Ever wonder how to "interact with the local populace" when you travel somewhere? Well, here's how it's done:
- Be prepared to discuss your personal interests (hobbies, books, travel).
- Be sensitive to your body language.
-> Smile as long as it is appropriate.
-> Avoid sitting with your arms crossed.
-> Do not show the bottom of your feet in an Arabic culture.
-> Keep your hands away from your mouth.
-> Lean forward and nod.
-> Make frequent eye contact (if culturally appropriate).
- Use the person's name, position title, rank, and/or other verbal expressions of respect.
...
- Remember, a person's favorite topic is himself
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WARNING - This document contains technical data whose export is restricted by the Arms Export Control Act (Title 22, U.S.C., Sec 2751, et seq.) or the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, Title 50 U.S.C., App. 2401 et seq. Violation of these export laws are subject to severe criminal penalties. Disseminate in accordance with provisions of DoD Directive 5230.25.
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT D - Distribution authorized to the Department of Defense and DoD contractors only due to critical technology. This determination was made on 26 June 2000. Other requests for this document shall be referred to Commander, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, ATTN: SFAE-AV-AAH- ATH, Redstone Arsenal, AL 35898 - 5000.
DESTRUCTION NOTICE - Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.
You can only hope that the uploader is who they say they are...
You are not committing a crime or doing anything special by finding and sharing this information (/unless/ you are read in to whatever program may or may not require one to protect it).
I don't know why they would want to prevent it. It's free publicity for them with no consequences. They just have to make sure to delete it eventually.
Train a ML model as a classified document classifier and scan everything through that... now they just need to dig through their archives for the training set from all the past leaks.
I mean I was partially joking about the origin of the dataset, but they likely could work with DoD at this point to get a model that is acceptable to put in place, after as many leaks as they have had.
I believe they already have things track how documents are accessed and copied across their network. There’s definitely flaws in it, but it’s not completely open.
Isn't there standard text on these? On a cover page and/or headers/footers?
I get that the content of the documents is not known, but I would think the structure of them is known and could be matched on. Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.
They could maybe even slurp up the text from PDF's they blocked to prevent someone from posting similar plaintext. Probably not, though, because an endpoint that says whether something is or isn't classified is basically a classified document generator with enough time or clever tricks.
Then just forward the reports to whatever country's military owns those docs (or let the company's government do that). I think War Thunder only needs to make a nominal effort; the various militaries of the world will take care of backing it up with a dire threat.
> Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.
Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to maintain a database of distinguishing sensitive marks on documents?
Hell, some documents are so protected even the labeling is protected information.
Infeasible.
Edit: I don't mean infeasible or difficult from a technical standpoint. I mean procedurally, this isn't viable. You couldn't accomplish it in a way that wouldn't be so full of holes as to be functionally useless.
Not really much of a conspiracy there, most of the "leaks" are technically public info NATO documents, War Thunder's developer doesn't want to touch ANYTHING that might have been classified at one point.
That is almost certainly what is happening. There are tens of millions of Westerners who are sympathetic towards the adversaries of the West (primarily Russia).
Does anybody understand why this happens within the War Thunder community? It's not like War Thunder is a hardcode simulator - why on earth do the players need real manuals anyway?
Why does this not happen for DCS or any of the much more serious simulators?
The real reason this is always happening for Warthunder is because it's being sensationalized by the media and what's happening is being massively misrepresented.
Every time one of these articles comes out for like the last 6 months at least the "leaked classified documents" have already been available online for _years_. But someone posts these easily findable documents on the Warthunder forums and suddenly the leak originates from the Warthunder forums because it makes a good article title.
Has it happened in DCS in the past? I know of the instance where an Eagle Dynamics employee got nabbed due to possessing documents but I don't know of an instance where a community member has posted docs publicly.
ED has clamped down on it. Now if you post something and can't prove it's from an unlimited distribution source BigNewey will delete your post pretty much immediately. I typically see that stuff on community Discords where the volunteer mods have a longer reaction time.
1. Jeez the Panther fires slow for a tank with one of the first auto loaders.
2. Wow other people have the same complaint
3. Statement from the developers that they have used the reload times from a technical document written by the french after ww2, where they disassembled and tested a panther for the government
4. Hang on that panther specifcally had its autoloader removed, and was piloted by untrained people.
5. Located a locked thread with pages and pages of technical data, arguments about russian tank favoritism, and ultimately no change.
The devs bring it on themselves by being very much in love with russian hardware, and being very picky about their sources. They also participate in the conversation and that leads to people trying to prove they are wrong.
I think it's the fact that War Thunder is less serious than hardcore sims that makes all the difference. The sort of person who is into a "real sim" and values the experience of reproducing the "real" experience is also relatively aware of the culture around military technology. You know it would be potentially bad for you to post classified stuff and you probably understand why "not for export" and "top secret" are different classes of information and why you want two classes of information. You respect the information hierarchy that these systems of secrecy respect - and part of that respect means you enjoy really flipping all of the knobs on an Apache. You probably have access to these documents but you would never be so gauche as to post them on a public forum.
