Reddit reviews A Nightmare's Prayer: A Marine Harrier Pilot's War in Afghanistan
We found 3 Reddit comments about A Nightmare's Prayer: A Marine Harrier Pilot's War in Afghanistan. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
After loads of reading on the bus to work every day, here follows my reading list for military aviation:
Modern
Vietnam
WWII
Overall/Other
Bonus non-military aviation
I highly second the recommendations of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Diamond Age. I would also recommend:
A Nightmare's Prayer: A Marine Harrier Pilot's War in Afghanistan
>Winner of the 2012 Colby Award and the first Afghanistan memoir ever to be written by a Marine Harrier pilot, A Nightmare’s Prayer portrays the realities of war in the twenty-first century, taking a unique and powerful perspective on combat in Afghanistan as told by a former enlisted man turned officer. Lt. Col. Michael “Zak” Franzak was an AV-8B Marine Corps Harrier pilot who served as executive officer of VMA-513, “The Flying Nightmares,” while deployed in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. The squadron was the first to base Harriers in Bagram in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. But what should have been a standard six-month deployment soon turned to a yearlong ordeal as the Iraq conflict intensified. And in what appeared to be a forgotten war half a world away from home, Franzak and his colleagues struggled to stay motivated and do their job providing air cover to soldiers patrolling the inhospitable terrain.
Edit: This would be post modern - 2002-2003
I really enjoyed it, read it to fill that hype hole before the Harrier was released. I'm hoping at some point their will be a campaign that consists of difficult flying similar to what he describes in the book.
I don't really upload my missions since (to be honest) I suspect that they would not really be much of a hit. They are very much "single-use" missions and don't have much replay value. On top of that, they sometimes involve so little action that many might find them excessively boring and rate them accordingly. The missions I make are really just built for me and the handful of friends that I know are on the same page as me when it comes to mission structure preference.
I guess I feel like my missions would not really work out in the public. There is a lot of context that my friends and I have built around these things that are not really present in the mission files themselves. I am not sure how to explain that better but I can't shake this feeling that they would be confusing or disjointed for folks who don't have that context.
All that being said, I do want to encourage you to really dig into the editor. I am not really a expert in the slightest and while I know my way around the editor, I find that unless you are trying to create some kind of big multiplayer sandbox thing or a elaborate PvP/PvE hybrid scenario, you don't really need to make things terribly complicated in order to make them very realistic, plausible, and authentic. In fact, you really can do just fine using only the editor's built-in flag and trigger system and that system may seem complex at first, it is actually rather simple once you actually learn some of the very basics and see how it all fits together.
Seriously, I am not usually someone that gets really good at editors and I was able to work my way through it with very little outside help (since useful mission editor tutorials are somewhat rare even still).
The other thing is the military knowledge element. This is actually a interesting point to bring up since that knowledge has implications both in the editor as you make the missions and in the simulated cockpit as you execute those missions.
Building up that knowledge is not as daunting as you might think. It does require some "book-work" but you will find that a lot of the really useful information is condensed into only a few (very enjoyable) books and perhaps some NATO/USAF/USMC/Navy manuals/documents when small gaps need to be filled.
Here is a short reading list that will really expand your understanding of how missions are organized and put together.
1.) A-10's over Kosovo. This book is a goldmine of "short stories" that outline specific parts of the Operation Allied Force campaign from the perspective of both pilots and their commanding officers. It really gets into some of the details of how these missions were planned, what kind of air-power infrastructure they were working with, and how the day to day political changes changed how they did their jobs in the air. This book is a great way to start and it helps that it is free.
2.) Joint Force Harrier. This is written from the perspective of a British GR-7 pilot and squadron commander in Afghanistan. This book is filled with delicious technical details about not just the aircraft but how the day to day missions were organized. Alongside A-10's over Kosovo, this is a great way to learn a lot of great details rather quickly and easily.
3.) A Nightmare's prayer. This is a somewhat different book. It is written by a Marine pilot and while it is does offer some inside-looks at the way missions are planned and organized, it mostly focuses on his specific personal experiences during his time there. It may not give you a lot of technical details but it will help you understand the mindset.
