[Sun] 02 Aug 2015 (Fighting Chinchilla)

[Tigershark]

My favorite part was when CO told me to have Raptoer fly instead of Tigershark and then the jet exploded.

Nim

This. I also liked how Raptoer then started to blame me....did you even put the flaps down? Um...I did...but even if I hadn't...you were the pilot Chinchilla boy.

[Tigershark]

We began with a run of HSLD, commanded by comrade Tigershark. With LZs right next to the target compounds, it was gutsy stuff - a direct air assault of the kind that only recently got our platoon massacred in a run of Bees. Yet, somehow, with one-and-a-half squads, comrade Tigershark pulled it off.

As I often do ...my record as CO stands on its own...just saying . I fuck up rarely....as opposed to Kefirz...who fucks up regularly. In fact, it's kind of his thing

[Kefirz]

Oh Tiger, let's not kid ourselves, you don't have a track record because you don't command
Besides, have you ever seen someone fail at HSLD? Seems like a cakewalk to me

[fer]

moonlighting.png (153.02 KiB) Viewed 9729 times

[Sparks]

Wait, Fer, I'm confused, which one's the Chinchilla?

[Sparks]

Public holiday in Ireland this Monday, so Sunday was nice and relaxing for me - so of course I spent the morning installing upgrades and drivers on my windows box because what else do you do with a sunday morning? Happily, at some point in the last month or so, the nVidia drivers and Arma upgrades meshed somehow so that all of a sudden, where YaML was giving me a limit of around 15-16fps in 1200x780 resolution with all the features turned off, now I'm getting 22fps in YaML at full native 1920x1080 resolution with lots of features turned on (even PiP so I can look under the MH9 with that dinky mirror thing). It ain't 60fps, but damn, this game sure got a pretty GUI...

Add to that, Push-to-Hear finally work for me (though we need to update the version in the Folk repository from 1.5 to 1.6 so that its configured keys get saved between games) and I even tried a little presession training to see if the graphics held up on the server as opposed to in the editor. Take a peek: HS,LD last week vs this morning. It didn't hurt that I took a few minutes to fix the attachment clip for my headtracker either...

And lo, what's the first mission chosen for the session?

HSLD
Pilot, TH3


Area map


LZ map

So volunteer (wtf? we volunteer now?) CO Tigershark, in a very irrepressible and bubbly mood after his closed-door conference with Comrade Aquarius (we understand the Party has already conveyed its commiserations to Comrade Aquarius), chose a different approach to the LZ than last time, opting to stage out to the north-east by the airfield and run into the LZs in a straight line from there, then exfil over the town and looping around to the north and back to the staging area. I'd mutter about exfiling over an alerted town full of hostiles, but (a) they shoot at us taking the pressure off the troops when they're most vulnerable, and (b) he put all the pilots on the same teamspeak channel so his tactical brilliance is obviously just misunderstood



And the mission went really smoothly, obviously as a direct result of this radio channel decision If VON Direct channel worked better, it might have been even smoother during the exfil, but I think that people are not terribly calm whilst immobilised in the helo or wrestling with the Arma action menu while being shot at anyway so how much smoother is a matter for debate...

All the helos made it to the staging area without incident and within sight of each other this time (nice liftoff btw), I scared Netkev (dude, it was cool, I so had that), then we got our run-in call from CO and off we went. I almost (so close) nailed the landing in the courtyard, but at the last minute realised I had too much speed and couldn't correct without walloping the main rotor off the house, so I popped over the wall and set it down as soon as the tail cleared. Not horrible, but it would have been better to drop before the wall in hindsight. The exfil went smoothly for me, but I heard TH1 and TH2 having a more sporty time of it and Alpha took casualties at the LZ. The helos regrouped at the staging area and waited, listening on CC to the progress of the mission while Netkev practiced his landings and I critiqued Dabbo's anti-collision lights.

Then we heard the last CSAT kill being confirmed and popped up to airtaxi and orient for the run-in, the groundpounders all legged it back to the Bravo LZ where I'd first landed, CO called us in and popped green smoke to mark the new LZ (which was a bit further back than before), and I landed on the smoke grenade The loadup was perhaps not the cleanest in the world - everyone needs to be a little calmer, they're only bullets whizzing past your head, you don't need to worry till they're cannon shells or RPGs I'm still not sure if Jigsor made it on or not and I'd mistaken Eqbot for FTL on the LZ. I think we could stand a little more practice there lads. But we lifted and RTB'd without incident.

Meanwhile, TH2 had a mapreading incident with a tree, so we were down some seats and had an extra bum to worry about ( ), so I dropped off my passengers and legged it back to near the original staging area so CO had an extra helo to hand; but TH1 and THFer were able to lift out everyone without incident. Incidentally guys, it's impolite to try to shoot down your own helo after it drops you off if it's flying back into the AO to save more of your buddies, just sayin'...

Also... kindof impolite to try to shoot down the rest of your helos as they RTB with your buddies. Seriously guys, not cool...

Also, I think we only lost one or two people on that run? Shiny




Buzzard (updated)
ASL with Zanzos (ASM)



So originally I was supposed to be Alpha 1 FTL, but we had few jet pilots to hand (I don't know what's wrong with my controller setup for jets in Arma, but it just doesn't work, it's like stuff is cross-linked or something) so Tigershark bumped from ASL to Pilot and I was promoted before my time (but we saved on the clean-the-old-SL's-brains-out-of-the-beret dry cleaning costs, so that was handy). The plan was... simply and robustly explained ('Go there. Shoot things. Later we might go this way and shoot more shit') and as SL I presented this simple plan in a tailored fashion to my fireteams ('Go there. Shoot things. Later we might go this way and shoot more shit. Don't get dead.').

We moved up on OP Napkin, with A1 taking the point and looking north while A2 went to a more sheltered location to the east so they could kickoff for OP Cherry Pie (seriously? With the names? Now I'm hungry dammit) while A1 covered them. We spent a few minutes shooting all the stuff that was in range, then CO gave the order to head out to OP Cherry PIe with whipped chantilly cream, and I passed that on to A2 and gave A1 orders to cover the north. Fer headed off; Netkev happily continued shooting at trees and shrubs. I opted to stay with A1 because Reasons.

A few minutes later, Fer had belly-crawled and stumbled half-way to OP Cherry Pie with whipped chantilly cream and a nice strong cup of coffee, and I gave him a polite nudge because we were hearing lots of noisy things up North and I hadn't seen one vehicle yet and I knew there were striders out there somewhere being all ninja-like, Fer told me it was a good thing I'd not seen them yet which did nothing to ease my paranoia, and ten seconds later there were very close vehicle noises, a strider dukes-of-hazard-ed out of the darkness and missed running over me by about two metres, and as BSL fled past me, the strider swiss cheesed me with point-blank 50cals. The entire "engagement" took just long enough for an enthusiastic expletive.

Seagullised, I watched Fer manage to get across to OP NyomNyomNyom and clear the woods there, covered by Bravo 2; watched Netkev join him and get scared by Fer's big bad UGL; watched RawDog completely miss the EI sitting 4 metres from him while shooting away at the remains of Bravo 2, then crawl on top of the EI; watched Netkev clear "Compound Death" (wow, that escalated from pie quickly); watched Gemoxy's suicide run across the airfield to retrieve the fuel truck and then scare the bejaysus out of me by getting it so close to the jet; watched Tigershark check the runway was clear by driving down it like he rented it, and then crash the car at the end of the runway and then call in that the runway was clear ; and then watched the most infamous almost-takeoff in recent Folk sessions.

Honestly, I don't think I've seen anyone earn two nicknames in one night and I'm at a loss as to how we combine Flaps and Chinchilla into one new nickname for pooter...

And then we watched as the ninja Striders showed off their ninja skills by coming out of the water to murder Netkev and then returning to the water to ambush some other poor bastard. Kindof glad we didn't take the beach approach...

Oh, and Comrade Rawdog will be compensating the Party for abuse of perfectly servicable Party-commandeered vehicles...



Bay
Alpha 1 AR with Gemoxy (FTL),



So maybe not leading and having a big gun would help my survivability?

The plan was... well... so simple a giant rat could understand it, apparently. So long as it had CC set up properly. We landed, Bravo ran up the hill and shot lots of things, we snuck around the side of the hill and tried not to shoot Bravo. Or Alpha 2. We almost succeeded in that one. We had a few long-ish range engagements, and one or two holy-shit-where-did-he-come-from close range pants-wetting sessions, and finally made it to OP San Jose. (Seriously guys. Hose-ay. Not Jo-say. Come on...)

