Kings Mountain fire team

@BeachAV8R. I am actually a little jealous. Having a daughter and only child is great. But my sim habit is, in her eyes, a silly time sink at best—maybe even a touch sad.

But your kids see it through your experience. Not just as a worthy visceral experience in itself, but also a creative muse that had earned you a small but certainly non-zero income. And now the moment has come to share it in a guided and controlled setting. Beautiful, man! Beautiful.

I spent a year or so trying to hang with @adlabs6 and @JediMaster during ARMA nights at SimHQ. I was so f-ing useless. But they were eternally nice about it and always funny. VR pulled me away for good and that was perhaps better for everyone.

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You need mods for that. You can load basic weapons and equipment into vehicles and containers but for anything larger you need to have the appropriate mod.
Let me look through my mod files and ill send you a list of helpful ones you can get off the workshop
I highly recommend getting the “A3 launcher” if your going to start modding as its got a great server list and direct mod downloads
I’ll find some links when I get back home

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Yesterday was so fun that I can’t hardly describe it. Seeing the boys discover things on their own and being so excited…it totally renewed Arma for me once again - and reinforced my view that it really is the ultimate playground. I mean…you can skin the cat a hundred different ways on a mission and it is so fun talking about it with them…

“Should we go back to the helicopter and rearm with some air-to-air missiles?? Hey…don’t shoot until we are all ready… You have the guy on the left or the right? Owww…what does owww mean…are you wounded??” :rofl:

My wife was so engrossed in our discussions and mission that guess who wanted to get her own Steam and Arma account?? (Purchased it for her this morning…!) She says she is great at planning… :rofl: and that we need some organization in our attacks…

I too have great memories of playing with the SimHQ crowd - I was completely useless as well. I think it was Biff and Dart and @adlabs6 and a few others that mostly tolerated me coming along and rarely getting a shot off…

Thanks! It is fun getting to know the game a little bit better. It is weird because features I had never really looked into…well, now that the kids are playing I feel like I need to know the game a bit better. It is sort of like when I first got my CFI rating - I knew NOTHING about airplanes and teaching at that moment…but it forces you to learn it so you won’t sound totally like an idiot (just partially…)…

We are playing a Tanoa map today…a mission that dynamically spawns missions…anyone know what the menu on the left means or how you access it? I’m guessing it a mission designer added in script or mod…?

I’ve seen that layout before. When you roll your mouse wheel does it give you an option for “open server comms”

Just tell her to be careful where she keeps mission ideas… I remember a regular from our group of mission makers telling us that someone at his work discovered a notepad he had kept ideas on, with “destroy comms tower” or something similar written on it… And that he had to explain it… :rofl:

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No…I didn’t see anything in the scroll wheel menu. It certainly looks like something offering support…but I can’t figure out how to access it…

Another day of extreme fun on the BeachAV8R A3 LAN party. Today we introduced the boys to Tanoa…a map I have barely played at all, so it was great fun for me to explore it too. We played the awesome dynamic mission spawning NUTWK Dops 4.8 mission…which seemed to work in most cases:

I about jumped out of my skin this morning as I was sipping my coffee and going through the ammo box trying to settle on an outfit and gear…all of the sudden the roar from the base anti-aircraft system jolted me upright… :rofl:

Tanoa is just a gorgeous map…and the Blackfish is so much fun…

Kai-Bear got his first MANPAD kill today…!

We had an awesome time doing the “Rescue the Scientist” mission…but when it came time to get him in the helicopter he was giving us fits and an enemy patrol opened fire on us and ended up killing him…job 50% done anyway…

Tanoa is so lush - much different than the long sight distances on Altis…definitely terrifying when you get in close with the enemy in the jungle…

And over my shoulder…a question from my wife that I would have never thought I’d hear:

“So how far away from these guys am I supposed to place the Claymore mine??”

