"The two Team Yankees and the Novel" Topic

A short time after the historical speculative fiction Team Yankee was published, the boardgame Team Yankee, designed by Frank Chadwick (Command Decision, anyone?) came out The boardgame had a supplement to convert it to a miniatures game.
I believe that Coyle was aware of the Chadwick game and even though he worked on the current miniatures game, I wonder which game is more faithful to his novel according to Coyle
And then there's this. The Coyle book is not in the TMP "library". One might have expected the game's authors or publishers to have supple a copy?
At a recent convention, during thw playing of the current Team Yankee, I asked if anyone knew of the Chadwick game and not surprisingly no one did

Not sure what you are getting at, but I think the target audience for the new TY game was not alive when GDW was

Saber6---that's cruel. True but cruel!! :)

Knowing Chadwicks' other rules, one can assume missles dominated over every thing else in the game. Another eighties fallacy that crashed like a lead balloon in '91. I always wanted to meet the man in order to give him a good slap upside the head for this.

I understand he may even be on the boards here from time to time.

I'm old enough to remember the GDW TY board game along with TSR's The Hunt for Red October. My HS game club played lots of hex-and-counter games from Avalon Hill and SPI, even the cumbersome Squad Leader. Good times.

It wouldn't surprise me that many of the younger TY players who also play FOW have not read the cold war novel or even heard of it before now but maybe the miniature game will make them interested in reading it.

My favorite Coyle book though is Sword Point.

i read that book when i was in the 5th grade from dad's military book collection. I did a book report on it and for extra credit i made a diorama of a scene. I chose the scene where the US dragon teams ambush the Russian Armour as it tired to push through some dense woods. chopped up a bunch of old plastic army men and used those pens where you if you blew through it, it had a splatter/spray effect. I used my red one to do blood spray. My teacher was horrified and I wasn't allowed to present it to the class.

If you were born in 1991, you'd be 25 now. I imagine most people gaming this have no recollection of the cold war period at all.

Some of those who didn't know or remember the Chadwick game were older gamers
They might not have known about the boardgame because of what I have seen of a prejudice (maybe too strong of a word ) against boardgames by miniature gamers
As too any Chadwick design, well, even Featherstone and Dunnigan made huge blunders and tried to mask them. After all, they were going on the basis of certain assertions of the time, be it missiles or the ten foot tall German or three foot tall WW2 French or Russian or indeed the 1990 opinion of the 7 foot tall Iraqi
Besides, who knows what would the NATO-Pact war in Europe have been like if fought in 1960 or1970 or1980 as there wasn't any and the technologies changed as well as the troops Using the Arab Israeli wars or Vietnam for support of this or that theory reminds me of the old social science joke about data collection, where a driver who lost his car keys in a dark alley is found looking for them in another better lit street saying, the lighting is better here
And this observation about searching for data searching applies to a lot of what passes for history
So, in five or ten years, the data for the current TY may be found to be as wrong as the 1987 TY

I don't think Frank deserve's a smack in the head. Team Yankee and Combined Arms were designed with them best open information available at the time. Frank didn't have access to any thing classified and if was off on missile effectiveness then so was everyone else not in the intelligence community. I also played the original DunnKempf rule and I can tell you missiles were pretty dominant in that game as well.

I've read several times on TMP, in different threads, that ATGMs weren't as effective as everyone thought they'd have been. From stories I heard from Gulf War vets, TOWs seemed like they did a helluva job on T-72s, and I know from buddies of mine that were anti-armor guys that the same was true in OIF 1.

What are the opinions that ATGMs aren't effective based on?

And just so we're all on the same page, I have no real knowledge on the subject, just anecdotes from guys I knew saying they smoked T-72s. And besides what the negative opinions are based on, I'm trying to figure out what the negative opinion is: is it that the missiles would miss? Not penetrate? Both? Something else?

Thanks in advance.

V/R,
Jack

The Israeli's certainly didn't think they were worthless, though they didn't "make tanks obsolete" as some had assumed.

Saber6 for the win. Still chuckling.

VERY,VERY, "True but Cruel!"

one can assume missles dominated over every thing else in the game. Another eighties fallacy that crashed like a lead balloon…

Possibly reinforced by very effective use of Sagger missiles during Yom Kippur?

YouTube link

Measure, counter measure, counter counter measure; and so on ad infinitum. . .

Not just in the YKW. HOT caused the Israelis a lot of problems in Lebanon, the Libyans suffered against Milans in Chad, TOW was very effective in ODS and Lebanon too.

IIRC, Frank was an Army Reserve Officer at the time and I bet his work was monitored for "leaks". He co-authored at least two books in 1992 on the first Gulf War.

Also, IIRC, the early sagger and other ATGMs relied on the trigger puller to keep the cross hairs on the target. By firing in the general direction of where the missle came from, it was hoped to make that guy flinch and have to re-acquire the missile. Hard to do in just seconds! Enter the bee-hive round to assist in that task!

I recall the Israeli stories of all the Sagger wires draped over the barrels of their tanks of those that missed!

Enter the bee-hive round to assist in that task!

To be effective the tank had to have beehive loaded, the gun pointing in the right direction and the range known to set the fuse on the round. Not easy to do in a few seconds. Hence the Israelis fitting extra MGs.

Talking with Israeli's in the 80's, they felt the TOW was good but made whichever tank it hit a total loss on the battlefield and unfit for rebuild. A Israeli LTC when asked about how many Sagger missiles it took to obtain a hit in the Sinai during the YKW, "a whole ing lot". He had been a Captain then and found himself and his men thrown across the Suez to hold what would become a crossing site until relieved.

The beehive round was found during Vietnam to no have the desired effect. The small flecettes (dart) were found to be able to inflict what could become a lethal wound but not necessarily incapasitate upon striking. The dart would pass completely thru the target leaving a tiny hole at entry and exit. Even being hit by a large number of darts would sometimes not immediately kill an individual. The cannister rounds for the Sheridan did not have this problem. By 1980, the use of Beehive was still covered in the classrooms of the Armor School, with a possible potential idea of shooting it at helicopters, but it was not in the basic load of ammunition on a tank in Europe.

I'll have to dig out my Team Yankee board game……..I've got Red Storm Rising too……might have to give them both a spin!

Wasn't there something like one Sagger every 30 metres?

Tom-

I'm pretty sure Frank was never an Army Officer. If he was, it was the top- secret kind. And he is the sole author of both Desert Shield and Desert Storm Fact Books. The first one is what gave him the title of "New York Times Best Selling Author" :-)

I've got the Team Yankee board game and it's pretty good. Very playable.

I've even used it with 6mm GHQ minis to do x2 T-72 Bns vs Team Yankee.

All the scenarios in the rules are straight from the book.

Go over to Boardgame Geek and have a look:
link

"…the TOW was good but made whichever tank it hit a total loss on the battlefield and unfit for rebuild."

So, sounds like penetration wasn't the problem.

"ATGMs relied on the trigger puller to keep the cross hairs on the target. By firing in the general direction of where the missle came from, it was hoped to make that guy flinch and have to re-acquire the missile. Hard to do in just seconds!"

The first counter to that is, if your tank is moving at speed, spotting the plume of the launch, realizing what it is, and getting weapons on target, is hard to do in just seconds.

The second counter is pairing the ATGM with an HMG, with the HMG keeping the tank buttoned up so they can't see anything while the missile is in flight.

I'm by no means saying ATGMS made/are making tanks obsolete, and tank production during the Cold War would suggest no one else thought that either. But I think ATGMs are pretty effective, so where does the data/opinion that they're not come from?

V/R,
Jack

Up to '91, fire and forget was a future comcept.
An ATGM packed enough punch, that is not in doubt.

