Ok, I'll bite.
Firstly, I was typing in haste and I was not speaking literally when I said it was the West's ONE and ONLY qualitative advantage, I was referring to the specific case of tank on tank combat, and that the thermal imager was the only real, non marginal, qualitative *technological* edge between the two. Yes they had different armor, firepower, speed and so on, but the TIS was the one thing that was present on one side and not on the other. The other differences are like splitting hairs when it comes down to the comparison of numbers.
Quote:And I dont believe soviets are totally ignorant of such technology. TIS, after all, is not complex (as a huge system, i.e. modern fighters) nor concept revolutionary as atomic weapons. It is just add on devices on conventional weapon systems such as tanks. If such devices could render their huge armored formation almost useless in perhaps most parts of the war, do u think soviets would not try to steal it or design some tactic to avoid this problem?
Where to begin. To say that it must not have been that big of an advantage because if it were, then surely the Soviets would have stolen it, copied it, or tried to avoid it -- that is an interesting statement. The answer is, they did all three. They avoided it by choosing not to attack at night, and instead sought to hold what they had at night and push during the day. I recall many an hour of "stand to" at in the morning, waiting for the early morning Soviet attacks in training where the OPFOR fought based on Warsaw Pact doctrine. The Soviets did have their own such devices too, the device wasn't secret per se, and it was certainly not something they were ignorant of. The simple fact was, they did not have the technological or financial capability to create the device on a large scale in the small component size needed to fit in their massive fleet of tanks and once they did create the device small enough and could afford to employ it, only company commander or battalion commander vehicles would have the device, if they had one at all, and it wasn't until the mid 1990s when they started to see widespread use *in that role* (on command tanks). Needless to way, I am talking about the 1970s to the 1990s here when thermal imaging devices where hundreds of thousands of dollars; you can probably purchase one for hundreds of dollars now days for all I know, but back then it was a high dollar luxury item for a tank. Well, maybe I should rephrase that. It wasn't as if they couldn't afford the device or technology, but the Warsaw Pact operated under the acceptance that they would suffer high losses. It wasn't so much the cost per individual unit per tank, it was the cost of a massive number of units for the entire tank force. Maybe that makes more sense.
You are correct though, the TIS was not a revolution like an atomic weapon, but it was something similar to the introduction of the machine gun on the WW1 battlefield, or (in their own times) the gladius, the longbow, and so on. It, in itself, was not a paradigm shift, but it was a leap forward in effectiveness that,
when applied properly and in sufficient numbers, gave (and still gives) a massive combat multiplier. I mean, what good is the longbow in medieval times if you engaged your enemy at close range all the time? What good is a single night vision device on a Taliban's head if the rest of their force cannot be equipped with them? What good is thermal imaging if both sides field it in large numbers (which, BTW, you will notice that if both sides have TIS in MC then they essentially cancel each other out)? For these combat multipliers, it all depends on the application of a device or weapon and the numbers in which you can employ them, rather than "how revolutionary" (which is totally subjective) the device/weapon is or was.
Referring to the effectiveness of the device itself, you keep referring to how you don't think a thermal imaging system is that effective. I assume that you have extensive first hand knowledge and experience with thermal imaging devices? Perhaps you were a member of a tank crew which was equipped with a thermal imager like I was? The short answer here is that you cannot fully understand the advantage that a thermal imaging system would provide until you have been on vehicle that has one, and pitted against (in training or in real life) against vehicles that did not have any. A perfect example of this is Desert Storm. Although the entire war was not fought at night, that clash was fought almost exclusively at night, where the Iraqis were all but defenseless, and it wasn't just because it just so happened to be at night every time the coalition struck (either in the air or in the initial battles on the ground) the western forces specifically chose the time and place to give battle, and naturally it was during a time of day when they would be able to see the enemy and the enemy was unable to see them. In that type of match up, the enemy was essentially helpless targets on a range. It is also, in a large part, because of Desert Storm that the Russians and Chinese have shifted away from the quantity preference and, in this case, has fielded thermal images in large numbers on MBTs (which is also due to the affordability of the technology these days as well).
Quote:Even with TIS could armored units slaughter infantry units in forest or urban like sitting ducks as that happens in the game? I hugely doubt that. If so the Afghanistan war should be over years ago.
Well, just my opinion here, but the length of the current conflict does have something to do with it being an insurgency, not a conventional war, the ruggedness of the terrain, the broad spaces, the relatively thinly spread coalition forces, the difficulty in telling foe from civilian, and so on. The real reply to this statement, I guess, is that the thermal and night vision advantage has helped, with the other advantages, to allowed coalition losses to be a fraction of that of the opposing side. There are no real parallels here to the subject matter of this thread though, or at least I don't see the connection. It is like saying that if the Leopard 2A5 or AH-64 Longbow is so effective, then why aren't the Taliban all eliminated and the war won? It hasn't been won yet, therefore those weapons must not be effective. It doesn't make sense. The inverse of this would be to say that the Thermal Imager was so effective that the Soviets never bothered to attack across the East/West German Border in 1985, which probably makes more since being the historical case.
But really, why don't you just turn off the TIS flag in your OOB and play without it? It would certainly turn it into a closer run thing for NATO if you did this, but they would probably be totally unable to do much to the massive numbers of the WP if you turned it off. Still, the solution here seems simple: edit the OOB, turn off the flag for all the vehicles that have them and save the components, then update the values so that all the flags are removed on those vehicles and voila, no more TIS.
Also, I seriously recommend that you purchase Steel Beasts Pro PE, not just shameless plug here (well, OK, maybe a little shameless plug). In it you could directly see first hand any advantage of a TIS equipped vehicle versus a non equipped one during darkness. ;)
edited: typos