[Sun] 18 Nov 2012 (Flaming Choppers Outta the Sky)

[Ferrard Carson]

Missions:

• Arrival SE
• Coop Wideola
• Khalid Pass
• Moonless SE

Much fun was had, and then we Cholo'd ourselves out for the night! An American Army division landed at Loy Manara airfield, seizing the place but getting cut to shreds in the process and performing a well-executed sweep of Jaza and Loy Manara before Company Command told us the area was clear (hint: It was not, and the next cargo planes squished a bunch of Takistanis on the runway). We then stepped into the shoes of the latest in a long string of British Air-Cav platoons assigned to clear the area of Zelenogorsk of farmers and their fertilizer bombs. Yours truly looked at the track-record of the previous expeditions, and decided that forests were verboten, as it seemed like the trees were alive, and thirsted for British blood. Instead, we landed two choppers in the lumberyard, where one pilot got shot, and the other ate a missile, then a tree. Oops. Zelenogorsk was ours though, and we were able to clear out the caches in and around the city itself. Khalid Pass saw another go, and the roles were reversed, with Russians spreading out across the key terrain while the Takistanis seized the crash site and were slowly pecked to death from afar. By rockets. We ended with a fairly cowboy run of Moonless SE, with messy fire discipline, dudes looting the corpses for watches and rings, and (again) the only casualties due to friendly fire. Still, we succeeded.

==THE FOLLOWING IS PARTY DIRECTIVE #108==
So, like I said towards the end, there are some general guidelines that we adhere to in Folk to keep a fun experience for all. First off, the orders of your FTL, Squad Lead, and Platoon Commander are your orders. We don't do milsim here, and we don't care about ranks, but if whoever is leading your element tells you to hold fire, then you hold fire. If you are told to hold position, you hold position. If you think of a plan of action that would be advantageous to the team as a whole, then you can certainly ask the next higher-up for permission to take such action (e.g., "There's a KORD here, can me and my buddy break it down and bring it with us?") and they'll either approve or deny the request, but they are the ultimate arbiter. Second, please do not violate the spirit of a mission - we had two night-missions sans night-vision in this runthrough, and they are both clearly meant to be played that way. The Party gives you most of the gear you might require for a mission. Basic AT stuff like an RPG or an AT4, grenades, smoke, more ammo, that's all okay to pick up. Don't trade out weapons unless you're otherwise going to be critical on ammo, and on an adversarial, do not, do not, do not do something that will give you an unfair advantage that you are not meant to have.
==THUS ENDS PARTY DIRECTIVE #108 - THE PARTY HAS SPOKEN==

~ Ferrard

[lwlooz]

Hello, thanks again to all guys making these sessions possible and everyone who joins.

Arrival SE - Role: CO
Mission was to defend an airport and take two towns adjacent to it. The airport was according to the Briefing expecting a counter-attack.
Not wanting to get slaughtered on an empty airfield my plan was to send my entire team into one of those towns to get them out of harms way.
One squad was to take the second town while the other squad was to shoot at any AI that made victory dances on the airfield.
My first time as CO on folk and I had high hopes.

Turns out we came immediatly under fire. Both squads disengaged nicely , but then had to charge into some more fire. Turns out I picked the wrong town.
Alpha got slaugthered on a ridge between those two towns drawing fire from everywhere. Oh dear .
Merging them with Bravo I decided to have them clear both towns while I on my own defended the airfield with some massive Mk19-GL fire-power.
Unfortunately I ran out of ammo and got shot by a sneaky AI while giving more waypoints to the squads.

Coop Wideola - Role: B1 FTL
A helicopter fell on me.

Khalid Pass - Role: Indy A3(?) AAR
Drove to some outpost,got out of my UAZ , was shot.

Moonless - Role: Alpha AAR
We killed some AI that came towards us. Then we shot some trucks that didnt seem to care much about that.

[thekev506]

Hit up the workshop before the session. 100% worthwhile, and I might try out being FTL in a workshop in coming weeks.

