The perfect team?

December 13, 2006  |  Airsoft, General  |  View Comments

In response to this thread ,

“So, what’s, IYO, the per­fect CQB team?
For me, I was think­ing an 8 man team, 2 rifle­men, 4 smg-weilders, 1 sup­port, and 1 shotgun-ner.
The entire team would be equipped with either AK or AR cari­ents for ease of mag exchange. The rifle­men would have upgraded, full-size vari­ents like SLR-105’s or M15-SPR’s.
SMG-ers would have have Beta’s/ aks-74u’s or 10.5″ bar­rel or shorter m4’s.
Sup­port would have any­thing they wanted because they need big drum/ box mags.
Shot­gun­ner could also have whatever they wanted but I’d say a Maruzen m870, m1100r, or other gas shot­gun, spring­gers, IMO, are more effect­ive in woodland/ urban. The shotty-user would also have to carry some­thing like an mp7, mp5-k, m11, or any­thing else that’s very smal and has full-auto, even a kitty kat or a stock-less beta would work.

any­way, the rifle­men would stay behind the team and give, basic­ally, sniper sup­port by cov­er­ing doors while the main team moved in. the sup­port would do some­thing sim­ilar, if the field size allowed. The sup­port would stay mid-range so that the rifle­men could move around also. as for the smg-ers and shot­gun­ner, they would mostly stay together but would have des­ig­nated teams of two and three, in case split­ting up was needed. One team would be two smg-ers and the shotgun-user while the oth­ers would be a team of two.
That’s what I have so far, I’ve almost con­firmed a team of 7 as of last night and we’re decid­ing whether or not to get new guns or not. also, we want some team form­a­tion information. ”

simple:

The Darkangels

… All so called per­fect teams need only one thing; play­ing to their strengths.  Thats it.  So if you have a great pis­toleer you don’t make him play a long M4 just because you think it makes [i]the look[/i] better.

…  Moreover, truly great teams are about two things; pas­sion and lead­er­ship.  It is a team game.  You must be able to inspire and be inspired by every mem­ber of your team to play better.

You may think that I am pick­ing hairs, but I am not.  On Tues­day I watched as a well armed team got *fruitcage*ed big style by another team who were pre­pared to put in the effort to win.

Spe­cific to CQB, some usual assump­tions that are not correct,

1. Short accur­ate weapons are bet­ter.
Rub­bish.  All that mat­ters is that the user is very well versed in his gun.  That he can move fast, slow, jump, etc without banging it.  That he can shoot very accur­ately from either side of his body with it.  Two weeks ago a man with a full size M249 kicked the ass of someone with this:

Hassles gun

How?  He knew how to pos­i­tion his gun to take advantage.

2. Fast fir­ing guns are bet­ter.
As much as I respect those who have very fast fir­ing guns and a hanker­ing to use them, this is just not true.  Accur­ate and skill­ful  move­ment is more import­ant.  [b]It only takes one BB to hit someone.[/b]  Watch the Elec­trow­erkz movie over in the Elec­tro forum (post about movie com­pet­i­tion) and watch for Vince mov­ing out of cover with his pat­riot.  Vince is a big guy, but his skill level is so high that he is able to clear the door, slink around the wall and hug the cover all without tak­ing his gun off his tar­gets and without look­ing where he is going.  hav­ing a fast fir­ing gun isn’t going to help a man avoid being hit.

3. Room Entry is a vital skill set.
Now my broth­ers, the Darkan­gels are trained in room entry.  We love it.  How­ever, we are good at it pre­cisely because we recog­nise that this is just a game.  One with infin­ite lives. We use this under­stand­ing to our advant­age.  Real life mil­it­ary tac­tics will only help you so far.  Air­soft room clear­ing skills comes from think­ing out­side the “Real Steel” box.  None of your men are going to die so why not use that as a tactic?

We often use the “Gram­maton Cleric Method”, which is simply the use of one very fast run­ning pis­toleer to sac­ri­fice him­self (and hope­fully take a few with him).  He runs through the door scream­ing and draws the fire to him so that the team gain those few seconds to take the room.  I have been this man for the DA’s on many occa­sions (when I am wear­ing level III armour) and this tac­tic works great.  I men­tioned it once on the SNAFU boards and got back “snig­ger, if you lose a man enter­ing a room , you are doing some­thing wrong…”  Frankly I rel­ish the chance to prove myself right against these people.

4. Moscarts own in CQB.
Don’t make me laugh.  Moscarts cant hit *beep*.  Two weeks ago I was shot at from a clean angle from maybe 15ft away and didn’t get hit by noth­ing.  The guy then popped his head back around the corner to see what had happened and I single shot him with my pis­tol.  Even DA 1, who loved the things in the past, had a 6 shot launcher and he often fired 3 or 4 at a time!  Don’t expect a scat­ter shot to make up for what should be excel­lent snap pis­tol skills.

