I'll take the job! :salute:

You got it. but you will not get any paycheck for it.

Markus

And I'll take the "official cameraman" posting. :D With the not so insane amount of pics (I think I got many more when I went to Belgium) and the really insane length of my videos (specially the docking video), one could make some decent trailers. :)

For honor, for glory!
 

Meh, paycheck ... I'll just live off the honor. Who knows, maybe the newly gained job will impress a waitress somewhere out there ... :03:

Day 5
 

But hey, we would almost forget that there are still two days missing from these rapports so without further delay:here is day 5 gentlemen or, as the few remaining Subsim members would call it: bonus day 1. :up:

The day started like any other with a nice breakfast but had a bit of a sad ring to it: today we would say goodbye to a large group of new friends we made over the past few days. And I don't mean to get all emotional here but when you've had as much as fun as we had, you always want it to go on. At least a few days more. Sadly though, people had to get ready to catch their ride home one way or another. They say that all good things must come to an end but sometimes you just wished they didn't.

The ones that remained, however, had little difficulty choosing the destination for today: we would go and visit the Danish Naval Museum. And even while not being present himself, John's well done preparations and the various print-outs he left us made it child's play to find the museum. Thanks again m8!

Probably because we got there so efficiently the museum was still closed so we strolled around a little bit and visited a market square where we had a look around. When it was nearing the opening time of the museum we walked back there and got in.

Apparently it was a special day because the guy behind the counter told me that the tickets I bought for the group were also valid for the Arsenal, which was a couple of blocks further down the road. Nice surprise, and that settled the rest of our plans for the afternoon. Buying the museum tickets for everyone in one go was part one of my plan for supporting Peter's projects some more. Everyone paid me back with loose coins so that was easily settled.

The ground floor the museum housed a nice collection of canons which got especially Mike's full attention. He just loved looking at the big guns that were present there and I have to admit, there were a couple of impressive looking ones in there.

That first and second floor of the Naval Museum had, among other stuff, some of the most amazing scale models of galleons (the car-nut in me keeps typing 'gallons', most irritating!) and steamboats I've ever seen in my life. Someone clearly must have had a lot of free time on his hands in order to build these ships, they just looked amazing. The combination of all those ropes, masts and sails on these ships was most impressive. Just imagine seeing one being built on full scale in real life. Half a forest in wood went into each of these and the amount of ornaments and other markings were making them a floating work of art.

While walking through the museum and ascending it's floors, you were guided passed the various era's and we could clearly see the ships and their technologies evolving through time. The first floor covered roughly from 1510 to the beginning of the 1800's and on the second floor history went on with the 1820's until 1920's. The difference in the way ships were built and fitted over even a period of just a few hundred years was astonishing so you can imagine what technological advances the whole 400 year period brings to the table. Amazing stuff, and well worth the visit.

When we were done at the Naval Museum we went over to the Arsenal and that just place has to own the biggest collection of guns and canons I've ever seen in my life. Upon entering the room or hall we were greeted by a V2 rocket hanging from the ceiling and 'some smaller stuff to the right' but when you glanced left there were canons on display, almost as far as you could see. Bas and I realized that we had to warn Mike but we were just to late preparing him for this entry and a loud 'What the ... !!' filled the room. He looked like a kid in a toy store, smiling from ear to ear. We all strolled around and gazed over the huge collection of canons, anti-air and Gatling guns, it was just so much to take in. It was huge!

But then we went upstairs ...

For those of you that weren't there; the best description I can give of what we were exposed to on the first floor, is to picture that scene in the movie The Matrix were Neo explains that he needs guns, lots of guns ... Now Neo may have had a lot of guns but, as it turned out, there is always someone with more. The Danish for example.

They had glass showcase after glass showcase after glass showcase filled with just about every single handgun, machinegun and rifle you can think of, ranging from the stone age (okay, maybe a little after that) up until the modern era. We just didn't know where to start looking. Mike and I kind of teamed up and walked around, talking about the various guns we saw while trying to figure out how some worked. It was a blast and the guy who came to tell us that the arsenal would close up came in way too soon. I could have spend another half a day in there without getting bored. Mihai managed to buy a last minute souvenir and we went on our way.

Even though we hadn't nearly been walking around as much then when John or Lars were leading us around, we still worked up a pretty good appetite so we declared diner time and looked for a pizza place. No one heard me complaining about it, pizza is always a good choice for me no matter where I am. So pizza it was and after that we all went back to the hotel where we found Dan again. Unfortunately, that was where the day ended for us and we had to say goodbye to our friends from Ubisoft.

Bas and I emptied our pockets for coins at the counter from the Cabin, loaded up the remaining luggage in the car and then went on our way ourselves. But we were not heading home just then, no sir. For us, the 2009 Subsim meet wasn't going to end that day. Our final chapter of the meet was set to be at an undisclosed location in Germany.

While we all very much like all the pics and tales of the Adventure. :yep: :up:

I think were at the point where we want to hear detailed accounts about the SHV preview. And not just this...



" Because next up was the Silent Hunter 5 presentation by the Ubi guys and for me personally I can sum it up with the same two words our Danish tour guide used: extremely good. Man, it was just awesome. We saw the new interface, game features and talked about what Dan had in mind when designing 5 and its various components.

I'll leave the more detailed review of the presentation to others "
----------------------------------------------------------------
Understanding pics and vids were verboten... I think it's time to end the suspense and tell us a detailed account of the preview.

I don't want to read about it in UBI Silent Hunter V .COM :DL

The point is that the game is still very much WIP. Meaning that at lot of the stuff we want in the game may still make it - it al depends on budget and time.

What we did see (as far as I remember) was that:
The campaign has more depth. Your actions will have some consequences. You can no more sink the same ship more than just once.
You can have an overmap in the same screen as looking through the periscope.
You can move through the sub
You can see the torpedoes being loaded.
Several changes to the interface

Please note that this game in not even in apha stage, so we only saw bits of the ideas, but it looks like some really good ideas.

Thx McBeck :up: Nobody can ask for more than that. It just seemed like it was being held close to the vest for no reason. Just bits and pieces.

If I could have gotten away I would have come mostly for the SH5 Preview.

To read where I quoted Von Hinten post it sounded like alot more. I won't press you for more.

I am old enough tho to know that the UBI suits wouldn't let the Devs show anything that they cared about being seen.

And the Devs aren't going to risk their jobs showing and telling what they shouldn't.

What was done is what we call in the Street Racing world as " Bench Racing" Discussing ideas. With a few pics.

Ahem :) er, some/most of that was in my twitters, released the night of the event, how was that held close to the vest, FW? :O:

And there's the transcriptions of my notes. :D They're more like detailed walkthroughs of what I was seeing at each particular moment, than a story about how it went. Also made some sketches of the GUI. But I haven't got it into the computer yet (it's on paper, and in Spanish).


Right now I'm doing a global debriefing for our High Command at the 24th, but I intend to do the transcription some time... hopefully not too far into the future. And I've been answering some random stuff in the SH5 threads here at subsim anyway, so there's stuff going on for sure. :yep:

9:30 AM PST

@ Neal and Martes86 I will respond when I have some coffee and wake up as I was up until 3am last night. :yawn:

I have a few things to ask as well. :DL

Hey, no thread hijacking! Get your own darnit! :arrgh!:

Sorry Hinten:salute:

Yes sir! :salute:

Jawohl Herr Oberleutnant! :D

That's more like it. Now go play outside while I finish up the report on the final day. :O:

"Final"? Wait... when did you actually leave? On Monday? :o :hmmm:

Heh, just wait and see. ;)

Day 6
 

Bonus day 2! You'd think it was all over didn't you? Well for most it was, but not for all of us. Bas and I, when planning our trip to the Denmark Subsim meet 2009, had thought of splitting up our home trip to reduce the amount of hours we'd have to drive. So when we noticed that Wilhelmshaven was kind of on our way home the plan was made: let's visit it and see what's up there. While we were talking about it with Michael he said that if we were actually going to visit the city we should let him know because as it turned out he lives there and would love to join us.

The initial plan was to drive straight to Wilhelmshaven from Copenhagen but mother nature got in our way and forced is to cut that journey in half as well which had us ending up in a Hamburg hotel. We arrived pretty late which meant the door was actually closed up but luckily for us they had a Check-in-O-Matic so we could just enter some data and find our rooms. I do remember taking a long hot shower first but don't even remember hitting the pillow after that. I did wake up on it sure enough so I guess I made it into bed safely.

After breakfast we got ourselves and the gear into the car and headed to Wilhelmshaven. Although the weather was just amazing for the time of year, the timing was pretty lousy because the German's were working on most of the autobahns we were passing. A lot. This slowed our progress a lot but we made it eventually. Michael, who by the had done the entire trip from Copenhagen to Wilhelmshaven in one go, was going to meet us there so we could visit the Deutschen Marinemuseum there together.

At first I parked the car on the wrong side of the bridge. I just followed the sign Museumshiffe but aparently there are two sections of them. Luckily we had exchanged numbers with Michael so when he sent me a text message telling that he had arrived we knew that we had to move just a little further. So we crossed the bridge to get to the correct side of the canal and Bas came very close to pulling the handbrake just so he could shoot a picture from the destroyer. And I have to agree, a ship that size is an impressive sight. We met up with Michael

Besides a number of smaller vessels, the Deutschen Marinemuseum features the submarine, or u-boot, U10, the mine hunter Weilheim and the impressive missile destroyer Mölders. After looking around on the museum area, which was pretty much deserted, we head for the destroyer first. I cannot stress how good it was to have Michael with us because no guide could have told us much more about the ship than he did. Awesome job m8, thanks again for tagging along with us.

Simply by following the signs we were guided over and through the entire ship, passing all the various stations. Not having seen one in real life yet, both Bas and I had a great time on there and had trouble choosing targets for our camera's. For one, the objects on a ship this size are pretty big so getting them in the viewfinder was not always an easy task. Sometimes there just wasn't enough room on the ship to get a clear shot. Speaking of clear shots, we yet again were very lucky with the virtually non-existing crowd on this tour: basically we had a clear shot at everything we looked at. Cool!

After the destroyer we went back to the shop to ask until what time we could hang around. Apparently the museum closed up at 6 so that meant we had only roughly 15 minutes left for a quick dash through the sub. That rather close deadline didn't stop us from trying though so we took a run for the sub and shot a few great pics in there as well. And although this was a similar class sub as the one we visited in Denmark, the way it was outfitted differed quite a lot so it was good to have seen this one as well. For a second we joked about hiding aboard and let ourselves locked in so we could have a longer look around but one of the museum people caught up with us and friendly, though surely, guided us off the sub.

We then went looking for food and ended up in a Chinese restaurant where we had a long chat with Michael over diner, until it was really time to get moving again. His final guiding job was to the autobahn where we then went our way and that was it for the 2009 Subsim meet.

So, here's our final 'naval' score of this meet:

Subs:
German U-995: Das boot where we went out the conning tower and all over the deck
Danish Sælen: Another opened up conning tower and working periscope for spotting targets
Danish UC3 Nautilus: Sailed it, engineered it, dove it, blew ballast on it. In one word: awesome experience!! (okay, so that's two words)
German Type VII: A nice walk around on a virtual one during the SH-V presentation by our friends from Ubi. Saw the engine room, crew quarters, and a torpedo getting loaded. No sign of the guy with the soup ...
German U10: Got chased over it by the museum person, so much to see, so little time

Ships:
The Copenhagen water busses: great view at 'hidden' subs and easiest way to get around
Sehested torpedo missile boat: you better be on their side when they come looking for you in one of those. Extremely gøød!
Oliver's 10 foot speedboat: the ideal way to very quickly get from the middle of nowhere to slightly to the left of the middle of nowhere *grin*
German missile destroyer Mölders: walked all over it, gadget-o-rama! Impressive piece of equipment.

I'm beginning to believe Neal when he said that this is going to be a meet that's hard to surpass. Then again, according to others, that's what Neal has been saying every meet so far so ... I'll just try and attend as many as I can from now to find out.

Signing off now. It's been a pleasure meeting the lot of you and I'm hoping to see you all again at the next meet guys! :up:

:D :D