Arrival SE - Bravo 3 AAR
We start under fire and get off the runway immediately. FTL finds us a good spot, we set up security and start taking out the bad guys (though I don't because my job is to look the opposite to the rest of the team .) With all the FTLs and SL apparently dead apart from Audiox he takes over and we push into the first town, spotting a technical that kills our FTL and AT. I take it out as it slowly drives around the corner towards me, shooting the driver and gunner. Mamuto takes command and we support Alpha as they clear out the second town.

Wideola
I don't remember my fireteam, role, or squad for this one, because roughly 4 seconds after deploying a chinook promptly fell onto my head . Such an early death meant only one thing: toast and tea break! So I can't complain, really.


Khalid Pass - OpFor Alpha 2 AR
Jump into a UAZ, get stuck trying to find a way out of the compound, and then we speed off into the night, straight into a rock at top speed . This busts the engine, so we all get out, and moments later the car catches fire, to us all going 'shit, run!'. After reorganising we hustled and took one of the objectives pretty quickly, our smug sense of achievement quickly wiped off our faces as a friendly took out our entire fireteam and squad medic with a single grenade. Khalid Pass is always a tough one for blue-on-blue, though, so no hard feelings.
One of my favourite missions of the session for the sheer comic ineptitude of it.


Moonless - Bravo 2 AR
Being AR meant having NV goggles rather than optics, which made life a lot easier. We set up, hid, took out the fashion show of enemy squaddies, then Alpha went to hang out on the road, and it all got a bit messy from there, really. Looking forward to seeing that first part of the ambush on youtube, though.

[Black Mamba]

Well well.

Ferrard's Tiger's Workshop
A2 AAR
Saw the usual fire and movement drill, at which we are getting better and better. Nobody was shot in the back.
Then some Humvee mounting. I think somebody in my FT lost the map to the front right door.
Some alleyway movement. Was a lot better, definitely some improvement here, even though it still needs a bit more communication, but from what I could hear while we were waiting for the last FT to complete it, people realized that and I have no doubt it will be almost perfect next time.
And finally fire and maneuver. Needs more communicating too, but we'll get there.
Please come to those, it's really nice! And helpful.

Arrival SE
A1 AR
We came under fire immediately on mission start. It was great. ASR AI does wonders. After a while we did manage to get out of the airfield, but we were quickly ambushed at close range, and about everybody was down. I started to provide cover and raise people up (man that was hot. I even had to resort to use my handgun to shoot dudes at really close range. Surprisingly I managed to do it without getting shot. Ultimately Astute, our FTL, died, so I took command of the FT and let Washington (A2 FTL) take command of the squad.
We cleared the first village as the rest of the platoon regrouped, then I led my FT on a not-so-authorized flanking maneuver while other Alpha callsigns and bravo were moving onto the villages. Ajax and myself shot up a few dudes trying to flank the main force, and when we got to the second village, it appeared to be clear of any hostile.
After what we went all tactical blob on Loy Manara and the mission was called.

Wideola - Coop
Alpha Pilot
Seeing that people were unusually reluctant to take the choppers in the last mission, I decided to take one of the flying buses. Then Ferrard came up with his plan, which looked like a lot of fun to me.
Unfortunately we took fire on landing and I died the moment I was about to put her down. Spectated my chopper stopping in the middle of the LZ, zitron being forced to take time to land and smashing his own face into trees and the squad that was hiding in those.
My 2 cents. Air assault on the objective can be done quite easily with a blackhawk (or a little bird). Chinooks are too fat (and take too much time to unload anyway).

Khalid Pass
Indy A1 AR (well, I think it was A1)
Kale, truck driver, got lost in our FOB and ran over a few dudes there. So much for non-combattant roles. When we finally unfucked ourselves, we drove to the northern outpost but somehow dismounted a bit late and came under fire right away, leading to myself and Adam being pinned down long behind the rest of the squad. Then we went on a daring flanking maneuver, which ended when we realized the other dudes did the same and were behind us. Well, at least I did, cause Adam took a bullet to the face. So Iwas the only dude tasked with watching our back, while the rest of us was eating rockets coming from the south.
I managed to move pretty close to the enemy signaled one to the main force who shot him down, after what I was on my own to track down the two otheres and kill them. I did shoot them both, but think one was revived, and as I was moving to check the kills I came under fire. Turns out Triggerhappy was still up, and we were 15 meters apart from each other, separated by two walls of sandbags. After a long game of hide and seek and shoot, I made a mistake crawling back and exposed myself to whizzing pieces of metal. My death was the end of the mission, and I'm pretty sure if I had killed him it was the other way around. Damn it.

