"PRMM-izing" the Tanks (crew #'s, armor, & countermeasures)

Lev_Astov · Post by **Lev_Astov** » 2006-06-06 01:59

So, I see that a hot topic right now has been how many people should crew the tanks. This post will be long, so I will highlight the most critical points for you lazy folk.

As one of the few major advocates of armor in PRMM, I feel it necessary to go over what needs to be done to the tanks in PR to make them realistic in an unbalanced way. Balance Sucks. I concede and will agree that PR tanks should have a crew of at least 3 (option 2 in the popular post in General). This will make tanks MUCH less effective right now, and should therefore only be implemented with the following major modifications.

The armor must be realistic based upon heavily researched ballistics data for weapons and the appropriate tanks. This will mean doing a lot of digging for information. Far more than simply googling tank armor. The result will likely be tanks that can be destroyed by one well placed ATGM (anti-tank guided missile) or tank fired armor piercing round. This will make the placement of the hull a very very important task for the driver, as exposing the wrong areas may mean certain death. In this case it is likely that the Challenger 2 will end up being the best armored tank, as no one will dispute the superiority of Chobham armor. Reactive armor will also need to be taken into account on all tanks, which will protect one side of the tank against one ATGM hit while doing no damage to the tank. Grenades and C4 should subsequently do no damage to the tank until the following point can be implemented.

The tanks can be disabled by hitting the engine or treads. I know this is not easily implemented in the BF2 engine, devs, but it is so crucial to good mixed infantry-armor maps that you must keep trying to find a way. I have confidence that you can do it.

Tank reload times must be accurate to real life in each tank. Right now all the tanks seem to have a 9 second reload time, which is okay. I believe that skilled loaders in the Abrams and Challenger 2 can beat that time, giving them a big advantage over the T-90 and Type 98. This should be looked into and real tank crew men should be consulted. The T-90 and Type 98 have autoloaders capable of reloading in anywhere from 7.5 to 10 seconds. That time depends on which ammo type is selected and where it is located in the ammo carousel. This will make ammo selection a big deal for their gunners, while not so much for the Abrams and Challenger 2. If anyone has any more info on this, let me know.

These tanks use different ammo from each other! It should have different effects! This should be a big deal. Screw balance! Let the mappers do the balancing. I do not have all the info on this, but I'm pretty sure that the Chinese and Russian ammo used are not the same as the American and British ammo. This should be fully researched and implemented.

The turrets NEED to be 100% stabilized if the driver and gunner are going to be separate. This really goes without saying. From what I've seen, the BF2 engine has some form of stabilization built in, but it is completely inadequate. The devs will need to work hard to get the stabilization just as good as the real tanks. This means that when the gunner sees a target, he can switch on stabilization and the turret will maintain its bearing and elevation above the horizon perfectly, regardless of what the driver does. Look it up. All these tanks have fully stabilized weapon mounts.

Full, real life accurate optics must be available to the crew. This way the driver can look out of multiple viewports and see all around the tank. The commander/gunner should have a periscope and viewports (where appropriate,) as well as the targeting sight. Awareness of your surroundings is very important, especially in a tank. It would also be pretty sweet if the crew could open their hatches and look around, but this is unnecessary.

Each tank needs the countermeasures fitted on the real things. This is my favorite!! This means that all tanks will have fast acting smoke screens that actually protect against laser guided munitions. i.e. none of this slow puffing smoke, but a series of very fast and violent explosions that result in a huge, dense cloud of smoke in a couple seconds. This will need to actually mess up the trajectory of laser guided munitions and make them likely to miss the tank, by which I mean that they should occasionally swerve away when pointed at the smoke.
One especially need change will be the T-90. Apparently, this is the only one of the tanks in PR that is fitted with a suite of jamming devices in real life. Ever wonder what those two red "eyes" on either side of the gun are? They are special jamming devices. According to a number of sources, including Modern Russian Armor, the T-90 is capable of jamming and redirecting incoming IR, LASER, and even wire guided missiles! It has a series of detectors that locate the direction of the guidance system and, with the push of a button, the gunner can tell the turret to face directly towards it. The jammers then can go to work. They can send out false IR signals to confuse the guidance systems of IR guided missiles. They can even effectively redirect wire guided missiles by emitting a false reference flare, causing the guidance system on the launcher to think that the missile has gone off course and make corrections. This will result in the missile shooting up into the air or down into the ground. If all else fails, the gunner can cause the turret to point right into the oncoming missile, exposing the most heavily armored area. From what I looked at, not even the well designed Challenger 2 has such a feature. Let me know if you know for certain otherwise.

What would this result in? Tanks that required a skilled crew, but can be used as effectively as the real things. The Abrams and Challenger 2 would likely be lethal killing machines with their skilled loaders keeping them firing fast, while the T-90 would be very difficult to hit with missiles and guided bombs. The Type 98 would likely suck, but it seems no one like the Chinese in PR anyway. Again, I say that it should be up to the mappers to balance the game through vehicle numbers and entrenchments. The machines should be very unbalanced as in real life.

Please fill me in on anything I may have missed or gotten incorrect. I shall update this post as you do.

Cerberus · Post by **Cerberus** » 2006-06-06 02:09

Agreed.

coolhand · Post by **coolhand** » 2006-06-06 02:31

That would make tank-combat maps amazing.

six7 · Post by **six7** » 2006-06-06 02:46

Lev you are such an armour whore

I totally agree though, especially about seperate driver/gunner, disabled tanks, and fire stabilization.

hop_ic · Post by **hop_ic** » 2006-06-06 02:52

'[R-PUB wrote:six7']Lev you are such an armour whore I totally agree though, especially about seperate driver/gunner, disabled tanks, and fire stabilization.

lol

trogdor1289 · Post by **trogdor1289** » 2006-06-06 02:52

I agree totally with all his suggestions and suggest the devs put them in game as soon as is pratical.
sorry for the weird writing style just been watching the apprentice.

