tofudog

Hello again,
 
in the days since my last post I had a few additional ideas I would like to share.
On the logistics side I found it hard to organize airborne retrieval of the PK if you do not expect to hold the field after the battle - which would be the standard situation in hit-and-run raids. So even if you chuted the Mech in, you would have to get it out on the ground, or you would destroy it to enable a stealthy getaway by your troops.
 
On the scenario side - how about this:
 
Mission: Saving Private Panzerklein.
An airborne PK operation has gone horribly wrong and now a crucial piece of machinery is in enemy hands. Our heroes are called upon to make things right - which means to recover the disassembled PK from bandit (or whoever) hands before they figure out how to actually make use of the machine.
This might be the introduction to the world of PKs for our heroes, who would not know such a thing existed.
The usual reason would be: You are in the area and we have to act faster than we can bring in regular commandoes, so in spite of your non-existant security clearance, we are sending you.

Hi Blunter,
 
long night, quick answer.
 
The security system itself might yield some explosives (if that is what they used), but apart from that, there is nothing I can think of.
Depending on what else you had in mind, the oscilloscope might be in the house. For models I would not mind if you re-used existing boxes and labeled them "Crate with whatever in it"
 
The Palmach (or whoever) - as I said "use or ignore as you see fit", but thanks for asking anyway. My personal view coincides nicely with yours, so paint them as black as you please. Nobody ever said that in undercover work potential allies had to be nice guys.
 
The medical things... Yes I was reacting to "Procuring Opium", but I also thought of using the hospital as another source of side-missions. Making it kind of a favor-for-a-favor economy in the line of "You are good at killing people and getting stuff, we are good at fixing people up, so lets trade healing a lungshot for getting truckload of anesthetics."
 
The ongoing PK-debate... YEEEESSSSS, TANKS!!!! Tankety tank tank tank! Now that would be the ultimate infantryman´s challenge.
As it stands now, I cant see the tactical niche a PK would occupy. It is slow, loud, deaf and blind, vulnerable to small arms fire and it does not really pack any more firepower than a well equipped grenadier. On top of that one of them is probably expensive enough to train and equip a whole platoon of PK-hunting infantry.
If they were the walking tanks S2 originally said them to be, they would be of interest to the military - but then I would lobby for the revised perk trees of "Hammer and Sickle" and assume that you need so much specialised training that our heroes just cannot pilot them.
 
 
That is it for now.

Welcome aboard Okami ,
when I read that you were dedicated enough to spend an hour on these 5 lines I decided to try to welcome you in russian,
so here goes:
 
жела́нный о́коло себе́, жела́ю хоро́шего дня.
 
Hats off to you, mate, this is not easy. Not easy at all.
 
I wholeheartedly agree with your wishes - particularly the shotgun, as in the postwar setting of this mod a hunting shotgun would be an easy choice for someone looking for some firepower at close range. Those would then likely be sawn-off doublebarrels for one-punch housecleaning.
The others, well except for the silenced Tokarev I would file them under eye-candy.
But as I am not one of the artists and programmers here, I am happy with whatever I get.

So, lets try for a short post this time .
 
Will you tell us, when you start auditing for voice-actors?
 
About the ammo...
Have you considered subsonic ammo? Something that does a lot less damage, but is necessary to make the silencers work.
It would also soften the report of base guns.
On rifles you have about 1/3 muzzle velocity, which transfers to about 1/10 impact with the same bullet weight, not to mention a lot less range. You don´t have to be that accurate, as the damage model of the game is softened already - the numbers are just there because I love them.
 
And... have you considered hot-loaded ammo?
Something with a little extra kick, that makes your weapon require more maintenance and maybe is a little less accurate.
 
@Seefeld.
 
I would put it as "Stationsvorsteherin" - the "in" suffix denotes the female form. Also in german nouns are always capitalized - so you would write Frau, not frau.
 
Fritz is such a charmer .
 
I won´t say nothing more, this looks absoulutely fantastic.
 
On a side note I seem to have installed the wrong SQL. Would somebody be so kind as to tell me which one I need?

A happy new year everybody,
 
I take full blame for not reading the whole thread before commenting on balance .
And as far as I understand warfare the deadliness of real life guns has lead to the tactical implication that he who hits first will live, while the other one will not.
No matter if the caliber was a lowly .303 or a mighty 7.62x54R (did anybody else notice how it is russian guns that hit the hardest in this game?).
Though I share in the sentiment, that it makes for a more exciting game if you have to hit the other guy A LOT until he quits and you can progress through stages that make it increasingly easy to do so.
Maybe a layout of that progression and the place of everything within it might help clear things up.
 
A small update or several:
 
1) A few months ago a helpful zombie has uploaded the editor to this forum. I am installing sql on my main machine as I type this. Finally I can put my big foot where it belongs: In my big mouth .
Truth be told: I would have believed you if you told me LUA was a malayan fish-dish 5 days ago.
 
2) Disclaimer: This shall in no way be construed as implying that Blunter and the crew of this mod are anything but completely awesome in what they are doing here. This is just an attempt to share my experience using the fruit of their labors.
 
I was curious about my feeling, so I reran castle Linden, doing nothing. I just sat my group in the living room, and guess what happened: The Dust group (aka gun turrets)did take care of everything. I only had to intervene twice, when some bad guys were camping in blind spots.
Case 1: There is a kink in the palisade on the west side, just before the stairs up to bruiser´s post. That position is blind to all of the gun turrets. And this is where one zombie parked, holding up the whole goddamn war.
Case 2: The southeastern corner has a comfortable place for three bandits to take cover, which is what they did, only moving to their shallow graves when I submachinegunned them.
 
Also: this very piece of wall has room for 1 figure to be on it, which is bad for the zombies, as they cannot get up, but they still try to, comfortably being mowed down by whoever is slinging his gun up there (Dani with her bigass Sauer comes to mind IF somebody tosses her spare ammo).
 
Apart from that I did NOTHING, through the whole siege. The PK never even got into Bruiser´s arc of fire. Dust took him alone.
Even the Tesla team (who have relatively human stats right now) were relatively unscathed in the end.
 
3) If I am boring you with tech, please don´t read the following paragraph.
 
I still think that a cable is way too mundane for Compton´s needs. If you really want to transfer a shitload of current from a to b, you can just steal a piece of railtrack and weld it in place - its sliceplane is large enough that the inferior conductivity of iron vs copper (1:6, meaning copper is 6 times better or iron has to be 6 times bigger to be as good) does not matter.
If you are a snob about conductivity you would use a silver cable anyway (~5% gain on copper).
 
However, there are other devices that I would think of.
If I was the mechanic in charge of setting up a device to produce powerful electric pulses the result would be something like this:
 
A mobile generator or three (what is available? How much power do you want? Chaining is always an option), because it does not interfere with regular operations.
Your typical mobile generator is powered by a truck-engine and it delivers AC-power. The engine of an M3 halftrack would by my best estimate throw ~70 kw in generator mode.
A capacitor (or a bank of capacitors, if you cannot find a single one to suit your needs) is dependent on DC-power for its operation, so you would first need a transformer to give your power the desired Voltage, then a rectifier to convert it, then the capacitor bank and finally a bigass contactor to release the pulse.
 
The transformer would need to be custom built, as it needs a specific relation of threads on the input and output sides.
If you have a machine shop (the armory of a special forces base would be sufficient) you can do this yourself.
For raw materials you would need one or more kilometers of basic cable and a solid iron core.
A low power (everything is relative) rectifier is used for consumable electrode arc-welding, so you could cannibalize a number of welders (using portable machines about 20 would be sufficient) and set them up in parallel. Or you could find yourself 4 titanic diodes and voila - instant rectifier.
 
The last piece is the contactor, which can not be synchronized from smaller pieces and thus must be a single device.
 
From that grocery list I think the piece most likely to be troublesome to find would be the contactor.
Diodes would be nice, as a bank of ~20 small rectifiers (IF the power from a single truck is enough) is a bit cumbersome.
 
Assuming you could not find a contactor on the open market, you would have to take one from a power station (don´t be shy, take the main circuit breaker from the installation - in itself only barely portable, I would guess, but as our heroes are capable of lugging around a solothurn AT-weapon this should be no trouble).
If you would also want to hide what you have taken you would also have to blow up the whole installation and either fake an accident or plant evidence to blame a convenient scapegoat.
As a side-effect you might have to have your conscience overlook what effect that loss of power has on the civilian populace of the area.
 
Sketch of the mission:
Steal the main switch, plant evidence blaming Die Wölfe (anything to diminish popular support for their cause is good). Blow it up. Thank the Heavens it was just a coal powered installation and not a nuclear one.
What did we learn today, Children? asks He-Man Adam. Yes, correct. Only those who get blamed in the end are terrorists, the others are just unsung heroes, doing what is necessary for the greater good.
 
 
Now for the oscillograph. Oscilloscopes were introduced in the thirties, but the familiar device with vertical and horizontal calibration was introduced commercially in 1946, if wiki does not fail me.
Their use is in visually showing waveforms (rhythms) of fluctuating energy. Like the reflections of a radar wave. I understand how Compton would want such a device to study how the sphere reacted to different patterns of stimulation.
The obvious path to get one would be anywhere a radar is.
That should yield a long list of targets, almost all of them military in nature. But what if a clandestine group used a radar base, say for timing smuggling flights to avoid air-patrols?
Smugglers would object to handing over their precious technology, if the heroes are lucky, gunslingingly so. But they would not go running to the authorities if their objections were overruled - which is what makes them a target. And if you can confiscate some pirated copies of Windows 48 while you are at it, so much the better.
 
 
If you are bored by tech, you can switch back on HERE.
 
4) The installation has finished, now I have to figure out how to make the MSSQLSERVER service available to the editor.
Life never gets boring.
 
This has - once again - gotten longer than intended. Now I just hope that some of it has been useful to somebody and take my leave.
 
Bye.