Moonless
B1? - AT dude
Nice ambush at first, then everything went rambo. That mission needs an upgrade, it's definitely too easy.
Note to mission makers: in one of the missions I'm working on, I just made sure nobody on the map had night vision, even enemies. Prevents people from cheating.

Cholo
We bunched ourselves in the two doorways leading to the only room containing the two cops, so that it was impossible to move. Worked perfectly and I got shot to the testicles, point blank, by a PCP-deprived cop.

Little Coop with Fer, forgot the name.
Alpha AR
Gotta love those old missions where, as an AR, you get a scoped M240.
Killed quite a lot of dudes. At some point we discovered enemies waiting in ambush to our right, about 700 meters away, and took on crossing some open ground while hoping they wouldn't start shooting, thus getting tunnel-minded towards our right hand side. About two third in I realized the ground was strangely incurving to the left, and that could nicely hide a bunch of enemies.
Turned my head to the left. Turns out there were enemies, 25 meters away, waiting for us.
We all died.

[thekev506]

My 2 cents. Air assault on the objective can be done quite easily with a blackhawk (or a little bird). Chinooks are too fat (and take too much time to unload anyway).

Chinooks are good for hot landings because they can take a lot of punishment from small arms fire but they need big open space to land, and that just isn't available in most of Chernarus. Could always take Merlins if we wanted to keep things BAF - good deal smaller but can still transport a lot of people.

[Black Mamba]

Merlins are unarmed. Doesn't make them the best candidate for air assault.
Air assault should always involve heavy suppressing of the LZ during the final approach, the unloading and the take off (which we didn't really do yesterday, but that's my bad. Should have told my gunners to do so).
We could easily have landed 100 meters away in the field. Anyway this was all bad luck, I took the first round to the face. Had I survived a bit longer, I could have cleared the LZ for zitron to land quicker. The chopper itself can take a lot of fire, but it only takes one round to get the pilot anyway. That's why blackhawks are better for this, they can unload in less than two seconds with a moving insertion, and that reduces the chances of losing the pilot drastically.

To get back to the chinooks: a 75 meters wide square LZ can more than safely welcome two chinooks. The inbound route was in my opinion the best (I had been looking at the map for the entire briefing to find it. I did came up a bit too high though, wrong estimation of the distance left to go and at that point I had forgotten the terrain was descending on our final approach. I should have been about 20 meters lower, so I could get in faster.
One thing I think should be done, I'm still trying to find the best way to do it without getting into any comms mumbo-jumbo, is to have the different pilots and crew more linked, so that they can communicate with each other and synchronize their flight in a better way.
Probably will have to stick all the pilots and crew in the same group, while keeping markers for each helicopter. Or have them in a different TS channel, with the Flight Leader on CC.
But that would mean less useless chatter in the back of the chopper while flying, at least not on the vehicle channel, this one being reserved to the pilot and his crew.

[zitron]

Wideola
Bravo Pilot

Man, I am really sorry for this one.

I followed mamba in, he landed right in the middle of the parking lot surrounded by trees and invisible power lines. I was not quite sure what his intentions were (now I know he got shot!!), and being extremely afraid that we would collide if he decides to take off, I circled around to find a place to land. Then Ferrard shouted on the radio for bravo to land NOW!!! I put it down on one corner of the parking lot trying to be as far away from mamba as I can, in case he takes off and didn't see where I am. Bravo unloaded while bullets were flying and hitting my engine and hull, so I decided it was time to GTFO. Unfortunately, while I was hurriedly landing I didn't have a chance to check my surroundings, so during take off I hit a tree some of our guys were using as cover

[audiox]

A fine evening indeed.
Tonight was my first "let's be FTL"-evening, so if any of my fireteam-members wish to roast me over hot coals please do so. Critiques welcome. Thanks to Ferrard for the videos you put up, they are a great help for understanding how the different roles work. (Might a sticky with on each of the FTL, SL, and CO videos be in order?)

