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holocaust bloopers posted:Without Remorse is cool cuz where John Kelly makes a literal boomstick. poo poo owned. Best book to read as a junior high student. Also the hyperbaric chamber bit.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:05
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Dead Reckoning posted:I don't understand what you're trying to say. DnD is usually a balance of finding something to challenge the players without having something unbeatable (however realistic it might be) in the first cave they walk into. More of a slow progression where the difficulty scales but barring bad luck the players are meant to have a good shot at getting to the later stages of the story. Chess is a fair, rigidly balanced game and if it goes badly, gently caress you that piece is off the board, deal with it.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:06
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Panzeh posted:The thing to understand about war games is that they're designed for training purposes, not exploration of possibilities. Brainstorming is cheap, and there are wargames that are made for that(those are your board and computer wargames you can find on say, boardgamegeek). Training is distinctly not. It's more like a game of D&D than a game of chess. Dead Reckoning posted:I don't understand what you're trying to say. I think I do. With chess, you have a lot of way the board can play out, but the set-up is always the same--pawns, queens, what have you. In the wargame analogue, you have all your fleets, air forces, bases etc. on your side, and all of his fleets, air forces, bases etc. on their side, and you can play around with your SEATO Decapitation or Iceland Maximum attacks to your heart's content. Trying a new line of attack is as simple as resetting the board to its original state. With D&D, the set-up is not always the same, and the results of attacks and campaigns, and the reaction to same, can vary wildly. A party consisting of a fighter, a rogue, a barbarian, and a ranger won't do much in a game that's all about high magic, and if your players are all magicians of varying stripes there's going to be a lot of sitting on hands and beating of heads against the wall if your campaign features a lot of tests of strength. For wargaming, this means that you have, making up some names, the 1st Tank Regiment "Osea", the DDG Minnow and attendant support ships, the 44th Tactical Strike Wing "Warwolves", the 97th Marine Expeditionary Battalion "Houndoom", and the helicopter carrier group Chika who've come to play your "campaign" (training exercise), and you need to write up a scenario that gives each of those "PCs" a chance to roll their dice and do something.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:11
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Davin Valkri posted:I think I do. With chess, you have a lot of way the board can play out, but the set-up is always the same--pawns, queens, what have you. Pretty sure the term you are looking for is deterministic perfect information game. VVVV Kelly kills a dude with by putting him in a hyperbaric chamber and cranking up the pressure, then decompressing him so he gets the bends. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 05:16
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iyaayas01 posted:Also the hyperbaric chamber bit. What was that? I don't recall.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:19
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On that note, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is now up on Netflix. And my goodness, it's not a very good movie.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:26
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Wingnut Ninja posted:On that note, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is now up on Netflix. And my goodness, it's not a very good movie. Not watching this movie on some weird nerd principle that restarting this series is guaranteed to be poo poo.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:43
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Totally TWISTED posted:Not watching this movie on some weird nerd principle that restarting this series is guaranteed to be poo poo. I can assure you, it is quite poo poo.
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Jan 9, 2015 06:05
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Totally TWISTED posted:Not watching this movie on some weird nerd principle that restarting this series is guaranteed to be poo poo. It's a weird side effect from his divorce. He had a really nasty divorce with his ex-wife, and it's a lot of the reason there is a massive gap between Sum of All Fears and Shadow Recruit. A combination of IP rights being community property in Maryland and he and his wife being joint owners of the company that licensed out a lot of the Tom Clancy branded stuff. It's also why Jack Ryan stops getting named in several books despite it clearly being him.
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Jan 9, 2015 06:12
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After 2 actors playing Jack Ryan on film I was pretty done and didn't bother with the Affleck one. So this one, nah. vvv Agreed, but stop making GBS threads up this thread with WWII poo poo you lovely shitterpater. priznat fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 06:12
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Stop making GBS threads the thread up with lovely Tom Clancy  What was it about the Lancasters that made them suitable for nighttime bombing missions? Was it simply because the RAF had fewer men/aircraft than the USAAF, so they couldn't risk daytime raids while the Americans could? Or was it something else like the Lancaster having special direction finding equipment or more suitable defensive armament or something else?
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Jan 9, 2015 06:48
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No, it's because the Brits were much more loss averse, and day time raids were not going well.
