Bullethead

Unless Skyrim is a total disaster rushed out the door 1/2 finished, it's unavoidably going to set the new standard for FRPGs. After all, SOMETHING has to be the standard by which all other FRPGs are judged. Oblivion has had that honor for the last few years but it's obviously dated now so the industry needs a new standard. There are other quite excellent new FRPGs out there now, but none of them will sell anywhere near as many copies. Because Skyrim will sell so many copies, nearly every potential customer of FRPGs will have seen it, so it's the logical choice to compare other games to. Thus, game companies for the next few years will copy Skyrim's good points and try to improve on its bad points, and you'll see comparisons in reviews like "It's like Skyrim only without X but with Y in addition." But this really doesn't matter because Bethesda games with their open worlds are apples and oranges to almost all other RPGs. Of the "5 reasons Skyrim will change gaming", 3 of them have been standard Bethesda RPG features since forever and in all that time, hardly anybody else has followed suit. The only ones that spring to mind are the "X" series of space games (a new one of which is due out soon) and, to a lesser extent because there's no magic, the "Mount and Blade" series, both indies that have devoted, but relatively small, followings. For the most part, everybody else has kept on doing more or less script-driven RPGs. This hasn't stopped these others from being successul in their own right, either. For instance, I love "The Witcher" games, but in them you have no major choices--you're stuck playing this 1 specific guy who has to follow some specific main quests. So you can only compare them to Skyrim in terms of graphics and interface because they're trying to do completely different things.

I've identified a few more things... The 2 accomodation hulks tied to the jetty are the sloop Cormorant and the corvette Rapid. Both were composite-hulled ships, meaning they had iron keel and frames but wood planking. Long before this pic was taken, they'd been gutted, roofed, and turned into floating barracks. Cormorant was launched in 1877, hulked in 1889, renamed Rooke in 1946, and not disposed of until 1949. Rapid launched in 1883, hulked in 1906, and remained at Gib until 1948. Also, there are some important buildings ashore. To the left is The Convent, home of the governor, although the building dates to the 1531 and was originally a Franciscan covent. More in the middle is The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the Anglican main church in the outpost, built 1825-1832. The fortificiations along the waterfront are Brit-built from the 1770s, just in time for the Great Seige. I suppose the visible bastions all have names, as was traditional back then, but I haven't yet found a reference for that.

Thanks, but it's wireless, which doesn't work for me. Also, I think this model has been discontinued.

Yup, Bethesda rocks. I have every reason to expect that Skyrim will be at least as good as Oblivion and Fallout, and probably better in a number of ways. However, I also expect that, as usual with such large and complex games, it will require a fairly hefty patch about 1 month in to fix a few broken quests, clipping issues, etc. I just ordered my new P4-ready desktop yesterday. I won't have it until a few days after Skyrim ships. But I do plan on having the game sitting here waiting on it .

Lots of people make trackballs, but today they've all got the ball mounted in the center, even Logitech's. Or at least it was so 2 months ago when I went shopping for one . Yup. As I understand things, in Skyrim the left mouse button works the left hand, the right button the right hand. You can carry weapons in both, spells in both, 1 of each, or shield and weapon. I suppose if you use a 2-handed weapon, only 1 button works. This is a big change from previous games in the series. In those, you had to have a weapon, it was always in the right hand, and you used the mouse to swing your sword (or maybe I'm confusing that with Mount and Blade--it's been a while since I played Oblivion). My main question about this new system is whether there are any built-in limits that force your character to be left- or right-handed. By that I mean, do you have to put your shield or dagger in the left hand and your main weapon in the right, or does the game not care? I ask because of ergonomics--the index finger is the fastest, the middle finger is the strongest. This is why in pretty much every game, you use your weapon with the index finger on the left button. If the game doesn't limit what the character's left hand can do, then all my characters will be left-handed swordsmen, which would be useful in several tactical ways. But if it does care, hopefully the game allows remapping the mouse buttons. That's cool . I had no idea any place in the story was real. I live about 5 miles from The Myrtles plantation, which over the last few years has become famous as a haunted house. It's been on TV lately a few times with "Ghosthunters" and "Is It Real?", and naturally right now it's doing booming business as Halloween approaches. But it's not haunted at all. The stories were all made up by the current owners to increase business (and it worked). Even if the stories were true, though, all the supposed ghosts are relatives of mine so I doubt they'd bother me Anyway, back to Skyrim.... I'm fascinated by the new character stat system. It breaks with RPG tradition going all the way back to paper D&D. No more character attributes like strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc. Instead, just a bunch of skills and the 3 basic combat units of hit points, magic points, and stamina points. At first, I thought, WTF? But the more I think about it, the more brilliant it seems. If your character can cast some powerful spell, for example, then he must be pretty damn smart, so why bother tracking intelligence separately? So I'm thinking I'll like this new system and will hope to see it in all future games. Besides, the new system avoids one of the things that's been a bit weird for me even in fantasy settings. That is, having characters increase their bodily attributes during the game. Now sure, in real life, you can work out to build strength and stamina, but there's not a lot anybody can do to make themselves smarter or less clumsy. And even where real world stat increases are possible, there are still limits on them. And I've never bought the idea that your character was in some why special and different from the common herd, so could magically do this. Anyway, it seems to me that Skyrim assumes your body's got whatever it's got, but during the game you just get better at using it, as measured by increasing skills. So that's another attraction to me.

