a week and a week-end wrap-up, Part 1
Aug. 23rd, 2004 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerCentreville HS Thread: now 56 and counting. Topic has shifted to lectures on how to not respond to mass emails.
I trundled off Saturday morning to play another round in the DC Conscripts' 2004 Iron Conscript ASL Tournament. One of the club members down in Springfield was hosting, and if people think I have a big game collection, they should see his... wow! I played a Schwerpunkt scenario entitled "Burn, Gurkha, Burn!" in which a ragtag group of 17 Indian Div troops, about half Gurkhas and the rest presumably Jats, Frontier Force, or Burma Rifles, face off against two large forces of Imperial Japanese Army troops determined to capture a series of hilltop positions from them.
I organized a forward defense with local reserves and a fallback position, knowing that to win Jap had to clear us off all three hills. One small hill I guarded with a dug-in platoon of the non-Gurkha troops and one Bren LMG, with one leader to help rally stragglers. On the largest hilltop, near where the main force of IJA would appear, I put our one medium machinegun, our best leader (a Gurkha 9-2 officer) and a mixed force of Jats and Gurkhas. In the jungle between the two hills, I put a couple of squads of Jats who could run either direction as needed and, on the edge of the jungle where it opened out into the elephant grass and clearing the Japs had to advance through, I stationed a squad of my best Nepali hillmen with a Bren, trusting them to destroy any IJA who tried to move through that are between my positions. Lastly, I put one squad back on the last hill behind the rest of my line, the last-ditch defence. The rest of our small force (another platoon of Gurkhas and a leader) would show up there on Turn 3 and, though we would almost certainly lose the outer positions, we might be able to hold on there until the final turn. They had some foxholes, but, in retrospect, I should have had them busy throughout the game trying to get more ready...
My opponent winced at my good early dice as the Bren stationed on the smaller hill cut down an entire squad of the enemy as they moved forward. This put one of his two flamethrowers out of commission for half the game, as his other troops searched through the jungle for where the first squad had left it. More of his troops fell as he tried to push forward against my smaller position, but numbers told, and as the IJA rushed forward there were too many of them for us to shoot them all (in ASL, most squads break when they do badly--their morale shatters and they run and hide until a leader rallies them and they comeback to fight; but when the Japanese fail, their squads lose some of their strength but keep coming--they almost never break outright.) Far too soon he overwhelmed that hilltop, though I did him a good deal of damage in the process.
He made one rush to the bottom of the large hill and set up a firebase with several machineguns and mortars there. The MMG went on a tear, taking out an entire stack of his units, probably the better part of a platoon, including all his mortar crews. We also damaged a number of his squads waiting to make the run up the hill. But I'd miscalculated and but my entrenchments back from the north crest of the hill, forgetting that his attack there was more likely and more dangerous than from the east. To defend the hill, most of my guys had to move out into the open to fire downhill, and that made them very vulnerable to his MGs. He pushed forward again, my MMG squad broke and fled, the other rifle squads followed, and he pushed over the top of the hill. Most of the guys on that hill got surrounded (Joe was very good at moving around my flanks and isolating broken units.)
So it was all down to my last-ditch defenders. The reinforcements brought another MMG with them, which went into our prepared position on Hill #3. But again my rifle pits were not sited as well as they could have been, and a lot of his troops were able to move from the big hill into position to attack the small hill without taking much fire. His MGs held onto the top of the big hill until their ammo began running out and their fire (I think it was) caused some of my last Gurkhas to battle-harden (becoming fanatic) and for a hero to leap out of their ranks. Not only that, but the heavy fire that Jap was putting on my last hilltop turned the newly-arrived officer into a raging tiger, bumping him up two levels in quality. We got pushed off the hilltop, then in our last phase we struggle back up and held one end of the ridge. He had only one player turn to defeat these stalwart defenders. And wouldn't you know? It was the flamethrower, lost in the first turn and retrieved many turns later that, with its only shot of the game (ran out of fuel, too!) broke the fanatic squad and the leader (the hero had bitten it in close combat) and won him the game
and
After the match, I started to head home, but realized I was out on a Saturday with some free time, so I pulled into a car audio shop that I had previously located on the Web and inquired about options for fixing my unit. It came in the car, which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redactrice and I had bought used from Carmax, so we had no manual and were unable to set any of the stations (after a year or two I figured out how to reset the clock...) Lately it had been giving me various troubles: the radio signal would BLLATT annoyingly at the slightest bump or, on some days, if one even touched the dashboard anywhere. I'm assuming that was a loose connection to the antenna, since it only did this with the radio, not with the CD player. On the other hand, the CD player would sometimes turn the volume ALL THE WAY UP without any human intervention and, having done so, would not allow any controls to work (volume down, power off, etc.; one had to detach the faceplate (it was removable) whihc automatically shut the power off.
