Re: Starship Troopers Review--game stuff added to keep it on topic

> To understand the film you have to understand the two most important
> men in its production: Paul Verhoven and Robert Heinlein. Verhoven
> grew up in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation and apparently
> saw some pretty bad stuff. This has coloured most of his film work,
> most obviously--and first--noticed in the film _Robocop_.

Well before you go too far, Verhoeven was an officer in the Dutch
Marines. While the rest of the dutch Army isn't much when it comes to
their soldierly abilities and attitudes (hey it's a 9-5 job). The Dutch
Marines fall into your standard elite unit category with similar
attitudes and behaviors of say Rangers, Royal Marine commandos etc. etc.
I have worked extensively with them on several occasions, (one tie for 6
months) during my 20 year military career. All of them have the typical
gung ho tear em up, hooah attitude.  If anyone would be more gung ho and
"jingoistic", it would be P.V. Many of his movies are good old fashioned
shoot em up and let god sort em out type films, and if he thinks he's
making some kind of anti-war statement with it..well, whatever.

I liked the movie, besides it's numerous shortcomings, and would see it
again. I also liked the soundtrack. One thing that  I was surprised with
was the fact that despite having Dale Dye as their military advisor,
many easy mods to the film were left out. Don't these guys use tactical
formations in the future?  Fire team wedges, immediate action drills
etc. etc. Every scene is a huge swarm of SSTs stepping all over each
other, or you get ten troopers circling a bug firing at it from the hip
with no friendly fire. Also not much in the way of Fire support in the
future for the MI I guess, not crew served weapons attached to the line
companies OR orbital bombardment support.

I feel that it had little to do with the book besides taking some basic
plot lines, and using some people and place names. I already heard they
are going to film a sequel with powered armor. Has anyone else heard
this? This will include the rest of the war and the final assault on the
home world.

And by the way, what the heck is wrong with a little T&A? The films
alreay got an R rating with the violence anyway.  While maybe giving a
nod to some notion of coed combat units in the future, I feel that the
inclusion had a lot to do with packaging the film for today's audience.
The while movie is filled with those kinds of decision, which of course
leaves us curmudgeons grumbling.

Someone mentioned that there's a 15mm version of the bugs out? I'd like
to grab some of those for Stargrunt. I do have a couple bags of spiders
for DS II (these are microarmor size.) I also picked up some battletech
elementals from Ral Partha. These are about 8mm tall, and are basically
troops in powered armor (if you are not familiar with battletech).
They're pretty close to SST. They were $8.85 for a pack of 30. If anyone
needs a web address where they can be had, let me know and I'll send it.
They also make a few lines of "regular" futuristic infantry and a ton of
vehicles (grav and tracked) as well as the mechs. It's a bigger scale
than traditional microarmor 5mm vs 8mm.

Los