PC favorite Vehicles in Twilight
 

Has anyone else encountered PC s that always seems to have a favorite or tendency towards getting certain vehicles?

My brother has a secret love for the M247 sgt york AD , hes had 3 over the years in 3 differant groups he has played.

For me its the Bradley APC and the M1A1 - had the M1A1 in my original game and the Bradley in several games since

I have only ever really got to play my personalized humvees or motorcycles. I dont get to play much as Im always the gm. The last time I got to play I was ducking Mexican patrol by driving thru fields and suburbs trying to avoid being captured. Made several great roles to keep from crashing or flipping.

Depends on the situation. For a cargo carrier you can't really go past the OT-64. A little armour and a reasonable weapon with decent mobility and range plus excellent cargo capacity. NOT a combat vehicle with any real chance of survival, but certainly tough enough to withstand shrapnel and small arms and keep your supplies (relatively) undamaged.

For a light combat vehicle I've always been fond of the FV721 Fox, or the FV101 Scorpion for a tracked vehicle.

If fuel and long range mobility isn't an issue, then it's the Challenger II.

Most of my groups went for the M2 or Humvee.

Leopard 3 tank. Is there a cooler looking vehicle anywhere?

Quite often the conversation comes around to "what's the best vehicle for the Twilight War in the Polish theatre" and the answer I always give is "the AAVP-7A1, it's a truck that swims and has good guns." You don't actually fight in it but for just carrying junk and being resistant to machine guns it's awesome.

However.

When it really comes down to it might true love is the M551A1 Sheridan reconnaissance vehicle. It's just the coolest, best-looking track out there in my own personal, probably warped opinion.

I'm not sure if I submitted it to Paul but I did a "best vehicle that never was" where the poor old track got the upgrade kit it seriously needed* to an A2 model involving ERA blocks, an upgraded missile sight system, an upgrade to the main gun making it an M81E1A2 with a semi-combustible cartridge case and an improved casing, beam riding retrofit for the missile, the removal of the flotation capacity and some bar armour around the rear.

I've run maybe two of them in games but they've never really gone anywhere. Pity because I got the FM for the little bus and read it so I'd know what it was and wasn't capable of it.

(*Really, the M551 was never seriously upgraded during its whole twenty eight year long service. It got some vision upgrades in 1990 that were done so grudgingly it's really indicative of how much the tank commanders loathed any idea of light tanks and gives you an idea of why the M8 Buford, the Stingray and all the others withered on the vine)

M-1A1, followed by the M-113.

I've always found it interesting that some other countries saw the potential in the M551 when it seemed that the US did not. I believe it's been mentioned before somewhere on this forum, that the Australian Army was testing the M551 as well as the M114 as potential vehicles for the reconnaissance role. Unfortunately the M551 was found to be a bit too delicate for Australian conditions (and the M114 wasn't found to be entirely suitable either).
It really does appear that the higher-ups in the US Army had no interest in light tanks despite their demonstrated usefulness in WWII in the recce role.

The persistent and understandable concern is that in extreme circumstances they'll be used in place of MBTs and suffer the inevitable losses. When light tanks get hit they have a much higher incidence of crew injury and death to similar penetrations compared to MBTs owing to the fact the far heavier armour and chassis of the MBT absorbs most of the energy of the strike.

The problem with the M551 was that unlike nearly every vehicle it was expected to be perfect from the beginning when really it had several evolutions in front of it owing to it being a fairly new concept. While it looks like a "light tank" that whole concept was outdated and nonviable on the modern battlefield. It was instead supposed to essentially be a fragment-proof heavy weapons platform and reconnaissance vehicle and then had its role changed several times according to whatever fad was sweeping the various military think tanks at the time. I can understand why the US Army was suspicious of such a creature born of many fathers really.

At the time of its creation MBTs were doing away with massive armour except in a few cases and instead relying on speed and agility as it was thought that the recently-perfected chemical rounds could cut through any thickness of practical armour. This was the period of the Leopard 1 and the AMX 30. The gun-launcher allowed the M551 to mount the equivalent killing power of a 105mm+ cannon on a 15 tonne chassis (just) while still being able to defend itself from any MBTs it couldn't avoid while still being able to cross light bridges, negotiate soft ground and in extremis swim across rivers. As the Japanese found in WW2 having a pathetic tank that could get places no other tank possible could is very valuable indeed.

Now, from a US standpoint this is nice but hardly essential. They had a lot of MANPATs around of varying utility and the US owns the air in all but a NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation and even then they intend to get local air superiority/supremacy via clever operational methods.
However for non-US western forces as you say these little beasties become attractive because in the absence of US military support you suddenly get a lightweight support vehicle that can bring long range heavy firepower to the troops with comparatively little infrastructure. This is one of the many reasons behind the proliferation of wheeled gun carriages that are around now because even though these things can only just stop a 23mm AP round the can blow the ever living crap out of anything less than a current generation MBT. Most armies have kept these specialist vehicles lurking around for airborne and rapid intervention purposes (even the soviets kept the ancient ASU-85 because they had trouble replacing it until the BMP-3 came out). Looking back it seems these vehicles tended to get deployed far more often than MBTs did until recently and when used for patrolling and support tend to get used more often with non-US forces.

Continuing my wild derailment of the thread (I'm going to post another vehicle to bring it back on-track after this) the M551 as essentially a proof-of-concept vehicle should have changed a fair bit over its lifespan apart from the aforementioned dislike the US army power structure had for it. It had simply too little armour and wasn't even rated against 14.5mm weapons from memory in a time when that weapon was everywhere and should have had an engine and armour upgrade. As technology advances arrived they were prime contenders for upgrades and although the did get a laser rangefinder and thermal sights along with some lesser improvements in the A1 upgrade the basic problems were not addressed. Now, there is a ton of reasons for this as there were new vehicles available and no one wanted it around but if these things had been done the vehicle may have lived another ten years minimum.

Here's a list:

- Mine vulnerability
- Autocannon vulnerability
- Obsolescent main weapon technology
- Excessive recoil from main gun
- Slow main gun reloading cycle
- Main gun round fragility resulting in catastrophic loss on some penetrations
- Sensitive sighting systems
- significant dead zone between minimum missile engagement range and maximum HEAT range
- Impractical amphibious system
- Ad hoc commander's weapon mount too large
- Obsolescent commander's station with no hunter/killer functionality
- Limited sensing ability

Now the poor amphibious capability and lack of armour can all be solved by ditching the swimming aspect and up-armouring the vehicle with applique armour. This extra weight would also absorb recoil. Making an A2 version of the gun with a redesigned breech would solve the ammo, reloading and dead zone problems. Changing the missile to a beam-rider would require retrofitting the ammunition but that's a lot cheaper than making new stuff. A modern cupola would finally fix the TC's station.

At this point you'd start thinking that the XM8 Buford is just a simpler and easier system to utilise but that still only used a low pressure 105mm gun and it's inability to deal with MBTs was the whole reason the 152mm gun launcher was adopted in the first place.

Back on-topic.

A much-loved class of vehicle is the light guntruck.
As an alternative to the standard Hummer the light guntruck such as the Pinzergauer or the Swedish Volvo 4140 (with its awesome ground clearance) lets a scout team return fire with overwhelming power while still lugging a bunch of junk. We had a 4140 in our Kolobrzeg game and it was the only vehicle to survive.
For some reason we never used a Hummer for this reason and I think it was because we were stuck in the "this is what a Hummer looks like and they never change" mentality.

Volvo C303 weapon carrier:
https://topworldauto.com/pics/Volvo/...gb-1111-02.jpg

To be fair though, the game was pitched at an American audience with the expectation that they would play American characters, so American vehicles are an obvious choice. It seems pretty common for non-American players to have as many non-American vehicles on their favourites list as they have American vehicles, if not more.
The very few T2k games I was involved with had British or Soviet vehicles in the main rather than US. No surprise really as we (the players & Ref) were not American.

