However thick a tank’s armor is, something can always get through it. Strictly speaking, in a situation like this, the tank commander would launch smoke grenades and switch on ECM “music” to jam the missile, then throw on violent maneuvers to try to defeat visual tracking. For comics purposes, though, this does the trick.
It’s been another really tiring week of missteps and faux pas, for me. Well, why not?
On the plus side, though, today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s one of those things I really do remember from my childhood. My dad brought the TV into the kitchen, something we never did, and we watched it over dinner. “Remember this,” he said. “You’re watching history. The Cold War is about to end, and the communists are doomed.” I guess it’s a sign of the kind of upbringing that I had that I even knew what the Cold War was at age 10. That was one of the great pronouncements I remember my father making when I was a kid – another, of course was about a month later when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown, but we’ll get to that in December.
But at a time when communism, Sovietism, and other such ideologies that glorify violence are back in vogue, it’s instructive to reflect on the German experience (to say nothing of the greater Eastern European experience, generally) and to try to remember that the only way to build a state based on force and oppression is to turn a country into a prison, or to turn it into a graveyard. It was the promise of freedom and peace that led the people of Berlin to rise up and throw off the shackles of communist oppression. The years since then have not been easy, but liberty is not about having it easy, it’s about living with respect for the dignity and the individuality of your fellow human beings, treating them as equals, not as objects to be manipulated for your own purposes. The fall of the Berlin Wall was hardly the only sign of the end for the Communist Empire, but it was the most visible, symbolic, and in many ways the most memorable. Vielen Dank und möge Gott Sie segnen, miene freunde!
Can’t really maneuver much in urban combat which is why tanks are so useless in cities at times. Lots of buildings to break line of sight though.
True on both points. Either way, a good shot with an ATGM is still going to ruin your whole day.
As far as we know, those things have already been done. ECM is frustrating to depict in both narrative and visual modes–which is frustrating, because it’s so important.
Very true. It’s easy to drag out a scene far more than is necessary, and I err on the side of speedy plot movement, when I can. These days, anyway. (and I know that some dispute that but, hey.) 😉
The gold standard is to fuzz the targeting screen and have the nebulous fleet command esque target track jumping around effect
I guess I really am a bad person. Cause I miss the Cold War. Why? Because overall the world was a much more peacful place.
I think I know what you mean, in the sense that the conflict was more clear cut, and occurring in slow-motion as it were, and so it was easier to imagine that it wasn’t really a “war” in the way that, for example, the insanity in Syria or Ukraine is today. Nevertheless, I’m afraid I have to differ with you. The Cold War was a time of unprecedented and systematic violence. Just look at the massive genocide committed by the Soviet and the Chinese in their industrialization programs: ten million in the Soviet Union, thirty million or more in the so-called Great Leap Forward. And then there’s the nearly two million casualties in the Vietnam War, on all sides, in a decade and a half of slaughter and massacre. Or the insane systematic self-destruction of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which left a quarter of the population dead: equivalent, in terms of the United States, to the eradication of the entire population of the top fifty (that’s FIFTY, five-zero) most populous cities in the country. And that’s not even mentioning the craziness in Angola, Congo, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Afghanistan – the list goes on! It simply boggles the mind.
Of course, what we see today is lower in volume, but higher in intensity, and so bold-faced and openly sociopathic that it might make old-school Communists blench. Where the Cold War could be likened, metaphorically, to shooting a gun at your enemy, the current age is more like ripping out his throat with your teeth. Where there is violence in the world today, the level of naked barbarism with which it is being pursued is also definitely on the rise, even though the overall degree of violence in reasonably civilized places like East Asia, North America, Europe and Russia is on the decline (with some notable exceptions, naturally), historically speaking. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
well shit
Pretty much.
Well it is a wire guided so flares and smoke me little
That is one cool looking tank.
I mean, at least for the next 0.01 seconds…
🙂
😀
Yes, for my money, the retro US tank designs can’t be beat for style, even though the Abrams and the Leopard have radically surpassed them in performance.
I humbly submit my FB gallery, possibly relevant to your interests:
https://www.facebook.com/ColdWarTech?ref=hl
That is a seriously impressive collection of photos there!
