Monday, April 5, 2010

Nos' Vault 1 Remodel, V1, Released

That's right, Kiddies. It's done.

At least, V1 is.

I'm sure I'll go on a decorating kick again in the future, but for now... if I never have to script another fucking light switch, it'll be too soon.

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8457

You'll also notice I renamed the file entry. Nostalgic as it may be, I could not in good conscience leave it named Bedroom Redecorated. We've gone way past the bedroom, let me tell you...

I also want to say that converting that many screenshots from bmp to jpg one at a time was an amazing pain in my ass.

Here's hoping I didn't screw something up, and forget to add a file into the archive. I think I got everything, but to be honest I've been working on this off and on so long that I can't for the life of me remember what all custom resources I used...

Oh, well, I'm sure I'll find out.

42 comments:

  1. Looks good, though losing the Training Room means that an idea I had for a quest mod goes down the tubes.

    I had a glitch that put Sally from Mothership Zeta in the training room - and I had never met her till then. I thought that she was a bit like 'Betty' in Tranquility Lane. I found out later who she was, and where she was supposed to be, but the idea of a corrupted Holo Deck was left stuck in my head.

    Oh well, the place looks much more comfortable, and I can always go back to the older version of the remodeling if I really want to do the mod.

    Good work as always.

    The Auld Grump

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  2. I never used the training room, myself, and it was a pretty decent drain on performance, so I figure hacksaw the whole mess off and dump it, you know?

    If I want to snag some quick XP there are any number of places near Springvale with respawning enemies, and at least I get to loot them.

    That aside, I'm glad to hear you like the new look.

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  3. I use the training room for a bit of chaotic fun, now and again. Not for XP, but just sneaking through the 'Urban' terrain, hunting down whatever the Crazy setting felt like giving me.

    Not being able to loot means not having to run around grabbing stuff afterward, I felt that it was a decent balance. (I don't picture them as real creatures, which is why I tend to think of the training room as the Holo Deck. :P )

    Rinse and repeat, until the stress goes away. It can be downright cathartic. :P (As witnessed by the fact that I will do it the first thing after work.... Then I will scoot over to the Mini Hideout mod, near Springvale, and soak in the Jacuzzi. If there was anything that I wish I could import into your Vault it is that Jacuzzi.)

    The Protectrons... I don't think I ever activated them except for the first time I used the Vault, can't say as I will miss 'em. Protectrons are pretty darned useless any way you look at them.

    I am getting annoyed with FOOK. FOOK is a great mod, but I have no desire for the hardwired Phalanx, dammit! I much prefer your NPCs. (Did I mention that I really hate the damned dog they stick in Vault 101? Well I do, I really, really do.)

    The Auld Grump

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  4. Preachin' to the choir about that dog.

    Last year... I'd guess it to be somewhere around July, I tried Phalanx again. This was before I was officially part of the RR thing. The companion system was having tons of trouble, and efforts to fix it were not going well.

    I hated that dog. Came to find me out of nowhere, and was so buggy that it would NOT go away. Set to essential so that I couldn't kill it, wouldn't go back to 101 to wait for me.

    Lasted less than ten minutes before I started trying to kill it.

    If I was a Fallout 2 aficionado like Tarrant, I might have had some pointless emotional attachment to the mutt, and been willing to cut some slack.

    Alas, I think Fallout 2 was crap. But I've always hated turn-based RPG, so y'know...

    Replied to your comment about FOOK on the nexus; did you ever find out what was causing the conflict? If you can point me in the right direction, there's a decent chance I may be able to create some sort of work-around patch for FOOK users.

    Sadly, the jacuzzi probably won't happen. I'm going to take a look at it in minihideout now just 'cause you've got me curious, but I try to avoid blatant copying from other mods.

    However, I will say that you're not totally out of luck. With the star-dome working, I've turned the NosCo engineering division towards figuring out how to strip out that useless eyesore of a jail and replace it with a hot spring.

    Why? Because I watch ENTIRELY too much anime, and every good harem anime needs a hot spring episode.

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  5. Little followup:

    While testing v5.6, I switched on the minihideout and had a looky-see.

    I have to confess, I was expecting... bigger. When the author says mini, he ain't a'kiddin', apparently.

    Anyway, that jacuzzi is VERY similar an idea I had already had for the bathroom, save that mine included less statuary.

    Shouldn't be out of the question for the next version of the Remodel.

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  6. Heh - one of the perks of the Jacuzzi in the Hideout is that it lowers radiation. Which may seem silly, but in the fifties hot tubs (or saunas) and beer was the recommended treatment for radiation poisoning, trying to sweat or soak it out. (In the real world it worked about as well as you might expect, which is to say, not very well at all. But given the retro nature of Fallout....)

    The radioactive rain mod that I use makes being able to soak out the rads very tempting.... (Gods, I hate the radioactive rain! In a good way - it starts raining and I seek shelter someplace safe and dry, like a ghoul infested sewer.)

    But the idea of a Japanese style water garden sounds very nice. Fountains splashing over rocks, etc.. (As for the anime baths, a friend of mine once loaned me Plastic Little.... Holy gratuitous bathing scene Batman!)

    Having rocks to sit on rather than benches or chairs, and maybe some bath robes if there is a suitable clothing mod out there. A little spot of pseudo nature, to relieve the claustrophobic nature of Vault life. Add mist for a steamy soft focus look.

    In regards to the training room.... perhaps as a separate mod that adds a door to a new world space, rather than as an integral part of the Vault. It might allow some silliness as well - Mothership Zeta for a SF load out, Oasis for a forest, as I said, I picture it more as a holo deck than any place real. (Heck, in keeping with the anime concept, maybe a few non combat scenarios, for those using the holo deck/training room for trysts. Scantily clad holo women?)

    It would cut down on the system load, that is for sure.

    Not really high on the list of priorities though - the holo deck is a luxury, not a need.

    Not enough sleep last night, and my mind is wandering....

    As for the damned dog... that will not go away bug is still there. I may end up ripping FOOK clean out, I find Phalanx so annoying. Do you have any idea where I can find version 6 of the old FOOK - before they started doing FOOK 2?