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Jan 9, 2015 06:54
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:No, it's because the Brits were much more loss averse, and day time raids were not going well. Also because regardless of what was said in public British leadership as well as Bomber Command leadership (i.e., Bomber/Butcher Harris) had waaaaaaay less compunctions about intentionally going in to a city and wrecking shop without any intention of only targeting military targets or really any target other than the city as a whole. Granted USAAF leadership got that way by the end of the war in Europe (saying nothing of the Pacific), even if they still continued to toe the line in public about "daylight precision bombing," but when the 8th and 15th were getting started they really believed the Norden combined with strict box formations would allow them to deliberately target a particular factory complex while leaving the surrounding areas relatively untouched. Also it's worth mentioning that the Lancaster/other RAF bombers had, generally speaking, a lot less defensive armament than American bombers (this is particularly true of the Lancaster, especially because of its long unobstructed bomb bay). This meant they could carry a significantly heavier bomb load than comparable American bombers (particularly the B-17). e: Other RAF bombers of the Lancaster's generation (Sterling and Halifax). Obviously earlier two-engined designs would be a different story. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 07:11
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Lancasters used .303 rather than .50 like the Yanks too. And mostly the British The only time you don't want darkness is if you have to be more precise than flattening a city's industrial district (and even then...) The US had something called the Norden Bombsight, and refused to share the tech with the British (despite how much tech the Brits shared with the US under lend-lease/getting them to send people.just generally paying them to be in the war on a continent across an ocean). This meant the B-17 pilots could actuall be precise in the first place - something that the RAF couldn't. So the RAF had no need to run in the day time (unless they were breaking people out of prison) and the USAAF could benefit from running in the daytime. An interesting point is that the Norden bombsight became a political point long after it was obsolete, and I think the Brits finally paid to get it when the Yanks didn't care enough any more and let it go.
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Jan 9, 2015 08:07
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iyaayas01 posted:Also because regardless of what was said in public British leadership as well as Bomber Command leadership (i.e., Bomber/Butcher Harris) had waaaaaaay less compunctions about intentionally going in to a city and wrecking shop without any intention of only targeting military targets or really any target other than the city as a whole. This tends to happen if the enemy have been flattening your cities too. And I'm not totally convinced that the USAAF were that against it as a concept - although I'd be glad to be proved wrong. I always thought of it more as an "efficiency through division of labour" thing - train for daylight missions, become specialised in that, run in the daytime, RAF takes over at night.
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Jan 9, 2015 08:11
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The short answer is that the results from nighttime bombing were awful. Bombs fell miles, or tens of miles off target because cities were blacked out and navigation was a bitch. There was a lot of tactical debate within the British and American services over day vs night and high vs lower altitude. Spaatz's anecdotes from this time period are pretty interesting, he was an attache in England.
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Jan 9, 2015 08:18
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simplefish posted:The US had something called the Norden Bombsight, and refused to share the tech with the British (despite how much tech the Brits shared with the US under lend-lease/getting them to send people.just generally paying them to be in the war on a continent across an ocean). This meant the B-17 pilots could actuall be precise in the first place - something that the RAF couldn't. Another layer to it all is that despite the US refusal to share with the group, the complete design had already been passed to the Germans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring
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Jan 9, 2015 08:19
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Phanatic posted:Didn't Clancy have A-10s attacking the Kirov in RSR? Actually, it was a 688i (the Chicago) that was attacking the Kirov, and had its attack hosed up by a Norwegian diesel sub that fired all four of its Mark 37 torpedoes into the Kirov. Later on the captains have a chance meet at a bar and the Norwegian captain practically molests the guy since his failed attack was the only thing that stopped the battle group from finding and sinking his boat. And yeah, I agree that the Iceland subplot didn't need "Vigdis Augustdottir." Clancy could not write women without them being Mary Sues or, more often, victims. bitcoin bastard posted:Going (hopefully) the opposite direction from Tom Clancy, what is the consensus on Eric Harry's Arc Light? The single best thing about Arc Light is that it rather realistically describes a very limited accidental nuclear war scenario. I remember one part where one of the wives is driving near the recently-bombed March AFB and the California Highway patrolman advises she 'close her A/C vents' before letting her drive through the contaminated zone of the freeway, and Marines on an LPD talking about how in the wake of the attack, that the Weather Channel had become the single-most watched network on US television because they offered the most accurate and frequently-updated fallout projections. It's pretty much "Trinity's Child," which turned into the HBO movie "By Dawn's Early Light" done far better. Despite that, I think the only thing it misses on is that even if we'd gotten away with a good handful of strategic military bases wiped off the map because of an 'oopsie,' it still would have collapsed the US economy into a serious depression. A single low-yield nuke detonated anywhere in or near a decently-sized city would be a disaster that would make Katrina and Sandy look small by comparison. To say nothing of the fact that most of the bases in the 80s that would've been taken out by a counterforce attack are/were located very near to agricultural centers. A US that has to import nearly all its food for the next few decades because of a contaminated midwest is something economists don't like to contemplate. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 09:15
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iyaayas01 posted:Also because regardless of what was said in public British leadership as well as Bomber Command leadership (i.e., Bomber/Butcher Harris) had waaaaaaay less compunctions about intentionally going in to a city and wrecking shop without any intention of only targeting military targets or really any target other than the city as a whole. There's a story about Harris being stopped by the police because he was driving too fast. The policeman says to him "if you drive like that, you might kill someone." Harris replies, "my friend, do you know how many people I kill every night?"
