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Gaming in the real world
Author: Fred HuntPublished: 16th January 2008
Weapons
Having a full range of graphically perfect weapons that are very representative of what their real-life equivalents look like makes Battlefield 2 an amazing experience – especially after having the opportunity to use the same equipment our forces use for real in anger. What you fail to see though, are the gritty truths of using this kit in the field: the game’s L85A1/2 (otherwise known as the SA80) for example, has all the good features included but none of the bad ones.
Games don’t jam
Jams are caused by foreign objects, such as dirt, in the breach and/or incorrect loading of ammunition into the magazine. Many of you will have heard the stories of poor kit performance in the liberation of Kuwait – how the British rifle would jam, was often unreliable and had a bad habit of falling apart when dropped. In fact, the MOD introduced a series of upgrades to the L85A1 and stipulated that only the updated version would be issued to forces in our second visit to Iraq – this should give you an idea of the severity of the problems.Most modern automatic weapons work by channelling the hot gases caused by the round’s black powder explosion back to reload the next round. These gases contain carbon, a substance that is then deposited as a residue which, after a few hundred rounds, blocks up the gas parts and can cause jams and miss loads. With 30 rounds in a magazine, this problem can roll round pretty quickly so on an L85A1/2 you would need to switch to excess (a setting of the gas parts) or to sit down and clean the weapon (from my experience in firing the SA80, that can take quite a bit of time – Ed).
Also, while I’m mentioning cleaning... have you ever had to clean a weapon (or its sights) in Battlefield 2? Nah, I didn’t think so...
How many rounds have I got?
Another thing to consider is the handy heads-up displays you get in most games – you know, the ones that conveniently tell you how many rounds you’ve got, and how long it is until you’re going to die (the health meter). Unfortunately for those of us serving in the Armed Forces today, there is no visual way of determining the number of rounds left other than counting how many shots you’ve fired in your head. And believe me, I can guarantee that this is the last thing you would be thinking of when you’re under fire.Real life soldiers don’t benefit from a Heads Up Display (HUD), so in games such as GRAW, a futuristic theme is applied to the modern soldier to explain the presence of a HUD on his headgear. In reality, the only way to know that you’ve run out of ammunition is when the breach stays open after firing last round – you can tell that you need to reload because the sound you hear is different to what you’d normally hear while the rifle is automatically reloading.
Instead, what you hear in most games is a “click” – this indicates an empty chamber, with the firing pin hitting nothing. The reality is that the firing pin can’t be released unless the moving parts are manually released forward and thus, there would be no click.
Another thing to consider is reloading – have you ever noticed in most shooters how reloading the weapon before you’ve exhausted the rounds in your magazine automatically puts those rounds into the next magazine? Every soldier dreams of such a thing, as reloading an empty magazine with your cold/sweaty/sandy/muddy/tired hands is not a job to look forward to.
Of course, this is just skimming the surface of the reality void for the L85A1/2, and each other weapon will have its own niggles and quirks in real life – ones that would definitely push you towards choosing the better weapon when equipping and steering away from the lemons.
In actual fact, most Special Forces in the world are able to choose their own weapon and in many cases choose not to take up their homegrown offering. As for accuracy, you may or may not be comforted in knowing that the standard soldier will usually only train on a 25m firing range. This is simply because beyond that the accuracy of these weapons drops significantly and environmental aspects such as firer stability and wind variance increase inaccuracy even further.
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