[Christian LaSala]

Okay, here’s a really oddball one for everyone here:

If you have a Support Lt with a few buddies near an artillery piece and you use the Recrew option when taking an action to move ALL of them over to the gun, what happens to the officer’s order die?

 

We already have rules for officers in units, so I’d assume he continues to function as an officer, just as part of the gun crew and only activating when the gun activates, but what happens to his order die? Is it considered a casualty? Is it put aside until the officer is killed, then awarded as a kill? Is it just removed from the game and no one gets credit for it?

 

Additional complexity to the situation: he and the extra guys he has are armed with SMGs; if the gun is assaulted can they reaction fire with their personal weapons? Normal artillery crew don’t get personal weapons, but the extra guys a Support Officer takes explicitly DO get weapons. While you cannot make reaction fire with an indirect weapon, can the six extra dudes with SMGs fire their personal weapons when their gun is assaulted?

More awkward questions: the extra crew have weapons with their own equipment line, in addition to the artillery piece. Can they fire them when you shoot the artillery piece IF you have more men than it requires to crew it? Precedent has been set for this with the IJA Machine Gun Section that specifies any men beyond the 2 required loaders are allowed to fire their weapons in addition to the MMG (so you don’t get left with 8 riflemen loading one MMG). If it’s an indirect weapon can they fire at another target (since indirect weapons in squads can fire independently already)?

Yeah, the Support Officer really mucked up a BUNCH of rules.

[Christian LaSala]

I’ve got a question on the IJA grenaduer squads. Historically Knee Mortar operators were equipped with rifles in addition to their mortar (which was really just a grenade launcher).

The books all say “you can give a man a light mortar for +25 points” and not “replace”.

I’m aware you cannot fire both weapons at once, but since the knee mortar doesn’t replace the rifle, can you choose to use the rifle if the enemy is inside the 12” minimum range of the knee mortar?

As an aside, why does the knee mortar have a minimum range? Historically it could be fire perpendicular to the ground as a direct fire weapon because it used a trigger and not a drop-fire system like a real mortar?

[Christian LaSala]

Here’s a question that’s my group has been trying to figure out: can you assault with two units at once into the same target if you activate them simultaneously with an officer?

It really seems like a corner case, but sometimes you only have damaged units and an officer (1st Lt or higher) left and assaulting a larger unit to push them off an objective wouldn’t work normally, due to how much numbers affect assasults, but combining the two units might give you enough bodies to pull it off.

Is there a way to do that, or are you bound to throw one unit at a time into the meat grinder?

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