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Jan 9, 2015 11:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Despite that, I think the only thing it misses on is that even if we'd gotten away with a good handful of strategic military bases wiped off the map because of an 'oopsie,' it still would have collapsed the US economy into a serious depression. A single low-yield nuke detonated anywhere in or near a decently-sized city would be a disaster that would make Katrina and Sandy look small by comparison. To say nothing of the fact that most of the bases in the 80s that would've been taken out by a counterforce attack are/were located very near to agricultural centers. A US that has to import nearly all its food for the next few decades because of a contaminated midwest is something economists don't like to contemplate. Basically from the advent of ICBMs and on, even the most "limited" counterforce strikes against the US would have involved over 1,000 nuclear detonations, hundreds of which would have been in the 15+ megaton range. Even zero direct hits on population centers would have put enough fallout in the atmosphere to reach "unacceptable" levels of Strontium-90 in the entire US population within six years. People gotta understand that it really isn't as simple as one nuke to one target. Especially in the 60s and 70s, being "sure" that a strike would destroy an ICBM silo required more than 7 warheads. Paving the way for strategic bombers to fly in also meant massive salvos of nukes - in fact, before AGM-86 ALCM, we were actually going to expend more nukes rolling back Soviet air defenses than the bombers would deliver to "strategic" targets. We figured - and the Soviets figured - that once we were nuking each other, there wasn't much of a point in using conventional weapons anymore. On top of that, damage requirements got progressively more insane. At the beginning of the McNamara regime, a target was considered "destroyed" if it was reduced to rubble. Midway through, it had to be reduced to gravel. At the end, it had to be reduced to dust. During the Carter administration, it was decided that dust had to be nuked into even finer dust. The US had well north of 10,000 nuclear weapons at our peak, and every single last one of them was programmed to a target somewhere in the SIOP. There really was no such thing as an even theoretical "limited" exchange, because it would only be "limited" relative to the size of the total stockpile, which most well-adjusted people would describe as "unimaginable, nation-destroying destruction."
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Jan 9, 2015 15:02
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Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:51
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These colors don't run. But now they glow in the dark.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:12
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange. Take the cockiest rear end in a top hat you've ever met in your entire life, clone him, give them really opposite beliefs and fed years of propaganda, and then give them both a poo poo load of nukes. I mean the collapse of the Soviet economy was apparently just half time after a bad first half for them. Giving up has never really been on the table for either party. Mazz fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 17:21
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I'm not sure if any of these have been posted before, but I recently came into possession of some video clips related to nuclear propulsion; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqTmA_H9gaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue9VLdqngLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPecFw8Ufyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8uxpjRR8r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krQO8zVOztA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1884LFKGoLs
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Jan 9, 2015 17:47
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange. DON'T TREAD ON ME 
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Jan 9, 2015 20:00
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holocaust bloopers posted:What was that? I don't recall. When he kidnaps the drug dealer. e- Teeth of the Tiger, aka Jack Jr. is really bad.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:23
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange. Plenty of people did. But these decisions are made by people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:23
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LostCosmonaut posted:I'm not sure if any of these have been posted before, but I recently came into possession of some video clips related to nuclear propulsion; These are cool, but hard to interpret without context.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:27
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simplefish posted:This tends to happen if the enemy have been flattening your cities too. And I'm not totally convinced that the USAAF were that against it as a concept - although I'd be glad to be proved wrong. I always thought of it more as an "efficiency through division of labour" thing - train for daylight missions, become specialised in that, run in the daytime, RAF takes over at night. American policy makers from FDR on down were initially against indiscriminate bombing for moral and legal reasons, it wasn't until Operation Pointblank after the Casablanca Conference that the AAF and RAF combined and started strategic bombing of cities. After that all bets were off, before that the AAF was focusing on stuff like sub pens and the like. FDR posted:The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity. Link
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Jan 10, 2015 00:52
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange. I think you are right - it is - but to knowledge that would break the logic of Nuclear standoff!! nations edition. If you admit "Okay USSR you win I guess basing missiles in Cuba is way, way, less bad than utter annihilation" or whatever then you can only use your atomic arsenal for MAD. It really says something that from a utilitarian view at least, complete capitulation to the enemy is a considerably better option that global nuclear war.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:22
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Sikorsky fantasy porn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqorIPC-BbE Looks like HSLD types would like it over riding on the skids of a littlebird
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Jan 10, 2015 05:45
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um, the wing loading from these stunts is terrifying me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSw7iGDpl4
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Jan 10, 2015 05:53
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Jan 10, 2015 07:03
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That's a loving crosswind right there.
