The Commander Series Forum

Hi Pete,

played an ace game of BKC last night! One query came up which we'd never encountered before.

My opponent (Brits) used a couple of Archers for the first time. The thing with Archers is, the back's at the front, and the front's at the back! So when they're shooting at you they're exposing their rear.

We played it that any head-on shots against a shooting Archer would actually count as rear shots, with the extra dice and the minus one save. After all, you're technically shooting it in the engine where the armour is softest.

Did we do it right?

cheers

John

Sounds correct to me.
If I was using an Archer and shot at someone I would expect the return shot to be coming in on my less than well protected rear!
Shoot and Scoot! (Without decapitating driver!)
So should be:
Shoot! Pause as driver waits for breech to return to normal position before manically getting the Archer to speed off with the rest of the crew shouting and praying!
I like Archers.

Yep, sounds right to me too

Sort of, the lower front is the most heavily armoured bit, a hangover from the tank, but the heaviest armoured bit on the supersturcture is the gun sheild. How did you account for it not being able to move and fire ?

ianS

With that nasty 17pdr, the Archer should be able to take care of itself if deployed well back from the front line. Use it as an ambush weapon by tempting enemy tanks into its range with your weaker armour.
(strangely, this never seems to work for me...don't know why I bothered saying it now, DOH!)

Both Archers died, but they put out some pretty serious firepower.

I,m also a fan of the archer. Sometimes you collect ,em just because you ,em . Whatever their faults. Phil

I've kind of interpreted the whole extra dice thing against shots throught the side and rear as being a reflection of the shock effect on the target of taking fire from a direction they aren't expecting. So it seems a bit harsh to be penalised for taking fire from the direction you can return fire to but from the direction the archer has no weapons baring is fine.

So basically I think if they are caught on the move then their front is their front back their back, but if settled into firing position the back is the front and front is the back.

Although the -1 to the save makes sense.

Sorry bagpiper i have to disagree with you they were a confounded beast that shot in the wrong direction. The British were often at the limit of their technical expetrtise and engineering capacity not for a want of talent but due to the enormous strain the war placed upon their overall means of production.
Sadly they did not have the resources to produce good armoured fighting vehicles until nearer the end of the war. Perhaps there is a finite limit on skilled and gifted engineers and the like. For quite a long time I beleive armoured vehicles were attended to by a committee which can be a horrible manner in which to achieve any thing. This is not a criticism as the country that produced the hawker hurricane as its first front line fighter clearly has a good deal of expertise but all things are finite. Please if you disagree tell me so.

The Americans had similar problems in that they recognised the need for a better anti tank gun on their Shermans fairly early but the high command in particular General McNAIR I think it was, felt the true purpose of tanks was to assist the infantry and opposition tanks could be taken care of by specialist tank destroyers. A fine idea except there were never enough and thery were like policeman never quite there when you wanted one. It was a long time before the Americans adopted the 76mm gun and by then it was almost out of date.

The other thing was getting a major piece of equipment into service had a long lead time. If you wanted something for June 44 then you had be starting to produce it by June 43 and designing it by June 42!

Churchill reckoned 18 mts from prototype production to full service use.

IanS

There is a very good book called Armoured thunderbolt which explains the american tank policy in ww2 by Steven Zaloga.

Basically unless the field commanders asked they did not receive and as the field commanders viewed tank on tank engagments as rare in italy they felt the requirement for a bigger and better gun were not required and they preferred reliability and a good HE round as being more important
that obviously changed after France which lead to the M26 pershing.

There is quite a good account of British failures in tank design in AJ Smithers "Rude Mechanicals". Apparently, one reason for not having bigger guns was the small turret ring diameter resulting from the narrow width of British tanks. This was the result of a committee decision that the tanks should be able to be transported on British railways...which might have been helpful except that they were being built to fight in France, Egypt, Italy...

Mark

Greetings

I'd have to check but I thought the width restriction was removed by the War Office in 1942. The issue was that a lot of later war tanks were already in development by then.

The whole saga of putting the 75mm in the Cromwell, the modified 17pdr in the Sherman, the 77mm (cut down 17 pdr) in the Comet and the 17 pdr in the Challenger is pretty complex and I've only skimmed the details myself.

Regards

Edward

Hi Edward

Yes, you are right that the width restriction was removed in Sept. 1942, but it applied to the designs of both the Cromwell and Churchill, so when attempts were made to up-gun them in 1944 it was found to be impossible.

Incidentally, the design and development time for the Centurion wasn't 18 months, it was apparently 2 years 8 months! makes you wonder what impact a few hundred Centurions might have had if they had been available in Normandy.

Mark

There were a lot of issues the first obstacle to Briyish tanks was lack of a suitable engine in the early stages of the war and of course the design of smaller cheaper vehicles with a turret ring only suited to the 2 pounder. So there was no real linear succession in British armored vehicles. The Panzer IV for instance saw the entire war out as a very effective vehicle capable of numerous upgrades, the T34 became the T85 even though the Russians considered a new medium tank it was rightly decided to upgun thier already successful design.
The concepts of the Churchill seemed to be wrong from the beginning when first planned by Vauxhaul to suit the specifications of a large trench crossing vehicle it was meant to have sponsoons on each side ala WWI which is probably a reflection on the design specification as much as the lack of suitable designers and engineers.
It was in the field in North Africa that they first fitted 75mm guns from damaged Shermans to the Churchill. So it was possible but not initiated from the design stages. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the men in the field.