Copy_of_Blah · Post by **Copy_of_Blah** » 2006-06-06 02:59

Great ideas all around.
But the Reactive armor can't be possible to implement, can it? You either do damage or you don't with BF2. You would need a way to shed armor, to implement that, and BF2 cannot do that afaik- Just like you can't add destructible child objects to a parent vehicle. You can, but if the child goes the parent goes up with it.

I can speculate that you could cheat and cycle the ammo types on ATs; after the first shot you would switch to an ammo that had an affect on the side texture [reactive armor plate]. It wouldn't work with vehicles against vehicles because they carry more than 2 rounds. It also wouldn't work if the AT soldier had previously shot his first round and fired anew at the side of the tank.

Turret stabilizers [USI] and smoke [21CW Mod?] have been tried before in other mods with some success.

Lev_Astov · Post by **Lev_Astov** » 2006-06-06 03:06

They have ways to deflect rounds currently, supposedly, so I imagine it may be possible to do the same to missiles. I think you are right that they couldn't get it to only protect once, however.

OiSkout · Post by **OiSkout** » 2006-06-06 07:11

Well I'm not much of an armor junkie(game or life), so I'm wonderin if a SRAW or Eryx can take out a tak in one shot(back/front/side/whatever of an Abram), or if it hit the wheels it could take out the treads fully(as in lose total mobility vs some)

Cause having more people operate it would obviously make it weaker, and for balance reasons, it should probably be a lil stronger(heavy dependant on number of operators).

Zepheris Casull · Post by **Zepheris Casull** » 2006-06-06 07:57

odd, i thought we went through a similar suggestion before and bumped into the problem that is the BF2 engine. Plenty of things in real tank warfare that would be a blessing if it can be implemented but the last time we went through this the BF2 engine capability seems to fall short of what we needed.

Post by **eggman** » 2006-06-06 08:10

These are very good suggestions

Not sure if we'll get to all of them, but certainly we know we need to improve vehicle combat dynamics.

egg

Post by **Rhino** » 2006-06-06 08:48

very nice suggestions there.

But as you probaly allready guessed, there is alot of conflicts with the BF2 engine

Stuff like laying down a exstramly heavy smoke screen, this would probaly make the AT guy miss, not by the smoke do anything to the missle, but the AT guy would lag so much he wouldnt be able to shoot the missile

keep them comming thou

dunkellic · Post by **dunkellic** » 2006-06-06 10:50

actually shouldn´t the loaders in the challenger and abrams be slower than the t-90s autoloader?

Post by **Bob_Marley** » 2006-06-06 10:51

I thought the Type 98 was fitted with a laser to "blind" weapons using laser guidance systems.

Thunder · Post by **Thunder** » 2006-06-06 14:55

Bob_Marley wrote:I thought the Type 98 was fitted with a laser to "blind" weapons using laser guidance systems.

doesnt the T-90 have a simular system also.

if the t-90 and type 98 have autoloaders wount that limit their ammo choice as the ammo if it feeds along a carosel.

sound like a fun idea but aslong as it doesnt get too complex as complex things are easy to break.

Lev_Astov · Post by **Lev_Astov** » 2006-06-07 06:58

Reports show that human loaders can beat the old Russian carousel based autoloaders with some training. The carousel rotates to what ammo type is needed. There is a video available on that website I referenced. See it HERE.

You also obviously didn't fully read the countermeasures section, Thunder, as I went over the jamming systems on the T-90. As for the Type 98, I couldn't find much about it's countermeasures other than it's smoke. I don't see any Shtora jammers on it, so I doubt it can do the same as the T-90 (go Russia!)

If anything, please make it so that, with the push of a button, the tank's turret turns to face the source of the lock. That way it will expose the strongest armor and help me take out the attacker like with real tanks. redirecting TOW missiles would be sweet, if you could manage for the T-90.

[ZiiP]DarkJester · Post by **[ZiiP]DarkJester** » 2006-06-07 07:23

overall though, wouldn't this just make tanks completely indestructable? If you implemented smart-countermeasures and automatically target aquisition on tanks, then you'd have to give infantry some extra abilities, otherwise the balance would be disgusting.

These could include, stronger missiles? - so if you did get hit by one, you'd be fooked. Depends on real life of course to what missiles can do.

More mines? or other hiddable explosives? IED's? - If you ain't gonna have a chance killing a tank with a rocket, then something is required to ambush or limit tanks movement. - This poses another problem. If rockets don't prove to be effective against tanks anymore, then people won't play the class. - there won't be a reason to.

dunkellic · Post by **dunkellic** » 2006-06-07 10:45

yeah, kind-of giving the t-90 shtora defence and at missiles become useless

Eglaerinion · Post by **Eglaerinion** » 2006-06-07 11:43

Some great suggestions although I doubt the automated defence systems are possible in the BF2 engine. I'm looking forward to what the devs can do with these suggestions.

I'm with you on the balance through numbers instead of balance by nerfing vehicles.

Iasthai · Post by **Iasthai** » 2006-06-07 11:57

Theres something i havent seen covered here, the auto-warning, if the AT class is to have a chance the autowarning Has to to go, as far as im aware tanks have Nothing like that in real life, how could they?