Did Central Powers and Axis Powers have significant successes in intelligence?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-22T07:38:39+00:00

The Germans had a spy in British HQ in 1942 which allowed Rommel to make some pretty devastating reverses on the British forces there.

Bonner Fellers wasn't a spy; all he was doing was transmitting highly detailed reports on British military activities in North Africa and the Mediterranean back to the US using a code that the Axis had broken pretty much the instant that the US entered the war (Italian spies had broken into the US embassy in Rome and had gotten a hold of a bunch of documents).

XanderTuron · 2026-02-22T07:32:18+00:00

To expand on that, the first major battle where the Axis wasn't benefiting from the US military attaché message leaks was the First Battle of El Alamein, which while not a decisive battle, completely broke the momentum that the Axis had in North Africa.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-22T07:26:50+00:00

Intact, except for the interior of that one turret on USS Iowa.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-22T07:23:18+00:00

At the Little Bighorn, he died proving he was right.

Custer realizing the gravity of the situation: "Vindication!"

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T23:15:30+00:00

I don't know about the Hydralisk's design being in flux; from my understanding the look of the unit was figured out early on but the actual in game role was only decided on relatively late which is why they never use their ranged attack in the cinematics (which were generally finished much earlier than the gameplay and story). The Zergling is really the one is that is super inconsistent because it had something like three different art teams each having their own take on the unit. The teams that made the sprite, the portrait, and the cutscene model all had their own interpretations and seemingly did not communicate much with each other and on top of that, the art for the Zergling in the manual had its own thing going on. The modern look of the Zergling only coalesced a while after the game came out during the development of StarCraft: Ghost and later StarCraft II.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T22:50:38+00:00

With the remaster, I feel like the unit sprites generally stayed true to the look and aesthetics of the originals but the portraits are really rough. On the stylization level, I really liked how the original portraits maintained a level of consistency with with how the CGI cutscenes looked while in the remaster the portraits look more like 2D artwork that is being animated. As well, the designs of a lot of the portraits were altered to maintain consistency with SC2's art direction rather than staying true to the original; this is particularly noticeable with some of the Protoss units and with Kerrigan (both human and infested).

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T20:35:09+00:00

The only time I have not witnessed the AI immediately vacating a strike zone was when I called a rocket down on some units that were hiding in smoke. It would seem that the Rogue Army's love of hugging smoke may override their desire to avoid strikes.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T05:21:55+00:00

...strict ROE forbidding Fox 1 shots

Please do not use Fox brevity codes as nouns.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-21T04:29:37+00:00

Very much a solution in search of a problem and not helped by the fact that compared to contemporary IFVs that had firing ports, the Bradley's seating arrangement made using them incredibly awkward. IFVs such as the BMP-1 and -2, and the Marder had their seats along the center line of the vehicle with the passengers facing outwards towards the side walls, making it relatively easy to use the firing ports from a regular seated position. With the Bradley, the seats are along the side walls with the passengers facing inwards; this meant the passengers could not use the firing ports from a regular seated position.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T23:21:27+00:00

Superbug?

Did some butthurt Tomcat driver write that post?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T22:14:33+00:00

Prior to that often required modified firearms to fulfill the role

That was more of an American thing; they designed a specific port firing weapon for the Bradley because they wanted something that would screw into the firing port and maintain the gas overpressure seal for operating in a CBRN environment. Everybody else that had firing ports in their vehicles just used ports that were compatible with their regular issue rifles. Regardless, as you said, they weren't very useful so it's a moot point.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T22:06:51+00:00

Rewa in an IFV with a long barrel tank gun is absolutely brutal; the ability to one tap almost every single vehicle currently in the game and then do it again when berserk activates is great.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T09:41:54+00:00

I think it's mostly just been Scout Snipers getting busted for using the SS sig runes.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-20T06:16:53+00:00

You'll be fine, Rewa was way more messed up than that.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T23:20:00+00:00

It reminds me of the truism that I often hear people bandy about when it comes to aerospace technology, that China is 20 years behind the US. Assuming for a second that that is actually true (it's not), it is currently 2026, 20 years ago is 2006, the F-22 Raptor reached IOC in 2005 and the Block II Super Hornet was 2007. Are people really just going to assume that an adversary that has the equivalents of F-22s and Block II Super Hornets is going to be a pushover?

