Bayonets

Barton commented on my thread. My life is complete and I can die in peace.

tbh i think that the technical issue with impletnting it is the animations are already a problem in this game adding more sounds like a bad idea.

then we go to gameplay it sounds like a nice idea but in realm of coh i think it would be bad in general for the game. that and this game wasn't designed for melee in mind i feel the only way it could work is if they made melee (only) units which wouldn't really fit in ww2.

If implemented I guess it would be more of a cosmetic feature than anything else. Dont know if it would look any better though.

On a sidenote: modern armies still uses bayonets, not for clearing houses but mostly when assaulting enemy positions and entrenchements.

If implemented I guess it would be more of a cosmetic feature than anything else.

The ONLY single advantage to implementing that is, we would finally give schock troops the weapon they actually use in game currently, but with different skin:

Show Spoiler

Other then that single unit, as I've said, it makes absolutely no sense, adds absolutely zero value to the game and imbalances 100% of infantry combat in return.

Pretty much every rifleman was issued a bayonet, and trained on it. But it was a spiritual rather than a destructive thing, similar to how AK-74s and M-16/M-4s can still mount them. 'Fix bayonets!' is the order for the assault, and the order to make one move close to the enemy.

Actually killing someone with a bayonet was a very rare occurrence. Submachineguns, pistols, and hand grenades of various fuses (impact, concussion, delay) were the close combat method of choice and would cut them down before that.

It was both German and Soviet practice to load up with as many grenades as possible (up to a dozen) in grenade bags.

The Bayonet was still a useful tool as sometimes you would find yourself low on ammo and just because the statistics show that a low number of people were killed it does not mean it did not happen

Bayonets are very dull blades, similar to a kitchen knife. Fighting knives, sharpened spades, and shovels were more useful. Even the butt of the rifle is more useful than the actual bayonet. There's much about this in writings on WW1.

In WW2, the claims of killing people with bayonets most commonly come from the soviet side of things. It is common enough to wonder if it was just a 'catch-all' description of close combat rather than the actual act. It is rare to hear about bayonet kills on the US or Axis side.

Imagine if this was implemented, obersoldaten would get plasma swords.

A bayonet, much like an ordinary knife, is exactly as sharp as you want it to be. Both in the Imperial German Army/Wehrmacht it was standard practice to leave the blades dull in peacetime/garrison and sharpen them once circumstances demanded.
As to the lethality of the bayonet, a mounted bayonet works exactly like a spear and is as a rule much more effective then ie. a riflebutt - there is a reason why bayonets have established themselves in the first place. Of course a solid whack with the latter can easily knock you out or even crack your skull, but the rule of thumb in anatomy is that a stabwound more then 4-5 cms deep almost anywhere on the torso is lethal if unattentended. As for the frequency of bayonet fighting/melee in the European theater in WW2, it is true that as a rule it was indeed very low and in the grand scheme of things amounted to a quantité négligable - think below one percent of casualties inflicted. Still, a granduncle of mine actually lost his left forearm to a bayonet thrust and was involved in several very close range fights involving hand to hand prior - but as mentioned, his experiences certainly were not representative.
In the Wehrmacht at least, bayonet fighting was generally abandoned in their revised training curriculum from 1943 onwards, not in the least because it was found that even at very close range, firearms proved much more effective then bayonets or spades - the time was instead allocated to additional close range marksmanship. Also it was found that it required an inordinate amount of time and effort to train an individual to such a point that he would actually enjoy a tangible advantage over an untrained opponent both in bayonet fencing and hand-to-hand combat in general.
That being said, in specific theaters, and with specific units, one will find actual hand-to-hand fighting a more then sporadic occurence, maybe ironically because they received pertinent training on the matter beforehand and since the alleged importance of closing into melee range had been imparted upon them. Whether such a training regimen was ultimately beneficial is of course a different question entirely. Still, I've come across both German (almost exclusively on the Eastern front, and on one occasion in Italy, Soviet and American AARs (in the PTO, more usually on the defensive, both vs Japanese banzai charges and infiltration attempts) who credibly and specifically mention actual hand to hand fighting. A much more frequent use of the bayonet seems however to have been to kill already incapacitated opponents...

The ONLY single advantage to implementing that is, we would finally give schock troops the weapon they actually use in game currently, but with different skin:

Show Spoiler

PPSh got changed actually, it still has a sharp dropoff but it gets max DPS out to 10 meters and can out-DPS's a Gren squad up to 14 meters.

The ONLY single advantage to implementing that is, we would finally give schock troops the weapon they actually use in game currently, but with different skin:

Show Spoiler

Other then that single unit, as I've said, it makes absolutely no sense, adds absolutely zero value to the game and imbalances 100% of infantry combat in return.

Shock troops with claymore, SN-42, smoke and nades. Seems extremely OP.