Review: Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

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Bush vs. The Axis of Evil

Another former internet timeline turned book, Bush vs. The Axis of Evil amounts to “What if World War III broke out in the early 2000s”?

It starts with Hezbollah conducting 9/11 while thinking it’d just be a minor message-sender, which gets it off to a “good” start. All this is told in a long series of blocky exposition posts with the occasional in-universe “book excerpt” that mysteriously resembles a blocky exposition post. Anyway, this leads to a spiraling 200X WWIII against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea at once, with such amazing things as:

  • Millenium Challenge 02 being used as a serious reference for a Battle of Hormuz, which leads to a carrier (the Lincoln) being sunk. This is a “good” benchmark for how militarily plausible all of it is.
  • A copy-pasted Christmas Truce straight out of 1914 pop culture.
  • Divergences into music festivals and pro wrestling pay per views, since every contemporary internet AH timeline MUST have a “what about the thing?” pop culture segment.

There’s some potentially interesting divergences like the Unification Church converting ex-northerners en masse, but it squanders all of them. The bulk is just horrible gore-atrocity descriptions done with all the immediacy and intensity of the instruction manual for a 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer.

Stuff like this has made me a lot more respecting of Larry Bond, because he manages, however imperfectly, to combine storytelling competence with knowledge of military operations. Often you get one, or as in this case, neither.

Soviet-Romanian Air War

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With All Union now on a little cooldown, I figured I’d share my exposition/notes about the Soviet-Romanian air war:

Overall course of the war: Starting on September 8, 1998, the Sovereign Union invaded Romania with two fronts (army groups). The northern Dniester Front was arguably the most advanced and powerful fighting force in history at that time. That combined with good terrain made it sweep south in close to nine days. The southern Danube Front had a more difficult task in the form of more fortifications,more cohesive defense, the daunting task of crossing a massive river opposed, and the bulk of it consisting of forcibly mobilized Bulgarians. Still, after the same nine days they had encircled Bucharest and linked up with the Dniester Front. For the rest of the month they prepared to storm the city, continued bombardment, and tried to push for a surrender that eventually came.

In the end, the USSR lost around 3,500 soldiers and the Bulgarians and other minor allies around 7,000. Romanian casualties are almost literally uncountable with at least 70,000 being essentially confirmed and with estimates as high as 120,000 KIA.

Now for the air:

The USSR’s air force was a curious mixture of everything from the hyper-advanced Su-37 Fermion fighter to dozens of ancient Il-28s. In general, METT-TC was used to allocate things, with older planes doing area strikes with smother/splash damage weapons in the daytime and newer ones using PGMs at night whenever possible. While not perfect, it was extremely devastating.

Romania:

The initial fire strike took out around five hundred Romanian aircraft on the ground, over 80% of its total. This caused a lot of panic in the USAF after the war. A few planes made it through, most notably in the defeat of a Danube Front forward detachment at Alexandria very early on. Otherwise Romanian aircraft were limited to tiny nuisance strikes and suffered very heavy losses while doing so, though surprisingly few to the vaunted SAMs. (Total air superiority+tons of friendly Soviet aircraft = a very short ROE leash and lots of fighter opportunities).

Review: Three Week Professionals

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Three Week Professionals

Though not the deepest sports book, Ted Kluck’s Three Week Professionals tells the story of the 1987 NFL replacement players with humor and the right tone. On one hand, the players had more of a justification for striking than was often the case given the lack of free agency and the sport being incredibly harsh. On the other, it was poorly handled and working-class people even at the time thought little of it.

As both a time capsule and a short breezy history, this book is good. Not deep, but it’s not supposed to be. It is fun and that’s what matters.

Weird Wargaming: The Realistic Space Warship

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In the late 1970s, the BDM Corporation did a study for what a plausible space warship could look like (thanks to the invaluable Atomic Rockets for its analysis).

It has a spin-gravity crew quarters, is powered by nuclear reactors, and its armament consists of a laser in a de facto turret, a forward facing railgun, and a rear-facing particle beam (because the radioactive particles can’t risk hitting the ship).

The Space Shuttle in the picture is for scale-the whole thing is about two hundred meters long!

Review: Tiger Chair

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Tiger Chair

The recent Tiger Chair is the Max Brooks short story of the Chinese invasion of the American West Coast. Told in the form of a letter back home from a Chinese, it mentions how all the high-tech contraptions that were supposed to win were countered by know-how.

