The blue smoke gives the two stroke engine away 
.
Not even for the first time of driving a car of any kind in all of Europe?! It wasn’t bad at all. I think other drivers had plenty of time & space to get around us and leave our slow moving line of Trabants in the dust, not too different from horse carriages or pedicabs.
Well, I’m a small town kid, and I always hate driving in Berlin. Mostly, traffic runs orderly in Germany, and it does indeed run more orderly in Berlin than in, say, Paris, Rome or Athens, but Berlin drivers are nonetheless reckless, and you have to be swift to get along.
Slight Hijack: I drove a Yugo. Loved it. Would love to have a Trabant, parked next to a 2C-V.
Guess I’ll have to be content with my Fiats and e10s.
And a few of my streetbikes are 2-Stroke. They keep mosquitos away.
The Millennium Challenge 2000
This infamous wargame is regularly trotted out as an example of the egotism of the US military/the vulnerabilities of the US military/how the US military refuses to acknowledge defeat because some upstart young Officer defeated their old style tactics. Whenever there’s any discussion of a potential new future war expect someone to trot out the MC2000 as the be-all end-all argument winner.
Of course this is ignoring the following
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The opposing force Officer admitted he wanted to be as disruptive as possible for the war game contrary to the rules he agreed on.
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He didn’t just “bend the rules” like so many people claimed, he was outright cheating. For example mounting weapon systems on vehicles that was impossible to mount them on, like long range cruise missiles on little motor boats.
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The Generals resetting the war game after the Opposing force officer “won” on the first day isn’t an example of the Generals refusing to accept defeat. When you do any sort of war games if one side wins early you all just don’t go home early. You reset the board and play another game since you already have all the pieces lined up.
Yeah, he “cheated,” but in the very same way guerilla forces do in asymmetrical wars. The specifics make the headline story less impressive, sure. The point stands that “wait, you can’t do that” leads to bad preparedness and strategy. He might have broken simulated physics or whatever, but there are no rules in war.
Olive Garden
Hey now. They make great soups.
I saw a Trabant at a car show. The two owner-restorers said that if they needed access to work on something in the engine compartment, no problem; they just lifted the engine out by hand.
You can even do it with a VW Beetle motor, which was a four stroke four cylinder boxer. I’ve seen friends of mine who are into Beetles lift the motor out with two guys.
Our tour guide pointed out an old Trabant when I was in Saxony many years ago. He said that even though it was underpowered, hard to drive, and ugly, Car and Driver named it their “Car of the Year” for 1989, in recognition of the thousands of East Germans who drove their Trabants into the West when Hungary opened their borders. I’ve seen videos of smiling families packed into Trabants, crossing into Austria, at Leipzig’s museum of post war Germany; I left the museum in tears.
I read a really long article on this (it was 2002, not 2000), and it’s fascinating. But some points:
- It’s a bit rich to complain about someone being disruptive in a game of war. He was assigned to play red as best he could, and that’s what he did. We’re not talking about “I’m gonna play my music real loud the night before exams” here.
- I don’t think he cheated. He used the parameters of the situation to win. There was a “white” team overseeing everything, and he literally couldn’t have broken the rules as the ref watched. Maybe he did things that wouldn’t happen in the real world, but that’s okay: in the simulation you operate by simulation rules, and that’s what he did.
- The reset made logistical sense, as there were scads of actual soldiers standing by for preplanned 36 hours of live exercises, and shipping them home would be incredibly wasteful. The stages after that–in which red was forced to follow a script that included boneheaded moves, so that blue could win–was what looked like cheating. Only, it wasn’t cheating on his part.
That said, it’s not like this had any harmful effects. All that happened is the military made a hugely expensive boondoggle in 2002 to force-prove that their new military doctrine was unbeatable by, say, a country with access to huge oil reserves and a despotic government. It’s not like we later went into such a country and got mired there for over a decade or anything, learning too late that our shiny new doctrine was shit. Pshah, as if!
Excellent Username/post combo!
It has a Pacer vibe, but the hood looks like it was stolen from a Studebaker Avanti
Consider using, I have a LOT of…
Now for the Terry Pratchett quote:
‘Everyone knows trolls can’t even count up to four!’*
*In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three, many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realise that many can BE a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-three, LOTS."
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms