shinRaiden

Because the last time this happened, Brat didn't have a seperate oxygen tree for OFP and VBS, and when he posted pics on his private board they showed VBS objects that were being used as temporary placeholders until the OFP-specific models were complete. Someone who had access to Brat's boards then went and posted that on Flashpoint.ru as a front-page news item. That started a flamewar there and folks got kicked from Brat's site for the chaos it caused. This isn't so much an issue of mod secrecy, but one of needful "PR" organization. While Brat did not announce the models here, he has at least clarified some details in development. ... or so I guess what's going on ...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... in RL once I was was QA engineer for a certain humongous UberCorp. We released the latest and greatest toy with much fanfare. Two days later we had to pull it and recertify the entire mess on an emergency rush case because an idiotic competitor started screaming that it was certain death. The only problem was PEBKAC as they had not bothered to read the README or practice proper security proceedures. Unlike games like Flashpoint, in RL, billions of dollars can swing in on screwups like that. Anyway, of course stuff comes up. With miracles as cool as ECP, bugs are bound to show up. The fact that the team is taking it seriously enough to dedicate the personal time needed to get it done right and get it out the door is far and away commendable. Anybody who's followed their work or experience will know that they're not the wild-eyed noobs that PS in tons of crap then disappear. Considering the OFP community has been actively developing for almost as long as DNF has been spammed on the market there really is no comparison. Unless you're insinuating that you've had DNF since ~2 years ago, in which case you'd be facing a PR for bringing a war3z chat on the boards here. The people not complaining are those that actually know what the process of a project like this involves. There's also the non-trivial major subsystems, and the concurrent EECP development as well. Not exactly small potatoes there, and thank you for doing it. -edit- I was looking for a Dilbert comic from a while back which shows the effect that "real code" has on the babbling zombies, but I believe this will suffice:

Huh. If only you knew the quality and reliability of the processes that go into composites manufacturing... it's as bad as the animal right's wacko's slaughterhouse exposes or Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 FUD. There's so many places for the process to go wrong... Here's a quick overview of the composites process: The manufacturer recieves composites stock from a vendor, and supposedly it's sampled for quality then put into storage. As needed, it gets pulled out and trimmed in sheets that look like gaskets. At this stage it looks like an oversized plastic or rubber gasket, but works like a piece of tape. When a part is needed, an operator will then gather the necessary layers at a workstation. Visually it looks like an old-style printing press. The operator will lay down a sheet and center it, then lay down the second layer on that. The overhead half of the heated press is then lowered to compress the stack and seal it up. The process is repeated until the part is totally constructed. I forget the staging on the next two processes, I believe though it's in this order: The raw part is then sent to the large autoclaves to get cooked. Following that it gets laundered through a nasty chem tank bath to get cured. It then goes to milling for any final processing before going into assembly. There's any number of places where stuff can go wrong... * Inventory control problems can allow for old deterioted composite tape to remain in the cycle instead of being discarded. * Design and communications problems can lead to improper layers. Oversized layers of course can generally be trimmed, but undersized ones are much more of a problem. * When the operator lowers the press, they can raise it to doublecheck the positioning before they seal the layer. If they catch an error or bubble then it's fixable, but if they seal it they have to toss it out and start over. * Cooking in the autoclaves is dependent on lots of factors. You presume the themocouples and pressure sensors are registering correctly so that the proper temperature and pressure is reached and held. If your sensors were feeding bad data, what happened to the part? If there is problems with the process automation, what happens if the parts are cooked too long or too short? All "strictly hypothetical" and not necessarily based off of any such real or imagined situation. ;) * Lets suppose that the chem tanks haven't been properly cycled because the plumbing was blocked by EPA action. Lets suppose that this shutdown was not communicated to the rest of the plant due to managerial politics. Lets suppose that the sensors in the tank were not returning accurate information about the chemical content and dilution of the acids in the tank. Lets suppose the crane controller to move the parts melted down and left tha parts in the etch tank for too long. Again, all "strictly hypothetical" ;). Anyway, I think you get the point. There is no justification at all for not doing penetrative testing such as X-ray or ultrasonic scanning on all parts, and destructive sampling as well.

