You mentioned that one of the things you didn't like was a lack of "immersion". I say "how could you NOT be drawn in with that awsome music"? And I thought that the voice acting of the single-player campaign was quite good.
There wasn't much of an in-game personality, I admit. *craft has always had a more detailed 'unit personality'... particularly when you start clicking on the same unit over and over again (FUNNY stuff in there).
But I was immediately hooked on it... the sheer scope of TA was great. And the control it gave you allowed you to manage that scope without too many headaches.
One of the great things TA allowed you to do: Order all the units of a factory out on a particular patrol route along the front line. When you've stocked up a sufficient supply of bodies, select them all (they can all be in the same control group, so this is trivial) and fling them at your enemy. Great fun. Lots of pretty explosions.
I think I'm going to have to re-install it Real Soon now. If only I could come by copies of CC and BT again.
How could they make it first pick? Because it rocked.
They're right. It was WAY ahead of it's time. Games today STILL don't give you the level of control that TA did.
Controls TA pioneered: Order queuing: Hold down shift and you can give a unit a giant stack of orders. No limit (save memory I'd imagine). Warcraft 3 had it, 2 didn't. Starcraft didn't either.
Factory orders: You give an order queue to a factory, and every unit it produced would get those orders. This feature has yet to be duplicated (to my knowledge).
Factory groups: If you assigned a control group to a factory, every unit it produced was also in that group. I haven't seen this duplicated either.
Seperate move & shoot behavior controls: Some games give you the option of having a unit be agressive or passive or whatever, but TA seperated movement and firing options. For movement you had "hold still, tether (follow enemy a short distance and then return), and free roam". For attacking, they had "hold fire, return fire, and fire at will". In warcraft three you can order a unit to hold still, but you can't order it to hold it's fire.
Select all of *: TA had LOTS of keyboard shortcuts to let you select all of a particular group of units. Some of those groups included "all units that can attack", "air units" "ships", "construction units", "all the units on the current screen", "all units of the same type as the ones currently selected", stuff like that. Oh, and "all units".
Production Queues: You could order a factory to keep producing a given unit forever. You could order 5 fighers, then 10 bombers, then 5 more fighters, then 3 scouts, THEN keep building fighters forever.
Foritifications: You were allowed to build little barracades called "dragons teeth". They could be shot over with indirect-fire weapons, but direct fire hit them, and it took quite a bit of damage to destroy them. You could build your own walls.
Pay as you go production: Producing units drained resources over time, rather than paying for everything up front.
Unlimited resources: There was no limit on how much of a given resource was present. A "metal patch" with a miner on it would continue producing X-metal-per-second until it was destroyed. More of a gameplay descision than a control feature, but still noteworthy.
If you didn't like TA, you either: * Need to take another look * Don't have the same tastes as right-thinking people (me).
And it was REALLY mod-able. Quite a few total conversions floating around out there. Sadly, many were based on someone else's IP and shut down (star wars, various other RTS's duplicated in TA, stuff like that).
Incidentally, Chris Taylor did quite a bit of "new spin on old ideas" in Dungeon Siege too. Sadly, he seems to have removed some "fun" stuff, along with many of the hassles. And I pray that he goes back and does that sci-fi RTS he's threatened to do on occasion.
I understand that ET was an embodyment of everything wrong with Atari at the time. Yes, I am a heretic.
Arogant fools the lot of them. They figured they could take a dump in a box and people would buy it. THEY PRODUCED MORE COPIES OF ET THAN THERE WERE ATARI MACHINES TO PLAY THEM. I understand some exec rationalized it by saying that some people would want an extra copy for their summer home, or some such sheet.
Arrogance killed Atari (the real one, not infograms).
As far as pac-man goes, I understand the 2600 port sold quite well. On the other hand, their ARCADE success was largely due to their being the only player in town. Then they were leading the way with a horde of immitators snapping at their heels. And then Pac-Man (originally "Puck-man", but it would have been too easy to mangle it into "Fuck-man") and Donkey Kong came along. Bad business decisions (back to ET again) + actual competetors that were equals = toasty Atari.
Getting rid of Bushnell wasn't a good idea either. But we have Chucky Cheese now, and we woulnd't have if Nolan had stayed at Atari. Yes, Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, founded Chucky Cheese's... home to video games and bad pizza. Yay.
Kinda struck a nerve, but I'll do what I can to keep my "tone" moderate.
