Chaplain

Crux is nearly upside down. I'm trying to figure out where you would have to be to see it like that...

Nah, but I have a friend whose family owns these:

A relatively new John Deere combine with 40-foot-wide grain header is about $400,000. I suspect that farmers who don't want their expensive equipment banged up were the original market for these, and it kind of grew from there.

At the WWI Museum in Kansas City, they have a display of artillery sights. It says that up until the onset of hostilities, almost all modern sights were produced in Germany. No one with influence considered that Germany might not wish to sell weapons to adversaries. Britain, France and their allies had to rush at the very last minute to reverse-engineer the German technology. The result was that there was a definite shortage of quality sights on that side for the first part of the war. I know of many other examples of this kind of thing throughout history, though few seem so blatantly short-sighted. "There is nothing new under the sun."

10.x.x.x is the Class A network assigned for internal-use only. I recommend every mission I consult with to get off 192.168.x.x and move to the 10.x.x.x address space if they can. We'll all be moving to IPv6 soon, anyway, and then it won't matter. Or so the industry keeps telling us...

Mine was waiting for me when I got home from visiting with family. Thanks for being different than most - no, make that the vast majority of - IT vendors!

So, I found out the video cable was connected to the wrong video port on the server. I didn't think to check for something like that. The other games were running pretty smoothly on the on-board graphics card. I would not have expected that, so didn't think to check the cabling to confirm things were running off the high-end card. I guess that shows I'm not serious enough about computer gaming. :???: SB Pro PE 3.002 is running quite well on initial tests using the good video card.

'Tis an XFX Radeon HD 7850. I won't have access to the server for a few days to run the DirectX diagnostics again. I didn't note down the details when I did it the first time, just saw there were no errors listed. I'll report back at that time. I was able to install and run MS FSX on the server and it runs quite well. Still, I know that SB Pro PE pushes the envelope more than FSX does, so that doesn't prove that SB Pro PE should work without any issues.

I let Windows send in the error report, yes. I'd try this on another Windows 2008 R2 server, but the rest of the ones I have access to have pathetic video cards: the kind that can't even run 32-bit color at 1024x768 resolution. I can't imagine that SB Pro PE would survive that. Another note - I went into the map editor and was even able to use the LOS tool. When I tried to use the F1 view, SB Pro PE crashed. It is not the program, per se, but the 3D environment that my server can't handle.

I tried all of the compatibility options that make sense. Trying Windows XP SP2 or Windows XP2 SP3 break it completely, probably because it is putting the files in the right place for Windows 7. Technically, Windows 2008 R2 "is" Windows 7. You know how that works, of course... The full error is: Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: SBProPEcm.exe Application Version: 3.0.0.2 Application Timestamp: 523c4c35 Fault Module Name: SBProPEcm.exe Fault Module Version: 3.0.0.2 Fault Module Timestamp: 523c4c35 Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 005bbf72 OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.400.8 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 0a9e Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789 Additional Information 3: 0a9e Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789 The timestamps change each time, but I think everything else is the same every time.

This might seem an odd question, but I do have access to a nice tower server with a decent pci-x video card. It is running Windows Server 2008 R2, and because of the TPM chip and Bitlocker, I cannot dual-boot the thing into Windows 7. I successfully installed SB Pro PE 3.002. Everything seems OK until I hit the scenario start button. Then, I can hear the tank engine for a moment, and then I get an appcrash error. At this point I can't interpret that error in a meaningful way. I have successfully installed a few other DirectX 9 games on this server and they run without trouble on Windows 2008 R2. It makes me wonder if SB Pro PE just won't run on Windows 2008 R2. I know that some games will not. If SB Pro PE SHOULD run on Windows 2008 R2, then I'll want to troubleshoot in detail. If it is not expected to and nobody has tried it before, then I may just let this one rest. Thoughts?

In a passenger car, I'd rather hit a tree than have an IED go off close by. In a tank or IFV, I'd rather face the IED. It has to do with how the force transfers. While a few wraps of det cord may sever a decent-sized tree, a couple of pounds of C4 placed fairly close by will not. The blast has to be in almost direct contact with the tree, and you use multiple wraps of det cord to cause the plane of the explosive force to be perpendicular to the trunk, so that little of the force is wasted. When the mass of an armored vehicle absorbs the blast of an IED, only residual energy gets through to the crew. Truly effective IEDs are really crude shaped charges that penetrate the weaker bottom armor of the vehicle. The crew is injured or killed because the blast actually gets inside the vehicle, and direct exposure to even a small part of such a blast is deadly. Also remember that an IED blast is almost instantaneous. You need an ultra-fast camera to see the motion of the wave. A person or civilian automobile exposed directly to it takes tremendous damage in that tiny amount of time, but an armored vehicle hull will still absorb the vast amount of that blast. The AFV might shudder, but it will rarely be thrown. By comparison, the impact of a tank against an sizable tree is spread out over a much longer time. Still a fraction of a second, but much longer. The tree has time to flex a bit and absorb the full momentum of the tank without breaking. What about the people inside the vehicle, though? They fly into the hard interior of the vehicle at the full speed of the impact. The tank has decelerated by 10s of MPH by the time they hit, and that impact is enough for serious injury. This is why some states in the USA now make it illegal to have anything sitting on the back shelf in passenger cars. A simple paperback book thrown forward in a collision can cause serious injury if it strikes a passenger in the back of the head.

