As China tightens its grip on Taiwan, a shadowy undersea Grey War escalates, forcing the United States toward a pivotal decision with deadly consequences.

Background:
A great deal is happening in this episode. The general idea behind it is that as the quarantine takes effect and with China moving to further isolate Taiwan, both the US and China begin to misunderstand and miscalculate the other and, under increasing pressure, make decisions that will have grave effects in this episode, and more importantly, the next. I also wanted to highlight the local and global economic impacts, the uncertainty of geopolitics when it comes to friends and allies in the region, and the technologies used in undersea ISR and sabotage. And though the script for this episode was planned many months ago… it has been outpaced by real-world current events in the Baltic Sea, North Sea and off Taiwan! It’s hard to keep up and keep ahead.

Commentary:
Pronunciations of places, names and translations are my best guess or through open resources such as Google Translation, etc. As always, uniforms are NOT exact. The rank shown on the uniforms of some of the characters are also inaccurate because they are not available in the gaming platforms used. Some of the UUVs are kit-bashed SDVs made to look like UUV/AUVs only because there are none available in the gaming platforms. If you look close and squint, those explosions of UUVs are actually old Russian subs. And yep, that H-6 is dropping a bomb, not a smart mine. No such thing exists yet in DCS. 🙂

Thank you to:

Michael Hilliard, creator of the geopolitical podcast, The Red Line for his in-depth insight and help in framing this episode. I HIGHLY recommend the Red Line Podcast:
https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/

Darth Rust

David Wellington

FIXEDIT for the beautiful DCS video clips. Check out his amazing YouTube Channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/@BobChanel

Lastly, as always, there is only so much I can do as a one-man-show in putting this series together to get it perfectly “right”. The gaming platforms I use are limited, the mods available within them can be limiting as well, so there are times when a rank or uniform might not be right, or a version of equipment, etc. I work with what I have, in the time that I have, so I ask for a bit of grace in focusing more on the story, tone and feel. That said, I’m always happy to receive constructive criticism. This is all about making the story and presentation better. Thanks!

This video was created in part using content of Bohemia Interactive a.s. Copyright © 2018 Bohemia Interactive a.s. All rights reserved. www.bistudio.com

Other games and software used include:

Command: Modern Operations by Slitherine Software https://www.slitherine.com/game/command-modern-operations

Digital Combat Simulator | DCS World | Combat Simulator by Eagle Dynamics https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/

Cold Waters
https://killerfishgames.com/games/cold-waters

Celestia
https://celestiaproject.space/

Map.Army https://www.map.army/

Voice Over: https://elevenlabs.io/

GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program https://www.gimp.org/

Davinci Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Music:

Echoes of Time v2 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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