'@' bail out of mortar crews leaves crews rifles behind...
 

I noticed that when you use the '@' hotkey to have a mortar crew abandon its mortar that they leave their rifles behind! In my base they had re-equiped themselves with pistols (not sure where they found them :) ) and are listed as generic crew (in my case it was a 12cm german mortar crew). I understand that this was probably a quick way of having experienced crew from a disabled tank survive a scenario...but it would be nice if in the case of a mortar, AT gun, HMG, etc. (I assume they all exhibit the same behavior) that they retain their arms. In the case of support weapons crews, they are trained infantry and should be able to be used as such (smaller unit of course and maybe not as much ammo or weapons load out).

...I remember some time ago there was a discussion of bailed out crews...but I could not find the thread and was not sure if it discussed this topic. My apologies if this has been discussed to death before :)

Re: '@' bail out of mortar crews leaves crews rifles behind...
 

Yep, you're pretty much right there. It's always one of those myriads of SP's "little troubles" (IMO). But in the time being, what if you think it this way: a Mortar team (or an AT gun team; note that you can't bail out HMG's crews) is a single, fully working, integrated fighting entity, and they're trained as such. So if they left their mortar behind, they have ceased to become a fully working fighting entity. In this case, a "bailed out" mortar crew means they're so much "routed" or "scared to death" that they dared to cease as a fighting unit (mortar). Anyway, who wants to use crews as fighting units?

But again, your suggestion is quite realistic and real-life like; the rifles ain't stuck dead at the mortar gun, they're slung over each soldier's shoulder. But I'm afraid, there's a possibility that this application will render it gamey.

Re: '@' bail out of mortar crews leaves crews rifles behind...
 

A crew is an entirely separate unit class from whatever it bailed out of. It simply represents men running away. Everything that can spit out a crew uses exactly the one same crew type template unit.

Crews are not there for fighting with - they are there for you to salvage the leader and his experience, in a campaign. They can also preserve the points of a unit, assuming you don't have an overall loss result for that battle. (If the battle is a loss, then abandoned units are marked as destroyed - a victory assumes you can police up abandoned wrecks which still have surviving crews - in which case only the damage done is credited to your oppponent).

If you have a panther worth loads of points, and it has a track hit then it is not a bright idea to dismount its crew to scout out ahead - since if the crew dies, the opponent usually gets the full points value of that panther, not the 1 damage point for the mine hit.

Andy