The radio
Handbook · chapter 3
Everything you know of the battle that your own crew did not see comes to you over one radio net, from four men each looking at a different piece of it. This chapter is about that net: how you talk on it, what makes a commander speak, why his report is late, what it does to your map when it arrives, and how the replay shows you the period you just lived through.
One net
All five tanks are on a single net. One station transmits at a time and the others wait. There is no company net to listen to, no channel to the infantry, and no way to hear the enemy. What is on the net is what your commanders chose to send, in the order they managed to send it, and what you said to them.
Your own transmissions are events on the net like anyone else’s. The commanders act on what you say. They cannot hear what you did not say.
Talking on the net
You address a commander by his callsign and say what you want, in your own words. He answers in his own voice. A cautious man asks back when an order is unclear; an aggressive one acts on his reading and tells you afterwards. There is no menu of orders and no phrase the game is waiting for.
0742You: Three, hold and put HE on that gun. Four, move up on his left.
0742Three: Holding. HE on the gun at four-seven six-five. I make it one gun, maybe a second behind the shield.
0743Four: Which left, Lieutenant, his or ours? I have the wadi on my right and I am not going in it.
Your own crew are not on the net. They are on the intercom, and you speak to them the same way: Gunner, that tank, AP. Your crew keep a list of the things they have seen and the handles they gave them, so that tank means something to your gunner before it means anything to the platoon.
The four commanders and your own crew are played by a language model. Without a key to the live model they answer in a scripted voice, and the radio pad says so once.
When a commander speaks
A commander does not narrate his battle. He transmits when one of a short list of things happens to him, and otherwise he is busy. The list is the same for every man; what differs is how fast he gets it out and whether, in a bad moment, he gets it out at all.
He sends a contact when he is reasonably sure of it, as he believes it to be, errors included. He sends a Tiger the moment he thinks he is looking at one, whatever his state, and this is the one report even a man who has stopped reporting will still send. He sends a hit on his own tank and what it did, if he knows, with where it struck and the direction it came from. A direction, never a position. He sends a casualty by seat, that he is stopped or knocked out and whether the crew is bailing, his ammunition state when one kind of shell runs low, that your order is done or that he will not do it and why, and a friendly tank burning, if he can tell which. And he sends whatever he holds when you tell him to report.
Note what is not on the list. He does not tell you he has arrived unless you told him to go there. He does not tell you what he cannot see. He does not tell you he is frightened, though you may hear it.
How long it takes
A report is never instant. Between the thing happening and the words reaching you there is a delay, made of three parts. A few seconds, always: the time it takes any man to find the switch, wait for the net to clear, and speak. Longer for an undisciplined man: over a thirty-second period, the difference between a report you can act on this period and one you act on next. Longer again under stress, and a commander past his own limit will, some of the time, not send it at all. When that happens it is written down as a reaction with his name on it, and you will read it in the after-action report.
A steady man reports in seconds. A green one, on a bad day, at the end of the period. Or not.
What a report does to your map
When a commander reports a contact, his belief about it is copied to every tank on the net, errors and all, and plotted on your sheet as a reported contact carrying his name. It appears where he said it was.
It does not correct anything your own crew already believe. If tank one has seen a gun and plotted it in one place, and Two reports the same gun somewhere else, you now have two marks and a decision. The game will not merge them for you, because the men would not have either.
A contact of your own crew’s goes grey the moment they lose sight of it and stays where they last saw it. A contact that came over the net goes grey when the reports stop coming. A fresh report brings it out of grey and moves it to wherever the report puts it.
The replay
When a period is executed you watch it back, tick by tick, from tank one’s seat. You see only what tank one could perceive: contacts your crew gained or lost, shots by your own platoon within earshot, enemy shells landing close, hits and casualties and reactions on your own tank, any platoon tank brewing up, knocked out or bailing out, and the commanders’ reports, voiced at the ticks they were sent.
A hit on the enemy is voiced only if your crew had that contact in view at the very tick it struck. A knock-out or a brew-up is voiced the first time your crew see the hull afterwards, since it is there to be seen burning, and never twice. Everything is named by what your crew believed it was at that tick, not what it turns out to have been. Nothing that happened only to the enemy reaches the screen at all. The observations and reports stay in the radio log afterwards, and the after-action report’s plot counts its ticks the same way, so the two agree to the second.
Who is on the other end
Each commander is a man with a temperament, a level of skill, and an opinion of you. The temperament decides whether he asks or acts. The skill decides how often he is right about what he saw. The opinion decides how much rope he gives an order he does not like, and it moves, both ways, on what you do with his friends’ lives. You will learn who to believe. That is most of the game.