Started off in the workshop. To our surprise no traitors were found and summarily executed during our bounding-drills. Such deviation from procedure left me ill-equipped to find the right door of our teams Hummvee. (I was confused by the "get in the back of the hummvee", was expecting a "get in front"-option...)
I still find it difficult to actually notice the bloody doorways in our street-movement exercises. The tempo was up, but as noted, we could get better at communicating our whereabouts. Sthud becomes too cramped in this setting.
Suppression and movement was also fun, and a first-time for me at least.

Arrival - B3 FTL
AR:mamuto AAR:thekev506 AT:Joe
Bloody hell they're firing!! Down down down. I froze a little in the beginning, since i was expecting a stroll to our first waypoints. We settled in the hill east of the airport and tried to relax with some hashi..... i mean, whip our self into order by reciting party directives. Whilst waiting for orders there we spotted the first western invasion of the airfield, and enjoyed mowing some? (hopefully) of them down. The rest of Bravo lost quite a lot of guys proceeding to the first village, and when we caught up with them elements of Alpha was there too. This must mean that the town is secure right? Great, let's stroll down mainstreet. And run straight into a Technical!!! Then i tried to gung-ho it with my grenade launcher, but it mowed me down.
(reading lwlooz now it seems we were supposed to disengage from the airfield, ooops, in that case sorry for taking so long to get to the village)

Coop Wideola - A2 FTL
I liked the plan, those trees have been the death of multiple me's in the last months. Watching the chaos outside the supermarket with wounded and exploding choppers and small arms fire was probably the most cinematic post-mortem experience in Arma2 yet. Other than that well done to the survivors, who managed to set off some caches and keep the situation under control even though so many of us were wiped out so soon.
And hey, i did get to click the left mouse button once in an attempt to get out of the chopper, so it was interactive, right?

Khalid Pass - A2 FTL
AR: Zitron AAR: Xenu AT: x25killa
The goat herders (not lightly trusted), were telling the truth. We could all smell the fumes from the broken russian vodka botttles down in Khalid Pass, surely this must have been a large shipment. Not for a moment believing lies about peacekeepers we decided to head for the crash site in search of the potato-spirits recipe one of these decadent russian imperialists were rumored to be carrying.
Kalelovil had, unfortunately, been the first to notice the vodka fumes and was slightly more intoxicated than the rest of us. He drove over the people in charge of modernizing our distillery, making it a cold necessity to get the recipe so we could sell it on ebay for cash.

This mission taught me the valuable "read how the objectives are to be met -thoroughly-" lesson. As we made it to the crash site it dawned on me that i had no idea what to do there, flares overhead, and hostiles firing at us from more elevated positions.
Looking for clues amongst the dead people seemed like a plan, though it did, unsurprisingly, get me shot.

Moonless SE - B2 AAR
FTL: somethingsomethingAjaxsomething
Ooooh, night vision scope, shiny!
We were vastly overpowered in this mission, or so it seemed. What if it was set in the daytime?

[fer]

I was really looking forward to hosting the session, but at the very last moment Ministry of the Interior troops from the Bodgist faction surrounded my dacha and attempted to place me under house arrest. After a fire-fight that lasted for hours (with much shouting of 'red/blue/set'), the aggressors withdrew into the forests, taking their dead and all traces of the attack with them. So I am grateful to comrade Ferrard Carson for stepping up to host the main session after doing the same earlier with the workshop (in comrade Tigershark's absence*).

Babysitters

CO: Fer
|- M: Daf
|- Journalist: SpecialSoup

After I'd finished cleaning my personal Makarov, I did manage to join an after-after-party and play an old Folk mission, Babysitters (which I wrote a long time ago). As comrade Black Mamba wrote, it was all going rather well until we discovered the perils of even mildly undulating terrain: the bad guys can be very close to you before you spot them! Rather than give an account of the mission, I want to talk about two things I observed as CO, both good and bad:

Good: We only had two fireteams, both of which were under-strength, but they still managed to support each other. One fireteam was always stationary as the other moved to the next position, sometimes swapping over to bound, other times staying in those roles as the BoF supported the other (scouting/assaulting) element. There's nothing fancy about this: it takes the red/blue drill from comrade Tigershark's workshops and scales it up to apply to the squad. This needs to become second nature, SLs!

