Outside Context

Or “What I saw at the weekend”

CLICK THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE

This week­end the Darkan­gel team and I drove down to the beau­ti­ful New Forest for a week­end of skir­mish may­hem. What a week­end we had!

Late Fri­day after­noon, Trip, Kiero and I arrived at the Z1 camp­site and met up with the rest of the guys (and girl; Jenny). The camp site is situ­ated in a couple of fields about a mile down a dirt path and was full of tents. In the final count I was told over 500 people were attend­ing! I saw tents of all types. Some had basic sum­mer fair, whilst oth­ers had pulled out all the stops and brought para­chute tents, mil­it­ary quick build­ings, African plains tents that sat atop their landrovers and all pos­sible per­muta­tions of alpine tents.

The Lon­don lot had taken over a small corner in the far field and we drove through the grounds to meet up with them.

We quickly unzipped our tents. I say quickly because Trip whipped out his 2 second tent and whooomph he was up and ready! 4 seconds later he had a beer in hand and was look­ing far too relaxed. At that point I hadn’t even got the bloody tent pegs out yet!

Doc, Kiero and Big D

My Tent!

Lex and his enorm­ous tent

Janno look­ing hungry

George smiles for the shot

Once the tents were up we quickly got down to busi­ness and star­ted drink­ing (joke!). No, we split into two groups; those play­ing the first night game, and those who were going to party all night. Guess which group I was in! The weather was glor­i­ous and I was very much in the mood to party as I hadn’t seen these guys for a month or so.

Before we got too emerged, I sauntered over to the Z1 crew and picked up my new gun.

ICS, in cel­eb­ra­tion of their 20 year anniversary have forged, in secret, a mas­ter gun. One gun to rule them all, one gun to find them, one gun to find them all, and in the dark­ness lace the shit out them!

As lex said, “Its very niiice!”

I quickly took her over to the range and gave her a little dance. Now, I had asked for her to be down­graded to 328fps because Elec­trow­erkz has a very firm limit on feet per second. Zero One had not only down graded her, but also charged the bat­tery, all for the bar­gain price of £269.

The rate of fire is of very high qual­ity, some­where below my LR with its Sys­tema high speed motor, but def­in­itely above a stock TM. Range’wise the LR is slightly higher (in fact the LR is sniper qual­ity), but the ICS is still very good indeed.

The whole thing is full metal and a nice solid feel on the shoulder. The accur­acy is great and the gears very loud (like all ICS). It comes with two (!) high caps, the bat­tery in a PEQ box, a T-shirt, a BB loader and a sling.

Fant­astic!

Trip and his super cus­tom HK with prowin gearbox

The night ticked on and we partied hard. Those fight­ing in the night game came back and announced that the site was huge and the enemy exper­i­enced. They also announced that ACU cammo is bloody use­less in the the wood­land! Doh! I guess we are not in Lon­don anymore!

Around 1am I drove the spiders out of my tent and went to sleep.

The next morn­ing was beau­ti­ful. We woke at 7:30am and, after a quick visit to the bogs, made break­fast and got ready for action. We star­ted in our ACU’s, but I think we all knew that we would need to change later to some­thing that didn’t glow in the dark and announ­cing in loud clearly annun­ci­ated Eng­lish where we were hiding!

Trip, Me, Kiero

Z1 had put in a massive amount of thought and plan­ning into the days games. The basic premise was that there was three sides in a loc­al­ised con­flict. The DA’s were on Delta, which was sig­ni­fied by the white tags that we hung from our tac gear. We were fight­ing against “Bravo” and “The Oth­ers” in a fully fea­tured war set­ting. The Idea was that dur­ing the day cer­tain object­ives had to be held, mater­i­als recovered and host­ages either taken or res­cued. I heard, through­out the entire week­end, many of the Darkan­gel team say that they thought the whole event was being very well arranged. I would agree. Z1 have done them­selves proud.

As the Mar­shals explained all this to us I took stock of the size of the crowd we had here. 500 people in vari­ous gear is a sight to see. It was massive! I could tell that the fight­ing was going to be very very fierce once we got started.

I was right. The teams made their way to their start points. I began to get an idea of the size of the Z1 play area. It is by far the largest I have ever played. Hills, val­leys, camps, bases, dug outs, brush, ferns, paths and off road paths lit­ter an enorm­ous area. The game star­ted an we DA’s looked at each other; already we were lost.

One of the reg­u­lar play­ers broke from his team and led us out. I have to say that in all my time in Air­soft I have yet to come across nicer reg­u­lars in any site. Soon con­tact was made and men went down in BB fire. The kill rules here are simple. once dead you sit out for ten minutes at des­ig­nated points and then you are back in. This lends a whole rein­force­ment aspect to the flow of the game, which worked very well. It also gives you a rest!

The Z1 reg­u­lar that scouted for us.

Geardo!

Janno describ­ing the size of his breakfast

The DA’s fought hard but made slow pro­gress down the path­ways towards the Bravo quad­rant. Our ACU was simply too easy to see (we nick­named it “I-SEE-YOU”.) I was start­ing to tire and decided to try and flank the enemy on the path by mak­ing my way through the bushes. Soon I was lost. The oppon­ents I encountered were quickly beaten by the sur­prise of see­ing me com­ing out of the bush and giv­ing them a wave, then shoot­ing them. Silly sods. I never cheated by claim­ing to be on their side, I didn’t have to, a simple wave of the hand dis­armed them totally.

I found myself far down the path of their lines and passed back towards the DA’s sneak­ing up to all the oppon­ents (who were look­ing the other way) and tap­ping them on the shoulder. I would simply say “You’re dead mate!” and pass on. I man­aged to kill 8 before they cot­toned on and took me down. It was too late for them, my strategy for the day had been decided. I was going to sneak.

An example of the quick reflexes and well organ­ised responses of the Z1 team came when a crazy women, noth­ing to do with the game (or so I under­stand) drove through the game in an open top red car. She obvi­ously had no idea where she was and if she was in danger from a stray BB. The car was very quickly trailed by a quad bike full of Mar­shals and soon escor­ted out of the arena.

I teamed up with George and we spent the rest of the after­noon sneak­ing through the bush as a double team and caused may­hem! Our greatest achieve­ment was tak­ing out the entire “Stag camp.”

We sneak up on “Stag.”

We skir­ted around the camp, which has mul­tiple sand bag pos­i­tions and great fields of fire down the front paths. Slowly and silently we crept in the rear entrance; hid­den through bushes. I led and came across a rear guards­man who back at me and, yes you guessed it, waved. I signaled him that he was dead and to his eternal credit he took the “bang kill” silently. Let me say it again; what a hon­est player. Passing by him I could see 8 play­ers dug in around the camp and all look­ing the other way. We passed silently into their camp and I bang killed 4 of them before the oth­ers even real­ised they were under attack. As I moved to the fifth George noticed that I had been spot­ted and opened fire. Sud­denly we were in a large fire­fight and all were killed. nev­er­the­less, we had taken the whole camp!

A nice feel­ing. We con­grat­u­lated ourselves and walked to the dead zone where we chat­ted with those who had fallen in the fight and swapped stor­ies about the firefight.

After that, my other high­light was tak­ing the “Check Point Charlie” base and hold­ing off a massive 20 man onslaught, only fall­ing to a gren­ade thrown through the door after tak­ing 8 men out.

It is an example of the size of the place that we fought the same men all day and didn’t see more than 200 of the 500 doing battle.

The end of day res­ults put Delta in second place by on 90 points and so there was all to play for. Big D made up much of our score by find­ing one of the most valu­able pack­ages; the gold nuggets.

As dark­ness drew we retired from the fight­ing for din­ner then made our way back to the night game. Lex and Trip had arranged with the Z1 com­mand­ers that they would announce the start of the night games by let­ting off a mark 120 pyro­tech­nic, which could be heard from all parts of the site.

Lex and Trip wire up the pyrotechnic.

CLICK ME FOR A MOVIE OF THE PYRO GOING UP!

The boom soun­ded and we star­ted the attack. Night games are always chaos and thus it was this time. All too soon someone was injured and the game was hal­ted whilst he was looked after. Trip and Lex then powered up the night scope and went and kicked 30 assess in the pitch black.

I decided to bug out at that point and go back to party harder than last night. Like only the Darkangel’s can!

On the way back to camp our res­id­ent singer; Big D together with Janno and myself came up with new words for the song “Bohemian Rhaps­ody”, which goes as follows:

Janno strikes the pose!

I see a little sil­hou­etto on the air­soft field,

Scaramouche,scaramouche light up the mother fucxer–

Thun­der­bolt and lightning-BB’s very fright­en­ing me–

Galileo,galileo,

Galileo galileo

Galileo He’s a newbie–

But Im just a new­bie and nobody loves me–

Hes just a new­bie boy from a rental family–

Spend­ing his life for an EO-TECH–

Easy come easy go-,won’t you geardo?-

Bis­mil­lah! no-,we will not geardo!-

geardo!

Bis­mil­lah! no-,we will not geardo!-

geardo!

Bis­mil­lah! no-,we will not geardo!-

geardo!

Will not not geardo!-

Will not not geardo!-

No,no,no,no,no,no,no–

Mama mia,mama mia,mama mia let me geardo!-

Beelze­bub has a devil put a sidearm for me?,for me?,for me?-

’nuff said!

The next morn­ing, I awoke to the sound of many snor­ing ‘angels. Brush­ing the mul­ti­tude of spiders from my obvi­ously irres­ist­ible body I crawled out of my tent and star­ted to make the cof­fee. then someone had the best idea I had heard all day; let’s find a café and get a cooked breakfast!

Morn­ing has broken!

We quickly formed up in three trans­ports and zoomed off to find a very nice little café in Christ­ch­urch. I was so hungry that the other team mem­bers christened me “F18” in hon­our of the speed I drive (which was a fully legal speed, I assure you!)

The second days fight­ing saw the ‘angels stick closer together and work very well as a team. We even fol­lowed the object­ives in the plan!

The Delta a Bravo teams joined forces and attacked the entrenched Others.

Our mis­sion was to assault the high hill camp, but first we had to get past the defenses along the roads lead­ing to the base of the hill. We decided to flank the oppon­ents and snuck along through the ferns to the far far left of the road.

The DA’s’ quickly adopt local cam­ou­flage and blend in! You can’t tell but there is 4 maybe 5 DA’s in this pic­ture! Can you even spot a single one!?

Mov­ing well as a team we beat a path upto the hill and star­ted our assault. The fight was tough, very tough but after much battle, lay­ing flat and crawl­ing up the mud we were vic­tori­ous in tak­ing the highest point and beat­ing the defense to a pulp. Janno, as is his way, led the cry for a “Hell yeah!” and the Delta/Bravo men and women cried in unison.

We have the hill!

Then, of course, the union of the two forces failed at the mar­shals com­mand. After many hours slug­ging it out, includ­ing one mas­ter shot from the LR, which took out a guy bloody miles away, we passed back by the home safe zone and called it a day.

Night vis­ion glock!

The remain­ing DA’s salute their leader!

The event had been very suc­cess­ful and we all had a great time. We packed in very high spir­its and slowly, tak­ing our time, we drove off in con­voy. We used radios to keep in touch whilst driv­ing up the M3 and after many good byes my car left the oth­ers for its jour­ney to Buck­hurst Hill.

There and back again. The event was over for us, but the memor­ies will last until we next take up arms at Zero One.

Regards,

Basho