On the other hand, if you mostly enjoy military hardware in a semiotic and arcade-y way, all official documents simply represent potential ammunition to win internet arguments. You aren't aware of the baroque system of different kinds of secrecy and if you heard of itt you would think it was silly. If the information is "out there" already why wouldn't you post it to settle an internet argument? Surely if you can get your hands on it then any potential enemy has as well.
If the US military's aircraft information is so incredibly important and secret, how the hell did it end up in the possession of some civilian gaming forum users? Maybe they should just add it to Wikipedia already and call it a day.
You do realize military personnel are gamers, too, right?
Video gaming has been mainstream for long enough for me to have had a full active duty and reserve career, retire as a senior officer, and then go utterly ga-ga over Baldur's Gate 3, which came out of early release over a month after I retired. The difference is I know how to keep my NDAs.
> Why does this not happen for DCS or any of the much more serious simulators?
Size of the player base? I imagine there are an order of magnitude more daily WT players than there are DCS players, for instance.
And while WT isn't a hardcore simulation, it is detailed enough that obscure technical details can make a difference in gameplay balance, combine that with someone salty about getting blown up in a situation they shouldn't ("the game has that panel 12mm too thin and 3 degrees off, the round actually would have bounced!") and obsessing over their favorite piece of Olive Drab steel, well, we find ourselves in this situation. Yet again.
And the military needs nerds (positive term)! Who do you think maintains all our communications, networks, avionics, cryptography, collates all our intelligence information, and translates what the bad guys get intercepted saying in their native tongue?
All of these communities have, well, a reputation for a certain type of personality. The old joke is that you can tell an extrovert at the NSA because when he/she is talking, he/she looks at YOUR shoelaces.
I would get all that, for a hardcore sim. Back in the day there was an F-16 Falcon simulator where people regularly used real (old) manuals to learn how to just start the aircraft.
But I have doubts War Thunder is modeled accurately enough for a real service manual to actually make any difference for any of the players. War Thunder, from appearances, looks very arcadey and designed to be fun for most players. Sims usually involve 20 minute startup sequences, weight balance shifting, etc... I just don't understand this with War Thunder.
It sounds like you haven't played War Thunder. The service manual is obviously useless in War Thunder because repairs happen automatically under a cool down. The point of the game isn't to learn how to operate any specific vehicle. The point is to act as the commander with high level controls but with some skill based elements such as aiming.
Meanwhile the technical specs of the tank.... Those are absolutely critical because the damage simulation is entirely dependent upon them, because this isn't world of tanks where tanks have hitpoints. When you shoot a projectile, the projectile interacts with the armor, creates spalling (or explodes inside) that then has to kill all the personnel inside the vehicle for it to count as a vehicle kill. Shots that don't kill can disable parts of the tank, activate the ammo rack, destroy the tracks, etc.
A service manual isn't going to tell you how thick a specific section of the armor is, or what composition the armor has or what angle the armor is. Yes this still retains a sort of arcade simulation feel, because a realistic simulation such as this [0] is computationally too expensive to happen in a multiplayer game.
War Thunder has multiple game modes, one of which is very arcadey, one of which is relatively realistic, the other which is a simulator. Most of these players play the middle one, which attempts to model everything as accurately as possible from public information but which automates and abstracts common aircraft-specific sequences. That way you can have a relatively realistic multiplayer experience and something that approximates a life outside of it.
The realistic mode can optionally also hold your hands through many aspects of operating the aircraft, at a significant cost in performance, so more serious players will play with "simulator controls" (and will map more advanced things such as changing fuel mixture/prop angle/radiator activation, etc..., like you'd do on a proper simulator).
The developers in theory and sometimes in practice will correct inaccuracies in performance or capabilities if you can point them out from non-classified sources. Unlocking modern vehicles takes 100-600$ or hundreds (sometimes thousands) of hours, and sometimes due to inaccuracies they end up being or becoming non-viable, so some people are irrationally motivated to change that.
I think you've hit the reason with the wrong cause though: because War Thunder is pretty loosey-goosey with it's model, it leaves plenty of room for the "that's BS! The real Abrams would totally have..." argument.
Whereas in a more crunchy simulation model, whether one plane beats another or something is going to be tied up in a lot more nuance.
People aren't posting these for players to use as in-game references. They're posting them to prove that the developers short-changed their favorite piece of hardware, in hopes that the devs will say "sorry, you're right" and fix it.
> It's not like War Thunder is a hardcode simulator
People work themselves into prison due to stalking and death threats to game developers over balance issues; "what my in-game tank can and can't do" is a balance issue, even if it isn't a sim.
I heard that in the present day that is mostly irrelevant. The hard part is procuring adequate fissile material more than designing the bomb. Maybe an ICBM design would help North Korea?
It seems like aspects of miniaturizing multi-stage fusion devices can still be difficult. Single stage unboosted fission devices should be be near trivial, so long as you have a source of fissile material (as you indicated).
The other secret-ish aspect is details of the safety features and permissive action links. I say -ish because at one point the US offered to give PAL technology to the Soviets.
True most major military planes receive regular block upgrades and are pretty much unrecognizable from the initial release after a few decades, save for the airframe.
Not sure if this is also the case with the Apache but I don't doubt it.
First result on https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22AH-64D+Apache+Longbow%22...
I am available for hire as a spy.