I just realized that this comics would make for an amazing mod for Wargame: ALB, European Escalation and Red Dragon.
Actually it would. It’s just about the right scale! Rumblers on the field would be glorioysin ALB!
Any modders want to volunteer?
Well. There is a good reason why Super Heavy tanks were abandomed as a concept following WWII. They were airforce practice targets and would later became utterly obsolete with the arrival of modern ATGM’s. So you would have to considerably re-design the anti-air and anti-ground missile defences for the Rumblers and their sibling vehicles in any Wargame mod if you want them to have any value on the battlefield. Wargame is an extremely detailed game that shows you why speed and range can always beat armor and firepower if handled by a pro.
I seem to recall that the military has a pretty functional laser defense system (although if I recall correctly it is actually a MASER as it uses microwaves) capable of taking out about 15 missiles a minute. The major problem with it (if I recall correctly) was that it was only good for defending large valuable structures due to its power consumption. If your tank is essentially a moving building then you can probably afford the power requirements. The thing about the Rumblers is that they are large enough that the rules start to change because if you are already making something that weighs around 800 tons it becomes pretty easy to add things that just wouldn’t make sense on a lesser vehicle like fancy laser defenses or a railgun. When your (presumably composite) armor becomes thick enough standard weapons, even standard ATGM’s just aren’t going to do very much. Lets face it, standard, weapons just won’t do anything if your armor is upwards of 4 feet thick and specifically designed to counter pretty much any form of launched explosive or projectile. It would be like trying to take down a modern tank with nothing but your sidearm, it’s just not going to do anything. At that point the crew of such a monstrosity (assuming it isn’t autonomous) would be more worried about not being able to see through the explosion than theywould be about
Darn it, I accidentally hit submit when trying to go back and fix stuff. So to continue where I left off…
… than they would be about suffering any lasting harm. After all, the enemy could be being sneaky and are using the repeated explosions to blind the crew while they bring something out something that the crew might have to actually worry about.
Something else to bear in mind if you are considering porting it to some form of wargame is that assuming the map is reasonably sized (and you are using a Real Time Strategy format) the other players may not actually be all that concerned about it unless you somehow managed to build several of them, because it can only be in one place at a time and would require roughly the same amount of resources as 50 regular tanks. Meaning that if you can build it you probably don’t have much else and if it does anything other than sit at your base they can probably wipe you out by striking while it is away. Unless you can change the rules such that you can move your main unit production and resource gathering capabilities with the tank (and or set the tank as your command unit) you won’t be able to do much without at least 2 if them. If on the other hand you use some other game format and unless you can have a significant portion of your player base in a single game (probably upwards of 60 players possibly upwards of a hundred) players in a given game there is just not going to be a way to counter them short of having your own. Which simplifies down to some number of giant behemoths slugging it out with a small host of lesser tanks/players shooting at their similarly small counterparts while trying desperately not to get run over.
About ATGM missiles: You now have power amour troops and you can give them anti-armour weaponry that could have only been placed on tnaks previously due to weight. Also. Wargame has the format that you CANNOT build new units on the field of battle. You have only 60 points before battle starts to create a “deck” of units that you are going to use. And those units will be everything you will have access to for the entirety of a 60 minutes long match. Both fighting Wargame battles competently and creating unit decks is an art form.
That’s one of the aspects of WG:ALB that appeals to me – you have to build a force and then play the strategy that you’ve built it against. 6-Commando in WG would be a real challenge, and probably impractical, as the minute Mike arrived, he’d be the target of all the enemy’s fire. Which is an interesting idea, actually, since it would free up conventional forces to outflank and seize objective zones and dig in.
Of course Mike would probably be pretty costly in terms of points you could spend in such a system. I would wonder about the ability to deploy some units after the start of battle as that might dramatically affect the best place and time to deploy mike or some of the specific support units. One of the most important aspects of Powered Armors (PA’s) is that they are regularly the most mobile units on the field, even if there flying units. The addition of jump jets amplifies this effect and in a real world scenario they would probably have a pretty decent chance to dodge most attacks capable of destroying them.
However most of my previous comment was based on an assumed universe similar to World of Tanks, Supreme Commander, or better yet Battletech. If I could find a game that reasonably allowed research and development of vehicles like mike and the PA’s (preferably for the PC) I would totally play it. Unfortunately, I have yet to encounter a game/GM willing to let me do my own R&D and weapons development, mostly because what I excel at is finding ways to do world breaking things… Usually in ways that nobody has ever considered. Like developing plasma weapons, homing bullets, and solid state cloaking technology in Cyberpunk, or applying a tiny bit of real world chemistry to the alchemy system in D&D (resulting in cheap, self igniting smoke bombs and incendiary arrows). The GM’s usually aren’t particularly happy when I make them work out rules on damage for enemies with finely crushed glass in their monsters lungs, or have to work out blast radii for dust/fuel-air explosions… = (
Oh well.
If you like good old-fashioned paper gaming, Mekton Zeta from R. Talsorian Games might appeal to you. The entire system is wide open and scales for that kind of thing really well – including an RPG system for creating R&D-based adventures: finding things needed for research, etc. You have to dig the “anime” style, but it’s still a very well-thought-out system.
The problem is that power armor infantry are still INFANTRY. And a burst of gunfire still can cut them down lile we’ve seen. They may take a burst of square hits but their armor isn’t great, and those lasers… well. Besides that, Mike is an Aegis combat system on the ground and everything has datalinks kn this universe. So you tske one potshot and suddenly a sniper or tank gunner gets a nudge “there’s someone here” with CEP 5 meters.
“Captain! Evade now!”
“Captain!”
“Too late! Bail out!”
Oh, and Happy Veterans’ Day. Or Armistice Day if you prefer.
“Intensify Forward Firepower! INTENSIFY FIREPOWER!!!”
“TOO LATE!”
*KABOOM*
Hah! I had a similar thought.
By the way, I’ll take “Armistice Day,” personally. But then I’m an old stick in the mud.
Though I’m pretty sure the city won’t erupt in flames if one Sentinel goes down.
Wasn’t the Executor crashing that took out the Death Star, that thing was WAY too big for one impact to take out, even something going on 12km in length, but it did always bother me that a single hit could take out a warship that big or that it didn’t have an auxilery helm in the event the bridge was hit.
The Hood went down to less than that :P.
Well…. This is gonna hurt
Mm… Indeed…
I like your anecdote about your Dad. I had to work on New Year’s Eve 1999 up until 11pm, then went over my brothers house for a very low key celebration. I made him wake up his 4 year old son to watch the Year 2000 ring in and even though he was very sleepy I kept telling him “Remember this, this is historic, your going to want to tell your kids you saw this.”
Ok this might be a slightly odd question but what is the tactical role of a tank? It always seemed to me as though almost their entire purpose was to destroy other tanks. To me it seems as though that would be a tremendous waste of resources considering that there are infantry weapons capable of destroying them. But that can’t be right because otherwise tanks would have virtually no purpose and would have been discontinued. That said their would be an advantage to having something like, Mike because it is just so big that that nothing short of (or possibly including) a tactical nuke would be capable of destroying it. The psychological impact alone might justify the deployment of such a weapon, particularly as a distraction (if a horrendously expensive one).
The role of tanks has changed with the conflicts they are involved in. In ww1, they were infantry support weapons, basically great big slabs of mobile steel for troopers to hide behind as they moved across no-man’s Land. This role continued to a degree into ww2, with tanks like the British Matilda and they also evolved into specilised engineering units like the Hobart’s Funnies.
Its as Tanks get faster and more mobile, they really leave infantry support behind and the advent of attack helecoptors and infantry anti-tank weapons, has indeed raised a lot of questions about their usfulness, but I don’t think they are going to go away any time soon, if only because they are such a potent symbol.
Nothing seems to say Military Might, quite like a column of tanks rumbling along, whether its a UN ‘Peace Keeping Mission’ or some tin pot dictator crushing internal dissent, Tanks are one of the ultimate symbols of your nation’s military strength.