Bad: We're (all of us) far too easy to distract from our assigned arcs. During the first contact of the mission I watched in horror as most of one fireteam rotated 180 degrees to engage enemies within the other's assigned arc, only for an enemy technical to appear at their backs. Part of playing in the Folk and ARPS sessions is accepting that our approach is organised: hosts and COs try to make things fun for everyone, but that doesn't mean everyone can be shooting at every opportunity - sometimes you will have to leave the shooting to others, in favour of watching an assigned arc. Providing better all-round security for the squad / platoon is a great way of ensuring we all survive to the end of the mission - please help us make that more of a regular outcome!

Also:

Please do not violate the spirit of a mission

Everything comrade Carson wrote is very much endorsed by the rest of the Party. In particular, however, I want to point out something that is key to our ability to create lots of missions especially for Folk and ARPS: our comrade mission makers assume that all other comrades can be trusted not to 'game' a given situation. If you have ever written missions for pubbie servers, you'll know that much of the effort goes into stopping people doing things - whether it's by locking vehicles, creating 'mined areas' etc. This type of editing work is boring and time-consuming, and ultimately cuts down on the number of missions that can be created.

Please don't be the one to make our comrade mission makers re-consider this trust. Now that this issue has been flagged, hosts will take an increasingly dim view of infractions. And by 'dim view' I mean, of course, that you may find yourself alone in a room with comrade Tigershark, which is a situation you really want to avoid. He's so ... handsey.



* Wait a minute ...

[Mamuto]

What a night!

Arrival - B3 AR
I put myself into Bravo 3 AR thinking I was so far removed from being field promoted to leader that I'd be alright just being a grunt and shooting bad guys. Boy was I wrong.
B1 FTL, B2 FTL, and BL all died within 5-10 minutes of mission start and then AudioX tried to tease the technical that popped around a corner away from the rest of the fireteam. With his face. I report that he's down and suddenly I find myself in charge of Bravo. I really need to stop doing that. Really nerve wracking commanding a bunch of people who probably know what they're doing way more than I do. Thankfully the mission was called before we tried to recapture the airfield, so I didn't have to send Bravo to a glorious Party-approved death.

I like this mission. Also, audiox, I think you made the right call to engage the attackers from the west, we protected the rest of the platoon's flank/back. I have no idea how we didn't get shot to pieces, either

Coop Wideola - B2 FTL
At least, I think it was Bravo 2. I decided tonight was going to be the night I commanded people to their death, so I chose FTL. We were in the second chopper... I went for cover at the supermarket as soon as I hit the ground, bullets and explosions and smoke and confusion... A minute later, "Bravo 2, report in." "Bravo 2?" "Bravo 2, anyone up??"
I felt so depressed that I lost my men that I went and got myself shot in the head.

Ferrard, good plan. Even if it backfired horribly, it made for a very very memorable experience. More CO's should try to be ballsy

Khalid Pass - A1 or A2 FTL
Not satisfied at all with being a FTL from last round, I decided to try again in an adversarial. And wow, it's a very different feel when you're in command against other players. We took up our position on the Southern hill as ordered, and listened to the cries of pain and death from the rest of our team. Thank GOD we didn't get flanked, as all our eyes were to the North... Basically Ajax, AR, took up a position more to the Northeast and did his thing. Joe, Red Sniper, and myself stayed on top and tried to engage targets being called out by Ajax, CO, and other elements. Bullets wizzing by us constantly, Joe got shot at the VERY least 4-5 times, losing his legs eventually. I fired his RPG at that smoking technical but hit just short, realizing I had no idea what I was doing. Mission got called and all of my men were still alive. Hoorah, men, that's a success in my book.

Moonless SE - FTL
Agree with others, this mission needs a revamp. I vote the convoy gets tanks, BTRs, and a lot more men. That way the satchel charges and RPGs can be used against something more substantial than a technical and a squishy goat herder. I felt a lot more comfortable being a FTL this time around, but that may be because we weren't really shot at. Joe even landed his RPG on a AAA truck. woo!


For the workshop, we should do RPG/Rocket drills. And grenades. And GL, again.

Thanks again for an awesome night of ArmA2, hope you didn't mind my commanding.. But let me know if you did