Reply To: Tank Armor Information

[John D Salt]

Apologies for the delay in following up — it’s been a very full week, and I’m pleased it’s over.

The “Tank Data” book arrived, and, as you probably have worked out for yourself, does not give the level of detail you require.

Another thoought that has just occurred to me is that if you have access to the old “Combat Mission” series of computer games, they have exactly the information you require for a pretty good range of tanks. Between “Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord”, “Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin” and “Combat Mission: Afrika Korps” they have pretty much every US, UK, German, Italian, Rumanian and Hungarian AFV you could want to know about, and a few French and Czech items (in German service) too. The only really big gap is the Japanese, The games give thickness and slope for turret, upper hull and lower hull front. side and rear. and roof thickness. Getting the data out might be a bit of an exercise, but this series was extremely well researched, and it’s a source I would trust on this. Besides, they are all very good games, and you can pick up bundles of them pretty cheap.

Ah yes, BAPS — copies of both editions still resplend on my rules shelf, and I think that was the first publication to credit me in the acknowledgments section (OK, another reason to like “Combat Mission: Afrika Korps” is that “Salt” is one of the names inluded in the British nominal roll).

I haven’t been paying attention to the magazine, but just bimbled over to read your two pieces on the deign of G.A.M.E.R. I think I wholeheartedly agree with practically all the points you make, and as “Seastrike” has been a favourite of mine since 1974 I quite agree it’s worth stealing ideas from. On the matter of cards, I have found it pretty easy to make up bespoke card decks if you have a printer and a few sheets of pre-punched business card stationery. The great thing about making up a bespoke deck is that, unlike a bynch of dice modifiers or a CRT, the platers do not know exactly what the probability is of any particular result coming up (until they have looked through the card deck, anyway). It would be quite possible for a gamesmaster to “rig” the card decks for a one-off game, to maintain the sense of mystery. I have yet to really experiment with cards for combat resolution — I used them in an infantry multi-player solitaire RPG I presented at COW a few years ago entitled “A Footslogger Situation” (because it ripped off the format of Tom Mouat’s very highly successful “A Foorfall Situation” SF skirmish series of games). THe cards were used to represent equipment, as per the equipment cards in “Footfall”, but as I was focusing on the ordinary PBI instead of elite special forces folks, rather than snazzy weaponry, sensors and body armour, I had people pick things like rations, water, blankets, groundsheets, helmets, webbing and all that jazz as well as weapons and ammunition. Part of the point fo the game was to impress upon the participants just how great a weight of stuff (even before CBA, PRRs and CamelBaks) an infantryan has to carry. It was good to see how nobody wanted to take the PIAT or the flamethrower along, wargamers are usually keen on that sort of thing. The other game mechanism I used, based on S L A Marshall’s ideas in “The Soldier’s Load”, was a system of fatigue and fear points, which were largely interchangeable, with each individual having a secret magic number of the amount of accumulated fatigue and fear he could tolerate before cracking.

BAPS was always one of the low-level infantry sets of rules I admired for making a serious attemt at trying to show the vital importance of leadership at this level (the WRG’s “Infantry Action” was the other; my old RSM contributed to those rules). G.A.M.E.R. seems to be putting the emphasis on other things, and I agree that the bread-and-butter business of fire control in the infantry section is something that most wargames rules blithely ignore, despite its importance. In fact I think the only possible point of disagreement I’ve found is that, having been brought up on the Bren and GPMG, I think the infantry’s firepower comes mainly from its LMGs rather than its rifles, and I’d point to Dave Rowland’s “Stress of Battle” for confirmation. I’d also recommend “Brains and Bullets”, but then I always do that.

Sorry, I seem to have wandered several kilometres away from the original subject. Tanks. H’mm. Yes. Try “Combat Mission”, it’s great..

All the best,

John.