Chuck
The game will never be as "realistic" as you desire . It's a game, the game engine has provided a large number of people with a lot of enjoyable hours of play but it's not perfect and never will be. Dig deep enough and you will likely find hundreds of "realism errors" that are insignificant in the big scheme of things that will drive the sticklers for accuracy crazy but the game wouldn't function properly if everything was exactly by the book or would generate complaints from other people more concerned with just getting on with the game. Artillery transports are one example where carry capacity was given with an eye to game play over "historical accuracy" The British "Howitzer Tp/T" is a good example. It works well enough for 99.9% of the players but there are problems if you look at it. In the early 1930's it has three guns and two transports and all three guns have to load into each of the transports regardless. We have no way to force players to choose the "correct" transport. We can "advise" but most people don't read the information. If we set up the transports and guns exact to "historical" standards people are going to pick a gun and a transport combination that won't fit and ***** about it. ( Basically, SOMEBODY is going to complain we should do things differently no matter WTF we do.) For that unit in late war years there are four guns and three transports and although it might be too gamey for some people we have to ensure that each gun can be transported by each of the transports and sometimes that means numbers get fudged a bit. ( and if we take units away somebody at some point will ***** that we haven't included that unit and should for "historical accuracy" ) Putting in the correct gun crew numbers and transport capacities would cause no end of aggravation from a game perspective and all basically to keep a very, VERY small percentage of people who are concerned about such things happy. The gun quad really should only be used to pull 18 and 25 pounders but the nature of the game allows it to be used to pull things it never did in reality.
Here's another example. The Ordnance QF 18 pounder had a "gun crew" of 6 men but there were another 4 that were responsible for ammunition supply that were usually behind the gun lines and generally only met the gun crew when they went forward with ammunition ( but not always ) so TECHNICALLY the full crew compliment was 10 men though only 6 usually served the gun. We give it 8 men, same as the 25 pounder. Why 8 ? Offhand I have no idea. Likely a compromise. Many guns in that range are given an 8 man crew. I do know it's been that way for years without any complaint whatsoever until now and I'm assuming that all this started because some idiot decided to use gun quads as APC's in a PBEM because we gave it 1 armour
I'll tell ya what. I'll put it on the list and maybe in the fall I'll look into it. I'm fairly certain the carry capacity of 116 for the quad could/should probably be reduced but likely not to "historical" levels. Perhaps the gun crews as well but if the Brit gun crews and arty transports get reviewed then all nations may need looking at which turns what is an insignificant little "problem" into a job that will consume far more man hours that it really deserves that will have next to zero impact on the game 99.9% of the people play.
Don