Bullethead

I wasn't gone, I was just passed out drunk in the corner of the mess :).

Ah, now I'm happy. I was thinking P4 was mostly a graphics overhaul and a few new planes. I'm overjoyed that it's got major rework of the campaign and AI. Not that P3's versions are bad--far from it--but improvements to these areas would be more meaningful to me than any number of new planes. So yes, get the gameplay improvments down, then release periodic batches of new planes. Bravo

I'm a good bit Borderer myself and I don't have a problem with it. It's something of a distinction to say that my ancestors were responsible for the introducting the word "blackmail" into the language. Also, Borderers (at least those who lived mostly on the north side) were literally "not worth the rope to hang" due to the traditional parsimony of Scotland. So when the King of Scotland would periodically send punitive expeditions to the Borders, they just drowned everbody they caught in the nearest creek But I'm also descended from the some of the more infamous Highland clans, red-handed Vikings, savage Picts, and wild Indians. I've also got a streak of evil Norman. I somehow got my Y chromosome from a Sarmatian (I suppose in the Roman garrison of Hadrian's Wall) and several of my more recent ancestors were pirates. You have to be proud of your forefathers--that's required by man law--and if all you've got are bloody murderers, well, you have to be proud of them. I firmly believe that I'm only alive today because of the toughness bred into me over thousands of years by this motley crew of ancestors. But OTOH, I think they also gave me a personality to get into situations where I needed those genes to survive Interestingly, there's a whole bunch of Border surnames in my neighborhood: Turnbull, Graham, Kerr, Scott, Armstrong, Elliot, Johnson, Nixon, Percy, to name a few (and a lot of Highland names, too). They mostly came over when this part of Lousy Anna was still Spanish. The Spanish wanted them as settlers as a defense against English encroachment. Thus, in a lot of ways, the Anglo-Scottish disputes crossed the ocean and are responsible for much of US history. As George MacDonald Fraser said in The Steel Bonnets, "Hadrian built the Wall." Before then, it was all Brittania from Land's End to John O' Groats. Different tribes, some language differences, but pretty much the same general culture. But after the wall, there was a huge difference: Roman civilization on 1 side, barbarism on the other, and it stayed that way for several centuries. That was long enough to set what would become England and Scotland on their separate paths. You reall should read that book if you're a Borderer. Fraser wrote the "Flashman" series, but he was a damn good historian. Hehehe, you've got some deep roots! Stone houses go WAY WAY back in Scotland, at least to the Neolithic. For instance, in Orkney there's the whole stone village of Skara Brae (3200-2500 BC), not to mention many single houses scattered about. Given that the huge number of megalithic monuments date the to same general time, the ancient Scots were pretty good at piling up rocks. But they probably didn't have much choice. Without a lot forest and stone axes sucking for chopping down anything big enough to make a lot of boards from, stone was their best option for a permanent, reasonably warm structure.

We have this thing called rednecks, most of whom are of Celtic origin, and that includes the cops. Besides, our government is infamous for its corruption. Thus, feuds are still fairly common here. Even deuling. As opposed to say 100 years ago, we don't have nearly as many killings, but we have a lot of very serious brawls and the odd arson. This culture of bloody revenge is the main reason why Southerners are noted for the politeness. Nobody wants to start a feud by accident

Believe me, I'll take whatever you throw out :). And I wouldn't be averse to buying period plane packs :). Oh well, maybe you can sneak a bottle of booze into some cubby hole instead :). Let's see..... According to the joined date beside my avatar, I've been begging for the FE2d for 2.5 years now on this forum alone. Plus a month or 2 on the forum that must not be named, so I'm coming up on 3 years now :).

And they're not where you live? Strange, almost unique :). Feuds are still the main thing in most parts of the world and of course in any urban area where there's more than 1 gang.

Howdy All- I recently came across the attached candid pic of WIDOWMAKER as he actually appears in life. This brought to my rum-soaked attention that I haven't been in this forum in several months. EEK!! How did that happen? (looks at pile of empty bottles--OH, that's how). Anyway, I've missed you all and OFF, too, and hope to be catching up on things soon. Hope all is well with you all.

I dunno. Back in the day, there was 2-4 guys at the point of attack on the end of a hose. These days it's the same. The main differences are: 1. That handful of guys doesn't require several dozen guys outside working the pump and passing buckets of water. 2. That handful of guys inside can get into more trouble than before, due to being dressed to withstand worse conditions, modern fires being hotter, and modern buildings falling down faster than older ones. That latter point is currently a hot topic of professional debate. Because modern buildings burn hotter and faster, and fall down sooner, the time for doing aggressive interior operations for both rescue and extinguishment is considerably lower now than it was even a couple decades ago. The odds of victim survival in fire areas is also correspondingly lower. Thus, the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) has recently published a set of "Rules of Engagement" that strike many as a betrayal of our main jobs of saving life and property. These rules center around making a call as to when viable victims are no longer possible and then going to pretty much extrior operations. Only interior operations have much chance of saving the building, so (while this is an over-generalization) these RoEs are perceived by many as "if there's nobody alive in there, screw it." A lot of firemen have a big problem with this. Most times, there's nobody to rescue because everybody got out under their own power, so it's mostly about saving buildings and their contents. Plus, they knew the job was dangerous when they took it, groove on adrenaline, etc. If they don't almost get killed, they consider it a waste of time. Personally, while I'm as much an adrenaline junky as the next fireman, I have no problems with these RoEs because I don't want to get killed over an empty building. You need something way more glorious to get into Valhalla :). So these RoEs have had no effect on how I determine the extent of intgerior ops. We go into vacant buildings if it appears we can do some good without it falling on us, and we get out of occupied buildings if they look about to fall on us.

I've whined long and loud for more 2-seaters. There are a huge number desperately needed. I'm glad to see the Aviatik and Rumpler, but the French don't have a single 2-seater to call their own (license-built Strutters, while common in the AM, don't really count when you consider ARs, Caudrons, Farmans, Breguets, etc.) and the Brits could use a few more.

The new Fee looks good, but I'm really going to miss the Mata Hari pin-up and the sliding pack of cigarettes it seems :(. Any chance of getting an FE2d version? Bigger engine, no nosewheel, fixed gun for the pilot?

I thought Gibson did quite well in Hamlet. In fact, I liked that whole movie. It was the actual play, dialogue and all, but set in and around a real castle instead of on a deliberately theatrical-looking stage as in the Olivier classic. That and the more-or-less contemporary Henry V were both IMHO outstanding film adaptations of the Shakespeare originals. Both the English and the Scots were headhunting savages for thousands of years down to very recent times (say only 4 or 5 generations ago). The main difference between them was that in Scotland, it was mostly an individual thing, something you'd do to your archenemy or a member of a clan you were at feud with. In England, it was mostly a function of the crown. Thus, an Englishman would be repulsed by some private Scottish citizen making a drinking cup from the skull of his neighbor, but had no problem at all with the King hanging various body parts all over London like the chief of a cannibal tribe.

Is that for if a UFO crashes? :). Since that pic was taken, firemen haven't changed that much. That shows all the modern trends already in place: machinery doing all the work and the troops getting fat as a result. Go back to the mid-1800s and before, though, and firemen were real men. They pulled their own vehicles (horses being for girly-men), worked their pumps by hand (as on contemporary ships), and supplied their pumps via bucket brigades from wells and fountains instead of supply hoses from hydrants. http://www.currierandives.com/galfire.htm Nowadays, we ride in airconditioned comfort, have 400hp diesels turning our pumps, have 2000gpm hydrants ever 300 feet or so (at least in urban areas), ladders that raise themselves hydraulically, etc. We've gotten soft :).

We don't have any ourselves. We're just a fire department with no police powers. In Lousy Anna, the fire-related police powers are vested in the fire marshalls, who are an arm of the Lousy Anna State Police. They have dogs, the crime lab to test samples, can arrest people, and handle the criminal prosecutions for arsons. They also have to be notified if there are victims hurt or killed and for several specific types of fires even if nobody gets hurt. So the way it works for my department, we do the initial investigation during and immediately after the fire to determine origin and cause. If we suspect arson, or if it falls into one of their other categories, we call the fire marshalls in, keeping the scene secure until they get there. They'll bring their dog if they think it's needed, which is established during our phone call with them. Dogs are only really needed when 1) you have reason to suspect arson and 2) the scene is so trashed that you can't see evidence for arson with your own eyes. In my pics above, there was no need of a dog because we could easily see the pour pattern (plus smell the left-over diesel, plus feel the stickiness of the sofa cushion foam which was on its way to becoming napalm from contact with the diesel, and smell that, too). But that fire only burned for about 2.5 minutes before being CAREFULLY extinguished. In the real world, especially where I live, scenes are SELDOM that well-preserved. In my bailiwick, fires usually get to burn much longer (and they grow exponentially) due to the travel time to reach them. This means that even if we save part of the building (which doesn't always happen), the part where the fire started (which has burned the longest) is totally destroyed. I'm talking a heap of roof material (melted shingles or sheets of metal) on top of rafter remnants on top of joist remnants on top of ceiling remnants on top of wall remnants on top of contents remnants, all of which have been thoroughly blasted by fire hoses and scrambled by firemen digging into the debris to get at smoldering hotspots buried deep within the pile. Firemen don't want to have to return for a flare-up later so tend towards overkill during extinguishment :). Dogs are quite useful in such situations if there's reason to suspect arson.

