17th Pathfinders

Week 7: Ground Regained

Current Area of Operations[puu.sh]

While its been a slow fortnight due to lower attendance than usual, we've made some decent gains in territory. A major military objective has been taken, and we're well on the way to pivoting onto another primary town objective.

The week 6 rotation involved a themed CE event that turned into a Spartan-based op, which was primarily hunting for enemy FOBs in the AO. This was a successful operation, and gave us some breathing room for more aggressive missions.

Here's an excerpt of the extraction from the last FOB we hit.[gfycat.com]

Week 7 began as a low-attendance op, but ended up involving 9 total members. We initially retook Kalithea, which was still held by the URF from the Week 5 counterattack. From here, mounted ODSTs used Warthogs to move through the small objectives of Agios Petros, Almyra, Radio Tower 226168 and Thelos. At the end of this operation, Grizzly support became available, and we were successful in rotating the ODST unit back up to Military Lab Bravo. After an intense infantry engagement, and with cover from the Grizzly, we took the Lab from the URF, eliminating a major source of enemy aggression and counterattack in the region.

From here on out, we're in a strong position to continue encircling Paros, which should give us the ability to properly attack and take it within the next couple of weeks. We may need to undertake some rescue side missions soon, as the high amount of FOB hunts has reduced our intel reserves heavily.

Our current vehicle assets are:

• 1x Pelican (unarmed, stationed on frigate)
  
• 2x Falcon (unarmed, stationed on frigate)
  
• 1x Grizzly
  
• 1x Bison
  
• 1x Unarmed Warthog
  
• 1x Recovery Warthog
  
• 2x Stallion

A couple of big new additions to the mission/server this rotation!

The first of these is the URFs deployment of long range SAM sites around Altis. They've been strategically placed in fairly safe locations, so we'll need to wait until we either have strong intel on their locations or we can directly acquire them from our standard operations. As for how they'll affect flight paths for current logistics and CAS - heavily. Thus far, flight higher than 40m above ground level further than a kilometre or two into enemy territory seems guaranteed to get a lock from the radar controller on the aircraft. At this point, you'll need to either dive for ground cover or undertake extreme evasive manouvres to avoid the missiles. They'll take a Pelican out of the sky in 2 rounds, and close extremely fast. Adjust your flying accordingly.

The second big change is the switch to the TFAR Beta version thats on the Workshop. It includes a host of new features, including better audio quality, less performance impact and intercom functionality for passengers and crew in vehicles. It does require some installation - you'll need to get and install the new teamspeak plugin from the TFAR website[radio.task-force.ru], as well as install the new workshop item. Alternatively, the teamspeak plugin can be found in your mod folder "\steamapps\common\Arma 3\!Workshop\@Task Force Arrowhead Radio (BETA!!!)\teamspeak". Once this is done, make sure you swap over both the mod and the plugin in the respective programs - old and new don't play nice with each other.

Updating to the new TFAR version is required, as the server can't run different versions of the mod at the same time, and the two aren't compatible with each other.

Fuzzle