maturin

It's amusing that people don't think Putin is an oligarch. He's one of the richest people on the planet, and never once in his life sold a good or service to anyone.

Okay, but back in the real world, game features are supposed to be used by more than 0.25% of players. Speaking as a member of the 0.25%. By 2035 they'll be using computers anyways.

Yeah, it's true power that the CIA used its time machine to make a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire, sparking an enormous popular revolution in Egypt, with the uprising finally spreading to Libya. Now tell me how the OSS was behind the Japanese tsunami as a distraction for the invasion of Okinawa. It just came late because because they misplaced a decimal point over at DARPA.

Really, people. What the fuck are you carrying to be having these problems? Be glad you can sprint at varsity sports speeds at all. People in rifle plates are more often restricted to a clumsy waddle (to the point that people in the defense industry are criticizing the current emphasis on armor), with every movement impeding your breathing. It doesn't matter how "fit" the boot camp commercials make you think people are.

That's a paranoid fantasy. Enough. The U.S. failed in Iraq precisely because of the sectarian violence that was unleashed. That's what caused the war to drag on inevitably and cost so many American lives. And before you start blathering about the military industrial complex and oil companies, the Iraq War's length bankrupted the United States, and now the results are disrupted oil production in Iraq and steep budget cuts for the military. The Bush administration wanted nothing but stability in Iraq, and their last ditch effort (the Surge) was entirely focused on ending sectarian violence. Stupidity before malice, always. So your idiotic statements require that the U.S. and its CIA be the all-powerful puppet-masters of everything, secretly controlling all political forces (besides Putin the hero), and yet failing in all of their own policy imperatives by doing so. The CIA started the Arab Spring because it wanted political Islam to be revitalized? Because it wanted to destroy its oldest Arab ally and endanger the Egypt-Israel peace? It toppled Gaddafi (who had been happily selling oil for a generation) because it wanted to disrupt its own oil supply? You deeply dimwitted people spend your entire political lives obsessing about the West without ever having the foggiest idea how it actually works, or what it thinks. It's like being lectured on the nuances of solar power by a troglodyte.

Another mission today ruined by the broken Careless/Safe setting. My squad walked into an enemy patrol at 75 meters, in an open field, on a perpendicular heading. Over the next five minutes we blithely shot them all to death. First we dropped the last three men, but the leader and one subordinate just keep walking nonchalantly down the road. I was breathing heavily, and found it difficult to draw a bead. So every 30 seconds or so I would hit the team leader with a round, he would fall over, stand back up, and continue walking. This happened THREE TIMES. In the end he just sidled off. A positively damning indictment of ArmA 3's body armor and combat state "system."

The Black Boxes are going to show nothing interesting. The plane's behavior in Ukrainian airspace was utterly normal. Even if the airtraffic controller was a Jewish freemason and the lovechild of George Soros and the lead singer of Pussy Riot, trained by the CIA, none of the conversation would be particularly important. The plane simply received everyday instructions to fly a normal route, with minute adjustments. The plane was flying along obliviously until it was suddenly blown to pieces. Even if you think it was jet that did it, the pilots would have no idea. There's no rear-facing camera or visibility, nor any reason to pay attention to your six. As for the satellite footage, it seems that the U.S. pulled a boner and wasn't watching for unusual missile launches. A Buk launch doesn't trigger the established early warning system, nor is a Buk considerably different from a Grad volley, in visual terms. Russia probably doesn't even have the capability. If they had any actual evidence, they would have put together a news conference that wasn't 90% unintelligible, with Su-25s pulling off impossible R-60 kills and then magically transforming into helicopters, all while the Kremlin-controlled media spreads alternate versions of the same conspiracy theory.

If you can't travel a kilometer in ArmA without exhausting yourself, you just don't know how to play. Put your weapon down, run a hundred meters, walk a few paces, then run some more. Better yet, use bounding, take a knee when stopped, and scan the horizon. You will get there just fine. Walking regenerates fatigue. There is no excuse for making yourself combat ineffective, besides simple impatience. If you keep your fatigue at about 30%, you need only seconds to return to 0% and be perfectly capable of aiming. (Note that I only know this because I use Dyslexci's excellent fatigue bar mod. Without UI feedback, it can be confusing and seem more harsh than it really is.) Remember that this is a game, and thus the default mode of movement is full-speed running. In real life people will spend 200% more time walking, EVEN when under fire. Watch any video of combat, and you'll see that people move slowly and carefully except when absolutely necessary. Running a full kilometer in real warfare is an absolutely exceptional situation. If you can't stop to rest and don't stop to provide security or maintain situational awareness, you are probably engaged in a desperate rout. And once you get to your destination, it's unlikely to find yourself in immediate contact, with no time spent getting on line and organizing your positions. But in ArmA, the multi-km run is a feature of almost every mission. And therein lies the disconnect that gets people confused. But in the end, the fatigue is a massive step forward, and exactly what fans have been calling for for years. It's so much better than what modders have been able to produce. It is perfectly valid to criticize the degree and style of weapon sway, but the movement and animation effects are pretty much perfect at this point.