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Jan 10, 2015 07:43
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That GIF is more impressive the second time when you realize where the runway actually is 
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Jan 10, 2015 07:49
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That pilot deserves a medal because that was masterfully done.B4Ctom1 posted:Sikorsky fantasy porn. I'd hardly called it fantasy porn since everything indicates they're going to deliver on all the doodads and gizmos they originally advertised in that old demo reel. On time and on budget; which is ironic considering the deal with the whole Comanche thing. The unveiling a couple of months ago was pretty cool. http://youtu.be/6iWlLJm3v9s Back Hack fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Jan 10, 2015 |
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Jan 10, 2015 09:02
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BHX is good for crosswinds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P9OAng32F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPuFYMKZL4 (I haven't watched these ones in particular, so I don't know if they're any good, but there seem to be quite a few of them for Birmingham.)
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Jan 10, 2015 09:44
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priznat posted:That GIF is more impressive the second time when you realize where the runway actually is Is it really what it looks like and not an illusion or camera angle fuckery? Honest question, because it looks so crazy.
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Jan 10, 2015 11:51
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Antti posted:Is it really what it looks like and not an illusion or camera angle fuckery? Honest question, because it looks so crazy. It is exactly what it looks like. Crosswinds (any wind not directly head-on or from the rear) blow the plane off course, so the plane has to yaw in the opposite direction for the engine thrust to cancel it out and keep the plane on course. Then they have to kick the nose back towards the direction of travel at touchdown to prevent too much side load on the landing gear (which can handle some, but not much.) This plane is traveling parallel to the runway centerline. 
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Jan 10, 2015 12:28
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Alaan posted:That's a loving crosswind right there. Back in high school, we were coming back from O'Hare from a student journalism conference in Chicago into Dulles in a United 777-200 (this was probably late '97). Even at that age, I look out the window and see all the cloud bottoms in the area are flat as tables. My seatmate, good guy, isn't what you'd call the quintessential 'enthusiastic flier.' So I decide to take his mind off the fact that we're on final approach by giving him a bit of meteorological trivia by explaining that when the cumulus clouds like the ones we're seeing outside the window have bottoms that are almost *all* uniformly flat as tables, it means the air's unstable. Not bad for a glider, but not very good for wide-bodied 777s that have to aim for a distinct patch of solid ground. I know we're not in any real danger, but I owe him for a few slights and pranks, so I kinda get a kick out of seeing his knuckles whiten a bit on the armrests. The pilot's pretty damned good, but we rather silently miss our first approach - I doubt anyone except me and my buddy noticed, since I made sure to mention it to him as I can see us regaining altitude and hearing the engines spool back up, since we were almost dead-center on the fuselage. The pilot must've been told if he missed again he'd get spinned, so he actually frightens *me* a bit on the second pass by landing the bitch on the left side main gear, turning the 777 into a unicycle for a few moments as I notice the port-side wing come within about 6-8 feet of scraping the ground, and even less from clipping one of the marker lights. Thankfully the jet leans the other direction, probably prompted by the pilot, and the thrust reversers come on louder than I think I've ever heard in a modern airliner. That pilot - and his first officer - got a handshake on the way out. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Jan 10, 2015 |
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Jan 10, 2015 12:39
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