I'm afraid you've missed them. I don't consider today's idiotic, politically motivated center-ball models as proper trackballs. Fingers are for pushing buttons, thumbs are for moving the ball. Doing it the other way around violates all sorts of ergonomic principles, both in causing carpal tunnel and in decreasing the speed and precision of operation.

Why not use a trackball instead? They're designed to be used that way. Geez, trackballs and mice. A very long, sad story there..... Back in the early 1980s, IBM was preparing to introduce the first of the PC family as we know it today. There had been other "home computers" before but nothing so powerful. Anyway, the 1st PC was going to have a pointing device, something no "home computer" had yet had, and IBM was trying to decide which type to standardize on. Even in those ancient days, all the current types (mice, trackballs, touchscreens, light pens, etc.) had already been invented, and IBM was conducting an exhaustive competitive trial to see which one was best. And in thos days, IBM so dominated the computer industry that (almost) everybody else was waiting to follow Big Blue's lead. This study was completed and unequivocably showed that trackballs were far and away the best type of pointing device in every category. They were the most ergonomic, required the least desk space, were capable of doing the most things, and were the most reliable. So IBM was in the process of signing contracts to ship the 1st generation of PCs with trackballs. And by all rights, that should have happened, and so today we'd all be using them and most folks would never have heard of mice. But in defiance of the will of the gods, those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned bastards (whom we declare excommunicate and anathema ) at Apple beat IBM to the pumch by a couple months with their 1st generation Macintosh, which used the much-inferior mouse. This scuppered the pointing device situation for everybody right down to the present day. But at least Steve Jobs has recently gone to the special place in Hell reserved for him due to this great sin. See, back then, only geeks knew about this competition and there were very, very few geeks. In fact, the biggest job in introducing the 1st PCs and Macs was convincing the average person he actually needed a computer in his house. Anyway, the stores soon filled with the ignorant masses who'd never heard of a pointing device, let alone that they came in many flavors. All they knew was that here was a shelf full of Macs with mice, which they could compare to one of the few demo prototypes of the PC, which as yet lacked any pointing device at all. Thus, the masses were misled into believing that mice were a good idea. But despite their technical ignorance, the masses of that time were at least smart enough to realize that the 1st Mac was a complete piece of crap. So, they decided to get a PC instead, but they bombarded IBM with requests to attach a mouse to the PC. And IBM, still reeling a bit from Apple having stolen some of their thunder, caved in. Rather than giving the masses the best product, they changed their plans and shipped all PCs with mice. This relegated the trackball to total obscurity for no less than 10 years. It wasn't until the 90s that a few brave aftermarket companies like Logitech tentatively put them on the market. But despite their total superiority to mice, by that time the mouse had become firmly entrenched in the public mind as an essential part of a computer, so trackballs were regarded as outre' and never had much market share. However, at least they were available to those who wanted them. But then, just in the last couple years, the trackball industry has been destroyed by the friggin' government. Unlike mice, trackballs have to be made either left- or right-handed. And all the lefties whined so much that trackballs were only right-handed that now all trackballs are made with the ball in the center. This design utterly destroys the utility of the device, making it actually inferior to mice. So now even I have to revert to the pathetic mouse, for which I shall take vengeance on God Himself . This, too, I blame on Apple. If that 1st damned Mac hadn't had a mouse, then store shelves would be full of both lefty and righty trackballs and all would be well in the universe.

