> On Jul 21, 2015, at 12:10 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But the players *simultaneously* believe that
>
> 1) they're swanning about in the equivalent of a US Navy WWII motorized Patrol Torpedo boat and
> 2) that all those movies wherein brave PTs dash in at high speed, sink the destoyer and then dash away again with only a few dramatic bullet holes (and maybe an NPC or two getting hit) are accurate protrayals of PT boat tactics
>
> Never mind that the actual wartime missions mostly involved motoring quietly to a spot where previous experience showed Japanese supply boats were liable to be encountered, waiting with lights off and motors idling for these heavily-laden slow-moving targets to put in an appearance, drifting quietly into torpedo range THEN launching and immediately hitting the gas, leaving at flank speed under heavy smoke while earnestly praying that no searchlights found them . . .

One of my old books in my collection  is ‘They were expendable’ <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/837265.They_Were_Expendable> the book that the John Wayne movie was made from; it was clearly written as wartime propaganda, but a lot of the actual flavor of the actual reality comes through, like how many of them simply exploded because they were essentially high-powered racing boats with hundreds of gallons of avgas in them, and the bilge vents sometimes stopped working.
—
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs