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[Lt. Razak]

Oh yeeeah the marsec heavy explosives.... I used them in the beginning before I had vortex mines and marsec body armour for everybody. I used to have great fun with them (turn-based); I gave them to my hovertroopers and if the squad got pinned down my hovertroopers set out to solve the problem.
Imagine you are a soldier putting down suppressing fire on a hedgerow (or something) knowing that the enemy is in there. You don't notice the shadow crawling towards you from behind, much less the trooper hovering 8 stories above you until you hear a distinct *clunk*. You turn around and there is a small suitcase, which seems to have appeared out of nowhere. On closer examination, the suitcase turns out to be a bomb... suddenly it goes *bleep* and *booom* and sends you off to blightey...

I also remember a mission (still turn-based) in a marsec arms factory where the aliens were about one screen away from my spawn point. My soldiers spotted them at once: a big clump of aliens (about 5x5 fields), everything up to anthropods and about 15 aliens alltogether.
I had 3 hovertroopers and although they were wounded due to reaction shots, they managed to drop a LOT of explosives:
6 AP nades
6 Marsec proxymines
4 suitcases aka heavy explosives
+ about a dozend AP nades from other soldiers.
The amazing thing is: When all that stuff went up, there were still survivors (those anthropods didn't have any vortex mines at that stage). However, above the alien position there 2 levels of solid concrete which then started raining down on the poor devils. In the end only 2 hyperworms survived, convieniently trapped in the resultant crater. They died shortly afterwards of natural causes... well, I think they were natural considering they had just taken a ton explosive yield plus several tons of rubble


About manual control: I can fire in 180 degree arcs, there or thereabouts and I guess thats the way it should be. However, I'm still prone to make mistakes. The aliens have taken a fancy of invading my city with class 1 and 2 probes once more so I sent out a few craft to every UFO except one so I could test my annihilator (2 medium, 1 heavy disruptor) on it. I knew at once that the test was successful when the UFO just said *poof* and vaporised :evil: and went on to the next UFO. However when that was downed by the other craft, I switched to the grid map to set a new course for another UFO... unfortunately, I left clicked instead of right clicking and so the damn thing fired...
and took about 600metres of highway and 300 metres of people tube down... (had that not happened then this would have been one of the few missions where no roads got smashed up... needless to say, transtellar is permanently pissed and most of its income these days consist of X-COM bribes... :whistle: )