    The Auld grump

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  7. Lowers radiation? Didn't even know there was a script function to do that by immersion in water.

    ...Where'd I leave that plugin? Now I'm curious again...

    Nice thing about having a couple of my girls along is that a ghoul infested sewer or metro tunnel very quickly becomes a quiet sanctuary. You oughta see what three of them manage to do to the Dunwich building. I'm pretty sure it technically counts as a form of rape.

    Seen the radioactive rain thing. It's a part of Enhanced Weather, I believe. Don't run it though. It'd just about be suicide with Arwen's Tweaks on.

    Unfortunately, one of the things holding me back from creating said hot spring is that I want it to look sort of traditional. Maybe not exact, but at least close enough that people know what it is, you know?

    Trouble is, I can't find bamboo or lotus plants or anything in base Fallout 3. Never seen a mod version I could add in, either.

    Sitting on rocks is pretty much out too, since I don't know how to tie the idle animations into new statics, and there are no sit-able rocks already in the game. Best I could do is reset the texture on a stone bench so that it looked like it was carved from the same rocks.

    There is actually a wrapped towel outfit that Backsteppo made, but I'll confess I was planning to be a perv and just go with the good old standby naked.

    Holodeck probably not gonna happen, I'm sorry to say. I don't have Zeta or anything like that to do the teleporters and sci-fi details. After the total shit that Operation Anchorage turned out to be, I could never bring myself to waste $12 on another DLC.

    I can't tell you how to rip Phalanx out of FOOK completely, but there is a simple solution. FOOK is an esm file, yes?

    Open it in the GECK, and create a plugin that modifies all the Phalanx NPCs to disabled. All you have to do is find them in their starting places in the world, double-click to edit them, and then check the little box that says "Initially Disabled". Save your new plugin to the FOOK master, and as long as your plugin is running, the NPCs shouldn't ever appear in-game, but won't be deleted to cause script problems and such.

    Don't know where to find old versions. The Google, it does nothing.

    Might try FOOKUnity though. If anyone would have a copy archived someplace, it's them:

    http://www.fookunity.com/forum/index.php

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  9. I went looking on FOOKUnity - all I found was a boast that they had removed the older version. After all, why would anyone not love FOOK 2?....

    For traditional textures, I would suggest looking at some Oblivion mods for the textures, I am pretty sure that conversion is possible (folks were using the TES editor before GECK was available). Just a minute while I rummage....

    http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7235 - a Japanese style house mod

    There is another, who's title I am not remembering right now, need to dig.

    The Auld Grump

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  10. "I went looking on FOOKUnity - all I found was a boast that they had removed the older version."

    One of my largest problems with the FOOK crew. They tend to be a tish totalitarian for my taste.

    Regrettably, that was the only resource I knew of for FOOK downloads. Might try searching around the Nexus if you haven't already? There's not likely to be an old version, but maybe someone else got sick of it and decided to create a patch?

    Looked over that mod you linked. I DO have an Oblivion to Fallout 3 model converter... but wow that's a list and a half of other peoples' work he used. I'll look into it, but it'll come down to whose work it ends up being and how receptive they are to the idea.

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  11. Yeah, I have to admit that I do not much like their FOOKing attitude. :P On their forums they derided some folks who had what seemed to me to be perfectly understandable questions. (Including someone asking where to find 1.6....)

    I still have not found the house that I was looking for - it had a large number of paper and carved wood screens and lattices. It may be completely gone now.

    I may need to see if it is around as a torrent somewhere. I always feel guilty downloading torrents, even though I only go after things that used to be around as free downloads. Last item I dud up was Witches Reel by Green Crown. (If I had more to go on, from my memory, I would look around for the... dangit, I just had an idea of how to find it, but TesNexus is down! (gotta love stream of consciousness typing...).)

    Some of the long list of contributors may be from COBL - one of the best ideas for modding that I have encountered - essentially a whole bunch of commonly used items, textures, and scripts so folks don't need to go reinventing the wheel. There are a fair number of house mods for Oblivion that have been COBLed together.

    http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21104

    Something like this would be very handy for Fallout, but I am not certain that it will ever happen. FOOK may be filling the niche, or at least acting like it does. (COBL is more of a toolkit, FOOK is, if anything, too much of a whole. CRAFT comes closer.)

    The Auld Grump, longwinded, it seems....

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  12. Sorry, but not surprised, about the holo deck. Very much a tangent in any event. Heck, half my disappointment comes from that Sally glitch - I was certain that I had discovered Vault 1's PLOT!

    And yeah, Anchorage was a sad disappointment. Some good loot, but a lame plot. Zeta is a bit better, though very linear. Both Broken Steel and Point Lookout are very good, and very open ended. (There is a great bluegrass radio mod out there for Point Lookout... I am partial to bluegrass.) If you had to get one then I would suggest Broken Steel, though Point Lookout has ties to one of the creepiest places in Fallout 3 - The Dunwich Building. (Another great mod adds the Necronomicon and the Dunwich Horror from Lovecraft.)

    The Auld Grump, garrulous too, it seems....

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  13. I want to try Broken Steel, and have almost bought it several times - if for no reason other than to get rid of that asinine level cap.

    But the bug reports... I've been keeping an eye on them since it hit, and broken steel makes the base Fallout 3 game look stable and well written by comparison. So thus far I've contented myself with just inventing my own cells and NPCs.

    I am familiar with COBL. Use it in my Oblivion install. I have to admit, while I'm not huge on sorters in general, their alchemy component sorting/storage rack is a brilliantly useful piece of work.

    Unfortunately, the Vault 1 overhaul is more or less on hold for the moment. I use Arwen's Tweaks, as I've mentioned before, and her Smarter AI module just destroys the girls' combat behavior. So I just didn't use that module. Problem solved.

    Well, yesterday Arwen uploaded 4.2, which no longer has a separate AI module. PM'd her about it, and she said she couldn't tell me which settings might be doing it.

    No offense to Arwen, it's a great set of tweaks in general, and the AI module is great for players who fly solo... but man does it complicate my life when people go messin' with something they don't understand the full import of.

    Downloaded and tried 4.2, and it's even worse. Now, the companions won't attack an enemy under ANY circumstances until they're within twenty odd yards.

    This leaves me with a bit of a conundrum. I have to either stop using the tweaks now - which sucks, since I like the damage, perk, and skill/stat tweaks... or I have to do someone else's work for them and go setting by setting seeing which does what to create a patch to un-fuck my companion system with the tweaks running.

    I swear, there are days I think of taking up Yahtzee instead...

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  14. Heh, you got any fours? No? Dang, I gotta Go Fish....

    Yeah, that is where having a predetermined protocol and architecture can come in handy. Using COBL as an example, how many times was the alchemy sorter reinvented? Having a single set choice makes a huge improvement.

    It does seem like each release from Bethesda is less stable than the one before I recently started playing Oblivion again, after gods know how long. I was amazed at both how much more stable it is than Fallout 3, and just how BIG it feels, even the dungeons, with their up, down, and around architecture.

    I am hoping that the reason TES V has been delayed is so they can work on their stability issues.

    I think part of the stability issue just comes down to resource management - their engine uses up way too many resources on random clutter.

    That said, I have not had huge problems with Broken Steel, at least until I installed FOOK 2. In honesty, I am inclined to blame FOOK more than Broken Steel in this - FOOK 2 adds a huge amount to the resource load, then when you add MMM on top of it the situation gets more severe.

    That said, MMM makes it much easier to remove undesired elements than FOOK 2, when I wanted to get rid of the aptly named Floaters (which look like an unwelcome surprise in a swimming pool) it was as easy as checking a box for No Floaters. Now if I could reconcile the raiders from MMM and the ones from the Dimonized Type 3 body....

    It also seems like the good folks at FOOK would rather blame Bethesda than try to split up their precious mod into more easily assimilated pieces. Phalanx should not be part of the main program, dammit! I am pretty sure that it is Phalanx that is causing the problems with Broken Steel. It screws up the AI more than a bit.

    So, right now, given the choice between FOOK 2 and Vault 1, Vault 1 wins easily. I am likely going to reinstall the game, and leave FOOK 2 sitting next to that damned dog in Vault 101. Just turning off FOOK left the game unstable, so away it goes.

    The radioactive rain does indeed come from Enhanced Weather... makes my character's life a living Hell. :) Rad Away has gone from something I sell off to something I burn through at an alarming rate, and even go scavenging for.

    I have not used Arwen's Tweaks, that I know of. Right now my favorite NPCs, even before the ones in the Vault 1 mod, are Kelsey and Jessie. Jessie has had a quirk or two, but for some reason I have found them more amusing than annoying.

    My favorite in regards to Vault 1 kicks in when Dance Party is going - sometimes she gets out of the pool and starts dancing without putting on her clothes. I just chalk it up to her being a teenager.... I do not have that problem with other NPCs, not even Kelsey, just her. I thought that the 'problem' had gone away, but she started doing it again yesterday. I realized that I had kind of missed it.

    When I take her into the mini hideout she makes a beeline for the Jacuzzi - keeps her clothes on, but it seems part and parcel with her behavior. Jessie is a sensualist. :P

    The biggest use of the Vault 1 NPCs was for an assault on Old Olney.... Death Claws everywhere. Noticeable, but not severe lag, despite having four Vault 1 NPCs, Kelsey and Jessie, Fawkes, and Dogmeat. My old computer could not have handled it.

    Then I got FOOK, and the program crashes with a whole lot less by way of critters.

    I found FOOK 1.7 a few minutes ago, over on PlanetFallout.Gamespy - with a note to Plz Remove. Guess they didn't get the message. :) Downloading now - bye bye K-9.

    Better sign off, before I lose the post again....

    The Auld Grump

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  15. Heh. Here's hoping 1.7 does it for you.

    I really think the huge problem with FO3 is that it's just half-assed from one end to the other.

    It was supposed to be an "adult" RPG, but at the last minute got cut down to make the M/R17 rating.

    Was supposed to have iron sights on the weapons, but at the last minute abandoned in favor of a plain crosshair.

    Supposed to have a "party" type follower system ala FO/FO2, but then scaled back to a single follower.

    Shipped with no provision for more than two gigs of ram or multicore processors.

    I'm not sure whether it's the devs or the management, but someone has a hellacious issue with follow-through and time management.

    I've had similar experiences to yours with Oblivion. I love it. The forest in the rain, sunset on the Abacean Sea. Snow in the mountains. It just feels like peeking into another world.

    Unfortunately, I can only put arrows into things for so long before I start missing the metallic cartridge pretty heavily. So it's pretty much Fallout 3 or Call of Duty 4, and I haven't managed to get any hot women into CoD4.

    Before I threw myself at the RR Companions Vault, I used Jessi and Kelsey pretty heavily. Back then my fireteam consisted of Jessi, Kelsey, and Clover - whom I had modified fairly heavily to not look atrocious.

    Never had much of an issue with them so much as they aren't mine, you know?

    Hell, I had a thing for tall redheads before I even knew what to do with one. The urge is definitely not getting any better as I get older.

    Could have done some modifications to change one of Lox's girls... but it wouldn't be the same.

    And it all seems to be working out decently. My companion-OCD seems to be improving the game for at least a few people, and I figure statistically speaking there are probably anywhere from five to ten times as many people using the mods regularly as there are that take the time to drop in an endorsement or a comment.

    My empirical testing with Arwen's is done. With it running, the girls wouldn't engage until the proverbial 'whites of the eyes' distance. With it off, one of them was cutting down people from a hundred plus meters away.

    Now, I get to turn Arwen's tweaks back on, and then turn Kelsey on, and see if it screws ALL companions, or just mine.

    I am not looking forward to digging through all those settings.

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  16. 1.7 seems to be working so far - while I have had a couple of crashes they have been to desktop, rather than complete lockup. It is too bad that the 20th Century Weapons project is currently on hold.

    No interference with the Vault Girls that I have found.

    Nappy time.

    The Auld Grump two and a half days, too hours of sleep....

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  17. I know the feeling. Along about day three of less than four hours sleep I start acting more and more like a grizzly bear.

