So sat at home, bored out of my mind, I decided to create some diagrams to demonstrate what I meant by spacings on the first post.
So as a background, even in Arma, incoming fire raises your stress level. This has a variety of effects based on weight, from making it harder to spot the enemy, to making it harder to return fire accurately to outright pinning you behind cover. All of this makes it much easier for the AI to close in and kill you.
Every round has an area around it, we'll call it the suppression area, where it will affect you. A machine gun, due to an inherent inaccuracy and sheer weight of numbers, will have a much larger one than a single rifleman. But this zone is important to us. Theoretically, in the open we should maintain 10m or more spacings, meaning that even a belt fed machine gun firing on us in wedge formation would struggle to effect more than a couple at a time.
The main point of this post though, is inter grouping spacings. We always tend to travel as a single packet, like an overlarge squad rather than several separate elements, probably because its easier to control. We then get shot at and pinned down as a group, like this:
Where the heavy red line is the actual line of fire, the red cone is the suppression zone and the blue is us. Maybe we were travelling down the road, one team on either side, and when we got to the break from the town, got shot at and all dashed into the building. It's something that has happened before, and given the field of fire the enemy has on us, it makes it difficult to do anything in return, return fire will be hampered and movement will be difficult without running into a bullet.
However, imagine that one fireteam followed the road, and one followed the dry riverbed that runs parallel to the road. The contact begins at the same time as the first scenario, but instead of all bolting for the same position, the second fire team moves into the compounds in front of them. You then get a situation like this:
The second fire team are now in position to locate the enemy firing on the first and either suppress it or manoeuvre on it.
This also helps out with multiple firing positions, as it forces them to split their firepower rather than concentrating on one particular position, thus reducing the suppressive effect on both halves of the section.
So as a background, even in Arma, incoming fire raises your stress level. This has a variety of effects based on weight, from making it harder to spot the enemy, to making it harder to return fire accurately to outright pinning you behind cover. All of this makes it much easier for the AI to close in and kill you.
Every round has an area around it, we'll call it the suppression area, where it will affect you. A machine gun, due to an inherent inaccuracy and sheer weight of numbers, will have a much larger one than a single rifleman. But this zone is important to us. Theoretically, in the open we should maintain 10m or more spacings, meaning that even a belt fed machine gun firing on us in wedge formation would struggle to effect more than a couple at a time.
The main point of this post though, is inter grouping spacings. We always tend to travel as a single packet, like an overlarge squad rather than several separate elements, probably because its easier to control. We then get shot at and pinned down as a group, like this:
Where the heavy red line is the actual line of fire, the red cone is the suppression zone and the blue is us. Maybe we were travelling down the road, one team on either side, and when we got to the break from the town, got shot at and all dashed into the building. It's something that has happened before, and given the field of fire the enemy has on us, it makes it difficult to do anything in return, return fire will be hampered and movement will be difficult without running into a bullet.
However, imagine that one fireteam followed the road, and one followed the dry riverbed that runs parallel to the road. The contact begins at the same time as the first scenario, but instead of all bolting for the same position, the second fire team moves into the compounds in front of them. You then get a situation like this:
The second fire team are now in position to locate the enemy firing on the first and either suppress it or manoeuvre on it.
This also helps out with multiple firing positions, as it forces them to split their firepower rather than concentrating on one particular position, thus reducing the suppressive effect on both halves of the section.
Lead me, Follow me, or Get out of my way.