One neat thing about this book is that it focuses quite a bit on how the whole system can break down while a pilot is flying a mission. You will read a lot of stuff about how poor planning, misused resources, and even inflexible time-lines all contribute to potential issues in-mission. These are things that you can find ways to simulate in the editor and add a lot of flavor to the missions you make.
4.) Black Aces High. This book focuses on F-14 bombing operations in Kosovo and offers some very interesting insights into how they gather useful intelligence and make use of it when planning missions. It also gets into some very interesting details about how large strike packages are organized.
This book also gets into just how failure prone some of these aircraft and the equipment they carry really are.
The following is a selection of links to documents/manuals I have found that may seem very heavy and difficult to parse at first but really should be treated as references. If you find yourself in need of a very specific term or a specific bit of information, these are organized in such a way that you should be able to find exactly what you want rather easily. Some of these have more updated versions that may or may not be downloadable but you can usually find them via google to read.
1.) 3-09.3 Close Air Support (joint publication)
2.) Air Support Operations Center (ASOC) procedures
3.) NATOPS tactics, techniques, and procedures for Close Air Support. (direct download link from ED forums)
4.) Multi-service tactics, techniques, and procedures for the joint application of air-power.
Those are a few good ones. Since I have been working mostly on CAS missions lately, I have focused a lot of my research on that specific aspect. This is why all those documents kinda relate. As far as fighter operations go, I would have to see if I can dig up any information on organizing patrols, intercepts, and the like. I suspect that information is out there but I gotta know what to look for.
As far as learning the editor goes, there are not a whole lot of great resources available. The DCS World manual covers a lot of the basics of the interface and taking a look at it every now and again can give you insight that you might not pick up intuitively. Still, there are some youtube lessons that might help, here are some good ones I have found.
1.) Mission randomization (very useful and very important!)
2.) PickinThatBanjo's mission editor tutorial playlist (some good basic information here and some intermediate concepts mixed in.
3.) Ranger79's mission editor tutorial playlist. Like the prior link, it has a lot of basic stuff but also covers some trigger and flag concepts that (while simple to do) really open up the editor in a big way.
When I approach making a mission, my first thought is how to properly capture the experience of the pilot and only the pilot. This means that I don't have a lot of interest creating some sort of randomized dynamic campaign kinda thing and instead focus on capturing what a typical sortie would look like. As a result, my missions tend to be fairly straightforward. If I task the player with bombing a target, I am going to take into account things like up to the minute satellite images, prolific drone use, and even up to the minute reports from troops on the ground. As such, the player will have a lot of information available even before they hop in the cockpit. To put it simply, don't agonize over randomization. That kind of stuff has a place in certain types of missions but only to a certain point. NATO has a lot of tools at its disposal that can provide very fine details about what the enemy is doing and what they are doing it with.
As a final thought. When you really get into some of the reading material, you start to see that in real-life, the missions are not really all that "epic". A day to day G-CAS, X-CAS, or even a CAP sortie is not going to be this huge battle and will probably instead be filled with more mundane, procedure focused tasks. When you do get action, it is (on average) going to be fairly isolated and won't require a lot of bombs, bullets, or missiles to take care of.
Additionally, it is useful to limit the scope of your missions carefully. In those big sandbox scenarios online, they often end up with far too many "cooks in the kitchen". In real life, you may have a lot of flights in the air but they are typically two ship flights that all have their own tasking and only interact with each other in specific circumstances. With this in mind, try to make missions that focus on just two pilots in a single flight. It will make it easier to create realistic, plausibly scaled missions. Likewise, equip those aircraft with realistic loadouts as that puts a heavy emphasis on managing weapons as opposed to just going up with a stupidly overloaded aircraft and dumping on inappropriate targets.
Hopefully this helps. I know it is not exactly a mission download list but I suppose this could be taken as a long-winded "teach a man to fish" scenario. Making your own missions is a good way to be self-sufficient. That is something that is not emphasized nearly enough in the DCS community these days.