WHAT THE F*#$^?!
Kidding.
Now then. "Simple" code can still contain things that aren't straight C. For me, a virtual function is "simple". Heck, so is the STL. I've used it, got over the initial syntactic shock, and discovered just how bloody powerful and simple (yes, simple) it is to USE. Stepping through it still isn't much fun, but I try to avoid that, and usually can.
Function pointers aren't that big a deal... for someone who's been exposed to them. But saying "No function pointers" in straight C (as opposed to Gay C?) means you can't use the standard libraries qsort fer cryin' out loud.
And the nightmare's described in dealing with fixed-size arrays have quite a few known solutions that he's (she's?) been FORBIDDEN from using.
Yes, OOP, prodedural programming, various languages. All tools. But when you're (non-technical by the sounds of it) boss says "Don't use those tools over there, stick to the tonka toy versions", you're a little limited.
Good thing I was never in that situation. Wouldn't be pretty.
And that sounds like a stupid way to achive what the manager sounded like they wanted anyway. XP (not the OS) would work, as would some basic code review/inspection practices.
Sounds like the knuckle-draggin' PHB just didn't know anything about any other approaches to their "interchangable programmer" goal and went about things in the most destructive way possible.
You get power from letting heat go from a hotter area to a cooler (darker) one.
Okay, so I'm really stretching here. What's your point?
They usually use two metal plates seperated by vacuum at HIGH (>=1000C) temperatures, but there's been some work lately on creating a solid-state version that could work at around 200c-400c, give or take.
Slap one of the yet-to-be-developed solid-state thermopiles between your car's engine and radiator... could be very sweet.
I *do* like Planetside, so let me take this chance to defend it.
A patch going onto the test servers this week (should have been last weekend, but wasn't) addresses a number of things.
They're making a nearly all-encompassing 'balance pass', where they're tweaking the stats of just about every weapon and vehicle in the game. Whether or not this actually FIXES the faction imbalances (perceived or real), remains to be seen.;)
The bug count was never as bad as I've heard about some other MMO games... the release was actually playable. I heard a number of other players saying that it "wasn't nearly as bad as X when they first released it". None the less, the PS devs continue to fix (and yes, introduce) bugs.
I woulnd't say it's a complete failure at all. If Sony thought it was, they wouldn't be continuing to sink money into developing more content for it. They're about to start a beta on the first expansion pack.
They're also about to introduce one of the feature's thats been hinted at (even showed up in an old screen shot) since beta, "Platoons". If that doesn't mean anything to you, oh well. Means a lot to me. Yes, they did take their time in actually getting it released (should be available on test server this week), but at least they're actually getting it out.
So I think there's still a lot of milage left in planetside.
But....
Savage looks pretty cool too. I'll definitely give the demo a shot when it becomes available.
Dude. It's a Farnsworth Fusor that some highschool student and his dad threw together with parts they scavanged from various places.
The only interesting thing about it is that it was made so cheaply by a kid.
Farnsworth-style fusors have been well known for quite some time. If you'd read the fine article again, you'll note that these sorts of setups (at vastly higher efficency using much higher quality gear) are used in science and commerce for various applications requiring neutron generation.
Yes, actually. It does, at least as far as the collision detection goes.
But I'm still a little fuzzy on a couple points. Going back to the initial purpose of BSPs (according to the article): depth sorting.
Place the camera some point in the world looking in a particular direction.
Okay, so finding which leaf it's in isn't too hard. Got that.
But given a particular facing, how the heck do you sort all that stuff? Seems to me that any given node's parent deviding plane (whatever you call it) could be at basically any orientation at all.
I get the top-down usages... it's the bottom-up ones that confuse me.
And maybe I'm just looking at the problem wrong, and this is a top-down kinda thing in the first place.
I'm a 'regular' programmer trying to break into the gaming realm.
I read this article. I understand how to build a BSP. I feel that left out some important details.
Like how you actually use it. The article mentions that modern games don't use it for dept-sort drawing any more, as hardware z-buffers are now good enough to make this unnecessary... it said that they're used instead for things like collision detection.
My question is HOW? Okay so I've got this tree of map hunks. So what? Given an object or person in *3D* space, I don't see how you're supposed to use it. Someone else mentioned an "octa-something" tree which sounds like it would be far easier (for me, conceptually) to use. With 8 directions, you've got above/below, right/left, in front/behind. 2^3 = 8. Groovy.
I suppose the articles example may have confused me a bit, being entirely 2d. In a non-trivial (I hesitate to use the phrase "real world" in this context;) situation, many of the deviding planes wouldn't be lined up vertically, giving you some 3-d-ishness to your data...
That little trip down congnition ave still didn't help me figure it out though. Given a viewpoint and facing, I don't see how you're supposed to traverse this tree is going to help.
Okay, so you find the node the viewpoint is in. I can see how that works (am I inside this convex space? no, okay move on). I just don't see how that helps you. It seems to me that a given node could have been sliced out of your world-data by a plane on just about any angle... so I'm mysified as to how you find anything near you (that isn't in your current node), or traverse the BSP in z-order from your current position in some arbitrary direction.
Feel free to use the example data from the article (describing your own data sounds like a lot of work for a/. reply).
"From the tech driven SF genre into the character driven fantasy world."
Which fantasy world are you on?
Seriously. That horrific overgeneralization is just plain wrong. In both genres, you've got some stories that are character driven, and some that are there to explore how "X" would affect a society... whether "X" is the ability of a select few to conjure fire out of the air, or the technology to travel faster than the speed of light. Whatever.
And, in both genres, some stories have neither interesting characters, nor an interesting "X". Such stories tend to suck.
I'm thinking spider slik is an exception to that rule.
Think about it: Cobwebs.
When was the last time you looked inside some nasty old house and DIDN'T see century-old cobwebs? Just ask hollywood! They're the authority I go to for all my fact-checking needs.
Okay, so it occurs to me that all my "nasty old house" refferences are from movies.
But cotton is also an organicly produced compound, and I don't see the clothes rotting off your back.
I just started a "Video game programming" class at the local community college (Palomar College in San Marcos, CA). One of the annecdotes Ed Magnin (the proff) mentioned to us went something like this:
Way back in the Apple][ days (not ||) Ed was quite the Apple expert. Apparently the local San Diego apple user's group got quite a few visits from Steve & Steve (Jobs & Woz). Anyway, Ed decided to go into making software, and created a fairly significant BBS to sell his stuff. People gave their credit card number on line, and downloaded their software. Ed would then print out the credit card numbers from his dB and take them down to his bank.
He's been called into a number of patent cases to demonstrate prior art. The hostile company would then drop their case and move on to their next victim. It's quite possible that he was talking about these PanIP guys. Sounds sleazy enough.
Why on earth wouldn't you use a tracking system? (other than to prop up your argument, I mean)
It's not that complicated. It does add a little more maintenance, but only a little.
I personally think the cleaning would be more of an issue than the directional control. Stuff gets DUSTY around here (southern california). Car washing is either incessant or a waste of time. (yes, that was an oxymoron)
" Question is; can we detect it fast enough to matter? Knowing where a sub was 30min ago is useless. "
I disagree. While 30-minute-old information might not be of much use in a sub-battle, it could be quite useful to know that "them dang ians just launched 4 subs towards 's coast... and we can expect them to arrive in less than 2 days" on a strategic or political level.
IIRC, Daikatana had this whole "aura of mystery" thing going right up until release. Doom 3 has gameplay footage (just a little, but enough to look at it and go "holy SHIT that looks good") and screenshots available to all.
I *know* doom 3 will look amazing. No one new jack sheet about Daikasucka until it was release.
Could be wrong, but *I* sure didn't see any Daikatana screenshots or gameplay movies until after release.
I use STL in "real-life applications" on a regular basis. Maps, sets, vectors, deques, lists, algorithms, auto_ptr (and boost's shared_ptr), and so on. I haven't needed iterator adapters (for example) but that doesn't mean their not useful in "real-life applications".
Would you care to back up your assertion with some examples?
Slashdot Mirror
You must be thinking of MYST... two very different games.
You mentioned that one of the things you didn't like was a lack of "immersion". I say "how could you NOT be drawn in with that awsome music"? And I thought that the voice acting of the single-player campaign was quite good.
There wasn't much of an in-game personality, I admit. *craft has always had a more detailed 'unit personality'... particularly when you start clicking on the same unit over and over again (FUNNY stuff in there).
But I was immediately hooked on it... the sheer scope of TA was great. And the control it gave you allowed you to manage that scope without too many headaches.
One of the great things TA allowed you to do: Order all the units of a factory out on a particular patrol route along the front line. When you've stocked up a sufficient supply of bodies, select them all (they can all be in the same control group, so this is trivial) and fling them at your enemy. Great fun. Lots of pretty explosions.
I think I'm going to have to re-install it Real Soon now. If only I could come by copies of CC and BT again.
How could they make it first pick? Because it rocked.
:
They're right. It was WAY ahead of it's time. Games today STILL don't give you the level of control that TA did.
Controls TA pioneered:
Order queuing: Hold down shift and you can give a unit a giant stack of orders. No limit (save memory I'd imagine). Warcraft 3 had it, 2 didn't. Starcraft didn't either.
Factory orders: You give an order queue to a factory, and every unit it produced would get those orders. This feature has yet to be duplicated (to my knowledge).
Factory groups: If you assigned a control group to a factory, every unit it produced was also in that group. I haven't seen this duplicated either.
Seperate move & shoot behavior controls: Some games give you the option of having a unit be agressive or passive or whatever, but TA seperated movement and firing options. For movement you had "hold still, tether (follow enemy a short distance and then return), and free roam". For attacking, they had "hold fire, return fire, and fire at will". In warcraft three you can order a unit to hold still, but you can't order it to hold it's fire.
Select all of *: TA had LOTS of keyboard shortcuts to let you select all of a particular group of units. Some of those groups included "all units that can attack", "air units" "ships", "construction units", "all the units on the current screen", "all units of the same type as the ones currently selected", stuff like that. Oh, and "all units".
Production Queues: You could order a factory to keep producing a given unit forever. You could order 5 fighers, then 10 bombers, then 5 more fighters, then 3 scouts, THEN keep building fighters forever.
Foritifications: You were allowed to build little barracades called "dragons teeth". They could be shot over with indirect-fire weapons, but direct fire hit them, and it took quite a bit of damage to destroy them. You could build your own walls.
Pay as you go production: Producing units drained resources over time, rather than paying for everything up front.
Unlimited resources: There was no limit on how much of a given resource was present. A "metal patch" with a miner on it would continue producing X-metal-per-second until it was destroyed. More of a gameplay descision than a control feature, but still noteworthy.
If you didn't like TA, you either
* Need to take another look
* Don't have the same tastes as right-thinking people (me).
And it was REALLY mod-able. Quite a few total conversions floating around out there. Sadly, many were based on someone else's IP and shut down (star wars, various other RTS's duplicated in TA, stuff like that).
Incidentally, Chris Taylor did quite a bit of "new spin on old ideas" in Dungeon Siege too. Sadly, he seems to have removed some "fun" stuff, along with many of the hassles. And I pray that he goes back and does that sci-fi RTS he's threatened to do on occasion.
I understand that ET was an embodyment of everything wrong with Atari at the time. Yes, I am a heretic.
Arogant fools the lot of them. They figured they could take a dump in a box and people would buy it. THEY PRODUCED MORE COPIES OF ET THAN THERE WERE ATARI MACHINES TO PLAY THEM. I understand some exec rationalized it by saying that some people would want an extra copy for their summer home, or some such sheet.
Arrogance killed Atari (the real one, not infograms).
As far as pac-man goes, I understand the 2600 port sold quite well. On the other hand, their ARCADE success was largely due to their being the only player in town. Then they were leading the way with a horde of immitators snapping at their heels. And then Pac-Man (originally "Puck-man", but it would have been too easy to mangle it into "Fuck-man") and Donkey Kong came along. Bad business decisions (back to ET again) + actual competetors that were equals = toasty Atari.
Getting rid of Bushnell wasn't a good idea either. But we have Chucky Cheese now, and we woulnd't have if Nolan had stayed at Atari. Yes, Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, founded Chucky Cheese's... home to video games and bad pizza. Yay.
That's "FUNNY" not "Troll". Wow.
"
Confusing language is the tool of every good businessman
"
Your definiting of "good" and mine differ significantly.
Being a thieving bastard seldom pays off in the long run. Ask Enron.
Kinda struck a nerve, but I'll do what I can to keep my "tone" moderate.
WHAT THE F*#$^?!
Kidding.
Now then. "Simple" code can still contain things that aren't straight C. For me, a virtual function is "simple". Heck, so is the STL. I've used it, got over the initial syntactic shock, and discovered just how bloody powerful and simple (yes, simple) it is to USE. Stepping through it still isn't much fun, but I try to avoid that, and usually can.
Function pointers aren't that big a deal... for someone who's been exposed to them. But saying "No function pointers" in straight C (as opposed to Gay C?) means you can't use the standard libraries qsort fer cryin' out loud.
And the nightmare's described in dealing with fixed-size arrays have quite a few known solutions that he's (she's?) been FORBIDDEN from using.
Yes, OOP, prodedural programming, various languages. All tools. But when you're (non-technical by the sounds of it) boss says "Don't use those tools over there, stick to the tonka toy versions", you're a little limited.
Good thing I was never in that situation. Wouldn't be pretty.
And that sounds like a stupid way to achive what the manager sounded like they wanted anyway. XP (not the OS) would work, as would some basic code review/inspection practices.
Sounds like the knuckle-draggin' PHB just didn't know anything about any other approaches to their "interchangable programmer" goal and went about things in the most destructive way possible.
Scary.
There already is one. Thermocouple/thermopile.
You get power from letting heat go from a hotter area to a cooler (darker) one.
Okay, so I'm really stretching here. What's your point?
They usually use two metal plates seperated by vacuum at HIGH (>=1000C) temperatures, but there's been some work lately on creating a solid-state version that could work at around 200c-400c, give or take.
Slap one of the yet-to-be-developed solid-state thermopiles between your car's engine and radiator... could be very sweet.
I *do* like Planetside, so let me take this chance to defend it.
;)
A patch going onto the test servers this week (should have been last weekend, but wasn't) addresses a number of things.
They're making a nearly all-encompassing 'balance pass', where they're tweaking the stats of just about every weapon and vehicle in the game. Whether or not this actually FIXES the faction imbalances (perceived or real), remains to be seen.
The bug count was never as bad as I've heard about some other MMO games... the release was actually playable. I heard a number of other players saying that it "wasn't nearly as bad as X when they first released it". None the less, the PS devs continue to fix (and yes, introduce) bugs.
I woulnd't say it's a complete failure at all. If Sony thought it was, they wouldn't be continuing to sink money into developing more content for it. They're about to start a beta on the first expansion pack.
They're also about to introduce one of the feature's thats been hinted at (even showed up in an old screen shot) since beta, "Platoons". If that doesn't mean anything to you, oh well. Means a lot to me. Yes, they did take their time in actually getting it released (should be available on test server this week), but at least they're actually getting it out.
So I think there's still a lot of milage left in planetside.
But....
Savage looks pretty cool too. I'll definitely give the demo a shot when it becomes available.
Dude. It's a Farnsworth Fusor that some highschool student and his dad threw together with parts they scavanged from various places.
The only interesting thing about it is that it was made so cheaply by a kid.
Farnsworth-style fusors have been well known for quite some time. If you'd read the fine article again, you'll note that these sorts of setups (at vastly higher efficency using much higher quality gear) are used in science and commerce for various applications requiring neutron generation.
Not a new thing.
But it has not been done many times by someone IN HIGHSCHOOL.
So that's news.
Ya crusty bastard.
Yes, actually. It does, at least as far as the collision detection goes.
But I'm still a little fuzzy on a couple points. Going back to the initial purpose of BSPs (according to the article): depth sorting.
Place the camera some point in the world looking in a particular direction.
Okay, so finding which leaf it's in isn't too hard. Got that.
But given a particular facing, how the heck do you sort all that stuff? Seems to me that any given node's parent deviding plane (whatever you call it) could be at basically any orientation at all.
I get the top-down usages... it's the bottom-up ones that confuse me.
And maybe I'm just looking at the problem wrong, and this is a top-down kinda thing in the first place.
I'm a 'regular' programmer trying to break into the gaming realm.
;) situation, many of the deviding planes wouldn't be lined up vertically, giving you some 3-d-ishness to your data...
/. reply).
I read this article. I understand how to build a BSP. I feel that left out some important details.
Like how you actually use it. The article mentions that modern games don't use it for dept-sort drawing any more, as hardware z-buffers are now good enough to make this unnecessary... it said that they're used instead for things like collision detection.
My question is HOW? Okay so I've got this tree of map hunks. So what? Given an object or person in *3D* space, I don't see how you're supposed to use it. Someone else mentioned an "octa-something" tree which sounds like it would be far easier (for me, conceptually) to use. With 8 directions, you've got above/below, right/left, in front/behind. 2^3 = 8. Groovy.