The ability to tracka target for eight to twenty seconds is where the failure occurs. Distances from cover to cover are pretty short in most of central Europe. The ability to track a target in Europe might only be a brief few seconds. The spate of ATGMs back then were all wire guided. Bushes trees and cover really play havoc with wire guidance nevermind not seeing the target as it disappears behind a barn. Maybe a bit easier in the emptness of southern Iraq or the Sinia. Having to maintain control of the guidance system and to continuously target and correct the ATGM is not so easy when you are under fire. A fifty cal or even a 7.62mm burst travels at what three to five times the speed of the ATGM?

ATGMs need distance and time to track in order to work.
A fin stab cna tracel ober three km in two seconds.

All anyone needed to do was to talk to a tank gunner to learn this in the eighties.

Team Yankee did have the uber missiles "problem" (I have no opinion on this either way). Even giving the Dragon a very high AT factor. Later games in the series ending up halving the AT factors for missiles and reducing the number – in TY I think every squad was given a Dragon value for example, might be in TOE but the things were darn near useless against any tank.

Isn't the main advance of the ATGM that, like the RPG before it, it gives the infantry a way to threaten tanks where they couldn't before.

It's more of an ambush weapon, but now, a tank can't simply sit 600 meters from an infantry unit and be safe. There's always a risk of incoming.

Similar to how the bazooka and RPG did the same for the 100-300 meter range band.

I'm always reminded of reading about those old, obsolete 57mm AA guns in Vietnam. They didn't shoot down many planes, but their existence meant that American pilots had to fly higher and generally work with them in mind.
Their simple existence changed the tactics you had to employ.

There is always the risk of threat.
That is why you try to limit your exposure to any risk.

Drive from concealed position to concealed position.
limit your time of exposure to observation and fire.
Use your main and secondary armament and return fire.
Return fire does not even have to be accurtae to make someone loose concentration and tracking.
Use smoke for concealment.
Use artillery and mortars.

It does not mean that they are not a threat any mre. It just means that wise use can limit their effectiveness. Like I said, missles were incredibly over rated until '91.
ATGM have limitations too.

Even after '73 there was a huge 'lessons learned' school on how all those saggers were overcome by relearning the use of combined arms working with infantry and artillery together with armour.

So, we are to judge the reality of missile effectiveness based on the info of the 1980s or the 1990s or later? One view is to be faithful to the Coyle novel, as the missiles deficiency were not known then or to depart from the so called reality of the novel and incorporate what we know now This is an ever present problem with our games based on data as the older data is revised and the older games deemed less historical, yet the current and past TY are based on the Coyle novel, well, the scenarios, but the data? What was Coyle input into the current TY? What revision to his original did he accept? Do we approach Coyle as we would say SLA Marshal, with a grain of salt or as the game is supposed to be based on his book, follow Coyle? TY is supposed to be a representation of what they in the 1970s 1980s thought the NATO-Pact war would be. At this writing, there is no Pact, the tanks and technologies of 2015 are not those of 1980 and because we have no real data, no real battles in Europe of those years, how are we to judge whether Coyle opinion at the time is more real than any later revision?

I've still got the TY boardgame, though only remember playing it once. I had another tactical modern boardgame at the time called 'Air Cav' that we thought was much better, so we stuck with that – sadly that one got destroyed by a leaky roof and accompanying mould. :(

The Dragon was a very noisy and slow missile compared to the Tow. It popped and puttered its way to the target, but, it still moved along as can be seen in this short video

YouTube link

One problem for the operator during launch was the shifting weight of the missile as it left the tube. If the gunner was leaning excessively forward prior to launch it could cause them to pitch the sight assembly forward and down causing the missile to fly into the ground.

The novel had to go past military censors, nothing in it could tip off any hard military data except that which was already public knowledge. The issue with missiles is that they are big and bulky and you can run out quickly. Logistics catches up with you sooner or later.

