War With A Mate - Episode 26: The Trucks

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Oh this is quintessential War With A Mate. The trucks are out in storm here, they are making their way across the deserts and our hearts. Touching on the logistics of trucking is this week’s history segment, wherein Andy covers some much more capable “truckers”. A Common Ground segment that is focused on taking things back to basics, as well as a reflection on what makes the guys tick.

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Because we have your number. Sounds even better than the... I'm going to save us money on that royalty-free track. Just saving yourself effort, really. Yeah, that's a good point. No need to edit it anymore. I'm going a cappella, baby. What else should we sing?

The intro? Oh, again? Again, yeah. That was the intro. I know, I liked it. Okay, okay. That sounded like you were ragging on it a little bit. No.

This is What With A Mate with me, James. Me, Andy. and despite what you may be thinking no this is not the acapella karaoke podcast this is the podcast in which we play all of spi's the campaign for north africa starting at the moment with a little practice run of six turns soon to be followed by the full damn thing yeah maybe not super soon but we have some hope after today well we're still playing the game so right now this is all just a little teaser it's all one big test run before the big thing and that big thing is going to take us at the moment i think we're on course for 34 years i think is what it looks like

currently so we're gonna have to pick up that pace we do need to pick the face the good thing is when we get to retirement age we're gonna get a lot of free time yeah things speed up real quick so to be fair i think we actually miss retirement age by a few years at this rate well this will be the thing we have to finish before they let us have our pensions our pensions are tied to this yeah i knew i shouldn't assign that scheme i don't think i like damn you aviva you con artists that's not a true reflection on aviva i'm sure they're lovely people over at aviva headquarters nah can't speak to it personally but maybe maybe they're lovely so we've been playing a little bit of the game today yeah we've been uh doing some trucking we have we've finally been fucking those

trucks or rather i guess delegating supplies very carefully via the trucks which is their intended purpose and as the rule said the trucks are the game and today we found out yeah they are the game so how do you feel it went for you because you finished your trucks and i am halfway through my trucks yeah it was fairly simple for me at the minute i only have four convoys that's what i was worried about it just seems simple but basically i have a singular supply route from alexandria along the north coast smart man and then there's a supply depot at the other end that i'm using to supply my front line people so it's basically alexandria to miss him a true miss him a true my supply dump supply dump to supply the guys and then they start heading back so it's fairly

simple for me it should maybe just go in a cycle which is the intended purpose of them yeah in the rules it says you should have three tiers of trucks you should have first second and third line trucks first line trucks are attached to units so they are there on the front lines with your men your men can immediately draw resources from them second line trucks run from your men back to supply dumps and your third line run from supply dumps to major ports yeah so that is it sounds like what you've done in spirit yeah and that's not like a rule that's just a suggested structure for it like second line and third line trucks aren't distinct yeah it's a it's an idea yeah and it does actually say in the rules this is not a rule yeah so that's that's very handy

it means we can free form it a little bit we don't need to worry about it being a complete mess we don't have to worry about more rules to fuck up well and it was all going fantastically well until the dice hit again because these dice hate me so the dice work on a scale so it's it's two six-sided dice and there's a big one and a small one and they represent the tens and the digits so it's a scale it's a weird scale because it goes up to 66 it starts at 11 but of course it misses off some numbers you can't have any number that has a 7 an 8 or a 9 in it yeah so it's 11 to 16 21 to 26 yes the highest you can roll is 66 the lowest is 11 but it also works weirdly where 11 tends to be the best result snake eyes is what you want is good in this for the uh so i rolled 65

so one off the worst possible well it was the same worst possible result 50 of the trucks that delivered some stuff to my front lines well specific my front line supply depot uh all just broken yeah just really uh thrown a wrench into the sort of nice cycle of just going back and forward if 50 of them are gonna get fucked every time well that's what i'm kind of scared about the fact that i've been thinking this all through meticulously and then in the very first roll we rolled a rainstorm for the weather which means that roads are now half as functional as they would be and now on top of that i forgot really to factor in the breakdown so now all of these well thought out truck routes are not only half as effective in the rainstorm but also subject

to breakdown as they always will be which means that you can be hit like you were today 50% of your truck's gone yeah which is because i didn't think it was going to be an issue either because you know when we were doing the breakdowns for the attached trucks in the combat phase they hardly get any most of them couldn't actually have any losses yeah the trucks have a big boost where their breakdown rating is adjusted so they they get essentially a two um yeah two adjustments on the table so it's very hard for them to break down at all but that's when they're moving with units that are significantly slower. Because the units are capped at about a third of it. Exactly.

Whereas if you take a truck to its limit which is 30 across a clear which is the sort of average tile that's 4 times which is like 120 the table goes up to 70

tracks half it so 60 it's still really bad so I might, for the main game I might think about doing some shorter more sustainable jumps, if that's possible. That might be what we need to do. Shorter, more consistent, sustainable journeys

rather than big push. I may add a fourth or fifth line. A fourth or fifth line? Where the hell do they go? Shorter. There'd basically be two trucks on the third line loop, two trucks on the second line loop. Okay, two stages to each one.

You'd have your 2.5s and your 3.5s. Yeah. Okay, that's a smart way to do it. I'm going to have to see our mind pan out because you have four convoys i've got 15 yes your guys are spread out a lot more um i guess and i guess yours you just arranged it that way yeah i broke them down a lot more because i realized but so the the axis forces the italians have a lot of garrisons a lot of my men are well not a lot of my men but a lot of my counters a lot of my individual uh groups are garrisons which

are all stationed at various towns and burrs so they don't have a whole lot of food i'm trying to get food to them which is why i've got so many different groups of trucks but as time has went on today i've realized i'm probably not going to be distributing them the way i thought i think it's going to be a case of one or two trucks do the runs for all of the garrisons because it's mostly stores that they'll need because those garrisons are going to be in there for the long haul they're not big fighting groups you're looking at three or four tow points of it like infantry for the most part uh infantry yes so you don't need fuel don't need fuel and also even if i did they're not moving yeah the garrison so they're staying stationary villages have almost infinite water

because of the wells they're relatively infinite they can deplete but relative to a garrison they've got enough water for the whole game and they just need food so i'm going to give them the food they need and they're going to hold up i'm not going to move them into battle they'll just die yeah and when it comes to my big forces they are getting reinforced at the moment by the trucks yes i've been moving them around up along the north so all along that coast um sort of tabrook area and then there's a sort of valley where the black shirts are stationed yes the first and fourth i think it is the black shirts the ccnn divisions they've just got a um a real good position last movement so two sessions ago they moved around drop them back in a sort of

Retreating holding war? Yes. And the 1st and 2nd Libyan divisions are now fully stocked again. I've given them all the ammo they need to go for a second swing at you after they retreated last time against the cold stream guards. Yes. So I am very much looking forward to a second bite at the cherry so that I can really go for your men

and also rescue my prisoners that you got. You can have them back. I don't want them. Well, of course you don't want them because prisoners are a permanent drain on your food supply yes so why would you want to keep prisoners it's insane you'd have to be mad to want prisoners but you are a madman yeah i've said that from start to finish a madman who is going to be able to move his train at the end of this movement yes when the trucks are done and when my trucks are done moving that's it upstage one done polished off yeah which is a big feels like a big milestone well that'll be one of 18 upstages for

the practice run yep and then when the practice run is done that will be back into the fresh start of 334 op stages yes and this one's only taken 25 26 episodes well you gotta bear in mind a lot of this was setup prep a lot of this was us adjusting the board a lot of it was finding new and interesting ways to make the game more efficient yes we've put magnets on all of the game pieces and we've put all of the five maps into picture frames we've stuck metal sheets behind the picture frame so all the magnets stick on so now instead of it taking what two hours to set up yeah it takes two minutes so we've just saved ourselves two hours immediately and when it comes to other efficiencies we now automate all of the supply distribution because of the

formulas you put on the excel spreadsheet and you've also now you've scanned the pdf in such a way that now it's text that we can search so we've got a searchable pdf we've got magnetized board game we've got formulas for the supplies we are fucking nailing this yes we are ready to fly hopefully a lot of the bureaucratic stuff that's actually the slow bit yep will be copy a line with a formula in so like hours to five minutes to go through them all and i'm feeling very optimistic about it now especially because i i shamefully admit i had a little bit of fun today again this is becoming a bit of a theme enjoying myself playing this game and that was because i got to reinforce the first and second libyan divisions yes with ammo knowing

that i've pulled them back last turn put them into a position where they can defend a zone of control but also now reinforcing them with the ammunition they need yeah means that you can't really go for them without getting into a fight similar to the one you had last time i mean realistically i shouldn't have gone for them last time uh but yeah i know it will definitely count they'll die yeah that's it i think now being able to give the men the resources they need to fight you and knowing that i'm in complete control of that albeit yes the weather the trucks the breakdown there's a lot of factors that impact it but having the agency now it feels more like planning a strategy it feels a lot less like a whole structure of bookkeeping and i think maybe

when we looked at it in the first few sessions of play it felt like it was just bookkeeping because that's all there was to do yeah but there is a game in here yes it's hard to get to and i don't think it wants to be played but it is in there and it is maybe good maybe enjoyable that is i think um that's the wrong word but you used that description when we sent over the snippet for cam on cam sandwich channel um you you put in that description for that when we were talking about it that the game doesn't want to be played yeah i do agree with that still i do yeah i think that's a great way to describe it the game will do everything it can to stop you from playing us even the size of the map i mean the map itself we the fact that we've got the picture frames

is great because we can lay them around different surfaces they don't even need to be touching the maps can be sort of spread out just the fact in the box it's like so you're gonna need 10 feet like four feet or whatever it is it's like it's just against people's like room yeah no one really has that storage available in a sensible way but i also i do think the map has to be at like the scale and size it is for the other stuff to matter if that makes sense it does like if the hexes were like much bigger like distance wise relative to the real world thing all the supply stuff would be less of an issue i think yeah you lose scale of it and the scale is part of what makes the game the game yeah uh but yeah so trucks trucks we've um we've

started moving the trucks around you finish moving the trucks around your trucks i've got more to move around i've moved three of the groups so far three convoys i know one of them is coming from tripoli so there's very little to do they're almost in a standby phase where they just skip a turn and then eventually they appear on the map yeah and there's two others that i already know the options they have to move because of the resources they have and where they are the rest of them i'll need to decide what they actually do yeah but all in all i think my truck phase next time will be done because next session that we play we're playing an extra long one yes we've we've carved out a weekend day for it we do yes we've got we've got a full weekend day to play

the campaign for north africa and we're playing from the early hours of the morning straight through into the late evening maybe even night so it will be a big one and based on this i think probably we'll be tidying up up stage one and doing a decent chunk of upstage two and fingers crossed air movement i think we might get to air movement i'm hoping that because before i'm before our movement it's all the bootkeeping stuff so and that's mostly all fly through that yeah So that means we'll be, yeah, providing there's not another rainstorm or a sandstorm, we can move our planes. Yes.

And that will be exciting. You might even get to bomb my naval convoy because last time you couldn't find them because you rolled bad. I mean, I'd like to find them, yeah. You have been cursed with the dice. The dice are not happy with you. I don't think I've succeeded on much in terms of dice roll. Well, you know you haven't.

I'm sorry to say it, but my God, man, you've been cursed. The dice hate you. i'm hoping this is gonna flip and i'm just getting the bad luck for the short scenario i have bad news for you you're not this is this is just not going well at all but all in all i mean what a what a time i'm enjoying it i'm moving around the trucks it's a far cry from when we first started around new year's what was that we're only seven or eight recordings in yeah and i was i was furious at the game and i'm starting to bit by bit not be angry and maybe even like the game yeah i am i'm in a similar boat um

i was tired today which i was like i don't want to do this but uh yeah you you you've actually flipped because usually you're always on the ball and it's me who comes in tired i've actually i slept better last night than i have in a long time because usually my schedule forbids any sort of good sleep pattern but i slept well so when i came in and you said you were feeling tired i was like i know that feeling man but i did enjoy it once we like got into it um you did perk up a lot yeah i'm not sure if it's sort of an initial excitement because this is all the first time like all these steps yeah but i do think they are i think if the bootkeeping is mostly automated the actual decision making and combat stuff isn't

arduous no it does it has a bit of a weird charm to it now yeah and i don't hate what's happening i don't you know what this is it's stockholm syndrome yes i that is kicking in potentially yeah that's what it is we went through all the bootkeeping all the horrible parts of the game now we're getting to play a little bit and it's like oh this is the little um bit of length that will give you you can you can have a little bit of freedom here and realistically we're going to get caught back in the bookkeeping next week so yeah maybe we'll know

next week next week when we realize how complicated it gets with the plane movement and also if the bookkeeping works the way we hope it will because we need to test out the automation

make sure it definitely does work well it'll work for mine because I've been testing that but we have different Excel layouts so I might need to take a look at what are yours oh well you

know look at my units well I guess or you can do the automation no no no you can do it i'll show you there we go i'd rather show you now in the practice run when things don't really matter because in the practice room we're just playing for a kinder bueno yes in the actual game we're playing for a meal a whole meal that's what the winner gets sit down meal yeah well i think that covers off a good little portion of what we'd be doing today and i i can hear in the airwaves is that that sound again are they coming it's the telegrams go and do it what oh i'm doing all of it acapella

you can't say that i understand morse code and that was foul now see the audience are going to be confused because they'll be thinking i thought james was going to do an acapella but all i heard was the usual sound effect because it's that fucking good so telegram we have some communication from our listeners and we're going to start off with eric eric here um i just read out his full name you did that a little while ago read out someone's full name on the board we had a we had a sense of that one yeah it's fun to dox people by mistake well don't worry i was there in the editing studio otherwise known as my bedroom to stop that from happening so eric says hi andy i'm sorry hi wow i fucked that up immediately episodes over sorry guys back to the drawing

room sorry hi james and andy i'm just i thought you would go first i mean alphabetically you should hi james and andy or jameson and andrew as i can only assume your names are uh 50 there um i am jameson you're just andy on your burst my name is eric and i told myself that once i caught up to the most recent episode i would write in and now that my eardrums are thoroughly destroyed by the censoring in episode 21 that's that's very hot that's what we were just talking about i figure now is the time to go about doing this i have to say i love both the early episodes with how off topic you would get as well as the recent ones which are more focused well somewhere between now i guess one of my favorite things are the can't sound bites for each segment well

yeah now it's just me acapella baby and i especially love the backward sorry the background laugh in the common ground opening anyways enough blathering time for a few questions first was there anything in particular that inspired the two of you to begin on the project it's a huge undertaking especially with your admitted lack of experience with war games in general second the two of you keep complaining about the rules so is there anything you enjoy about it any tidbits that shine through or sections that are just plain fun looking forward to seeing how long it takes you to get this one done and love the work you're doing staying subtle humble and brave eric thanks eric well eric that's very handy because a lot of this it feels

spiritually like we've already breathed a lot of it out so far so i guess um first question andy anything in particular that inspired us to begin it in your words what would you say that is our friend brought the game to us he presented it to us i think we were drunkenly talking after a dnd session about how it'd be a good idea for a podcast i said oh yeah that would be good our friend who brought the game to us then dropped out and left it in our laps and then i think it was almost a version of chicken when neither of us wanted to drop out and then we had a thousand pound board game and we had to do it well that was it we um yeah because when we say our friend dropped in our laps we don't mean the actual board game just the idea that the board game exists yeah

he'd mentioned it in passing and we thought that would be crazy to play and then after a bit of back and forth we all thought no we will actually play this our other friend rightly so decided he doesn't want to play that i'm not doing that you idiot he was actually um if you've listened to the last episode he was the friend who was um asleep and or watching jurassic park while we were recording in the same room as us so he he brought the uh the game to our attention and then not long afterwards we watched cam sandwiches video on the campaign for north africa realized it is as bad as it was made out to be and thought well we should play that we we had a lot more time in our schedule than we we had previously and we decided that what better way to fill that gap

than to play this um we had never recorded a podcast realistically we did we have technically recorded a podcast before yes the unreleased pilot to our podcasting careers would you rather drown in oil yes we released a little podcast we're not going to release we recorded a podcast called would you rather drown in oil or where the idea was um we run through scenarios hypothetically of would you rather drown in oil or and then a hypothetical situation um for an example one of them is would you rather drown in oil or have quick time events in real life and would you rather drown in oil or every time you clap your hands together your hands become random kitchen appliances and they were uh less focused than our early episodes yeah just to give a context

and i think every one of them was recorded blackout drunk they were absolutely i've still got the recordings of most of them oh no and they are yeah they're just not really palatable um so yeah so we already had a sort of hankering to put something together creatively we never really knew what it would be or why we're doing it we've clearly just got a drive to create art is what it is or just it's some sort of hubris or vanity project and this game seemed perfect it's a niche it's interesting we were immediately enamored with the idea of it so we thought let's let's just get straight into this yeah let's buy the board game at an auction for god so much money and then let's let's play it yeah let's let's play it let's finish it let's destroy its

resale value absolutely we've stuck blue tack and magnets on it we've put the maps in picture frames but we thought it's a fun idea let's finish it no one else has finished it so far we know that there's a lot of other people out there that are playing scenarios there's a couple of people who've commented on reddit posts that we've put out saying that they're doing um some of the mini scenarios in it some people i mean veilfisk the the youtuber has there's a big meta that he's going to release a video yeah actually last week he teased that he would be so soon it might actually be out by now who knows so there's a lot of um buzz around the game at the moment which is which is great it's a really interesting thing but um i think we we just saw something that drew us in

we decided to go for it so it was a bit of free time and uh yeah too much too much passion too much drive yeah and then i guess the other bit was uh is there anything we're enjoying about it I mean, yeah, we've kind of been answering that, but the last few weeks out of the bootkeeping... It's changed. Yeah. It's not the game that it once was. So we'll see if that continues,

but yeah, there's some silver linings in there at the minute. I would say I'm really excited for air combat, which we've not had the chance to do. The fact that it's been drawn even further away from us does make me anticipate it and excited a lot more. Distance makes the heart grow stronger. And when it comes to what we've done so far, the combat has been good my favorite bit of combat by the way is barrage yes i think the barrage stuff

is cool um i like the idea of locking down enemies before the combat yeah it's just a fun like the combat sort of multi-staged as well it's not just like stack all the numbers on it makes it feel more tactical which is i mean that's that is what that game is you know when it comes to if you want a game that's tactical and well designed well thought out i cannot say that there's anything else i've not played any other war games but i can't imagine there's anything like this out there not not to this scale no i think there's a couple other sort of mega games but uh yeah i think for whatever reason this one sort of sits on the top of that pile i think i mean i think the very reason for that is just the scale the magnitude of how in depth richard berg went

when he made this there's nothing that really trumps it as far as i'm aware of just based on the fact that this is the one that comes up when you search for it this is the one that caught our eye because it's impossible and i i i mean me personally another part of why i enjoy it and why we want to get into in the first place is i love the idea of a an unfinishable task oh i love one of my favorite books is my favorite book ever is house of leaves which is a book that is also just bizarre in its its layout in the nature of it read that absolutely loved it and i've just kind of hankering i think for things where people are like this is going to take all of your time you can get very invested in it love it yeah so i'm enjoying i think all all facets of the game

in that sense where even the bookkeeping i know that it all pulls together to make what this game is yeah i am also enjoying now we've got a bit more of a we've been doing the stages it's not just sort of all abstract trying to like read the rules and like picture what things are like i am starting to feel like oh i can start to maybe strategize and come up with plans and stuff yeah because i've now done most of the steps that's it i think the yeah the the nature of the game it sort of builds as you go and the fact that we've covered the admin and now we get to play and oh it's the reward for all of the admin being able to now plan it out is so cathartic when you get through all the bootkeeping to then go right it's paid off now i can do stuff but the burden

is now when we next do all the admin it's knowing what the consequences are and knowing that it has to be spot on or things fall apart so it's it's really at a point now where it is getting interesting and fun and now that we've automated the admin i think that can only get better yeah so right now i'm definitely the most positive space i've been about the game since the start and i think that might actually just increase so here's hoping maybe it'll snowball and we'll absolutely fucking love the thing by the end maybe it'll get three turns in and i'll realize no bit premature it's actually bad i think it's gonna sort of go ups and downs it's gonna look like a sine wave yep ebb and flow ebb and flow but great question eric um we love the uh the fact that you love the can

soundbites and i'm sorry i've had to do them acapella but um yeah thank you for the thank you for the message and we also have a message from penelope penelope uh hello andy and james my name is penelope i've been a listener to of y'all's podcast ever since i love y'all they've got another y'all in ever since your cameo and calm sandwiches video i know your emails have started picking up and wanted to get mine in before too many folks started reaching out my question is this what is it about the campaign for north africa that you think captures people's fascination so intensely obviously the fact it's so expansive makes it a spectacle but there are a ton of over complicated board games that don't get half as much attention as north africa

i'm utterly fascinated myself with it but i couldn't tell you exactly what the draw is why do you think north africa is in particular gets people hooked so obsessively i figure that since you two are some of the only folks who have ever bothered to play the game, you might have some insight into it. If not, well, you've got plenty of time to reflect. Maybe something will occur to you further as you play. If something does, do share it with us on the show

because I'm fascinated by the response this game elicits from people. Good luck, you crazy bastards. Your listeners are rooting for you. Thanks, Penelope. Well, thank you, Penelope. Yeah, thanks for that. and it is a good question and one i've not because i've been thinking about it as well i don't think i've got like a succinct thing like answer i don't actually know what i've got some ideas but

i don't know i think it's a little bit what i touched on there i think the draw for me is that it is supposedly unfinishable yes that is a big part of it and i love that i love the idea of there being a game that's so long and difficult to play because if you think about stuff like like video games you've got dark souls where it's a big franchise it's very popular in the sense of people enjoy the difficulty of it people enjoy speed running it's it's the idea of being able to beat something in the most efficient way or tackling something that regularly can't be beaten and that to me is massively appealing and i don't know why i think it is i think it's clearly some sort of masochism built within my system that means i can't enjoy something unless i know it's

not meant to be enjoyed i think there's also the fact it's not being finished but it's theoretically finishable it's not like a broken board game necessarily yes you'll see how it holds up in the super late rounds but in theory yes it is finishable there's rules there's a game it is there yeah it's not unfinishable because it's broken and i think there's something also a little bit unique about it being a fully packaged physical thing it isn't some esoteric it's not like a video game where there's sort of loops and code and it's it sort of falls into a category where it's random number generator and it can be it could be made impossible through programming it is a physical piece of gameplay yeah you could you've got all the rule books you've got the map

it's big in scale you can hold it and the idea that there is this thing that's written out and it hasn't changed it won't change and it's been the same since the late 70s i do think richard berg i don't know whether the game's mythologized him or he's helped mythologize the game but there i think the fact there's a person yeah associated with it might also bring people in that it's not like this thing a company spat out i know spi did but it's not like a game by spi it's a game by richard berg published by sbi yes so i wonder if the there's an author like a or tour to it might help as well i imagine that's bigger in like the sort of spheres of people who know the game because when we found it i don't think his name sort of popped as much as like this guy is the the guy

behind it but now that we know it and also reading the rule books there's huge personality in the rule book yes it's so long all of the rules they go on forever but there's a personality that shines through yes and it's mocking yeah and the thing is you know richard berg i mean i mean curse the man for making this board game but also there is a real charm in the way that the rule is written like every every page of that rule book i don't think i've got through a single full page where i haven't smirked yeah at some of the way it's written so the rules seems like a bit of an asshole but one i'd like want to go to the pub with yeah he's like a fun cheeky guy is the vibe i get if i had to go through some sort of parasocial bond through the rule book he seems

like a fun guy a new level of parasocial what a 50 year old board game written by a dead man yeah that's it i think there's a lot of charm to the game and that mythology of the idea that no one's finished it really builds on that so i think that was a big draw and the fact that people are enjoying us going through that because at the moment we aren't sharing a whole lot of the actual gameplay because we're still figuring it out we don't want to be sharing too much of the map and the breakdown the spreadsheets all the stuff like that if it's wrong but when it comes to the actual playthrough we'll be committing to sharing everything yes because at that point when we start the main playthrough that's that's it that's when we're locked in whatever we're doing is

concrete there's no going back there's no adjusting everything is solid so the fact that we're going to be able to share that with other people as well as one an accountability tool which i'm afraid all of you are but also that people seem to be enjoying the experience so far when we're only finding our feet yeah is a huge boon and we yep we love that people enjoy it so anyone listening credit to you sorry that you're spending your time doing this you've probably got better things to do but we love that you're here so if there's anything else you want to send over any of the suggestions the email is info at war with a mate.co.uk we've got an instagram which is just war with a mate and um we've got a youtube as well which is just the episodes so if you want

any comments on there i guess but and i guess if you want to see an in-depth uh breakdown of the setup uh i think cam sawage will be putting out on his patreon yes i'm not sure when he's popping it up um but cam is um after the latest recording cam got a glimpse behind the the screen so to speak he's putting some stuff up because we broke down some of the map with him but when it comes to the main game it'll be out there so hopefully that will satiate some of your questions penelope hopefully you'll get an idea as to why it draws everyone in when it becomes strapped down to the table if it bleeds we can kill it that's the way we'll hopefully we'll have a more succinct answer to that as we go on here's hoping here's hoping because we don't so far no but uh yeah thank you

very much for the question penelope well now that we've covered the voices of the past some of them are quite old emails uh people we need to catch up we've seen last uh last time we read these out that we were running a bit thin but people started firing the back over so we're building up that stockpile again thanks guys yeah thank you thank you we're always welcoming of questions especially when they're so insightful and uh and quite deep so i guess now we go deeper into the past yes we go into history itself and we pick up again with the history segment from last week you were doing about the long range desert group and their founder ralph bagnold and his book he wrote in 1935 libyan sands travel in a dead world so i guess if i can try and put

together a quick recap of your history segment last week yeah so a bunch of adventure bros went out into the desert during their annual leave guys who were in active duty and they decided that they were going to i guess not too dissimilar to what we're doing just go out and find something because it's there on the map to find yes so they drove out they found that you can't really drive in the desert so they had to get real proficient at fixing vehicles bringing along spare parts figuring out how to do it all on the go yeah and along the way found out it wasn't easy as they hoped sometimes it's just gunning your truck across the desert sands homing it doesn't break down and arriving in various settlements they shouldn't have via car yes and yeah they uh they

were having a jolly good time of it yeah and now i guess we'll jump into the next part let's hear it so uh kick off with a quote for the history segment the usual let's hear it the contrast between the east and west of the Nile is very marked. In the east the country echoes everywhere with past history. Every hill and valley has been intensely known throughout the ages but the western desert has always been a land of mystery. To the ancient Egyptians it was the land of the hereafter. They seem to have started the idea of going west. The Greeks knew it from tales of petrified forests as the home of the legendary Gorgon Medusa whose luck turned everything to stone. so we did the sort of east of the nile last time yeah and uh yeah so we'll continue and they're

sort of getting ready to head well west into completely inhospitable desert and that's where we are playing yes so after they travel to petra the year after they travel east again around the region cinna so eastern egypt travel further to the dead sea and they visit like a ton of historical sites from like the bible and stuff sounds nice he does note in this which i thought was quite interesting that um these locations of importance seem to move and drift over time to suit the purposes of the people who live there so like they went to like somewhere that moses is said to have gone but like 600 years ago it was 35 miles like elsewhere so these places sort Obviously, it would move to fit the people, and they're like legends.

Oh, okay, I like that. Yeah, I thought it was a cool observation. Interesting insight, yeah. This travel's relatively uneventful and successful. It does set them up for the next phase, which is going into the desert. They realize that with 10 days' worth of food, they can also carry enough fuel to not worry about refueling for 10 days, meaning for everything except water, they can travel like 1,000 miles.

Wow. and this gets them in the spirit where they start to go from feeling like tourists to pioneers i mean you would they've got a superpower and wanting to explore not points on the map like petra but the big empty expanses that are unmapped just for the sake of it uh yeah that is very much the theme today yeah it is just for the sake of it so the next logical thing for them to do is to go to the SeaWorld Oasis. Which is on the map. Which is on the map

and is a 400-mile cross-desert journey. So that's obviously the next logical step. Yeah, of course. That's what you jump to after gunning it through the desert in your truck. But they talk about another quote from him here. The fact is we were a little afraid of the Western Desert, not so much because it was waterless

and entirely uninhabited, but because it was so different from all experience so it's not just the lack of water it's there's nowhere like it on earth like everywhere else on earth like the geography shaped by water yes and there's landmarks and features this is one of the only places on earth that's shaped by wind and defined by it's like lack of water which is the the study that you'd mentioned yes a couple episodes ago oh god i can't remember the name of the study but it's oh the one he wrote yes uh the physics of sand and dunes there was a word for it wasn't there oh god it was some sort of ology aerodamic geomorphology or something maybe we'll have

to fact check that one but yeah that one that one but this emptiness it doesn't just create extreme difficulty with navigation it also kicks in a weird psychological effect okay uh to quote again when you're a lose sight uh not quote yet sorry but when you lose sight of landmarks he describes it as this an extraordinary powerful impulse urges one to move anywhere in any direction rather than stay still and think it out this psychological effect of the true desert is that being the cause of nearly every desert disaster of recent years so there's something about being in the huge empty space with no landmarks to orientate yourself that makes like the animal part of your brain just want to start moving yeah being it's um that sort of harkens to

the idea of have you heard the idea that if you blindfold yourself and you try and walk in a straight line you'll end up walking in a spiral eventually yes that's also it's not in this but it's a thing uh traveling in the desert as well because one leg will be stronger than the other yes so you need to work that out and hold a weight on the weak leg side to like stop yourself from looping background yourself in a straight line so the idea of yeah when you're in these vast spaces you either retreat into a safe space or you just have the desire to get away from somewhere that you're lost in yeah so a lot of issues apparently happen where someone like if a plane or a vehicle breaks down the people panic and start moving and then the vehicles are found later like from the

air or rescue things because they're like it's a big vehicle in the desert it's like spot you can spot it well i guess that also actually ties into a um i don't know if you've ever done the sort of team building exercise at work where it's like your plane crashes and you've got this big list of items yeah you can use three of them what do you do to get out the scenario and most people go well we'll we'll drink this and we'll eat this and we'll go in this direction with the converse and it's like no you stay by the plane wreck because they will be looking for the plane stay where you're safe and they'll find you yeah because often the plane gets found and then there's just no one there there's just bodies and all of the survivors have become bodies dozens of miles

away yeah because they've got lucky so his advice for this is uh if one can stay still even for half an hour and have a meal or smoke a pipe reason returns to work out the problem of the location it's generally a very simple matter of geometry so because of this they develop a rule never let anyone out of sight unless there's a truly dominant line landmark such as a line of cliffs or mountains because they could just go slightly over a rise that panic sets in and they go sprinting off and they could have been 10 meters from the car oh right yeah that's which is something crazy to think about but i've also never been stuck in the desert yeah so i i can't speak to that but that's a scary thought so that's one of the the things they're dealing with here the other

the issue they've got is water uh big issue in the desert yes because when they were traveling east of like in their previous expeditions when they gave all their water to the dog uh that one uh and the ones in yeah when they go to petra and stuff they realize the cars are losing two gallons of water a day which is fine because that region you're sort of never more than 30 miles from a source of water which is a long way to be from water but relative to what they're going to be getting into is the water's right there it's fucked that's the best case scenario um and one of the problems they have is when the radiator boils the steam pushes unboiled water out of the radiator as well okay so you're losing it twice over yes so they developed this thing that's

really cool where they run the pipes from the radiator into a container attached to the side of the car with water in it and then that one runs into another one so what they can do is the driver can reach his hand out to one of these pipes and get a sense of how hot the water is in there like how close to boiling it is which i feel like is your hand burns and you're like oh fuck it's boiling but when that happens you turn the car into the wind which cools everything down which has this unexpected effect that they didn't like realize but worked really well where as it cools it forms a vacuum in the radiator and pulls all the water out of those other containers back into the radiator so that's the thing you mentioned last time where they recycle the water

so that's how they do it so they yeah they can put it into the yeah so that's a very cool mechanism to have so it went from losing two gallons of water a day on the radiator to during a trip of 1100 miles they never have to add to water to the car and eventually they just stop checking it because it works so well fucking hell so they've sort of they've got a solution to some of the water and they've got a solution to the desert madness as it were but the featurelessness does also cause issues with navigation obviously uh because typically when you're exploring an un like mapped area you go landmark to landmark yes and then you sort of take your bearings after them and like map that space between them but one there's no landmarks two something i didn't

realize is the car and like all the moving metal parts in it um can upset the compass by up to 15 degrees okay so when they if you go and take readings you have to go like 10 meters away from the car or the car will fuck your compass up okay wow i did not know that a problem because what you want to do is have the compass on the like you would on a ship or something like on the dashboard yeah where you can just use it to navigate but that's obviously ruined by the metal in the car so our friend ralph comes up with another solution he invents the bagnold sun compass okay which is basically one day they're out after dark in like some early preliminary trips and they navigate by the stars and they go and he gets the idea oh i can navigate by the sun

so he invents this thing with it's sort of like a sundial and then there's a ring around the outside that you move around sort of every 15 minutes to half an hour as the sun moves across the sky okay and with that you can just have that on the dashboard magnetics will never fuck with it and you can just follow you just basically put the shadow on the direction you want to go hang on so these guys are so badass that they're just kind of looking at all of these various pieces of technology and bit by bit going what if we strip that back down to what it was beforehand that doesn't work in the desert how do we we just go back in evolution we just we devolve the process we take away some of the technology behind it

we go back to basics and that works all of a sudden so they developed this technique and with that they can travel 130km through deep desert with no landmarks and be less than 2 miles out from where they

wanted to be after 130 miles so that's a crazy small degree because there's the whole issue of if you're sailing a huge voyage and you're 1 degree off you will miss your destination by yeah so much distance so these guys are doing it so accurately and all they've done is which is a crazy thought that it takes so long for humanity to evolve and change processes upwards yes but if you want to dial it back yeah it's done in the space of a few

days and it works better in the desert yeah uh i mean yeah and then so these are some of the techniques and that they pass on to the long-range desert group like 10 years down the line which allows that group to become so infamous and successful navigating the desert so yeah all this stuff he's developing for his holiday eventually becomes depending on how they're viewed potentially one of the decisive factors in this war which makes me a lot more scared of these guys because you get them um a lot earlier in the game than i do yes especially in the form that they are and now that i know a lot more about who these guys are what they're going to be doing how they're doing it it makes them a lot scarier of a force yeah so and then just a few things

about how they're like traveling and stuff so water is rationed it's only used for drinking smart um as tea except at midday when they drink a pint with lime juice in it oh okay yeah keep the scurvy away yeah and it's just bolted to cans on the side of the car um and then in the evening to cook uh unless the can has paint on it they have special water for that to like boil and they just keep boiling over and over again otherwise they just chuck the can in with the tea and as it's boiling and like double duty so which i thought was funny because of the pasta point yes it's completely unnecessary and if you listen to this you know what the pasta point is yeah so that's this one i was mainly going to do sort of some of the big problems

and the techniques they use to deal with it rather than the journey itself um but they do get to see her eventually and just some quotes one of them that really stood out was uh it was a dead world upon which all life all movement except that of the wind had ceased from the far off time when the primeval medusa had looked out over the land and petrified it all forever because there's forests there that turned a stone because it's so inhospitable that the bacteria that eat wood can't survive in the desert okay which is also a thing um they mentioned it later but i thought it was quite interesting to mention it now they often had a problem with they'd get sores and stuff from the sand yeah but they wouldn't get any infections until they got

