Agiel

A friend of mine made this gif of something that happened in Skylines:

If you're willing to put the human race at stake on the assumption that either a.) The other superpowers would play by the same rules, especially so if fallout happens to fall on countries that have nothing to do with whatever quarrel Russia happens to find itself involved in b.) Russia could keep a nuclear war "limited" once a coalition force arrayed against them begins taking out "counterforce" (military) targets necessary to wage it, leaving Russia with only more survivable and less accurate weapons (thus are only good for one thing, "countervalue targets") at their disposal Then I'm afraid that your head, in the words of General William Smith, "left the world of reality." "The only winning move is not to play."

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition to tide me over till PoE comes. I think I'd rather that Beamdog compressed the audio files for the new characters so they don't sound so out of place.

Kind of the beauty of remote piloted vehicles is that the military that employs them will hardly care if they are shot down. No pilot was killed, they primarily use OTS equipment so no particularly sensitive technologies can be retrieved from them, and most of all, they're very cheap. The loss of a $4 million UAV (which mind you since it has an engine from a lawnmower and no ECM or LO properties is only slightly harder to shoot down than a blimp) is a drop in the bucket for the USAF, which is more than you could say about the ~$25 million Syrian Su-24 shot down by that IDF MIM-104 Patriot a few months back. As for SS-26es in Kaliningrad, I believe Pavel Podvig's quote is worth repeating:

Yeah, and "American money" also pays for your F-35s, MIM-104 Patriot PAC-3, THAAD, and a whole host of other military hardware, Bibi.

https://youtu.be/vefhZp-d_uw Like the real CnC Generals sequel.

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: