Agiel

Dr. Dala?

Homeworld rights have passed to Gearbox, who subsequently handed out the name to Blackbird Interactive. which includes alumni from Relic, for their project, "Shipbreakers" (which will function as a game in the Homeworld universe). I still think very, very highly of Relic, and I hope to see another Dawn of War soon.

Speaking of CVs, looks like that Chinese homegrown one is coming along: http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2013/08/those-chinese-aircraft-carrier-pics-what-we-know-what-we-can-guess-and-what-we-cant/68114/

"Armoured combat toe-to-toe with the Rooskies... in Ukraine*." Beasts on the prowl... Mechanised infantry assault... The thing I miss from Steel Beasts? T-72s brewing and their turrets flying 50 feet into the air (BMPs blow up with the power of a one ton unitary warhead though, potentially lethal for an infantry squad that took it out with an AT-4 at close range!) Infantry squad scans for targets with the Javelin CLU. *The devs swear up and down they've been making the game since 2009.

https://youtu.be/qOIhKtvWQYU The US Navy repaid the favour by hosting carrier qualifications for French Rafale Ms aboard the Carl Vinson as well.

I've never one-hundred percent understood how to play Caravan, in spite of the fact that nearly every playthrough I have done I try to roleplay as a card shark and pick up all the cards I can buy whenever I hit a shop. It might be a brilliant, brilliant little card game, but I never had the energy to figure it out.

Scandinavia has caught the bug:

As it has not been mentioned yet, Syndicate (you know, the good one) is now "On the House" on Origin, if you're not loathe to use the service.

"Praise the sun."

I'm reminded of a passage from The War that Never Was that explains why this didn't happen, according to a character who was a former KGB analyst: Because it hadn't gone "hot," no one really considered the idea that the result of the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union had about the same effect had it lost a conventional shooting war with the First World and its coalition partners.

Studying at UCSB, every year during Palestine Awareness Week there's some Palestine solidarity display on the lawn in front of Storke Tower where some stakes with the colours of the Palestine flag are put up. That's usually vandalised in one form or another (the stakes knocked down, thrown in the trash, or the green, black and red stakes replaced with blue ones). A couple of times I saw some vilely anti-semitic graffiti on the inside of Pardall Tunnel, though it's occasionally balanced out by the odd anarcho anti-globalisation scrawling. In Isla Vista the Bear Flag is a very popular livery on the apartments there. I guess it's for this reason we're probably the "generic" college in the UC system (its party scene notwithstanding). As far as political leanings, UC Irvine is probably the big GOP campus (being in Orange County), though there are a ton of Asian students there ("University of Chinese Immigrants") who are usually ambivalent to such matters. UC Berkeley is usually thought to be the big hotbed of "pinko commies," but honestly, UC Santa Cruz frightens me a lot more.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-kabul-ki-dance/302610/

It does seem totally insipid to the core that Netanyahu is exploiting this opportunity to be condescending towards its greatest political and military patron just for the sake of votes, all of it made worse by the fact that the information given to him by Mossad, among the world's most terrifyingly effective foreign intelligence groups, flies in the face of everything Nethanyahu has been saying about Iran's nuclear program, and that's before we even talk about the delivery platform. Back in the Iran-Iraq War and the Second Gulf War, Iraq had to stretch the technical limits of his modified Scud missiles to hit targets in Tehran and Israel, but the result was a missile that had a CEP that could be measured in counties and only capable of carrying an extremely modest payload. Nuclear warhead and associated triggering mechanisms or chemical payload with associated proximity fuse? Hogwash. So it's unlikely any foreseeable Iranian missile could ever have any meaningful strategic effect on Israel before an Aegis BMD destroyer off Israel's coast, THAAD (the US Army-manned complex in the Negev Desert is the only foreign military presence in Israel), or Israel's own Patriot missiles ever had the chance to swat them out of the sky. Israel, like most foreign policy, tends to be one of those things that transcend political boundaries in the US. For instance, George H. W. Bush had threatened to withhold loans to Israel unless serious effort on he part of Israel was made towards rapprochement to the PLO and curtailing settlements, a policy that was reversed once Bill Clinton took office. It would seem that Obama isn't going to let this black-eye affect his current dealings with Iran, but what I fear is what Israel will demand in return: Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/warming-to-iran/383512/ I absolutely *DO NOT* object to the latter two, especially as it pertains to actual existential threats to Israel, but if it undermines the first, then forget it.

Do they usually wander around at sea with no escort ? At risk of getting all of this moved to the Modern Wars thread: Since the Russian Navy only has the one aircraft carrier (and calling it a big deck carrier is a bit... generous) and there are very, very few countries willing to host Russian air defence fighters on their territory, it usually does whenever its traversing open ocean.

For those who want to head into the "Danger Zone", F-14A/B/A+ is on its way to Digital Combat Simulator: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=140017

I've heard naval aviators lovingly call oversized surface combatants like the Kirov-class battlecruisers "Navy Crosses waiting to happen".

World War II IJN Battleship "Musashi" found. I think we know the next logical step:

I get the feeling. In the run-up to its release there was a lot of hoopla raised about the individual modules on capital ships, as well as the fact that the Mothership was upgradeable with new armament and such throughout the campaign (to say nothing of the hugely ambitious new direction Relic had initially planned for the sequel, which involved bases and defenses being built on the huge derelict space debris you saw in the skyboxes). The former was rather underwhelming and the latter seemed to have been cut. Nonetheless, though I can't say it was the revelatory experience the first Homeworld was (it still boggles the mind how a rookie studio had so thoroughly knocked it out of the park), I immensely enjoyed it and I hope Gearbox takes the feedback to heart and really makes this remaster shine (as well as the Homeworld 2: Complex guys).

Reminds me of the "Your World" Kickstarter that was around a while back. Maybe we all should pitch in $1. That way if it ends up getting funded we can get in on a good 'ol class-action lawsuit against the guy.

The toy I dreamed of getting as a kid (I eventually had to settle with the regular action figure that had limbs that articulated very poorly, and the skin browned with time).

Some tweets I've found in some defence watcher circles:

What can I say? The fun for me starts at 500 knots and 9 Gs

Honestly how into this I will get will be entirely dependent if it takes off with my friends since my life barely has room for one and a half F2P games as it is without me spending obscene amounts of cash, which I've largely been able to avoid ("obscene amounts of cash" being defined by any more than what I paid for a 3-month subscription period for an MMO of yore in that same time period). Hell, I already put down a season's gaming allowance on this as it is.

Fascinating piece you might be interested in from Pavel Podvig, perhaps one of the great Jedi Masters of strategic arms and strategy, in light of the recent "Bear Runs" into Europe: