Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

My wife picked up Harlan Coben's 'Missing You' for me last weekend. I've liked most of his books, but haven’t started it. I've been reading a lot of tech books for work so less fun reading, ‘fun’ being anything about tanks, plans or guns. I can read Coben’s book in the can heh.

Does Brad Pitt count? He has been in some really great movies, Seven, Fight Club, Inglorious Bastards, etc, I think he does a good job in them. Of course I have pretty low standards.

I remember Dale Brown’s flight of the Old Dog. I read it when I was a teen. B-52s are cool and stuff. I just picked up a copy of Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Coonts. I read it about the same time as Old Dog(edit the first time).

Yeah, that's just crazy. I wonder where he got it?

I think I agree with your wife.

Dudes, the TACTICAL PHONE CASE with real rails! We could get rich!!

So I went ahead and ordered a new set of tracks for my M4A1 direct vision 'El Elamein Sherm, and a aluminum barrel for it as well. I may not even finish the 1/72 stuff. I really want to do that DV Sherman, the IC Firefly Hybrid is cool too, and I have a beutiful aluminum and brass barel for it. I may build them both at once. They will have to be painted together as well, at work... Anway, some box shots.

That was a really good read, But are there any Admirals ready to step up and throw away their careers in congress to kill it?

That was a really good read,

Yeah, all the interesting stuff is in 1/35, and 1/48 in an abortion in armor.

That epic has never been put down on paper, and I think much of it is lost to the sands of time, or the clouds of pot in my case.

So I started my first model build in a few years today. An M4A3 76 from Trumpeter. I got this far before my wife woke the beast. Some thoughts. I remember medium CA glue being a little thicker. 1/72 scale is SMALL. Small stuff is easy to send flying. Trump is about 2 grades lower than Dragon, things like lifting loops in 1/72 are solid, I’ll cut them off and add wire ones. Just not as much detail as a similar dragon kit but only about 2/3s the cost. With a scale this small good side cutters are really needed. You can’t be cutting little shit off the sprues with an exacto knife. I think I’ll go back to 1/35 though, this scale is really frustrating. But maybe not, I’ll try a few more brands and see.

Man, that monitor, I'm so jelly!

LOL yeah, I missed that on the product page. Those are mostly for show then? Pic link is broken for me. But I can picture it. And I'm super jealous.

My longest played character was Smedley Butler the Paladin

So the new cooler is working well, the old one was hitting the 90s playing WOT, but it was pretty clogged up once I got it out. It even hit the heat protects and shut down on me once in FarCry 4. This new one I haven’t seen an 80c with all the fans blowing. And this one will be a lot easier to clean if it gets clogged. It's very easy to remove. I could then take it to work and blow the dust out with real compressed air. Course, I'll need to buy big tubes of heat sync goo. My main problem with the coolers from Noctua are they specifically called out my motherboard line saying would need me to move the ram to the further two slots over. But then I can't put in more ram. Also, I doubt it would work with my ram even then, its stupidly tall, I wouldn't buy RAM this tall again, there has to be RAM as fast but not this tall! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231617 I still need to get filters... Also, it seems like every windows update resets my power saving settings.

*puts on his robe and wizard hat*

I've been writing a novel for an embarrassingly long time. I friend and aspiring writer encouraged me years ago to write a short story. I did, about marine fighter pilots, and he liked it. That was enough encouragement to try and expand it into a novel length book. That has grown into an almost obsession. If I’m not reading forums, playing tanks, working or interacting with the wife, I’m working on my book. Because my two favorite aircraft of WWII are the Corsair, and P-38, I incorporated a brother who went army air force. One thing that became very clear right off the bat is, no matter how much I thought I knew about a subject, it was shocking how little I did until I tried to write about it. I’m pretty well read on the Corsair and P-38. At one point I had every book in print and several not in print on both. There were no really big surprises in the planes history, though it was very hard to nail down when they started using F4U-1Ds. Things I didn’t know (not a complete list): I didn’t know anything about the ground campaign through the Solomon Islands, other than Guadalcanal campaign. I didn’t know anything about the naval campaign. I had no idea about the geography, or the locations of the important airdromes on either side. Maps of the area are pretty hard to find. Google Earth was a godsend, but when it first came out, they had almost none of the Solomon Islands or New Guinea with decent detail. Over time this changed and it got good enough I was able to find just about all the important airfields, or close enough to get an idea of what the area looked like. I have a badly organized google maps save file with all the Japanese and US bases I could find marked on it. A lot are still in use today, worldwide, but many have also gone back to the wilds. In a few places you can just make out remnants of the airbase. Munda Point on New Georgia is still the major northern Solomons airport for example, but there are no traces of anything really on southern Bougainville. (EDIT: All the work I did in Google Earth was also done by Pacific Wrecks, I'm pretty proud of how close I came on the questionable ones) I also really had very little idea about how the military worked, or how a fighter squadron was run. This set me down the path of buying books, lots and lots of books. Books on specific squadrons that fought there, and the land and air campaign, then more books about everything from ship design, to geography. The more interesting things I read, the more I wanted to incorporate. The book got bigger and bigger, following two pilots in two separate places in the war made for a lot of characters to keep track of. So they got split and I focused on the one about the Marine. Now this first book is in draft four, I’m doing minor tweaks and going through and fixing grammar etc. As it stands, the book is a little over 2000 (600,000 plus words) double spaced pages. It follows the main Marine character from mid-43 to the end of the war. He does the standard three tours before relief, just about the end of the third tour he breaks the record Eddie Rickenbacker set in WWI, of 26 kills. During the war race to beat this number was in the news a lot. Rickenbacker promised a case of scotch to the first one to beat it. Joe Foss tied it, and the first one in real life to beat it was Dick Bong. The Marine is then promoted and sent back to the states to get the Medal of Honor. This was practically guaranteed by breaking the record and the reason Dick Bong got it in real life. This is one of the few major non historic parts. The book is clearly billed as fiction though, and I’ll have a foreword talking about the real men. In the book about the air force brother, Dick Bong is a major character. The next major break from real history comes in the next part. The Marine after getting married to his best friend’s sister ends up with his own squadron based out of Santa Barbara, training to deploy around late 44 early 45. At this point in the war Marine Aviation is kind of at a boring point, the fight around Rabaul was over by early 44, the marines don’t participate in New Guinea at all. Some squadrons see some action in the Marshalls but it’s not very exciting stuff, just ground attack, very few Japanese planes were seen. This didn’t go unnoticed in the United States and if I recall right they started deactivating some marine squadrons. Then the kamikaze threat came along, and the navy was caught short of fighter pilots. At this point the Marines finagled their way not only onto escort carriers, but also onto several Essex class ships as well. This is where the main character gets back into the war, and were I strayed from real history again. I made up a fictional armored deck carrier, with a back story that includes the old U.S.S Constitution burning down and freeing up the name. During the war her stripped hull was used to house officers awaiting court martial. Anyway, he goes back to war commanding a marine Corsair squadron aboard the fiction ship. The book then follows the ship through the rest of the war, including Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Yamoto suicide run, and the first attacks on main land Japan after the Doolittle raid. The ship also sails through Halsey’s second hurricane and one that hit right after the war ended. It also follows several family members back in the states, like the girl he marries and his family. I’ve spent a pretty large amount of time reading books as research, including as many of the issues of Life magazine as I could. People in the 40s had so much less to do with their free times, but it was a pretty damn interesting time. My goal is to push through the final grammar edit, and then do an edit, to compress it down a bit. My major inspiration is really to produce something like Herman Wouk’s Winds of War and War and Remembrance. They were really fantastic books. I would like to get published at some point, but even if that doesn’t happen, I don’t view it as a waste, I’ve learned so much and had so much fun doing it, I have no regrets. I’ve written other stuff too, I’m about 35% through first draft on the army air force brother, and have all the source books for that one now. I’ve followed some of the same characters into Korea and their offspring into Vietnam. If anyone is interested in offering feedback, I can send you a chapter or two. I’ve had a few people read it, but you know how that goes, it’s always ‘good’ when its family. Or I could just post a chapter or two to the thread every once in a while.

That must have been extra fun to clean up.

LOL me too!

I've always kind of wanted an update of Twilight 2000, the old pen and paper RPG, the setting was right after the end of WWIII, that had only gone a little nuclear, and you were Americans stranded in middle of Poland after the last US ARMY attack or something. I think it would have a big market, the USA prepper nutballs, and Red Dawn fan boys, plus if it was very FPSish, FPS fans if the game play was good. The setting would need an update, because we wouldn’t want to have to buy the rights to the name, plus, who cares about WWIII in the 80s now? I’m not sure what help I could be. I’m sure I could help with world/character/story lines. I could also help mechanics as long as I don’t have to do the math. I’ve got a killer system and have beta tested a lot of software. Not just games, I got paid to write bug reports and FAQs at one time. So, I guess it would really be a more realistic no mutant Fallout, with a much bigger world. I’m only really interested in PC gaming.

What was the name of the thing Howard Hughes crashed into a neighborhood right at the end of the war?

The little grin too, very creepy.

I think this fits. The improved P-61, IE F-15. It's like a P-38 and P-47 had a baby.

It really sounds like this isn't fixable with wars going on. The part about the guys giving the war crimes lecture at west point and no one raising their hands is really disturbing.