Peter Cairns

Thanks for that I'll take a look. gibsonm, Currently may wife is thinking of keeping her old G4 12" Powerbook with wireless card and using it as the remote drive for the Powerbook Air, rather than buying the add on USB drive. As it is we should be able to use remote with the iMac and Macbook (not iBook as I typed) as remotes. The Macbook is a great little machine but it's only a 1.83Ghz core Duo, 2GB 667 Mhz SDRAM with 64MB of shared system memory, so i think it will struggle if it runs it at all. Time to beg my wife for a nice Birthday present in July... Say a nice alloy 24" 2.8GHz iMac to act as the home hub. Peter.

Wait till we start getting "VOTE HILLARY".... Having said that maybe BF could drum up some cash by selling in game adverts. Peter.

Well just to get them out of the way. 1) Any ETA on the Mac version. 2) If I want to play RT or Wego on my home wireless network, between my iMac and iBook, will I need to buy two copies. 3) Will it run on my G5 IMac, or just my intel iBook (although my wife is looking seriously at a Macbook Air). Peter.

tiny_tanker, "but it should limit collateral damage and its a fair sight better than our troops getting hit." No it isn't..... That's the point. Your not there to protect yourselves your there to protect them. If to protect yourself you harm them then you have lost. If they believe you care more about the risk to yourselves from insurgents that about their safety then you become the enemy and that will in the long run cost you a lot more men than the occasional mortar round. You can't win this war without them. Peter.

The Phalanx is potentially a disaster waiting to happen and to be honest I think only an idiot would deploy it in Iraq. Scenario; Attack, Small insurgent team set up a 60 mm mortar in a built up area close to US compound and let of three or four rounds, these would be very inaccurate and unlikely to hit anything of significance let alone kill anyone, particularly if in-base drill and protection was up to standard and by now it should be. Response, The Phalanx engages the incoming rounds with two or three burst for each round of between 20 and 100 shells,which are completely effective with all four mortar rounds hit at least once. End result all the mortar rounds that probably wouldn't have done any harm anyway are destroyed. Consequence, Somewhere between 100 and 500 shells which missed the target continue on their, way with either unexploded or shrapnel parts from these, landing anything up to five miles beyond the attackers in various parts of the built up area. These parts could of course include, Schools ,Hospitals,Markets, Mosques, Electricity or Water supplies, Traffic or Homes and Shops. After this long is there still no one with authority in the US military in Iraq who has a clue about how to win this war. When they write the history of this conflict they should call it " From Liberator to Persecutor in One Hard lesson". I am not being anti American here people I am being anti people who shoot first and think about it later. What does this tell the average Iraqi in the street about how much the US values their safety against that of it's troops. To be honest anyone who thinks this is a good idea doesn't understand the conflict. I mean did no one stop to ask.... " What happens to all the rounds that miss, or don't explode and land where kids play". Peter.

"If he waits his issue will be addressed. The question is how long to wait? " Has someone been watching "Field of Dreams"..... Peter.

Well after we had our third kid my wife and I had...... Oh sorry I miss read that.... Peter.

It's all very well to talk about fitting anti ATGM defences on tanks but why bother. What tanks have is Mobility Protection and Firepower. But if you look at MPF the modern UAV beats it hands down. A UAV has far greater mobility, it can fly four or five times as fast as the best tank, it isn't constrained by terrain, hills, rivers, woods, towns. It has far longer range and endurance while using far less fuel. How many M-1's can you get in a C-17... 1, How many UAV's, anything from 10 to 50..... How much fuel does an M-1 use to cover 100 miles compared to a UAV. In terms of protection it can avoid the vast majority of field weapons and is difficult to detect let alone hit. They have low visibility and signature and can quickly move away from concentrated defences. As to firepower a networked UAV can direct everything from a Javelin team to a Trident 2, so that's really no contest. A stand off UAV will soon be able to target for GPS rounds that can hit a moving target without terminal guidance. But it can also direct conventional dumb rounds or guide in aircraft. £ for £ and indeed lb for lb the UAV is a more efficient way to do it than a tank. Peter.

I would like to see the NONA as well. I think the Russians also have an 82mm automatic mortar that can be truck mounted. Peter.

82nd airborne v Killer pygmies. Peter.

Oren, Infantry hold ground tanks don't. What you need to be able to do is bring firepower to bare accurately on the enemy. In the past artillery couldn't do that without excessive volumes of fire, now it can. A networked UAV can bring to bare more firepower than a company of tank and it's better protected that a metre of armour because the best protection is not being able to be hit. At 2,000m it can pick off tanks all day at not one in the world can touch it. It can stay airborne for close to 48 hrs bringing in MRL rounds that can hit a moving target from 60 miles away. As in the Balkans you can hide tanks, but then they just become pillboxes waiting to be destroyed. What 2006 shows is that you can't win a war with air superiority alone, but without it you can't win at all. Although you do have my sympathy..... Aafter nearly five decades of trying to develop the worlds best tank Israel has produced it, in time for it becoming obsolete. Peter.

I think it doesn't really matter as over the next few years the next generation of small armed UAV's will be with us. For 10% of the value of an MBT, armed with two to four Javelin type rounds and the ability to target for long range terminally guided MRL's, tanks will just be battlefield junk. Peter.

and this just in, BBC News Sunday 27th. Peter.

