Field Oggy

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." — Elie Wiesel
 
 

Dunno, there are other security risks to consider:
 

I have no idea, for sure it wasn't advertised by our gov. I guess the discussion is being waged through media at this point, and making formal request will happen only when understanding is reached. Filing formal request might very well mean that it is formally denied, an outcome nobody would really want.
Also sorry for spamming memes, but this debacle results in a lot of hilarity popping up:

To be fair we do have rather a good one ...
Home - The Tank Museum
 

Yeah, lol. The idea that a $60 game can make you an effective attack helo pilot is just so gosh darn cute.
If that were true, I should be Chairmain of the Joint Chiefs, given the number of hours I've put into CM.

I saw that movie recently and agree with your take. As someone who read the book which this movie was supposedly based on I also wondered why besides name recognition they even called that movie "All quiet on the western front". the movie had very little to do with the book it was based on. IMO the 1930 version is a better adaptation.

so, what is the point of the trial in this sequence? You've predetermined the verdict, and the sentence, so why bother with the trial.

Still doesn’t beat their best recruitment video so far
 

As a Professional user in my day job and what feels like a lifelong fan, I do think they've done a good job balancing development with a small team. War gamers and staff officers are a tough crowd to please, but their passion comes through in their work and their adaptation of Steam after years and years of discussion shows a willingness to be responsive, listen to the community and reach new fans. 
 
I imagine the Professional orders have taken up a large amount of time, in part because we're a demanding bunch, and also because of the nature of government procurement and contracting. Beyond that, current events sunk a Black Sea module that seems to have had a fair bit of work invested in it. The important thing to me is that they're communicating with the community here, and have remained committed to it even when people are disappointed. This has often been a point of contention, and again shows a lot of positive development. I don't want all that to get lost. 
 
In terms of specifics, of course I would like to see Partisans, Co-Belligerents and RSI in Fortress Italy, and a fully developed TOE and OOB for Italian forces in Sicily which right now are lacking a lot. I'd love to see Brigade Piron and the Princess Irene's in Battle for Normandy/Final Blitzkrieg, and the Scheldt and Rhine Crossings for the Commonwealth in Final Blitzkrieg. Finally, as with it seems everyone else, minor Axis / new Allies for Red Thunder, particularly the Poles and Romanians who played a huge role in critical operations. 
 
This is my "Christmas list" every year, and I want to point out again that in Fire and Rubble, we got partisans. That's a major item was on the list addressed, just as Rome to Victory crossed off nearly all of my wishes for Allied forces in that title. These aren't small things, and I just want to take the time to show that they don't go unnoticed. 
 
The new year is sure to be marked with some  frustration, disappointment and delay, like every year, but there will be high points too, and sometimes that gets lost in the moment. Merry Christmas everyone. 

I envy you.  17 years of humping a ruck in full tactical fighting order means I can't run anymore.  My knees are shot.  Best I can do is a slow jog and only a short distance.

Ah, the Americans are not that bad

I care not for what is its replacement is for NATO as long as it can be conceivably called a "flakpanzer". 😍

Oh, so we're only supposed to reply if we like a mod? 
 
That, and whether or not you like my attitude really has zero bearing on me. 

Put down all beverages first. It is that funny.

As an trained, though not practicing archaeologist, it is my (non-)professional opinion that the most important of the early pra-human's inventions was a pointy stick with which he could kill larger animals and defend himself, also from other humans. There would be no leaving the African savanna without this skill (and perhaps ability to make fire). From it follows that we were natural born killers way before we became what constitutes a homo sapiens. If one feels philosophical,  an interesting question is if learning NOT to kill each other allowed us to create civilization, or if it was the ability to coerce an kill others that made bigger social structures possible...
Edit:
On a related note, 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best movie ever made  
 
 

I'm sixty years old and practically all my life I have been struggling with the phrase "WARCRIMES".
As I see it, war is by definition a crime and we humans ALWAYS commit horrible crimes during war, civil wars, uprisings, revolutions, conquests and even in peacetime.
Romans, Persians, Dutch, French, Spanish, Aztecs, Vikings, native -Americans, "Arabs", African tribesmen, Chinese, Russians, Japanese, German, and yes even Americans and Canadians and the British (and every other large group of humans), exploited, killed, maimed, tortured and executed their opponents. Be it real or suspected opponents, that is.
Most people, certainly in the West, have the illusion that war can be fought in a "rather clean way".
In my opinion the whole morality-stance on the "yes or no" execution of these Russian prisoners is a waste of time. It is a part of war and as long as we humans go to war, these combat-crimes will happen. I fact, it is a miracle that there are so much frontline-soldiers that DO NOT commit "warcrimes".
I do think there is a big difference between combat-crimes and noncombat-crimes, but if you really want to stop warcrimes, stop war.
 
 

I think most people, given the choice between street fighting in Kherson with the possibility of killing and capturing many Russians, versus liberating the city with fighting within the city, but letting the majority of Russians escape, would choose the option that avoided the city fighting.
The cost in extra military casualties, civilian casualties and damage to the city isn't worth what you'd gain.

Seen some discussion around Kherson and whether Russia is truly retreating or not and whether Ukraine is making a mistake by not contesting the retreat by advancing rapidly to pin the Russians down, i just want to point out, the most important goal should be the withdrawal of Russian forces from Kherson, and Ukraine retaking the whole right bank of the Dnipro. 
If that can be achieved by allowing Russia to move resources back to the left bank under fire, without utterly destroying Kherson in urban combat, even if it allows Russian forces to escape in larger numbers and equipment, preserving Ukrainian equipment and the lives of its soldiers and civilians are much more important overall and benefits Ukraine way more than pinning Russia down in Kherson. 

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

Russian BTR-82A carried AT-mines on the top and something happened...
 

 

There are a remarkable number road casualties even in peacetime exercises. Twenty year old corporals that haven't slept in two or three days are not the world's best drivers.

Or all he really wants is sharks with freaking laser beams on their heads....