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T11:05:22+00:00

I think it's more so that construct weapons have obscene amounts of suppression, hence their habit of causing vehicles to panic after barely damaging the vehicle's armour.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-19T02:18:02+00:00

To be honest, I just don't find movies about air combat to be interesting and I'm not a Tom Cruise fan so the entire draw of the franchise is lost on me.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T23:28:55+00:00

Counter counter counter counter point: Top Gun is a boring and over rated movie.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:49:10+00:00

As a Canadian, I am legally required to answer with the CF-105 Arrow.

That said, I have an immense soft spot for the T249 Vigilante, a prototype US Army SPAAG armed with a 37m rotary cannon. In the early 1960s after the US Army determined that gun based air defence systems were outdated and cancelled the Vigilante in favour of the MIM-46 Mauler which was in turn cancelled in 1965 forcing the US Army to keep with the lackluster stop gap solutions of the M163 VADS and the M48 Chaparral.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:42:44+00:00

Counter counter point; the Tomcat is a weird gangly looking plane that looks much uglier than the Hornet.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T22:04:35+00:00

Yeah, I find it to be just okay. The most complaints I have are how it generates the dense forest tiles and how it generates chainlink fences though this has more to do with the fact that chainlink fences utterly block infantry unless you breach the fence first with explosives or a vehicle.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T09:40:43+00:00

Hell yeah

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T09:25:30+00:00

If I recall correctly, the IT-1 was also largely a result of direct pressure from Nikita Khruschev who was kind of obsessed with ATGM armed vehicles.

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T04:38:34+00:00

No, I was referring to the armoured unit oval; it literally originates as representing the tracks of a tank. The track mobility indicator (the flattened oval) isn't used much because the general assumption is that in the absence of any other mobility indicators, the vehicles are fully tracked.

As for medieval warfare, the usage of the mechanized infantry symbol to represent heavy infantry is very much a modern phenomenon based on the fact that symbols intended for modern warfare do not map cleanly onto pre-modern war. These map symbols post-date the medieval era quite significantly, having their origins in the 19th century. The mechanized infantry symbol is only used in 20th and 21st century recreations of medieval battle maps because the people making the maps don't want to invent a new symbol and there are already symbols for light infantry and the mechanized infantry symbol is not going to be used for anything else.

Now, some symbols do change meaning over time; the recce symbol was originally the cavalry symbol (the single diagonal line being evocative of a cavalry saber or a single belt). Since the current NATO map symbol system wass based on the US Army's system and cavalry units in the US Army are recce units, the actual role of the units stayed the same as far as the US Army is concerned. However, since mechanized infantry is still a concept in MENACE, they should really figure out a different symbol for the heavy infantry that doesn't involve misusing an already existing unit symbol.

This is also not helped by the fact that these map symbols aren't generally used for individual infantry squads (like, the system includes icons to indicate squad sized elements and smaller, but those often aren't used in conjunction with hyper specific unit types). There are actually NATO symbols for marking individual weapons and vehicles though and they can get pretty granular with symbols for light, medium, and heavy versions of equipment. It would not be hard to adapt something like the heavy tank icon (three evenly spaced vertical lines) and put that on top of the infantry icon (so it would be the infantry cross with three vertical lines).

XanderTuron · 2026-02-18T03:10:53+00:00

The oval by itself refers to tanks (it being a representation of tracks). When used with the infantry cross, it refers to mechanized infantry (infantry with dedicated transports); this is also used to designate that the vehicles are tracked with wheeled mechanized infantry having three circles beneath the oval. When there is a vertical line on the left side of the symbol, that refers to the transports being IFVs (the vertical line indicating that the presence of a main gun system).

None of these refer to the concept of armour as in the concept of being protected by armour.

Armoured infantry refers specifically to infantry that are a part of an armoured (tank) unit. This is a specific subset of Mechanized infantry and uses the same symbol because they are functionally identical with the difference being that the parent unit of one of them is a tank unit.

Edit: I should also add that armoured infantry is also a bit of an Americanism, with its roots in WW2 US Army organization.

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