On 26 Oct 2015 at 19:41, John Dallman wrote: > On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 6:06 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, but is that enough to explain a factor of four? > > You can't see nearly as well from inside a tank. It's much harder to > acquire and retain situational awareness. That's the commander's job. > > There's a lot more stuff on the ground to run into, fall into, or get > stuck in. Avoiding that is the driver's job. He can't see all that > well. > > Shooting stuff is the gunner's job. He has a pretty accurate, but > unquided weapon, and opposition who have things to hide behind. He > can't see all that well. > > The loader is the guy who's theoretically replaceable by > mechanisation, and the Soviets did that. The Western powers have > mostly chosen not to go that way. Given that the interior of a tank is > inevitably cramped, because making the vehicle smaller is > advantageous, I think I'd prefer not to share the space with a > mechanical loader that works quickly, because it will remove any > fingers that I leave in the wrong place, and may well bash me in the > head if I'm out of position. > > None of these guys are selected as fiercely as fighter pilots, or get > nearly so much spent on their training. > > John
Note that the loader is doing a job that simply doesn't exist on a modern fighter, and aircraft that had guns that required reloading in flight have never asked the pilot to do that - at worst a gunner or flight engineer has had it as a secondary job. As for the rest of the workload, a fighter has a lot more automation than a tank, particularly of its sensor suite (which is why even big full-feature fighters can now have a single crewmember). Flying is easier moment-to-moment than driving, and with the cannon being fixed aiming is part of flying, and the missiles are automated in a way that a tank's gun is not (and insofar as they need aiming, it's also part of the 'flting' component of the job). That leaves situational awareness and tactics. A fighter pilot can see better than most of the tank crew (all of them if they're buttoned up), and while dogfighting tactics are quite complex, they aren't as terrian sensitive as tank tactics. Also, because of the generally more open environment the fighter pilot gains more from having a friend looking out for him, and fighters generally operate in units of two or four to take advantage of this (it turns out that groups of three tend to result in odd'man'out problems and don't work so well). While tanks do this too, it doesn't provide quite the same boost to situational awareness. On top of this, fighters operate with a *lot* of ground/AWACS support that tanks simply don't have, though if we spent ~50M per tank on electronics and networking, plus extra for real-time drone feeds to command centres that then pipe out the intell in near-real-time, like an AWACS does, a tank might have something similar - but it still wouldn't find those pesky infantry dug in with LAWS and such. However much the fighter pilots might like to claim otherwise, the ground combat environment is more complicated than the air combat environment. More cluttered, more different kinds of threats, and worse (tactical) intel and situational awareness. Yet, due to numbers and perceived value, we train aircrews far more extensively than tank crews and infantry. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