LOL Ohlam, similar things have happened to me :)

Ah, some of my favorite stuff. I like to make jambalaya with andouille, too :) It's a Ferrara, the factory being only about 70 miles away. As such, we prefer to do business with them because support is within easy driving distance. Ferrara's becoming big business, though, with customers nation-wide and globally, too. They're currently in the middle of buiding a batch of 50 aerial trucks for FDNY. My particular truck is their MVP body on the "Ember" chassis. Ferrara subcontracts the Ember out to HME ("Home-made Engines") so all that happened locally was building the body and putting it on the chassis. It's a rescue-pumper with a 2000gpm pump, 1000gal water tank, and enough storage space for all the required equipment for pumper, service, and all types of technical rescue. So it's got our Jaws of LIfe, plus stuff for rope, confined space, swiftwater, and some hazmat on it. It's interesting how we got this thing. We had a new pumper in the budget to replace one that's old enough to buy beer, but that was supposed to happen later in the year. This truck would have been a commercial-based truck pretty much identical to 2 ordered last year and got this spring, and rather cheaper than an MVP goes for. However, a month or 2 ago, our main rescue truck died unexpectedly and replacing it wasn't in the budget. What to do? As it happened, Ferrara had just made this MVP as a private venture to advertise the type at Fire-Rescue International. Because it wasn't made to a specific customer's specs, it was on sale down in our price range, so while it was a bit more expensive than the pumper we were going to get, it was cheaper than getting both a pumper and a rescue truck separately. PLus having a 2-in-1 truck reduces our overhead in this day of budget cuts. So it was a good deal for us.

Well, the part about "after you've eliminated the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbably, must be the truth", is definitely part of the job. And besides, fire leave pretty recognizable tracks. The whole thing boils down to following the tracks back to where the fire started, determining what fuels were available there, and then figuring out what provided the spark that set it off. Sometimes it's pretty easy, as in the pics attached below. This was an investigator school burn especially set up for us to look at. Normally in such a fire, the roof has fallen in so you have to dig down through it, layer by layer, to get to what you see here. And even then, the firemen who put the fire out are more interested in saving any victims and making absolutely sure the fire is out (so they don't have to come back later) than preserving origin and cause evidence, so things are hardly ever this neat in real life. Anyway, Demo 01 shows a distinct "pour pattern", where an arsonist poured a flammable liquid (diesel in this case) on the floor from the door to the sofa at the left end of the room. The area where the accelerant was is the best-preserved because the liquid, despite being fuel, abosrbed heat and thus protected the underlying floor/carpet. So, the liguid just stained this areas. Immediately outboard of the liquid, the carpet is severely burned due to lacking this coolant and being right next to the intense fire atop the puddle. Beyond that, the floor is less-damaged but obviously suffering from heat. Demo 02 is a general view of the area of origin. You can tell the fire started and was most intense at this end of the room due to the shadowing of the the burn patterns on the walls caused by the furniture, and the V patterns on both the back wall and in the sofa itself point to where the fire started at the bottom of the Vs. So this all points to the fire starting on the sofa, despite the pour pattern in from the door (which normally would be used as a "fuse" lit at the door to burn in towards something futher in). Demo 03 shows the actual point of origin, the hole all the way through the sofa cushion, which correspondes to the apex of the V patterns on the wall and in the back of the sofa. On the floor below the hole, and in surrounding areas, are some distinct areas of white ash that don't match the remains of the rest of the sofa and surrounding area. So, we took samples of the floor in the pour pattern, the sofa upholstery, and the suspicious white ash. The floor and cushion came back positive for diesel and the ash as residue from a road flare. In fact, we found the butt end of the cardboard flare tube in the ash pile under the hole in the sofa, and you can see it between the red and green arrows in the Demo 03 pic. Bottom line: The perp poured diesel on the sofa and from there along the floor back to the door, then tossed a road flare onto the sofa. And in fact these conclusions were confirmed by the video taken when this fire was set, so my team of would-be investigators got a perfect grade on this test. However, this was a very easy scenario.

Oh pshaw! It's just 1 itty bitty satelite. Nothing weighing more than 300 pounds is expected to reach the surface and only about 26 pieces in total. Whoop-dee-doo :). Anybody old enough to remember THIS?

I'm glad you all haven't forgotten me I looked at the P4 shots before posting here--otherwise I'd have posted up a day or 2 sooner . I'm liking the Fee's new look and my 1st project when P4 ocmes out is to redo my clapped-out Fee skin for the new model ;). This summer has been a blur: long stints of hard work divided occasionally by binges. All my jobs got busy at the same time. I haven't even had time to read much, let alone play games. OTOH, there have been a number of interesting things happening to keep me busy. The most recent interesting things are that we got a new firetruck and I just today completed a school on fire investigation. Fire investigation is about figuring out the origin and cause of the fire (and sometimes who the arsonist was). It's a cross between archaeology and CSI. So don't go lighting fires in my jurisdiction because I WILL figure it out . The new firetruck is our first "real" firetruck, as in a total custom thing built from the ground up specifically to be a firetruck. All our other trucks are barstardized things built on commercial truck chassis normally used for delivery and garbage trucks, etc. I got to drive this thing home from the factory. Topic save: Due to the epochal nature of this new truck, there was a large crowd gathered at the station waiting on me, complete with media. So when I pulled up, I felt like Lucky Lindy landing. The truck hadn't even stopped rolling before the crowd swarmed it :)

In my part of the world, the Great Mississippi River Flood of 2011 isn't any big deal as regards the water itself because my area is far above it. HOWEVER, for this reason, local real estate is highly desirable by the residents of our few low-lying areas (aka swamps), and most of those residents are undesireable wildlife. Among the least desireable of these swamp-dwellers is the gnat Simulium meridionale, AKA the "buffalo gnat", which normally lives fairly close to the River's edge. Thus, as the River has come up, so has the gnat, so that even my place 200 feet above the current waterline is overrun with them. I've never seen them this bad in all my life, even at other times of high water. In the mornings, you can see them swarming in their millions over the pastures. They form amorphous, translucent, tan-colored clouds, despite their main body color being black. I suppose the color is from their wings, which catch the most light. Just to walk outside during the day requires most folks wearing safety glasses, a bandana over the nose and mouth, and even earplugs, because the damned gnats bum-rush every hole in your head. And of course they also bite which is painful to most folks. For some reason they don't bite me, but I've been getting many in my eyes and ears so have had to wear the safety glasses myself. It's been just plain miserable to go outside lately. Hounddogs won't come out from under the house until it's dark. Plus, everybody's chickens are dead. The infernal gnats suffocate them by crawling up their nostrils by the thousand. I'm talking a plague of Biblical proportions here. Anybody ever hear Captain Beefheart's "Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on my Knee" ? That explains current conditions here better than I can. BUT, thank the Dark Gods, solace has come. It turns out the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned bufflalo gnats hate the smell of vanilla. It doesn't even have to be real--imitation works just fine. So, if you ever have a gnat problem, get yourself a bottle of imitation vanilla extract. Then rub a tiny amount all over your head. You can either pour about 1/2 a cap's worth on a palm, rub your hands together, and then rub your head, or you can pour the extract into a spray bottle and give your head a squirt on each side. This is MUCH cheaper and MUCH safer than chemical repellants, plus smells way better.

