costard

Thanks Oddball - it also makes sense that with relatively few being available they'd be parcelled out to specialist teams. It must be my confirmation bias coming into play.

Well played John.

I'm curious as to how commonly the G43 was actually used as a sniper's rifle - it seems to me that there are too few scoped Kar98 getting around in the game (I can't remember having seen one). Anyone else thinking this way?

Michael, I generally bunch all my orders in one hit - travel, face, deploy, CA. "Set and forget" gives me more time to manage other units, definitely a useful procedure in Real Time. WEGO, less of an issue. It helps me to have a standardised approach to giving orders as I'm less likely to forget something important. That said, I have no idea whether the game parses the orders in the sequence I give them - I just figure that clear communication is appreciated by computers just as much as by meat people.

Alas, I have eaten my last prawn - the one that gives you an itchy throat and tells you that your next might be the last thing you ever eat. Pity, I quite liked munching on those ten-legged submarine spiders. Can't even use them for bait now. And Mrs Costard's seafood risotto is off the menu - a thousand times alas!

Bats generally produce exactly the right amount of guano, copious or not. The undeniable truth is that if you don't eat you don't crap and that if you don't crap you die. Now, it might be argued that utility and aesthetics are in the orifice of the beholder: might I suggest that an adventurous ass experiment with the possibilities of a well lubricated, small furry mammal capable of producing some extremely high frequency vibrations? Some of us would be delighted to read the report (I'm looking at you Emrys).

Wozzies (they adore being called wozzies) know how to value rock. It is all they have. They will happily dig it up and sell it to you if you only nod and smile as they expound on the superiority of their rock. On the other side of the country we get the occasional patch of dirt, even the odd bit of fresh water, so we're spoiled for the variety of objects we can extoll: good gracious, we even have trees! Ok, they burn like nothing else on earth so we concede that the trees aren't actually that great, but dirt and water: with these two things you can actually grow food. Wozzies like eating rocks.

Fantasy for fun is the foundation of creativity, fantasy taken seriously is a pathology. Get off his lawn.

This is most of the reason I moved to Real Time - the solutions I come up with are far messier, but the game is over in thirty or sixty minutes. Bad pathing is easier to notice and correct, too.

Good one JonS. Thanks.

JasonC, You can more readily justify the argument that all injustice experienced was delivered by the same group of men. Your argument is thereby rendered semantically null and your claim to intellect doubtful. However, given that the 'Merkins are world renowned for sending themselves up (definitely exceptional), maybe we should - oh, ok, you. Alone. Adult discussions require the willing participation of adults.

Someone asked if JasonC was being racist in his earlier analysis of gun crime statistics. Rather than jumping straight into an emotional and unproductive interpretation of his analysis, I'd like to look at the environment the 'minority' individuals come from and compare that to the environment experienced by European women, see if I can identify a reason for the discrepancy in statistics. The immediately identifiable difference is in the level of survivability and the tools required to ensure survival in those two markedly different environments. A gun is a tool. The expectation that a harsh environment doesn't lend itself to the adoption of effective tools in order to alleviate that harshness is in complete denial of human behaviour. With the extant and worsening social environment experienced by immigrants and minorities (not to mention every other poor bastard currently being screwed by our financial overlords), is it any wonder they (we) choose to adopt the gun as an effective tool?

At about 14s in the clip the guy shoving the rag down the tube lets the stick slip past the rag and you hear a definite "scrick" as something gets damaged - his mate looks up, he suspects something is wrong. From a quick look at some schematics, I'd guess that he's damaged the ignition assembly somehow, and this has slowed the launch of the grenade enough to let the rocket motor ignite whilst still in the tube. Plausible?

- burn merrily and convince the footsloggers of the advisability of marching to battle.

The gun wasn't the important part of the photo, nor was the caption beneath it: the important bit was the fiercely loving little boy. Nice photo, baron. Lucky us to have little boys who love us: it is no wonder we get so defensive of them, wherever we may live.

My take is that the Western political leadership had a shot fired across its bows - from the Western military leadership. Prez going to congress to seek approval? Unheard of! PM doing the same? Likewise! Where it goes from here is complicated: the ultimate aim was to enable the US to strategically default on its debt, i.e. anyone going to war with the USA could kiss its savings held in US Treasuries goodbye. A scam of the highest order with the lives of the soldier and citizen counted as nothing. Poland just confiscated half its citizens' retirement savings . The Polish Gov is too much in debt to borrow any more, so it has stolen it's peoples savings - for the stated reason of being able to borrow more. My personal opinion is that if you took several hundred people, carefully selected from all sorts of places around the world, and shot them on the lawn of the White House with full TV coverage, you'd do more to achieve the start of solving the problem than has been attempted over the last forty or fifty years. But I'm a crank with a hangover today, so its unlikely that my proposed solution is viable or helpful.