Any­way,  CQB is great fun.  It is most def­in­itely not milsim and in my opin­ion any per­son “design­ing” a team needs only to pick a flex­ible suite of weapons and REALLY train with them.

Basho

Humiliation in airsoft

Humiliation in airsoft

November 9, 2006  |  Airsoft, Featured Airsoft  |  View Comments

From this (“Air­soft knife kills?, yes or no?”) discussion,

The word humi­li­ate makes me wonder…

One the sub­ject of humi­li­ation, it is an unfor­tu­nate side effect of air­soft that someone is going to get hit and someone isn’t. There are two types of humi­li­ation and two dif­fer­ent reactions:

  1. Caught unawares. E.G. Shot in the back of the head, from a hid­ing place etc.
  2. Dom­in­ated. Dom­in­a­tion in air­soft is when one team is so eat­ing the smack down on another that the second team is unable to mount a defense anymore.

As a mar­shal I spend a large amount of my time keep­ing the game bal­anced to avoid people being humi­li­ated by dom­in­a­tion. Often by giv­ing advice, mak­ing cer­tain people swap sides, per­haps shoot­ing a few people myself, or even call­ing a halt and reset­ting the floor/game.

It is the oppos­ite of when as a player I try to “break” the oppon­ents men­tally all the time. I want them so afraid that they won’t come out of their res­pawn. I want them frozen in fear in their defens­ive pos­i­tions. I want to flank them and crush them utterly. I want my lack of fear of the pain of being laced to be my advant­age. I want to work harder than they and res­pawn quicker to flood a room with more men fir­ing faster…

… etc. This is the Darkan­gel way and our “aggres­sion” has won us many battles.

The prob­lem is the reac­tions once the fight has gone to total domination,

  1. They get upset and humi­li­ated. Take time out. Sit down, shake, cry, etc. They are in effect shell shocked. This is not good for them. Not good for the flow of the site or the game.
  2. They get angry. Start shout­ing that people aren’t play­ing fair. That they are not tak­ing their hits. They start to cheat, often blatantly. Even­tu­ally these people leave the game in a huff. It is not fair that they have been humi­li­ated, etc as they are special.

In situ­ations where people are get­ting this “stressed” then rub­ber knives have no place and should be with­drawn for the night.

In games and on nights where the play is equal (ish) then rub­ber knives can be a safe fun addi­tion to the mix.

It is for mar­shals to know how to make the game bal­anced enough for every­one to have a good time and not to go back to the safezone in tears.

Basho

The defence of airsoft goes to the Lords

The defence of airsoft goes to the Lords

October 21, 2006  |  Airsoft, Featured Airsoft, Personal  |  View Comments

From the ABA website:

When I spoke to an amend­ment in Com­mit­tee on 22 May at col. 623, the Min­is­ter said that the Gov­ern­ment rejec­ted it and that they believed that there was no com­pel­ling reason for air­softers to use real­istic imit­a­tions. That is the very point at which air­softers and the Gov­ern­ment diverge in their under­stand­ing of the sport. Air­softers have said to me that it is vital in skir­mish­ing that they should be able to use real­istic imit­a­tion weapons. In Com­mit­tee, I put on record a detailed descrip­tion of what con­sti­tutes the activ­ity of air­soft. As this is Report, I shall cer­tainly not go through that detail again, but I am very much aware that the activ­ity is not well known to Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment in either House, so it took some while for a head of steam to work up and for noble Lords and Mem­bers of another place prop­erly to appre­ci­ate how import­ant the activ­ity is to a sub­stan­tial num­ber of people in the United Kingdom.

I am proud to call myself one of those number!

It is a won­der­full thing when a small group can get to speak to the highest people in the land and get them to listen!

If air­soft can do it then so can any­thing else. 

Lex’s Patriot Video

September 21, 2006  |  Airsoft  |  View Comments

This is the most insane of all CQB AEG’s.  Lex, the leader of Darkan­gel, is here demon­strat­ing his newly upgraded Patriot. 

What?

Basic­ally the Pat­riot is a cus­tom built mini M4 rifle, cut down to be as small as pos­sible.  In fact it is not much big­ger than a large frame pis­tol and fant­astic for CQB.  This is of course not enough for Lex.  He has been con­stantly upgrad­ing this mon­ster for the last year or so and here I show its latest con­fig­ur­a­tion.  The major dif­fer­ence to it today is that he has bought and installed a Prowin gear­box:

Its not very often air­soft gets innov­a­tions like this. Prowin have just designed a gear­box for the Tokyo Marui M4/M16 that incor­por­ates the hop up unit and the gear­box into a single air­tight unit. Red­wolf air­soft claim that the new design gives gains of about 100 FPS over a nor­mal updated gear­box using the same spring. And here’s a great little fea­ture, the back of the gear­box can be removed and the spring changed in under 2 minutes with the box still in the receiver.

http://www.airsoftzone.org/

Whilst notori­ously dif­fi­cult to build, the Prowin is def­in­itely the cur­rent box to own.

The FPS of this…this…thing is only 270fps, but I can speak with feel­ing when I say that it is not fun being on the receiv­ing end of it!

Sorry for the qual­ity of the video, as my phone cam­era is shite, just check out the happy grin on his chops!

Fear!

I am glad that I am on his side!

 

!EDIT! this You­tube has been changed to a link because it was rap­ing my bandwidth.

AIRSOFT HAS BEEN SAVED!

AIRSOFT HAS BEEN SAVED!

September 21, 2006  |  Airsoft, Featured Airsoft  |  View Comments

Amaz­ing news!  The for­ums are a’buzz with the news that the ABA led by min­i­mi­man have had their request for an exemp­tion form the VCR bill granted!

Oh day of days!

I feel like Admiral Ack­bar at the end of ROTJ, when he breaths out a big sigh and sig­nals the fleet to start the party.

Details of the exemp­tion are still com­ing through and are likely to included some form of regis­tra­tion.  Frankly, it could involved dan­cing naked on a pogo stick for ten minutes whilst being sprayed with high powered cus­tard and I would still be happy.

Let­ter from Air­softscot­land here:

Letter from the homeoffice

Well done to all those who wrote let­ters, badgered their MP’s, phoned into radio shows, wrote to web­sites and espe­cially to the ABA for for­mu­lat­ing and present­ing the case to the government.

An exemp­tion for the com­munity can only mean that the gov­ern­ment have recog­nised that we are a mature and com­mit­ted bunch; that we [B]deserve [/B]an exemp­tion. We all must do everything we can to con­tinue to por­tray the pos­it­ive sides of this great game of ours.

This was our wake up call and has become a golden oppor­tun­ity to make air­soft a truly recog­nised sport, to organ­ise and spread fur­ther. I have a dream that we can use this very strong will that we have amassed to cre­ate a frame­work under which air­soft can flourish.

I hope that Arnies, the other for­ums, retail­ers, sites and the ABA can be lead­ing lights in form­ing airsoft’s rebirth as a gov­ern­ment acknow­ledged pas­time of great value.

Air­soft is a beacon of hope for other minor­ity pas­times under threat from tyr­an­nical legis­la­tion. For if we, one of the most frac­tured groups, can form into a single voice that reaches into the very cor­ridors of power, oth­ers can take heart and fol­low our example.

Now as the leader of the Stone­cut­ters said, “lets all get drunk and play ping pong!”

:D <—- Basho is very happy

Start your party engines!

ICS M4 Para Anniversary 2006

ICS M4 Para Anniversary 2006

August 31, 2006  |  Airsoft, Featured Airsoft, Review  |  View Comments

FIRST IMPRESSIONS & BATTLE REPORT

ICS, in cel­eb­ra­tion of their 10 year anniversary have forged, in secret, a mas­ter gun. One gun to rule them all, one gun to find them, one gun to bring them all, and in the dark­ness lace the shit out them!

Here she is in all her glory:

(Click for a lar­ger, more detailed image)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that this is a very unique and spe­cial look­ing gun and not at all deserving of the com­ments she has received from the like of Dark­lite:

So it’s not incred­ibly real­istic — and still looks like it fell out of the arse of the ugli­est bird in ugly­land at the top of the ugli­est uglytree and hit every ugly branch on the way down to the ugly ground before being trampled to extreme ugly­ness by a ram­pa­ging hoard of uglybears.

Rub­bish sir! The ICS is not ugly; no one would call her ugly that held her. She has a bluff bow, lovely lines. She’s a fine war­bird: weath­erly, stiff and fast… very fast, if she’s well handled. No, she’s not ugly; she’s in her prime.

Of course, she had a metal nose…

So, what’s in the box? What do you get for your £269? Actu­ally quite a lot:

  • Unique Indi­vidu­ally Serial Numbered Body.
  • Com­plete Rein­forced Main Gear Set, Steel Pin­ion Gear, Steel Bevel Gear, Steel Bush­ings, Metal Spring Guide, M120 Spring, Alu­minum Pis­ton, Bore-Up Cyl­in­der, Strengthened Gear­box, New Sil­ic­one Wiring.
  • Work­ing for­ward assist to release the gears.
  • Super Torque-Up Turbo 3000 Upgraded to M120.
  • Metal Body, metal Receiver — Lower & Upper, Bar­rel, Front Parts, Sight, Stock, Hand­guard, metal Fold­ing Stock.
  • Spring Eject RIS Bi-Pod Ver­tical Grip Two High Caps, Speed­loader, T-Shirt, Sling.
  • Metal Tsunami RAS.
  • Sanyo Bat­tery in PEQ Bat­tery Box.

Which, as any­one would agree is a lot of value for £269!

I received the gun at the start of the Ground Zero Week­ender and was able to give her a thor­ough run through a check out, both in the range and in the field. 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, which was very nice of them since it is a small con­nector and I only have a large con­nector on my charger.

I zipped up a high­cap of BB’s and let rip at a dis­tant tree. As a com­par­ison I also fired on the same tar­get with my LR 300 cus­tom £800 AEG, which has a real steel holosight, Sys­tema high­speed motor (ooooo­hhh) as well as Pro­meth­eus intern­als and a tight bore barrel.

To put that into con­text, on the Sunday and using the LR I was able to shoot a guy stand­ing 60 meters away, single shot, in the back of the head. To stand up to that chal­lenge the ICs would have to be hot stuff!

And stand up it did. The rate of fire is of very high qual­ity, some­where below my LR with its Sys­tema but def­in­itely above a stock TM. Accur­acy was good to very good and I was drop­ping rounds onto the tree with no issues. It doesn’t have the upgraded inner bar­rel, but it was more than good enough for combat.

Since the whole thing is full metal it has a very nice and very solid feel on the shoulder, which cut down my aim time by a fair whack. I would say that it is bal­anced very well, even with the PEQ box bat­tery and snap shoot­ing was not a prob­lem. The stock folds down and has a slight bump when fol­ded to hold it in place. I didn’t find it jumped around at all in play.

The tube stick­ing out the back, which was the cause of so much con­sterna­tion amongst the gear­dos is in fact identical to the RS ver­sion and a god send in air­soft because this is where the sling mount has been attached and it is a very nat­ural pos­i­tion for it to be in. I found it attached with no wor­ries to my Chalker sling and the whole pack­age sat nicely on my front without drag­ging me for­wards like many other full metal guns do (the hate­full Star Sop­mod being the worst.)

So how did it fair in battle?

<—Battle

Well, for a change, the Darkan­gel team was fight­ing in wood­land this week­end and since this is not a nat­ur­ally ten­able pos­i­tion for the DA’s to find them­selves we have a very short time to come to terms with being in wood­land, before we got hit and had to sit out for ten minutes.

Obvi­ously in those few moments before being laced, it is the qual­ity of your gun that adds the dif­fer­ence between liv­ing and not. For example, a AAA bat­tery gun isn’t going to win, no mat­ter how good you are.

The ICS helped. It went through the mud and trees, it went through the bushes and got down and dirty and every time came up trumps. I had fant­astic suc­cess using this gun on this day and my final kill count was 27 down for 13 lives with 9 of those being bang kills. Lovely!

Also a nice fea­ture was the bipod. It meant that I could put the gun down and not worry about it being in the mud. Very handy indeed!

Accur­acy… Well to be sure, hav­ing a proper bipod helps a lot in obtain­ing pin point accur­acy in the field. How­ever, please wait dear reader as next Tues­day I will be test­ing it out before the games in Elec­trow­erkz, which are as near to ideal con­di­tions as you can get. Suf­fice to say that dur­ing this week­end I was hit­ting everything I shot at and frankly that is all you can ask for with any gun.

The only gun I have that is bet­ter cost £800, so nuff said. The value of this pack­age is immense and it is by far the best air­soft pur­chase, backed by Z1’s rock solid war­ranty, that I could have hoped for.

Buy one, you wont regret it. As lex said,

“Its very niiice!”

Here are some images of the trades and two movies; one I show the spring loaded bipod and two I fire the gun dry.

The free T-shirt

MOVIES:

First I show the spring loaded legs:

<—-CLICK FOR MOVIE

Next I show the gun fir­ing (the noise is very loud for an AEG).

The first sound is single shot, then you can hear a burst, then you can hear my wife moan­ing about me shoot­ing in the house, then I press the for­ward assist and release the gears.

<—-CLICK FOR MOVIE

So, next week will come a battle report in my home turf; CQB and a full accur­acy test from the top floor of elec­tro… watch this space!

Regards,

Basho

Zero 1 - Airsoft Weekender

Zero 1 — Airsoft Weekender

August 28, 2006  |  Airsoft, Featured Airsoft, Review  |  View Comments

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