This comes up every time you start a mission.

Detection, definitely a difference. Snipe the team leader first, if he's the only one with a scope, and his subordinates will be hard-pressed to find you. With accuracy, the effect is nil, at least compared to what it should be.

You could estimate a rough azimuth of fire from the shadows in the picture. But unless you arrive at a heading of due east or due west it proves nothing, because the border zig-zags so much.

Oh, those evil energy companies, not wanting the oilfields to be overrun with genocidal terrorists.

Confirmed for what? Don't both sides use Smerch? There is another dud sticking out of the ground in Torez or Snezhnoe.

Sa-8s, really? If those pictures are real, the fiction of Russia's non-involvement should be absolutely over now. There is exactly ZERO chance, in any conceivable parallel universe, that the rebels still control any Ukrainian stockpiles of weaponry that they have not already looted. I'd like to hear any pro-Russian commenters in this thread admit that fact.

We had incriminating photos of Buks inside Ukraine and inside Russia, not all of them completely proven. And nothing solid about transit. Remember that the SBU lies as much as RT, and probably even more. I've never seen any satellite images worth a damn, besides the grainy footage of grad batteries. Giving (more) Buks to the rebels after MH17 would be like begging for more sanctions, and a pointless provocation. Yes, obviously Russia is transferring equipment, but the mere presence of that equipment on their side of the border is not incriminating. They have a 40,000-man army there! The equipment doesn't just vanish; the journalists just go have coffee. And notice that they weren't able to take any pictures or video, nor did anyone track the vehicles afterwards. The border region is so featureless that I don't particularly trust journalists to know where it is. Russian APCs have pulled a number of stunts already, rushing border posts and pulling back at the last minute. Please try to exercise some healthy skepticism. Having a pro-Ukrainian Spooky Lynx is just as irritating.

No freaking way is Russia openly sending Buks (with logistical vehicles too) to Ukraine. That would be on the front page of BBC right now. Those are probably just pictures of Russian vehicles maneuvering inside Russia. If not, why are we hearing about this from the Latvian foreign minister? The empty trucks aren't that surprising. The convoy was probably a military operation from the start, cooked up by the bloodthirsty secret service spooks that are the only people left in the Russian executive branch of government. They could have turned to society for help organizing humanitarian aid, but ordinary citizens can't be trusted to take part in the Kremlin's projects. I mean, fuck, you can't involve people who actually care about innocent civilians in Donbas.

TMR's Fall function has really matured nicely. I was using it all day and thought that I had TPW Fall enabled, because it worked just as well.

Distant sounds and incoming fire are where JSRS really shines.

Precisely. It's broken and can't be trusted.

Times sure have changed since I crossed the border there last November. The main question is: which side gets to loot the duty free store with all the booze and cigarettes? Ukraine or Russia?

An Aim-9 is IR-guided, so it tracks stealth aircraft perfectly well. The game's MANPADS are either optically or IR-guided, and have a range of over 5km in the game, so no reduced engagement envelope there. It's unclear how the SPAAGs are guided, but it's probably not by radar. So that only leaves the made-up long-range missiles on the game's jets, which in fact have no better range than their smaller heatseekers. The simple fact is that there are no radar-guided weapons in ArmA. So there's nothing for stealth to affect in any case. Unless you want to make stealth aircraft invisible at ranges where they should be seen by even the naked eye.

It's the Bedouin tribes that live in a way reminiscent of some "ancient barbarism." Isis is a peculiarly modern disease, from a generation born under American (and now Syrian) bombs.

If Strelkov is really gone, it is BIG news. He's the subject of burgeoning personality cult inside Russia, and the "most revered" figure of the rebellion. Russia could conceivably be trying to localize the leadership, as Putin looks for a way to reach an accommodation with Ukraine. Otherwise, he is left with the equally disastrous choices of invasion or the separatists' military defeat.

Skirmish should definitely be turned off by default, so as not to break every mission ever. All the mods other features are minimally disruptive and most people will enable them on a permanent basis.

Safe behavior is a recipe for stupidity. It doesn't matter how relaxed or secure you are. As soon as the first bullet goes past your head, you will be instantly in DANGER mode. Putting AI patrols in SAFE mode and letting them wander blithely around in no-man's-land is the ArmA missionmaker version of a stealth-arcade ego-shooter.