The Download Munkey : Finder of Things …

CG rendered game videos are getting more photorealistic by the day, and Codemasters’ Operation Flashpoint 2 : Dragon Rising is no exception. Besides, the fictional scenario presented in the trailer reminds me of Jeff Head’s freely downloadable novel Dragon’s Fury on a hypothetical World War III instigated by militaristic regimes in China and the Middle East.

This ‘Sheer Scale’ trailer for Codemasters’ sequel to 2001’s Operation Flashpoint : Cold War Crisis showcases significantly larger battles than the original game. Below is a sypnosis and analysis of the 2 min trailer.

© Codemasters

An American special forces team (identified by their helmet and the silenced MP5s) takes out an enemy outpost. The sentry seems like a PLA soldier since the carbine he’s holding looks like the current PLA service weapon, the QBZ-95.

© Codemasters

But I’m curious about the camouflage worn by the American soldiers, since it doesn’t look like the current US woodland pattern and is probably one of the new digital camouflage patterns like the Army Combat Uniform Pattern (ARPAT).

The identity of the outpost occupants are revealed when they exclaim in Chinese the moment the American troops burst it and secure the building.

© Codemasters

After completing their objective, the squad is surprised and taken out by enemy (artillery?) bombardment while exiting the building. The camera then cuts to show a group of Strykers rumbling into the area.

© Codemasters

Encountering enemy PLA Type 92 armoured personnel carriers and infantry ahead, the Strkyers engage the vehicles while soldiers quickly dismount from the back to provide additional firepower.

© Codemasters

Enemy reinforcements from the flank almost overwhelm the Americans until a flight of AH-64 Apaches arrives to save the day. Finally found the the enemy armour that took out the Stryker at 1:09 after replaying the video several times (see closeup in second pic below - top right corner).

© Codemasters

Later, a flight of UH-60s land troops into the fight with door-mounted chaingunners pouring suppressive fire into the town ruins.

© Codemasters

The camera then zooms out to show a couple of Nanchang Q-5 ‘Fantan’ flying past and finally the island where the skirmish has taken place.

© Codemasters

The Wikipedia article for Operation Flashpoint 2 : Dragon Rising states that the island in question might be Okinawa but I doubt that the architectural style of the buildings in the trailer look more European than Okinawan.

Download the ‘Sheer Scale’ trailer at Gametrailers or visit the official Operation Flashpoint 2 : Dragon Rising website.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Armed Forces Handbooks (DPRK, PLA)
Soldier of Fortune - Payback Trailer
Act of War : Direct Action Singleplayer Demo Impressions
Alliance of Valiant Arms Wallpapers
Next Generation Infantry Concepts from Tom Clancy’s EndWar

A very good collection of photos taken by David Pride at the Yad La’Shiryon Museum in Israel which houses an extensive collection of armoured vehicles in service with the Israel Defense Force from its birth in 1948 to the current tanks like the Merkava IV.

The most interesting exhibits to me are the indigenous variants of the American M4 Shermans which Israel acquired in substantial numbers after WWII and modified into up-gunned tanks with French 75mm and 105mm guns as the M50 and M51 (the Sherman in WWII was fitted with a 75mm cannon and a 76mm cannon in the case of the Sherman Firefly) , 155mm self-propelled artillery and even multiple rocket launchers as in the MAR-240s and MAR-290s. More information on these interesting variants of the Sherman can be found at israeli-weapons.com.

© P. David Pride

Other than the Sherman variants, there’s the Achzarit APCs converted from captured T-55s as well as refurbished T-54s, T-55s and T-62s known respectively as the Tiran-4, Tiran-5 and Tiran-6. There’s also up-armoured M60s known as the Magach 6/7 and locally-upgraded Centurion and AMX-13s.

© David Pride

Due to the disparate numbers of tanks in the inventory of Israel and its hostile neighbours during the early years of the Israeli state, it had to make do with every vehicle on hand, resulting the variety of up-gunned and up-armoured improvements as shown in the photos above.

If you know your armoured vehicles, simply head over to the thumbnails page and start browsing from there, otherwise you might find it more enlightening to start at this page and take a virtual tour of the museum complete with captions for each photo. For more pictures of armoured vehicles, don’t forget to check out David Pride’s other photos taken at various American Army museums including a picture of the infamous 280mm German K5 railway gun below.

© David Pride

Check out David Pride’s Yad La’Shiryon Museum photos.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Armed Forces Handbooks (DPRK, PLA)
ACE Armoured Vehicle Scale Model Boxart
Tompei’s Museum of Machines
Merkava Mk III Baz 3D Renders
T-72! Balkans on Fire Renders and Wallpapers
Theatre of War Renders
800mm Dora Railgun

A quaterly magazine on Allied military aviation during WWII, Steve Darlow’s Fighting High e-magazine provides a more personal look into the airmen whom served in the Allied air forces, from fighter pilots to the crewmen of the massive bomber armadas over Germany than most general history books offer. Fighting High was given a glowing recommendation on the official Osprey Publishing blog where I first read about this e-magazine.

© Steve Darlow

In each issue, there’s mission reports from the actual pilots and crewmen who participated in them as well as recollections and memories in words and pictures by Allied veterans. I especially liked reading the accounts by the crewmen of two RAF Lancasters’ participation (550 Squadron and 625 Squadron) in the nightime raids over Germany near the end of the war. I first read about these raids years ago from one of the Airplane issues by Orbis Publishing and was quite pleased to read more about these missions.

© Steve Darlow

Another article which I thoroughly enjoyed was the account of pilot Eddie McCann when a Luftwaffe fighter pilot graciously broke off the engagement after noticing the badly shot up wing of his potential opponent, leaving him to nurse his Spitfire back to base.

On top of these first hand accounts of combat, little known salvage and restoration projects are also highlighted, including a look into the efforts by Beech Restoration in restoring and rebuilding WWII aircraft to flying condition. For the book enthusiasts, there’s a fair number of military aviation book reviews in each issue.

© Steve Darlow

There’s also a competition in each issue in which the winner walks away with an book upon guessing the squadron of a WWII aircraft from its serial or insignia. While the deadline for the previous contest is long over, you might want to practice your identification and Googling skills in preparation for the coming contest in next issue available from 15 July 2008 (hey, that’s today! ).

© Steve Darlow

The last issue showed a four engined bomber with a bold black H in a white circle close to the wingtip (above). Should be relatively easy to deduce the aircraft type since there weren’t too many four engined bombers in service with the Allies during WWII. Identifying the squadron number would be significantly harder since I’ve seen several squadrons with the H letter emblazoned in almost the same area as in the photo.

Download Fighting High.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Armed Forces Handbooks (DPRK, PLA)
Osprey Publishing’s Military Art “Advent Calendar”
DIA Military Art Collections

A collection of over 100+ tiny firearms illustrations from the Vickers machineguns of the early 21st century to the modern firearms like a M16 with attached M203, a Barrett M82A sniper rifle and iconic submachine guns like the FN P90, H&K MP5 and IMI Uzis.

© Java The Fox

Created by Java The Fox (deviantART gallery) where I found this image months ago. It’s no longer in the gallery but you can download the original picture here. (Didn’t manage to contact Java The Fox since there wasn’t any contact info at the time of writing )

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
H&K MP5 Vexel Art by John Norris (donbenni)
2nd Amendment Fonts (Firearm Silhouettes) & Other Cool Dingbat Fonts
Assault Rifle Basics Vidcasts
APB Character Designs

Found this nice screensaver featuring 10 AK-type semi-automatic rifles and light machineguns from Arsenal, Inc. Some of my favourites below:

© Arsenal, Inc

Screensavers aren’t really useful for me since I don’t use them on my desktop and it seems a waste not to be able to use these photos in the screensaver as wallpapers. I fiddled with the screensaver a bit to see if I could somehow extract these photos from the screensaver as standalone images and below is a short summary of my findings. It’s slightly on the technical side, so do feel free to skip it and head for the download link at the bottom if you don’t want to bother with it

Running the screensaver installer under Sandboxie (an short intro here) reveals that four files are extracted into the windows\system32 folder in your sandbox.

Since photos are usually saved as JPG files, I resolved to search for the JPEG header or more specificially the Start of Image (SOI) marker (two bytes - 0xFFD8 - more about the JPEG header) in the SPF file with my trusty HxD hex editor. Each occurrence is followed by JFIF bytes which further confirms that the images are stored in this file as JPEGs and without any compression (ZIP, RAR, etc)

While I could write a parser which could spit out the JPEG images from the SPF images, I’m a bit too lazy for that at the moment and decided to use Marco Pontello’s excellent BitmapRip which extracts images in JPEG, PNG or GIF format from any binary file. Simply drag and drop the SPF file over BitmapRip and you’re all done!

Download the Arsenal Inc AK Screensaver and BitmapRip.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Zacca 1/6 Guns Collection & World Weapon Collection
Oleg Volk’s High Resolution Firearms Photos
Modern AKs
H&K MP5 Vexel Art by John Norris