Dean F.

Holy Crap! There's a 1.08 patch ?!? Uh, I gotta go...

Holy Crap! There's a 1.08 patch ?!? Uh, I gotta go...

Holy Crap! There's a 1.08 patch ?!? Uh, I gotta go...

Holy crap! Were you in the Blackhorse? I note that you said "mech infantry" and not "cavalry..." I ask because I was, from 1991-1993. 511th MI Co. Я изучил в военным институте иностранных языков, но это много лет тому назад. We called our instructors мучитель instead of учитель, as did Russian students everywhere. Haven't really used it since, though. As an example, though I understand every word of your cyrillic I don't really understand the reference... It seems like it must be a joke, and I laughed just because it involved God and beer. I'd send my joke about the Kamchatka boy in spelling class, but I'd REALLY have to look up the correct spelling on a lot of the words, myself... [ March 30, 2008, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

Ok, maybe I'm showing my age, but I don't get the "YMMV" thing. All the rest (ROFL, ROFLMAO, IIRC, IMHO, OTOH, etc.) I've pretty much picked up on, though I don't use them, but YMMV stumps me. I find emoticons useful, though, since humor is so hard to pick up on in text. Yeah, I saw Kiev in your profile, but why Kiev? If you were an intelligence officer did you go to DLI or something, learn Russian or Ukrainian, and then that led you to Kiev? Speaking of problems with a free press, are things in the Ukraine as bad as in Russia? Увидимся

Brother, if there is one thing we agree on, it is this. There is a reason, in my opinion, that the First Amendment is the FIRST Amendment. If you closely examine almost any repressive cesspool on this planet you will almost invariably find a constrained press. We need a free press to keep the government accountable. If forced I would give up any other Amendment before the First. Again, concurrence, but with a mitigator... I find that many of the Americans nowadays who are so critical of the US are not doing so out of love of country. For the past few decades, at least among liberal academia including journalists, it has become fashionable to bash the US at every opportunity. I'm not sure why, but it does seem to be the knee-jerk response to anything. I really don't have a problem with this. I say, keep the politicians on their toes. I haven't met an honest one yet. If they were honest they'd have real jobs. But I don't kid myself about the motives of these critics, either. Are there patriots among them? Sure! But I would go far enough to say that the majority (i.e. somewhere >50.1%) are just selling newspapers... And, of course, as a soldier I have a healthy dislike of having the little buggers in my immediate vicinity. You can't trust them- they make stuff up and twist words or broadcast them out of context, and they do it ON PURPOSE. (Nothing personal...) Of course, making things sound contentious or asinine, again, sells more papers. But the whole "if it bleeds it leads" mindset is a side-effect of a free commercialized press, and I'll take that over a government-controlled press any day. Nonetheless, I try to fight this "the US is always wrong" attitude wherever I can. Valid criticisms I will accept. Still, I thought it was HILARIOUS when CNN stepped over the line and got cut off during Desert Storm, but then I have a vindictive streak like that. This is why I haven't (I think) jumped all over you on this issue. I just said that I understood what a prior poster meant when he said "winning militarily." Does this mean "victory"? No, of course not. The US "won militarily" in Vietnam, too, but lost the war. Witness the Tet Offensive, which even Walter Kronkite cited as a military disaster for the US: The Viet Cong had exactly one significant though temporary victory, Hue City, and then was essentially combat ineffective on anything but small scales for the rest of the war. The NVA took over the struggle. Yet we lost. In a big way. Vietnam War history isn't my strong point, though, so if I've got this wrong, lemme know. I'd like an expert opinion. I will not defend the Shah, as he was yet another tin-pot dictator with a hideous human-rights record who was propped up by the US during the cold war because the alternative was thought to be worse, at the time. But again I think you're bringing up things that no-one will argue with. I'm not sure how they support your position on how the US is losing militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it does look pretty on the screen, doesn't it? ( I know, I know, you were reacting to other posts. HUMOR. Poor humor, maybe, but humor...) Seriously, though, you come across as if you just want to use this forum to post all the things you want to criticize the US about. In fact, you seem to like to post lists of them... Anyway, I'll still stand behind the US making extreme efforts to limit civilian casualties and, in fact, taking casualties themselves because of it. I patch those guys up every day. Funny how all cynics claim they "grew up." All of them. That's rather like saying "Come on, think about it!" over and over during a debate. It impugns everyone else by implying that they haven't "grown up" or aren't "thinking." I've been a civilian, then military, then civilian, then military again, and I'm probably in the top 1% of educated people on this planet. Please don't say that to me. Even if you are one of that 1%, too. It is very difficult to know who you are talking with on the internet, and I've gotten more and more careful about things like this as time goes on. I was once expounding upon the carbon cycle in opposition, it turns out, to a ecologist. I still say he was wrong, for several reasons, not least of which he obviously had an agenda long before going to school. By the way, what are you doing in Kiev? I've always wanted to take a tour of St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. I may get to do a Baltic Sea cruise next year that stops in St. Petersburg, at least. [ March 30, 2008, 04:55 AM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

