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Hello All,

I was playing a turn with a game I have running with Pvt Bombadil last night, and I finally noticed something (30 turns into a 40 turn game)..

The time frame is 1985.. West Germany (PvtBombadil) vs Russia (me)..

My Speznatz teams have been killing Leo's with little difficulty - but I noted last night that one of my teams KIA'd a Leo using some sort of Uber Weapon.. seems that the flame rocket launcher that some of the teams are armed with has a HE or HEAT penetration value of 999!.. this is not the Schmel RFT launcher, but a short range (200m) weapon.. not sure of the name as I am away from my game..

Does this thing really exist? - or is there an OOB error?

Our game is MBT v2.51..

I think it's a mistake.. unless this thing is a shoulder fire Particle Beam weapon.. :boom3: I wonder if it's been fixed in v3?

I think I probably owe Pvt Bomabadil a new game, and we should drop the one we are playing.. what do you think Thomas?

-Greybeard

It's not an error as far as I know. It's what happens when you score a direct and damaging hit with a FAE weapon on an armored vehicle. It's extremely lethal. It is assumed that a vehicle has some air vents, open hatches, etc that make the actual armor irrilevant with regards to the destructive effects of the FAE. Hence the score of 999, it's the highest it can get.

I had noticed the same a while back when testing for the game but in that case it was Buratino's doing the damage. The effect may have been toned down somewhat so that they don't score as many hits as before but if and when they do, its PEN 999.

Narwan

UMMM... Burantino is a 220mm FAE. Quite large. They are also very very rare. TOS-1 I think means Tizholii Ognimyot Stankovii-1 (Heavy Flamethrower, Tank mounted) IIRC and as such probably used in Army Level or Higher Independant Flamethrower Battalions. I would'nt trot them out very often. Well maybe vs Iranian Basiji attacks.....Hehe. :whis: I saw a pic of them in use vs the Chechens.

I was not attacking the messenger, but the message. I'm sorry I wasn't as clear about that as I should have been, or thought I was. The simple fact is that thermobaric weapons have LESS effect on a MBT then HE rounds of the same caliber. So every time this particular Urban Myth pops up, I wack it on the head with the biggest stick I have at hand.
Once more, FRAM's are not much more expensive then HE or HEAT rounds, if at all. So if they were silver bullets why is their use everyday and commonplace? Logic says that is because they don't work as well as the sales brochure claims. That doesn't suprise me.
More Logic. The size of the Thermobaric warhead is limited by how fast the fuel can be propagated thru the air. Since the fuel burns, it would be logical that at some speed, atmospheric resistance would generate enough friction to ignite the fuel. Since there is a time window that the event has to happen in, the maximum affect is NOT a function of explosive filler, which is itself a function of projectile size.
Why not treat it as an HE round, with some sort of bonus when used against Infantry in bulidings?

It's a difficult round to incorporate in the game. It does have some effect against AFV's (and their crew), as your links clearly showed, to the point of inflicting a 'kill' for game purposes. The original engine for the game never made room for ways to damage AFV's besides penetrating their armor. So that's what this round does too. It sometimes 'penetrates' the armor, by which I mean purely from a game mechanics perspective, in order to allow the game to assign damage to the vehicle, not meaning that the actual armor is breached. Think of it as being 'overcome' rather than 'penetrated'. It should happen at least some of the time.
Look at it from this angle, take the example you gave of the russian MBT being lit up with a FAE round so that the rpg's could see where to fire at. While it may well be that it was rpg's that did the actual physical destruction of the tank, what it does not say is whether the FAE round had some effect of it's own on the vehicle. For example, did the burning cause the engine to fail? Were the crew exposed with open hatches and if so what happened to them when the round hit? Was any internal equipment damaged by the round, maybe to the point of rendering the vehicle combat ineffective? If any of that happened the game would have to find some way to reflect those effects. If all the crew had open hatches for example (and remember that the game assumes unbuttoned vehicles to be the norm) the FAE round may well have caused enough injury to them to make the original FAE hit a unit 'kill' in the game.

Again, I'm not sure if the game currently has the right balance for these types of weapons. I suggest that people interested in this check the next version (and maybe the current one too) and see what they make of it. If you feel it's way off, let the CAMO crew know at the Shrapnel site (but be sure to be able to support your views with references and game data!).

Narwan

Hello Guys,

Ahh - now I feel like a Padawan... new things to learn..

So perhaps it's not an uberweapon in the game - as it has taken 2-3 hits to kill a tank with these things..

I'm a pyro anyway - dates from my days as a boy scout.. :)

-Greybeard