[grizzlymc]

Black with a pale metallic blue stain, and light drybrush with silver.  Gloss varnish.

[grizzlymc]

I think it is gas pressure rather than acceleration that tears shells apart, but they amount to the same thing.  Somewhat simplifying reality, howitzers used elevation to achieve range, where guns simply relied on brute force of bigger charges and longer barrels (which allow acceptable pressures to persist for longer).  In general a gun requires a much higher muzzle velocity to achieve a comparable range to a howitzer and, for a given shell weight, will carry less explosive so that the shell can cope with the pressures.

 

For most purposes, the advantage of howitzers (more explosive, a more circular burst pattern, the ability to lob shells over terrain, lighter weight carriages) outweigh the range benefits of guns.  However, even today, the Russian doctrine uses guns to snipe counter battery fire on enemy artillery.

[grizzlymc]

Worked, got me buggered.  Knots in the cables?

[grizzlymc]

One last try

Believe me, being the umpire was fascinating.  Although today I would not be able to run up the stairs.,

 

The problem, as I see it, is the rather simple question of who the wargamer is.  In most 1900-2020 games you are at least a dozen people with three ranks.  In the game I have just described, each person round the table was three company commanders (or Sov Bn), his immediate boss was commanding a Bn with a bit of support (Or a Sov Regt) and the two chaps trying to make sense of it all, were Brigadiers or divisional commanders.

 

The key point here is that, in a normal game, the four players per side would have the telepathic sense to be able to put each platoon where they wanted them with no failure to move or poor positioning.  I think that the idea was worth working with, but people thought the blue on blues, the delayed and uncoordinated advances were a failure of the approach.  I rather saw them as a resounding success.

 

[grizzlymc]

No, I can’t post my reply on this site.  Damned if I understand why.  I have checked it for naughty words and the like.

[grizzlymc]

Model engineer exhibition 1970, I saw a Wellingtonics game being played and the next weekend my dad and I made up some rules and used my Airfix ACW figs and the confederates got some cuirassiers as cavalry.

[grizzlymc]

Stephen, I am getting a 403 forbidden post response, I’d be happy to chat about this elsewhere.

[grizzlymc]

A mechanism which I tried once went like this:

A wargames table was set up in the usual fashion, with six chaps playing a 1980s cold war gone hot game.

There were two tables set up upstairs for three wargamers a side, each with a hand drawn map of the table.  They wrote orders to the people down below.

The orders would be taken downstairs where the chaps playing the game would play their first turn, then they would have one minute to report to their CO.   They could only exercise initiative based on the experiences of each and all of the three or four subunits they controlled, and within their orders.

 

The two umpires would rush upstairs whilst the chaps below were playing their next turn and deliver the reports and collect the orders immediately.

 

There were also two lonely CinCs, each with their own table and reports and fire mission requests from their three subordinates.

 

So, everyne was talking one turn late and receiving two turns late.

 

I would have liked to develop the idea further, but everyone got pissed off that they didn’t know what was going on.

[grizzlymc]

Fascinating John.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast with experiences of 21st AG and from the Brits in Italy. One comment I have never heard made about Commonwealth troops was inadequate patrolling. It seems to me that the moment you had a foxhole dug and a wet inside you, someone was calling for a patrol. Ubiquitous patrolling must have solved the issue of signaling plans to the enemy.

It’s also interesting to note the difficulty of getting MGs to put enough suppressive fire downrange. I have never heard that comment about Commonwealth troops, but apparently the Americans learned that the purpose of shooting is not always to drop an enemy.

[grizzlymc]

It seems odd to get rid of the LSW, it was meant to facilitate maneuver by keeping heads down, not act as a sniper rifle.  I’d have thought that a battery of 3  GPMG at company would be the best approach for thickening fire, handed out where needed or maintained as a company fire base, whether mobile or on tripods.\

 

Of course, there are intermediate calibres.

[grizzlymc]

These sorts of snippets are pure gold.

 

Couple of questions:

1.  What does full mean in the method column?
2. What sort of map would our FOO be using?

I could see that in Ukraine in 1941, he might have a pretty good 100k scale topo map with prominent features on it, but in Hungary in 44 would he have anything better than a 250k map showing that bend in the river and this town as a dot?

[grizzlymc]

I do not often disagree with the salty one.  However, movement may not represent a simple paces per minute number.  A clever officer might give orders to units that have to move furthest first, giving the appearance of faster moving troops than the stupid officer who issues them in alphabetical order.

 

 

Conversely, a cautious leader might move more slowly, but avoid an ambush.

 

I think O Group has enough C3 in it to reflect other aspecs of these characteristics quite well.

[grizzlymc]

Prior to the introduction of the FV432 did the armoured formations of the BAOR use the saracen to taxi their infantry?

[grizzlymc]

That Airfix building is a classic.  Takes you from pointy sticks to the near future.

[grizzlymc]

And he welched?

[grizzlymc]

Jemima Fawr wrote:

Etranger wrote:

It reads well & looks good Mark. Eagerly waiting for the next part!

………………………… I never believed it, as it was physically impossible anyway. ………………….

He was younger and more flexible then!

[grizzlymc]

COTOTS blesses you my son.

[grizzlymc]

Re the PIAT, I can’t remember where or whence it came, but I have an idea in my mind that three were carried at company level without crew and were parcelled out as required.  In action, you’d imagine that each platoon would get one unless one platoon was on the obvious axis of an armoured attack.  Then again, it might have been issued as a form of punishment.