The favorite vehicle I ever used in t2K is an AMX10RC, liberated after a deep penetration raid by the game group at the time, Team Wolverine. It had, in turn, been liberated by German Forces, and in turn had been liberated by Czechoslovakian forces, before COL Green and the crew of his LAV-25 (along with another tanker), decided to make it his command vehicle after dropping some CS grenades down the open hatches. (Took a while and a lot of activated charcoal pulled from MOPP suits to take care of that mess, and the faint small of CS still sometimes permeates the interior.) Had a decent amount of ammo onboard, and the gun mount was later modified at a small shop outside of Krakow to take an M68 gun. Too bad I haven't played in a game with it in a while --it seemed to lead a charmed existence.

Despite their shortcomings, the entire 82nd mourned the loss of their M551s. We badly needed some kind of armor backup, and the LAV-25 (which they experimented with before Desert Storm) and up-armored HMMWVs (which they experimented during and after Desert Storm) just don't cut it. There was a rise in morale when it looked like the M8 might be put into service, but then the DoD let us down again.

I sometimes wonder what 3/73 is doing these days. Probably tooling around in M1114s...

The only vehicle we ever got was a BRDM-1 (or maybe -2, it's been 30 years), which promptly got blown up.

My favorite (and/or most memorable) group that I've run was probably my first campaign. It lasted almost a year in real-time, and they rolled a significant number of "Derelict" random encounters. At one time or another, they had an M1(A1?), a LAV-75 (sounded so cool from the description); neither with any main-gun ammo), an M113, and I think a BMP, with at least one HMMWV and more than one 2.5-tonners. Not all of these were running at the same time, but they sure tried.

I suspect their favorite was the M1, mine may have been the -75.

The few times I've been a player, I've hoped for an M113 on the vehicle table.
I read an article before I played T2k about the Scorpion and its family, and those always sounded really handy, but I've never played/run in a game with one.

I have a mate who was in the REME in Northern Ireland and Germany and his house game had a pair of AT-105 Saxons.

For those who don't know Saxons are a V-Hull and probably had the strongest mine mitigation design in NATO for a medium vehicle. Like many personnel carriers the rear seats are removable to convert the Saxon into a cargo carrier.
This low/medium intensity design makes it a great vehicle for T2K gypsy soldiers because it makes a great light truck that can take incidental abuse. It can carry about 10 troops in the rear or about one to two tonnes of junk as well as more stuff in an overhead rack under the armour, and that's before you start hanging junk off the outside.

The standard version in the 1990s was the AT-105E which had a machine gun turret rather than the open pintle the original vehicle had, some of these turrets were spares from the FV432 APC; a small one-man turret with a roof hatch, periscopes and an FN-MAG.

So yeah, a two-man cargo carrier that's also a high mobility very lightly armoured combat vehicle that uses little fuel and is easy to work on.

https://www.armyrecognition.com/unit...ription_u.html

Here's a model of one with the turret, the only turreted image I could find
https://www.scalemates.com/products/...0-pristine.jpg

Ran a Californian campaign last year and the party had a ancient LVTP-5 fron a scrap yard / depot, it was a realy great machine and they loved it, massive cargo, amphibious and with enough armour to stop small arms.I always let characters figure out what vehicles they want to keep from what they get or capture

I believe its been converted to more 'modern' uses as well in Ukrainian service, acting as a drone carrier among other things. They're reportedly really popular with the troops, quite the turnaround from their rep in British service!

LAV-25 FTW
 

I've had a thing for the LAV-25 ever since I set eyes on the content of the v1 box set.

THIS has reignited my pre-teen wheeled AFV crush:

https://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=6095

I've also grown quite fond of the BTR-80, since one, a former DDR example affectionately called, Der Krokodil, has featured prominently in a long-running campaign in which I play.

IIRC, we had a favorite PC vehicle poll here at one point. I'll post a link here if I can find it.

As Promised
 

It only listed APCs/IFVs as options, but here it is:

https://forum.juhlin.com/showthread....t=favorite+afv

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I am happy to be a bad influence on you, Rae.

- C.

There seems to be a large difference between the British and the Ukrainians in their use of the AT-105, with the Ukrainians choosing to use the vehicle in manner better suited for which it was designed. That is to say, the AT-105 was meant to be used as a protected transport/cargo/utility vehicle and not as a frontline APC.
I believe the original design intention was for it to be used to transport troops/cargo from the rear to the front - similar to an APC but not the 'same', the AT-105 is more accurately, an armoured GS truck.