What I meant was, between 1800 and 1914, Spain had gone from being a Great Power (it had been the Great Power a couple centuries before 1800) to not even being even a regional power (due to the loss of all its major imperial possessions and its nearly perpetual civil wars at home). From the POV of the 1914 Great Powers, Spain didn't really exist. It was off in a corner of the Continent and no longer owned anything on an invasion route between the contemporary Great Powers. Also, its own real estate wasn't particularly desireable to its neighbors, so they didn't carve it up like they did Africa, China, etc. Spain suffered this fate primarily due to the European wars involving Napolean, and this was well-known to those in power at the time. This has mostly been forgotten precisely BECAUSE Spain dropped out of European power politics after Napolean. West of the Urals, historical awareness of the post-Napoleanic period is dominated by WW1 and WW2, in which Spain played very minor roles. Spain's main press from this period is the civil war of the 1930s, which outside Spain is called "The Spanish Civil War", as if it was the only one ever, instead being merely the most recent of a long series dating back to immediate post-Napoleanic times. Anyway, I'm thinking the fate of the Spanish Empire would have gnawed at British and French leaders before and during WW1 just as Poland's ghost no doubt haunted the nightmares of Russian, German, and Austrian leaders. Belgium, like post-PLC Poland, had the misfortune of being a small state trapped between competing Great Powers. IOW, a place where its bigger neighbors met to fight. Belgium also had same ill-starred birth as post-WW1 Poland in being created more or less artificially by a remapping of its part of the Continent after a war between Great Powers, done in the interests of the Great Powers. In Belgium's case, it was a compromise that none of its parent Great Powers was particularly happy with, but it was better than the alternatives. With Spanish and Austrian claims to the area removed as a result of the war, the Great Powers were left with the question of what to do what the area. As the closest non-French part of the Continent to the UK, the UK could not tolerate Belgium being owned by a rival Great Power. But because Belgium is a strategic area between France and Germany, neither of them could tolerate the other or the UK owning that area, either. Thus, they agreed to create an independent, neutral Belgium as a barrier on the invasion routes between the 3 of them. No wonder, then, that the UK entered WW1 when the Germans attacked France via Belgium. Well, that's a complex question. For most of recorded history, those provinces had been known as Elsass and Lothringen. IOW, they had a much longer history of being German than being French, so the Germans of 1870 considered them as having been "heisted" by the French not long before and were just trying to get them back. Of course, from the French POV, owning Elsass/Alsace and Lothringen/Lorraine resulted in a much better "natural" (as in defensible) frontier than not. But OTOH, as the Prussians / newly Imperial Germany pointed out, the French had for the last few centuries continually invaded Germany, and had in fact been the aggressor in the 1870-1871 war, so the new Reich needed a buffer zone between its "natural" fronteir and such a predatory neighbor. Of course, Great Powers never heed the opinions of the natives of the provinces in question. As I understand things, these areas would prefer to be independent rather than part oif either France or Germany. As with Belgium and Poland, they're tired of being somebody else's battlefield. Well, for all of WW1, Germany owned all but a corner of Belgium and they made extensive use of Belgian ports for U-boats, to the great discomfort of the Entente. But there was never any question of basing the High Seas Fleet there. Zeebrugge and Oostende weren't big enough for ships larger than light cruisers. Antwerp was, but it couldn't be used by men-o-war without violating Dutch neutrality downstream. Removing this obstacle would have required the Germans to invade and occupy all of The Netherlands, which it really didn't have troops to do, especially because the Brits would then have been able to invade The Netherlands themselves and thus turn the flank of the Western Front. Besides, whle The Netherlands were neutral, they could trade with the world and the Germans could trade with the Dutch overland, thus circumventing (to some extent) the British blockade. Thus, it was definitely not in Germany's interests to invade The Netherlands, the result being that Antwerp could only built U-boats and torpedoboats for use (via canals) from the smaller Belgian ports. Now, if the 1914 German rush had netted them some ports in France, things would have been different. Maybe. The Germans would still have had to get ships to Cherbourg or Brest, for instance, either through the Channel or north-about, with the RN knowing (thanks to Room 40) that they were coming, and positioned to stop them either way. Plus, Kaiser Bill was quite averse to risking his beautiful ships.

