Agiel

I am very fond of TLJ but this gave me a giggle. I made a small improvement to that original post which makes it ever so slightly succinct yet that much more loquacious

In Vietnam prohibitive ROE and the fact that the VPAF chose when they would go up (basically waiting for un-escorted Thuds) played some part in skewing kill ratios in the early part of the war. In a stand-up fight, they got trounced. I'd also advise you do a little serious reading for youself: http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/25312/if-all-fighter-jets-become-stealthy-how-will-they-fight-each-other-in-the-futur/25327#25327 Older long wave radars like that of the SA-3 perform better against certain kinds of stealth aircraft like the Stinkbug (which was optimised for hi-frequency threats like the new double-digit SAMs that were coming online during its introduction) since the wavelengths were roughly the size of a fighter-sized aircraft, which produced resonances that gave better returns by an order of magnitude. Larger aircraft with all-aspect stealth qualities like the F-22 and the B-2 (because it's big, it's actually even stealthier than smaller stealth aircraft) had been designed in response to this. Long wave radars are also very susceptible to ECM jamming, which the Air Force and Navy have also invested heavily in recent years. That on top of a complex threat environment of air launched decoys, HARM shooters, and cruise missiles coming in low over the horizon when the gloves are off. As for the S-500, I think it should be remembered that the VKS in 2012 (in the golden age of oil, no less)claimed that it would be ready in the year 2013.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Din... errr... MRE!

Throneworld, part of the "The Beast Arises" Warhammer 40000 book series. Awesome to read about my favourite space elf ninja clowns in this one, and see them mop the floor with the Adeptus Custodes and almost come out on top of a Callidus Assassin.

As if high-alpha turns and other departure from controlled flight maneuvers haven't been a thing since the 1950s : And in an age of continuously computed impact point gun sights, high-off boresight missiles, and intra-flight datalinks, conducting such maneuvers in a modern "knife-fight in a phone booth" are highly inadvisable : And US fighters can keep up just fine: 3 points to anyone who can tell what aircraft that HUD belongs to.

Other than the cat puzzle, what other ones? Every game has one awkward one for me (I still hate a few from The Dig), but for the most part they are all pretty easy. Granted there are just bad adventure games, where the puzzles are just bad - see AlternativA. I could name _quite a few_ in The Longest Journey off the top of my head: 1. The rubber ducky puzzle. 2. The "give the cop the candy that was dipped in radioactive goo" puzzle. 3. The "arrange the items in the alleyway so that the silhouette looks like a man aiming a gun" puzzle. 4. The "make aloe vera to temporarily cure the guy who was turned to stone" puzzle. 5. The "take the can of soda to the other side of the city to a power tool that can shake it up so that it sprays into the face of a cop you give it to" puzzle. Seriously, it's as if they make April Ryan out to be Eldrad Ulthran that she's able to unravel the skeins of causality to effect such serendipitous outcomes to her plight. For all I know, there might well be many, many more puzzles that are equally egregious as these (if not more so) since eventually I just gave it double middle fingers and uninstalled it half-way through the story.

Environment puzzles in RPGs. Hell, I'd go as far as to say that the actual puzzle parts of point and click adventure games are terribad as well.

And considering that we don't know how much of the DLC is related to the mediocre multiplayer mode...

https://twitter.com/tolokno/status/731013376491556864

Must have gotten their degrees from the same mail-order college as Dr. Thrax.

A singe weapon to wipe out Texas would have to be in the gigaton range. Theoretically it's possible to fission-fusion-fission... ad infinitum to get to that yield, but then you run into the problem of trying to get that physics package into a militarily deployable size. For instance, if we assumed a weapon that matched the weight-to-yield efficiency of the most efficient weapon ever developed the B41, which had a weight to yield ratio of 5kt per kg, then to get to a gigaton would require a weapon that weighed 200 metric tons, obviously impossible to mount on an ICBM. I'm also not entirely sure it makes a ton of strategic sense to for Russia to try and replace the SS-18 Satan (Russia has effectively lost the ability to sustain that program since the rocket was developed in... you guessed it, Ukraine) with an entirely new system rather than replace that capability with existing prolific and mature weapons like SS-25 (Bulava? Different story). Sarmat would ostensibly only be replacing 46 missiles, at which point it simply doesn't make sense in regards to economies of scale. But hey, who am I to try and stop Putin to lose his new Cold War the same way the USSR lost the last one.

Wistful of your school days doodling B-1B Lancers in your composition books? Ever wanted to be in the shoes of RED CROWN in the Tonkin Gulf as USAF and USN aviators went "Downtown" over Hanoi? Does your inquisitive mind demand answers to such pressing questions like "How many La Combattante IIa fast attack craft can an Iowa take on?" Then head on down to Steam and grab Command 60% off for only $32 USD.

Giving that Overwatch beta a try. Part of me wished Tracer had a proper "dead common" C0ckney accent like Ms. Brahms in Are You Being Served or Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Otherwise I don't quite understand Blizzard's logic of being so transparently and inexorably fixated on the eSports aspect when the most surefire way of getting a big audience for this game is appealing to the TF2 crowd that actually mattered: The guys who played in (at minimum) 8v8 pick-up games which gave them the space to try new classes without being a huge burden to the team.

The epigraph for the trailer was a quote pertaining to the Necrons and there seems to be a fixation on the theme of "Death comes for all", so perhaps they will feature as a non-playable hostile faction in the game much like they did in the Winter Asssault expansion so as to tease their playable status in an expansion. That said, should be interesting to see how Relic handles the Necrons story-wise; there hasn't been a faction that has had its fluff so drastically and fundamentally changed as the Necrons have. I should also note that the imagery of the trailer as well as this promotional image just screams "Khorne" to me.

...et voila: Psyched to see Wraithknights. Fingers remain crossed that we'll see Harlequins.

The Air Force is supposed to submit proposals for a Minuteman III replacement soon, but frankly if they're smart they'll drop silo-based ICBMs (after all, everyone knows where they are) and go all-in with the B-21 and LRSO (there's indications that they might be contemplating just that; there's whispers of doubling the current order of 100 B-21s). With bombers, leaders have the luxury of recalling them if the situation calls for it, they can still deliver weapons the most accurately of all the legs of the triad (try putting 50 kilotons on a dime with any other weapon), are basically the only way to hunt down mobile ICBMs like the SS-25 Sickle, have the best cost-to-yield ratio, and can still serve in the conventional role to boot. In the missile game, besides simultaneous launch capability (not that useful, in my opinion) there's absolutely nothing the old Minuteman's can do that the Trident IIs on the Ohio SSBNs can't do better (they're probably slightly more accurate than Minuteman III, making the old argument that SLBMs can't be used against counterforce targets like hardened command bunkers, missile silos, and airfields moot). Consider how half of US warheads are on subs, more than 25% are allocated for bombers, and the remainder on land-based ICBMs and the retirement of the ICBM leg isn't going to be too huge of a loss for those who believe in minimum deterrence.

I have a feeling it will be something like the Company of Heroes games, which is somewhat of a happy medium between the original Dawn of War and Dawn of War II, as in there will be some base building which unlocks new units and avails new upgrades, but not nearly to the extent there is in the original Dawn of War games so that the player can focus on the nitty gritty tactics.

Dawn of War 3 announcement potentially at 1400 Zulu. https://twitter.com/DawnOfWar/status/727135823540318208/photo/1

From what I've heard, KFC's marketing strategy in Vietnam is to play up the Colonel's weird resemblance to Ho Chi Minh.

As we eagerly await the reconstituted GSC Gameworlds' (hopefully) eventual next installment of STALKER, a moment to reflect on its subject matter:

I've generally found DS3 somewhat harder than the rest. Part of that may be because of how magic now takes a "yuge" investment into it to become viable (particularly for my favoured agile Dex/Int/Faith spellsword build) but also because the Black Knight Halberd/Glaive is now only available 3/4 of the way through the game where in DS1 you could get it within 15 minutes (RNG willing) and a third through the game for DS2.