The novel's description of the Dragon as with everything else should be updated based on later data, yes, no IDK?
Not only does the operate have to keep track of the missile staying still, but it creates a backlash of smoke betraying the operator's position
In the TY game I played, spotting the target never entered, yet in a TY game where units must be spotted to be fired on, this w old be important
Also the missiles speed is slow enough for the target to react. I recall photos of tanks with the wires of these missiles draped over their hulls, the tanker had simply moved and the missile missed. This is something that cannot directly be factored in as the missiles and reaction take place below the time frame of the game turn. It could be factored in with the following modifiers, the distance, the angle, the target speed, any visibility features and target size (a T72 being larger than say a PT76) As TY currently is scaled one to one for vehicles this would be appropriate, yet do we want to add these mods just to be supposedly more realistic for this game?
t

Isn't this the sort of thing that ultimately would just get factored into the to-hit roll?

> sn't this the sort of thing that ultimately would just get factored into the to-hit roll?

NO. leaves out way too much doing so. If your enemy is using proper tactics a missile should have a very hard time scoring a hit, if they are not it should be very easy for them to hit. Lumping this all under the to-hit chances pushes too much of that under the rug. Easy to use modifiers for the target evading or popping smoke or the enemy being able to fire at the missile shooter (with other non-moving units on overwatch) gives a better feel.

I mean, it's a D6 based game intended for having a lot of figures on the table. There's only so much you can do.

Would a tank crew ever not use these defensive tactics, if they had them available?
"-2 when shooting at veteran crew" or whatever seems fine to me.

If we're playing a battalion commander, then we shouldn't really be making decisions about what individual tanks are doing.
The tank commander gets paid to command this tank. I get paid to figure out what hill he's going to go die on.

The old problem of which level of Command you are playing. Is TY a game about the platoon or the company or the individual tank? In the current TY you roll hits against the other platoon, yet individual tanks/vehicles are affected. In the Chadwick First Battle series where each counter is a platoon, the effects of fire affect the entire platoon, not separate individuals. Because of this mixing of levels in the new TY and because the individual vehicles of the platoon are moved and fired and take hits, it's hard to not have to have included the actions and reactions of the individual vehicles such as reacting to individual missiles
That the designer is using the D6 and that this creates too rough of a granularity to include the modifiers for the individual reactions or act I on and if we deem that the game fails to be faithful to Coyle s description of individual vehicles in the novel, well, then the designer screwed up and Coyle himself should have noted this. Indeed, Chadwicks version is more fathful as while it portrays entire platoons, it abstracts the individual actions which is where TY now has problems
One note on TY as it is. The casualties are much too high. Platoons should be in serious morale difficulty after 30% losses, breaking at approaching 60%, not the 80% currently This kind of loss reminds me of Fred Vietmeyers old Napoleonic miniatures game Column Line and Square where the so called winner took 80% casualties and the lose above 90% which never happened in that era anymore than it did in any one action or day in WW2 or later unless there were exceptional circumstances such as fanatics or fortresses Troops would run away well before they were wiped out

With that new video of an ISIS tow 2 failing to kill a T-90A on a turret roof/gunsight area hit,Troopwos arguments are made more valid.Yes,ERA has advanced significantly since Frank Chadwicks 1985 assault game,missles have too
.The big issues in the video are why was the T-90A bunkerized on a hilltop given its poor gun depression,why was the shtora shut off ,why werent the perimeter guards more vigilant?Where was the suppression fire ?
The next time there might not be a crew stunned combat resolution.

GDW's TY (First Battle) is single vehicle or squad per counter. Assault was platoon per counter.

Assault gave us Command Decision.

I think the issue folks had with ATGM is most rules gave NATO ATGM @ 80% chance to hit and WARPAC @ 70-75%.

Usually this was figured as 2-3 actual missiles, but gamers seem to think that every fire roll is a single shot.