Well, Poland lasted rather longer than the 16th Century. It was (as the main player in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) at the height of its power in the mid-17th Century. It strechted from the Baltic to the Black Sea. At that time, there wasn't a Germany. There was the Holy Roman Empire to the west, and there wasn't yet a Russia to the east, only Muscovy. IOW, the PLC was the main power in Eastern Europe. Its troubles didn't really begin until after the 30 Years War was over, and its final disappearance didn't happen until well after that. So when somebody way up-thread said no European nation had been snuffed out since before the 30 Years War, I was offering Poland as a counterexample. There's also Spain to consider. The sun never set on that empire long before Queen Victoria came along, and but for some adverse winds in 1588 she never would have been born. Even by 1800, Spain still owned much of South America, almost all of Central America, and even what is now the southern edge of the US from Florida to California, not to mention a number of important Pacific islands, although most of its extraterritorial European possessions had been lost in the 1700s. So still a mighty empire. Then came Napolean's occupation of Spain itself. This led directly to most Central and South American territories winning independence, and the North American territories either revolting or being taken or purchased by the US from either Spain or its successor states. So after Napolean, there was pretty much only Spain itself left. However, Spain wasn't really a single country because it was nearly constantly in a state of civil war between secessionist territories like Catalonia and the Basque provinces, plus multiple competing royalist factions, republicans, anarchists, socialists, communists, and military dictators. This strife continued until very recent times and in some ways still smolders even today. So for all intents and purposes, Spain ceased to exist no later than 1808, at least by the standards of 1914 European politics. Yup. I enjoy this sort of discussion very much.

On top of that, they've got nerve poison in their bite. Not surprising, being as they're close kin of spiders. For some reason, they don't use their poison all the time, and not everything or everybody is affected by it. However, for them that are vulnerable, it's highly debilitating. Our last dog had it bad. Just 1 tick on her and she couldn't stand up, let alone walk. She'd just lie there twitching like she had Parkinson's. But get rid of the tick and she'd be running around just fine within the hour. Around here, after a few years, pastures tend to get overrun with bitterweed. Cows will eat it only if there's nothing else and it makes their milk bitter, so if there IS anything else, the bitterweed proliferates, so eventually you have to disc up the whole pasture to get rid of it. But this weed has 1 redeeming feature--ticks hate it. So, if you have the misfortune to get covered with "seed ticks" (that is, you brush against a bush where a bunch of tick eggs of just hatched, so you're covered in nearly microscopic baby ticks), you can brush them right off with a stem of bitterweed. 2/3 of all living species are parasites. And some parasites exercise a type of mind control over their intermediate hosts, so they're more likely to get eaten by their final hosts. Pretty creepy. I recommend the book Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer (http://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-New-Epilogue-Dangerous/dp/074320011X) if you really want to get creeped out.

OK, forget the Aztecs. And I don't want to get into the argument that the pre-1865 US was more like the EU than the USSR, so we'll ignore the perfectly legitmate (by the standards of its time) CSA. Besides, neither was European. HOWEVER, Poland was European, and in fairly recent European history (as seen from WW1's timeframe) had gone from being a mighty empire to not existing at all. There were still Poles but they all lived neighboring parts of other mighty empires, which between them had divided and absorded what had been Poland not so long before. Poland has been resurrected 3 times since then: after WW1 (for a couple decades), after WW2 (in theory only), and after the break-up of the USSR (as we find it today). Seems a good example to me. There are also, of course, the many minor but independent German states, which had existed for centuries, that disappeared as a result of the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars (in which some WW1 senior officers had served in their youths). The same thing happened in the several Wars of Italian Unification in the mid-1800s which, when combined with the Austro-Prussian War, also split what had once been the monolithic Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy. The Baltic States came and went at various times, too. And the Holy Roman Empire had lasted, at least in name, up until Napolean abolished it less than a century before WW1. Anyway, the extinction of nations was not an alien concept in European warfare prior to WW1. It had happened before many times, sometimes within living memory at that time, and even to states on the winning side, as in the unification of Germany. Which is all I was trying to say. OK, forget the Aztecs. And I don't want to get into the argument that the pre-1865 US was more like the EU than the USSR, so we'll ignore the perfectly legitmate (by the standards of its time) CSA. Besides, neither was European. HOWEVER, Poland was European, and in fairly recent European history (as seen from WW1's timeframe) had gone from being a mighty empire to not existing at all. There were still Poles but they all lived neighboring parts of other mighty empires, which between them had divided and absorded what had been Poland not so long before. Poland has been resurrected 3 times since then: after WW1 (for a couple decades), after WW2 (in theory only), and after the break-up of the USSR (as we find it today). Seems a good example to me. There are also, of course, the many minor but independent German states, which had existed for centuries, that disappeared as a result of the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars (in which some WW1 senior officers had served in their youths). The same thing happened in the several Wars of Italian Unification in the mid-1800s which, when combined with the Austro-Prussian War, also split what had once been the monolithic Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy. The Baltic States came and went at various times, too. And the Holy Roman Empire had lasted, at least in name, up until Napolean abolished it less than a century before WW1. Anyway, the extinction of nations was not an alien concept in European warfare prior to WW1. It had happened before many times, sometimes within living memory at that time, and even to states on the winning side, as in the unification of Germany. Which is all I was trying to say.