What a great weekend…

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This morning I was catching up on unread Mudspike threads and a nefarious undercurrent to all this family enthusiasm dawned on me. @BeachAV8R has worked extremely hard to make M.A.D the Amazon of logistics using decrepit old airplanes. (Well actually Amazon is ALREADY the Amazon of logistics using decrepit old airplanes—see Prime Air). If you don’t follow Beach’s MAD AAR thread then you may not know that he has near constant personell issues. One pilot, “Destiny” (former poll dancer who loved her stage name so much she kept it), has flown thousands of hours over the FAR 117 limit this year. Such abuse is unsustainable and expensive. What better solution than to use in-house unpaid labor!? I once knew a guy in North Carolina who had a crop dusting operation. His business model depended on his unlicensed teenaged son to spray.

See what’s happening? Clearly, this ARMA thing is a gateway drug! Beach is getting the family hooked so that within a month or two they’ll be flying rubber dog doo out of Hong Kong while he and Destiny secret off to Myrtle Beach for the weekend.

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We found some female character faces and hair for my wife…hard to believe that that option isn’t part of the vanilla game, but I get it…all those harnesses, backpacks, guns, animations…are all set for a template…so from that standpoint I get it. But why not include females in the facial art?

She looks like a badass though…

So now with our “squad” complete - the four of us moved on on our first training mission. The boys were so tickled that “Mommy” was joining us. She had actually spent the entire afternoon going through the Arma tutorial section…it was amazing. She practiced all the positions, resting the weapon, using the mines, firing the different rocket types.

Of course, once in the mission - the scope of just how much is available opens up. A trip to the ammo box and we outfitted her with a rifle and went back over how to switch to the scope optics. The plan was for the four of us to just head to a ridge, plink off some shots at a small enemy outpost, retreat to the back side of the ridge and get out of Dodge via the helicopter.

We all spread out and let Marisa take the first shot after each picking out some targets. The agreement was five shots each, then a retreat back over the ridge. In our haste to outfit, both her and I had left MRCO scopes on…and at the range we were shooting did not fare very well. Both boys got one kill each…but Marisa and I missed. As we backed of the ridge, Kai stayed a bit too long though…and after a few second two deafening explosions rocked the ridgeline as two RPGs impacted nearby. He was down and wounded…I started crawling toward him to heal him up when a third RPG crashed between him and I, killing him outright and wounding me - but I was able to self-heal.

It was a weird ride back to base with me, Marisa, Kai’s cousin…but Kai left on the ridgeline dead. By the time we reached the base a minute or so later, Kai had respawned and was running around the base…so that made everyone feel a bit better.

Re-outfitted with the awesome LRPS scopes and headed back to the ridge for a few more shots before having to call it a night.

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Concerning the female model: looks tough! I see the following dialogue:

Guy: Hey (insert woman’s name), have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Gal: No, have you?

(Dialogue stolen from Aliens )
:smiley:

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asses1

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Such a great movie.
One of the best sequel movies of all time.

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Yeah…now you got me wondering if my kids are old enough to watch it yet… :rofl: Can’t wait for them to see that one…

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LOL…apparently it is a raging debate:

My gut feeling is: wait another two years or so. (Kai is 10, right? 12 should be fine.)
But that’s my personal opinion.

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Yeah…he will be 11 in March. He is an odd mix of being very bright and smart, but still has some of that kid in him. He still calls me “Daddy” instead of “Dad”…and I love it. I know the horizon where he switches over to being more standoffish is coming…God I dread it…

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I consider myself lucky that right now I am still the greatest man alive for my kids (ok, probably 2nd greatest after grandpa), but yeah , I see it coming in a few years.

We will be there for you when it happens. :slight_smile:

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When the 10 year old drops a bounding mine on your left on accident…and the 12 year old drops a grenade on your right instead of crouching…

calm1

…and Kai has this habit of just yelling out “Owwww!!” when he is getting hit by incoming fire…

oww2

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Reminds me of the old days when FPS games usually came with automatic weapon switch and you ran around firing your machine gun, when suddenly it ran out of ammo, the game switched over to the rocket launcher and you blew yourself to kingdom come. :smiley:

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:rofl: I think I’m going to have to make them only carry smoke grenades until we get a handle on that G key… Maybe we should all re-assign it to something less handy…

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My grenade key is set to T. And alternate grenade key is shift-T. Early on in A3, there were a lot of inadvertent thrown grenades until we changed the key.

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