Here in Germany, the first time I tried to go to google.com I got redirected to google.de. But there was an option on the page there to go to google.com instead.
I don't see how you could play a game well enough to be competitive past 2 days without sleep. When I was in the Army there were field exercises where I effectively stayed awake for up to 72 hours, fueled by army coffee and Copenhagen chaw. Long before you get to the outright hallucination stage you have to contend with the heavily degraded attentativeness stage. The experience was like watching a movie, but only getting to view one frame of every 10 or so.
Insightful? The history of science is full of petty egotism, vanity and vicious, jealous rivalries, and some of the greatest scientists are the worst examples.
Scientists are as human as anyone else, and it would be foolish to believe that the process of science is immune to the flaws of the people who carry it out.
You could feel bad instead for all the doctoral candidates out there who decided to base their work on Schön's. According to an article I read previously (Salon I think), there are quite a few and most are fsck'd at this point.
They don't address what he was saying because both examples exclude this critical point: CleanFlicks is making money off this. Unauthorized altering of someone else's product for commercial gain is not acceptable. Your examples only address private, personal use which is completely different.
You on the other hand, want to force people to watch parts of movies they'd rather not watch. Hell, you want to do this even when it might violate their religious practices in addition to their civil rights.
What a preposterous statement! He wants to force people to watch movies? Where the hell did you get that? There is nothing about movie viewing that is in anyway compulsory. If you do not like the subject matter of a film - don't watch it. If someone's religious and civil rights are violated by the act of watching a movie, they have themselves to blame.
Political correctness has clearly gotten to you. No one has a right to have movies and literature made or edited to suit their sensibilities, particularly when the editing is for commercial gain and against the wishes of the artists who made them.
Unfortunately, these days I wouldn't be surprised if an infants first words were "sex" instead of "mama" or "papa".
I would be - do people show infants sex and violence-ridden films these days? Not in my family, nor anyone else I know. But maybe we're weird.
I don't get it - movies with adult content (sex, violence) tend to also have adult context. They mirror the world adults live in, which surprisingly includes a lot of sex and profanity. They're just not for kids, so I fail to see the point in censoring them. And quite a lot of movies do lose much meaning when edited like that - imagine Saving Private Ryan with all the graphic violence edited out. The graphic violence was rather one of the main points of the movie - war is awful and is so awful in part because it butchers and maims people by the thousands, as you can see in the film. This is quite an advance over many war movies of the past, which made the whole thing look heroic and glamorous.
Interesting, though, that you rail against sex and profanity but don't mention violence. In any case, it's not like there is any shortage of movies made just for Junior. From the Toy Story to the Lion King to Attack of the Clones - plenty to choose from without having to take an axe to someone else's work.
I ask myself - what's next? Family friendly edits of Shakespeare's sex and violence-ridden work? Good grief.
So he's a stupid moron for having a political opinion that disagrees with yours? Apparently you don't know jack shit about the economy either, given your assumption that the Government finding an alternative to Microsoft would somehow damage the economy.
Although, why you should be taken seriously isn't clear at the moment; if your political views were so significant and so important to you, you'd have enough spine not to post as an AC.
Re:Comic book setting not appropriate for an MMORP
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
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· Score: 1
True. But it makes suspension of disbelief that much harder when the hero:normal guy ratio is 100:1 or so.
What makes me tend to agree with Golias is that MM games have very expensive operating costs, totally unlike text MU* games. If you had a persistent internet connection, you could run a MU* server from your home computer. When I was in grad school I had a friend who did just that from his laptop. But MM games require sizeable server farms, serious bandwidth and expensive staff just to run it all, not to mention the developers who must continually tweak/ patch/ nerf the game to deal with all bugs and cheats. To cover all these costs and make a profit, you need a large subscriber base, so I think the market will only end up being able to support a handful of such games. A niche MM game will never pay the bills.
A better model for online multiplayer roleplaying is Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. A brilliant game, despite the buggy release, and its true potential won't even start to be realized for at least a year.
Re:Comic book setting not appropriate for an MMORP
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
·
· Score: 1
Bear in mind that the "MM" means "massively multiplayer." We're not talking about a team of 4 heroes or a superhero population of 50 in a city of 12 million. We're talking about 10,000 or more heroes (players) in the city. Everyone in the game is a hero. That's quite a difference from what you are saying.
Re:aren't they going to run out of characters?
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, but you know that 90% of the player base is going to rip off comic book heroes, that there'll be hundreds each of Spiderman, Hulk, etc. and the Comic Book Guys will still be at each others' throats about how faithful their characters are to the ones they're based on.
Comic book setting not appropriate for an MMORPG
on
Marvel Goes MMPORG
·
· Score: 1
Imagine roleplaying in a gameworld where everyone you meet is a superhero or a monster of some sort. Isn't a key part of the whole comic book superhero thing the rarity of superheroes, trying to save the normal population from Evil with their unique powers? Who are you going to save from Evil, your fellow superheroes? A superhero setting has to be one of the worst settings imaginable for a massively multiplayer game.
Sometimes I think the current MM craze in gaming is like the early days of the.com bubble - a lot of clueless business types with more money than sense leaping at every idea, however ridiculous, because supposedly savvy people tell them that (idea) is the Next Big Thing. "I don't know what an MMORPG is, but we gotta have one!" MMORPGs I think are suitable for certain types of settings but it seems now that every possible game setting is getting a MM game to go along with it. There are so many being announced now it's insane, and most you can tell at a glance are doomed to fail.
Still, a superhero MMORPG could have great comedy potential, if only to laugh at the absurdity of it all. For those of you who have played Ion Storm's great game Anachronox, this recalls that Planet of the Heroes where Paco Estrella was from.
Who are you to decide what is a worthy use of time and what is not? Does a 5 digit slashdot ID make you wise enough to tell other people what to do with their time?
It seems your eagerness to insult strawmen has made you overlook something: it's not really the people who play the game abnormally much who have cause to be angry, but casual players. For people who can only play a few hours a week, gaining levels and developing their characters (which make you more competitive in the game) take much longer, and for someone now to be able to pay a bit more and jump past that is rather insulting.
How many hours someone plays a game is frankly irrelevant. Bending the rules based on the size of a player's credit card is simply unfair and players have a right to be irate about that.
My brother got a ticket for surfing the wrong beach there, apparently he had strayed slightly over the imaginary line separating surf and no surf zones while riding a wave.
I remember when Phish decided to play the new Va Beach Ampitheater (summer of 98). The Va Beach cops were out in force, it was unbelievable. I have never seen so many police at a concert! They even had horse police. It was unbelievable how aggressive they were, shoving people around for nothing, yelling, I saw a group of 4 descend on some kid sitting on a cooler, one of them shoved him off so they could look inside to find beer (can't have that in the lots, vendors need the $7 per small plastic cup of bad beer they were selling inside)... totally different to how police treated fans at shows in nearby Hampton (respectfully for the most part).
Black friends and colleagues of mine have told me that they are mistreated by the police there very frequently. Va Beach doesn't exactly have a shining history of race relations.
I think one big reason why Va Beach cops are the way they are is because a large proportion of the city's population is deeply, radically reactionary. Pat Robertson's worldwide HQ is there, and apparently a lot of his ill-meaning followers want to live near the leader. All the tales of Beach cop excesses plays well to the home crowd.
I used to avoid that place like the plague. If you want to see what an ideal America looks like in the minds of hardcore Republicans, go to Virginia Beach.
Re:With that last question I ask another
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
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· Score: 2, Interesting
For example, according to an Ipsos-Reid poll [globeandmail.com] last week, 69 per cent of Canadians said the U.S. shares some of the responsibility for the attacks, while 15 per cent said all of the responsibility sits on American shoulders.
If we Canadians feel that way, how does the rest of the world feel? You are bound to get stung when you stick your hand in the hornets' nest looking for honey.
Dumping on the US is the national sport of Canada, behind ice hockey, and has been for a long time. Nothing new or surprising about those numbers, and I daresay they have much less to do with deep analysis of international affairs and a lot more to do with the usual Canadian complexes vis a vis the US.
Nothing new to see here, move along.
Re:The RPG is dead! LONG LIVE MMORPG!
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 1
Your statement
Its just natural that PnP RPG declines, they will become the poor mans "computer games."
... is not true. No GFX card will ever be able to outrender our imaginations, and no software code for the forseeable future will be as powerful and versatile and able to create things on the fly like our imaginations. The promise of computer RPGing is mostly one of convenience - it's ideal for those of us who for various Real Life reasons can no longer gather a quality local group of players and spend a night or a weekend playing away in someone's basement.
