Reto.Christiano

I see that the 37mm ЧК-М1 Airborne Gun Model 1944 could also be mounted in vehicles like the Willys Jeep, GAZ-64, and even the Harley-Davidson with a sidecar. (which could be fired on the move, provided you are a hard road and not exceeding speeds of 10 km/h) Can someone find pictures/data on this gun being used in that vehicle mounted configuration? I am particularly interested in it being mounted in the GAZ-64. According to the wiki page linked above, it would have a 30º traverse, and the penetration is fairly similar to the two other guns, making this a good candidate, provided that we can find enough reference for it. I do remember finding the picture above when looking at the GAZ-64 as a second Infantry transport vehicle, but I had completely forgotten about it until now.

Now that the vehicle update is out, the content track is finally able to resume. There are some assets from our old pipeline that will be finalized (heavy tank destroyers, fighter planes, recon vehicles, and halftracks) After that we will boot up a new pipeline for more vehicles. We already have our eyes out for a couple of categories (more infantry vehicles, new anti-aircraft vehicles, more recon vehicles, more tankdestroyers, etc. (you can find their discussion threads in this forum)) Now I'm looking for some self propelled anti-tank guns to give to the Infantry. Something that will allow them to fight back against tanks, without having to rely solely on mines, grenades, and rocketlaunchers. I am interested in guns mounted on vehicles - No towed on fixed guns. For discussions on those I refer you to Killroy115's thread on the subject. The initial selection I had in mind is something like this: If anyone has better suggestions (especially for the Soviet) they are most welcome.

I agree that it would be an great addition. But there are way too many tasks that needs to be done on the audio front, and I am not going to promise any time away from out audio designer. Also, please put stuff like this in the General Development Suggestions forum.

The armor consistes of: Front, Right, Left, Rear, Top, Bottom, Turret, Mantlet, Right-Skirt, Left-Skirt, and Turret-Skirt. Only Front, Right, Left, and Rear are represented in the UI. Shooting the Front will not wear down the Mantlet. The entire turret is one whole group that does not have any front/right/left/rear/top sections. So shooting the turret anywhere (except the mantlet) will wear down the entire turret.

We are starting up a new content pipeline, and are starting with one new AT gun for each faction. But given the similarity and shared parts of the PzB-39 and GrB-39 it made sense to have both of them made in the same production. The PTRS and M18 are planned, but not for the first production run.

I have been looking at that drawing, and the way I see it, is that the inertia striker is held in place by the tip of the screw (safety key) - The tip of the screw just needs to be raised slightly to free the striker, which is why I suspect that it might be made so that you just need to turn it a quarter of a revolution to arm it. (so if the key is perpendicular to the fins its safe, if it's in line with them it's armed). Or something along those lines. If they key had to be removed completely it would have been easier (and a lot cheaper) to do it with a pull-pin (like on the Bazooka rockets). But yeah, going for a mine without the safety fuze might be the way to go. I'll be doing a couple of experiments with the Ampulomet while it's in the block-out phase to see what configurations would work out best.

Having looked closely at the gun to make the blockout model, this makes perfect sense to me, and answers my second question. 3: Is cocking the striker (firing pin) by pulling it back until it clicks. 4: Is rotating the striker to engage the safety. The striker has a cam sleeve at the rear, which when rotated upward block the trigger from moving downward.

It looks like there was supposed to be an image within the spoiler, but it doesn't appear to be working for me. Could you reupload it, or attach it to the forum? Good find on the paper vs brass casings issue. Excellent find. Skimming through it I can see it's a step-by-step manual to how to prepare the Ampulomet. My Russian isn't terribly good so if someone would translate it there is probably less of a change of me misunderstanding something.

Quick update: I am 90% settled on the Ampulomet. (with the FBM-125 as default ammunition). The remaining 10% comes down to whether or not our animator can make it work as an individual weapon without it looking like Buccaneer-Bill hip-firing a pirate cannon. So I've made a block-out model of it with all the correct proportions and details where they are needed - but otherwise a very rough model - so we can try it out in the game before going on with the production. I have a few questions that I'm hoping some of you might be able to dig up. Firstly the sight markings. According to this article the sight is notched for firing at fixed ranges from 50m to 100m. Looking at the spacings of the notches, this is my guess on what the different range markings indicates: Does anyone have anything more concrete to go on? Secondly, does anyone know if the breech block is locked from rotating? My gut-feeling say that it isn't, but it would be mechanically fairly simple to have the trigger lever lock into the barrel extension so that you would need to push the trigger lever upward to unlock the breech block. - And at least on the production line that has the four lug interrupted thread breech block there is a definite slot at the 12-o-clock of the bolt, exactly where I would imagine such a locking block would be (could just as well just be a safety venting hole in the event of case ruptures). On the two-lug production (recognized by the large diameter bolt rear) I haven't seen this slot. And while you are at it, if you have to push upward on the trigger lever to unlock the bolt, it would also be very simple to have an extension on the trigger bar that automatically recocks the striker when the trigger is pushed up. But like I said, I have a feeling that this isn't the case, so the bolt is free to rotate at all times, and that you need to manually cock the striker every time. But it is something I can see would be fairly simple to make, so it is not impossible that that is what they did. Lastly, the FBM-125 mine has an arming key with a label saying " Вывернуть перед стрельбой " Do any of you native Russian speakers interpret it as in the key just needs to be turned 90º to arm the grenade? - or do you interpret it that you have to completely unscrew and remove it from the grenade?

This is a very common practice. The US Army also had several .22LR conversion kits for their M1919 machine guns for training purposes. These .22 training machine guns were developed by David Marshall Williams (the guy behind the M1 Carbine) and used his Floating Chamber design to boost the recoil of the rather weak .22LR cartridge so that it can cycle a heavy bolt. Williams had previously designed a .22LR training conversion kit for the M1919A1 pistol for the US Army, also using the floating chamber to boost recoil. I made a gallery a while ago explaining how it works, featuring some high speed footage of my Colt ACE The Trainer, Machine Gun, Caliber .22, M1 was a permanent conversion for the M1919 that fed from a special .22LR cloth belt. This was not particularly reliable and required a lot of changes to be made to the host machine gun. They skipped the M2 designation (to avoid it being confused with the AN-M2) The Trainer, Machine Gun, Caliber .22, M3-5* (*M3 for the 1919A1, M4 for the 1919A4, M5 for the AN-M2 .30) was easier to install and uninstall, and used .30-06 sized cartridge adapters that each held a .22 cartridge. This meant you could use regular .30 cloth belts, and thus made the loading procedure a lot more similar to the real thing. Each of these cartridge adapters acted as the floating chamber to boost the recoil as explained above, and would be ejected just like a cartridge casing normally would. (incidentally this is very similar to how modern Simunition works) The benefits of using .22LR for training is that they are a lot cheaper to produce, so you can shoot a lot shots for the same price. - They have a relatively short range, so you don't have to cordon off a huge danger zone down range. - And since they have a more curved trajectory you can practice long range shooting on a short shooting range by simply scaling the targets accordingly. Anyways, .22LR training machine guns is not something that would be suitable for the game, cool as they may be. I am however interested in hearing more about the Maxim-Tokarev usage. According to the Russian wikipedia entry on it, only about 1000+ (out of roughly 2500) were sold to the Spanish Republic (I was previously under the impression that Spain got all of them), and China received about 1300 in 1938-1939. A quick search through Russian sources are similar, but with slightly variations in the numbers. (different production and export numbers, and some saying that China got them in 1940 - But the general consensus appears to be that Spain received a less than half of them during the Spanish civil war, the guns then went into storage, and China received more of them during the second world war) The Maxim-Tokarev is a very good fit for the game, so if it was still in Soviet service at one point during the war it is definitely a potential candidate. That or the DS-39 are the two I've currently got my eyes on.

Sorry, but unfortunately new optics won't make it for the first iteration. We still consider a new optics system to be an important part of the vehicle update. But a while back when, we saw that the vehicle update was going to take longer time than first anticipated, we started prioritizing which parts to release first. So we had to ask ourselves some questions: Are the new optics important to the update? - Yes, quite important. Will the update work without the new optics? - well, yes I suppose it would. Would it be better or worse than what we have now? - well, it would be the same. Since there is nothing that is directly dependent on the optics being updated, it was a part that could be postponed for the second iteration of the vehicle update.

It's not as simple as that. It would require quite a bit of testing. There are a few potential issues, a big one is that the entire world would be drawn through a transparent glass effect (which is not optimized for that purpose). Our QA department would need to do a lot of testing on various graphics cards, old and new to see how it would affect performance. does the transparency even work on all graphics cards? or maybe smoke effects would be rendered on top of the glass with other graphics cards? (an issue we are already having with clouds). - Many concerns that needs to be addressed and tested QA is already overburdened by the amount of new features in the vehicle update as it is, so for now we are focusing on just having the essentials. If they also had to test all the nice-to-have stuff the update would never be released. When the essentials are all working we'll release the update as soon as it's ready, and then we can look into enabling some of the nice-to-have features.

Sorry, no. - At least not for a while. That is one of the main reasons why the planes don't have cockpit views. The cockpit resolution is not the greatest (and is even worse on the older plane models). It's something I've been tinkering with before, and thought I'd add this to the prototype to see how it would work out. I'm gonna have to disable it again before the vehicle update is released, but that doesn't mean I'm giving up on making cockpit views. Fortunately the plane models are all constructed with the idea that at some point the cockpits could be updated - so the models are structured with the cockpits being separate meshes that can be replaced without having to redo the entire plane. My ambition is to some day make cockpits that are build from generic instruments, switches, buttons, and dial modules that are shared across the different planes. While this would make the cockpits less authentic (not that they are completely right at the moment) it would mean that we can have higher detailed instruments without using excessive texture space - with the bonus that it might be possible to make some of the instruments actually be functional. This however is not something that will be coming any time soon, and is certainly not something that will delay the vehicle update. It is something I'm looking forward to working on, but there are a lot of other more essential issues that need to be done first.

They do not. Recon, Medium, and Heavy Fighters all have the same amount of hitpoints (750). When the recon and heavy fighter classes were introduced there was a debate weather or not they should have different hitpoints, but it was decided that it would be best to leave them the same for the moment to see how the fights evened out, before tweaking it. I'd imagine that there would be even more uproar right now if the P-38 had gotten a health boost on top of being the most owned heavy fighter in the game. And bonus: it does not. The Yak-9 has a maximum speed of 139 m/s (500km/h) horizontally and 166m/s (597km/h) diving. The Me-410 has a maximum speed of 150m/s (540km/h) horizontally and 175m/s (630km/h) diving.

All vehicles are scaled 110% relative to their authentic measurements to make them appear more correct in when viewed on the screen.. - This also has an additional benefit that it allows our character (who is a rather large guy compared to your average 1940's person) to easier fit into the vehicles. The problem was that a few of the vehicles were scaled beyond this 110%. I noticed this when I was working on the upcoming SU-100 (which is on hold until the vehicle update is done), and I was comparing it to the SU-85. The SU-85 was quite a lot bigger than the SU-100, where as they should be the same size (both being based on the T-34). So I double checked it by comparing the SU-85 with the two T-34s, and it was indeed quite a bit too big. - My suspicion was that it might accidentally have been scaled 110% twice. I then went through all the vehicles in the game to check if their sizes were correct (that is that they are all consistantly 110% scaled), and found that the SU-85 was about 110% over that, and the two T-34s and Kubelwagen were about 105% over that. The M16 MGMC, which in our game has a set of rear storage bins, appears to have been set to the length of the vehicle without the storage bins, meaning it was too small. All other vehicles were ok. Since part of the vehicle update includes our animator going through all the vehicles and correcting/fine-tuning/redoing animations, this would be the best time to correct this mistake, so that the animations can be adjusted to fit the new scale. So after this fix all the vehicles are the same relative scale.