Matrix Games Forums

Is the reliability of vehicles and equipment going to be a factor? Rarely does a unit go into battle -- even the first one of the war -- with a full TO&E.

In our cavalry squadron, based about 30 kms from the East German border, we could generally roll 90-95% of our vehicles during a lariat advance -- our monthly alert -- by stripping a few "hangar queens" to make the other vehicles operational. And even 'operational' vehicles were often degraded . . . tanks with inoperal thermal sights, for example, or the M901s with hammerheads in need of viagra -- the finicky hydraulics sometimes didn't function, especially in cold weather.

If our unit, with first call on parts and service, couldn't maintain a 100% readiness rate for a "come as you are" war, I doubt there were many others that did.

Readiness varied depending on the type of equipment. The M113 class was a wonderfully reliable design, but by the late 80's the vehicles and engines were old, and more likely to break down. Helicopters of all types require *a lot* of maintenance to keep them combat-worthy. On the Russian side, some of the old vehicles, like the PT-76s, would certainly never approach 100% availability, as well as some of the newer designs -- like the T-64 -- that proved to be less than reliable.

In a game of this scale, it probably isn't worthwhile to have vehicles "breakdown" during the scenario, but I'd be interested to see the starting number of vehicles in each unit adjusted based on the reliability of the vehicle, whether the unit was moving to contact (more breakdowns along the way) or was already in place, the weather, and a random factor.

Other thoughts?

That is a really good observation. In this game we track unit strength right down to the individual vehicle but no further. If you are supposed to have 10 T80Us in your company and two broke down on the approach march to get to where you are now, the scenario designer will give you only 8 vehicles. We do not explicitly track breakdowns during the game but the assumption is that a certain number of combat losses could just as easily be breakdowns. For us, a vehicle is a runner or it is lost to the player for the scenario. I had intended to assign a notional breakdown rate and gather a pool of 'fallen out' vehicles that could be returned to battle (or perhaps after it for the mythical campaign game) but then realized I was going a little overboard. It would not improve the game enough to make it worth the while! The possibility exists for version 2 though...

I agree that perfect TOE starting formations would be very infrequent in real life, but we are also assuming a few weeks of hasty and/or secret mobilization prior to the start of the campaign so there is a reasonable chance that most unit commanders could report for at least an hour or two at the critical time that they had 100% runners. Beyond that I would expect serviceability rates in the field falling pretty quickly to maybe 60-70% prior to battle losses. Tank platoons of 3 quickly become tank platoons of 2, even in peacetime. Anyone with a better handle on this please advise!

This of course is an area of huge superiority for NATO - we had the capability to fix a lot of our equipment quite far forward - far more than anything the WP had. I would hope that our better servicing facilities would help offset the greater complexity of our equipment and keep us at least even with the WP. They had their own problems of course and testing of captured equipment paints an appalling picture of servicability and reliability.

The Battle Generator allows for this issue. When you are creating a force for a scenario one of the questions is "% up to Strength 10- 100%". It then goes through the vehicle list and randomly decides whether individual vehicles are in or out depending on the odds. As a scenario designer you can adjust indivual units further by hand too.

Going back to the game, these battles will be so intense and so bloody that the chance of vehicle breakdown (say 30% every 150 miles) is paltry compared to everything else you are going to face. For an operational game I would have given it far more attention, but a grand tactical game? Forgetaboutit...

As an aside, I hold also worried about the failure rate of individual munitions. A bullet is a bullet, but even those can fail after a long period of storage. Remember all the dud ammo at the start of WW2? The WP would have it far worse than us too since they store so much for so long under less than ideal conditions. At the other extreme are all the ATGMs that are precision electronics and have a zillion failure points. I would be quite confident that 90% of ours would work more or less as advertisied, but the rest? Ultimately though I just used everything at 100% because so many other factors come to bear on this that it washes out in the long run. The game is just not tactical enough to explain to a player that ATGM #8 fired by this unit at this time flew wide of the mark due to a defective control motor. He just wants to know that this infantry fired off a bunch of ATGMs and bagged three tanks. That is what we give him!

Having said all that, for testing so far we are using units at 100%.

Cheers, Rob.

Rob,

Thanks for taking the time to give my post a more reasoned and thoughtful response than it probably deserved.

Great idea (for version 2) to have a pool of broken vehicles to repair and draw from . . . I'll like 1.0 even without it, though.

You are dead-on right about ammo and equipment. In Ft. Bragg, in 1980, I had the opportunity to join a company of M551 Sheridan's of the 82nd Airborne on their individual tank gunnery table. Only two of the tanks'* co-axial machineguns worked (the excrable M219 . . . later replaced by the wonderfully reliable Belgiam M240). One frustrated tank commander pulled out his .45 caliber pistol and banged away at the machine gun targets from his cupola . . . that will forever be my mental image of an "airborne tanker."

As for the ammo -- main gun rounds would occassionally "go wobbly" if the round was stored too long in one position allowing the propellant to serttle, and the weight to shift. In our table-top wargame exercises, we had to assume a base 90% hit rate from TOW missiles -- but we barely achieved a 90% successful *launch* rate on the range. And, as you say, despite these shortcomings, the reliability of NATO's ammo and equipment was certainly far, far better than the Pacts'.

*/P.S. = The 13-ton Sheridan was not officially a tank. In Army lexicon it was an "Airborne Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle" (AARV). But the men who commanded and crewed them were 'tankers' not 'aarvers'.

Reliability rates for equipment and munitions are very closely studied whenever there is a real war. The results tend not to get published though. Can anyone point to anything in the open press that they know of?

I'm feeling paranoid now!

Cheers, Rob.