    I grunt and growl a lot, and occasionally swipe at whatever's annoying me with my paw.

    It's a shame that 20thCW is on hiatus again, yeah, but I know first hand just how many scripts there are to write and implement there. Even copying and pasting, you're looking at weeks - if not months - of work. Gets old real fast, let me tell ya.

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  18. I can see that - and coordinating volunteers is also a lot of work. I would go so far as to say months - if not years - of work, rather than weeks.

    I did have to reinstall Fallout 3, the game had become completely unstable after removing FOOK 2 from FOMM. Seems to run fine(ish) with the older FOOK though. Crashes are less frequent and less severe.

    I think that I will blame FOOK 2 for everything from FO3 crashing to the economic downturn. Broken Steel seems to have no problems with the old FOOK, though it does have a few with MMM, most likely because both mess with the encounters. (One thing that I don't like about MMM - I prefer not having random Behemoths, they should be rare and preset.)

    Having fun in Oblivion right now, and a mod that I had given up on is getting released in a few days. :) Pell's Gate over on Oblivion Real Estate. (Fallout Real Estate, the sister site, never seems to have taken off, maybe you should plug the RR Vault over there.)

    The Auld Grump, awake, aware, and alive. Eating pizza at my CSI Arkham tabletop game.

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  19. Tabletop game? You mean one of those archaic things that uses... PAPER? The scandal!

    Never could keep MMM running, myself. The bugs I could get around... mostly, but those new textures he's so proud of aren't optimized well at all, and just destroy my framerate. Seriously, I take like a 20% hit with the new creature textures active.

    If they were outstanding work, I could see the big deal, but they're really nothing special.

    Which was a shame, because watching my fireteam's worth of companions go all Delta Force on a group of extra-extra-increased spawn raiders was always quite the show.

    Ferals are more a joke than anything. An auto-shotgun or pretty much anything belt fed renders even a dozen ferals not even an annoyance. We won't even talk about breaking out the MK19.

    I'm a couple versions behind though, so I may have to give it another look.

    Looked for the Fallout Real Estate site... but it appears to be taken down. Google produced a post from September saying it had been taken down due to lack of interest. Looked around the ORE forum, but didn't see anything to contradict that - though I'll grant I didn't look real hard.

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  20. Nope - it looks like you are right, the Fallout Real Estate site did indeed go away. I used to poke my nose in once in a while, it was how I found the Mini Hideout, but it did seem fairly dead, so.... I had not realized it had been that long since I last looked around. :/

    It had been a while since I visited Oblivion Real Estate as well, but things seem much healthier there. Shezrie is finally putting up her Pell's Gate mod. It seems like Oblivion just has a healthier fan community in general, Oblivion is hardly a new game, but there is still quite a bit of stuff coming out for it.

    I also found Bond's Holy Crap The Tent Is Better Than The House tent mod there. Given the grot and grime of the Wasteland, I found the shining clean interior of his tent disconcerting, let alone the maid and butler, both impeccably attired.

    For portable shelter I generally go with My Brahmin Bess, who has a tent and bedrolls among her gear. I generally live the life of a Scavenger, killing Raiders, then peddling their stuff to the traders. I keep her parked in the main entrance of your Vault, to keep her safe from Raiders and Ferals.

    Yeah, MMM has a bad effect on frame rates, though I think it may have improved since last you tried it. At least it does not seem to make a serious difference in crashes. Some great changes - Raiders are scary, Night Ghouls are bad news, especially when you have radioactive rain healing them, and increased spawns are nice. Of course then I have to go with Essential Traders, because otherwise everything dies....

    The Auld Grump

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  21. I think Oblivion has a healthier community because of less competition. Not much in the way of single-player fantasy on the market.

    FO3 has to share interest with the Call of Duty series and now Bad Company. People who are looking to shoot stuff generally don't want RPG content beyond "leveling up" to get access to new weapons.

    That, and Oblivion actually works, the vast majority of the time. Been playing Oblivion on and off since 2006, and have only had to reinstall once, because of some hefty texture conflicts that arose from three plus years of installing one mod of the top of another. Could have fixed it, but it was simpler to just wipe the mess and reinstall only the mods I actually used.

    About to come up on my third reinstall of FO3 in less than eighteen months, and odds are decent either way whether this will actually fix it and get the game working again.

    Seriously beginning to wish I hadn't invested the amount of time I have in modding for this game.

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  22. Well, hopefully Vegas will be healthier. :)

    Something else to bear in mind - most mods for Oblivion are fairly small - Oscuro's is about half the size of FOOK, let alone FOOK 2.

    Unsurprisingly MMM for Oblivion is also smaller than the FO3 version, though not by as much.

    I really would not say that FO3 is in competition with CoD or BC, both are much more FPS oriented. While FO3 has that to an extent, I don't think that it is the main thrust of the game. Much more focus on the RP aspect.

    I am pretty sure that most of my conflicts were with FOOK 2 more than anything else - I have only crashed to desktop twice since switching to the older FOOK, both times after about six hours of play. (And took them both as signs from the gods that it was time to go to bed.)

    I ran the Fallout tabletop game last night for a bunch of fourteen year olds, some of them children of my regular gaming group.... I am kind of sad to say that the kids were focused, goal oriented, and progressed the plot about twice as fast as their parents would. :/ They actually cooperate better too. (The part they are in right now is based on an urban legend from my childhood, that Walt Disney was in cryogenic suspension. Right now they are in the tunnels beneath Disneyworld.)

    The Auld Grump, the scenario name is The Darkened Tunnels, the arc is called Walt Disney on Ice! I have a hard time resisting puns....

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  23. Man, I haven't tabletop gamed in forever.

    Would've been... fifteen, maybe?

    Kind of soured me on the whole thing, since it was just three of us: me, my younger brother (who has the roleplaying ability of your average World of Warcrafter - which is to say slightly less than a block of wood with a smiley face sharpied onto it), and a complete asshole of a DM who turned every 'adventure' around to getting stiffed by our employer and shafted on loot.

    Shame. I always wanted to get into Mutant Chronicles. Y'know, before games workshop sued Heartbreaker Games into extinction and all.