Anyway, the MMORPG is NOT the successor to the RPG, pen and paper or otherwise. An MMORPG is a completely different sort of experience, one that won't satisfy what a traditional RPG provides. Again, pen and paper games are only bounded by the imagination, while computer games are very limited as to what they can do. However, another important limitation is that with a pen and paper game, you can choose who you play with, while in an MMORPG, you can't and even if you find a good group of roleplayers, your experience will often be disrupted by foul-mouthed 13 year old griefers.
Bioware has taken the first serious stab at reproducing some of the features of pen and paper roleplaying with Neverwinter Nights (I don't think NWN is trying to be the RPG version of Quake; it's trying to be the CRPG version of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons). I haven't yet played the multiplayer game, but friends tell me that is very good if you have a good group and a DM who is proficient with the DM client. I haven't gotten around to it because I am completely absorbed with the toolset, which is nothing short of amazing.
I actually don't like the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, even though 3rd edition is by most accounts a vast improvement over the old, kludgy 2e rules, but the promise of NWN has got me willing to play again.
I'm really happy that Bioware has chosen this path with NWN and I hope that it will pay off big for them, and other computer game companies follow suit. It has so much potential. MMORPGs have been an utter disappointment for roleplayers, I think, certainly for this roleplayer, but for a while I feared that it would be the only form of online multiplayer RPGing.
Now what we need is a NWN-style GURPS game!
I was never in the Navy, but I had friends who were and according to them, the aftermath of Tailhook turned the Navy upside down. If sexual harrassment weren't taken so seriously by the service, there would have never been that kind of mass punishment/ purge.
LTG Kennedy (I think that was her name) - I don't remember the details, so I can't really comment on it. IIRC though, the general accused of harrassment was forced to retire as well; Kennedy apparently did something else to piss off the brass (possibly jumping the chain, who knows).
SMA McKinney lost his job over the incident, as it should be. I got to see him speak a few times when I was in, once he came and visited our unit in Baumholder, the other time was when I attended the company commanders'/ first sergeants' course in Vilseck, he and the USAREUR commander held a talk and a Q&A session with each class. He was a really impressive man with an illustrious record... alas for the power of the penis to drive even the best and brightest to do utterly stupid things and lead them into ruin.
"Chicks in trenches" are treated pretty well, at least in the units I was in that were mixed gender. I think Scratch-O-Matic was pretty much right in what he said about sexual harrassment in the service; he didn't say that it doesn't happen, but that it is very hard to get away with. If an incident comes to the attention of the command, it is dealt with, not swept under the rug like in earlier days. Look at the cases you mentioned, LTG Kennedy and SMA McKinney - in those cases a general and the highest ranking enlisted man in the entire Army were forced to leave the service over sexual harrassment charges.
How many CEOs of big corporations do you hear of being canned over sexual harrassment?
In my years working for both the government and the private sector, my experience says mostly that there is little difference in work environment; the bosses all read the same stupid management fad literature and tend to act in the same, typical ways.
That said, though it still surprises me to say it, of all my work experience, the US Army was the least screwed up of any organization I've worked for, public and private. When I was in, I always thought "man things are so screwed up here, I bet things run much more efficiently in the private sector." Was I ever wrong.
Well, it's no longer new (over a year old), but in the vein of original and funny, and not a sequel to anything, is Ion Storm's Anachronox. In my opinion, it's the only game ever made that was as funny as Sam and Max, although it's a console-style RPG instead of an adventure game. One cut scene in particular made me laugh so hard I cried.
Sadly, that team (Tom Hall's) went under after the game was released. It would be nice to see more gaming goodness spring from the demented minds that made that game.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be an Anachronox sequel, either;).
The most reliable place for finding out about the good games out there is the Usenet, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.* - aside from that there's http://www.GoneGold.com, http://www.Quartertothree.com, and Adrenaline Vault (http://www.avault.com).
Re:RPG's $10 and are extraordinarily widespread
on
Electric Armor
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· Score: 1
IIRC, the tank became mired while in the middle of a battle. It engaged and destroyed 3 Iraqi tanks while immobilized and took several non-penetrating hits from the main guns of those tanks. Once the enemy was dispersed, the unit commmander ordered the tank destroyed; rounds were fired into the turret, but those failed to destroy the tank too - the ammunition detonated but the ammo stowage on the Abrams is designed to focus the explosion upwards out of the tank (heavy armored doors facing the crew compartment and light panels on the roof of the stowage), and the tank's fire suppression system took care of the rest. The unit was forced to move on. Eventually, the engineers came by and dug the tank out. The turret was no longer serviceable so it was pulled out and replaced, but the chassis was good to go!
The turret was sent back to the States to be repaired and refurbished and went back into service later.
Re:Another article stolen from Kuro5hin.
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 1
I wonder why APFSDS type ammo is not available in smaller RFC style weapons.....
Because APFSDS is only effective with a staggering amount of kinetic energy behind it, much more than any man-portable system could deliver. APFSDS is only viable as a large caliber cannon round.
Re:One small problem...
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But the thing is, sabot rounds can only be fired by large, hypervelocity tank cannon. These days, that is a much rarer threat than small, man-portable HEAT weapons like RPGs which are in abundance. The foes Western powers are most likely to face have precious few tanks, but a hell of a lot of RPGs.
This system will potentially allow much lighter vehicles to enjoy the same protection against HEAT weapons that only the heaviest of tanks today have. This could make lightweight tanks viable, which is important as the weight of current MBTs prohibits their being able to be quickly deployed to a crisis.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Germany, the first time I tried to go to google.com I got redirected to google.de. But there was an option on the page there to go to google.com instead.
I don't see how you could play a game well enough to be competitive past 2 days without sleep. When I was in the Army there were field exercises where I effectively stayed awake for up to 72 hours, fueled by army coffee and Copenhagen chaw. Long before you get to the outright hallucination stage you have to contend with the heavily degraded attentativeness stage. The experience was like watching a movie, but only getting to view one frame of every 10 or so.
Insightful? The history of science is full of petty egotism, vanity and vicious, jealous rivalries, and some of the greatest scientists are the worst examples.
Scientists are as human as anyone else, and it would be foolish to believe that the process of science is immune to the flaws of the people who carry it out.
You could feel bad instead for all the doctoral candidates out there who decided to base their work on Schön's. According to an article I read previously (Salon I think), there are quite a few and most are fsck'd at this point.
They don't address what he was saying because both examples exclude this critical point: CleanFlicks is making money off this. Unauthorized altering of someone else's product for commercial gain is not acceptable. Your examples only address private, personal use which is completely different.
Political correctness has clearly gotten to you. No one has a right to have movies and literature made or edited to suit their sensibilities, particularly when the editing is for commercial gain and against the wishes of the artists who made them.
I don't get it - movies with adult content (sex, violence) tend to also have adult context. They mirror the world adults live in, which surprisingly includes a lot of sex and profanity. They're just not for kids, so I fail to see the point in censoring them. And quite a lot of movies do lose much meaning when edited like that - imagine Saving Private Ryan with all the graphic violence edited out. The graphic violence was rather one of the main points of the movie - war is awful and is so awful in part because it butchers and maims people by the thousands, as you can see in the film. This is quite an advance over many war movies of the past, which made the whole thing look heroic and glamorous.
Interesting, though, that you rail against sex and profanity but don't mention violence. In any case, it's not like there is any shortage of movies made just for Junior. From the Toy Story to the Lion King to Attack of the Clones - plenty to choose from without having to take an axe to someone else's work.
I ask myself - what's next? Family friendly edits of Shakespeare's sex and violence-ridden work? Good grief.
So he's a stupid moron for having a political opinion that disagrees with yours? Apparently you don't know jack shit about the economy either, given your assumption that the Government finding an alternative to Microsoft would somehow damage the economy.
Although, why you should be taken seriously isn't clear at the moment; if your political views were so significant and so important to you, you'd have enough spine not to post as an AC.
True. But it makes suspension of disbelief that much harder when the hero:normal guy ratio is 100:1 or so.
What makes me tend to agree with Golias is that MM games have very expensive operating costs, totally unlike text MU* games. If you had a persistent internet connection, you could run a MU* server from your home computer. When I was in grad school I had a friend who did just that from his laptop. But MM games require sizeable server farms, serious bandwidth and expensive staff just to run it all, not to mention the developers who must continually tweak/ patch/ nerf the game to deal with all bugs and cheats. To cover all these costs and make a profit, you need a large subscriber base, so I think the market will only end up being able to support a handful of such games. A niche MM game will never pay the bills.
A better model for online multiplayer roleplaying is Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. A brilliant game, despite the buggy release, and its true potential won't even start to be realized for at least a year.
Bear in mind that the "MM" means "massively multiplayer." We're not talking about a team of 4 heroes or a superhero population of 50 in a city of 12 million. We're talking about 10,000 or more heroes (players) in the city. Everyone in the game is a hero. That's quite a difference from what you are saying.
Yeah, but you know that 90% of the player base is going to rip off comic book heroes, that there'll be hundreds each of Spiderman, Hulk, etc. and the Comic Book Guys will still be at each others' throats about how faithful their characters are to the ones they're based on.
Imagine roleplaying in a gameworld where everyone you meet is a superhero or a monster of some sort. Isn't a key part of the whole comic book superhero thing the rarity of superheroes, trying to save the normal population from Evil with their unique powers? Who are you going to save from Evil, your fellow superheroes? A superhero setting has to be one of the worst settings imaginable for a massively multiplayer game. .com bubble - a lot of clueless business types with more money than sense leaping at every idea, however ridiculous, because supposedly savvy people tell them that (idea) is the Next Big Thing. "I don't know what an MMORPG is, but we gotta have one!" MMORPGs I think are suitable for certain types of settings but it seems now that every possible game setting is getting a MM game to go along with it. There are so many being announced now it's insane, and most you can tell at a glance are doomed to fail.
Sometimes I think the current MM craze in gaming is like the early days of the
Still, a superhero MMORPG could have great comedy potential, if only to laugh at the absurdity of it all. For those of you who have played Ion Storm's great game Anachronox, this recalls that Planet of the Heroes where Paco Estrella was from.
Who are you to decide what is a worthy use of time and what is not? Does a 5 digit slashdot ID make you wise enough to tell other people what to do with their time?
It seems your eagerness to insult strawmen has made you overlook something: it's not really the people who play the game abnormally much who have cause to be angry, but casual players. For people who can only play a few hours a week, gaining levels and developing their characters (which make you more competitive in the game) take much longer, and for someone now to be able to pay a bit more and jump past that is rather insulting.
How many hours someone plays a game is frankly irrelevant. Bending the rules based on the size of a player's credit card is simply unfair and players have a right to be irate about that.
My brother got a ticket for surfing the wrong beach there, apparently he had strayed slightly over the imaginary line separating surf and no surf zones while riding a wave.
I remember when Phish decided to play the new Va Beach Ampitheater (summer of 98). The Va Beach cops were out in force, it was unbelievable. I have never seen so many police at a concert! They even had horse police. It was unbelievable how aggressive they were, shoving people around for nothing, yelling, I saw a group of 4 descend on some kid sitting on a cooler, one of them shoved him off so they could look inside to find beer (can't have that in the lots, vendors need the $7 per small plastic cup of bad beer they were selling inside)... totally different to how police treated fans at shows in nearby Hampton (respectfully for the most part).
Black friends and colleagues of mine have told me that they are mistreated by the police there very frequently. Va Beach doesn't exactly have a shining history of race relations.
I think one big reason why Va Beach cops are the way they are is because a large proportion of the city's population is deeply, radically reactionary. Pat Robertson's worldwide HQ is there, and apparently a lot of his ill-meaning followers want to live near the leader. All the tales of Beach cop excesses plays well to the home crowd.
I used to avoid that place like the plague. If you want to see what an ideal America looks like in the minds of hardcore Republicans, go to Virginia Beach.
Blipverts?
Nothing new to see here, move along.
Anyway, the MMORPG is NOT the successor to the RPG, pen and paper or otherwise. An MMORPG is a completely different sort of experience, one that won't satisfy what a traditional RPG provides. Again, pen and paper games are only bounded by the imagination, while computer games are very limited as to what they can do. However, another important limitation is that with a pen and paper game, you can choose who you play with, while in an MMORPG, you can't and even if you find a good group of roleplayers, your experience will often be disrupted by foul-mouthed 13 year old griefers.
Bioware has taken the first serious stab at reproducing some of the features of pen and paper roleplaying with Neverwinter Nights (I don't think NWN is trying to be the RPG version of Quake; it's trying to be the CRPG version of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons). I haven't yet played the multiplayer game, but friends tell me that is very good if you have a good group and a DM who is proficient with the DM client. I haven't gotten around to it because I am completely absorbed with the toolset, which is nothing short of amazing.
I actually don't like the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, even though 3rd edition is by most accounts a vast improvement over the old, kludgy 2e rules, but the promise of NWN has got me willing to play again.
I'm really happy that Bioware has chosen this path with NWN and I hope that it will pay off big for them, and other computer game companies follow suit. It has so much potential. MMORPGs have been an utter disappointment for roleplayers, I think, certainly for this roleplayer, but for a while I feared that it would be the only form of online multiplayer RPGing.
Now what we need is a NWN-style GURPS game!
I was never in the Navy, but I had friends who were and according to them, the aftermath of Tailhook turned the Navy upside down. If sexual harrassment weren't taken so seriously by the service, there would have never been that kind of mass punishment/ purge.
LTG Kennedy (I think that was her name) - I don't remember the details, so I can't really comment on it. IIRC though, the general accused of harrassment was forced to retire as well; Kennedy apparently did something else to piss off the brass (possibly jumping the chain, who knows).
SMA McKinney lost his job over the incident, as it should be. I got to see him speak a few times when I was in, once he came and visited our unit in Baumholder, the other time was when I attended the company commanders'/ first sergeants' course in Vilseck, he and the USAREUR commander held a talk and a Q&A session with each class. He was a really impressive man with an illustrious record... alas for the power of the penis to drive even the best and brightest to do utterly stupid things and lead them into ruin.
"Chicks in trenches" are treated pretty well, at least in the units I was in that were mixed gender. I think Scratch-O-Matic was pretty much right in what he said about sexual harrassment in the service; he didn't say that it doesn't happen, but that it is very hard to get away with. If an incident comes to the attention of the command, it is dealt with, not swept under the rug like in earlier days. Look at the cases you mentioned, LTG Kennedy and SMA McKinney - in those cases a general and the highest ranking enlisted man in the entire Army were forced to leave the service over sexual harrassment charges.
How many CEOs of big corporations do you hear of being canned over sexual harrassment?
In my years working for both the government and the private sector, my experience says mostly that there is little difference in work environment; the bosses all read the same stupid management fad literature and tend to act in the same, typical ways.
That said, though it still surprises me to say it, of all my work experience, the US Army was the least screwed up of any organization I've worked for, public and private. When I was in, I always thought "man things are so screwed up here, I bet things run much more efficiently in the private sector."
Was I ever wrong.
Well, it's no longer new (over a year old), but in the vein of original and funny, and not a sequel to anything, is Ion Storm's Anachronox. In my opinion, it's the only game ever made that was as funny as Sam and Max, although it's a console-style RPG instead of an adventure game. One cut scene in particular made me laugh so hard I cried. ;).
Sadly, that team (Tom Hall's) went under after the game was released. It would be nice to see more gaming goodness spring from the demented minds that made that game.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be an Anachronox sequel, either
The most reliable place for finding out about the good games out there is the Usenet, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.* - aside from that there's http://www.GoneGold.com, http://www.Quartertothree.com, and Adrenaline Vault (http://www.avault.com).
IIRC, the tank became mired while in the middle of a battle. It engaged and destroyed 3 Iraqi tanks while immobilized and took several non-penetrating hits from the main guns of those tanks. Once the enemy was dispersed, the unit commmander ordered the tank destroyed; rounds were fired into the turret, but those failed to destroy the tank too - the ammunition detonated but the ammo stowage on the Abrams is designed to focus the explosion upwards out of the tank (heavy armored doors facing the crew compartment and light panels on the roof of the stowage), and the tank's fire suppression system took care of the rest. The unit was forced to move on. Eventually, the engineers came by and dug the tank out. The turret was no longer serviceable so it was pulled out and replaced, but the chassis was good to go! The turret was sent back to the States to be repaired and refurbished and went back into service later.
But the thing is, sabot rounds can only be fired by large, hypervelocity tank cannon. These days, that is a much rarer threat than small, man-portable HEAT weapons like RPGs which are in abundance. The foes Western powers are most likely to face have precious few tanks, but a hell of a lot of RPGs. This system will potentially allow much lighter vehicles to enjoy the same protection against HEAT weapons that only the heaviest of tanks today have. This could make lightweight tanks viable, which is important as the weight of current MBTs prohibits their being able to be quickly deployed to a crisis.
Invading a friendly country to save [i]movie execs[/i] must be grounds for mutiny.