<snipped quote>

tbh, I don't really think it makes a huge amount of difference. The discussion about sidearms and personal weapons has gone on way longer than it needed to in the first place; my whole point was I wanted to avoid fucking stupid things like fighter pilots tooling around with duffel-bags full of pistol magazines (which someone actually did in an RP I ran before. Mind you, same player also did try to pull off backflipping an A-10...), or otherwise flying their jet tooled up like the Punisher.
I.e. putting some common sense in there.

It says on the character sheet you get a standard issue sidearm. That's what you get.
End of discussion.

Made some good progress so far, I'm normally a fairly slow character builder, but thankfully short app.

Maybe I missed it somewhere, what is the exact date (or date range) for when our characters will start the RP?

Just trying to avoid any timeline conflicts.

Made some good progress so far, I'm normally a fairly slow character builder, but thankfully short app.

Maybe I missed it somewhere, what is the exact date (or date range) for when our characters will start the RP?

Just trying to avoid any timeline conflicts.

I think it's somewhere around 2010/2011.
That is hoping I did my math right.

I could probably be off by a few years. So apply a grain of salt to my estimate.

Probably going to take the old soviet approach of solving the lack of dakka with two Makarovs... at least until my character gets issued a Grach or PP-2000 (depending on how things go).

Massy, no making fun of my character's twirly revolver-fighty stance, and I won't point out that the P90 is smaller than a certain nine.

*Gets to work on crafting Yuri*

In my defense, I've been working on this since I've been at work, and I work midnights.

Character Name: Virginia Hilts
Nickname/callsign: Maverick
Age: 23
Nationality: American
Gender: Female
Bio:
An Air Force girl through and through. Virginia was a CAP cadet long ago in her early years, getting her taste of the military life at a young age. She was a big military buff and loved history, reading all the time. She knew what she wanted to do, so it wasn't too long before she started studying up. After high school, she attended college and enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program. With that all set, she had met Rose in her detachment. The two became quick friends, and together they helped each other study and attended classes together. The both of them would go on to Field Training and eventually earn their commission with the Air Force

After that, it was just a matter of flight schooling and getting into the right air wing. Ironically, though, she would not go to the sandbox of the Middle East, but right into a UN Expeditionary Force that America was quickly scrambling assets together to send. She was lucky enough to get Rose as a Combat Systems Officer for the F-16F that the USAF decided to try out for this incursion, instead of selling them all to the UAE. They still were giving them away, but it may be a good stand-in since the F-15E Strike Eagles were needed in Iraq. For now, she spends her time reading Tom Clancy books and listening to music when not out on a sortie.

Personality: Virginia is a quiet girl who gets done what needs to get done, but swears like a sailor and is loyal to a fault. She avoids alcohol and tobacco and pop music. She reads in her spare time and has a very wonderful friendship with Rose.

Appearance:

Personal Gear: M1911A1
Aircraft: F-16F Block 60 Desert Falcon
Aircraft Colors: Standard
Character Theme: A Quick Death in Texas

Character Name: Rose Patterson
Nickname/callsign: Mako
Age: 22
Nationality: America
Gender: Female
Bio:
Rose was born out of the same region of the US as her friend Virginia, learning this when the two met in USAF ROTC. A rough and tough take-no-shit kind of girl through school, as a result of constantly getting bullied for her short stature. She found it easier to move around tall people though, making her a better fighter when she took advantage of it. After the gauntlet of public schooling was done, she went on to put her cruisin' bruisin' attitude into college and looked at getting a commission for the Air Force. In her off time, she played guitar and practiced boxing when she wasn't studying with Virginia.

Once the commission was in and the butter bars were pinned on, it was a whole other ballgame. Thanks to being in the same detachment and being known as "the dynamic duo", Rose and Virginia were slated to operate their own aircraft together, with Rose in the back as the CSO. Their first assignment would be part of a new United Nations Expeditionary Force that would be sent into whatever hellhole that "Tokyo Jupiter" thing led to. Rose was not happy about it, but then again her job was to just shut up and drop bombs. Let Virginia do all the flying, while she made it rain. And honestly, she wouldn't have it any other way.

Personality: Rose is more cynical and brash than her partner, Virginia. Still, she's more open as well. Her spitfire attitude comes from the fact that she's short as hell and hates getting reminded about it.

