jungle than a .30 would give them.

 

On 1/26/2024 at 10:31 PM, Iarmor said:

 

AFAIK, in the Israeli army there was no use of machine gun fire for ranging. The TC estimated the range using his binoculars and the gunner then adjusted the range drum accordingly. Whenever a hit was scored, or even a close miss, the TC announced his range setting on the radio, so to give the other TCs in the company a clue about the required range settings to their own targets.

The LRF was introduced to the Israeli Centurions during the '80s, both on tanks that were fitted with a new FCS (Shot Cal Dalet) and on tanks that were not (Shot Cal Gimel).

 

Did the Danish Centurions retain the Meteor petrol engine? The AVDS-1790 Diesel engine greatly improved the Centurion's mobility. The Shot Cal could do 43 km/h.

 

 

 

I'm told the Egyptian and Syrians complained American supplied laser rangefinders, as if they were unsporting. If one looks at photographs, it's clear they were not so equipped. The IDF was just good at measuring out ranges, and in such circumstances  it helps if the enemy comes to you.

[Ssnake]

The important point here being that in prior skirmishes with the Syrian Army, the Israelis turned out to be terrible shooters. But General Tal recognized this, and took corrective measures to improve the overall training level - an investment that yielded immeasurable return during and after Yom Kippur 1973.

[Iarmor]

16 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The important point here being that in prior skirmishes with the Syrian Army, the Israelis turned out to be terrible shooters. But General Tal recognized this, and took corrective measures to improve the overall training level - an investment that yielded immeasurable return during and after Yom Kippur 1973.

That was almost a decade earlier, in 1964. Improved gunnery skills, including indirect fire, were demonstrated already in 1965, several months after the unsuccessful incident. The next full-blown war was the Six Day War in 1967, during which the improved gunnery training indeed paid off.

Edited February 27 by Iarmor

[Ssnake]

Thanks for the correction; I was actually not quite sure if I remembered it right when writing my nonsense. If I had thought about it a bit longer it would have become obvious that the important fixes in gunnery training must have been done prior to the Six Day War.

[Gibsonm]

Perhaps a Ver 5 thing:

 

Is there anyway to include some sort on Terrain Analysis into the Mission Editor?

 

I've spent months almost now on a project where I there is no simple way to see if a proposed route is viable.

 

On first glance this looks like its viable, threading the needle between the swamp on the map and a similar one under the blue line:

 

However after running it, it becomes clear that the "lillipads of death" extend well beyond the darker indicated area:

 

 

This unit followed the designated route, its just that the impassable terrain was larger than the map graphic depicted.

 

I'll now attempt a bypass, well to the South:

 

 

I'm not after the full "not suitable for tracked vehicles, "not suitable for wheeled vehicles" type hatching, but a nice clear, accurate, red zone would be a great help though.

 

Edited March 2 by Gibsonm

[TSe419E]

A wish for new fences on the map:

 

 

[TSe419E]

We could also use these:

 

The white pole with the blue stripe is what I'm talking about (although I don't remember the sign on them along the Czech border).

Edited March 2 by TSe419E

[Gibsonm]

36 minutes ago, TSe419E said:

We could also use these:

 

The white pole with the blue stripe is what I'm talking about (although I don't remember the sign on them along the Czech border).

 

Well you can do this:

 

 

Using one of these (this is the Diamond option):

 

Edited March 2 by Gibsonm

[Ssnake]

7 hours ago, Gibsonm said:

Is there anyway to include some sort on Terrain Analysis into the Mission Editor?

A definitive "maybe". 😜

It's not entirely trivial. You need to consider a vehicle's power-to-mass ratio, traction, ground resistance, and slope angle (which is notoriously fickle to use, as there's going to be a high degree of variation at the triangle level, so we'd need to implement some low pass filtering; but if you build a moving average for every triangle, that would require massive CPU loads).

Then, depending on rain in a scenario, ground conditions are variable, so we could make a terrain analysis only for the starting conditions.

 

For the moment, I recommend editing your scenario with the "Theme Colors Enabled" option for the map display. That will give you a better insight to where difficult ground is that isn't difficult enough to be shown in the regular map.

[TSe419E]

1 hour ago, Gibsonm said:

 

Well you can do this: ...

 

Interesting.  Didn't realize that could be done.  What I was requesting, though, is the white pole with the light blue stipe.

[Gibsonm]

7 hours ago, Ssnake said:

For the moment, I recommend editing your scenario with the "Theme Colors Enabled" option for the map display. That will give you a better insight to where difficult ground is that isn't difficult enough to be shown in the regular map.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, how if I do that I now need to "squint harder" just to see the routes.

Theme colours "on":

 

Theme colours "off":

 

 

We'll get there.

 

Edited March 2 by Gibsonm

[TSe419E]

3 hours ago, Gibsonm said:

We'll get there.

 

Could you not temporarily turn off the contour lines?

[Gibsonm]

1 hour ago, TSe419E said:

 

Could you not temporarily turn off the contour lines?

 

Yes you could but as its a night mission, the contours at least give me a rough idea of the topography (slope, where is uphill?, etc.).

 

In the last screenshot, the more Southern route requires the vehicles to go uphill, prior to WP593 and depending on the slope this is a "no go" for 4x4.

 

593 - 591 is at least traversing at the same height so all I need to worry about there are the trees and various bumps in the ground (lots of "a think I can" moments as the wheels spin and the vehicle inches forward).

 

591 - 592 - 132 is back down the slope.

[Ssnake]

One option is to edit the map's terrain theme and to reduce the theme's color saturation except for difficult types of terrain; these, in turn, should be made darker overall. That should make it more obvious which parts of the map to avoid.

You keep the mobility parameters, you just change the colors.

 

In the Mission Editor, you extract the theme. In the Map Editor, you open the default (blank) map, save as a new delta, then load the extrated THM file. Edit that file, export it (and overwrite the original THM file), then close the Map Editor (no need to save that delta map). Now, back in the Mission Editor, go to Map > Replace Theme... and pick the just edited file.

Badaboom, badabing.

[Gibsonm]

9 hours ago, Ssnake said:

In the Mission Editor, you extract the theme. In the Map Editor, you open the default (blank) map, save as a new delta, then load the extrated THM file. Edit that file, export it (and overwrite the original THM file), then close the Map Editor (no need to save that delta map). Now, back in the Mission Editor, go to Map > Replace Theme... and pick the just edited file.

Badaboom, badabing.

 

Thanks for the option.

 

Perhaps I'm doing it incorrectly but "reducing the colour saturation" requires me to adjust 19 icons, each of which has 3 sliders?

 

Edited March 3 by Gibsonm

[Ssnake]

Yes, unfortunately mass editing assigned colors is a comfort function that we haven't found the time to work on yet. Then again, it's not about precision. Just moving all three slider closer to 255 while approximately maintaining the relative distance between them is enough; alternatively, use one alarmingly red or blue-ish color for the one or two swampy terrain types, but then you'll continue to have the eye squinting issue to some degree whenever they are sprinkled, and there's lots of contour lines around.

Things will get better, pinky swear.

[Stuart666]

On 3/2/2024 at 7:24 AM, Gibsonm said:

 

Well you can do this:

 

 

Using one of these (this is the Diamond option):

 

 

I dont know if its of any interest, but I have a Soviet field manual somewhere, that shows Soviet style mine sign markings. In case anyone wants to make it case specific like.

Edited March 4 by Stuart666

[Ssnake]

We tried the generic approach so we don't lose ourselves in a myriad of nation-specific markings that would clutter up the GUI. I could imagine that in the future we'd first set a "configure party" dialog where you'd set camo schemes, affiliations, and possibly select things like specific artwork, and then you'd have a reduced selection when placing panels etc. But this would also mean that someone had to research, and then create such custom artwork for about two dozen different nations, minimum. That's not exactly a top priority for me, to be perfectly honest. But I appreciate the input.