Yup, those are the very things. And they have identical mounts on both sides of the plane, so the observers apparently could swap sides with them as needed. Thus, I think they were some tool of the observers and probably had something to do with observation. They look an awful lot like compasses with sights on them, such as mounted on the bridges of ships. With such devices, there's a mirror under the sight that shows the slice of the compass dial along the line of the sight. Thus, you aim the sight at some distant object of interest then glance down at the mirror to read the bearing to the object. A naval aircraft would definitely have a use for such a thing when out scouting for the fleet. Knowing its own position, it could then report the position of enemy ships by bearing and estimated range from its oown position. But that's just my best guess. I don't know for sure.

Yea verily. I"m looking forward to trying the new combat system with both mouse buttons going. That sounds a lot more intuitive than the previous versions. I wonder if it pays to be a left-handed swordsman?

That would explain the presences of 3x Revenges. See, by that point in time, those ships weren't frontline units anymore, due to being too slow. That's why only a few of them were updated early on in the 1920s and none of them were rebuilt along the lines of the [i[QE[/i]s. They were still in service, however, because in those days surface commerce raiders were still a real threat and slow battleships as convoy escorts could stop any raider smaller than Bismarck, which hadn't yet been built. Thus, the Revenges were scattered about at strategic locations instead of operating as a battle squadron. This is a big reason why I was predisposed to think those distant BBs were QEs. Sometimes it's bad to know a lot about ships Well, maybe you can answer a question for me.... A friend of mine just built a very nice model of a Swordfish. It has a couple of big, black, knobby things mounted on 1 upper edge of the observer's cockpit, but there are mounts for them on both sides, so obviously they could be moved across the plane. In the kit, they just had part numbers and instructions to paint them black. Neither of us know what they were. My guess is they were compasses with sights for determining the bearing to some distant object or ship. They look rather like that. Do you know if that's what they were? Thanks.

Some of both. I make naval wargames for a living so am rather familiar with pretty much all major ships from about 1860-1945, plus I have a huge referrence library. But the Brits made essentially 3 main types of cruisers (plus the easily recognizable Didos). First they made a bunch of big, high-sided, things with 3 skinny funnels. Then they made several batches of much smaller ones with 2 widely spaced, thick funnels (or sometimes 1 fat funnel). Finaly, they made a zillion large, 2-funneled cruisers with a huge, blocky bridge. You have some of each family here. So the 1st trick is to separate them into their families, then go through and try to identify specific classes within those famnilies based on the minor detail differences between them. The ones with 3 skinny funnels are "Counties" because all of them were named after counties. They were 13 of these divided into 3 classes. The 1st and 3rd were practically identical except for the position of the cranes while the 2nd had a taller bridge structure. The small ones were the Leanders, Apollos/Perths, and Arethusas. The former had 1 fat funnel while the other 2 classes were practically identical in outline except the 2nd had 2 turrets aft and the 3rd was slightly shorter and only had 1. The big, blocky ones were in 5 classes, which varied mostly in some having vertical and some raked funnels, although the Edinburghs were bigger, had funnels further aft, and their aft turrets higher. They're rather hard to tell apart in a photo like this but, this being 1938, not many had yet been built. I hadn't noticed you'd already spotted Malaya behind Warspite. My bad. So, with Queen Elizabeth herself and Valiant both in dockyard hands, only 1 of the BBs in the anchorage can be a QE. If she is, then she'd have to be Barham. But they both look the same so are of the same class. That means they have to be Revenges. Strange. I usually don't make such an error. I can only offer excessive booze as an excuse. But on closer examination, it's clear. The funnel's too close to the bridge and they're too short in the quarterdeck to be QEs. What was I thinking?