As I suspected, simply taking the unit out and sending it for repair would cost nearly as much as a new system (there must be some clever name for the way mass production can make building something cheaper than fixing it). So I got a new Sony system, which has the added advantage that the display is lit, so I can read it at night. It's really annoying not having a clock one can read in the dark when you're going somewhere; no longer a problem for me!
I also stopped and left the four pieces that had been sitting in my car to be framed. One is a map of Rocky Mountain National Park; after touring there, I wanted a reminder of that beautiful place. Another is a watercolor painting of cats by Phyllis Greenway, an artist friend of my parents'. The last two were a pair of beautiful photo prints that Chris gave me as mementoes of our trip to Scotland in 2002: one of Loch Achray and one of the farm at Achnambeithach (now a mountain rescue station). They're by Michael McGregor, an excellent photographer. "parful" expensive, all that, though.
On Sunday, I clipped all three cats' claws (they were getting really long); Gilbert objected strenuously and required the whole "wrap the cat in a towel" trick to immobilize his (dangerously razor-sharp, not-clipped claws) while I did them one at a time. Then I managed to vacuum the entire place (Level 2 vacuuming, where you do all the rooms, not just the high-traffic ones, and you move furniture, but only the stuff you can shift with one hand). Washed, dried, and folded three loads of laundry (OK, some were pretty small loads), and put away a few piles of things.
I still need to work out a schedule, clean the kitchen and bathroom, balance my checkbook and run budget figures, do a paper recycling run, and carry out a few minor repairs. And a *lot* of document filing... And get some stuff up on ebay...
I trundled off Saturday morning to play another round in the DC Conscripts' 2004 Iron Conscript ASL Tournament. One of the club members down in Springfield was hosting, and if people think I have a big game collection, they should see his... wow! I played a Schwerpunkt scenario entitled "Burn, Gurkha, Burn!" in which a ragtag group of 17 Indian Div troops, about half Gurkhas and the rest presumably Jats, Frontier Force, or Burma Rifles, face off against two large forces of Imperial Japanese Army troops determined to capture a series of hilltop positions from them.
I organized a forward defense with local reserves and a fallback position, knowing that to win Jap had to clear us off all three hills. One small hill I guarded with a dug-in platoon of the non-Gurkha troops and one Bren LMG, with one leader to help rally stragglers. On the largest hilltop, near where the main force of IJA would appear, I put our one medium machinegun, our best leader (a Gurkha 9-2 officer) and a mixed force of Jats and Gurkhas. In the jungle between the two hills, I put a couple of squads of Jats who could run either direction as needed and, on the edge of the jungle where it opened out into the elephant grass and clearing the Japs had to advance through, I stationed a squad of my best Nepali hillmen with a Bren, trusting them to destroy any IJA who tried to move through that are between my positions. Lastly, I put one squad back on the last hill behind the rest of my line, the last-ditch defence. The rest of our small force (another platoon of Gurkhas and a leader) would show up there on Turn 3 and, though we would almost certainly lose the outer positions, we might be able to hold on there until the final turn. They had some foxholes, but, in retrospect, I should have had them busy throughout the game trying to get more ready...
My opponent winced at my good early dice as the Bren stationed on the smaller hill cut down an entire squad of the enemy as they moved forward. This put one of his two flamethrowers out of commission for half the game, as his other troops searched through the jungle for where the first squad had left it. More of his troops fell as he tried to push forward against my smaller position, but numbers told, and as the IJA rushed forward there were too many of them for us to shoot them all (in ASL, most squads break when they do badly--their morale shatters and they run and hide until a leader rallies them and they comeback to fight; but when the Japanese fail, their squads lose some of their strength but keep coming--they almost never break outright.) Far too soon he overwhelmed that hilltop, though I did him a good deal of damage in the process.