 

The staggering thing is that, if there is no permanent crewman, presumably the poor sod lugging it around would be expected to lug his rifle around too.  That sounds a bit harsh.

 

The great enthusiasm with which the infantry replace rifles with heavy weapons leaves me a bit surprised that nobody seems to have got the idea of a section of 2 LMGs, 1 designated marksman with Lee Enfield, 5 men with pump action shotties and assegais.

[grizzlymc]

It just looks like a google earth image, bloody fantastic.

[grizzlymc]

Not much point in mentioning a WWI game, it’ll all be over by Christmas.

[grizzlymc]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much Caunter in one place.

[grizzlymc]

In the late ’90s, seven condoms wouldn’t have lasted you a weekend in Caracas.  Venezuelan women didn’t wear very much, but they always seemed to be keen to wear less.

[grizzlymc]

That is a bit of phoooaaawwwwwrrrr.

 

The Church Of The One True Scale blesses you my son.

[grizzlymc]

You want a grand bargain on the reconciliation of figure size to scales.  Hell, if you can achieve that, you should go on to peace in the middle east and nuclear disarmament.  The latter two will be a doddle.

The whole business of figure height is made more complex than it might by two things: first, the height is measured from stockinged feet to eyes (well of course, we all measure people’s height that way); second, many manufacturers lie like troopers, generally adding up to a scale foot to the figure’s height.  There is a great incentive for ranges to make themselves incompatible with one another so as to lock customers in.  Good luck, but don’t make detailed plans for the other two, heights and scales will take most of a human lifespan.

 

If you really want to scale figures, you could try measuring the length of their weapons.

[grizzlymc]

I believe that in a snippets file you sent me is a measure of 25pdr equivalents to achieve levels one and two.  One could then extrapolate to three and four.  The degree of cover would have to form the other axis of a matrix.  I have never heard of artillery bombardment reducing an entrenched force to collapse, and when you look at the first world war race to the parapet, even those enormous bombardments were not enough to cause more than a game turn of neutralisation.  So my guess is that proper trenches require an order of magnitude greater than out in the open, and overhead cover might require an order of magnitude more.

[grizzlymc]

A lot of black dyes fade brown.  Something that often comes up in American Civil war discussions of the origin of butternut and the jackets of the Louisiana tigers.

 

Whilst modern dyes fade from blue to slightly faded gray blue, the cheap Bangladeshi shirts I wear in the desert fade to a noticeable purple on the shoulders.

[grizzlymc]

This one is quite handy:

If NW Europe is your thing, this one explains how the army worked, there is more here than coordination of gun group and manouver group:

 

At a lower scale there are ripping histories of divisions and regiments.  Google the division or regiment;

And the list of first person grasshoppers views is too long to list.

[grizzlymc]

H&R are 1:300 true scale, anatomically perfect, and have everything you could ask for in their enormous range.

 

Irregular are awful little blobs which people keep assuring me paint up well, they can obviously paint better than I can.

 

Adler are oversized, a little squat with exaggerated detail, this makes them much easier to paint than H&R and it is easier to identify weapons.

 

GHQ are similar to Adler and mix very well.

 

I have not seen the Baccus 20th C ranges but, based on my experience with H&M ranges, they are probably similar to Adler.

[grizzlymc]

Now that is a bit of alright, that is.

[grizzlymc]

Although the 71st did not wear the kilt, they did wear a blue shako with a diced headband.

[grizzlymc]

Thankyou Mr Salt. I had heard of this op, but had no inkling of the details nor the casualties. It really would make a great subject for a wargame.

It seems to be one of those cases where elite forces are called for. A brigade could never have funneled down that road and taking the objective with less than a brigade was always going to take a fight of epic proportions.

[grizzlymc]

For me, if it’s one, and only one, it must be second Afghan war. But, of course, a lot of those figs work with NW Frontier, as do your early war desert troops.

[grizzlymc]

Forgiveness be damned. I’d stalk them for the rest of their lives. I’d be hounding them off social media, sending documentary evidence to their employers, and hoping, always, to meet them in a dark alley.

[grizzlymc]

OMG! I had always assumed that the Didos had a C turret. Agincourt could have had ABXPQRYZ. No bloody wonder the Abwehr chucked in the towel so early in the war. Germany didn’t have enough filing cabinets to index information about commonwealth forces, let alone store it.

[grizzlymc]

RMASG: (4 Centaurs and 1 Sherman per troop)
Why the Sherman? Was it a DD or a firefly, or just a way of making the REME chaps work harder?

ET Had Agincourt not used such a whimsical turret nomenclature it is not certain that the aft three turrets would have been X,Y,Z. As the forrard one was not superfiring it may have been R (as in PQR for the midships three). Maybe the captain couldn’t decide, so he made them days of the week. What was Rodney’s aft turret called?

[grizzlymc]

I think that the only reason Z was never used for a turret was that no RN ship I can think of had three aft turrets. Had one done so, I’m sure they would have been X,Y,Z. Looks to me like there was no system in play, it was probably up to the Colonel’s discretion what they were called.

[grizzlymc]

Did No 1 commando have no LMGs then? Rifles up to the 2″mortar?

[grizzlymc]

Jemima Fawr wrote:

What colour Blanco for the curtains…?

I think the curtains were done with the “Gay striped” blanco standard issue to Royal Marines and rearguard.

[grizzlymc]

I always thought HG Wells covered the gender issue rather well.

[grizzlymc]

That bloke on the right looks as if he is about to get his arse blown off by a PIAT.

[Author]

Posts