My 2: BIS-ChibiChari (FF-01) BIS-ChubbyChari (DD-01 modded to lvl 3)

ROI... I'm thinking of saving pennies running around in me FF-01 until I can afford to jump to a high-end destroyer or higher, any comments on that? I don't plan on buying every model in between and busting the bank to tweak them all.

I believe you're referring there to Yosemite in California, nowhere close to Yellowstone, but geologically unstable just the same. http://www.tatsumaki.net/sth/mt_roasty.jpg This is a panorama of the mess called the 'Pacific' Northwest. Starting from the west, you have the Pacific plate diving under the NA plate off the coast. Incidently, researchers are rushing out atm to a newly erupting underwater seamount ~320km off the coast of Vancouver Island. The pressure buckle causes an immediate uplift mountain range - just out of picture on the left border - called the Olympic Mountains. Although not volcanic, the layers exposed reveal regular tsunamis and landshifts that would make the recent Sumatra tsunami look like pebbles in a bathtub. Coming off the east slope of the stressed range, the plate fractures in the greater Puget Sound region. To get an idea of what the faults look like under Seattle, just consult a shattered car window for an excellent visualization. I hinted at that with the little red dots. It's so messed up nobody has a clue what might really happen. Underneath that all the edge of the Pacific plate starts breaking off. Moving east to the orange line of the volcanicly active Cascades range, this is where all the crap that's fallen off the Pacific plate boils up into a stressline at the edge of the plate and pops in any number of hotspots. I've noted the active or semi-active major peaks in Washington and Oregon, Mt. Shasta and Lassen Peak in northern California are also culpable suspects. Mt. Rainier, which has grown approximately 1~5m during the past 15 years I've lived in it's shadow, last had a significant eruption about 500 years ago, resulting in the mudflow outlined on it's north face. I live near the top end of where that mudflow exited the mountain canyon. The path marked to the left shows the presumed path of the next flow, which is a geologically "imminent threat" Immediately to the south is Mt. Adams, which has a pleasently warm and active crater on it's summit, and to the SW marked in orange is Mt. Saint Helens with the previous mudflow marked as well. The area to the east outlined in purple, is the greater Columbia River basin. The base is all volcanic of relatively similar vintage throughout. It is also home to some of the most significant orchard and wheat areas in the US, along with a about a dozen major dams that routinely keep California's lights on. Surrounding that to the east are the Oregon-Idaho Blue Mountains intersecting with the southern Canadian Rockies. These ranges are an odd mix of non-volcanic material positioned and rearranged by volcanic and tectonic forces. The long red arc shows the historical track of the Yellowstone Caldera's movements as the NA plate has shifted eastwards. That is the upper Snake River area, and is also a vital farming district. Beginning in the lower right hand corner you have the US Rocky Mountains. Although commonly regarded as non-volcanic uplift mountains, recent research has discovered dangerous faultlines running along the western edge, that contributed to the sudden and extreme elevation of Utah's Wasatch Range. -edit- This one is Lassen Peak in northern California. The peak is the after-cone of a much larger mountain, the crater of which you can see outlined. ~8km in diameter. This one is an oddball lots of people don't know about. It's in northern New Mexico, due south of Yellowstone. To the best of my knowledge it's long dormant, but the caldera is still 25~30km in diameter, about the same as the Yellowstone core. -edit- http://www.tatsumaki.net/sth/or.jpg This one is another angle, showing the chain from the 10km in diameter Crater Lake north to Mr. Rainer, ~440km to the north.

Actually peaked about 30km I think then dissipated. Basically just a big gas burp that shuffled the pile. I'm about ~110km north, but there's good deal of terrain between here and there. I was curled up with a good book reading up on LDAP systems design so I didn't notice anything until my dad mentioned the report on his way home from work. This shows the relative postion of Mt. Saint Helens. I'm ~45km SE of Seattle (bottom left corner of picture) and ~110km NNE of St. Mt. Helens. The block to the right of the mountain is Portland, Oregon. The wind currents carried the ash cloud in the same manner as the 2004 and 1980 eruptions mostly due east between Mt. Rainier on the left of the red arrow and Mt. Adams on the right of the arrow, dropping anywhere from Yakima at the edge of the brown area to the state of Montana, as much as ~800km to the east. Rivers are blue, interstate highways are red. When the I-5 highway was built, the bridge over the Toutle River (drains north side of Mt. Saint Helens) was minimally constructed as the river at that location was historically rather placid. As a result, in 1980 the lahar came quite close to smashing the only transportation corridor route for road and rail between Seattle and Portland. Crews scrambled to keep the log jams from piling up in the steaming and cementing river underneath the bridge. The flow did reach as far as dumping a significant amount of sediment in the Columbia river downstream from the vital freshwater maritime ports in Portland, severely impacting shipping operations on the West Coast for several months in 1980, and dredging operations have had to be escalated since then. To protect the railroads and highways in the transportation corridor, the US Army Corps of Engineers constructed a massive sedimentation retardation system as seen near the bottom of this third picture. While it likely can't contain a 1980-class lahar, it can block or retard the debris flow to regulate the downstream flow and prevent massive flooding. Additionally, the concrete-like nature of the mudflows makes downstream flood control and cleanup much more difficult. This picture was taken prior to the 2004 eruptions and development of the 2nd cone. The position and hieght of the new cone is marked in red, while the older cone is in blue. Scientists think that the reason for the locational difference is that as the mass of the old cone had relatively cooled and hardend, the pressure released in 2004 and yesterday is from the same magma vent under the old cone, but squirting to the south side due to the geological inclination to the north. As long as the passage remains hot, magma and gas pressure can continue to periodically vent in this side channel.

I've got a panorama I made from the citidel covering Cairo. The cemetary alone is huge, in OFP scale terms. The pyramids are far enough out of Cairo that it's a totally different area, but as I got there in the tail end of a sandstorm it all looked the same to me. The other thing that would be tricky would be all the mud brick housing in everything but the colonial sections of town. I have no idea what would happen if you hit one with any sort of medium or heavy ordnance, but they generally looked like a structural catastrophe. I suppose that a well aimed shot or two from an MBT or attack helicopter would shatter such a building, rather than knock a hole in it like classic unfinished concrete and rebar with tile. While the buildings in the outskits are not that tall, the further in the taller they get, and in places 4~6 story buildings adjoining alleys were not uncommon, plus the mud-brick grandparents huts on the roofs. The building height to street width was so great in some quarters that I think those sections could go back the other way on the MOUT bell curve due to the restricted lateral engagement of vertical targets. The easiest solution would just be to chase the stale goat-head fallafel cart vendors in the area you want cleared, the stench would drive out even the crippled beggers.

Comments on 2005-02-27 posting: (note, only SCARS' comments in Japanese are translated.) 2005-03-07 http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/scars/imgs/6/1/61f7be1a.jpg

(finished translating the comments updates) When viewing CJK encoded pages for translation, it often helps to enlarge the character size (ctrl + in Firefox, manual? in IE).

That's why there is so much flexibility in that recent Merkava designs. You can use them exclusively for 'classic' armor operations, or you can rearrange the configuration of some variants to throw a squad or med-evac in the back. Abrams can't do that. M1A2 Abrams got an extra m240 on the loader's hatch to complement the Commander's .50, and the coax. While it's not the same as Bradley pintle mounts or over-the-top on an AAV7, it helps. I'm not sure on the purportions, but it seems like the Merkava's barrel is set back much further than the Abrams to allow for tighter clearances. Of course politics says "oh the humanity, armor on infantry". Well, when you have MANPAD's and shoulder-fired specials and roadblocks and anti-tank mines and such that can stop and destroy anything less than an MBT, and has a reasonable chance against MBT's using competent tactics, it's very much a fair fight.

2005-02-27 Feedback comments from SCARS on the 2005-02-15 posting:

As someone who is actually sympathetic to your cause, and understands where you're coming from, and who bothered to notice your post count and registration date, may I suggest that you read either this thread, or Iraq thread pt. 4, or Middle East thread pt. 2 in its entirety so you know what you're getting into before posting. That said, I commend you on your bravery (suicidal nonetheless) in standing up for what you believe in. You also committed the "grave atrocity" of daring to point out Anti-american hypocrisy. There are those out there that view your belief in divinely commanded world betterment as blasphemous imperialism. Don't let that get you down, just continue to do what you know is right. That is a concept that can not be 'rationally' explained, but still works all the same. Don't expect any "positive words about America", so long as her "crimes" go unpunished. On the general subject of US politics, what's so suprising about the astonishing news that Bush talks to his friends in private the same way he talks to everyone else in public? Some of us happen to like that better than the old business as usual club. As for bombing terrorists with nukes, I think it's safe to say that 911 helped push the transition from "my army vs. your army" to a "us vs. them" mindset. When the public realizes that we're all branded "infidels" and "fair game", then that's a whole different ball game. War's not supposed to be "fair", that's an invention concocted by those on the losing side. If there's any shortage of nukes, then they can follow it up with salt clusterbombs to rain over their fields. If anything, not only do nukes change the tables, but they also get the job done quicker and cheaper.

Well the situation as you nailed it spot on, (and exposed the dirty little secret of the significant OT threads) is such that it has seldom been 'debate' for a very long time. It seems to me that there has been four groups of postings here that we are all collectively and individually guilty of to some degree: 1) Blog-ish opinionated preaching 2) Dynamic news 3) vaguely related gaming topics 4) Utterly useless crap. Sometimes inbetween all that may be an honest and reasoned discussion in an ad-hoc panel of pundits that gives an interesting and unique analysis perspective. We can go to Google News to get the latest wire feeds, but I often come here to get "live-on-the-ground" reports from real people with real experience in the subject, rather than pompus talking heads on the TV. However, whatever news or analysis content was present in many of the more volatile threads was soon replaced with the same kind of virilent attacks and demagogery that I can get on the nightly news, or you can get on talk radio for that matter, with the exception of AirAmerika. Regardless of how right or wrong your postion may be, you lose your audience when you do that, unless your only demographic of interest is your self. As a result, all participents quickly denegrate to a vicious spitball war using various incantations of spun numbers and creative postulating to prove the holiness of their preferred biases, and damn the percieved heresies of their opponents. Is this debate? no, it his unilateral Jihad. Part of the problem is, as more clearly evidenced in the religiously themed topics, is the refusal to agree to a common framework of ideas for debate. For example, those of us active and professing/confessing believers generally insist on integrating 'spiritual' and 'natural' realms, in some cases as a combined realm of discussion. To not do so is a cheating ourselves at best, and moral suicide at worst. Conversely, to strictly rational atheists, not only is that blending unacceptable, but it also disqualifies the subject as being delusionally incompetent. With such mutually exclusive parameters, it's not feasible to conduct an argumentive or analytical debate. Again, the same subjective difficulties appear with the otherwise interesting dynamic news. Given the diverse international audience, and the generally more mature people that the Flashpoint community attracts, there are often in-depth news stories posted or referenced that do not get covered well elsewhere. While blogs may have their place as specialty news gathering and analysis tools, they tend to focus on exclusive topics or audiences. Here on the other hand you have a much more diverse audience, with a wide variety of interests, which is frankly much more interesting than the filler pages between A3 and the editorials in the daily paper. My suspicion is that the majority of those so-called news items are in fact reports made by lazy reporters busted surfing the net instead of working. Also polluting the discussion is various fanboy drool over all the other games out there. Do we need yet another announcement of Halflife2? I think not. On the other hand, a debate about the dark overlords known as E(vil)A(bbadon), or obscure new tacsim titles, or vs. analysis of why what is better, I think all have a welcome home here. Finally there is the utter crap that gets spammed and trolled here on occasion. No debate is needed there as the vast consensus is to do (*trademarked*) artillery ranging tests with the poor poster in-game. A couple final comments regarding the politically charged discussions. As you are all well aware of, with few exceptions America has often projected and acted out the role of a wild lone cowboy. While this may be offensive to some, please bear in mind that not only do others prefer that image, but also feel that those actions are divinely obligated and inspired. Second, there are often younger forum members who are not necessarily aware of the 'traditions' of the offtopic board. Rather than nuke them off the boards, I would strongly recommend that instead you considerately explain "how things work around here" and provide examples. None of us should be out to chalk up another victim count on our modded pc's. Finally, if we find ourselves more wrapped up in bashing bit-buckets over each other's heads, than playing the game or making stuff for others, we need to seriously step back and think it over. It's a friggin game, now go lag on port 2302, not port 80. Btw, GwBush pwnz0rs the world, that's why I voted for him.

