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Originally posted by Tegyrius
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... as long as I don't have to clean up after it!
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I want one!
... as long as I don't have to clean up after it! -
Don't worry. The mess will be someone else's problem.Originally posted by swaghauler View Post
(Hat tip to Vespers War for already linking to this madness.)
- C.Clayton A. Oliver • Occasional RPG Freelancer Since 1996
Author of The Pacific Northwest, coauthor of Tara Romaneasca, creator of several other free Twilight: 2000 and Twilight: 2013 resources, and curator of an intermittent gaming blog.
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.
- Josh OlsonComment
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I know we've mostly been joking about pigeons, but a Twitter account dedicated to military pigeons (appropriately, @MilitaryPigeons) posted a sketch from a Marine in Iraq in 2003 of one of their chemical detection pigeons:
There was also a link to a blog post about how the Marines acquired 175 pigeons to serve in that role, after chickens failed because they couldn't survive the climate, along with an interview with the CWO responsible for the program.
There are other mentions on that account of the Swiss program that ended in 1994, which likely would have been around longer in a Twilight War scenario. There's also an article on the blog about China's still-active pigeon service, which has been around since 1950. France still has a single military dovecote with around 200 partially-trained birds, used for ceremonial displays but with the awareness that they could be useful in case of a blackout situation.
It would require more logistical preparation than most PC parties could put together, but a network of dovecotes in either CivGov or MilGov territory wouldn't be out of the question, particularly since they only need about 2 ounces of feed per bird per day. It's a relatively low resource commitment in exchange for a reasonably reliable messaging system (British analysis after WW1 was that ~95% of messages got through, and some later breeding/training systems had rates as high as 98%).The poster formerly known as The Dark
The Vespers War - Ninety years before the Twilight War, there was the Vespers War.Comment
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Find the book titled Operation:Columba
This goes into how the use of pigeons for intelligence communications was rebuilt for WW2 (and you will wonder on how the allied intelligence system got anything done or worked at all. My take is the other side was even worse at it then we were.)Comment
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