A tank is breakthrough and exploitation, but also a mobile strongpoint. A 120mm HE shell served to anything will absolutely screw up that day, while the heavy tank lile Abrams or Leopard or Leclerc is nearly impossible to decisively destroy with infantry weapons.
That would imply that tanks presently serve as fast mobile assault weapons and that their role would probably be to raid enemy encampments and then retreat before the enemy can recognize the threat and bring their anti tank weapons to bear. Or I could see them being used to take a position ahead of the main force and harass the enemy while a forward base of operations was established. I could see some version of a tank effectively serving as a fast mobile command center but if they outpace the infantry then I am unsure of what they would be commanding besides other tanks, at least until everyone else arrives.
With the changing nature of warfare I expect to see tasks become faster, more agile, able to navigate more difficult terrain, and have more reactive reactive and adaptable defense capabilities. They may become more intelligent as well as more complex artificial intelligences are required to operate their automated defenses. They may evolve (if that word is appropriate) modular hard points, armor, and weapons mounts in order to increase their adaptability in the field. Such an evolution would allow tanks to swap out parts in the field in order to take best advantage of any advancements made since its production. For example if the tanks were regularly encountering a particular type of anti tank weapon they could swap out for armor developed specifically to counter them.
Fast Mobile Assault by tanks is already a thing. The Germans called in Blitzkrige, which did indeed make use of dedicated command tanks, using fast armour to take key positions and knock out opposition before they could mount effective defences.
Modular hardpoints are an interesting idea, allowing you to configure a single vehicle to do a number of different roles. Again, I’m reminded of Hobart’s Funnies, which were standard allied tanks like the British Churchill and American Sherman, modified with external devices like a rotating chain-flail for mine clearing.
tasks = tanks
Stupid auto correct…
I was 14 & home sick with a stomach flu when the Wall fell. I was flipping through the TV channels & saw the breaking news. I was shocked & stunned. I found myself just starting to realize a new world of possibilities.
Kids/people now seem to look at the cold war as a joke or look at the people of that time as a bunch of over armed paranoid nuts seeing commies everywhere. I was an Air Force brat. Both my Grandfathers had served in the Army. I knew full well what war would mean for my family & the world. If it went nuclear me & most of my nearer extended family would be gone in a flash. We lived either on a Military base or near a targeted major city.
I had grown up generally assuming that I would likely spend the mid to late 1990s in a muddy ditch in Europe shooting a Soviets flooding through the Fulda Gap. I wasn’t hiding under my bed in fear. I wasn’t crying myself to sleep. I had friends & did fun things with family. But the threat was always there. Like living on the coast & knowing that sometime a major hurricane will hit, you just don’t know when.
The Soviet Union was making threats all over the place. NOW we know it was bullying to psych us out, but at the time we thought they were “coming to get us”. At the time I was alive they had invaded Afghanistan & were instigating communist revolutions all over Latin America. If you think the border issue is a hot topic now, think about the thought that the Communists might invade from the south if nothing was done.
We had seen what the Soviet Union had done to Eastern Europe & were horrified at the thought of it happening here. And no, I don’t just mean the economic system for those who like to bash capitalism. For one example a friend of a friend had a family bible full of names that they took when they fled Latvia. Those names where all the people they knew that the Soviets killed or ‘disappeared’. We had the Weather Underground in our own country talking about staging a Marxist revolution that would ‘necessarily require’ the execution of about 2 Million, yes 2 MILLION fellow Americans.
You can see how we might have been a little concerned about a Super Power that we thought was our equal or maybe a little more powerful trying to destroy our way of life.
Yes now we can look back at the times with hind sight, sober reasoning & armchair quarterback what things we got wrong. That doesn’t capture the emotion of the times. As humans so much of what we do depends on our emotions & current perceptions.
Seeing the Berlin Wall fall & the Soviet Union collapse was like seeing the Eye of Sauron go out at the end of the Lord of the Rings movies.
I feel I must point out one other thing. I had & have no feelings of hate for the Russian people. It was their government & leadership that had me spooked. One of my Grandfathers had met Russian soldiers during the end of WWII said their average guys were like our average guys & got on well with them.