Operation Zulu

The DA’s have played some unusual games over the years, but this was a first for us: this was the first time that we were asked to be a scrip­ted opposition.

The idea has a lot of merit if you think about it. Firstly, games often ebb and flow ran­domly. One side may gain the upper hand in an attack, but they loose too many men to rein­force the pos­i­tion and soon are driven back and it is the other team who are then on the offens­ive. Sim­ilar to a game of foot­ball. How­ever, some­times a team simply ham­mers all oppos­i­tion to such an extent that the suf­fer­ing team can­not ful­fil their object­ives at all. Some­times they can­not get out of their safe zone. The game sud­denly becomes unbal­anced, tem­pers raise, cries of cheat­ing go up and no fun is had at all.

Well, at least none by the team get­ting a kicking.

Con­trast this with a scrip­ted game. In a scrip­ted game one team has know­ledge of the lay­out, defences and shoot­ing power of the other, but instead of using this know­ledge to anni­hil­ate the oppos­i­tion and ruin the game for all, they design a set of tac­tics that chal­lenge but fall short of vic­tory by a very small amount.

At least for a while.

Frankly, given the repu­ta­tion of team Delta Alpha for “push­ing shite back in” I was sur­prised that the organ­isers came to us to ful­fil this role. Sur­prised but pleased. You see, the DA’s have wanted to show their abil­ity to restrain them­selves, to play the game with know­ledge of the inside and yet will­ingly walk into night ambushes, heav­ily defen­ded stra­tegic points and over­lap­ping arcs of fire without get­ting angry or upset. We wanted the chal­lenge to see if we could do that, and so we did.

Milsim is not CQB, indeed the real­ity of this hit me the moment I arrived at Zulu. We were bil­leted in a lofty build­ing full of dust, only one small light and we were sleep­ing on the hard con­crete floor. We had it easy, the OPFOR were camped out in the forest areas with only what they could carry and rain had been fore­cast! Our roll mats came out and sleep­ing bags were deployed, one smart ass even put up a tent (wish I had thought of that!). This was our safe zone and the one place in the whole camp we could relax in true DA style.

Our brief was to oper­ate out of this build­ing under cent­ral com­mand of a mem­ber of staff who would feed us attack and with­drawal orders as well as sup­ply vehicles for us to “air­drop” with. On assault, we were to push the enemy, but not break them. We used our nor­mal team struc­ture of com­mander “Sock­dog” (so called because he is ten­a­cious like try­ing to get a dog to let go of a sock) to dir­ect two fireteams that can split into 5 man sub-units under a 2IC.  This then gives us Ser­geant, lieu­ten­ant and com­mander roles. Every trop­per was under com­mand and no-one went lone wolf, not even me. This worked really well in keep­ing our options flex­ible and enabling us to with­draw pres­sure from the field in bite size chunks, or turn it up by attack­ing a flank.

The idea was that we would be ordered to with­draw after a cer­tain time, even if that meant we had to aban­don that assault’s object­ives. We had to regroup and launch mul­tiple pronged attacks all over the Opfor con­trolled area and try and take host­ages of a few “CIA” agents hid­den amongst their number.

As the night drew in, we were to act out the role of Insur­gents buy­ing arms from gun­run­ners (Team Gray Fox) by per­form­ing “drops” at vari­ous sites around the base. These drops were to be defen­ded, but in a haphaz­ard man­ner to allow the Opfor to observe them and gen­er­ate the next set of their object­ives.  We also had to attack their base dur­ing the night and walk right into a three line ambush, get­ting cut to pieces in the pro­cess. When we died, we were to act wounded and cry out in pain, shout “man down!”, panic, etc. Any­thing we could do to increase the real­ism for the other team was to be attempted.

I hope that you all can see how much more fun this was for both sides! I loved it, being that I come from a role player MMO back­ground. Any­way, at this junc­ture I will say no more; this was the first time we have done this for an organ­isa­tion, but hope­fully it will not be the last!

The film.

This was also the first time that I have made a film with my new Bashocam. This new model is a VIO POV 1 and is much higher qual­ity than the pre­vi­ous cam­era. Video is saved as high defin­i­tion files and then con­ver­ted to be used in my edit­ing pro­gram: Sony’s Vegas. My old cam­era is now tied on the front of my Mag­pul PTS and will be gen­er­at­ing gun­cam foot­age for those Mul­tikill moments. In this film I have out­lined the basic storyline of the game, and then put down the best foot­age I took. It was a bit of learn­ing pro­cess and I will be using a zoom cam­era as well next time to cap­ture the many Opfor I shot.

I hope that you all enjoy it!

High Qual­ity Ver­sion on Vimeo:

Oper­a­tion Zulu from Basho Mat­suo on Vimeo.

You­Tube version:

Out­side Con­text has been through a major over­haul and now all the air­soft art­icles are col­lec­ted into a series for easy reach by the read­er­ship. I have migrated to a new, much more power­ful, server that can handle the sort of traffic I get these days. I invite you all to come have a look!

Regards,

Basho

Pop­ular­ity: 4% [?]

Related Posts

• Mag­pul PTS AEG – Part Two
  Part two of the Basho review, the gun in play!…
• Band of Delta-Alpha : A Basho Film
  The Ground Zero Week­ender is the biggest yearly event on the UK Air­soft calendar.…
• Tokyo Marui Pro Goggle Review
  How well do the new TM goggles hold out?…
• Mag­pul PTS AEG review – part one
  The greatest AEG made by a man?…
• ATC 2K video cam­era review
  I review the BASHOCAM! water­proof video camera…
• “your best pis­tol u have had?”
  Some new player on the for­ums pos­ted the ques­tion, “your best pis­tol u have had?” I say it is this:…