Armoured cars in France '14

[ComradeP]

Thanks Volcano Man.

I've never fully understood how vehicles that exposed their crews so much could be such a success on the battlefield, I guess the fear of the vehicles being invincible played a large part. The earliest UK armoured cars were seemingly only capable of stopping rifle-calibre bullets from over 500 meters on their armoured parts.

These vehicles were "armoured cars" in the most literal sense: cars with some armour plating, the additional weight of which the Rolls-Royce happened to handle better than Mercedes and other chassis.

As an aside, I've always wondered how the Universal Carrier could be such a success, considering how exposed its passengers and crew were compared to German and American halftracks, but the doctrine of not using them like true battlefield taxi's or support weapons might be an explanation.

As another aside, the SA values of 1916> British infantry units equipped with Lewis MG's on roughly squad level could be quite nice compared to German units with a handful of Madsens, it might even be strange to play a wargame where the British have substantially better SA values, considering how weak the British are in WWII compared to German motorized/mechanized forces in WWII games.  

For those interested as to what it meant that car manufacturers only delivered the chassis, with the customer deciding on what coach/cab to fit at a specialized craftsman, some pictures of the earliest Minerva's show a decidedly "do it yourself" look compared to standardized armoured cars like the Rolls-Royce 1914 pattern.

Pictures of the ad-hoc UK armoured cars can be found on the page linked to in the first post.