Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ5KnAV9teU

I seem to have missed the Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills when it first aired. Although by then my folks had moved us to a rural locale that didn't have cable television.
 
Besides, when it came to camp 1990s television series with improbably long names, my tastes were more along the lines of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
 

I confess; when EE or Looser or whoever characterized the Ukrainian government's muscle as fascists, I thought this was Russian hyperbole.  I was aware of the presence of far-right elements during the protest period, and had no doubt that there were some neo-nazis in the ranks currently, the characterization seemed exaggerated.  After all, the Soviets had accused NATO of similar things, and surely the Ukrainians wouldn't be so dumb as to openly play into the role of villains in the Russian cultural monomyth of the Great Patriotic War?
 
I am reconsidering this view.

My brother!
 
My parents also let me stay up for Magnum in elementary school! It was the only show I got to do that for. I watched it religiously. 
 
It holds up too, they play the uncut originals on Encore with no comercials, I been recording them and watching my favorites for months. 

Magnum PI was the best show of the 80s. FACT. 

Fantastic TV. Dark and funny.
 
It's a black comedy set in a military hospital in Vietnam Korea. Weird that I typed Vietnam. No idea what came over me there.

So let me guess. Jack Ryan goes back in time to stop a Russian nationalist from planting a nuclear device at the 1985 Geneva Summit, blowing up Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. There he teams up with Captain Marko Ramius who was attached as a liaison for the Red Fleet.
 
And yes, god damnit, this plot works and will bring the series full circle and it makes more sense than Debt of Honor.

This is where the first church of high and fast comes in with my dream bomber:
 

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. 

Panzerkampfwagen Panther Ausf. QQ
 

This was original posted by goon Vessbot in the Aeronautical Insanity thread, but since some people here are poor and can't afford $10, I'll copy it over to here;
 
 
 

 
 
 

Posted Today, 10:38 PM
Donward, on 22 Feb 2015 - 10:36 PM, said:
 
To be honest, I'm far more critical of most media property - particularly television series - than that.
 
 
Eh. The first couple episodes were OK with the horse and the tank thing and I was able to talk myself into watching the entire first season despite the love triangle bullshit and the annoying kid. Kicking ass with a .357 revolver and any show that has Norman Reedus in it goes a long way with me. But I stopped watching when The Farm happened and have never looked back. Which is a shame because I liked the zombie genre before it got ruined by all the hipster morons who think it's cool to dress like zombies and the survivalists/preppers.
 
The point is NOT to be the zombies, hipsters! And survivalists/preppers. Way to use that OPSEC about preparing for the "Zombie Apocalypse". Now everyone is using the term. Why don't you post some How To Youtube videos about how to fool the guv'mint by building ARs from 80 percent lowers while you're at it since you love shooting yourselves in the foot.
 
Shit like this is why we can't have nice things.

Except The Walking Dead. It's shit. Granted, it went from being mid-level shit to irredeemable bison excrement, but it was still shit from Day 1.

Today I learned Donward can not only tolerate being around, but is capable of actually marrying and living with a Doctor Who fan.
 
Scientists are trying to collect a tissue sample of his pain nerves to try and study this effect.

This is old news to the well-informed, but part of the problem is also simple psychology. Nobody in the navy wants to be stuck as captain of a patrol boat, even if swarms are more efficient. And nobody in the airforce wants to be stuck as a drone jockey. So you are always going to have people in both organisations pushing for big ships and manned aircraft.

Germans are a very literal people, and they got a bit confused when they heard somebody calling the radio their most effective weapon because of the indirect fire fragmentation capability.

"I think radios should have those rails so you an fit on do-dads like bayonets, maybe call it the tactical radio" - Heckler & Koch 

My gun bookshelf so far:
 

 
The stack on the right is the reference material for a single article. No kidding. It's gonna be awesome.

Damn, compared to that the various ________ Ship Design and Development books by Norman Friedman look crazy cheap. I've even had some decent luck at coming up with rare books/textbooks about the early modern period.

*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. 

*flashbacks from 10 years ago when Zinegata was very active in The Gaming Den*
 
The Essence of RPGs
 
The essential thing to realize about a roleplaying game is that it is ultimately a conflict generation and resolution mechanism. The game must be able to create conflict scenarios, that is then resolved by the players using their characters.
 
Hence, before beginning development, you need to define what kinds of conflict the system is supposed to generate and resolve. All successful RPGs, at its core, must feature interesting conflicts that players would like to participate in - be it a "dungeon crawl/adventure" conflict (D&D), a "military" conflict (Twilight 2000), a "space opera" conflict (Star Wars) or whatever.
 
And in general, I'd note that specificity is very important for good RPGs. D20 Modern for instance is mostly forgotten because it didn't have a strong central core conflict - it was basically seen as a D&D port in a quasi-modern setting that didn't necessarily subscribe to the dungeon crawl style of conflict to begin with. Shadowrun by contrast, despite its mechanical clunkiness, has niched itself solidly by defining itself as the RPG that combines both magic and cyberpunk elements in a sorta coherent whole.
 
Tabletop vs Computer Implementation
 
In general, tabletop systems are the easiest to develop because the premise of the system is that there is a human Gamemaster to nudge the system along even when the rules fall short. On the other hand, the ease of development means there's also a massive glut of tabletop gaming material out there, plus it's not exactly a growing market. This will apply regardless what your conflict resolution mechanism is - be it dice, special dice, cards, etc.
 
PC games by contrast are much harder to develop, as the computer game program must come out fully understanding the rules with minimal bugs; and it must also have the resources to generate conflict scenarios. A tabletop Game Master can, with a few hours of preparation, create a dungeon that the players will tackle. A computer can't do this - it must have a pre-loaded scenario or it must have very robust tools for creating random encounters (as eptomized by the random dungeons of rogue-likes).

On the one hand, I loathe how darkest Africa has become this lazy stereotype that we all wallow in whenever anything happens on the continent.
On the other hand, a game which shows just how fucking impossible was for any of the post-colonial countries to develop in a stable and productive fashion during the cold war would be pretty neat. And grimdark.

For the best role-playing experience, no skills would be visible.

What? You'll go a runnin' off to that half-mad German git? He'll be too busy talking to trees! Why I have more Royal Blood in my left gonad than the entire Royal Family put together!
No, I'm serious! Given that I'm related in a round about way to King Edward IV (the most battle winningest, sex havingest of the English monarchs) and the recent paternity issues that have cropped up after the discovery of Richard III.