German Motorcycles and their Units

[Shan]

Hi again!

Yeah this game is great... in the meantime I compared some MC units of various OOBs - German MC sections are AFAIK the only ones having size 2 - they have 12 men and carry a lot of weapons... but in some other OOBs you will also find large squads, all at size 1, so the first thing I'd do is change the existing Kradschuetzen to size 1.

I'm now experimenting with my MC transports and trying to find a good company TO&E - I use Scouts, created 6-men light infantry squads and got LMGs as well, while the MC transports are only armed with a SMG. The company has 2 directly attached MC scouts (3 men, size 1, SMG + grenades), 3 platoons including a heavy platoon with an attached FO, A/T rifles, a sniper and a light A/T gun and so on - good for the initial German campaigns...

I'll need to find out more about actual Kradschuetzen TO&Es, however, to reconfirm this, but basically I think I'm not too far off. Such a unit may quickly secure a bridge and fight off an enemy counterattack until relieved, as it happened many times in RL - which is almost impossible with the existing, non-dismounting MCs.

Panzerbob,

The armored cars always existed parallel with the Kradschuetzen, the latter being the fast-moving infantry support for the former... if I find a good TO&E I'll post it. Later in the war, esp. in Russia, the MCs got bogged down in the russian mud and were worse-affected by the road conditions than all other types of vehicles, thats why this form of transport was abandoned... one of the reason why Germany had so many MCs and didn't give the recon units appropriate transports such as - at least - 4x4 unarmored vehicles, better half-track APCs as was done later, was just that the industry counln't cope with the requirements - look at the enormous losses of MCs in Poland, where roads were pretty bad as well - already in '39 it was obvious that MCs would never survive the russian mud seasons in spring and fall...

A related issue: I checked particularly on recon units in the german OOB and foudn that the 6x6 and 8x8 SdKfz231 currently are rated at size 2, while the successor, the 234, got size 3 - in fact the older Spaehwagen was so high and technically complicated - even without frame antennas it was 2.4m high, the versions with frame antennas 2.9m!
Thats why a new design was introduced - looking very similar but the '234 is 20cm lower that the basic 8x8 '231 (and has no more frame antennas - the '234 had better long range radios where such an antenna was unnecessary).

Basically, both versions are quite huge (6m long...) and should have size 3 or even 4, I'd say. (size 2 is also the size of a Kuebelwagen or Jeep... ;-))