AI Art, generated in Flux. Hunter. Of what is up to your imagination.
A Thousand Words: BeamNG Drive
BeamNG Drive
One reason why Fuldapocalypse hasn’t been updating much is BeamNG Drive. It is an automobile sandbox with realistic physics that allows someone to do so much. Now on its own the game does not look like much. You can drive around maps that range from tiny to several virtual square kilometers, do some challenges like races or time trials or seeing how far you can get on an almost empty fuel tank, etc…
But that is like saying like sports is just throwing/kicking a ball around. With just the stock game (and the mods for this are numerous and excellent), you can control everything from big truck fronts to tiny old cars. The seemingly mundane can turn into fun, like towing a trailer with cargo many times the weight of the car pulling it, and doing so on a dirt mountain road without mishaps (easier said than done).
You have to make your own fun in BeamNG, but there’s a lot of it.
Classic Cars Were Terrible
So yeah, time to bust the legend of super-classic cars. In short. They sucked.
This video shows the biggest reason I dislike “classics”. They were/are horrifically, monstrously, massively unsafe. Bad seatbelts even assuming people wore them (they didn’t), cars that were basically metal sculptures designed with no concern for the people inside in mind, and yeah.
Ah, but what about the handling? Good question. Your car engine was either so underpowered that a modern econobox can match it or it was a gargantuan rocket inside a frame that could barely contain it, which doesn’t exactly help with safety. And said engines burned through gas so massively that the supposed halcyon days of cheap gas (even beyond inflation) often actually weren’t. Oh yeah, and they were tremendously space-inefficient.
But they built them to last unlike todays evil capitalist planned obsolesence machines, uh…? Well, I’ll just point out that an odometer on an old car being a full order of magnitude (10 times/1 digit) lower in max numbers speaks for itself. But even if it didn’t, you remembered the survivors who stuck around, the lovingly maintained Cadillacs and not the five millionth Chevy Nova that instantly broke down.
So yes, in everything except raw performance (and sometimes not even then), this rightfully regarded bottom-feeder 2017 Mitsubishi Mirage is vastly superior to the fin-boats of old.
Review: Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers
Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers
Raconteur Press’s Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers is an anthology of alternate history cavalry stories. You get helicopters in Southeast Asia (but not the way you might think), airships (of course) in the American Civil War, and plenty of good old horsies. While none of the stories are bad, a lot just feel like historical fiction with different names, which is a problem a lot of alternate history unavoidably has (I think that World War IIIs actually avoid this by being something so completely different from say, the Vietnam War, but that’s another story).
Thankfully, there are ones that go above and beyond that. My favorite is a World War I divergence where the Tsar Tank actually works. How can you not love a giant armored tricycle? Anyway, while the execution may not be the best in every case, the concept is so great that I still recommend this collection (and lament that I couldn’t write a story about armored recon units in the Soviet-Romanian War for it).
Review: The Athlete
The Athlete
With football/handegg season now upon us, I figure a sports book is in order. As good as any other is Jon Finkel’s The Athlete, a biography of Charlie Ward, a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and then went on to a long and successful pro career…. as a basketball player. Especially since, by basketball standards anyway, Ward wasn’t even very tall.
To get the negative out of the way, this is a rose-tinted view of him that excuses one of his most infamous incidents (which thankfully just amounted to him saying something dumb and not doing anything). It also praises him as if he was Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson, which is just a little too much in my eyes. But it’s still an interesting look at a man who succeeded in two places where almost everyone can’t succeed in one.
A final interesting piece is that Finkel doesn’t really try to answer the counterfactual everyone is going to ask: Could Ward have been a viable NFL quarterback? Could have been Russell Wilson two decades earlier, or an undersized runt who’d get crushed by pro defenders? The correct answer is “We don’t know”, but it’s a little disappointing to not even consider it.
While not the best book, this is a good look at someone I knew growing up from his time on the Knicks.
The Worst Pilot Ever
On May 22, 2020, Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303 crashed in Karachi, killing 98 people. Its pilot, Sajjad Gul, may have exhibited the worst judgement and skill of any pilot involved in an air disaster ever, and he and almost a hundred other people paid the price.
In written and video form, it’s horrifying to behold. There was good weather, a familiar and established plane, no mechanical issues, no foul play, and nothing save for someone who went in on a crash course, had countless opportunities to step back from the brink, and did not.
Absent pilots who crashed on purpose or otherwise did things like make bets that they could land blindfolded (they couldn’t) or reenact the flight of Icarus, this is the least competent aircrew I’ve seen. By the final too-late moments, Gul and copilot Usman Azam were apparently trying to do two contradictory things (which gives you a sign of how bad the crew resource management was).
Review: Star Eagles
Having loved Starmada, I eagerly embraced Star Eagles as a fighter equivalent. I wanted a small unit space fighter game that balanced customization with play-ability and am happy to note that it succeeded in sating that desire. Star Eagles is based on movement templates, activation dice, and special playing cards that a player can use.
It’s not perfect, but I’ve been able to do viable battles with a lot of ships adapted from a lot of different ideas, and that’s what matters. I recommend it to tabletop space battle enthusiasts.
Review: Tank Warfare
Jeremy Black’s Tank Warfare is a history of the century-plus history of the metal tracked armored vehicle known as the tank. Published in 2020, it wasn’t able to cover the wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, but that’s not its fault. There are however a significant amount of things that are its fault.
The book is a popular history broad-brush overview. Perhaps its biggest weakness is that it’s too broad for its own good. Tangets towards every tank developed and exported by everyone in the time period happen at the expense of actually exploring the topic. Which would be more tolerable if it hadn’t actually focused on World War I in depth simply because there were few types of tanks to cover. The balanced look at the earliest AFVs there give a picture of what might have been.
This is basically just a generic coffee table tank book, but it had the potential to be more.
Fake Mobile Game Ads
Most video game advertisements naturally show the gameplay at its most exciting, thrilling, and successful. Yet there is one common type that doesn’t. Imagine an ad for a platformer where the character misses an easy jump and falls into a pit, a fighting game where they try and fail to pull off a single special move, and so on. That is the changing but obvious world of fake mobile game ads, where the ‘player’ engages in either simple puzzles or a Space Invaders style descending enemy wave game and almost invariably loses pathetically.
See, there’s a reason for this and that’s because the actual game is nothing like the ads. Most of the games depicted in these commercials are city builders with everything taking forever unless you speed the process up with real money. Not very photogenic. The actual ad mode is relegated to a small minigame so that it’s not technically false advertising.
Review: Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army
Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army
David Isby’s 1988 edition of Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army is perhaps the missing link in the OPFOR puzzle. I have to give the obligatory “this is a Cold War western source” to get it out of the way. That being said, once basic prudence is applied, this is an amazing compendium.
It covers every single major weapons system in the 198X Soviet army detailing not just the paper specs but also the intended doctrinal use and actual combat experience in Afghanistan or with foreign armies. This comprehensive look at the whole and not just the sum of the parts is sadly too rare and is very welcome here.
This is a rare, expensive, and massive book. But it is well worth it to any scholar of the Fuldapocalypse.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 