It should also be added to the general topic here that "realism" is a damned subjective word.
When advertising for call of duty you will hear the word "realism" mentioned a LOT. In the trailers and dev diaries of Farcry 2 the word realism was used a lot. Again in the development of this game, and its predecessor the use of the word happens everywhere. Futher up the spectrum is the ARMA series, yes they also use that word. However all of these games arent aimed at the same mark, which should be blatantly obvious.
In my humble opinion Farcry and call of duty use realism to say "visuals", farcry two was a beautiful game in all visual respects; bullets ceasing to exist, unless fired from a scoped weapon, at 50 meters is utter bull*hit(FC2). The Red Orchestra series, to me, has always used "realism" to mean basically " Combat realism ". Ergo, " All aspects of combat will be as close as possible to their realistic counterparts ", with the exception that death is replaced with combat ineffective, so that you arent forced to crawl, or sit on the battlefield bleeding out.
Doing some digging on these here forums will reveal that a LOT of effort has been made to ensure that "Combat realism" is met, balance is not made by changing the weapons from their real counterparts, but by making those weapons realistic and also giving proper issuing rates. The ppsh balances out the lighter Russian mg capacity against the heavier German MG34 and 42.
On a secondary tier is visual realism, being able to see the inside of your tank is very immersive, and adds to the combat realism. I would also place the map design being based on real world tours of the locations here.
On a third and slightly less important tier is historical accuracy. I'd bet money that TWI would never re create a battle where one side was absolutely slaughtered, boy that would sure be a heck of a lot of fun to loose every time! They've stated many times that there is a balance between game and historical accuracy. This is where the tradeoff happens. I am also very sure if they had the time and resources they WOULD get every button and rivet right, as well as having the beards of all soldiers trimmed to regulation length, and making sure of *ETC*.
TF2 is a hat/clothing simulator, RO2 is a ww2 combat simulator, and there still exists no WW2 clothing/hat/rivet simulator (Im sure there is market in that kind of a game amongst re-enactors).
The best thing the re-enactors could do to help in this case would be to take the offending screenshots, edit them to point out any errors. Take pictures of your combat uniforms that are correct ( God help any of you if you send in wrong info and have it corrected by another! ). And take even more pictures of exactly what needs to be corrected, then email that to TWI. Save them the expense of the research and this stuff may make it in before release, or in future tweaks.