Appearance:

Personal Gear: Smith and Wesson Model 629
Aircraft: See above
Aircraft Colors: See above
Character Theme: Khe Sanh Riff

I think it's somewhere around 2010/2011.
That is hoping I did my math right.

That's approximately about right, I didn't entirely work it out myself, but if we all mutually agree it's around 2011 then that's good enough.

@Massasauga Virginia and Rose are great, I look forward to playing alongside them :) Please post them in the characters tab, you're good to go!

I'm stil umming and ahhing about Ryan. I'm half-tempted to change his aircraft to an A-6 Intruder (alternate timeline, change of world circumstances, aircraft stays in service, etc) as I have a great fondness for the 'Tin Tadpole' and I love ground attack as a role too. Would mean I'd need to create a WSO and change my background a little though, but I don't mind too much. I'll keep thinking on it.

I'll be honest, those apps were shit. Which is weird because I'm usually really good at apps and spend a lot of time on them.

I'd say keep Ryan in a Fighter or Multirole aircraft, but that's just me.

Well, I decided to go with the A-6F, so I have altered my sheet accordingly and I've gained a co-pilot

Character Name: Yuril Greggor
Nickname/callsign: Clem
Age: 26
Nationality: Bulgarian
Gender: Male

Bio:
Originally trained to fly MiG-29B, attrition while flying against the initial Yerrill invasion forced the Bulgarian and other eastern-aligned air forces to pull out their resserve-stocks of MiG-23s and make-do with whatever leftover avionics they had. Thankfully most of them had been retrofitted for improved dogfighting characteristics, but the older radar kits with a maximum acquisition-range of 70 km made them much more reliant on "flight leader" aircraft and ground controlled intercepts and less on individual manuvering than he'd grown comfortable with.

Things did not return to 'normal' until deliveries for replacement Zhuk-ME radars arrived for the MiG-29s that no longer existed, and so it was decided to fit the much improved MiG-29S's radar into the 25 year old airplanes and hope for the best.

Personality:
Calm, trusting, and skeptical. Often given the grunt-like part of any mission while other pilots had the privlidge to sit back and wait patiently for a radar-lock. Yet whenever his comrades got pinged, it was his job to race back at no less than 950 knots off the deck and sucker-punch a Yerrill fighter off their tail from below, or provide immediate close-air in the event of a bail-out over enemy territory to help the downed airman break-contact and flee to a rendezous with a friendly whirly-bird.

Appearance:


Personal Gear: A pair of Makarov pistols. (and Yuri)

Aircraft: MiG-23MLGD
Aircraft Colours: Woodland camo with shark's teeth
Character Theme: Bulllllllets!

Though I do like me some Su-22 goodies

@Foster Yuri is looing good so far! Bulgarian is a nice choice. It's a refreshing to change to DA COMRADE RUSSIA, but still getting to use a lot of the same stuff. And woo, get to play with different culture and such too.

I hadn't heard of the specific MLD variant of the MiG-23 before, it sounds like a good one.

I saw a sad-looking MiG-23 and an accompanying sad-looking MiG-27 at a museum in autumn last year. Admittedly, they only looked sad as they probably needed a bit of TLC from being on display outdoors in T'North of England and its' weather. The fact it was tremendously cold, windy and overcast also didn't help. That makes most things look sad by comparison.

Ask them if you can put a shark-toothed smiley-face on her.

Was tempted to do East Germany, for das Bundesboos out there.

But they get Su-22.

Ask them if you can put a shark-toothed smiley-face on her.

Bit of a long way to go back and ask ;) But maybe they'll do something like that if they refurbish them sometime in the future. Either way, it was something different to see. The whole museum was good, actually. Had a lot of unusual stuff for a museum over here, and things I hadn't seen before. A lot of the museums here only have ex-RAF, Army or RN aircraft. Seeing some foreign things was a nice change.

Notes that the first time I listened to "Bullets" by Archive, I thought the line said "Bullets off of beauty in the western sky. Bullets off of beauty and I don't know why."

<Snipped quote by Foster>

Bit of a long way to go back and ask ;) But maybe they'll do something like that if they refurbish them sometime in the future. Either way, it was something different to see. The whole museum was good, actually. Had a lot of unusual stuff for a museum over here, and things I hadn't seen before. A lot of the museums here only have ex-RAF, Army or RN aircraft. Seeing some foreign things was a nice change.

I guess I'm kinda spoiled to have a running T-34/85 just down the street by the airport.
(You'll have to ask the owner super-nicely, though)

Importing ammo for it is probably a pain, though.

Although I was somehow more impressed by the collection of vintage trucks.
-Vintage land rover trucks aren't common over here.
-Oddly enough, main battle tanks are exempt from this tax. So you can literally buy a gently used Centurion mk 8 for less than a Land Rover.
-I'm hinting that Vickers should start building tanks for the American public. Out-Hummer the Hummer already, show 'em how it's done.

BTW: a pound of chicken-meat is cheaper than a pound of eggs.

Just Bio to go, still using Mig-31

<snipped quote>

Land Rovers are a lot more common here. I cycle past a nice ex-military one that evidently belongs to a collector most days I cycle to work. It's still got the old markings and has the radio antenna bases still installed. I'll get a pic one day. There also a Humber Pig that just sits in someone's drive in my home city too.
I think because Portsmouth is a military town, there's quite a lot of stuff like that locally. One of the old defensive forts here was scheduled to become a museum, and they got to the point of bringing in a bunch of vehicles to exhibit, but never opened the museum. Now it's a park and ride for the local hospital, with a Chieftan tank out front, and apparently some more vehicles inside.

Just Bio to go, still using Mig-31

Sounds good to me! Looking forward to seeing it.

<Snipped quote by Foster>

Land Rovers are a lot more common here. I cycle past a nice ex-military one that evidently belongs to a collector most days I cycle to work. It's still got the old markings and has the radio antenna bases still installed. I'll get a pic one day. There also a Humber Pig that just sits in someone's drive in my home city too.
I think because Portsmouth is a military town, there's quite a lot of stuff like that locally. One of the old defensive forts here was scheduled to become a museum, and they got to the point of bringing in a bunch of vehicles to exhibit, but never opened the museum. Now it's a park and ride for the local hospital, with a Chieftan tank out front, and apparently some more vehicles inside.

*Points at local Nat'l gaurd open-air armory, motor-pool, and Oshkosh truck MRAP storage/repair yard.

Have chatted with M270 MLRS crewmen back when CNN was still mistakening them for bridgelayers.

Doesn't take a 6 yr old long to count the number of tubes on one of those.

"Why doesn't it have more rockets?" (was expecting, like, 40... just like BM-21)

"It has enough."

<Snipped quote by Silverwind Blade>
"Why doesn't it have more rockets?" (was expecting, like, 40... just like BM-21)

"It has enough."

Do your lads nick-name them the same as ours? A friend of mine had a brother in the Royal Artillery and they apparently called the MLRS 'grid squre removal service...! I like that one, made me chuckle.

There's mostly naval stuff around these parts, Portsmouth is one of the places on the South Coat of England the RN calls home, which is why we have all the tourist attractions around here mixed in with operational stuff. Not to mention everyone and their grandmothers' dog has a connection to something to do with the navy one way or the other. It's good in some ways, but it tends to be a bit like running the gauntlet if you're on a night out to the pub.
I probably don't see as much as you, as I suppose it's a bit easier to get up-close-and-personal to the land stuff, but it's still cool to see stuff when it comes around, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't one of the attractions for moving to the this area compared to where I used to live, which had absolutely zero interesting features. The only good thing there is the airsoft site in a disused shopping mall.

_{Note to non-british people that don't get teh orgin of the brit slang for the M270, as it was a joint US/UK thing originally called the "General Support Rocket System" or GSRS, and thus teh gridsquare-backronymn. As it was never officially called that in US nomenclature, the "removal-service" bit went over most people's heads and they called it based more on form than function.}

I think we call it somthing of a big woodland-camo grid-square eraser. Because of its brick-like lozenge shape.
-The rockets themselves are known as steel/Iron Rain. Those who named it off of function tended to refer to it as a commander's personal shotgun, as it could lay-down some mighty impressive counter-battery fire in the event of surprise-artillery (and as that threat became a non-issue, as a 70km sniper rifle much like its 203mm older brother).
--In short, it's the artillery-incarnate version of the A-10 Warthog.

For all the oopsies field commanders may see in need of removal to look fit and proper.

Strangely enough, you get desensitized to it. The vehicles tend to stay the same.
Sometimes they come back a little more or a little less banged-up than usual. Since this is kinda where MRAPs that run over landmines end-up.

All done here, just need to proofread and I'll post it tomorrow.