And they do - bought the license Sunday evening, had this error then and this morning, then successfully activated a few minutes ago.

I can run the latest version of SB Pro PE on my Windows 8 ThinkPad with no trouble. The CodeMeter must be working correctly for me to do that.

Merry Christmas!

Well, you may be correct about Microsoft's intentions for expanding their profitability. It was something along those lines that led to the death of MS Flight Simulator. :-/

Windows 8 works fine for me and for several others I know who have upgraded. It won't likely make your current heavy-duty computer games run any better. It won't likely cause problems for them, either. Just remember that you might have to update or reinstall a driver or two if you do an in-place upgrade. I did such an upgrade on two computers already, and both went quite smoothly.

A factor to remember is that if the production facilities are shut down, most of the trained technicians will seek work elsewhere. It won't be easy to get them back in 3-5 years when the government decides to reopen the contracts. The US government cannot simply order workers experienced in tank production to move back to Lima and get to work, even if a war has already started. Therefore, the US Army's stated position will not bode well for maintaining our current technological dominance on the battlefield. On the other hand, the US has done a pretty good job of ramping up the industrial base for war on the past. We could once again rely on our geographical isolation to allow time for rebuilding the industry. That, of course, would reduce our current ability to be a viable world power. Maybe that would be good, maybe not. It would also mean that those soldiers caught in the early days of a future conflict would suffer badly, just as US soldiers have done in most of our past wars. I think that our society has become so distant from the reality of armed conflict that they will not support the cost of a superior military for much longer. The US will end up relying on the latter strategy more from complaceny than from a conscious decision that it is the better option.

Virtual machines cannot access the full power of the video card on the host machine. The newest Hypervisors are a lot better than the previous couple of generations in passing through video acceleration, but don't expect wonders.

Hi, Werewolf. It's been awhile, hasn't it? One issue is that some features of SB Pro won't be released in SB Pro PE, lest military customers skip the $1,000 SP Pro product and purchase the $125 SB Pro PE product instead. IIRC, the free camera you are asking for is one of those Pro-only features.

First video game in our house: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=2&c=1114

I think that someone who wants the drop-in-at-any-time approach should try writing a few scenarios that would support the concept. Get four or more other guys to agree to test them by running some MP games without allowing for a planning phase. Everyone jumps into a tank at the start and off the game goes. Any communication or command structure on either side must be created ad-hoc. At most, one person is designated the commander for a given side, but no one is to be admonished for ignoring the commander's wishes and going it alone. If that is tried and more than a handful of people say it was fun and they still want a drop-in-at-any-time server, than it is probably worth further discussion on the matter. Right now, all discussion on the matter is based on assumptions that may or may not apply to whether a sizable number of people would really enjoy such a setup. Remember there was vocal opposition to a playable T-72, on the basis that "no one would have any fun playing a T-72 in Steel Beasts." It seems that more than a few people who believed the T-72 would be a waste of time have found it to be quite fun to play. Maybe the same is true for a drop-in-at-any-time server for SB.

When I was an M901 platoon leader, all of the 11H NCOs in the company felt that the ITV should remain stationary once the gunner started to raise the hammerhead. If the gunner really needed the vehicle to move a bit to get a proper field of fire, he could direct the driver to move. The driver was not to move the vehicle on his own for any reason whatsoever, until the hammerhead was fully stowed again. One thing to remember is that the M901 should never fire at the enemy when anything but the top half of the hammerhead is exposed. To wait to move until the hammerhead was stowed under enemy fire would "only" risk having the hammerhead hit and destroyed, not the crew. Moving the vehicle hastily would most likely cause the hammerhead to fall. That fall would likely cause as much damage to the vehicle as having the hammerhead directly hit by enemy fire. Neither option was good, but lowering the hammerhead properly was considered "safer." I know the M2/3 is different, but for the M901, I think the AI driver should not be able to move the vehicle on his one while the launcher is up. M901s should not do berm drills. I have heard that an M901 could safely move from hull-down to turret down if the gunner first moved the hammerhead to the load position. We never talked about that in my unit, but I heard about it later. Maybe the locks in the load position are more secure than in the fully-raised position. One minor note - the animation for raising and lowering the hammerhead on the M901 is off. On the real vehicle, the hammerhead raises fully and then spins 180. Lowering is the reverse. It has always been odd to see the ITVs in SB raising/lowering the hammerheads while spinning the cupola.

It's also true that in the real vehicle, the gunner would feel the vehicle start to move and yell, "Stop!" The gunner in SB, using high mag while engaging a long range target, might not notice his vehicle moving until it is too late.

I have seen the same thing. I got the Hannover-Weserbergland.ter map to open only once in the editor, and that was only fairly soon after booting. The other times I had tried it, the progress bar appeared for only about a second and then disappeared, with no error message. The operation apparently cancels itself if it cannot get enough recources. It would be helpful if it gave notice of what happened. I have 8 GB of RAM on Windows 7 Pro x64. a core i5 2520 CPU, and an NVIDIA NVS 4200M GPU.