My new Sea Lion Press article on (American) football is up. Enjoy!
Author: coilerxii
The Megaliners
I mentioned a long time ago how I had a fascination for “megaliners”, “superjumbos”, or aircraft designed to hold more passengers than a 747. Leaving aside the impracticality of them, most were/are pretty conventional. They just took an existing jumbo and either added or stretched the upper deck.
But not the Tu-404. This not-found Tupolev design was a flying wing for maximum passenger space.
Some variants stretched capacity into the four digits, and it would have been driven by six propfans.
Review: Military Strategy For Writers
Military Strategy for Writers
I’d love to see a book that can concisely explain strategic concepts to non-army nerds. But Stephen Kenneth Stein’s Military Strategy for Writers is not that book.
The biggest problem is the tone. It’s less “here’s what strategy is and why it’s often overlooked” and more “The generals are idiots, the writers are idiots, but I the great Historian shall tell you why all of them are wrong”, a tone that at absolute best is unhelpful.
It doesn’t help that I see typical pop-history cliche sneers that trigger alarm bells. WRT Vietnam and Iraq, for example it,s “hurr durr greeted as liberators” (during the actual invasion, that was largely accurate) and “Hurr durr us did big conventional war in Vietnam not smart coin like the British in Malaysia ” (they did that because the north was also doing it, with large northern armies being a complication that pure guerilla wars never had).
Ironically you could use Vietnam and Iraq to show the limits of strategy. Like the best case in Vietnam was going to be a Korea-style divided country, likely without South Korea’s economic boom. As a powder keg held together solely by a dictator’s lash and with a neighbor that had the ability to stir up trouble and the reasonable fear it could be next, Iraq was always going to pose a challenge.
Anyway, it fails to balance storytelling. Like yes, you get unrealistic amounts of decisive battles in fiction, but that’s because not every work needs or wants to be a hazy grey tale and because decisive conflict works for storytelling.
Happy Valentines Day
Happy Valentines Day!
Review: Alamo on the Rhine
Alamo on the Rhine
For the first World War III review of the new year, I turn to T. K. Blackwood’s Alamo on the Rhine, a spinoff/side story of the Iron Crucible 1990s World War III. It’s about a daring strike on a vital air base at the start of the war. Told with the same effectiveness as the other entries, I greatly enjoyed it.
I couldn’t help but see the parallels to Market Garden, Kitona, and Hostomel and wonder what role those historical battles played in the crafting of this book, similar to how I wanted a “Soviet Gulf War” in All Union but not an exact one. It’s to Blackwood’s credit that the excellent story does not come across as a simple historical copy-paste.
This is a very fun book of the kind I haven’t read in a while. Nice job.
The Draft Bust That Changed History
It’s almost Super Bowl time, and it’s Black History Month. So I figure I’d post this tiny bit of gridiron history I was checking out. So if you were to list pioneering black quarterbacks overcoming the past stereotypes of the position to thrive in pro football, maybe you’d pick the first starter in the modern era, Marlin Briscoe. Or maybe Doug Williams, the first to win a Super Bowl. Or Warren Moon, the first superstar.
How about seemingly forgettable draft bust Andre Ware? Picked out of Houston college by the Detroit Lions no. 7 overall in 1990, he sputtered out in the pros. Now the “how” isn’t really the point of this article. From what I’ve read, it was a college scheme that didn’t really translate well to the pros, especially at the time. That white quarterback David Klinger followed a similar “went to Houston, was drafted high, and was a pro bust” seems to support that. But again, that’s not really the point.
The point is that Ware set a precedent for drafting black quarterbacks very high that has never stopped. Looking at later drafts:
- 1995: Steve McNair: 5th overall
- 1996: Tony Banks: 42nd overall, second round, however was first quarterback picked
- 1999: Donovan McNabb (2nd), Akili Smith (3rd), Daunte Culpepper (11th), this was the final nail in the coffin
Now obviously high draft picks are not total evidence of prejudice being eliminated. But it is interesting to note see the exact moment when, in practical terms, the tide turned.
A Thousand Words: OutRun
OutRun
Sega’s legendary car driving game OutRun was an arcade time attack game where you control a couple in a Ferrari trying to make it to the end of a series of branching paths before the clock runs out. That is the least impressive thing about it. The most impressive thing is that a game in 1986, even an arcade game, manages to still look fresh and well animated to this day, and have things like a changeable radio and diverging paths. Remember, the console stuff at this time was the likes of Mach Rider.
It took over a decade to finally be able to make an arcade-quality home port of it. Which speaks to how limit-pushing it was/is. While today its most direct legacy of giant arcade machine driving games with steering wheels and frequently even pedals is viewed as outdated kitsch, every game with vehicles owes a lot to this.
Review: The BAC Three-Eleven
The BAC Three-Eleven: The Airbus That Should Have Been
In one of those “only someone like me would like this book” book purchases, I got Graziano Freschi’s book on the BAC Three-Eleven. The actual never-was airplane itself was an all-British two engine jumbo jet similar to the Airbus A300 only slightly larger and with both engines in the back.
Freschi both describes the plane and makes the argument that it was a mistake for the British to cancel it, as with many (if not all) their big postwar programs, they would spend large sums of money on something and then cancel it, getting the worst of both worlds. His case is weakened by Britain’s poor reputation in such regards, and he kind of hedges from “This would have been a success” to “Britain would have been in a better negotiating position when they rejoined Airbus”.
Though not perfect, it is an interesting look at an obscure plane.
Nuclear Weapons Studies
I have an idea for teaching a class that would combine traditional history with red-teaming. This is of course just a fantasy, but this is a fantasy blog. The course would be called “Nuclear Weapons Studies”. It starts off with history and physics even I can understand. Then comes The Assignment.
Students are given a fictional country with a set government, GDP, and domestic industry. They have to present the story of that country’s nuclear weapons program and will be judged not just according to traditional metrics but also according to how ‘plausible’ it seems to me. And the program doesn’t have to be a successful one, just seriously attempted.
Review: Atomic Steppe
Atomic Steppe
Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe is the story of Kazakhstan and nuclear weapons. A Kazakh whose father was an advisor and think-tank head during the crucial early 1990s period, she’s well suited to write it. The bulk of the book is about the horrific environmental legacy of nuclear tests and infrastructure on the country, told excellently.
The problem with the main theoretical part of the book, the nuclear negotiations, is that despite her sincere efforts to show its complexity, the outcome was obvious and never actually in doubt. Kazakhstan had even less chance of preserving a nuclear arsenal than Ukraine or Belarus. That said, there’s plenty of finds from the almost video-game like saga of Americans retrieving super-enriched uranium for disposal to the Russian crews of the nuclear delivery systems flying bombers away and draining the fuel of ICBMs (SS-18s are liquid fueled) to skewer any chance of Kazakhstan being able to seize them.
It’s not a drama, but it’s a good look at atomic history.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 