I mod a worryingly growing list of communities. Ask away if you have any questions or issues with any of the communities.

I also run the hobby and nerd interest website scratch-that.org.

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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.









  • I would say to go and check out independent local game stores. It’s not uncommon for people to run 3D printing as a side hustle, and game stores tend to have boards where people put up flyers or cards.

    You want resin for 28mm characters. FDM, the alternative leaves noticeable printlines and not what you want if you’re paying for a mini.

    In U.S. pricing, I’ve found these individual print people charging $1-3 USD for a human 28mm figure. Part of the idea is paying less than it costs to buy figures out of the box.






  • The legislation already exists.

    18 U.S.C., § 921(a)(17)(B):

    A projectile or projectile core which may be used in a handgun and which is constructed entirely (excluding the presence of traces of other substances) from one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium; or [irrelevant section on jacketed ammunition]

    It would be difficult to produce flechettes not caught by that existing definition.

    Putting aside legality and assuming that is overcome, it would still be an uphill fight in the market. I would posit that the majority of people buying handguns do not highly weight armor penetration as a factor. Any company going into flechettes as an armor piercing solution would have to eat all the R&D costs to get flechettes that sufficiently penetrate armor from a pistol length barrel, produce or partner with an ammunition company to produce this new and expensive ammunition that only works for one brand on the market, produce and sell handguns for this. All hoping to recoup costs by catering to the subset of the market that is willing to pay significantly higher prices just for armor penetration.

    The only viable customer for a company to pitch flechettes to is the military, and once more- all of the rifle attempts have had insurmountable problems. Investing in flechette handguns simply wouldn’t be worth the time, as handguns are considered of low importance to small arms and current calibers work well enough. Even armor piercing 5.7mm never caught on widely for military adoption.


  • The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

    I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

    Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.


  • Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

    I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

    Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.


  • This is military rather than private defense driven, and in the military arena flechettes seem to periodically reappear. There always seems to be someone interested in them, but for small arms they seem unable to get past some of the issues that were identified early. Tank sabot penetrator rounds are more or less the same thing, but scaled up and with that increased size and specific use they are quite popular.

    For personal self defense handguns, while flechettes don’t have the downside of deflection, many of their upsides become irrelevant. This leads to trying to sell a more expensive ammunition to go in what would be a small selection of guns and not doing the actual task any better than conventional rounds.





  • The U.S. looked at flechettes in the 1950s with the SPIW program. They concluded that while the idea was great on paper, and the flechettes did deliver on being a low recoil, flat trajectory projectile there were too many practical downsides associated with them. The flechettes were found to be deflected off course by even the slightest bit of foliage or even rain.

    The U.S. toyed again with flechettes in the 1980s in the ACR trials, but again they were selected.

    I’d presume the Soviets saw similar problems.