Re: [semi OT] Women wargamers

 ---- john atkins wrote: 
> I don't know what the malfunction with your mail software is, but 
> please teach it to format your mail properly.  For instance 

not a lot i can do about this, actually - it's altavista.net, a
web-email gateway, which doesn't word-wrap. but i'm sure they'd be
willing to let me tinker with their server ... :-) of course, i could
just say that it's a paragraph, and paragraphs are terminated by
carriage returns. thus i'm right and your email software should cope
with it, but i won't because we'd just get into a big argument about
email that's of no value to anyone. if it troubles you, which it does, i
will ponder on this problem.

> Anyway, I conceede this point--but also note that in Starship Troopers

> the Mobile Infantry was a very small army relative to it's population. 

exactly! power armour is a force multiplier, of most use when the armed
forces are small relative to the population, as in most advanced states,
which have better things to spend their tax guilders on.

> And also 
> that the MI _did_ require a high standard of physical fitness and 
> stamina--remember their basic training had a more than 80% failure 
> rate, a failure rate more in keeping with Ranger School in the US than

> with basic or infantry school anywhere in the world.

true, but i suspect that this was more for plot reasons than technology.

> Everyone wanted to make it universal

i'll bet money that there were senior generals in the british army who
opposed it. that's just the way it is with senior generals in the
british army :-). anyway, wasn't motorised armoured infantry transport
pioneered in ww1?

> >now, every infantry formation has apcs/ifvs, or have more specialised

> >travel arrangements, such as helos or parachutes. in fact, i am sure 
> 
> Beg to differ.  In US, 10th Mountain, 29th Light Infantry, and
numerous 
 seperate brigades are light but not airborne or air assault.  The 
> Germans have their mountain units, the Brits have. . . Actually, I 
> don't know whether the Brits have light infantry formations outside of

> the Paras and Royal Marines.

well, the reason these lads are on foot is because they go where motor
transport cannot; i would include foot under 'more specialised travel
arrangements'. anyway, you are quite right and i was not sufficiently
precise.

>  I do know that they dismounted some 
> normally mech units and sent them to the Falklands as foot troops 
> because they don't/didn't have the sea lift capability to send them
nor 
> the logistical infrastructure to sustain them.

now that's a bloody good point; i can envisage planners looking at some
hundred-man rebel army on New Boxtead (unimportant backwater world) and
thinking 'do we really need to send power armour? nah.'.

>  But at any rate, that's 
> just major powers.  Smaller nations generally have a lot of 
> truck-mounted infantry and straight leg divisions because they can't 
> afford even trucks.

also true.

>  I'd also note that so-called parachute/airborne 
> units tend to do as much or more movement conventionally than by air 
> assault--

i suppose thatr once you've dropped into the theatre, it's not terribly
easy to get back on the plane ...

>the Paras walked to Goose Green,

NO THEY DID NOT! they *yomped*! there's a difference :-).

> That means that what a 'normal' eye sees at 200 (or 400) feet, I see
at 
> 20.  IOW, I'm pulling in 1/10th of the level of detail a non-visually 
> impaired chap is-and that's my good eye.  This level of eyesight was 
> such that it required a medical waiver to join the Army.  :)

a brief experiment in looking at text on the monito suggests i have
20/40 vision., based on the assumption that i have normal vision with my
specs on. which i don't, so it's probably more like 20/100. heavy, man.

Tom

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