*Chuckle* Posts like that are unreadable, I know. I used to refuse to even read them, let alone respond to them. But occasionally the guy writing it is having difficulty because English is not his native language, so I'm more tolerant now. When it's just some l33t speaking warez d00dz it is annoying as heck, though. One of my standard ripostes is this link: Chicago Manual of Style [ March 29, 2008, 06:23 AM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

Wow. I go away for a week and THIS happens... Nine pages?!? I don't think anyone denies that the US supported the Baath government against Iraq. Everyone always comments upon it as a classic example of unforeseen consequences. Thus, I'm not sure what your intent was in mentioning it. It's almost like you try to hide your contentious statements within a fog of obviously true ones. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Cheer?!? Where did you get that one? The chemical weapon use was pretty much condemned by everyone in the international community, including the US (even if not so loudly). Maybe you can produce a comment from some extremist official, but the US government and certainly the US media were critical of Iraq's chemical weapons use. I'd really like to see a source on that one- one that isn't just someone's opinion, please. No you can't. Heartfelt concurrence on my part. Iran is a complex issue. And truth be told, many of the problems in the Middle East can be laid squarely at the feet of the British, much more so than the Americans, though they have some blame too. But... Unworkable... probably. Dumb? I don't think so, unless you mean "dumb" in that it is probably unworkable. If you mean it is "dumb" in concept to try to influence Iran to change it's policies (even if that requires force or threats of force) I disagree. The truth is that there are many bad people in the world who do not play well with others, and most of them only respond to threats of one kind or another. (Recall the recent discussion on appeasement.) And if I may (mis)quote Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

abneo3sierra, "Bigduke" from the Ukraine is getting more and more rude. It has become painfully obvious that he is not interested in your opinion. He will not even say "Your opinion is valid, though I disagree with it." His sole goal is to annoy you. Stop feeding the troll.

Not to degenerate into a flame war (but I was provoked): Yeah. Those Serbians were sure dark-skinned. The truth is, in general, Europe and North America are not trouble-spots, so, yes, few Caucasians have come down on NATO's or the American's bad side. And let's discuss Dutch colonialism some time... No-one's hands are clean. And collectively the US military has a hell of a lot more respect for human life than anyone they've fought since WWI. They take casualties, invariably, because they are trying so hard NOT to kill the people whom the combatants are cowering behind. I really hate these discussions. I just want to play my little game, but the trolls keep provoking me... [ March 22, 2008, 12:34 PM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

Would you like, perchance, to expand on the first sentence? As to the second, don't worry, Elmar is equal-opportunity with his insults. Of course, he usually knows what he's talking about. So I'm always interested when some one is able to contradict him. To keep things simple, I would be fascinated to hear how the "war" is being "militarily won" in Afghanistan. And I am quite sure Elmar will be contrite, once he is put in his place. </font>

