Ssnake

When?

Its use has been forbidden quite a while ago, partially for the fire hazard, mostly for environmental protection purposes.

The LOD of trees depends on their relative size in what you're seeing. If you look through a scope into a deep forest, pretty much every tree is so large that he fills your entire field of view. We've experimented with having billboards after a layer of five, 10, 15 trees overlapping, but it all looked weird and worse, and you can't even be sure that (e.g. if there is a path in the forest) you couldn't actually see deep into a forest, so if the billboards then cut off a line of sight, that's not really great either. A possible solution would be to have glass walls with tree matte painting after a few dozen or a 100 meters inside the forests. But then you'd still run occasionally into situations like looking through an edge of a forest with maybe another edge behind it and you could end up with 280m deep forest again, even if you tried to generally limit it to 100m. Or, looking parallel to an edge of a forest that goes straight for 1000m or more - again, you'd have those frame rate dips due to many, many overlapping trees. The alternative would be to go back to billboard trees entirely. I'm not sure if that's desirable.

There also was a photo of an open Merkava Mk 4 turret armor array (which got purged quickly), it looked like a sponge. Yes, perforated plates are old news indeed (see the dimples on the German Leo 1A5 add-on armor from IBD Deisenroth), they're also used on the light side skirts of Leopard 1 and 2A4 as a protection boost against the BMP-2's 30mm AP ammo. The really interesting "new news" is that they can make steel of hardness similar to ceramics while maintaining most of its ductility. At least I have never heard of that before.

For training purposes the textures are good enough. Spending additional time to make high resolution skins that don't add to the overall training value would be a waste in this context. High res textures are a game feature, so it's something that we would definitely add for SB2. Also, keep in mind the intended commonality between SB Pro and SB Pro PE; for SB Pro much larger maps can be defined in the mission editor which can easily require 100, 240, 480, or even 1500 MBytes of texture memory, depending on the map dimensions. In these cases you'd be dangerously close to typical memory limits beyond which graphics cards will need to swap textures (with the associated massive performance breakdown). It certainly is nothing that couldn't be handeled in principle, but even small changes do require some time for implementation (and then a lot of time for testing) so that we are hesitant to add features which are not directly related to training value.

I'm mentioning this only because Hollywood (and especially the CSI series) suggest that you can somehow "sharpen" blurred digital images with sufficient computer wizardry. Let me state here once and for all that it is mathematically impossible to reconstruct a higher resolution of a single image other than by inventing information (which Take this, CSI! hardly meets the requirements for forensic evidence). So, all filter algorithms aside - they may make the image look better, but they cannot reach the same quality as a texture created from scratch that uses a high resolution right from the start. It may however be that Deja works with higher resolution textures internally before rendering them into a 512 resolution texture to meet our harsh requirements for texture space conservation. Interestingly however it is possible to calculate higher resolutions from multiple captures of the same scene that were made with a lower resolution camera. NASA demonstrated this a few years ago with a Mars probe.

I'm almost certain that it is a T29, not sure about the subdesignation. The T29E3 at Ft. Knox has additional housings for a coincidence range finder. I don't think the T-29 was ever procured in significant numbers, if it left the prototype stage at all, let alone operational deployment.

I don't think so, with the sole exception of the Egyptian M1s which didn't receive the dU armor layer. The Aussies, for example, have the depot-level "like new" refurbished M1s of A1AIM standard with no armor downgrades or anything. Actually, the Army wanted the Leo but the government (probably rightfully so) decided that larger operations with heavy armor involved would be performed with almost certainty in an alliance with the US. Since Australia doesn't have the strategic transport assets to move their M1s further than to the surrounding islands and archipelagos, the idea is to "lease" M1s from US forward deployment depots (like Diego Garcia) for the duration of an operation so that the Australian M1s rarely if ever have to leave the Australian continent, at least not in larger numbers (that is, numbers between 15 and 80). Since the Australian tankers will then have M1 training they can simply hop into the US vehicles and drive away for the duration of the operation. It's probably one of the rare cases where a civilian government is smarter than its army when it comes to strategic procurement decisions.

It's snowing over here, but I don't work or live in hell. However, development for SB2 has been suspended a while ago for an indeterminate period. Originally we thought that we could work on both SB Pro and SB2 in parallel, but it turned out that work on SB Pro required a lot more of our attention and effort than originally expected. The earliest possible release date would be 2011, but that's pure speculation at the moment.

Because it became disruptive for the exercise.

It seems that "the US" (whoever is making the decisions, be they GDLS or some committee in the Pentagram) are unwilling to offer versions other than M1A1AIM or M1A2SEP. Australia chose the former because the latter was so much more expensive; they would have preferred something in the middle, but couldn't get it. Krauss-Mafia isn't cheaper, but at least they're willing to support at least a dozen different variants of the Leo 2, with small modifications here and there for each user nation. It may also have played a role that Canada made good experiences with the Leopard 1 (and let's not forget the Leopard user community LEOBEN which probably offers a tremendous "soft" plus as far as mutual training support, spare parts supply, and exchange of operational experiences are concerned). Finally, using the Leo may also be a desirable decision in domestic politics as another sign of independence from the US; can't say how important that really is. I mean, visually Canada isn't that different from the US, and as far as economics are concerned North America seems to be one rather uniform zone, so Canada must resort to symbolism (and of course they have Quebec, a domestic France so to speak ).

The "Star Wars Yoke" actually is a replica of the Bradley's control handle, at least as far as size and shape is concerned. I think that the guy who designed it was somehow connected with the company that made the Bradley's handles at that time. I only have a dim recollection about the exact background, but I remember that part of the story that made it interesting to me - that they were made from the same design. There was an army adaptation of Battlezone with the Star Wars yoke as a primitive gunnery trainer, IIRC

Yay! Snow! The cat hates it.

You need to check out the image section more often.

Not Of This Earth?

1) Roll angle and Azimuth 2) Points or Waypoints 3) (Brightness of) Illumination Primary Sight with (Range-)Displays and Reticule and then Brightness (of the thermal imager's) Reticule

Owners of secondary licenses need not order multiple upgrade packages.

No. The response time of air strikes is faster than normal artillery, and it's a single bang, and much bigger. But that'sall there is to say about it at this point. Future enhancements will limit the number of strikes and eventually reduce their availability to certain time slots (loiter time). Whether or not guided munitions will be added at a later point I can't say. Ideally yes, but it is pure speculation right now. Later in 2009 we will also see an increase of rendering distances, probably out to 6000m, maybe a little bit more. That should give helicopters with long ranging missiles an additional, much needed standoff.

I THINK it's a polarization filter, but actually I'm not sure about it. I didn't find it particularly useful - unlike the UV and Polarization filters for my camera which work really great as I found out in the years after my army time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srfyVfH_nvs You knew it was inevitable.

PUNKT (From the Navigation Display in the TC's Position) Point (location/destination) WÄRMEBILDGERÄT Thermal Imager (TIS) SCHARFSTELLUNG Focus (focal plane shift) RÜCKSTEUERUNG Backsteering (or "Inverse Feedback") VERKANTUNG-KORR. Cant correction (or "Roll compensation") ANZEIGEWAHL Display selection QUERWIND Crosswind AUFSATZ Superelevation PULVERTEMP. Ammo temperature SONNEN-FILTER (Light Filter?) Sunfilter/Shades VERDUNKELUNGS-BLENDE Shutter (although, I may be wrong here, and it is the greyfilter instead which can sometimes help to improve the contrast if the air is particularly hazy Keep 'em coming... Your friendly neighborhood serpent

Two weeks before we start sending them out we'll announce the preorder phase. You will then have 14 days to place your orders, if you absolutely want to order in advance (and take advantage of the preorder discount). Details will all be announced in the newsletter.

You can create troops and make them Spawn, if... a certain helicopter is in a specific region for at least 20 seconds or so. That way, if the helo gets shot down, there won't be troops. It's a crude workaround, but at least this way the helicopters can have a tactical relevance. Then it is a question whether you send in helicopters as an air attack element during a battle phase when vehicles with a decent chance to shoot them down aren't in range, or otherwise occupied. For example, if you fire a smoke volley on a tank unit's position, they will have difficulty getting a good range on the helicopters. It's all about combined arms.

What's the specific driver version of yours?

There's few things that we can do. We can complain at NVidia about the quality of their drivers (please try to be very specific about driver version, operating system, and eventually the kind of scene where a frame rate drop occurs; I have just received a report that with Vista, the GTX260, and driver version 180.something the frame rate usually is very high except with the thermal imager selected. If this is similar for you others as well, then this will give us a good clue about the nature of the problem). As a short-term solution we can only recommend that you try older drivers until you find a version with which the problem will go away. This is another important clue, if you can tell us which specific driver versions create trouble, and which ones work well. This will allow us to nail down the problem, and hopefully allow NVidia to avoid similar problems in the future.