Hi vycem, and welcome. Play the demo, that will tell you enough to know if the game is for you. If you're excited (CMBO did it for me many moons ago - "I've found it!"), then you're hooked: you'll buy on the basis of your personal financial capability. Don't worry too much about playing with other people (although this lends itself to the greatest exploitation of BF's genius), you'll be able to find others in the same situation. There's little credit to those that own the latest and greatest here and BF don't really care (though they'd like to think that their work is worth paying good money for: 'tis well worth our while to stroke their egos a little) - they're in it for the love of the design. BF have the best business model - win/win - we get to play the game we want, they get to build the game we want.

Emrys, I've included an excerpt from a discussion I'm having with my brother here (he's doing some research into the history of European law). He accused me, gently and accurately, of engaging in teleological reasoning in my proposed solution of nationalising the MIC. As I see it, a monopoly already exists in the US MIC. The nationalisation I propose provides a legally defensible mechanism to break the monopoly and restructure it - eminent domain is a tested and recognised form of property and wealth distribution, with benefits to the state the aim of such a drastic move. I made a similar case for the instigation of universal health care in the US: what I didn't foresee was the outright corruption of the process whereby the interests of the populace were disregarded by their elected representatives: the ultimate design entrenched and magnified the power of the banks, insurance companies and health care providers, to the absolute detriment of the populace. In my defence, I could say that I expected too much; in actual fact the wiser heads, promoting a different point of view, understood that the cure was likely to be worse than the disease. I regret showing myself to be the naïve fool that I am.

The moral standpoint of the poor (ignorant) forced into breaking the law is much greyer in depiction than that of the rich (knowledgeable) choosing to break the law: it is easier to justify the moral outrage (the desired somatic response) against the perpetrator of the crime. Drama painted with a wide brush and bright colours is easier to consume (and perform). Also, most countries have a minimum requirement for local content broadcast.

A kinder, gentler fascism. Diesel: of course.

Apparently it will show the world that the US political system isn't entirely dysfunctional. Who's dumping the emerging markets? edit: diesel, whose is the largest economy?

Back to the economics: India is selling its UST to buy commodities following a collapse in the value of its local currency (caused in the main by a need for foreign investors to repatriate their money). This leads to a spike in yields, meaning that the US Treasury has to offer better rates to get people to lend it money. Which means that it has to find more money to finance its debts. Can you see where this is heading?

Yeah, well, stable for a dictatorship. Stable enough that Kerry dined out with Assad in Damascus before this current mess started. I'd expect a period of about a generation between coup attempts with that political model (time enough to breed the next generation of cannon fodder). Regardless of the moral position that Assad occupies, the big ask is whether the West is morally justified in enforcing the change of regime, (with all the concomitant misery, at home and abroad, of that exercise) when we haven't the resources to ensure that the outcome is any better. The idea that advanced societies appear fully developed upon the demise of a dictator is wishful thinking, at best. At worst, it is an attempt to justify the murderous impulse of someone who believes that there is no point in having the world's best military unless you use it (the idea is that you have a good enough military to ensure that you don't have to use it.) The delicious irony of agusto's suggestion is that you could argue that the US bankrupted itself with the Vietnam war (they had to abandon the gold standard) and most likely has done so again with its last set of adventures. $16 trillion debt?

agusto, while it is possible that the rebels will win a war of attrition in Syria, I would count it unlikely. Highly unlikely: the populace is embroiled in a civil war and is most likely pissed at both sides. Syria was a stable nation until relatively recently; as an ally of Iran it became the junior partner in the weaker coalition, engaged in trying to survive as the enemy of the US. Russia and China can do little more than veto every UN proposal to "legalise" the intervention of the US led coalition. It could well be that all we're seeing is geopolitical action to secure energy routes into Europe, with Russia removed from control, but Germany certainly isn't behaving as though this is a strategic goal (if wars for loot were profitable, trade would never have developed, nor civilisation). Which means that the aim is to teach the Iranians some sort of lesson, something along the lines of "We can bomb you." About as puerile as it gets, with the price of this lesson (as if they didn't already know) the lives of a few hundred thousand more men, women and children. There is a sickness in the West and it manifests itself in the behaviour of its leaders: they represent "a clear and present danger" to human civilisation.

By the way, I've worked out that the number of views in the Forum overview counts the number of times I preview the post during editing.