I stay away from tomato juice due to my acid reflux. However, I do make a drink called "Napalm", where you mix vodka, Karo syrup, and habanero juice. It sticks to the roof of your mouth and burns :). But in that game, that's supposed to be blood. I imaged the #1 prop of the B26 clipped the top of my head :).

Thanks for the word. I've been scanning the obits for folks getting buried alive while fixing plumbing

This plane is definitely deserving of a place in the Museum of Diseased Imaginings. And even saying this, it appears much easier to land this tub than a Roland

No, I was wrong yet again, because I bet you missed But that's OK, I've run into buffs, too: But at least I landed it

I've attached my identifications of the ships you hadn't labeled. Starting at the top of the pecking order, the 2 unnamed BBs are definitely Queen Elizabeth class, veterants of Jutland. There were 5 of them. You've already correctly spotted Warspie and in 1938, both Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were undergoing reconstruction. Thus, the other 2 must be Barham (flagship of Evan-Thomas at Jutland, sunk by a U-boat in 1941, the explosive video of which we've all no doubt seen) and Malaya. It's impossible to tell which is which. Battlecruisers: The "Hood-like" thing is definitely Repulse. She retained her tripods to the end and besides, Renown was undergoing reconstruction in 1938. In WW1, these ships were known as "Refit" and "Repair" due to their weak structure for their size. It's an open question as to which nickname went with which ship. Until all the WW1 vets died off, they argued this a lot. Repluse was sunk in 1941. Heavy Cruisers: There are 5 "County-class" "treaty cruisers" present, which I've labeled A-E. To my eye, those not occluded by other ships are all 4 of the London-class, all of which survived the war. London was seriously reconstructed but that didn't start until the very end of 1938, so I figure this pic was taken just before she paid off. "County E" could be either a Kent or a Norfolk, my money being on the latter. If so, she'd be Norfolk herself or Dorsetshire. I believe her paintjob is more in keeping with the former. Big Light Cruisers: These 4 are either Southamptons or Gloucesters, all very new ships. So new, in fact, that it's doubtful any of them were Gloucesters. So, odds are, you're seeing 4 out of 5 of the Southamptons, probably all of them but Birmingham, which was probably still working up after commissioning in November 1937. Of these 4, Southampton was sunk in 1941. Small Light Cruisers: Here you have 2 members of the Arethusa-class. They're not Perths because their mainmasts are shorter than their foremasts, even though their stern awnings prevent counting 1 or 2 turrets aft. If I had to guess, I'd say they were the 2 older siblings, Arethusa and Galatea, both names famous from WW1. Of these, the latter was also sunk in 1941. So, out of 16 more ships tentatively identified, probably 4 were sunk, all in 1941. If I had the proper motivation, I could probably ID the hospital ship, but that would take a lot more beer than I've already consumed this evening .

You need to come down here on the bayou. That sort of thing goes on every Saturday night at the regularly scheduled voodoo orgy :).

This looks like the easiest miss so far, but I've always been wrong so far.... Looks to me like you're all set to fly safely under the lead bomber and the 2nd is far enough away that you've got plenty of room to dodge it, too. Barring you having a total brainfart, like forgetting the 1st bomber is right above you when you pull up to dodge the 2nd, there's no real chance of collision here unless some catastrophic damage from gunfire in either direction radically changes the geometry. Or maybe they drop their bombs on you, which seems even less likely. So I'll stick with a miss, and if it's a hit, I'll drink to your bad luck

Bite me

This shows the futility of censorship, especially in the Information Age. Originally, "vanilla" Oblivion was going to be rated M, so had nudity, gore, all that. But at the last minute, some suit decided they'd sell more copies if they had it rated T, so the turned off the gore and made new textures with permanent skivvies hiding all the naughty bits. However, all the original content was still there, accessible via simple cheat codes. The ESRB Ghouls only saw the non-cheat version so gave Oblivion a T, but within about 1 week after release decided that because everybody knew the cheat, it should be rated M. In order to save the T rating, Bethesda promptly came out with a patch that deleted all the naughty content completely, even via cheat codes, at which point you had to install a mod to get it back. So this this time around, Bethesda is cutting the crap. M from the start. Censorship was silly in Medieval times and it's silly now, due to everybody's intimate familiarity with the naughty side of life from day 1: