Holien

Hi the key phrase I used was "could" and perhaps I should have also  said "some"... 
But hey ho the overall all aim of my post was to applaud the collaboration and I hope that came through...
😏
Both excellent companies that have both withstood the test of time...

Nice to see Iain in the video, and he is an absolutely passionate wargamer and has been very successful in seeing that passion work for him and deliver to players great games. Iain worked for Intelligent Games many years ago which was run by a close friend, it was a games software company that collapsed with cash flow issues when a major company failed to pay on time what they owed. A very painful experience for everyone affected at the company, lessons learnt which came at a price..
I am glad he has teamed up with Battlefront as they have similar passions. Sure his games have perhaps a broader appeal as they could be said to lack depth and are easier to pick up, but he and his team have provided gamers with many hours of fun.
To succeed in life you need passion for what you are doing...
Let's hope this partnership continues and we might see some benefits, even if it is just to keep Battlefront afloat and supporting the games we love...

Yes a big congratulations to all involved with the company. 20 years a massive milestone and years of quality gaming.  Thank you...

I thought the article was an interesting read.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-very-drugged-nazis?utm_source=pocket-newtab
 

Wow... sounds like the old days when I played close combat and ultimately discovered people could cheat...
What a sad world, but I guess just humans being humans, always looking for an edge...

I just came across this series of WW2 tank photo collections on YouTube. Some unusual stuff there. Like the Maus, a Panther turret in Berlin, some captured and re-captured
 
 

I obviously missed it first time around,
🙄
BBC showing old material and placing it on iplayer is useful, glad I caught it. Mind you with my memory I could have seen it 7 years ago and just forgotten! 
😟

The UK has the ONS office for national statistics and they are doing work on trying to get an accurate picture of what is really happening. It is politically independent. 
The image from the BBC shows 2015 vs 2020.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

Here is an interesting article discussing if the identified mutations to the virus make up new strains or not and if they have different characteristics when it comes to transmission rate, lethality etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-strains-transmissible/611239/
 

SN-42 had 2mm steel (3,3 kg) and approximately corresponded to modern 2nd class of bodyarmor. It protected from 9 mm bullets of pistols and MP-40 SMG from 50 m, but  there were many happens, that it saved from shorter range and even from point-blank shot. You can see above the photo of SN-42 with track of three bulllets. SN-42 also could protect from 7,92 mm rifle bullet from 600 m.
This body armor had something similar to the ballistic protection linning, but soldiers weared it over winter padded jacket with teared off sleevs for additional protection. Assault troopers were good opinion about this armor (though continuously enchenced it) in urban combat and trench fight, but rarely used it in recon missions or in protracted attacks, when needed many time to crawl - the armor only interfered to move by crawling, the soil or sand stuffed under the armor and suffered discomfort. 
Though not only assault engineers used  SN-40 and SN-42 armor. Its were in use since 1941. SN-40 was prodused 15 000 and SN-42 only in 1942 was ordered in number 100 000. 
 

And here experimental using of SN-42 by AT-gun crews

Or send tourists who like Cathedrals and leave deadly perfume bottles around to be picked up by innocent folk on the look out for a valentine's gift...
 

There tends a corresponding increase in the amount of vitriol and rhetoric that emerges from America as its slice of world GDP declines and another power's rises. We saw this most recently in the 2000s when China's growth began to takeoff, we saw it in the 1970s as Japan's market power grew rapidly prompting American pundits to launch into vicious and dishonest tirades about a resurgent Empire of the Rising Sun taking over the Pacific through bank accounts and not warships, as if the Americans weren't abandoning the Gold Standard to do precisely that. In the end Japan's growth fizzled out as its population growth capped, and China's was slowing before COVID, but no one was sure it would continue to lose steam and in fact it may be ideally positioning for another growth cycle while our consumer markets are crippled. 
What I have no doubt about is how the growth of China's GDP slice will prompt many, not all, but many American leaders and media pundits to double time their circulation of vicious and contemptible filth anchored on many tired (but clearly effective) entertainment-media industry cliché's. Rise of the Asian menace, oh no the Soviet Union is back, they're just jealous of our freedom, etc and other Great Hits on this Album!  Some Americans have a bizarre perception that the world is some sort of zero-sum game where there's only one winner and everyone else is a loser and while many obviously don't think that way the question in American popular-electorates will be as always how many believe that. Even the more seemingly benign mythology, like the false-equivalency stuff comparing American "liberties" to Chinese "oppression" is loaded but i'm sure we will be seeing more and more of that in the coming decade. American leaders of all backgrounds know that the path to power is never a question of the entire electorate, just the electorate you need to cross the barrier. 
Issue to me now, and here is a big mistake American Social Liberals (and many right wingers) have made. The logic of zero-sum games, of one winner in a world of losers, that only the strong deserve to survive, etc will be an assumption taken for granted by all of that rhetoric. The foundation of all it will be, basically, that either America has to be first, or it's last. This is in fact utterly Hitlerian reasoning and will almost certainly be the grounding for American fascist movements if it isn't already. Unfortunately the last 30 years of Nazi Wolf cries has left everyone a bit tired of the cliche but that's where America's media has genuinely failed it. Not because our media circulates lies, but because it circulates nothing except advertising. By exhausting the meaning behind the term to push ratings up (and ergo profits) Americans are clearly less informed and totally ignorant of what Nazism actually is, which leaves them really defenseless to it. Because they think it's about the superficial items, the flags, the tanks, the rallies, the salute and not the ideology which is totally anchored on (discredited) notions of Social Darwinism, and behind that, Eugenics.
Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the lessons of history have not reached a sufficient number of people in my view. 
 

Back to the people starving bit - I don't know about this situation so I can't explain what happened, but for those stuck in their apartments in quarantine, a volunteer delivery service for food was established, and given the deserved praise from the public similar to the praise that the NHS in my country and the healthcare services in other countries are getting. 
 
All this defending China haha man I sound like some kind of shill. Seriously though, there are so many wrong perceptions in the west.
 
Chinese are people too. They aren't all communist robots who have no emotion to people dying around them. They do have some totally skewed world views, are really, really nationalistic, view their country as the pinnacle of civilisation, and the centre of the world (the Chinese name for China, 中国, literally means 'Middle Country'), but they still do care. Local police aren't stone faced Stasi waiting to kidnap people off the street, they are just regular people like anyone doing a job.

Hey all, 
Came to check up on this forum on the off chance that my fantasy Combat Mission: OPLAN 5029 was going to be announced and we'd finally get to see the PLA in action in this series.
I don't normally post here, I *think* my last post was about 9-10 years ago, but after reading through this thread and seeing some strong opinions and predictions about China, I thought I'd throw in my two cents, as Americans like to say.
I've lived in China for 8 years, speak Mandarin up to HSK level 4-5, and work in manufacturing. I've sat through this whole COVID-19 epidemic, since it first broke here and then spread across the world.
Some of the perceptions about the government here and how they go about their business are pretty laughable, and some are on point, but mostly everyone is viewing society here totally through a western lens, though that's hardly limited to this forum.
 
There seems to be a perception that
1. The virus killed far more people here than is being admitted, even orders of magnitude greater, and that its being covered up to prevent some sort of mass revolt.
2. Society here just needs 'a kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down'; that once the economy goes belly up, there will be some sort of mass revolt.
3. The evil CPC will do absolutely anything to maintain that grip on power, including the mass murder of their own citizens.
4. People are suppressed and given the chance, they will overthrow the tyrannical regime and install a flourishing democracy.
5. My favourite - China has a long view on geopolitics - LOL.
 
The virus could wreck the economy here - there are already warning signs. I've been inundated with offers from factories who have bought PPE manufacturing equipment en masse in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. One insole manufacturer I know has totally collapsed and is relying completely on manufacturing KN95 masks, but due to the recent horror stories of faulty equipment creating yet another gaffe for China, as of two weeks ago only those suppliers on a whitelist can export items marked as medical supplies, regardless of whether or not their factory has all of the ISO standards, FDA registration, EU CE certification, etc. Everyone is scrambling to get on the list. 
China has a mountain of unregulated 'black' financial institutions, massive SME debt, and the situation looks grim to say the least. I read a news article here that had the People's Bank of China warning there is a small chance of depression. That's big news, when they admit something like that, it means the risk is pretty real.
The virus news broke just before the spring festival, which if you don't know is THE major holiday for Chinese and results in the largest human migration in the world every January/February. I was heading up to my wife's family in another city when the news was breaking. While I was there the nationwide lockdown came into place, though for different provinces the rules were slightly different.
Many people in the west seem to think that because China has a huge population and an untrustworthy Government, then by default they simply must have been ravaged and are lying about it. 
Firstly, the virus did affect an area with a large population - the city of Wuhan in Hubei province. Hubei itself has a population about the same as the UK. But it didn't appear everywhere at once, infecting droves of people. It appeared in one place and was noticed by local doctors. China's healthcare system is pretty turd in many ways compared to the west, but its not total rubbish (unless you are talking about traditional chinese medicine, but thats a rant for another day). We all know the story about the doctors that were arrested and accused of spreading rumours on social media. To understand this you have to step back and not straw man every action taken as indicative of the evil government. They were not silenced by the ruling elite, but rather the local police station/government who were following the rules laid out. Pretty stupid and draconian rules obviously, but from their point of view its the same as the rules Captain Crozier apparently broke leading to his dismissal.
Once the actual realisation came through that the doctors were right, action was taken pretty rapidly, though not as fast as we now know could have been taken. Did the government deliberately withhold info from the WHO and the West, allowing the virus to spread so their evil plan could be hatched? Probably not. More likely they didn't realise the scale this was going to be and so nuking their own economy by locking down the country was probably not what came to mind when they had 50 or so people with some weird new type of flu.
When they did fire the pistol though, they did it properly. Remember that this is not the first time that they have had an epidemic, even within the last 20 years. The leading Doctor, the 'hero' of SARS, Zhong Nan Shan, quickly came on TV telling the public and government what to do. Everything was shut down. Existing checkpoints at the entrances to residential areas and roads where manned with people checking everyones temperature. Contact tracing was heavily utilised so that everyone who came into contact with an infected person was contacted and tested. Did China use armed force to suppress people? Yes, but no more than American Police use armed force to suppress rule breakers every day. 
They got on top of things pretty quickly. Are the numbers accurate? Lmao of course not, but mostly for many of the same reasons numbers in good-guy western countries are not accurate. Of course, there IS the possibility that scores more people died, and there are hints here on social media that the numbers are higher - one truck driver admitting in a local news street-interview he'd been delivering about 3000 urns a day for two weeks to a local crematorium in preparation for the Qing Ming festival (the annual festival for honouring the dead). This awkward gaffe was quickly wiped off of Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, but not before millions saw it. Where the masses enraged, demanding the overthrow of the tyrannical regime? No. Most people shrugged it off as pretty normal - of course the official figures are inaccurate.
 
This is quickly turning into a huge post that most people won't bother reading so I'll leave it here for now and if anyone has any questions, they can ask in the forum, and I'll respond.

Then you really should know better.
And well just because I know it is coming might as well post this.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-he-has-evidence-coronavirus-came-from-a-chinese-lab-but-he-cant-reveal-it-232946854.html
And no, before we go there this was not a Pearl Harbor type sneak attack to undermine the West.  well not fully - the goal was... wait for it....
 Asked if he believed China was withholding information on the coronavirus so as to hurt his chances of being reelected, Trump said he didn’t want to “cast any dispersions [sic],” but added that “China would like to see Sleepy Joe Biden” elected.
“Well, China doesn’t want to see me elected and the reason is we’re getting billions and billions of dollars, many billions of dollars a month from China,” Trump said. “China never gave our country anything. China never gave us nothing.”
Pressed on whether he believed China had intentionally let the virus spread, Trump said it was a possibility.
 
Not sure what the billions he thinks we are getting is - he apparently still doesn't know who pays the tariffs.  He also doesn't seem to understand double negatives.
 
Meanwhile - on the other hand
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-intelligence-says-coronavirus-not-manmade-but-still-examining-chinese-lab-2020-04-30?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
The intel statement said the federal agencies concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Anyone who watches this clip I then suggest you read the following...
(The truth is out there, imo usually not in YouTube clips...)
https://theprepared.com/blog/dr-ericksons-viral-covid-19-briefing-video-is-dangerously-wrong/
His starting point is seriously flawed...
Here’s the obvious reason why using a 12% test positivity rate to claim that 12% of Californians already have SARS-COV-2 is so dangerous. Right now, the USA and many other countries are limiting their testing only to people who show symptoms of COVID-19. Furthermore, in many parts of the country since this all began, only those with the most severe COVID-19 symptoms have been tested. We aren’t testing 100% of the population.
What Erickson does in this video is conceptually the same as sampling a communion line to figure out how many Catholics live in California. Or estimating the prevalence of alcoholism by sampling an AA meeting.
It may be hard to believe that a physician would do something so dumb, but that’s exactly what he’s up to in this clip.

Numbers are starting to accelerate and blow up in Bakersfield, despite these two doctors (who, seem to be worried about their private business as they urgent care business owners). 

Their claim that the hospitals are empty are false  Yesterday  morning (28th April) , 31 county hospital beds are full from covid--(the ones testing confirmed, with 5 dead now,  856 "tested" positives, local prisons infected, 3,615 tests still pending results.
Their arguments are already falling apart. Every county agency has blasted them and a gaggle of local doctors, hospitals and virologists have had them on the carpet.
This video has been making all the conspiracy/alt-right site rounds of late

So I said I would furnish some examples that is all about decisions and less about the actual combat. Attached is the current area of operations where the German player is tasked with crossing the River Arun.
The German player does not get this detailed view until they have been in the area for a length of time and then I start to feed them these A grade maps.
The A3 Map is the quality the Germans get to begin with. The key with any of these games is understanding the terrain and how to use it. As a commander maps are absolutely key. In the ACW period they rarely had detailed maps, some commanders even brought Map Makers along with them Stonewall Jackson employed an amazing chap called Jedediah Hotchkiss. He is one of my mapping heroes and Jackson was capable of great things in the Valley because of his maps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedediah_Hotchkiss
Anyway I digress...
So examples of decisions rather than combat affecting the outcome of the game.
Allied player rightly blew the bridges at New Bridge but failed to put any thought into the foot bridges...
Result the Germans are crossing at Guildenhurst foot bridge.
The Allied player put units in Paplands Hanger woods and the buildings just South of the woods and the German player just tried to rush units in open across the bridge. Result lots of dead Germans. Eventually they worked over the allied positions but a simple fire mission on the possible enemy locations would have saved a company of infantry from dying.
The Allied player then made a key decision to pull back a heavy weapons company from the woods just before the Germans woke up to the fact that they should be shelling with artillery those woods. Again combat little effect and the Allies saved a Heavy Weapons company.
With hidden movement and only being updated when things are revealed it is about the commanders decisions rather than the combat. Of course the dice rolls do have an effect and it can sway a battle but often it is more about the decision of where things are located.
CM is often about that too...

I follow a gamers Youtube channel called Gameranx and they have 5.7 million subscribers. They put up a top 10 most historically accurate games list and it was pretty much the usual suspects, big games and so on. As I was watching it I was cursing to myself why these channels never do wargames in a serious fashion, but guess what? Wait for it ....
... and yeah, 5.7 million people might get exposed to a REAL game series 😃

Err it has been known for a very long time that amphibians like frogs are good indicators of the damage we are doing via pollution.  Alex Jones hopping onto the bandwagon and maybe for once getting something right is a kin to a broken clock.  And no I won't watch the video.  I'd rather smear feces up my nose and snort real hard than listen to that gas bag.
I spend my time reading stuff from educational institutions and the like, you know where people actually study science.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/960

This world leader is taking his safety seriously, no shaking hands and wandering around un protected in the covid wards....
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52461431
A pity his medical teams don't get the same level of PPE, mind you our UK staff don't either...
 

 
Ohhh and then I  just saw this....
Joy.. (Sarcastic joy...)

Does it really? Hmmm China makes money from supplying the world with goods used by humans.  Hmm let's shut down the whole world economy and put our own population out of work, get them really mad at the leadership and ferment political change....
That sounds like a cunning plan Baldric would come up with! 
 

Does it really? Hmmm China makes money from supplying the world with goods used by humans.  Hmm let's shut down the whole world economy and put our own population out of work, get them really mad at the leadership and ferment political change....
That sounds like a cunning plan Baldric would come up with! 
 

The UK has the ONS office for national statistics and they are doing work on trying to get an accurate picture of what is really happening. It is politically independent. 
The image from the BBC shows 2015 vs 2020.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654