    Not that it's easy on the DM, let me tell you. I'm one of those players with a HUGE store of esoterica from mythology and religion to draw on, make it a point to read every guide and source book for the game I can lay hands on, and make it a special point to learn to use the exact wording of the rules to exploit the holy living hell out of the system.

    Plus there's also, you know... the fact that I swear every other word and am a card-carrying pervert. Oh, the things I could've done with the 'adult' AD&D source book...


    As for Oblivion, I've got to disagree with you. While on the whole, the mods may have been smaller, it has some hefty ones too. Francisco's mod springs to mind. While it doesn't go as far as FOOK2 or FWE, it's still got its hand in just about every facet of Oblivion, save for weapon damage. There's a WIP that adds Drow territory, too. Realm of Northdark or something like that, that while not massive in terms of what all it changes in the existing game, is still pretty huge on new content; with the mod weighing in over 250mb.

    Of course, even there was Bethsoft's inattention to detail. I remember when Shivering Isles hit, it corrupted savegames for more than six months until they saw fit to release a patch. I'm amazed some days that the DLC for Fallout 3 works as well as it does.

    Ah, damn it. Now you've got me thinking about pen and paper RPGs.

    So many I wanted to play. RIFTS, GURPS, Shadowrun...

    That short lived one that got the developer sued by MTV... Aeon, I think it was called. Name was hastily changed to Trinity something or other, but it always looked fun.

    Kind of makes me wish I could get something like Fallout 3 or STALKER in multiplayer form. Since I know no one who does that sort of thing locally, net-play would be most likely required.

    Then again, even WoW could be interesting if one actually had a group to play with.

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  24. Oh, yeah: since you're doing the frozen Walt-Disney thing, are you going to do the anti-Semitic joke from Family Guy?

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  25. O_o I don't even know the anti-Semetic joke form Family Guy. (I am one of those Luddites who don't watch TV... I guess I am going to have to Google it.) Hmmm, okay, I'm familiar with the Urban Legend it is based on, not a whole lot of supporting evidence, but, given the prevalence of anti-Semiticism in the US during the 1930s, not particularly unlikely either.

    About the strongest confirmed political views that I have been able to find about Walt is that he was very much against communism, and included the labor unions among them.

    I think some of the anti-Semitic legend may have been carried over from Henry Ford - who was a Jew hating S.O.B. (Sending Hitler a million Deutch Marks on his birthday, etc..) I do know that Disney managed to steer clear of the Business Plot. (Look it up, a weird Fascist conspiracy from the '30s that wanted to overthrow F.D.R. and replace him with General Smedley Butler, a WWI hero. It failed because Smedley was a patriot.... :D In old Warner Brothers' cartoons, when you hear somebody says 'Ready when you are, Smedley!' General Smedley Butler is who they are referring to, going back to his WWI fame. Useless bit of info, isn't it?)

    In regards to Disney being ant-Semitic , I suspect Disney of simply being a cold blooded business man, pandering to those prejudices that would ensure the health of his then very young studio. He had no deep sympathies either way. Communism on the other hand threatened his business.

    Just to make you feel better about FO3 and instability, I recently started playing Daggerfall, for the first time in years.... Crashing so often it feels like I am listening to the Anvil Chorus. Then there is the joy of falling through the floor on those weird not-quite-stairs-but-not-really-ramps-either things. Sometimes I walk around on top of the dungeon, looking in.... :P I would love to blame DosBox, but I remember it happening when I was playing it on my old DOS machine, way back when.

    If you want to experience the joy, Bethesda has made Daggerfall a free download. I didn't need it - I still have the CD from back then. (And the UESP Wiki goes all the way back to that game. :) )

    I put off buying Shivering Isles until the patch was out. I have to admit that I much preferred Knights of the Nine - I want to play the hero, not drive a bunch of Joes crazy to amuse the Daedra Lord of Madness.

    Tabletop games are my first love - I am almost always the GM, the last time I got to play was over six months ago. Three games, two alternate weeks, the other is every other week. One Spycraf/Call of Cthulhu hybrid, one Steampunk game run using Spycraft, and the kids are playing Fallout, using the Spycraft rules.... Despite its name, Spycraft is a very flexible engine.

    The Auld Grump

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  26. The Family Guy joke was moronic (like all Family Guy jokes). They had said something about Disney being frozen, and it cuts to a scene of a technician waking Walt up from a cryogenic pod.

    He immediately sits up and asks: "Are the Jews gone yet?"

    To which the technician replied: "Uh... no...?"

    "Then put me back in." And he lays back down and closes the pod on himself.

    No idea whether Disney actually WAS an anti-Semite or not, I'm not really a fan of the company's works so have never looked into it, but there's a rumor at least that he at some point either made a cartoon or a statement praising the Nazis in the late 30's.

    Again, no idea whether is true or not. The bit from Family Guy was just so out of the blue and off the wall that it made me giggle.

    Yes, I'm often easily amused, as evidenced by the fact that I own BOTH Bill & Ted movies on DVD, as well as the complete Mr. Bean collection.

    Think I'll pass on Daggerfall. I tried Morrowwind a few years ago, thinking it would be more of the same as Oblivion... and was not overly impressed. Going back even further could bring no good.

    Surprised Daggerfall even runs. I never had good luck with DOSbox. Or pretty much any attempt at legacy gaming, for that matter.

    Used to actually have an old computer set up as a dedicated Win98 box just to play old games.

    But yeah, I knew new games don't have the monopoly on not working. I remember back in Windows 95 days, I used to play Interstate 76. Great game, but I never finished it. Why? Because no matter what I did, it would crash at the start of mission 13. No patches, no nothing, just didn't work. So annoying. Had similar problems with a slew of others in one form or another.

    It's just that Fallout 3 won like seventeen game of the year awards, for craps' sake. One would think Bethsoft might want to make it work for their corporate image, if nothing else. Contrary to what ad agencies say, there IS such a thing as bad PR.

    I was the exact opposite with the Oblivion expansions, though. I hated Knights. I played nice to finish it out, but had the armor taken away from me within twenty minutes of finishing for doing some naughty things we won't go into here...