I suppose the articles example may have confused me a bit, being entirely 2d. In a non-trivial (I hesitate to use the phrase "real world" in this context
That little trip down congnition ave still didn't help me figure it out though. Given a viewpoint and facing, I don't see how you're supposed to traverse this tree is going to help.
Okay, so you find the node the viewpoint is in. I can see how that works (am I inside this convex space? no, okay move on). I just don't see how that helps you. It seems to me that a given node could have been sliced out of your world-data by a plane on just about any angle... so I'm mysified as to how you find anything near you (that isn't in your current node), or traverse the BSP in z-order from your current position in some arbitrary direction.
Feel free to use the example data from the article (describing your own data sounds like a lot of work for a
--Not afraid to be baffled
"From the tech driven SF genre into the character driven fantasy world."
Which fantasy world are you on?
Seriously. That horrific overgeneralization is just plain wrong. In both genres, you've got some stories that are character driven, and some that are there to explore how "X" would affect a society... whether "X" is the ability of a select few to conjure fire out of the air, or the technology to travel faster than the speed of light. Whatever.
And, in both genres, some stories have neither interesting characters, nor an interesting "X". Such stories tend to suck.
I get all the mask/subdomain stuff, but what's the / at the end of the IP address mean?
I'm thinking spider slik is an exception to that rule.
Think about it: Cobwebs.
When was the last time you looked inside some nasty old house and DIDN'T see century-old cobwebs? Just ask hollywood! They're the authority I go to for all my fact-checking needs.
Okay, so it occurs to me that all my "nasty old house" refferences are from movies.
But cotton is also an organicly produced compound, and I don't see the clothes rotting off your back.
Meh.
I just started a "Video game programming" class at the local community college (Palomar College in San Marcos, CA). One of the annecdotes Ed Magnin (the proff) mentioned to us went something like this:
Way back in the Apple][ days (not ||) Ed was quite the Apple expert. Apparently the local San Diego apple user's group got quite a few visits from Steve & Steve (Jobs & Woz). Anyway, Ed decided to go into making software, and created a fairly significant BBS to sell his stuff. People gave their credit card number on line, and downloaded their software. Ed would then print out the credit card numbers from his dB and take them down to his bank.
He's been called into a number of patent cases to demonstrate prior art. The hostile company would then drop their case and move on to their next victim. It's quite possible that he was talking about these PanIP guys. Sounds sleazy enough.
Your my hero!
I haven't heard Bob & Tom for years... are they still on the air?
Why on earth wouldn't you use a tracking system? (other than to prop up your argument, I mean)
It's not that complicated. It does add a little more maintenance, but only a little.
I personally think the cleaning would be more of an issue than the directional control. Stuff gets DUSTY around here (southern california). Car washing is either incessant or a waste of time. (yes, that was an oxymoron)
"
Question is; can we detect it fast enough to matter? Knowing where a sub was 30min ago is useless.
"
I disagree. While 30-minute-old information might not be of much use in a sub-battle, it could be quite useful to know that "them dang ians just launched 4 subs towards 's coast... and we can expect them to arrive in less than 2 days" on a strategic or political level.
IIRC, Daikatana had this whole "aura of mystery" thing going right up until release. Doom 3 has gameplay footage (just a little, but enough to look at it and go "holy SHIT that looks good") and screenshots available to all.
I *know* doom 3 will look amazing. No one new jack sheet about Daikasucka until it was release.
Could be wrong, but *I* sure didn't see any Daikatana screenshots or gameplay movies until after release.
Boost (www.boost.org) has crossplatform libraries for both sockets and threads.
;)
You're welcome.
Err... huh?
I use STL in "real-life applications" on a regular basis. Maps, sets, vectors, deques, lists, algorithms, auto_ptr (and boost's shared_ptr), and so on. I haven't needed iterator adapters (for example) but that doesn't mean their not useful in "real-life applications".
Would you care to back up your assertion with some examples?
I understand the frigates (or is it destroyers... anyway) are designed to have a radar image that is identical to the carrier.
Takin' one for the team.
...Cool technology that could make for a weapon. Kinda like a hammer.
And just to save some some of you the trouble:
Lets hope it's not used to wipe out ALL OF MANKIND.
The sky! IT'S FALLING!!!
Lets skip the rest of those sort of posts, shall we? 'Kay?