He made one rush to the bottom of the large hill and set up a firebase with several machineguns and mortars there. The MMG went on a tear, taking out an entire stack of his units, probably the better part of a platoon, including all his mortar crews. We also damaged a number of his squads waiting to make the run up the hill. But I'd miscalculated and but my entrenchments back from the north crest of the hill, forgetting that his attack there was more likely and more dangerous than from the east. To defend the hill, most of my guys had to move out into the open to fire downhill, and that made them very vulnerable to his MGs. He pushed forward again, my MMG squad broke and fled, the other rifle squads followed, and he pushed over the top of the hill. Most of the guys on that hill got surrounded (Joe was very good at moving around my flanks and isolating broken units.)
So it was all down to my last-ditch defenders. The reinforcements brought another MMG with them, which went into our prepared position on Hill #3. But again my rifle pits were not sited as well as they could have been, and a lot of his troops were able to move from the big hill into position to attack the small hill without taking much fire. His MGs held onto the top of the big hill until their ammo began running out and their fire (I think it was) caused some of my last Gurkhas to battle-harden (becoming fanatic) and for a hero to leap out of their ranks. Not only that, but the heavy fire that Jap was putting on my last hilltop turned the newly-arrived officer into a raging tiger, bumping him up two levels in quality. We got pushed off the hilltop, then in our last phase we struggle back up and held one end of the ridge. He had only one player turn to defeat these stalwart defenders. And wouldn't you know? It was the flamethrower, lost in the first turn and retrieved many turns later that, with its only shot of the game (ran out of fuel, too!) broke the fanatic squad and the leader (the hero had bitten it in close combat) and won him the game
and
After the match, I started to head home, but realized I was out on a Saturday with some free time, so I pulled into a car audio shop that I had previously located on the Web and inquired about options for fixing my unit. It came in the car, which
redactrice and I had bought used from Carmax, so we had no manual and were unable to set any of the stations (after a year or two I figured out how to reset the clock...) Lately it had been giving me various troubles: the radio signal would BLLATT annoyingly at the slightest bump or, on some days, if one even touched the dashboard anywhere. I'm assuming that was a loose connection to the antenna, since it only did this with the radio, not with the CD player. On the other hand, the CD player would sometimes turn the volume ALL THE WAY UP without any human intervention and, having done so, would not allow any controls to work (volume down, power off, etc.; one had to detach the faceplate (it was removable) whihc automatically shut the power off.As I suspected, simply taking the unit out and sending it for repair would cost nearly as much as a new system (there must be some clever name for the way mass production can make building something cheaper than fixing it). So I got a new Sony system, which has the added advantage that the display is lit, so I can read it at night. It's really annoying not having a clock one can read in the dark when you're going somewhere; no longer a problem for me!
I also stopped and left the four pieces that had been sitting in my car to be framed. One is a map of Rocky Mountain National Park; after touring there, I wanted a reminder of that beautiful place. Another is a watercolor painting of cats by Phyllis Greenway, an artist friend of my parents'. The last two were a pair of beautiful photo prints that Chris gave me as mementoes of our trip to Scotland in 2002: one of Loch Achray and one of the farm at Achnambeithach (now a mountain rescue station). They're by Michael McGregor, an excellent photographer. "parful" expensive, all that, though.
On Sunday, I clipped all three cats' claws (they were getting really long); Gilbert objected strenuously and required the whole "wrap the cat in a towel" trick to immobilize his (dangerously razor-sharp, not-clipped claws) while I did them one at a time. Then I managed to vacuum the entire place (Level 2 vacuuming, where you do all the rooms, not just the high-traffic ones, and you move furniture, but only the stuff you can shift with one hand). Washed, dried, and folded three loads of laundry (OK, some were pretty small loads), and put away a few piles of things.
I still need to work out a schedule, clean the kitchen and bathroom, balance my checkbook and run budget figures, do a paper recycling run, and carry out a few minor repairs. And a *lot* of document filing... And get some stuff up on ebay...