The failure of communications I was talking about was between the offensive army HQ and its forward ground units and their supporting arms. During an advance, the distance between them necessarily increased and the rapidity and reliability of communications between them necessarily decreased. In the absence of radio (there were no voice radios at all back then, and no man-portable Morse radios that could be set up and used in the front-line trenches), HQ could only communicate with the units at the point of attack via telephone, carrier pidgeon, and runner. The pidgeon was 1-way only, from front to rear, usually wasn't timely, and often didn't get through at all. The runner was 2-way but took way longer than a pidgeon, although tended to get through more often. The telephone was real-time AND direct voice communications, but depended on guys lugging heavy spools of wire through enemy fire across the muddy moonscape of the Western Front battlefield. That was hard enough and often failed at that point. If the wire actually made it to the forward units, however, it was almost always soon cut by the barrage the enemy always put down behind attacking forces to delay or prevent the attackers reinforcing their successes. So, offensive HQs could plan an attack but it was like a PBEM game to them, all moves committed to paper and no way to change them until the next turn. Knowing this, H!Qs would send out orders for several likely scenarios of partial success, but nothing ever worked out that way. Thus, some units would achieve unexpected success but weren't told how to exploit it themselves and HQ couldn't exploit it because it didn't know about it. Or units would be told to get to Point A, wait for the adjacent unit get pull up alongside, then advance to Point B. Because the adjacent unit never got there, the 1st unit just sat, and HQ didn't know or, if it knew, couldn't get the word through fast enough to push on before the window of opportunity closed. Things were quite different on the defensive. Defending HQs almost always had at least something in reserve at a fairly close distance to HQ. Often telephone lines were in place and safely buried so would often survive the enemy bombardment of rear areas, and if they didn't, it wasn't a hard trip for a runner. Hell, the runner could often go by motorcycle without having to dodge anything but the odd arty salvo. Thus, committing reserves to shore up defenses or plug holes was always much faster and reliable than committing reserves to exploit successes. And knowing where to send them was easier as well, because telephone communications with the defending front lines were also often well-buried, and runners from there requesting help didn't have to cross No-Man's-Land. Notice I haven't mentioned airplanes at all yet. But getting around to them now, you have the same bias in favor of the defense. The airplanes couldn't do real-time communications with the ground troops at the point of attack so whatever they saw had to go back to the rear HQ. After that, to get to the forward units, it had to go through the same system as other ground communications. What solved this problem was voice radio that could be taken along by the spearhead ground units, and set up and used at cannon's mouth. But that wasn't an option in WW1. I have to disagree with this because there are many examples to the contrary. Start with the dawn of recorded history and you find city states being utterly destroyed, then mighty empires falling in the Bronze Age. Things continued in this vein throughout the Iron Age, the Classical Period, the Middle Ages, and the Rennaissance. It just wasn't as frequent as before, but it still happened. Troy, Jericho, Babylon, the Minoans, the Hittites, Carthage, both the Western and eventually the Eastern Roman Empires, post-Roman Brittain, the kingdoms of the Huns, Vandals and various types of Goths, the Sarmatians, the Tartars, the Aztecs, both Kingdoms of Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and eventually Poland itself, the Papal States, the Confederacy, and countless others, all before 1914.

ALL skins ultimately derive from OBD work, even total repaints, because OBD arranged the various parts of the plane out on the skin graphic and we follow their lead there. Thus, EVERY skin you upload has to say "based on the original skin by OBD", and if you know which OBD guy made the skin you worked from, you have to say "based on the original OBD skin by XXXX:". If you modify a 3rd party skin, you have to say "based on XXXX's skin, which derives from OBD's skin by YYYY". NOTE: OBD has given us more or less free rein to make skins, but 3rd party skinners usually haven't. So if you want to upload a modification of a 3rd party's skin, you should probably ask that person if it's OK.