Alternate Wars

I assume many of you in the computer gaming world have been sort of following the trainwreck that is currently Ubisoft’s latest DRM that’s been applied to both Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5.

Put simply, you MUST have an active internet connection on at all times in order to play either game. If your internet connection is interrupted for any reason, you’re dumped back to the main menu, and basically lose all progress since your last save.

But wait, it gets better!

Ubi’s servers have been suffering downtime!.

Yes that’s right. Even if you bought the game, even if you have a dedicated fiberoptic line into your home, you can’t play it because Ubi’s servers broke.

As for Silent Hunter 5 itself; the word on the street is that it’s a buggy, unplayable mess.

Long-standing bugs in the series, such as the save engine being basically broken, continue forward.

Basically, if you want a reliable patrol, you have to keep in mind these rules when saving:

DO NOT SAVE
–when submerged.
–when within 50km of a ship.
–when within 50km of a harbour.
–When within 50km of a sunk ship.

If you save while submerged, for example in Silent Hunter 4, your ship immediately incurs damage when your saved game is reloaded. And as a bonus, any damage you’ve inflicted to a ship with a near perfect torpedo spread is instantly erased.

Why?

I’ll quote Ducimus from subsim here:

The game keeps track if basic info. Speed, heading, position, ship type, stuff its equped with, etc. It does NOT keep track of things like damage incurred, shells expended, things of that nature.

What this means, is that in SH3, Sh4, and Sh5, when you damage a ship, you MUST follow through. The damage incurred, shells it expended, etc, is only kept track of while the ship is within 30KM of your own. ( At least i think its 30KM). After a ship gets away from you, and has exceeded 30KM distance, it is no longer rendered. So all temporary information is reset. After that, the game ony keeps track of basic information again, and does not render the ship until it is within 30KM. It does this to save system resources. (consider how many convoys and single ships the game is simultaniously tracking).

So as an example, you can create a single mission where a convoy of Allied battle ships are traveling in a 60KM circular route, but passing some stationary axis battleships. As the allied task force goes by, it will incurr damage, and use its shells firing its guns. Sit there and wait for it to come back, and it will be fully restored to prestine condition because it exceeded 30KM distance. The game stopped rendering it, and when it started to render it again as it came closer, it called upon the data files for the specifications of what to render.

This is what your encountering when you reload a saved game where you know you damaged a ship. The damage is not tracked. Its temporary data not written to file. So the moral of he story is, if you damage a ship and you really want to sink it, DO so before it gets too far away from you, or before you decided to save the game and quit.

Now, I was willing to be lenient with Silent Hunter 3 having these bugs, because it was Ubisoft Romania’s first major subsim and because a major game element (dynamic campaigns) were inserted into the game at the last minute due to a concerted community push. However, they’ve had two A++ titles since then (Silent Hunter 4 and 5) to fix these bugs and problems inherent in the game engine design.

By contrast, Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, which I recently finished playing through last month, basically kept track of the location of each weapon, body, item, and whatnot over a massive 26km2 map, and also tracked their damage states.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the PC gaming industry is dying.

First Person Shooters, such as Halflife Episode XLVI will continue to be made, along with the endless RTS swarm. Every couple of years, an interesting non FPS/RTS game like Fallout 3 or Hitman will come out; but for the most part, it will be a desert of MMORPGs and FPSes; with none of the innovative game designs that characterized the ‘Golden Age’ of PC gaming in the 1990s; such as Master of Orion, X-COM, etc.

Wargames were the first genre to die — it used to be in the 1990s, at least one title that was stocked at Comp-USA’s PC gaming section was a wargame from SSI or someone else. Now they’re all gone from the store shelves, and kept alive only by online-only publishers like HPS Simulations, or Matrix Games.

Flight Simulators were the next. Microsoft pulled the plug on the Flight Simulator series, and inexplicably killed Train Simulator 2 when it was substantially complete. Now, only Third Wire and Laminar Research are basically left of the flight simulation industry.

Yes, I know about Rise of Flight, but that game is heavily laden with DRM.

However, the Open Source/Freeware movement has slowly been picking up some of the slack left by the implosion of the PC gaming industry.

While you won’t get RPGs which are deep and as detailed as Mass Effect 1/2 or Fallout 3, due to the limitations of free time available to those who work on these things as hobbies; a lot of gaming categories offer decent, well made software packages.

Playable Software

Liked Microsoft Space Simulator? Then get Orbiter.

Liked Microsoft Flight Simulator? Then get Flight Gear.

Liked Transport Tycoon? Then get OpenTTD.

Liked Civilization II? Then get FreeCiv.

Liked Wing Commander/Privateer? Then get Vega Strike.

Liked Freespace 1/2? Then get The Freespace 2 Source Code Project. (You will need a copy of the original discs somewhere).

Liked Panzer General/Allied General? Then get PG Forever.

My computer is dead. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him stronger, faster, better.

There MUST NOT be a computer gap with Ryan!

• AMD 5850 Radeon GPU
• Cooler Master ATCS 840
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Intel Core i7-860 2.8Ghz CPU
• Asus P7P55D-E PRO MoBo
• Antec Earthwatts 650W
• 4 GB Patriot DDR3 RAM
• 64 GB Patriot Torqx SSD

Salvaged from the Mark One:

• WD 500GB HDD
• LG DVD-ROM/RW
• Creative Xi-fi sound card…maybe

It’s interesting how much more juice has been pumped into consumer IT in just two years. Compared to my Mark One build here the Mark Two is truly a beast. I understand that the few parts being used from the old one make this more like moving the ship’s bell to a new vessel than a true rebuild, but in these tough economic times this is what I’m using to rationalize it.

Since the 1980s, there have long been rumors about all sorts of secret planes and projects flying out of Groom Lake (aka Area 51, aka whatever), including the hypothetical so-called Aurora, a hypersonic spyplane successor to the SR-71 Blackbird.

And since many of you are going to ask — If Aurora exists and is operational, where are the sonic booms from the thing as it performs it’s mission, or just during check flights? Even flying at the very edge of space, a hypersonic vehicle will generate some nice sonic booms by the time it reaches the ground — just look at Shuttle landings.

With Aurora out of the way; I believe the actual truth of what goes on at Groom Lake is far more mundane and prosaic. The Boeing ‘Bird of Prey’ is probably more typical of what goes on at Groom Lake these days than hypersonic spyplanes (as attractive as that may be).

If you look at the development and production times for modern combat aircraft, such as the F-22 (conceived in the 1980s, prototype flyoff in 1992, first sort of production model plane in 1998, and squadron service in 2006ish); you’ll see that they take a very long time.

Long enough indeed that an engineer can literally spend his entire career working on a single aircraft; which can have deleterious effects on morale if that program is cancelled; such as the LHX/Comanche program for the U.S. Army.

“Gee son, this is a photo of the helicopter I worked on.”

“What’s that son? No, it never entered service, they cancelled the program.”

There are other effects from the long stretched out procurement process of today, with only one major combat aircraft program every fifteen or twenty years nowadays (first the F-22, then the F-35).

It used to be in the good old days of aerospace (1940-1970), that there was a new requirement issued almost every year (or other year) for a new aircraft program, and many of these requirements actually made it to the point where serious design work began.

I’ve personally read and studied many of the proposals from the George Spangenberger files at Archives II. George S was a key player in the Navy’s Aircraft development desk for a long period of time covering from the late 1940s to apparently the late 1960s; and as such, there is a lot of unseen information on the various proposals which were put forth by different aircraft manufacturers for each requirement.

Usually, what happened was that the Navy issued an Type Specification (OS), and the manufacturers would then submit proposals for that Type Spec. In the case of the F8U Crusader competition, which was OS-130, Chance Vought, Douglas, Grumman, Lockheed, McDonnell, North American, Northrop, and Temco all submitted serious design proposals.

Each proposal was very detailed; with a large amount of paperwork detailing just about every specific thing you could think of, from structural calculations, aerodynamic calculations, and blueprints showing the proposed internal arrangement of the proposal aircraft.

Even if that company’s proposal was not picked; the engineers for that company gained valuable design experience in detail design, which is very demanding on the engineers.

Preliminary design, of which the best examples of can be found from various startup companies, think-tanks, and student design competitions — are much less demanding. They are basically rough aerodynamic calculations from computerized wind tunnel programs, plus some guesstimates regarding the structural fraction that the plane will have, and components that are scaled off existing components.

In many cases, components are basically blank spaces — e.g. the radar for the University of AWESOME Lightweight Fighter will have a 30 inch diameter dish, weigh 200 kilograms, and have an internal volume of 1m2. There’s no consideration of how the radar will be cooled; how it will be powered, etc.

Because aircraft competitions as mentioned earlier, come only every other decade, and now that the aerospace field has been shrunk to basically three firms (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman); it’s now become much harder for engineers to gain ‘hands on’ experience in losing design proposals than it was in past decades.

This may be the part that the “black” world at Groom Lake plays in today’s Aerospace world.

They provide actual hands-on experience (using off the shelf parts) for engineers to learn the little tricks and crafts of their trade on projects that actually do fly; and keeping them in the “black” world provides two major benefits:

1.) It keeps development costs low, via everything being done off the board out of the ‘black’ world’s slush fund – and prevents congressional interference, such as some Senator asking “Why are we spending $50 million to develop a plane that doesn’t even have a modern radar on it?”

2.) It helps induct engineers into the ‘black world’ and lets the powers that be see who can handle the secrecy of the black world, and who cannot. For example, a background check only tells you if the guy doesn’t have any major pre-existing conditions that might be used for blackmail, isn’t an agent for another government; they don’t tell you about a man’s propensity to talk to his family or neighbors about what he’s working on.

So starting them off on a relatively unimportant project is a good idea, rather than starting them out on the B-3.

EDIT: Changed wording regarding speculative/preliminary design on input from E. Tylczak; an actual rokkit scientist.
EDIT: Typo of Aurora fixed.

Though I’m done with the navy, I was pleased to see that my old ship is on it’s way to Haiti. This puts me in mind of the Asian Tsunami relief and the time we spent off the coast of Sumatra. I expect the BKH will be spending a lot of time helping with air traffic control, plane guard, sea base security, etc. The disaster offers a tiny bit of silver lining: It happened right as the QDR is expected to come out, and all the naval activity going on may make it harder for the government to justify further draw-down of the fleet numbers.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh is showing what a good example of a rightwing fool is. Mind you, you can be leftwing and a fool, but Rush is a standard template for the Right. Rush Limbaugh says that the current administration’s response to Haiti is for the scoring of PR points off the poor third worlders. No comparison was given to previous humanitarian efforts by Republicans like Bush(who by the way is unconditionally supporting of the Haitian relief effort) who presumably helped out with natural disasters purely out of the goodness of their heart. But let’s say, for the moment, that both Obama and Bush send American servicemen and money to these disaster-riddled areas solely for political gain…

…so what? Then it becomes a situation where politics work for moral good anyway. Application of soft power is a good way to show off the non-shooty aspects of the US Military, and it marginalizes USA-haters who screech about our nefarious intentions and Marvel team Up with the Jews(tm). It’s also relatively cheap as well, much cheaper than, say, invading a major middle eastern country and staying there for several years. And unlike invading Iraq, you would be hard pressed to find anyone disapproving of humanitarian missions on the world stage.

Looks like the “Beast of Kandahar”, a fuzzy-image drone that has been spotted flying out of Afghanistan for the two years or so, does in fact exist. The photo out there with the best respolution makes it look like a flying wing…I can’t help but think of the old Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe game, which had a Gotha flying wing on it’s cover.

The reasons for operating a stealth UAV out of Afghanistan are obvious, it provides denialbility when we launch airstrikes into Pakistan or even Iran(aircraft like the Predator and Reaper being spottable by radar).

As always, xkcd doesn’t fail to disappoint.

In 1906 the sitting U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt, was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for successfully using the good offices of the President of the United States to mediate between Russia and Japan, bringing about the end to the Russo-Japanese War. The action gave both powers a chance to exit from a war that was growing too expensive and bloody for them. This gave an immediate reason with tangible results that allowed the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to present it. This is how one should present an allegedly apolitical award where an objective conclusion is arrived at.

Today the NPPC award President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. This was, to be frank, a completely moronic decision.

Some caveats: I voted for BHO, and barring some horrible incident happening between now and 2012, will likely vote for him again. In a lot of ways I’m conservative, but in more ways I am liberal. I think the shift of tone in his speechifying with our foreign partners is a good thing(compared to GWBs tone of talking down).

But. But. He absolutely should not have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He has done nothing in the past 9 months(of course he was nominated after being in office for 11 days) that puts him ahead of any dozen dissidents in third world oppressive locales, or even French President Sarkozy(who, if one believes, stopped Putin from rolling on to Tbilisi and “hanging Saakashvili by his balls”). Unless something spectacular and tangible happens, Obama should not get the Nobel Peace Prize while sitting in office. If at some point down the line, many years later, folks can look back and reach an objective conclusion that his foreign policy was on the whole furthering the interests of world peace…okay fine. After all, Jimmy Carter had to wait a few decades for his Peace Prize.

Oh wait, unlike this time around, when Carter was presented with the prize the committee specifically took swipes at GWB, thus watering it down to a circle-jerk.

I’m sure President Obama is pleased with receiving the award(who wouldn’t be?), but I bet it would have meant a lot to him if the Committee hadn’t already established a policy of “poking Republicans in the eye” as a main bullet point. In other words, him earning it on the basis of his accomplishments…not being “not-Bush.”

The next time you hear someone talk about deploying only “proven and reliable” missile defense systems; think about what I’m about to say for a moment.

The first SLBMs the U.S. Navy deployed – the Polaris A-1s; had less than 50% reliability. That meant out of 16 SLBMs on a SSBN, only eight (at best) would successfully launch and complete their missions. It took nearly two years before the next version of Polaris, the A-2 entered service, with a reliability of about 63-65%. Another two years passed before the next version, the A-3; arrived, with a reliability of about 79-82%.

Unfortunately, for this entire period; the W47 warhead was carried by the Polaris missile fleet; and this was a very troubled warhead. One specific model; the W47 Y2 Mod 2, which in 1965 made up 3/4ths of the W47 stockpile; had a dud rate of 75%! This meant that the overall W47 stockpile would only work 50% of the time (assuming that the earlier W47 Y1s which made up a quarter of the stockpile still worked).

To correct this problem, the AEC began to rebuild the whole stockpile of W47s (some 300 warheads), beginning in March 1965 to the W47 Y2 Mod 3 configuration. This fix was not achieved until late 1967.

To put things in context; from 1960 to 1967, the U.S. Navy deployed an unreliable weapons system on it’s SSBNs at great cost.

Either the missile wouldn’t work – or when it did, the warhead wouldn’t work.

Resources Consulted
From Polaris to Trident: The Development of US Fleet Ballistic Missile Technology by Graham Spinardi
U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History by Chuck Hansen

One of my favorite games of All Time™, “System Shock”; was released in 1994 by Origin, under the development of Looking Glass.

Even fifteen years later (my god has it been that long?); the game is still eminently playable (within either DOSBOX; or with a hacked executable that fans of the game have put together); and unlike most games even today; you got the feeling that Citadel Station actually existed; rather than being a random agglomeration of levels; because rather than using the same texture and level design ethic for the entire game (I’m looking at you Quake); each level had it’s own ethic.

For example, the engineering level, which contained the reactor had a very dark steam-punkish look to them.

The Research level was very brightly lit with a clean ethic:

While the executive deck was in a class of it’s own; bright metals and fancy wall coverings. Alas, I don’t have any more screenshots to show those levels.

While the story of the game was pretty good (Station AI goes rogue, and kills everyone, then tries to destroy Earth); there were a few plotholes in the presentation.

While on the reactor/engineering level, you find a fluff datacard that gives you the typical corporate publicity spiel about how great Citadel Station is. Among one of the datapoints is that Citadel has over two hundred armed security guards.

Which when you think about it is odd; you, a lone hacker without military or security training, manages to stop SHODAN’s plans when she’s at her most powerful, and when she controls the entire station with her Cyborg Death Squads™ roaming the halls. Meanwhile, those two hundred guards can’t stop her when she’s at her weakest.

The only way this can be rationalized away is that SHODAN got them all into one place with a fake announcement like:

“All security personnel must report to briefing room 21 for a security briefing at 1300 hours.”

And when they’re all there, waiting for the briefing; she could have vented the compartment to space, or used a modified security droid to massacre them all.

A later plothole, one that’s much harder to forgive; is the ultimate fate of the last surviving group of people on the Flight Deck of Citadel. When they contact you over e-mail, they’re fighting off a Cortex Reaver.

When you finally meet up with them, they’re all dead. Normally, this would not be a problem; but in the room you find them dead are several air shafts that a person could crawl through (this is how you gain access to the room); but the Cortex Reaver cannot follow (it’s too big).

Additionally, when you explore the room, you find behind a door a guy lying dead in a storage room holding a Mark 3 Assault Rifle, with several rounds in it; which can destroy a Cortex Reaver in a few shots; along with loads of Land Mines in the room.

While I do recognize the thematic links to traditional stories and RPGs; like finding the weapon that can kill the bad guy close by, if not on their corpse; such as silver bullets on the body of the werewolf hunter, the sword that can kill Grendel’s mother in her trash midden; etc. It’s annoying, after spending several hours playing the game to get to this point, and you’re hoping that by that point, you’ll finally link up with some survivors, instead of fighting off KillBots all by yourself, you get horribly disappointed.

ABM is not some new exotic technology. The very first ABM system was in fact invented in 1944, and came very close to being operationally tested against actual V-2s.

When the Germans began firing V-2s against England, the existing CHAIN HOME radar system actually could detect V-2s in the boost phase; and this gave the British about four minutes worth of warning. Planning for an “active” defense against the V-2 began immediately.

The first proposal was made on 24 August 1944 by AA Command. Basically, a 40 kilometer wide barrage of gunfire would be placed into the path of the approaching V-2 with 320,000 rounds of shells per V-2. About 2% were expected to be duds; meaning that about 90 tons of explosive would be falling back down from the barrage; compared to the one ton warhead of the V-2.

This scheme was of course not implemented.

By 19 December 1944; AA Command had refined their anti-V2 system quite a lot. The new plan consisted of two modified GL radars at Aldeburgh and Foreness facing each other to triangulate the location of the V-2 as it passed between them. This combined with the information from the CHAIN HOME radar system on the V-2’s launch point, allowed an accurate track to be constructed, enabling prediction of the future point of the V-2 at any time.

The track was then passed on to AA Command, and at a specified point in time, the AA guns were brought to bear at a fixed point in the air that the V-2 would have to pass through in order to strike it’s predicted point of impact. 150 rounds of ammunition would have been fired into a 1,000 meter square at 20,000 feet. Detailed calculations were made and concluded that the chances of a successful intercept were 1 in 50.

By late March 1945, a lot of advances had been made in predicting the V-2s trajectory via obtaining three accurate point fixes. The first point, the location of launch, was obtained by a modified US SCR-584 set in Holland. The last two were obtained through modified GL Mk II sets in Aldeburgh, Southwold and Walmer through cross referencing.

The entire Greater London area was then divided into a series of 2.5 km grid squares, and gun firing tables were pre-computed for each grid to destroy a V-2 inbound for that grid. It was estimated that 60 to 500 rounds of ammunition would have to be fired to destroy each V-2, depending on where the impact point was in relation to the various gun sites. Actual trials of the radar tracking system successfully predicted with 81% accuracy the impact point of the V-2s in the predicted grid square; or in adjacent grid squares.

In the end; before AA Command could get permission from the War Cabinet to try out the plan; Montgomery’s armies overran the areas of Holland where the V-2 attacks were being launched from.

References: The information for this blogpost was taken from a variety of sources, among them The Origins of SDI, 1944-1983.