Garrisoning AT guns in emplacements

I'm very new to modding COH2, started a few days ago and after getting a hang of the basics and playing around with custom emplacements and making a few of my own, I had an idea for garrisoned emplacements. Where say for example the pit_small from the bofors can be garrisoned with any anti tank gun squad and said gun and crew will appear and animate, exactly like if they were the on_construction_squad with the pit.

Now the trouble is I've tried applying animator_set_state and apply_crew even add_crew to both the on_construction_actions and on_loaded_squad/on_loaded_hold. The best I can achieve is to get the squad and gun in the hold, with the crew animated as garrison, but the gun completely invisible. I also have troubles with having regular infantry squads garrisoned inside also not animating.

I tinkered a bit with abilities and upgrades to make exceptions where the pit would be added to the loadout, or spawning a new building, but couldn't get anything to work. There don't seem to be many options for a clean spawn and despawn action.

So far the best I can work out is animating the gun only works the normal way if it's a building and squads/crews seem to only animate if there's a squad with both the emplacement and gun (both structures) in on_construction_squad.

I cannot be the first person to have this idea, yet info on different guns and emplacements seems to be sparse outside of the original "packaged" emplacement structures. Even info on garrisoning AT guns in buildings is hard to find. For both you normally end up finding discussions on game balance, tips for handling emplacements in game and questions about making the 25-pounder emplacement. Which makes me wonder if what I'm trying is even possible.

To be honest I don't think what your trying to do is possible as (apart from the Raketenwerfer) AT guns were never designed to be garrisoned, which is probably why yours is appearing invisible in the emplacement.

25 pounder emplacements work cause their attached to the emplacement from squad, which I don't think is possible with garrisoned units.

Garrisoning an AT gun within structures and other types of garrisons is possible. This post and this post within my guide covers a bit of the basics for garrisons.

1. Determine the type of markers the structure has. In most cases the "combat slot" markers will be able to hold units within the garrison. You may view these by using archive viewer and opening the .mua files with a text editor.
2. Match the ebps hold_ext and holdable_ext types. Both the garrison and the garrisoned entities need to have their types match up within these extensions.

This should probably work. Note that the ABP of the garrisoned entity must have the default name, meaning you can't name it xyz.abp or something custom. Also note that the guide I linked is specifically for moving entities so you probably wont have to worry about a lot of the other things in there.

This will only allow you to add an AT gun, or whatever other unit, into a garrison. It will not allow any crew to man it. I believe having a crew is possible but it's probably very difficult to do.

After a long time without access to the COH tools, I've finally been able to spend some time trying your advice. It seems COH just doesn't like what I'm trying to do.

I had some promise with attachments, but I'm going to cut my losses and either learn more before I try again or attempt it in the tools in the third.

Anyways, thank you for your help.