    On the flip side, Shivering Isles was great. Loved Dementia. Rampant OCD and paranoia and those smokin' hot Mazken guards... Stomp a few heretics for kicks. What's not to like? And when you get to be Sheogorath you can do anything you want and the guards won't give you trouble.

    I'm just that kinda guy, though. In Fallout 3 I generally shoot every water beggar I come across.

    Always fun, too, cause most of my companions are as evil as me. It's so cool to cap a beggar and hear from behind me "Good riddance!"

    Could never get into Call of Cthulu. Picked up a compilation of Lovecraft's "best" works awhile back... and for like two weeks I used the Dunwich Horror as a soporific. Get two, maybe three pages in, and be ready to pass out.

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  28. Heh - Dunwich Horror was one of my favorites when growing up... when a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction on the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean's Corners, he comes upon a wild and curious country.... (That is from memory, and could be a misquote, but you get the idea.)

    I was hoping that Point Lookout would be like that, it wasn't, but I still liked it.) The sad thing is that the town that Dunwich was based on is now considered one of the nicest places to live in New England - Wibraham, Massachusetts. Innsmouth has likewise gone upscale - Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The area that Lovecraft was describing is now Prescott Park, named after the two women who rehabilitated the neighborhood. The first tabletop roleplaying game that I ever played was run in the basement of the church that may have inspired the Order of Dagon Hall. (A Unitaria/Universalist church. One of the players was a Catholic priest, ah, the heady tolerant days of the mid 'Seventies.)

    I almost always play a hero - I get any villainy that I need by being the games master. When I play I want to rescue the princess, confound the villain, and swing, laughing, out the window while holding the damsel fair. (On one of those silly online D&D personality tests I came out as a Wizard/Paladin....) The few times I don't play the hero I am generally a ringer - working in cahoots with the GM.

    I have decided to use the anti-Semitic Disney idea after all, but not directly - one of the bad guy factions are a bunch of neo-Nazis with ties to the Enclave. (The Enclave in turn considers them an expendable asset.) They do believe the urban legend, and want to bring him back as a possible leader, if they can find his freezer. (They are in for a nasty surprise - Walt is kind of freezer burned, and has turned into a ghoulsicle - still semi, pseudo, sorta alive, but frozen and ghouled.)

    The Auld Grump

    *EDIT* Got a weird Blogger error, reentered the post.

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  29. I know how the error thing goes. Get times where I have to try to post something a dozen times before the blasted server will connect and let me through.

    I always figured Lovecraft's work would appeal more to people actually from the area. He was so big on naming specific places and details that I had assumed it would make perfect sense to someone who knew it all. Never been to New England, myself, so to me it's all just names.

    Now, when someone starts writing horror based in and around the swamps that they refer to as the St. Francis river on the Missouri/Arkansas border, that I'll be able to keep up with. Of course, any horror in that locale is probably going to involve dueling banjos and mention of pig squealing... so I might not want to read it, after all.

    Interesting thought, with the campaign. The Enclave do have a definite Reich vibe (that uniform hat, especially), and using the neos as a disposable army does seem like the sort of thing they might do. Why waste perfectly good power armor when you've got a few hundred skinheads that no one will ever miss anyway. At the very least, it'd make for a hell of a diversion while the armored shock troops Vertibird'd in to the objective.

    And a Walt Disney ghoul-cicle? I can't decide whether that's brilliant, or just plain disturbing.

    ...Just had a vision of a throng of people saluting Walt with his 'stache trimmed down into a Hitler-style one...

    Oh, man, that's seriously disturbing...

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  30. Oh Goddammit...

    Now I can't stop thinking about Mickey Mouse yelling "Sieg Heil, heh heh!"

    I want you to know that when my brain oozes out my ears, I blame you.

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  31. Yes, there is no doubt that The Man From Providence was a New Englander. :) Local flavor does count more for the locals.

    My current favorite in that regard is John Connolly - not just local flavor, he names names! I even know some of the folks he has put in. Instead of a generic hotel the character stays in the Inn on St. John, instead of going to a fictional gallery he goes to the Dyer's Gallery, and talks to Susan Dyer.... Despite this he is not a native to Portland, Maine, but is from Ireland and still lives there....)

    I just discovered the main reason as to why FOOK 2 continued giving me problems - I uninstalled it in the normal fashion for a FO3/Oblivion mod, rather than using the uninstall routine that comes with the mod.... (Great, now I can be angry with myself instead of them in that regard....) I still wish they would make Phalanx optional though - I really miss the weapons choices. :(

    As for Waltler, my question is, if they realized that he was ghouled, would they defrost him, or just leave him frozen, and salute the ghoulsicle instead.... And would he be aware? (Mwua ha ha! *Ahem.*)

    I use minis for my games, and the Kreigers (neo-Nazis) are based in part on some cheap plastic minis that just came out from Wargames Factory - sort of like Waffen SS with armor and gasmasks. I am going to stat up their guns in Spycraft, assuming that their rifle is a PC carbine with underslung shotgun, post war manufacture. (Which means that either the Enclave is supplying them with weapons or the Kreigers have their own weapons shop, more likely a combination - the Enclave supplying them with the machinery for manufacture.)

    I am using a bit of the Call of Cthulhu aspect, and stealing liberally from Steven King's The Stand - Flagg is becoming an aspect of Nyarlathotep, and a direct counterpart to the semi-Messianic Lone Wanderer from Vault 101. (Actually, I would argue that the Wanderer is closer to John the Baptist, with the rebirth in water thing, and that Harold is the Messiah figure, slowly crucified on his tree.... Why yes, I may be reading too much into it. :P )

    The Auld Grump

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  32. If you're going to do it, I say go full-bore. Make Uncle Walt some kind of monstrous psychic super-ghoul. You could say his consciousness is separated from his body while its in cryonic suspension - similar to a ghost - and he's spent the last few hundred years observing the goings-on around his tomb with ever increasing fury and whatnot.

    Can't comment on the messiah thing. In my experience, the beauty of such religious texts is that if you stand on one foot and squint JUST right, pretty much any prominent figure can be made into a suitable allegory.

    I prefer to think of myself and my girls as more of the fabled Wild Huntsmen. Largely indifferent on the whole, but don't draw our attention when we're bored...

    And wow. A pistol caliber carbine with an underslung masterkey? That's downright unfriendly. Chamber it in something fun like 10mm auto, set it up to use unmodified greasegun mags, and I'll take two right now.

    Well, I'm not thinking about Reichstag Mickey anymore... but now I've got the urge to build a 45 Win Mag AR-15 upper again. Man I need access to a machine shop.

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  33. Ah, but which Wild Hunt? Odin? Herne? Or jolly Old Nick? (Not St. Nick, the other one....)

    The super psycher aspect is being reserved for another plotline (setting is a sandbox - plots start when they get there) - The Freak Show. That one begins near Gibtown (Gibsonton - a retirement and winter community for carnies and freaks). Has ties with the local Rom, and the Carnival - members of the Carnival include several super mutants and a behemoth. The town is getting ready to send out the first carnival/circus in hundreds of years.

    When the super mutants or the behemoth get riled they tense up, then get a blank expression for a few seconds and calm down. The putative ringmaster, one of the Rom, sometimes gets that same slightly glazed expression from time to time, then smiles and changes his plans a bit....

    There is something very much akin to the Master from Fallout 2 behind the Carnival, but oddly enough there is no evil plot to take over the world - the psycher is dying, and knows it. It wants to leave something permanent behind, and to see that its 'brothers' the super mutants and behemoth have some chance in the times ahead to be something other than a menace.

    And Walt is in contact with the true Ringmaster.... He is not a particularly powerful psycher, but the Ringmaster is more than potent enough.

    Other characters in the Disney plot include Ethan Sparkes, ex Paladin of the Brotherhood, now a ghoul. Nick shares one wish with the Ringmaster - a desire to set up something permanent - he is after the hospital and reactors beneath Disney World, and intends to open a settlement in the Darkened Tunnels. Unfortunately the reactors have been cracked, resulting in the slow ghoulification of Uncle Walt. :P

    Aside from some feral ghouls in the tunnels the active threat is an Enclave holdout in Splash Mountain, this portion is titled Guns of Splash Mountain - picture Guns of the Navarone at Disney World.... Unsurprisingly they also want access to the reactor, to power the enormous railgun. (With the right shells it can hit the Commonwealth from Florida.)

    Other areas of interest: Cape Kennedy (I decided that the name did not revert back to Cape Canaveral in the FO universe), which ties into the Brotherhood, the Enclave, and the Visitors (the aliens that have a couple of interactions with vanilla FO3).

    The Florida Keys may well end up being the home of coastal pirates, and the cratered remains of the city of Miami is ghoul and Raider territory. More civilized ghouls are in St. Petersburg, and I have not decided what to do with Ft. Lauderdale.

    As for the Messianic leanings... I would be very surprised if someone involved with creating the story behind FO3 was not influenced by Joseph Campbell.

    The Kreiger Arms over and under is intended for short range in dense terrain, cities, tunnels, and trenches. Probably single shot on the shotgun, and I have not yet decided on a caliber for the PC carbine yet - 10mm is good, or I may decrease the RoF and go with .45. And for fun, I may have some of the Kreigers using dragonsbreath rounds in the shotgun, only a single shot, but a nasty, nasty surprise. :)

    Sorry, I'm a long winded sort.

    The Auld Grump

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  34. Whoops, unexplained terminology - the Kreigers are the neo-Nazis I mentioned above. The leaders of the group are not what their followers believe - they began gunmaking, then created the group to use their guns. They are profiteering gun runners more than they are anything else. (Any similarity to Kruppe is purely coincidental I assure you. :P )

    The Auld Grump, the Kreigers are holding their manufacturing processes to about the level of WWI - keeping things simple and sturdy.)

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  35. Which wild hunt? Oh, you're good. It's been awhile since I dealt with a worthy adversary. You're going to make me actually crack my library open and start re-reading stuff to confirm facts.

    But no, not Odin's band. I'm from a different group. Specifically, I was thinking Cŵn Annwn.

    I can see you're really into this. Never would have thought muties could be (somewhat) civilized enough to work a traveling carnehvaaaahl. Though I'll also confess I never played the original Fallout or Tactics, and only put about two hours into Fallout 2.

    Should probably revisit it one of these days.

    Still, I'll say this: you are certainly thorough.

    And just for kicks? Fort Lauderdale should be the Ghoul spring break capital. A bunch of two hundred year old, half rotted women in bikinis, getting blitzed and partying.

    Woo!

    ...Oh look, I can see the 'Girls Gone Wild' crew throwing up over in the corner.

    Lightweights!

    Don't have to explain the Kreigers, though. I had just assumed it was a manufacturer you came up with. I do it all the time.

    First piece I ever wrote - a Starsiege: Tribes fan fiction at age 17 (yeah, I ain't proud of the idea, either...) - I had the hero carry a special custom sidearm in a 13mm chambering. I called it the "Prometheus". Only one person ever got the joke.

    Philistines.

    Anyhow.

    I can see the WWI level of tech. Just remember that not all WWI gear was either simple or sturdy. The Chauchat springs to mind.

    If it were the "real" world we inhabit, I'd say steer clear of 10mm just for ammunition availability reasons (or lack thereof), but the stuff seems to be super prevalent in the Fallout 3 universe, so why not?

    I also feel the need to point out that "profiteering gun-runner" may be a bit redundant. I don't think there are any altruistic ones...

    The "Ringmaster". I've heard that before, now that I think of it. Where was it, though? Gah. two decades of insomnia and caffeine abuse have all but shredded my memory.

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  36. Yeah - I will admit that profiteering gun runner was a release from the department of the redundancy bureau. :P The main point being that they are manufacturing a war in order to sell their arms.

    Yeah, there was some cheap ass weaponry in WWI, and a few that were overly sophisticated for the limits of manufacture. My favorite in that regard is the Mondragon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_rifle - the world's first assault rifle. It ended up being relegated to a backup weapon for grounded pilots.... In WWII they added a scope and used it as a sniper rifle. Not bad for a gun designed in the 1890s.

    While not overly successful the manufacturer is still around today - SIG. I have fired a Mondragon - despite the mixed reputation it is a sweet gun, and would not particularly stand out today - manufacturing has caught up to it. :) )

    On the other hand, there are still functioning Maxim guns today. Simple and sturdy as machine guns go. But I really would not trust a flamethrower from the period....

    The Kreiger is based on a trench gun from WWI that, as far as I can remember, was never deployed. The U.S> was a big fan of shotguns in trenches, so much so that there was a movement to get them banned form the battle field.

    I wonder how the Kreigers and the Enclave feel about gas warfare? (As an aside, at the beginning of WWII there was exactly one world leader who wanted to keep the ban on gas warfare... Adolf Hitler. It is sad when he stands out on a moral issue... Winnie* wanted to allow its use.)

    The Auld Grump - for the record, I used to teach classes on military history, focusing on WWI, and the failure of tactics to pace technology.

    * I am not a fan of Winston Churchill - the cover up in regards to the munitions on the Lusitania was of his orchestration.

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  37. Ah, yes, the designs of General Mondragon. Never was a fan, myself.

    But then again, I also wasn't a fan of the Bang Rifle, and his design was plenty innovative for its day.

    Plus, Mondragon's rifle was really put to shame by the Pedersen Device. Shame they never got to deploy that.

    You gotta love the Trench Broom. Yet another piece of perfection from the holy John Moses Browning. I've handled (but not shot) several original 1897's over the years, and never cease to be impressed by the quality.

    Fans of the trench gun with good reason, I'd say. Nothing clears a passage like a couple dozen .32" lead pellets.

    I'm still not sure why they insisted on being able to mount a bayonet to the thing... I guess for some people, everything's better as a pike.

    I have to say, I think Hiram Maxim and his "Devil's Paintbrush" have got to be one of the great ironies of history.

    Designed the gun to be so terrible, that no one would ever want to go to war again to face such a thing... and the world did it anyway. Gleefully so, because as Ian Hogg put it:

    "A trained, talented solider could put out thirty, maybe forty rounds a minute, with a bolt action rifle... and here you had this machinegun that you could sit any idiot down behind, and he could fire six hundred."

    Can't say as I'm an inordinate fan of Churchill, the man did have his moments. Story goes that he once approached a female assistant, and asked:

    "Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"

    "Why yes, Mister Churchill, I suppose I would."

    "Would you do it for ten pounds?"

    "Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?"

    "We've already established what kind of woman you are, Madam; now we're simply negotiating price."

    Then again, it is just a story. No telling if it actually happened or not.

    Personally? I'm not sure how the Enclave on the whole would feel about chemical warfare, but I'm pretty sure we know how President AI would feel about it, what with the whole FEV debacle and all.

    Plus, it would work really well for them; since one would have to assume that that spiffy power armor has a filter or rebreather built into the helmet.

    And the 'contaminated' wastelanders aren't really human anymore anyway...

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  38. Yeah, the Pedersen device was a neat idea - Barret's REC7 entry into the arms contest was in a way similar - why build an all new gun when you can make a kit that can be installed in the field?

    Though if I remember properly the Pedersen did not good things to the aim and range on the Springfield. Given the choice, I think that I would go with the Mondragon. (Of course the fact that I have fired one may be part of my bias - I don't think that I have ever met anyone who fired a Springfield 1903 with the Pedersen attachment.)

    As for why a bayonet on the trench guns - remember shotguns have a limited magazine, and given the nature of trench warfare there was an excellent chance that the magazine would be depleted in the first few seconds of an assault.

    Ah well, instead of Winnie I could have started ranting about 'Bull(shit) Halsey.... Still touted as a hero of the war, but there was a reason his fleets were where they were, in part to keep him out of the way....

    Or Wilhelm II, so confident that the Austro-Hungarians wouldn't really go to war that he went off on vacation after signing their pact.... Hell, the bloody Black Hand killed the closest to a moderate that the local leadership had. And then Wilhelm was so certain that war was nowhere on the horizon - despite being a man who got rid of Bismark on the grounds that he was too much of a dove.

    WWI was such a mess.... I swear they had to invent new mistakes. (Let's invade across their artillery practice field, they'll never expect that!)

    Then again, I tend to think that WWII actually started with the Franco-Prussian War. :P Everybody revenginating against everyone else for more than fifty years.... And now we have the same process grinding away in the middle east. Oy!

    And an oddity - when I was in Kansas, circa 1974, there was an ancient French tank in the barn, rusted out and gunless, the tracks rusted solid. For decades I wondered how the heck a WWI French tank ended up in a barn in Kansas.

    Eventually I found out that we bought over a hundred of them from the French, and manufactured many more, most of which were shipped to Kansas for storage, then finally sold off for use as tractors.... Great thing for a kid to climb around and inside of though. :) There are probably dozens of the things still around....

    The Auld Grump

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  39. Hmmm, I seem to have drifted far off the topic of 'dang that's a pretty Vault'. So after this I think I will wander off rather than continue monopolizing your board. :P

    If you want to take a look at what I intend to use as the Kreigers you can find them up on http://wargamesfactory.com/AnnouncementRetrieve.aspx?ID=32119 I think that they are aimed at the Warhammer 40K players.

    The Auld Grump

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  40. Huh. Looks like the Death Korps of Krieg from 40k.

    Or maybe... Yeah, that's it. Those are a copy of the old Warzone game troopers. Shame Games Workshop sued them into oblivion... I liked Warzone.

    Anyhow, I wouldn't worry about being off-topic. I'm pretty sure the management won't mind.

    Although I will resist the urge to open that there can 'o worms on the Pedersen Device and it's 30rd mag.

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  41. Errr, this thread, not the whole blog....

    The Auld Grump, yep, a visit from my old friend, insomnia....

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  42. Ah, yeah. Well, to get into the other type threads on topic, you'd have to hit my other blog... and there lately I haven't even been posting my usual bitching.

    Really need to get around to that write-up on the BHI Gladius.

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