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Wargames Rules for Tanks (2)
FrankTankRants Homepage I hope everyone had a good break over the festive period. The gap in my usual posting routine is not because I have been idle (though too much good food and drink helped with some idleness). On the contrary, since my last post on the subject, I’ve had time to think more about…
Wargames Rules for Tanks
FrankTankRants Homepage This post is a bit all over the place. I have two posts on stuff I’ve been doing with my combat simulation on the go but I have been up to other things of late. I have had the urge to manoeuvre tiny model tanks around on a tiny model battlefield. I think…
WH40k Battle Report: Eldar vs Bloody Bones (2)
FrankTankRants homepage Mrs. Tank Rants was busy the other weekend and suggested that my son and I have a game or do some painting. We’ve had a few painting sessions over the last year or so, and so I thought it might be better to have a game. My son’s Bloody Bones Space Marines chapter…
British Tank Ace
FrankTankRants homepage Another year, another birthday. This year my wife bought me this solo tank oriented board game, last year she’d got me its older stable mate American Tank Ace. My birthday is long gone, this was pre-ordered before the summer but only turned up recently. This isn’t going to be a long post, if…
More Pages Go Live
FrankTankRants homepage Another short post this time, as my writing effort has been expended on pages rather than posts recently. And I’ve been ill. I’ve been developing and using my Combat Simulation quite a bit recently. Also I have been writing about it. Each post where I have used it or added to it, I…
Adding Artillery
FrankTankRants Homepage I am at heart a tweaker! I write a spreadsheet to do something, at work or at home and I can’t help but go back later and tweak it, adding a little detail here, tidying up there or adding some functionality that “isn’t that hard to add now that I have all this…
“Tank, 12 O’clock, 800 yards”
FrankTankRants Homepage Ok, that might not be what a tank commander would actually say to their gunner in reality, but it’s close enough. And yes I know that particular Panther is at 400 yards (but it’s a better picture than the 800 yards one). A Bank Holiday weekend, some sun and not too much else…
Artillery Delivered Anti-Armour Ammunition
FrankTankRants homepage I’ve been explaining these ammunition types recently for other reasons and realised I’d not actually written about them here, so thought I would. But rather than a post, I wrote a page for my “How Stuff Works” section. At the end of my “Ammunition Types and How They Work” page, I mention High…
Improvised Defence Works
FrankTankRants homepage Here is another post showing mostly WWII defences in the UK from 1940 or thereabouts, when the whole nation was expecting the imminent appearance of German paratroopers inland and invasion forces on the beaches. The Directorate of Fortifications and Works department responsible for designing field fortifications made up drawings for a collection of…
Anti-Tank Guns
FrankTankRants Homepage This is another of those posts where I start writing about one thing then end up writing about something else. Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I was doing quite a bit of work on smoke shells earlier this year, with the intention of including them in my…
Gun Houses, Shelters and Emplacements
FrankTankRants homepage Recently I posted some photos of pillboxes from all around mainland UK (This followed from a much earlier post on how to stop a tank, here) which I have visited. These small concrete bunkers were to be used to protect troops with rifles and machine guns as they defended stop lines, choke points…
Battlesight Engagements
FrankTankRants Homepage Periodically I come across this topic while browsing online chats on the intricacies of tank gunnery, but I don’t recall seeing mention of it in any of my books. It’s an interesting little gunnery shortcut but is also a bit niche. Recently I unexpectedly came across another discussion of the same topic but…
Pillboxes
FrankTankRants homepage A couple of years ago I posted “How do you stop a tank” and alluded to the fact that another interest of mine is fortifications. Castles used to be the thing. Then artillery fortifications. Then WWII defensive structures, of which there are many, surviving throughout the countryside and towns in the UK. The…
JagdPanther Juni
FrankTankRants Homepage Yes, I know that isn’t a JagdPanther. But bear with me, it’ll make sense shortly. I got a message from John of “Just needs Varnish” fame recently saying I had been volunteered for a painting challenge he and “Fort Syllabub”s proprietor were going do, the “JagdPanther Juni” June painting challenge. I had to…
WWII Tank Smoke Shells
FrankTankRants Homepage I have been exercised lately by smoke shells, how they perform, how to assess them and most importantly for me, how to include them in my Combat Simulation. In my last post on the subject, here, I touched on some of the smoke producing compounds used and types of shell. I also mentioned…
Three Up and Bags of Smoke
FrankTankRants Homepage I got my programming hat out recently and started to implement smoke shells in my Combat Simulation. You can tell I’m old because I have a programming hat not a coding hat! The title of the post comes from a wargamer I used to battle against many years ago, he had served in…
Target Size and Acquisition
FrankTankRants Homepage Having looked recently at the differences between wargame Probabilities of Hit (P(Hit)) and those I generate based on real world data and more complex methods (here), I thought I’d take a look at target size and Probabilities of Acquisition (P(Acq)). Or in other words how much the target size influences how easy it…
Stargrunt Stuff
FrankTankRants Homepage I was introduced to Ground Zero Games (GZG) rules by the proprietor of Fort Syllabub more years ago than I care to remember. Let’s just say it was in a different century! Stargrunt was the last of their trio (at least it was back then) of generic but “grubby” SciFi rules sets I…
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