Nidan1

Ewwwwwwww, I hate bugs See, even the Big Kahuna agrees with me! Right, even something as small as a disagreeable expression, or calling them an "Evil Empire" could have restrained Putin even a tad.

Would all this be happening if our current "Administration" had not decided to withdraw U.S. influence from the world stage?

panzersauerkrautwerfer: Your posts are cogent, funny at times and mostly on point, but could you please pleeeeeze take a few minutes of extra time to format your direct responses to other posters and include their handles so that I can read them without having to back up several posts or pages to see who made the posts you are quoting. Maybe its just me, but I find it annoying at best especially during a running exchange that is becoming a more interesting read. I know I brought this up before, and maybe you will tell me to go f myself, but then I will be very very sad.

In 1983 the Soviets shot down Korea Air Flight 007 claiming, after initially denying it, that the civilian 747 was a spy plane. Everyone aboard was killed. This is what can happen when the tactics that we are discussing get out of hand. This incident caused such a world wide stir that flight patterns from Alaska to Asia were changed, and the US allowed international access to its then top secret Global Navigation Satellite System, which is now called GPS. We have already had an airliner shoot down over the Ukraine, it can easily happen again if someone makes a mistake or misinterprets a radar blip. http://theweek.com/articles/445179/heres-last-time-russia-shot-down-passenger-plane

IanL you are probably right to signal a halt to the arcane techno-discussion about ATCs, transponders and assorted radars. However you are also correct to point out that Putin is using his air force to bring back the old games played during the cold war. You would also have to admit that those TU-96 flybys close to the DEW Line in northern Nunavut were probably the most exciting things going on in Canada during the 70's and 80's , or maybe it was when the Red Army team skated into Montreal or Toronto

Ah I see you were an f'ing sealed beams in boot camp...ha! Nobody could deliberately look that goofy, you photoshopped that picture, right?

Rammstein cover band? Mein Herz brennt!

Back in 1971 a USMC F-4 collided with a DC-9 near California. The DC-9 was descending into LAX and was at 15000 feet when it was struck by the Marine jet. Everyone on the DC-9 was killed, the backseat guy in the Phantom was able to eject, the pilot was killed. "PROBABLE CAUSE: The failure of both crews to see and avoid each other but it is recognized that they had only marginal capability to detect, assess, and avoid the collision. Other causal factors include a very high closure rate, co-mingling of IFR and VFR traffic in an area where the limitation of the ATC system precludes effective separation of such traffic, and failure of the crew of BuNo458 (the F-4) to request radar advisory service, particularly considering the fact that they had an inoperable transponder." After this accident stricter flight restrictions were put in place for military aircraft flying near commercial airports. Better layers of ATC coverage and improved radars have dramatically lowered the chances of military vs. commercial collisions. This of course is in US domestic airspace, but there are probably incidents of planes getting too close to one another, as a previous poster already mentioned.

It also takes personal hard work and practice. I took eight years of German in school, and it was spoken in my home when I was young, and today I can barely put a cohesive sentence together auf deutsch. Language skills tend to prove the adage that "if you don't use it, you lose it".

For a non-native English speaker I am very impressed with your abilities in the language. I wish I had been able to learn another language with enough confidence to verbally spar on a message board as you are able to do. Your use of sarcasm in a non-native language is also quite impressive ,that is of course that you don't posses fat fingers.

Because of the mysterious circumstances of this particular flight, there has been renewed impetus to install real time flight data transmitters that would continuously send flight data information about an aircraft to a receiving station. That would include engine performance, instrument readings, etc. All the information that is now stored on the so called black box. Something that is always searched for after plane wreckage has been recovered. From what I understand, the area where MH370 was flying contained numerous holes where radar and other tracking systems were either not present or not adequate enough to continuously track the aircraft's flight. It would not really have mattered if the transponder were turned off in those areas because there were no scanning systems watching that area of the sky anyway.

Yes, we should wait for the Biblical flood waters to recede I'm hoping you were not severely impacted by the floods.

Big difference tho, John's link is free!

Well said John.

I think that Americans are very educated as to the real cost of war, we really don't have to see bodies and coffins to realize what we are paying. You can just count up the dead and maimed since 1914 to realize it. During WW2 a British film maker (who later became a US Marine), Louis Hayward made a documentary of the battle for Tarawa atoll. The film was raw combat footage and so graphic that President Roosevelt himself had to approve it for viewing by the American public. No You tube or Wiki leak back then, the newsreels of the war were shown in movie theaters. What ultimately occurred after American moviegoers saw the real horror of what was going on in the Pacific was that war bond sales went through the roof. Once the service member is dead, his pain is over, it is the family that have to carry on with the loss of a loved one. I would never want the body of my son to be part of someones you tube feed.

All of the Baby Bells seemed to love these tests starting back in the late 80's and into the mid 90s. I think I took the damned thing a dozen times in a ten year period. After the third one I could actually skew the results to come out any way I wanted them to, which is probably one of the main drawbacks with personality tests. I don't know if slysniper is on to anything or not, but it might be fun if BFC tested all of their forum members, other than being a bit nuts, what else do we all have in common?

I'm reminded of a line from the movie "Patton", as the general is reviewing a parade somewhere in Tunisia, and he says something like..."they look pretty. but can they fight"

Wasn't pond scum an old denizen of the Cess ?

Gott in himmel!!!!, Andreas....wie gehts alte deutschejunge. Warum bist du zurückgekommen? Wir waren so glücklich, wenn man vor so vielen Jahren verlassen. Good thing your English is far better than my German.

Its interesting to read that a lot of players are still into the old CMx1 CMBB rather than the new updated engine of CMRT. I too really enjoyed CMBB, but alas it will no longer load on my PC and I'm not paying for a fix for that at this point. It is a matter of personal choice however, not that one game is superior to the other. They both have their pluses and minuses, and in their time they have both proven to be war simulation winners.

Someone said earlier that it was hit by a car bomb, and that the turret was dragged away from the remains of the hull. Dont know how he knew that, but it seems plausible. The video you posted shows a tank being hit by some sort of missile. It's hard to tell from the video what kind of vehicle is being hit. The second video shows an Abrams being deliberately blown up, which is more likely to cause the turret to leave the hull as the video shows. According to the ISIS caption, these machines are "fragile" and need to be blown up. I'm sure there may be other reasons why they blow them up.

As to the photo, anyone consider Photoshop? Looks too staged for me, no smoke or scoring marks anywhere on the turret. Hatches look intact. If a turret was blown off a tank by a catastrophic internal explosion wouldn't it have some externally visible damage.

In order to test the problem one needs to be completely accurate with the variables involved. Why test the problem with every type of German 75mm gun, when maybe the problem can be isolated to one particular type, i.e the unit in Stndrtnfhr's game that is having the issue.

Try doing a trick with the game file....if you are capable.

Ah! Jon the sarcasm is quite palpable There is a difference, the hedge fund managers and politicians created ruin in a legal framework, hence what they were doing turned out to affect many people in a bad way, but it was not against the law. As far as being lionized, that has not been the case generally here in the US. President Obama delights in ragging on the so called one percenters that supposedly control all of the wealth. Murder has been frowned upon in human societies for thousands of years, and has been punished. The closest thing in the 10 Commandments to rigging the housing market would probably be the 9th. Murder comes in at number 7. There is a place for society at large, I agree, but when children are very young and just starting to form their awareness of things outside of themselves, a parents guidance and involvement is paramount.