The problem was that something big and nasty was sitting on the far side of San Hose-ay just waiting for us to stick our fool heads over it, and when we did, it removed them with 50cals. From 15m back I never even saw what hit us, I just heard the booms and Gemoxy going quiet and then I was FTL, and while I was telling everyone to get back off the hilltop our AT guy died Micheal-Bay-style (ooooooohhhhh, right...) in front of me. I lost another rifleman trying to retrieve that tube before cutting our losses and pulling back. And then as we got ready to jog over to ASL and go round the hill to hit Palo Alto instead of over the hill, we heard from A2 that he was trapped on the southern side of OP San Hose-ay. Well, ****. I swapped my AR for Jigsor's useless carbine and told the AR's to head over to ASL while I tried to retrieve A2 with my smoke grenades, figuring that way we'd risk the least. However my ARs didn't quite understand the plan and came with me over the hilltop instead

Somehow (maybe the AI got bored?) we didn't get exploded there and then, even when someone tried to draw fire on a covert run-away mission by shooting at the big nasty thing, and we all cleared off OP Explosion City and rejoined ASL. Then instead of sneaking up and clearing Palo Alto, we got told to catch up with and reinforce Bravo and we set off on a long jog, during which Shacktac's HUD mod showed it doesn't know how to handle things when you join a team and I got lost and disoriented completely. By the time I got anything like a sense of what was going on again, Zitron had shown up to tell me we were glory-charging. I didn't even know we were all dead, or what we were charging, and then we ran into an IFV and an enemy patrol at close range and I was a seagull for just long enough to catch the explody death of Crassus.

Not my favorite mission of the evening, that one. Though the Chinchilla will live on in all our memories...



Room Service (after-party)
Da Polis



A deceptively simple plan, expressed in very complex form in that map. The orders were - drive up, deploy smoke, throw grenades, run in and go left (some of us, cunningly, would go right).

Things... did not go to plan. Turns out I still suck at driving in Arma and pedals don't help - the right one is fine, it accelerates. The left one is not the brake, it's the deaccelerator. Those are NOT the same thing. A brake just stops you; a deaccelerator stops you and then backs up over your teammates

Also the Ifrit's smoke grenades don't really fire forwards so much as all around the Ifrit, so the hotel lobby remained unsmoked. We lost two at the main door (one just after I'd treated him dammit) and a few frags later we ran in and to the left.

Grumpy went back to get ZeCatnip back up at the IFV where he'd taken a stray round, while Dabbo and I tried to go upstairs. Me and a badguy saw each other at the same time but I don't know if my rounds even registered as hits before I was down; Dabbo finished him off, then patched me up and advanced just in time for Cardova's sneaky grenade, which landed at my feet, to explode me and pepper Dabbo with enough shrapnel to blow him through the door and land him at Cardova's feet where he got executed. The remainder of my FT managed to kill Cardova and the other FT got Fer and that was game over to us. Hooray?



All told, a fun night, and the bump up in visual quality and FPS makes this a heck of a lot more manageable (if still not easy...).

[Sparks]

HSLD? Seems like a cakewalk to me

Tovarich, I believe that's the Party-approved method of volunteering to CO the next run of HS,LD...

[SuicideKing]

Raptoer, I was testing just now and I ended up crashing exactly the same way.

I'd recommend taking your hands off the mouse (and I don't mean the chinchilla), turning tightly on to the runway, NOT DEPLOYING FLAPS and pulling up ever so slightly when the runway ends. Like so:



Take-off = no flaps
Landing = flaps

At least in Arma (and according to an old flight sim that I used to play, F/A-18 Korea).

[Tigershark]

Oh Tiger, let's not kid ourselves, you don't have a track record because you don't command
Besides, have you ever seen someone fail at HSLD? Seems like a cakewalk to me

Haterz gonna hate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[Grumpy]

Also, I think we only lost one or two people on that run? Shiny

That would've been been me and another one of my guys in A2 getting TK'd by A1. Not sure why everyone thinks that mission so well? I got "volunteered" to lead A2 and then TK'd. Worst mission ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!