First thing that comes to mind... "dum-dee-dee-dum... (Z)oldner..." Once again, OFP leads the way.

Washington Vote mess timelines: November: December: January: Links to regional and national news articles are found by clicking on the links to each month. The source site, SoundPolitics, is also compiling an independent database of registered voters so the public can see if they're really registered or not.

Yes, Washington State still has no Governor... On Feb. 22nd, the Washington State GOP announced that they had determined that at least 1108 felons without restored civil rights voted in the November election and cast a ballot for Governor, along with 45 votes statewide cast on behalf of deceased persons, 10 votes cast by people who voted more than once in Washington, and five votes cast by people who voted in Washington and another state, along with an unknown number of votes cast in the name of registered voters that are involuntarily commited to mental institutions or declared incompetent residents of nursing homes. This in a race that allegedly was decided by only 129 votes. King county, the largest county in the state, had 884 of those 1108 known felon votes, and also has an admitted net variance of approximately 2000 more votes than votes. What the county refuses to provide evidence of, and is in violation of elections laws, is the individual precienct variances. The estimate is that if each precienct variance is tabulated, the total variance is actually approximately 9 500 votes, but the county elections board refuses to release or admit to the existance of that report to the media or to the state secretary of state's office. In testimony before the King county council, the council-appointed director of elections suggested that the state association of county auditors independently review the actions and results of the King County Elections Board. However, internal emails of that group obtained less than a week prior to that testimony disclosed an institutional bias favoring this elections director by a large majority of that organization. The elections director also indicated that the elections dep't assumed that the secretary of state's office or the judicial dep't kept those records. The elections director was informed by the council that they were advised by the secretary of state's office that the SoS presumed the county auditor/elections director maintained that list. The net result of this is that when a record of a conviction is forwarded to the elections dept, the registration is revoked, but there is no record kept, nor any way to prevent that person from successfully registering even a week later. The elections dep't director also testified that federal law requires that they automatically accept and register all recieved voter registrations, but contrary to established practice in other counties, King County makes no attempt to validate the registrations after acceptance. The county to the south, Pierce county, just this past month returned a report from the auditor's office to the county prosecuter's office to execute proceedings to revoke the voter's registrations of approximately 75 illegaly registered felons. The hearings in Chelan county regarding th election are still continuing, and the expectation is that the election contest will go to trial in mid April. The judge has said that he does not believe he has jurisdiction to call for a statewide revote or special election, but that he does have jurisdiction to set aside the election, not that it matters anyway, as it will be expedited to the state supreme court, and possiblely to the US supreme court, and Gore v. Bush '00 will have plenty of precedent along the way.

I have it too somewhere, an excellent little addon. Only limitation is the crappy slider system for controls. That could probably be replaceed by a spiffy looking console with direction buttons.

They've overloaded their server again, they keep it redlined on the single CPU they use for hosting.

900mhz Athlon with 512mb DDR2100 running Gentoo. Not the greatest compiler ever invented, but it's fine for the home 2 client lan games or MP dev testing.

hi-res pics here

So far, no luck. I've been cleaning out everything I can find on Google and cross-linking from them to no success. The short of it is the general area seems to be about 200 to 300 miles (320 to 480 km) south or south-east of Tehran. I found some map data for a section about 300x300 miles that I think covers it, I'm just trying to narrow it down to about 60miles (100km). Any lessons-learned or other more technical report's I've found to date only deal with the chain-of-command and communications breakdown's, and don't get into the details of the flight and ground operations very much. Any pointers or hints would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Found the motherlode here for all the extra GIS data I need. Thanks.

I know about that one, that's one of about a half dozen different maps showing anything from due south to due east of Tehran. Plus the scale on it is a bit difficult to compare, and if anything puts it right in the middle of a major city. This is also from that same site, but is still rather hazy, and you'll note it also comes from a significantly different angle as well. On the first map, the point marked drop-off is confirmed by all accounts to be about 50m outside Tehran "in the hills." I'm thinking of the general area between Latitude 32-34, and Longitude 53-55, but haven't been able to find any confirmation for that guess.

That's my assumption as well, as we haven't seen a side shot in quite some time. I just translate what's posted there with a minimal amount of commentary to make it readable.