Frontlines: Fuel of War

Cancelled Port

On 23rd January 2008, in the update to the fiscal outlook of 2008, THQ Inc. announced the cancellation of the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

Missile Launcher

The Euro-American (or Western Coalition) forces in the game have the advanced man-portable missile launcher they call the Guardian. The website says that it was fielded in 2015, and that to make their counterpart to the Guardian -- called the Stiletto -- the Red Star Alliance had to steal a Guardian to copy it. Not only is it a man-portable fire and forget missile, it can recognize whether it has been fired at a vehicle or an aircraft, people or a building, and react accordingly -- thus replacing every other missile that could only do one or another of these things. Furthermore, if you pick the the thing that you want to shoot at, and then click and hold and drag to a second point (say, around a corner) then the missile will go to those points in reverse order, thus shooting around the corner to hit the target so that you don't have to expose yourself. No wonder someone would go to so much trouble to make their own version!

On the "skin" of the polygon model of the missile launcher that the player character holds in his hand, you can seen there is written "Titan RLS" (which must be short for "Titan Rocket Launch System") and not "Guardian." You can see the same thing in the game's concept art. I would say that this means the game developers first planned to call the launcher the Titan, but then they realized that that there is already a US Air Force heavy lift rocket called the Titan for launching space satellites. So, they changed the weapon description to call it the Guardian, but neglected to change the writing on the side of the missile. Either they forgot, or they ran out of time to make changes.

On the outside of the Red Star version of this missile, the Stiletto, there is an arrow pointing towards the muzzle with the Russian word for "party" written there, as if to say that "the party comes out of this end."

Shotgun

The standard-issue combat shotgun used by the Red Star Alliance (i.e., Russo-Chinese power bloc) is described on the game's website as 18 millimeter, which is 13-gauge in US shotgun measure, and is referred to by the model name "Layats 15". Literally, this means the "Bark 15" shotgun. That is to say, in Russian, "layats!" (лаыатс) is one of the words you can use for the noise when a dog barks. However, more often one says "gaf gaf" (гаф гаф) in Russia to express the sound of a dog barking.

Weapons

There are many signs that the developers tried to make the military technology portrayed in the game plausible - in terms of what kind of vehicles suitable for combined-arms warfare, what kinds of small arms, what kinds of heavier weapons (for example artillery), what kinds of basic tools, and what kinds of electronic warfare assets might be available by the year 2024. I hope that sometime very soon I will have time to add more examples to prove why this is so, I have a plan for how to do this.

However, to start with I can say that the reconnaissance jeep of the Red Star Alliance (i.e. not the Euro-Americans, but the other side, the Ruso-Chinese power bloc) is referred to in the game as the "GZ-550." It seems clear from this vehicle shape and designation that it would really be "GAZ-550" -- made by the Russian vehicle manufacturing company GAZ (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod), which in real life makes a wide variety of light to medium ground vehicles for military and civilian use. For example, GAZ makes the various series of vehicles that Western observers today lump together by calling "the Soviet/Russian equivalent of a Jeep" and "the Soviet/Russian equivalent of a Hummer" respectively. Without having paid for a license from GAZ, the makers of the game cannot call their idea of a futuristic "Russian jeep" a GAZ-550, for then they would be sued. You can also see this because on the game web site page where a description of this vehicle is provided, the writer at first calls it by the "laundered" name "GZ-550," but then in the second line of text the writer has actually made a typo and has accidentally written "GAZ-550" instead. It seems reasonable that this is imagined to be what will come after the brand new GAZ-2975 Tigr (Tiger) which the Russians have today, especially because the model numbers of GAZ vehicles do not have to be in order. You can see from the game descriptions that each side in the fighting has a vehicle for this role, the Western Coalition calls theirs "Light Vehicle, Standard" (LVS). Both of these are described realistically as next-generation hybrid vehicles, both have features like capturing extra energy from braking and engine designs that give surges of extra power in an emergency. Both run on new combinations of regular petroleum and synthetic fuel. This makes perfect sense in a world where oil shortages have gotten so bad that a new World War has broken out because of it.

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