back into civilization because it'll kill them off when they're in the desert because there's no bacteria like living in there whereas there's bacteria like everywhere it can live this is so inhospitable that they're not getting infections from cuts and stuff the desert's sterile that's horrible that's how fucking lifeless the deep desert is that you can't get sick because it's so inhospitable there's no sickness in the desert yeah oh i hate that i mean it's it's incredible information but i hate to hear that is the case what you've done has made me more scared of the desert despite telling me in a lot of ways it's safer

if I've got water I'm safe in the desert, water and shade yeah, but also you've got to remember everyone else who's going through this region other than the long range desert group who he directly passes this to is working this shit out as they go, so there

must be like, oh I'm going over that sand dune for a piss oh where did Dave go? he's run in the wrong direction Dave went mad, he's dead I'm just sprinting off looking for you guys and picked the wrong direction. I would just shout.

I mean, probably, yeah, but just everyone's encountering these again. But also, I guess sound wouldn't carry very well in the desert. There's actually a great quote. I don't have it to hand, but there's about how oppressive the silence in the desert is. I don't have the exact quote to mind, but it ends with something along the lines of

it seems ludicrous that the stars can shine without making noise because it's so quiet that sounds eldritch that sounds like some lovecraftian shit that's horrible why didn't lovecraft write anything about the campaign for north africa i mean the desert does fit that like you'd think there'd be stuff in the desert i guess he was also scared of the connecticut countryside so we didn't need to reach for scary stuff that's a good point thank goodness he wasn't around for the wars because he would have written some egregious stuff but um that is more i guess very interesting and equally terrifying information you've delivered so thanks for making me more scared of sand and the deserts the deserts of my mind are becoming

a much scarier place yes that this book has done that to me as well where it's like oh it's just sort of sandy and flat and stuff and it's like no it's the desert's actually quite a varied environment like there's different types of sand dunes that behave differently there's like salt marshes where because you know the qatar depression that's on there yes on map b i think yes that i think is 600 feet below sea level okay and some of the cliffs are like up to a thousand like the line of cliffs that run along the north of the map sort of intermittently yes they're like five to six hundred meters and then they slope so it's a huge like altitude difference for the desert as well which affects it you've got like a microcosm of the the peaks and troughs of earth yeah just

in the desert alone yeah but if it's below sea level in the desert that's when you get all the salt marshes and stuff yeah because any water it gets trapped gets trapped and evaporated although someone did have a fucking mad plan that's mentioned in the book to dig a tunnel from the mediterranean to the qatar depression and let the water flow through and fill it up like a kid in a beach but of course scaled up slightly so there is some people doing like mad terraforming

to the desert plants but none of them work well that gives some horrible context to some of the landmarks on the map as well I'm going to look at them differently what a scary group of guys that is yeah it's that

mix of history and fear that you've always delivered it's not quite as uh wacky and looney tunes as the uh graziani history segment but it's uh it's it's interesting in a very different way well there's actually a bit at the start of the book where he sort of goes this might not be that interesting because we prepped really well so we didn't have any disasters what a humble man subtle and humble yeah brave even well i suppose the only thing left to do now to get me out of my cortisol deficit

or rather surplus is to find a little bit of common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording

maybe yeah yeah and common ground is the segment in which we find that little piece between us because we're up against each other we're fighting for a meal here or kinder bueno in the practice so we need to find the space between us and find somewhere to agree so each week we'll come up with a scenario and we have to agree on yeah and this week it's your scenario andy yeah what scenario are you bringing to the table i want to get rid of like 90 of the internet at least the internet yes right

that's a lot of the internet okay here's what i'm gonna leave you okay you're already giving me my rations yes you have wikipedia okay books that's kind of the same email yeah yep that's it yeah that's it i think people being able to put stuff on the internet it's not helped them and that's what we're doing right now i know i'm in this way in the common ground reverse i'm some sort of dictator globally so i probably wouldn't be doing the part yeah that's a good point if all of the common ground segments are one canonical series of events you're a monster you're a fascist is what you are you're enslaving animals you are digging tunnels underground you're a bad guy from the thunderbirds it's what you are i'm sort of mole man yeah that's the incredibles i think

yeah so you're giving me wikipedia yeah give me emails because when the internet came out it was like oh my god we could access all the information yeah people that's a great part so we're keeping that which is wikipedia okay books and books so it's information yeah but all like with a standard to it so you want wikipedia but since it's the only thing really out there that it's going to be incredibly fact-checked it's going to be just hardcore information yeah no fluff absolutely but what about entertainment so what you're telling me you're stripping entertainment from the internet uh you can have netflix you just have to email them a sign up and they'll post you the dvds right so no so it's not right so it's just back to what it was i mean in that

respect yeah so you so you're allowed to order stuff online uh via email right so what so so what happens to amazon you can email no no what happens to them oh their website's gone but how so say say we we implement this plan tomorrow yes right so what does that look like for the world okay what are you telling bezos tough shit so bezos is just he's waking up tomorrow oh god this is the worst you have to run amazon via emails where people are like do you have this can i have it so there's not like a catalog you have to ask them having a web page wasn't one of the free things so they don't have it by the way i guess is the answer because if you've taken away all

the infrastructure they don't have what you're after no so then why email so it's it's just a bunch of email addresses and wikipedia yeah and when you say and books where do you find the books there'll probably be a books tab on wikipedia a tab and it's full books it's all books so you so what you want to do is you want to rip all creative prospect from writers because everything they have is in a public domain it's readily available shops will open again no they won't it's all the internet the internet's gone man no bookshops are the only thing that i fucked actually that's fine yeah books that's fine hang on a minute you went immediately from bookshops are going to open again that's great for the books to oh yeah fuck them okay who cares about bookshops

i just think the one good thing the internet did was allow anyone to access like the repository of human knowledge yeah i agree with that and what it's done actually is allow us to fill the repository of human knowledge with shit memes shit what happens to memes tell your friends jokes no no i don't abide by that logic they can spread like old urban legends uh like what give me three urban legends that are good to to share richard gear and the gerbil that was pre-internet but everyone knows it yeah okay i'll give you that one that was a meme that's a fun one look it up kids look it up that's a good one yeah um taking like a cartridge out and blowing in it i don't think that works but everyone knew to do it uh no i think that's that's actually baked into human

psychology that's part of the um the human mind it's a bit like if you get lost in the desert you immediately run it's your cartridge stops working you blow into it yeah yeah okay um i'll give you a half point for that one and just general i don't know and just general mary like bloody legends pre-internet bloody mary is not that's way older yeah it's like a meme from the 1500s they don't have memes they had they didn't have a name for them yeah they did it was prejudice their meme was prejudice and killing people because they ran out of groups of people to kill they're like well now we'll go a bit more niche now we'll go women who are doing something that we didn't expect them to do they're witches now okay that's what you're talking about that's

the meme okay another thing the internet has just drained like human progress i would agree because a bunch of incredibly smart people are working hard to serve you odds better rather than useful shit. Yeah, you're right. Geniuses are making podcasts about board games. Yes. When they could be doing something else. We could be doing something useful.

Oh, we? Oh, well, I mean, I wasn't talking about us, but when you say it like that, I guess, yes, we are kind of the geniuses. So we're going to free up the human talent pool. All right, yeah, yeah. All that information and division from the internet, that's gone because you can't output onto it.

Okay, yeah, yeah. So that's good. I'm on board with that. Okay. um stock market that might be one because that's important pen and paper now that opened that updates once a day rather than real time okay that every day there'll be a wikipedia with all the stocks on it so wikipedia is not what it is now it's all information it's it's yeah it's the hub of all you'll also have the news on for like the article for each day once a day yeah so there's

no breaking news anymore which is good no you're taking us way back no i'm taking us beyond television you don't need to know breaking news i would like to know breaking news why because i need to know what's happening in the world you can find out with a huge delay okay so there's like a ship has crashed into an island in the like south china sea why do you need a notification on your phone about that my uncle was on that ship then you'll find out when he emails you monster he can't email me he's been in a tragic boat accident he's lost his hand his typing hand it's gone oh well that's you can ask someone to send him an email no no this is it technology right okay i agree with you to a point because i think the internet started out

as a great concept and it's just become one of the worst things we've ever done to ourselves no i agree with that things have gotten out of hand absolutely but access to information in real time is not the problem it's the type of information that's being front noted because you can get it at any time they have to fill it in so they make breaking news yeah but breaking news the news shouldn't be 24 hours it should be like half an hour a day that i agree with okay but the half an hour should be spread out as and when it's needed okay so you're like five minutes in the morning if there's something important okay so we can update the news once an hour uh okay fine yeah i'm fine with that yeah that's a nice and digestible

okay every every hour wikipedia updates uh reliable narrators yeah like the 15th of march 8 p.m to 9 p.m gmt yes yeah fine with that and that updates every every hour yeah okay yeah i'm okay with that that's not actually that crazy yep um what about what about um what about long form video essays because i quite like those to fall asleep to are they gone unfortunately there is going to be some sacrifice you're never going to know if patrick was fun from as a socialist that's that's one of my favorite long form hypothetical videos that's that's the one i want to know that's the answer i need so i so streaming services are gone yep so so what what happens cinema or watch normal tv so television's fine you're fine with television

yep what about the news on the television television later i'm sorry that's that's coming up yes so okay so i see what's happened unfortunately common ground is no longer the situation we set it out to be. Common Ground is where you slowly but surely give me your manifesto for your world takeover in which you are cruel, sensible

to a point, but yeah undeniably cruel. There's nothing cruel about this. Don't give me that face. Don't give me that recoiled frown. Help. Who are you helping? Everyone. You don't mean that. I do. You're helping

you i mean yeah but also most people's life hasn't been improved by the internet most people i would say there was a bell curve okay there was a bell curve with the internet yeah we are long past it yes we are in the bad bit yeah we've moved over it yeah and i don't know that we get i don't think we get a second chance it we're never getting it back no we went over that bell curve so we're gonna shut it all down we're gonna keep the useful bits and we're gonna kick the rest of it away oh God, I can't even argue with that. In theory, I do kind of... Oh, he's fucking putting his hands up in the air victoriously.

That's made me regret all of it. Oh, he's too happy. He's too happy. Andy, you know what? You've brought perfect sense to this. And with this and cams last week, that means that we've just got two solid ideas that just kind of make sense.

Fixing roads, fixing highways, and fixing the internet superhighway. Oh, God, he's done it. He actually has. oh and here i thought you know what no this works perfectly with episode 24 the thunderbirds yeah in a world without internet might be needed if anything the information is gonna it's gonna get to them faster yeah hopefully right but in that without bearing in mind if this is the same universe if we are finally crossing them over definitively

then the thunderbirds will need to know real time when there's a disaster okay they get they get special access there's a disaster in there and and but and because because before you make whatever point you're about to this is very important the thunderbirds also need access to the long form video essays do they yes do you think you're gonna be a thunderbird andy you've seen right through me i'm sorry you're not making the team and on that note i think we end it because andy has unraveled my plot to become the founding member of the thunderbirds well there we go we've got to go we simply have to trace the islands calling and um

and so is the internet i simply have to go home and watch some long form video essays i will tell you what on but what i will tell you is look on youtube they're all there andy hasn't got to them yet they're all free they're free if they're really that important to you download them all now i predict a sort of 10-year ramp up to absolute power for me anybody who creates a google drive with all long-form video s's on them right now gets a free lifetime access to uh not only episodes which are free at the moment but also you get andy's national insurance number email info at war with a mate.co.uk we also have an instagram i'll set that up as the auto reply instagram's war with a mate any information that you want any questions you have anything at all

send it on over we're here we're listening and we'll be here next time and every time after that so good night thanks for listening stay subtle humble and brave fare thee well We'll be right back.