The idea of the US "securing" pakistan's nuclear weapons was one of the things discussed ages back as a more realistic scenario for CM:SF than Syria. It's still in the news and active, BBC News. So I just wondered is anyone working on Mods for it. Peter.

I'd like this, Consider having the option of building in delays for going in close. If you were commanding a platoon you would have an overall view and could select units, but if you went down low to make detailed changes an micro manage a particular unit then you wouldn't be able to zoom back out or switch to another unit for say 15-20secs. This would simulate the fact that giving detailed orders takes more timse and draws your attention away from other things. Whether you would like this all depends on whether you see yourself as a platoon CO giving orders or as alternately taking the role of every squad leader and NCo in the game. Peter.

Steve, Fair enough i'll stick with the theme. I thing the key to asymmetric combat is really asymmetric objectives. A US player needs to target the enemy while doing the minimum of collateral damage and the minimum casualties while the Syrians need to maximise US casualties while keeping their own as low as possible. In addition the US should by and large need to take and hold ground. In this respect the US has to use self restraint effectively limiting the use of the firepower it has available while focusing on certain parts of the map, while the Syrian's have more tactical flexibility but poorer forces. If scenarios are well designed with this in mind you should get both balance and realism while giving players in effect two different games in one. To many games may have different forces but when you look a bit deeper they are functionally identical with different skins. Real wars not like that particularly in this day and age. Peter.

Steve, I am with M1, I wouldn't put UI in with graphics as it really is integral to game play. If the game is am M-16, then graphics are the sights and the UI your eyes. You can play at fight with a crap sight, but not if you are blind.... Having used a Mac for years I've been given a PC laptop from the Council to fit in with there Windows only PC system ( they won't touch bootcamp because the contractor owns all the PC's and systems) and it's bloody awful. It's not just that I've got to learn things that I'd forgotten or do them differently, things that I have relearned are still awkward and time consuming. By inclination I think the way forward would be to move as much as possible from the UI to the map and drop anything that isn't essential. Anything dropped could still be accessed via a drop down or menu, but I'd be for cutting it down. For me the template is a Fighter style "head up" as opposed to the cockpit of a 747. What you want to see is what you need now not everything you will ever need. Do you really need to know what weapons your squad has and have it visible all the time.? It's nice to have access to it but you can click for that. In the past I talked about using pie charts, Click on a unit and get a three colour disk that gives you something like firepower, movement and moral. A quick visual indicator of the three things the unit needs to tell you. In the past people criticised that idea because being able to manipulate the three would be micromanagement, but I think giving three clicks per segment would cover most of the options you need. It would move more pressure on to the AI and might make the tricky things like MOUT or assault trickier, but I think if you are going to play real time and get it right you need the slickest UI you can get. I tried Command & Conquer a few times and I found it's UI terrible. The Ui in CMx1 was okay, if not state of the art, but you had time between moves to sit and look at it. The fact that the UI wasn't that different visually was one of the biggest surprises when I first was CM:SF. Peter. I

What effect do you get when a shell hit's it... Blue bits or dirt.... Peter.

They look nice and are usually used by special forces. As to the lack of armour, one estimate is that since the fighting started in Iraq and Afghanistan, 20% of the SAS have been killed or wounded. It's a tough job but I think more armour might be a good idea. Peter.

Well fair enough it's anti ground not anti air. I picked up on the reference to the old ZSU, and assumed it was a replacement for AA not ground support. It makes sense in terms of ground suppression as in the past the Soviets would use BMP's to suppress infantry in the attack, but the problem there was that the BMP-1 like the ZSU had very light armour. I actually think this would be a good thing to have along with tanks if you came up against a Stryker unit. The ATGM's would take out a Stryker easily enough as would the 30mm at closer range. But I suspect twin 30mm's would be ideal to keep a javelin teams heads down. Peter.

From a search for BMP/BTR-T this is what I get. That's not the same vehicle. Also can't a Kornet allegedly target slow flying aircraft and helicopters. Peter.

Opinions please people. It looks like an attempt to produce an AA vehicle that can keep up with armour formations, but which is better armed and armoured than the old quad 23mm ZSU's. Peter.

I read the guardian because although much of the comment and analysis is left of centre, it is separate from the news, and that is what for me makes it such a good paper. Their is no slant in the news stories or the choice of story, they are straight and high quality, unlike any Murdoch title where every story and the choice of story often show the editorial bias. In addition on the comment pages you often get articles from people on the right which are published without comment, and good ones from abroad. It's also got some very good economics coverage. All reasons why read it even though it's coverage of Scotland is pretty poor.... Peter.

The problem with war with the Taliban because they supported Bin Laden, is that a lot of Afghans support them for a whole range of reasons, and most of them don't support Bi Laden. So for deposing the Taliban for supporting one group you declare war on far more people than you would have expected. It's similar in Somalia, the Islamic courts brought stability and hope to hundreds of thousands for the first time in decades but we deposed them because they had connections with AQ. In the last month half the population of Mogadishu has fled the ensuing chaos, and the destruction that has caused is tremendous. The end result is that we have destroyed the best hope a nation has had since the US left because that best hope may have been a threat to us. There has to be a better way forward... Me I'd talk to the Islamic courts and the Taliban and try to bring them in to a national government, with the help of the Saudi's. For all it's flaws, and they are many, Saudi Arabia proves you can have an islamic state that lives in cooperation with the west. Peter.

I am a big fan of two. One from each shoulder with a hand on the end. Peter.