Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

So I put this one to my wife, and here are her answers:

 

1. No, for the simple reason that if both of us took it there would be a 10% chance of one of us dying. This is a bit too high when you're contemplating raising children alone. Worse, the chances get a lot higher if you include friends and family - you essentially end up with a guarantee that someone you know will die.

 

2. It should be freely available, but limited to people over the age of majority who have undergone some sort of evaluation and counselling. There should also be provisions to stop overpopulation (a mandatory birth control shot per year perhaps?), as well as the legalisation of euthanasia for people who want to opt out. 

 

3. A very small number.

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, 

Amen to the 111 comparison.

 

The U.S.'s new joint fighter is in trouble. It is overbudget, behind schedule, and is failing to meet critical performance metrics. The Navy is thinking of dropping out and going with a proven manufacturer with a history of producing quality naval fighters...but enough about the F-111, let's talk about the JSF.
 

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, 

I did a little bit of 1:72nd armour before realizing that the high end 1:72 kits are only a little cheaper than equivalent quality 1:35 kits (or the same cost, if you hunt for bargains a bit), but with greatly reduced variety. 

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

Does anyone have the collected works of HAV in the form of the story of clan comieboo?

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. 

Time to wake up Pliny Bushbreaker, my wicked little halfling ranger assassin. I'm sure he's off somewhere wicked with his mate Piddle.

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. 

Not Three Mile Island (which was laughably insignificant compared to popular reception), but SL-1.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ed1_1387144246&use_old_player=0

 

Protip: Don't design reactors with a single control rod.

If you do design a reactor with a single control rod, don't move the control rod with your bare hands. A fatal case of Impaled-to-the-Ceiling Syndrome may result.

That must have been extra fun to clean up.

At first I thought this thread was about shoulder launched anti-tank weapons.

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 mustache is the most frightening aspect of that uniform. It is the stuff of Stranger Danger nightmares.

 

 

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's actually worse. I was looking through the comments section for more possible sources on my current investigations of Chris Kyle. One of the commentors said that Kunk in fact got away with scapegoating his battalion and is now a full Colonel.

 

So yeah, not only did Kunk create an environment where war crimes were more likely to happen, he was rewarded for it by dressing down the folks reporting it. Again, this is no surprise to me knowing the culture of impunity around the military and the jilted nature of the US officer corps. Staying in line and maintaining the fantasy of a "clean" army is more important than actually fixing real problems.

 

 

Let me share with you a story from another sniper veteran from Iraq; part of my compilation on Ramadi.

 

This sniper took issue with Chris Kyle's story about shooting a woman with a grenade. He took issue not because "he shot a woman" or any other typical liberal bleeding heart argument. He took issue because Kyle claimed that he might go to prison if he got the call wrong. The sniper, with blunt candidness, instead said that Kyle and no other US soldier would ever have gone to prison because they mistakenly shot civilians. Indeed, the sniper recounted an incident where an intelligence officer ordered them to shoot up an armed column of Iraqis; who could clearly see the American soldiers and yet took no hostile action. The result was a bloody firefight with lots of Iraqi dead, only to turn out all the Iraqis they killed were part of the governor's bodyguard. Was the intelligence officer sent to prison or even reprimanded? Nope, in fact as far as they knew he went up the ladder.

 

And really, knowing that the military practices this kind of culture of impunity, is it really smart to be letting extremists in? What if they start shooting helpless civilians left and right and then misreport it as "enemy combatants" or the CO turns a blind eye because he's so short-handed that he needs even these nutcases. Or, as the above cases show, the rest of the unit is afraid they might get fragged by the psychos in their midst, knowing there likely won't be an investigation? Pat Tillman for instance was killed by friendly fire and it took months for the Army to even admit this. And as far as I can tell, the folks who helped covered it up in fact got promoted while the perpetrators by and large have never been named or punished. 

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. 

I don't think Garbad is a nazi, just an douche with an overinflated ego.

 

We should put him and a certain other person in a room together sometime. It would be fun to watch.

Who?

And yeah, he isn't so much a Nazi, just an ignorant, hate filled, sack of shit. 

I'd contend that people with strong racist views, especially ones like Nazism that place a serious emphasis on killing the groups you're racist towards, are more likely to commit war crimes and other things that are really not good when you're trying to build a harmonious state.

 

 

 

There's a whole lot of not thinking about it that's being done, and there are pains being taken to minimize the effect on the American public. It's kind of a realization of the Vietnam desire to be able to fight the war without the public actually caring in a meaningful way.

 

Yeah I was thinking more the friendly light hearted Nazis like Garbad and Han Zulu. 

That was an interesting read. Took me two days to get through it though, a lot of it rings true with what Thomas Rick said in his book The Generals.  It takes something as bad as war crimes to get an officer relieved, when they should have been looking at sacking Kunk for running his battalion like shit and losing so many men.

Since the Green guy was a sociopath, shouldn’t that have gotten him kicked alone?

More interesting to me though is, why should the army screen for 'extreme political views', don't you have a right to be a dumb fuck Nazi if you want to? And if you don't let it affect your job, why can't they serve too. In a system that was working right, if they got out of line they could then be discharged, or is that too much of an idealistic view?

There also seem to be a lot of parallels with Vietnam, in how a long un popular war eats the system up and the poor new blood brought in can’t bring it back to the way it should be until we not fighting some shitty attrition war, in a shitty, shit hole no one should care about?

I first got interested in the Skyraider as a Kid reading Vietnam war stories. The amount of times the skyradiers came up in stories with rescue missions stuck in my head.  A large ordanance load and long loiter time make for a good CAS/COIN aircraft.

Yep, me too. And as bad as the movie was, Flight of the Intruder has some great Skyraider action at the end.