Nice shots.

They look like the real thing.

I like the fourth one the best, though. The others make war seem much too clean.

As an FO for an armored cav artillery battery.

I drove some weird stuff in the Army, like a Gamma Goat. Drove a Jeep inside a Chinook helicopter once, too. That was fun, in a sphincter clenching kind of way.

I never could drive that thing well. The combination of automatic stick and tight shifting pattern gave me fits.

I trained, and served stateside, on the old M114 towed 155mm. Went to a Cav regiment in Germany, and served the M109-A1. They are currently on either the A6 or A7 variant of that piece, which gives you an idea of how old I am.

I spent the last 8 months of my tour in FO section but I had a buddy in FDC, Brent Schlosstein. They still used the old slide rule system on occasion, but I'm pretty sure that they primarily used FADAC. It's been so long I can't remember, but I do remember glancing into the CP and seeing them standing around maps, fussing with slide rules.

We were pretty low-tech: maps, small plastic plotting template, and two radios. I can only imagine how they do things nowadays.

I started in the 101st Airborne, where we had towed M102 105mm guns. We had this big green fiberglass box in the back of our storage conex that just sat there. For an IG inspection my sergeant made us pull it out of the shed, so I asked him what it was. "The FADAC. It's on our TO & E so we have to show we have it." Never saw one out of the box. The Canadians (we did a training exchange with them) were already using TI programmable calculators to do their firing data, while we were just fielding the new BCS system, which cost a ton of money. (A single connecting cable was $25k.)

Then they sent me to Germany where we had M109 A3's. I wasn't too far behind you, though. I also learned with the "slide rules" and tables of data.

Nice, nice values on the black and white. I have trouble getting anything that looks that nice.

For what it's worth, I think that second image is most excellent. Composition, values, clarity, everything.

That's my preferred black and white software. I also use intensity pro sometimes

...but my images certainly don't come out as nice as yours.

i think it being a very overcast day helped...
these were taken on saturday as the rain began that tuned into a deluge for houston and areas about an hour east of austin.
here in austin we got a lot of rain but nothing catastrophic not like the 12-20 inches they got east of here