Infantry firing from inside APCs

[Mustang]

There are a lot of APCs with firing ports made for infantrymen to fire their weapons through. The WWII German Skdfz series had firing ports, and so do most modern APCs. BMPs have a kind of machine gun mounted inside along the walls for infantry to fire while inside, and so do Bradleys. Is there any way to reflect this in WinSPMBT?

[thatguy96]

I asked this a while back, and IIRC the answer was basically no with the constraints of SP

[Mustang]

Well, next time they come out with a patch couldn't they at least give APCs an extra machinegun or two to represent it?

[PlasmaKrab]

All depends on wether weapons can be made conditional, and apparently not. Because if you add some weapon to the APC (supposing its four slots aren't already full) it will continue firing when the infantry is dismounted. Besides, how would you decide which actual weapon you want the squad to use through the ports, as opposed to the rest of their pack (e.g. assault rifles rather than MGs etc.), and you'd also had to add precise IFV variants matching the infantry weapons date to date.

Other solution (the hard one, as ever ) would be to add some property to the vehicle saying that carried infantry-type units can fire with their own weapons while either: buttoned inside/ opening firing ports/ standing outside hatches/ etc., which would define the vulnerability modifier for both infantry (surface exposed) and vehicle (opening in the armor and NBC impermeability).

That would be hard work even if it was doable, and I suppose it would already have been done if the game allowed it.

[pdoktar]

I haven´t really heard of firing from inside the vehicle in combat. In BMPs there are ports for AKs and even for a PKM, but the vision and sighting system is very restricted.

Didn´t they had to devise a special short firing-port weapon for Bradley? And it wasn´t issued to the troops, because it would be yet another useless weapon system?

The swedes may be fond of shooting from inside the CV90. At least once I heard about it when I was in the army. How serious they are about it though remains unknown to me. When I was taught and shown the specs of CV90 in the finnish army, nobody said nothing about firing from inside the vehicle. And our tactics were strongly against it as the vehicle quickly would turn into a coffin for us earthly grunts.

[PlasmaKrab]

I have no reports on actual infantry actually firing from IFV gun ports in actual combat, but anyway I think that this would occur only in rare circumstances, and most of these (fighting off close-in infantry, assaulting on the move, etc.) would rather require the grunts to stand and fire from the hatches (as the Swedish apparently do on the CV90 and previously on the Pbv302, among others), which could possibly be modelled as well, this time accounting for some vulnerability of the squad.
Thinking aobut it, I wonder if that standing-out-of-the-hatch-with-weapon-pointed is much more than a show of proficiency or at most something you use on patrol, out of actual enemy contact? Then the sighting of an enemy, either from the squad or the crew, would call for the infantry to dismount at once to dig in and not be toasted with their APC in one (un)lucky shot.

[Mustang]

pdoktar said:
I haven´t really heard of firing from inside the vehicle in combat. In BMPs there are ports for AKs and even for a PKM, but the vision and sighting system is very restricted.

Didn´t they had to devise a special short firing-port weapon for Bradley? And it wasn´t issued to the troops, because it would be yet another useless weapon system?

The swedes may be fond of shooting from inside the CV90. At least once I heard about it when I was in the army. How serious they are about it though remains unknown to me. When I was taught and shown the specs of CV90 in the finnish army, nobody said nothing about firing from inside the vehicle. And our tactics were strongly against it as the vehicle quickly would turn into a coffin for us earthly grunts.

There are a lot of APCs with internal machine guns. The Bradley has modified M-16s fitted on the sides of the passenger compartment for the crew to fire, and the BMP has the same thing except with a modified PKM.

Well, if it's not practical then I guess it's not a big enough deal to include, but I thought that it'd be fairly simple to make it happen. Like, if no infantry are mounted in an APC, then certain weapon slots become inactive.

[troopie]

Koevoet used to do this all the time. They would drive up to the target, all mounted guns firing, music blaring on loudspeakers, R-4s firing over the sides of the Casspir or Wolf. The game engine is not capable of reproducing that, so I'm sure we can't have it.

troopie