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I missed the stream, but a quick glance at the loss charts indicates a 36:5 K:D ratio. 46:9 including naval assets, if you like. By numbers alone, that is a hugely lopsided victory, and a trade wildly in HG's favor from a corporate perspective. Sure, half of those are thoroughly replaceable shitbox scrubjets, but HG's fliers neutralized most of a squadron of the BSNC mercs' heaviest multirole assets - those Venezuelan Su-30MK2s might not be Indian MKIs packing Brahmos shipkillers, but they're nothing to sneeze at. Not to mention aircrew losses, which the campaign has AFAIK glossed over to avoid killing off player pilots, but would absolutely have an impact on OPFOR morale, optempo, and possibly willingness to remain on retainer. Eighteen Flanker-qualified pilots and backseaters (not to mention the other sixteen or so Kfir, Tiger, and MiG jockeys the Latinos lost today) are a significant loss in human capital for any merc outfit, no matter how piratically banana-republican their company culture may be. Realbarrow fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 09:17 |
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 10:29 |
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The Sandman posted:You can't see it, but from my life raft in the Bering Sea I'm flipping you off. Hey, at least we aren't on fire anymore.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 09:21 |
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paragon1 posted:Calm the tits down, Bac. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that we could have done better. This scenario could have and maybe even should have been a lot nastier for us than it was in actuality. If we don't learn from our fuckups then we will suffer hefty losses in the future.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 09:55 |
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Realbarrow posted:I missed the stream, but a quick glance at the loss charts indicates a 36:5 K:D ratio. 46:9 including naval assets, if you like. By numbers alone, that is a hugely lopsided victory, and a trade wildly in HG's favor from a corporate perspective. From a corporate perspective, the only thing they care about is that they lost 25% of the processing ships we were supposed to protect. Of course, those losses were essentially unavoidable, since they were stealth missiles fired almost from the Iceberg harbor, but I don't know if they will buy that. The only way we could have stopped those was to be here earlier. This was a really tough mission and it could have gone a lot worse. Our losses were avoidable, however. Our Meteors outrange the AMRAAM-C they used by a good 15 nm. We should make it part of our doctrine against enemies with active radar missiles like the AMRAAM to turn and burn away immediately after launching Meteors, to outrun the incoming missiles instead of closing in. In Angola we were fighting mostly SARH equipped fighters, so we could just keep flying at them after launching Meteors, their return fire would lose track when they got shot down or turned to avoid our Meteors. This time we tried the same thing and a lot of our losses were to fighters we had already shot down, but the missile kept coming. WVR combat (Sidewinders and IRIS-Ts) is so deadly that we should avoid that as much as possible anyway. Mechanically in CMANO we can at least get our Gripens to turn home after firing Meteors by just setting the RTB weapon state to "shotgun when all BVR weapons are spent, disengage immediately."
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 10:16 |
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Anta posted:Our losses were avoidable, however. Our Meteors outrange the AMRAAM-C they used by a good 15 nm. We should make it part of our doctrine against enemies with active radar missiles like the AMRAAM to turn and burn away immediately after launching Meteors, to outrun the incoming missiles instead of closing in. Completely agree with this this. No one had to die today.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 10:41 |
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Anta posted:From a corporate perspective, the only thing they care about is that they lost 25% of the processing ships we were supposed to protect. (Well, I more meant the perspective of Hayard-Gunnes' accounting and/or personnel departments. The guys doing the vaguely inhuman calculus, you know? Speaking of inhuman calculus...*straightens tie*) I agree wholly regarding the issues you identify in H-G Aerial Confict Resolution's standing policies and procedures concerning the deployment of standoff Resolution Hardware. It is unfortunate to suffer such losses in capital to grow our awareness of these shortcomings, but we at H-G Human/Mechanical Resources hope that these lessons can be retained going forward to allow us to generate new best practice metrics better tailored to maximize the performance of our Resolution Associates in the conflict environment.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 12:38 |
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Well fact is none of the sides involved can sustain these losses. Only way to deal with this now is to escalate or tone it down. Bet you no one is going to want to tone things down. Problem about mitsu is that we have more defeatconditions. Enemy can loose every merc out there but still manage to kill ships and win. We loose if we loose our planes or the ships go down.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 12:44 |
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I think the BSNC's air force is pretty much done. How many aircraft was it they lost, 30+? No merc company in the world could function after that sort of loss, never mind one that's relying on defections to keep supplied. Canada Express are also in a bad way. They lost ten Hornets and somewhere along the way their P-3 got downed too. CE are still in the fight, but they're in a worse shape than us.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:02 |
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Realbarrow posted:(Well, I more meant the perspective of Hayard-Gunnes' accounting and/or personnel departments. The guys doing the vaguely inhuman calculus, you know? Speaking of inhuman calculus...*straightens tie*) I would like to hire you for our "buy a bote" internal advocacy campaign! The prevailing conditions in current Ordnance Exchange Marketplaces clearly shows that acquiring means for a more permanent sea-based presence is essential for providing our customers the minimized risk profile and Freedom to Operate they require. e: Also, in the interests of corporate half-assing, we should get a clearer division of responsibilities between us, SMARF and the Dutch. SMARF was cleaning up after us in the south, but we might have been better served by letting them take the brunt of the work there. As it was we were probably doing their job for them for free. Anta fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:13 |
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orcbuster posted:Well fact is none of the sides involved can sustain these losses. Only way to deal with this now is to escalate or tone it down. Bet you no one is going to want to tone things down. That reminds me of something I was thinking about the other day. If we're going to escalate, it might be neat to branch into bombers for heavy strike capability (standoff missileboating with ALCMs, thundering in behind the BARCAP for good old-fashioned carpetbombing of hapless ground targets, left-field nonsense like making a MOAB out of a fuel truck, etc...) I wonder if Willy can magic us up a Tu-16 Badger (or the Chinese clone, the Xian H-6)? Or a Tu-22 Blinder? Not a Tu-22M Backfire or Tu-160 Blackjack of course, those are too new. B-52 is too big, B-1 too new. Gotta kick it old school. Edit: I will go ahead and shamelessly admit that I am strongly inspired by the saga of the Coke Bottle Express from 4chan's Planes & Mercs forum game, a Tu-16/H-6 piloted by a half-insane crew of Iran-Iraq War veterans. A thunderous, smoking beatstick in a game otherwise featuring sleek fighter planes. Realbarrow fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:15 |
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I think we did pretty well considering the numerical superiority our opponents had and the pretty modern hardware they wielded. Taking some real losses is inevitable if this is actually going to be challenging and interesting, though we happen to have taken it pretty hard in our high-end assets in this particular mission. We did take down a bunch of 4.5 generation planes which is nothing to sneeze at and should position us pretty well going forward. Not that things couldn't be done better, but a lot of the problems lie in the deeper challenges of CMANO like timing/coordinating different missions to support each other and dealing with congestion at airfields which are just inherently tough in an LP format.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:17 |
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Bacarruda posted:
Here's the thing - I checked, and Half-rear end is the only plan that had all 8 Gripens armed with max Meteors. Anything else would have gone even worse, probably enormously so. God help us if we had sent four of them to SDB that Mamba. This is legitimately not a fault of the plan. We took a beating, but we can actually afford to - we have a frankly ridiculous number of aircraft. It just hurts that 80% of our casualties were our front-line fighters, but that's also their role. You can't send 30 aircraft into the air vs a peer adversary and have everybody reliably make it home. We still achieved the objective as best as we could, and we've only had to scrub one mission so far when we failed to take out that SA-10 battery. Not having the Gripens set to RTB when out of Meteors sucks, but up until now nobody's ever had to worry about that, so I'm not going to fault Jimmy for not having some kind of crystal ball to know he'd have to specify that. As Yooper said, sucks that Jimmy is the one that got to learn about this on his first outing, but now we know. Defined takeoff order is something we'll need going forward, as is more specific instructions on when to disengage, I agree with that. Also the rally point thing. I think there's really no saving the Sea Eagles vs a goddamned PAC-3 battery. Those missiles are just lovely. The JSOWs proved their worth for sure and the Exocets are good enough, though - it's only a shame that using JSOWs means we can't assign the F-16s to pure CAP. All of you calling for procurement after one mission are ridiculous. Our enemies are hurting far, far worse than we are - I'd be surprised if BSNC can even do anything at this point other than hide behind their SAMs and pout. The only problem is how much Mitsuhashi wants to scream at us over those two processing ships (also the civvy, I guess) but given that we had no hope in hell of spotting those missiles we should be able to argue this into why we need more runways because these knife fight ranges are going to just keep emphasizing that problem. This sucks, but we came out ahead, so let's learn from our mistakes and capitalize on the advantage we have.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:32 |
I don't want Jimmy to get too much flak, part of it is the difficulty of managing orders and knowing how each thing dovetails into the next in the planners mind. Had I had orders in regard to keeping the Tornado's back in case of hostiles I would have, instead I did as best I could based on the orders and left them airborne along with the Gripens as cover. This mission had a few different random missions the hostiles could have taken. In our case it was worst case where we took the brunt of El Presidente's PMC and all the Canadian F-18's. I kept an eye on the Twitch Chat and took orders there as people pinged me. It got the F-16's in the air a bit quicker and activated the F-4's early as well. On top of this we held back MEAT until St. Lawrence was clear. Yes, we lost two Processing Ships, but it could have been double that, or more. I've got mixed emotions about watching the Twitch Chat for instructions. This time it worked for little stuff, but I don't want to redefine the missions on the fly. It's not fair to the planners, and it makes my job tougher. Looks like our SovCrap just got more useful.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:38 |
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power crystals posted:Here's the thing - I checked, and Half-rear end is the only plan that had all 8 Gripens armed with max Meteors. Anything else would have gone even worse, probably enormously so. God help us if we had sent four of them to SDB that Mamba. This is legitimately not a fault of the plan. We took a beating, but we can actually afford to - we have a frankly ridiculous number of aircraft. It just hurts that 80% of our casualties were our front-line fighters, but that's also their role. You can't send 30 aircraft into the air vs a peer adversary and have everybody reliably make it home. We still achieved the objective as best as we could, and we've only had to scrub one mission so far when we failed to take out that SA-10 battery. I agree with all of this. Although I expect BSNC is not out of the fight yet. This is when they will have to go asymmetric on us. They still (probably) have a sub out there, and I expect surprises from the Blue Star people. We should have air superiority now, so if Mitsuhashi lets us I think it's time to go on the offensive. e: I don't fault Jimmy at all, I think it was a good plan for a tough mission. Yooper posted:I've got mixed emotions about watching the Twitch Chat for instructions. This time it worked for little stuff, but I don't want to redefine the missions on the fly. It's not fair to the planners, and it makes my job tougher. As someone who can't be on Twitch at streaming time, I think things like asking the chat about unexpected things like the helicopter shootdown in Angola is fine and good, but I would limit how much the chat gets to change missions and such. Small things like launching alert fighters early like in this mission are also fine. Anta fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 13:44 |
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A some of the more important factors was that the OPFOR was substantially higher than what we had been led to suspect, and bad luck on the enemy AI's strategy role. Oh, and for the dipshits that keep trying to force diversity over effectiveness, or buy a loving sub-1K ton boat, THIS is why it's a stupid idea. If we have a stupid load-out, we're one act of RNG from being slaughtered no matter what Yooper does to stack the deck. Diversity is only a virtue when it has a practical benefit. Having a crap load of different planes with different capabilities, which you likely have to micro to make work together effectively, is asking for defeat in detail. You may value the meta-entertainment more that the actual results, but that leads to us eventually being wiped out, hard killing the LP. My view is simple. We are mercenaries, and we like being payed. We get payed for performance. We perform well by being good. We are good, because with have both skills AND the equipment to do what we need to do. If we suddenly DON'T have the equipment, we aren't good, so we don't perform well, and then we don't get payed. We like being payed, and are thus VERY unhappy. To paraphrase Vince Lombardy, being payed isn't the most important thing. It's the only thing. Also, this may be a personal opinion, but I've never seen the entertainment of watching somebody else gently caress up and have to be creative to fix it.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:00 |
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paid
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:06 |
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The Bering Strait just got interesting Seriously, that hurt but under the circumstances things went surprisingly well. Both the other PMCs decided to attack the Goons at once and they took a lot more casualties than we did. High-end stuff too, nine F/A-18s and nine SU-30s are eighteen (roughly) Gripen equivalents that we won't have to worry about in the future, Add those Skjolds and the majority of Iceberg's known surface vessels as well. And now we've learned that we need to take a whole bunch of things that we didn't need to bother with in Angola into account. Well done Jimmy, my plan wouldn't have handled this as well as Half-rear end did. Edit: Not to mention that Blue Star lost their AWACS to a stray Meteor PenguinSalsa fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:08 |
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omegasgundam posted:Oh, and for the dipshits that keep trying to force diversity over effectiveness, or buy a loving sub-1K ton boat, THIS is why it's a stupid idea. If we have a stupid load-out, we're one act of RNG from being slaughtered no matter what Yooper does to stack the deck. Diversity is only a virtue when it has a practical benefit. Having a crap load of different planes with different capabilities, which you likely have to micro to make work together effectively, is asking for defeat in detail. You may value the meta-entertainment more that the actual results, but that leads to us eventually being wiped out, hard killing the LP. This is extremely silly. A) Yooper is going to design a challenge for whatever we have. This isn't a static campaign where if only we had X we could overcome Y. If we had all Gripens and block whatever F-16s, the enemy would have had different stuff to make it a challenge. The enemy we fought in this mission only exists in this mission with the planes we had. We didn't lose ABC because we had a hard time inter-operating platforms, we had a hard time timing takeoffs, a challenge which will exists no matter what we fly. 2) Seriously. Yooper isn't going to kill his own LP. The planes we've acquired came from selections he hand-picked for us! iii) Lighten up.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:16 |
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The shootdowns will continue until morale improves.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:29 |
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The primary weakness - in my opinion - of Jimmy's and of most other plans is the lack of conditionals and rules of engagement. Like: if the Cap runs out of meteors RTB for a quick turnaround. Or: If the number of bogeys we're facing is larger than the amount of bvr's we have available, retreat all planes to a safe zone. And: gather all planes at point X and then throw all your ASMs at once to overwhelm AA.
Dance Officer fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:33 |
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glynnenstein posted:iii) Lighten up. I try to avoid being too meta in this thread but the people most invested in buying nothing but top of the line multirole assets also seem by far the most vocal about any perceived error or subpar performance. Like, holy poo poo guys. It's a game. Nobody's going to meet you five years from now and go "oh you're that guy that ordered DSM to his death in a milsim RPG". Even the perpetually unsatisfied boat lobby are good sports about it. It's one thing to want to point out shortcomings and areas for improvements. That's absolutely valuable. So is complaining about legitimate errors (I am still salty about that Tornado we lost to a strela 10). But keep it constructive. poo poo happens, we learn, we move on. While I'm on a meta topic, as far as stream chat goes, I think it's reasonable to use that as a way to answer unknowns the mission didn't account for but otherwise we should stick with the plan. If for nothing else than the fact that team Europe probably isn't going to be doing much participating at 3AM on a weekday.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:44 |
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Dance Officer posted:The primary weakness - in my opinion - of Jimmy's and of most other plans is the lack of conditionals and rules of engagement. Like: if the Cap runs out of meteors RTB for a quick turnaround. Or: If the number of bogeys we're facing is larger than the amount of bvr's we have available, retreat all planes to a safe zone. And: gather all planes at point X and then throw all your ASMs at once to overwhelm AA. Yeah. I feel there's kinda a threshold where sufficiently evenly matched opponents requires a lot of micro to get satisfactory success. That's hard to do with conditionals, but we can do better.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 14:54 |
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As a member of power crystals' so-called "gimme shiny" lobby, I'll say that that could have gone better but it also could have gone way, way worse. The Hornets could have gone really aggressive against our Tornadoes also, but thankfully didn't. So while the losses we took look bad, they could have been much, much worse. This was, however, our first run in with a full-on peer group and went much better than it could have. So good job Jimmy, you just happened to be first up to go against a peer. To follow is spoilered for the non-stream watchers: We might be facing another dozen or so Canadian F-18s (there's at least some at the Northern 2 Iceberg bases), so it'll stay interesting. There's still some BSNC Migs to worry about (they were basing out of the mainland, and bagged the Iceberg Orion), along with the Mamba site. So we're going to have to pick either Falcons or Gripens for CAP for a while, big deal. But SDBs and other long range PGMs may be the order of the day for St. Lawrence to deal with the Mamba. It looks like its based around Savoonga, so we can still suppress Gambell airport, if allowed, with shorter range PGMs or SAM fodder (Long range PGMs). The Sea Eagles have range but they're radar always on which hurts them, but the BROACHes got Patriots flung at them too. The loss of 4 Gripens is painful but not disastrous. More thought is going to have to go into plans, and we no longer have SDBs for days, so the missions should be more exciting. I suspect that Balkan Fun Time would have been/will be MANPADs and other SAMs all over the place, so to say that that would have been the preferable theatre is selling ourselves short. But we really should have gone with the Native Corp though.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 15:12 |
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Yes, it sucks that we lost some fighters. It sucks that we didn't take into consideration the launch rate and sent stuff out piecemeal, but that's what happens when you're using to flying in Angola and now move to a new location. What matters is that we put a serious amount of hurt on the rest of the region. What matters even more is how much we get hosed over by our employer for losing two ships.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 15:24 |
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I'm going to second power crystals' thoughts on asking Twitch chat: as a European it's extremely unlikely I'll ever be online when the streams happen (hell, I only happened to be online for the helicopter shoot down because of a combination of pure accident and ). As for what happened, from the sounds of it it was a mixed bag. But moments like these help inject some tension because they remind us that we're not guaranteed a win, and they also force us out of our comfort zone in terms of planning.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 15:34 |
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I'mma put my own two cents on this matter: This is basically what would have happened when that air wing came for us in Angola if we didn't have Rohan. In all sincerity we got the shortest end of the stick since these guys decided to go all-out on the very first op here, and it's something none of us really saw coming. That being said, I feel like we definitely have gotten a bit complacent after Angola's back half where the idea of facing any meaningful resistance in the air was basically a joke. Making it worse is that we never really had an op barring our reenactment of Comona in Angola where we had air resistance like this, and even back in Angola Rohan saved our asses there and wiped out close to half of the attacking force. Sooner or later...this was going to happen. Honestly we should be happy that most of us came back alive, learn how to handle the situations where our enemies throw basically everything they have at us better, and maybe consider getting planes like the Rafales that can better handle large-scale attacks.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 15:37 |
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Dr. Snark posted:I'mma put my own two cents on this matter: Thing is, none of the problems we dealt with here were really new. We'd had issues with delayed takeoffs, piecemeal aircraft commitment, strikers proceeding without escort, RTB orders not being issued/followed, planes with ASMs not being able to do A2A as far back as Tibet. Some of these things are gonna happen when one person is trying to juggle 20+ airplanes at one time. And some of them come down to oversight by planners. Jimmy, Quinntan and I have all planned missions that cost us planes. And some of those losses were because of planner errors. I'm completely guilty of writing oporders that didn't account for these things -- and that got goons (myself included) killed. To be constructive, I think future plans need to be: 1) simple and easy to execute, 2) focused on coordination (one way to do this is have all the aircraft take off, head to a rally point, then proceeding with their mission in a group, instead of going into battle one-by-one), 3) include conditionals for common events (ex. RTB when out of Meteors, do not do A2G unless CAP is in place, etc.)