I’ll be blunt, this is not a good story. It’s told entirely through less-than-ideal exposition, and is loaded with both references that are bound to age like antimatter (mentioning some minor celebrity controversy from four years before this post that a normal person like the narrator would almost certainly not even know about) and older ones (there’s a ton of Iraq War lingo that makes me think at least part of this was originally written back in the 2000s).

But the real problem (at least for a military nerd like myself) is that Brooks’ Pentagon Reformerism is on every page. Obvious from as early as the Zombie Survival Guide (where he praised the AK and scorned the M16), this goes from “there are counters to high-tech contraptions” to “they make high-tech contraptions useless”. This is hammered home in a hamfisted manner continually.

Don’t get this.

What’s In A Space Warship Name

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(That I’m interested in this topic just as I’ve gotten into Starmada is just a coincidence, I swear.)

Atomic Rockets is a great site for semi-realistic spacecraft design. However, one of their contributors was adamant about not transplanting ship names wholesale from maritime ones, as has happened many times before. Is this a sensible avoidance of tropes or just hipsterism for the sake of being different?

I feel it depends on the setting and tone. IE Warhammer 40k and its broadside space cathedrals and obvious Age of Sail symbolism can adopt naval terminology just fine. But there are understandable reasons to avoid the ‘superdreadnought’.

Names I think could make the cut:

  • Battleship. Pretty self-explanatory.
  • Carrier for anything carrying smaller craft. Also pretty self-explanatory.
  • Gunship/gunboat. I think this has already passed one test in that plenty of real aircraft are called gunships, and an added bonus of being a good literal description for many designs. (IE, big weapon on a spinal mount the rest of the ship is built around).

Cruiser, Destroyer, and Frigate are already a mess and have been for decades if not longer. These smaller ships are probably the best to make up your own terminology for (ie “Dragonship”).

A Thousand Words: Some Kind of Monster

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Some Kind of Monster

One of the best musical documentaries of all time, Some Kind of Monster covers Metallica in the early 2000s during the making of the St. Anger album. Given a surprising amount of access, including their arguments and therapy sessions (seriously), the filmmakers put together a tour de force. At times it’s like a ‘real’ Spinal Tap in its ridiculousness, but at other times it’s earnest.

Besides being a well made film, there’s a couple factors that help this along. The first is that it ultimately has a ‘happy’ ending: The band managed to overcome their difference, reunite, finish the album, and get a replacement bass player who has remained with them since. The second is that with hindsight it’s at just the right time. The band members are clearly past their absolute height and have grown with families and responsibilities. Yet at the same time, they aren’t in the pathetic, irrelevant “Fat Elvis” phase that every aging rocker inevitably falls into.

I think the best and most poignant part of the film comes when the album is finally done and the band members talk about the strange mixed feelings they have. As I’d just finished A Period of Cheating when I saw the movie, I understood completely that feeling.

Anyway, even if you don’t like Metallica (I’m not exactly a fan), this is a great film to watch.

Review: Vacuum Diagrams

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Vacuum Diagrams

Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams is a series of linked stories intended to tell the Xeelee from cradle to grave. I mentioned before that like Harry Turtledove, his writing style is a lot more suited for that. And like Turtledove, this is still uneven. There’s attempts at coherent arcs, including a later one where primitive humans have to escape their stone age prison the Xeelee built for them (it makes sense in context), but those really don’t work so well.

Others are basically just “here is a thing. Here is a description of a thing. Here is a character who exists as a camera to show you the thing.” Baxter has managed a sense of wonder and splendor a lot better. Here the scope is so big that it feels tiny. Going billions of light years to a megastructure/portal is done so often that it feels like running an errand (and I’m talking about the human characters, not the aliens).

Some of this has been retconned by later books, although “retcon” isn’t really the best word when time travel exists in universe. Either way, this is not one of Baxter’s biggest hits.

Weird Wargaming AAR: Starmada Star Wars/40k

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So inspired by the Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40k web serial, I made crossover fleet lists for Starmada. Then using Tabletop Simulator for a convenient hex map and making some quick counters in its editor, I ran a small fleet engagement of four Imperial frigates vs. five Republic ones.

The fleet lists are still subject to major revision but suffice to say the Star Wars side is about accuracy and fighters and the 40k one about brute power and durability. In this case brute force won out as the Imperium destroyed four Republic vessels for the loss of only one of their own.