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1st mission.. The Service
Split into two teams. One defending shrine, the other attacking it.
Offense, attack and take the shrine.
Mad scramble through trees. Fire exchanged between sides.
Contact called on enemy in window of house facing our line of advance.
Tried sneaking through trees, not much cover. Saw enemy movement but not in position to fire.
Tried to move up next to Pickers and took fire going down.
He tried to come pull me to safety and he took fire as well.
Ended up bleeding out in the weeds.
---------------------------------------- 2nd Mission... Lightning Strike
Coop mission
Went as medic for the Commanders group.
Getting organized at start was itself an adventure as it always has been anytime I have joined a Folks mission.
Follow that by trying to get the convoy lined up and ready to leave our forward location prior to heading to the AO.
Like real combat it would seem this requires large amounts of patience which are of course followed by moments of madness and mayhem.
Engaged by IFV that came up behind us.
Had to bandage Croissants, Aquarius and Wolfenswan along with myself.
We lost audiox.
After healing, we moved up to join Alpha at Point Juno
we then moved up to the town.
we dismounted and shortly thereafter the CO took fire and went down.
Wolfenswan moved into a garage/carpark, and took fire.
I moved up and healed him.
I followed Wolfenswan forward up near enemy armor location.
Friendlies were engaging enemy near the armor.
I lobbed two grenades over the armor and after the 2nd grenade, I took fire that killed me.
Third Mission... Surfin
Medic again, this time alongside Audiox who is CO.
Commanders medic again
after disembarking helo on approach, detached to go provide medical support/assistance to Alpha
CO moved up and I bandaged him near some ruined houses
Alpha took heavy shelling near the ruins, and after some moments, moved over to join Bravo in the rocks.
A lot of bandaging, I took shots and was bandaged by Gemoxy, then he and I traded healing a bit.
Lots of fire coming from our left.
I moved to a ruined house to our left and engaged the enemy, bandaging myself any number of times
I moved to circle around the house and engaged a distant rifleman near a ruined armored vehicle, and in the trading of shots, got killed.
I did not stick around for the next mission, instead calling it an evening at that point.
First of all, I want to thank my FTL's and TH pilots for the stellar job they did.
So, the plan was to split up and recon the 3 roads that were possible escape routes for the enemy VIP. Once we surveyed the roads, it seemed like the red truck, (in which the VIP was supposed to be in), was still at the FIA compound. I ordered the fireteams to set up ambushing positions just outside the compound and to wait for the possible VIP to come out.
But.... nobody was coming out, so we had to go in. A fierce firefight was taking place between Alpha elements and the FIA, in the meantime Bravo 1 was making it's way towards the compound from the flank, to help out with the fighting. Once the town was declared safe-ish (there were some sporadic contacts around). I thought that the VIP must have gone with one of the convoys then. We had the position of a static convoy, so that was our next target. Alpha 1 landed first and they were immediately in contact again. Alpha 2 and Bravo 1 landed a bit further, following a quite spectacular crash by Sparks . Soon, we liked up with A1 and started to clear out the enemy resistance, where the convoy stopped.
After we cleared that out, the mission was called and we started extracting. While we were doing that ''Mission Failed'' popped up, but I heard that we actually killed the VIP at the start, sooo.... I'll call it as a Major Victory.
''I am not going against tanks'' - Tryteyker, MAT gunner.
''Downboated so much, it's an u-boat now.'' - Boberro.
''Sorry, I meant hon hon hon baguette baguette Eiffel Tower'' - Mabbott
We think you killed him... we never did find the body
Also, damn that .50 cal shot that hit me in the head and plunged my bird right out of the sky. First one to die in two missions this evening. I've got the pro strats
Well, next time take a CO slot
Stay behind the action, survive, and claim all the glory
Last edited by Kefirz on Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
''I am not going against tanks'' - Tryteyker, MAT gunner.
''Downboated so much, it's an u-boat now.'' - Boberro.
''Sorry, I meant hon hon hon baguette baguette Eiffel Tower'' - Mabbott
As long as you deny your involvement until the session is over and then say that it was you...
''I am not going against tanks'' - Tryteyker, MAT gunner.
''Downboated so much, it's an u-boat now.'' - Boberro.
''Sorry, I meant hon hon hon baguette baguette Eiffel Tower'' - Mabbott
Toddler did not permit the workshop before the session But I did manage to get there in time for the first mission, and got some nice footage, so that was fun...
The Service
The plan was simple - Alpha runs up the west side of the AO, engages OPFOR from the hills and distracts them, while Bravo sneaks right up the east side of the AO and shoots a distracted OPFOR in the back of the head. I approve of such plans. Not so much the simplicity bit as the bit where we shoot OPFOR in the back. Far safer than trying to shoot them in the front, those lads have guns...
Sadly, somewhere between "sneaks right up the east side" and "shoots a distracted OPFOR", the plan met reality at a ridgeline. Half the squad was shooting over it and I was lobbing grenades over it, then an OPFOR lobbed one back at me and I got the best timed grenade warning in a while. As I lay there bleeding out, my squadmates tried to nick all my stuff to heal me with it, but SWS wouldn't let them revive me for some reason (not to mention that field medic'ing at 3 frames per second is a difficult task, it's like surgery by powerpoint), so my FTL told me "sorry, you're dead" and then ran off without administering a coup de grace. Which is why I was still alive admiring the scenery when the mission ended a few minutes later. Oh well, we won
Lightning Strike
This one was funny, and fun, in about equal measure. I got squadded with Eagle_eye, who wrote the mission, as the RAT. Unfortunately, this turned out to mean I was also the driver. You might remember from the Karts incident that me and driving in Arma is a bad mix. It probably doesn't help to have a low framerate and no picture-in-picture...
BTW, I was a bit confused by the briefing for this eagle_eye - for some reason I thought we were ambushing a motorised patrol, instead of being in a motorised patrol striking a tank depot. Might just have been me though.
Anyway, after a bit of comic relief getting out of the compound (I told you me driving was a bad idea) and a surprise run-in with an Ifrit that saw me dismount and get disabled by shrubbery, not to mention accidentally calling in a church tower as an approaching vehicle (and you wonder why I want to upgrade my rig...), we hit contact at a checkpoint. We dismounted, killed the vehicle, moved up to the checkpoint and as we were standing about chatting, someone noticed two enemy soldiers in the lookout tower six feet away from us and lit them up with machinegun fire. A tactical change of shorts later, the checkpoint was clear and we got back into our hunter, only to immediately hear a call about armour to our rear and we bailed out and went looking for it. I found it using my face. The others stole my stuff and killed the tank and went on to a cinematic and fun-filled firefight of a mission, with an infantry team destroying the world's toughest AA vehicle using four rockets and a satchel charge; three spectacular helicopter crashes in quick succession from both the attack helicopter and our last-gasp hail-mary extraction; and lots of cheating bleeping-bleeper AI hopping in tanks. The cheating sods. But we won anyway, so yay!
Eagle_eye, can RAT get body armour next time?
Like, say, six feet of reinforced concrete?
Surfin
The briefing said rag-tag forces with stolen SMGs. Well, that should be easy enough. And another simple plan here - Bravo establishes a base of fire and with that done, Alpha does a bounding assault and we go from there. What could go wrong?
Initial contact went perfectly. For OPFOR. We crested the hill into sight of where Bravo were to establish their base of fire, to find it was already quite well established by OPFOR and they didn't want to move. We opened fire, OPFOR opened fire, we got hit, I ran away, they shot me in the back. Harumph. Medic got me up and moving again, I ran ten feet, heard contact from the east, went prone by concealment and was promptly shot up. Harumph. I pulled back, taped my spleen back together, then moved up with my squad and we started firing on the OPFOR at Bravo's desired destination again.
Comrades, can I take a moment here for a small rant? My moment of hate, if you will?
You see this thing?
This thing is useless. This green ACO sight is a pain. IT. IS. NOT. FUN. You can't range with it, you can't adjust it for range, you can't even tell where the PoI will be with it because you tell me what part of that chevron-and-dot is the aiming point? My brain can't figure it out and I've been shooting for twenty-odd years now. The red ACO sight is marginally better with that circle-and-dot reticle, I can at least figure out what part of that is the aimpoint, but you still can't range with it or set its range. And in the real world, you're not meant to - those kind of sights are designed for shooting at targets under 100m away, but in Arma, for those, who uses sights? We just fire with the crosshairs.
So normally, I pull them off and throw them out the window of the helicopter on the way into the AO. The problem is, only thing worse than those ACO green sights are the Mk20's iron sights, which eat half the screen and don't let you see what you're aiming at properly, you'd have to set your sight's range to more than the range to target and hold the post of the sights below the target, the way you do with olympic pistol shooting.
So please, please, pretty please, Comrade Mission Designer can we get the Mk18 holosight instead of the ACO as a normal thing? At least in missions where we're using the Mk20 instead of the TRG?
Ahem. Anyways. That's my moment of hate over. (And audiox is feeling a bit relieved now I bet )
On with the mission and after we hosed down OPFOR at that hilltop for a few minutes, my fireteam bounded forward to a small cluster of buildings we were tasked with holding. We cleared those and held them for a few minutes, during which time I was getting worried that we were fairly tightly bunched up and the briefing had said that OPFOR might have stolen mortars. So I kicked out to the edge of the compound to spread out the fireteam by four or five metres at least, and then shortly after Ninja_demon twerked at me, I heard incoming mortar fire and ran for cover. After the mortars hit elsewhere, I went to leave my cover, but a friendly was shooting at OPFOR past the door I needed to get through, and while I was switching to direct channel to ask him to hold fire, audiox accidentally mortared me in the face. And a few others. The price of command being that "I not G" at a squad level is far more hilarious on youtube
There were a few awesome moments from then on, and we did the clustering thing a lot, several people got mortared into impromptu trenches by OPFOR, and last man standing was AJAX who bravely charged the enemy only to be wounded and then executed with enormous overkill in a stone-cold war crime on camera by OPFOR that looked like the final scenes from scarface
Little Birdies
I got to fly again! I love this game
The idea here is a coop version of The Rundown, and it had a bug or two but wasn't half bad. I was seriously confused for about half the mission though, in that I thought ASL (kefirz) was riding in another helo because the nametag over his head when he got into my helo read Pickers. It wasn't until just after I'd dropped off Bravo at their ambush point and saw Pickers saluting from outside the helo (very classy dude ) while kefirz was still in the copilot's seat that I caught up with that point. The "oh **** that's the boss" moment is remarkably well modelled in Arma...
The initial idea was to mount up and fly to designated forward points, then scout for the convoy with the red car. I flew over a convoy almost immediately, but no red car. TH2 likewise. TH1 found them and command designated ambush points for the convoy. We dropped off our troops - one of mine getting overeager and jumping just as I did a last minute airtaxi forward to avoid landing on a fence that popped into my render distance waaaay too late - Comrades, you really need to wait till the pilot calls it before assuming we're landed.
We then took off again and orbited, scouting for the convoy. TH1 found it again... and they shot him in the face with a 50 cal. It's hard to autorotate with most of your childhood memories splattered on the inside of the cockpit, so we lost TH1. But the convoys didn't seem to be moving, so command ordered the troops in to assault the compound (so far, this seemed fine - this was listed in the briefing as a possible scenario). Alpha started calling out heavy resistance over the radio and Bravo was moving up to support. Around this point, command had the idea to have me land, him get on the bench and turn us into a very impromptu gunship.
The MH9 is not well suited to this task
One near-friendly fire incident with a grenade launcher later, the compound was secured, but no officer had been found, so we landed to pick up the troops and ferry them to the next convoy to search that. The landing was fine (what, that football field over there? How about dead center of it? Where's the smug grin emoticon?) but just as Alpha and Bravo were about to board, we came under fire from one AI with more valour than discretion. After everyone had emptied a magazine into him, pilot included, we got back on board our now beat-up MH9 and booked it for the new LZ.
Unfortunately the new LZ was right next to active AI (this one's all my bad, pilot's supposed to tell command they're crazy if they order that and I missed it because I wasn't sure of the convoy's exact location), and after some blind paniced flailing at the controls like a psychologically disturbed sealion high on crystal meth tactical evasion maneuvers and damn well making the same mistake a second time and a second rejected LZ, we managed to land (Kefirz, I am choosing to pretend I didn't hear you suggest autohover you absolute philistine) and - and this is important - all my troops safely disembarked from the helo. Safe delivery. Remember that.
Then I flipped the helicopter and exploded.
I have no idea exactly how it happened, it was as if I'd dug the skid into the dirt on liftoff, but I had lifted the same way four times in that mission by that point. Oh well. At least it was cinematic and entertaining. I'm hoping someone recorded it for posterity
There were one or two more funny moments in the assault on the convoy (we are so lucky vanilla Arma doesn't have backblast) and then someone called the mission as won. I'll take that as a victory
Infection
This went all a bit pear-shaped, with people spawning under buildings and so forth, and then just before the zombie moans started, the server crashed, which ended the evening's fun. Oh well. Saved me screaming like a little girl over teamspeak again I suppose.
All told, it was a fun evening. Would do again, mainly for the flying. The AI bugs were a bit irksome, but not sufficiently to be annoying - the worst was the mild confusion it caused in Little Birdies when it transpired there was no officer, or he'd died at spawn, and that wasn't that bad, I was having too much fun pootling about the place in an MH9 to notice much.
Lessons learned - don't bunch up, mortars are dangerous, grenades are dangerous, my spectator script is utterly hosed, always know where the boss is, always know where the enemy are, and don't let someone tie your MH9 skid to a nearby tree before you take off.
Highlights reel:
guns.ie ● stochasticgeometry.ie ● weak.ie
Don't tell mom I'm a pilot, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse
. Soon, we liked up with A1 and started to clear out the enemy resistance, where the convoy stopped. 
But I did manage to get there in time for the first mission, and got some nice footage, so that was fun...