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 16:44 |
Mitsuhashi is still working Kanban magic and deciding how the payments are going to shake out. More details to come later. Another plus, they're opening other airfields for our use along the coast. But they're pretty limited in scope. Cobbie will especially come in handy in the next missions. Three more fishing boats have gone missing as well and everyone is looking at everyone else wondering who killed them. Except we didn't. Smarf didn't. BSNC didn't. And The Nuge didn't... Video is uploading, I need to do a mission post later tonight, busy at work today, so, welp.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 16:49 |
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So AngerPEACE is definitely back, and Mitsu is one dead processing ship away from being unprofitable. I mean, I logically know that we want our bosses to win, but gently caress me if I'm not hoping at least a little bit that the Little Submarine That Could is still gonna save the whales.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 16:53 |
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The reason
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:05 |
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I hope the sub is christened the SSK Biologic.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:07 |
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Coffeehitler posted:The reason As long as our destruction bonus isn't cut we should still be fine for profit.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:21 |
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Hmm not exactly sure what we can do to deescalate things. That's not usually in a PMC's toolbox. Is there something we could do that would encourage one of the other factions to negotiate instead of reaching for a bigger stick?
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:23 |
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paragon1 posted:Hmm not exactly sure what we can do to deescalate things. That's not usually in a PMC's toolbox. Is there something we could do that would encourage one of the other factions to negotiate instead of reaching for a bigger stick? Well, one of our enemies is an overconfident, cowardly racist who is exactly the kind of 'likes to look tough' rear end in a top hat to pick fights with people who are already down and the other one is a group of native peoples that just had most of their airforce blown away. I suggest we explore ways to combine these two problems into an asset.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:26 |
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TBH, Deescalate Things In Bering Sea is probably code for Please Stop Shooting at Things In US Waters/Territory Before They loving Embargo/Tomahawk Things, Plz Thx.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:30 |
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Night10194 posted:Well, one of our enemies is an overconfident, cowardly racist who is exactly the kind of 'likes to look tough' rear end in a top hat to pick fights with people who are already down and the other one is a group of native peoples that just had most of their airforce blown away. Allying with the BSNC against Iceburg is a fine idea, but not really our prerogative. That's on our bosses. Also, crazycryodude, sorry to inform you, but an AI submarine set on "torpedo everything" is actually one of the worst threats to marine life short of subsurface nukes. Goblin contacts are considered a threat at all times, so if it detects a whale and is set to loose RoE, that whale is getting torpedoes.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:30 |
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AngerPEACE would never torpedo whales, and any "evidence" to the contrary is capitalist propaganda intended to turn us against their righteous cause Seriously though a processing ship eating some fish of the explodey persuasion would make my day. gently caress Mitsu, it's looking like we potentially won't even make obscene money with them like we were promised. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jun 6, 2017 |
# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:34 |
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Yooper posted:
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:42 |
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Crazycryodude posted:AngerPEACE would never torpedo whales, and any "evidence" to the contrary is capitalist propaganda intended to turn us against their righteous cause "Got promised huge money by a corporation for little work and ended up in a hellhole of advanced munitions, incredible danger, and getting nickle-and--dimed" really does make this just as Shadowrun as the Balkans, when you think about it.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:42 |
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 10:29 |
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They probably just need like thirty levels of approval following some overly rigid protocols to authorize a payout of the size we are due.
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# ? Jun 6, 2017 17:48 |