I had heard about this simulator (or another very like it) while I was in residency, but I never knew it's name. I had even heard that the British Army was using it. (The facial expressions are impressive.) I've never used it, though. I'd be surprised if it was affordable for an individual to purchase. I assume that it is mostly a simulation of what happens in an ER trauma bay, rather than what happens in an OR. Thus, my interest is limited. I'm the guy that the first responders are trying to get the casualty to, with all those stopgap maneuvers, like the Foley catheter placed through the bleeding chest wound maneuver as seen in the demo clip on the website. (Subclavian vessel injuries ARE a bitch to control, by the way. I've never seen the Foley trick work.) You don't need an engine this good for camp. Use something like the Warcraft engine. No matter how you tweak things it is still orcs and elves and guys with chainsaws and force swords and gimmicks like mole mortars, not to mention glorified M113s as the basic APC (i.e. no really visionary technology, so you may as well just make it WWII). The whole good-vs-evil motif may be very well done, but it is space opera, plain and simple. Thus it also does not need an engine this good. Use the Warcraft engine and stick to units with "health bars." Again, though, I vote for sticking to historical settings. WWII is pretty much perfect for such a game-- all sides have approximately equal technology and skill, or at least they have complimentary advantages, and it is an excellent mix of all arms (infantry, armor, artillery, etc) that operate at reasonable ranges. About the only problem with a WWII setting is that it has been done to death. [ March 21, 2008, 07:47 AM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

Woops, sorry, that's a little confusing. I'm American, in the military, stationed in Kaiserslautern. Also, sorry to revive the post so late, but I wanted to answer.

Per capita, Poland lost more of its population killed than any other country. The losses were devastating, made all the more sad, if that is possible, by the fact many of those losses were cold blooded murder - mass shootings (by both the Russians and the Germans) and concentration camps in the main. The total according to Wikipedia was 16% of the 1939 population. One in six people alive in Poland in 1939 were dead six years later.</font>

I have to say that I am no motorcycle fanboy, but I gotta have horse cavalry! (And not just because I'm a Blackhorse veteran...) The SS fielded entire divisions of cavalry even late in the war, and the Soviets had cavalry CORPS. (I know, I know, the whole corps wasn't horse-mounted, so don't go there.) Where they are important is in antipartisan scenarios. Wehrmacht used them thus extensively. On the other hand there were Soviet partisan cavalry units, too. I get what you're saying about how they'd usually dismount off-map, but given the Polish history and the anti-partisan uses I think leaving them out would be an oversight. What would be really cool is if 1-in-4 men were left behind as horse-holders when they dismounted, too, so in dismounting you sort of lose 25% of your manpower. Perhaps a later mod, at least? Please? If I have to grovel I'll do it. Wow. Gotta agree on the basements and fortified buildings, if its possible. That would rock. I love those East Front urban nightmares.

Garm: I played the tabletop version of Battletach a few centuries ago, but ultimately tired of it. It wasn't very "high-tech" for a science fiction game. It was basically WWII combat dressed up with walking tanks. The designers eventually tried to retroactively explain that with a "fall of Rome" kind of scenario, but it rang hollow. I never played any of the computer games. They always seemed to need a computer one generation better than what I could afford. Nowadays I'm set on that front, but Battletech still doesn't appeal to me. As I have implied, it would have to be a quite original sci-fi game to interest me. I'm the kind of guy who loved 2001: A Space Odyssey and detested crap like Wing Commander, and even Star Wars and Star Trek, y'know? (Though Alcubierre's work is shedding new light on Star Trek style warp drives.) Lord knows I've been disappointed by every space combat game ever made. For a spaceship combat game I'd want something with a interface like the old 688i Los Angeles class submarine simulation-- where you never see your opponent, just read sensor information. Perhaps you would see him as a dot on the horizon through your periscope (or for space, a low-res light above the terminator via a telescope array) occasionally. And, you could accelerate to the limits of your fuel supply and there would be no upper limit on velocity. I certainly understand why there have been no such games. Nowadays, though, you could have some kind of navigational AI to crunch the numbers and offer orbital options or something, then arrange the proper attitude and delta-V.

I sort of take my model for a playable high-tech sci-fi engagement from colonial-era history. Since sealift was limited colonial wars were often fought with very small forces. If you consider the number of troops deployed in Europe during the Seven Years War and compare that to the pathetically small French and English forces fighting in the new world or India, it truly boggles the mind. A couple of regiments basically decided the history of the western hemisphere. Now, the purpose of colonies is to generate trade, and thus revenue, for the mother country. Thus, the mother country tends to economize on colonial forces to maximize investment-to-return ratios. This is why colonial forces in the early 20th century were still using single-shot large caliber rifles (a la the German Askaris in German East Africa) and the last generation of fighting vehicles. There was also a much higher ratio of infantry to armor or aviation in those forces. Back when I was playing Steel Panthers Modern Battles the most fun engagements were always things like "Greece vs Turkey in 1970", because both sides were using castoffs from more wealthy nations and neither had a war-winner like the Abrams in the First Gulf War. Regarding weapon lethality, well, there has always been a race between the weapons engineers and the armor/stealth engineers. The death-knell of the main battle tank has rung several times in the past half-century (usually by some ATGM fanboy) but the cussed things keep soldiering on. In the future I'm sure that gigawatt lasers will NOT be vaporising anything that crests the horizon. The computerized fire control system that directs those lasers has to see a target first, which is where stealth comes in. What about an armor surface covered in tiny-tiny lenses, resembling liquid glitter but dissipating most wavelengths? A mirrored target would be easy to spot, but you'd have to fire a warhead at it, not a photon. Or even cover the mirror surface with a surface that ablates, thus dissipating some of the laser energy while simultaneously uncovering a small area of the mirror? Sort of "laser-ERA?" Or, what about smoke dischargers that launch prismatic aerosols? And wouldn't a powerful laser's ionization trail (when fired in an atmosphere) make a wonder IR beacon directly back at the firing vehicle...? An x-ray or gamma-ray laser might be more difficult to defeat, but I'm sure some smartboy somewhere has a plan. I guess my point is, there will always be countermeasures. And a really WELL DONE sci-fi game could be a joy. And I'd buy a truly good sci-fi game, but I'd still rather stick to real history, given my druthers. Oh, and I'll throw down the gauntlet right here and now: WH40K is not science fiction. It is really bad space-opera. [ March 03, 2008, 05:26 AM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

I'm sort of a science fiction fanatic, and a military science fiction fanboy. The problem is that not much translates well into a good balanced game. Yes, Heinlein's Starship Troopers was a great book, and for its time grounbreaking, but it was all infantry with little mention of other arms. Granted it was infantry in powered armored combat suits, but nonetheless infantry. Joe Haldeman's Forever War is similarly based on powered infantry. David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series is very balanced, but the tactics are basically based on the use of armor in the Vietnam-war era. Also, the science is lacking in that weaponry is based upon a deus-ex-machina "powergun" technology. Keith Laumer's Bolo series is basically like OGRE. It is based around very large armored vehicles that routinely fight entire conventional armies. The stories span 2000 years and cover 60 generations of Bolo. The Meat of the Matter: A very good possible model would be one based on the now-defunct roleplaying game 2300AD, by Game Designers' Workshop. It is based around the colonization of space by (real-life) human nations after recovering from a catastrophic cold-war-turned-hot kind of war in 2000AD (which was covered in a prior game called Twilight:2000). This is the kind of game, like Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium, that people would buy just to read without playing. It was that good. 2300AD had VERY detailed weapons and armored vehicles from several human nations, and an EXTREMELY well-developed and ORIGINAL alien opponent that also had well-developed equipment. France and Germany had developed powered infantry combat armor, though it is no-where near as well-developed as in Starship Troopers. It was bulky, much like that seen in the 3DSF model pictures in the previous post. (And the United States used a license-built copy of the French design.) Manchuria had a perverse cultural fascination with vaguely mecha-like (but much smaller) "pods" that walked on legs but had no arms, and bristled with weapons. You definitle rode a pod, though, you didn't wear it like the French and German powered armor. Most "tanks" were in fact built more on Stryker MGS model than the M1A2 model. They had to be kept light because most were ground-effect (i.e. hovercraft). Thus, they depend upon maneuverability and C3 to survive, just like the Strykers. Only (I think) the French and the Manchurians kept main battle tanks mounted on tracks, and they were HUGE, like smaller OGREs or Bolos. Most of the combat had a very gritty Aliens-like colonial-war feel to it. It wasn't space-opera like Star Wars or Star Trek. The aliens were called "Kafers", after the German word for bug, but they are not insectile. They are interesting in that they get more intelligent under stress, using an adrenalin-analog that works on their minds instead of their bodies. But, every time they get a shot of this "adrenaline" over the years their baseline IQ would rise a little, too, so they could still have pretty smart officers and leaders who were old and experienced. This is all covered in great detail in the Physiology section of the Kafer Sourcebook. It was said that "nothing is more stupid as a Kafer at the beginning of a firefight. But nothing is more clever than the same Kafer twenty seconds later, either." The Kafer had several different rifles, ATGMs, anti-aircraft missiles, a ground-effect tank, and at least two types of tracked APC. Railguns and plasma guns are used extensively. Man-portable laser weapons tend to be bulky, but not as bulky as the man-portable plasma guns (which have backpacks similar to flamethrower tanks). But the Germans-- clever little devils-- had a man-portable plasma gun that didn't have a backpack (it only held six shots, though). The Ukrainians had a shoulder-launched single-shot anti-armor plasma weapon that worked like a recoilless rifle. These are all the high-end stuff, though. Most troops still shot bullets using chemical propellant, and many lower-end vehicles mounted autocannon rather than beam weapons. The timeline also covered many conflicts between the various human nations before cooperating (sort of) in the final war against the aliens. The human-on-human wars would likely make great 2-player games, with the Kafers excellent for 1-player games. You could even argue that the Kafer AI doing stupid things occasionally was accurate! Getting the license for this would be MUCH cheaper than one for Aliens and, frankly, has more information available to it. (The USCM Technical Manual covers USCM equipment in depth, but there is no info on any of their opponents.) Also, Marc Miller let Steve Jackson Games start making suppliments for the epic Traveller role-playing game using the GURPS system, so I think he is interested in cooperating with others about the games that reverted to him when GDW went under. Marc Miller as eBook versions of all the old books for sale at: http://www.farfuture.net/ Anyone developing CM:2300 would need the basic game, the Vehicle Guide, the Kafer Sourcebook, and the Aurora Sourcebook. There are fan-sites all over the internet. (It was, as I said, a truly excellent and original roleplaying game. It won awards. GDW always made great stuff.) By the way, Texas is an independent nation in this game. All that said, I'm all for sticking to real-life as well. But if a CM sci-fi game was made based on 2300AD I would pay ridiculously for it. [ March 01, 2008, 05:34 AM: Message edited by: Dean F. ]

I got a very good view of one of my M2-armed Strykers shooting one of it's disembarking infantry in the back when his v1.06 route-finding routine failed him. He took the short route around the front of the Stryker to go through a gate in a wall. Needless to say, he dropped dead in a very dramatic fashion, about 10 meters in front of the vehicle. No enemy were anywhere nearby, and I watched the round pass through him from an oblique viewing angle. Pure luck I was zoomed in that close at the time. (I had just gotten the game and was admiring the 3D modeling of the Stryker.) I still had the Stryker set to area-fire on the building, to suppress the bad guys who it turns out weren't there. The only bad guys were in a ditch behind the building, and had already been killed, but their earlier fire was why I was suppressing the building.