Recovery Vehicles
Posted: 2008-01-07 07:55
I've been waiting for someone on the devteam to make any nods towards increasing realism and taking away the vanilla-ness of engineers using a wrench for a long time, and I haven't seen much to replace that, except for the armor resupply HMMVs in .5 and .6 versions. With these taken away, and seeing 2-3 engineers recover burning, about-to-blow-up or tracked tanks after a minute or so and putting them back into full health..
I'm thinking, how can we improve this while encouraging team and gameplay and not hurting realism. In some other realism-based games, out of commission tanks and heavy vehicles are left for dead or towed back to a FOB or main base for repair and retrofit -- there's not a realistic or non-time-intensive way to repair a barrel or retrack a tank in the field, especially during an engagement. Instead of the engineer wrench as being an all-in-one magical revive tool for everything under the sun, can you implement something akin to the M88 series Armor Recovery Vehicles, preferrably the Hercules. These have been in use for the US and UK for a long while in modern warfare.
I don't know the limitations of the BF2 engine, as i'm not a developer, but I was wondering if it would be possible to get a towing vehicle or not into the game. They could tow them back to an armor repair point (suggested somewhere else in the forums, i can't remember atm) or at least back to a bunker to resupply and rearm. The real-life vehicle is capable of lifting and towing 70-150 tons and is used to retrieve tracked or bogged down tanks or repair them even while under fire, and has the ability to refuel tanks as well. They're also used for construction, bulldozing, etc so they could have a secondary use as a replacement for the "too many commander trucks" problem, to set up razorwire and bunkers/firebases.
They're lightly armored tanks with 3-4 crew (but for your purposes that could be 2 or 3) and only have enough armor for small arms or .50 cal AP protection, and the only armaments on them are a .50 cal machinegun emplacement.
PS: What's up with using the old M35 Duece and a half's for commander trucks? They've been decommissioned for at least a decade, replaced with the LMTV (Light Medium Tactical Vehicle) Unless you're using an odd skin of an M1078, I'm used to seeing M1093's when I was growing up and around the Navy depot here.
EDIT: Found a good vehicle reference guide for it: http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/cv/eng/M88.html
I'm thinking, how can we improve this while encouraging team and gameplay and not hurting realism. In some other realism-based games, out of commission tanks and heavy vehicles are left for dead or towed back to a FOB or main base for repair and retrofit -- there's not a realistic or non-time-intensive way to repair a barrel or retrack a tank in the field, especially during an engagement. Instead of the engineer wrench as being an all-in-one magical revive tool for everything under the sun, can you implement something akin to the M88 series Armor Recovery Vehicles, preferrably the Hercules. These have been in use for the US and UK for a long while in modern warfare.
I don't know the limitations of the BF2 engine, as i'm not a developer, but I was wondering if it would be possible to get a towing vehicle or not into the game. They could tow them back to an armor repair point (suggested somewhere else in the forums, i can't remember atm) or at least back to a bunker to resupply and rearm. The real-life vehicle is capable of lifting and towing 70-150 tons and is used to retrieve tracked or bogged down tanks or repair them even while under fire, and has the ability to refuel tanks as well. They're also used for construction, bulldozing, etc so they could have a secondary use as a replacement for the "too many commander trucks" problem, to set up razorwire and bunkers/firebases.
They're lightly armored tanks with 3-4 crew (but for your purposes that could be 2 or 3) and only have enough armor for small arms or .50 cal AP protection, and the only armaments on them are a .50 cal machinegun emplacement.
PS: What's up with using the old M35 Duece and a half's for commander trucks? They've been decommissioned for at least a decade, replaced with the LMTV (Light Medium Tactical Vehicle) Unless you're using an odd skin of an M1078, I'm used to seeing M1093's when I was growing up and around the Navy depot here.
EDIT: Found a good vehicle reference guide for it: http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/cv/eng/M88.html
