How the Fuldapocalypse Skewed Artillery

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Fair warning: This is done by an armchair enthusiast with absolutely no practical experience and whose sole experience comes from reading things. I could be totally and completely wrong about many things. Now that that’s out of the way, a look at how a Fuldapocalypse-centric doctrine has skewed perceptions of artillery to the point where Ukraine came as a surprise to many.

To put a long story overly short, the current paradigm in Ukraine is:

  • Largely static front
  • Lots of drones flying around on both sides (which translates to deadlier air power, which in turn makes it a bigger threat)
  • Limited resources

So you can see why smaller, easier to conceal towed guns are liked more.

Now compare this to the Fuldapocalypse:

  • Mobile front
  • Less threat from air but extremely good counterbattery fire
  • Lavish (prewar) spending to afford SPGs.

See the difference?

Now the interesting thing is Caesar-style “truck SPGs”, ie artillery pieces on open wheeled chassis. They have shown the weaknesses of both-ie they’re soft like a towed gun and big like an SPG (and even less maneuverable). However, they’re not really designed for either kind of large-scale war.

Review: Midnight Ops

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Midnight Ops

Midnight Ops is the latest Duncan Hunter book by Mark Hewitt . It is also not just the worst in the series but the worst “thriller” novel that I’ve read. Ever. At least as of this post. And I do not mean this lightly. Having read literally hundreds of these books, I’ve reached the point.

So the Amazon blurb mentions a defecting F-22 that flew to North Korea as the MacGuffin. Well you will be “glad” to hear that it takes two thirds of the book to even reach that point at all. And then it goes back to what it was previously doing. What was it doing?

Political rants. I’d say it’s like reading the Facebook page of your boomer uncle from rural Oklahoma, but that would be an insult to boomer uncles from rural Oklahoma. If you trained an AI model on nothing but conspiracy talk radio transcripts and then let it rip for five hundred pages, you’d have this book. But I’m still pretty sure the AI could do better.

The worst part is that I used to like this series! It had the same ridiculously right-wing politics and unstoppable Mary Sue, but could be fun in a Mack Maloney manner. This isn’t. The actual ‘action’ is the same repetitive easy victories that feels like an afterthought. It’s easy to tell the real emotion is in the rants.

So yes, I’ve found the new worst (thriller) novel ever. Welp.

UAV Classes

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The US Military has five official group of UAVs/drones.

(from ATP 3-01-81)

The standard hobby drone is a Group 1. Smaller military drones are groups 2 and 3. The ScanEagle is the best American example of a Group 2. The classic Iowa spotter Pioneer is a Group 3, so is the RQ-7 Shadow. Heavy attack drones like the Predator and Bayraktar TB2 are 4, while monsters like the Reaper and Global Hawk are 5.

Review: Resplendent

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Resplendent

A collection of previously published short stories, Resplendent is Stephen Baxter at both his best and worst. It covers the Xeelee universe from start to finish, in every time and every era. The good news is that Baxter gets to show off his worldbuilding. The bad news is that Baxter gets… to…. show… off… his… exposition.

Besides the infodumps, one big problem is that what the main characters do has to be ‘relevant’ somehow. You can’t just have Bill the monopole gunner getting killed, he has to fire the shot which changes the tide somehow. This Great Man-ism is at odds with the weaving larger than life scope of the settings.

Also Baxter is terrible at naming characters and keeps reusing names. So yeah, this book is a mixed bag.

Review: The Nordkapp Affair

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Northern Fury: The Nordkapp Affair

(note: I got permission to read this book pre-release for the sake of a review).

This fairly short novella to the Northern Fury epic is a side story about a Norwegian ferry at the beginning of the war. It has to try and evacuate people from what could become a warzone (spoiler alert: It does). While a simple plot, it’s a very suitable one.

One thing I particularly liked was keeping the “camera” focused entirely on the ship itself and a running tally of its status. Whereas a lot of “Big War Thrillers” understandably show the big war, something as focused as this is a lot different.

Which is a good thing, as there’s something to be said for an HMS Ulysses type story. Which I mean both in terms of tone/structure and in terms of location-an excellent place for a war novel.

A Thousand Words: Clue

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Clue

As proof that movies based on bizarre IPs are not a new thing, 1985 saw the release of a film based on the board game Clue. Thankfully the board game has a basic plot of “murder mystery”, which the movie uses. It ends up killing a lot more than Mr. Boddy.

This movie is not “good” by any means, but it falls into the category of “a lot better than it could have been” and is perfectly fun for a time waster. Its multiple ending gimmick at least tries to be experimental and interesting (it was intended to have different theaters show different ‘definitive’ endings). And the John Morris score is underrated and excellent.

Review: Super Mirage 4000

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Super Mirage 4000

Finally translated into English, this is a look at what was to France what the Avro Arrow was to Canada, the TSR-2 was to Britain, the Lavi was to Israel, and the Osorio tank was to Brazil. (Or what the AMX-32 and AMX-40 tanks were to… France).

It’s what you’d expect from a small coffee table book whose sources came from inside the program: A combination of knowledge and bias, mixed with tidbits without being the deepest. This isn’t a bad thing if you know what you’re getting into, and the plane is certainly worthy of such a book.

Coiler’s Culmination Calculator

On By coilerxiiIn Blog Stuff, Essay, Weird Wargaming1 Comment

As a fun side project, I made my first (intentionally abstracted) wargaming tool. The goal is to see the culmination point of an offensive.

Assumptions: The attacker is consistently advancing, however, the defender is fighting back hard throughout. The units of the attacker participating in the campaign are not going to be rotated out, hence they will only receive small and piecemeal reinforcements/replacements throughout.

This simple tool works as follows:

  • The attacker starts with a point total of 100.
  • For each objective, roll 1d10. 1 means the objective is taken unopposed and the force suffers no meaningful losses. 2-6 is a minor engagement where the unit suffers a point loss equal to 1d6 points. 7-10 is a major engagement where the unit suffers a point loss equal to 1d6+10.
  • After every turn, the faction regains 3 points.
  • The offensive will have culminated when the point total reaches zero or less.

Example:

  • Objective 1: 9: 16 points lost. 3 regenerated. 87 points.
  • Objective 2: 8: 12 points lost, 3 regenerated. 78 points.
  • Objective 3: 6: 1 point lost, 3 regenerated. 79 points
  • Objective 4: 6: 6 points lost, 3 regenerated. 76 points.
  • Objective 5: 1: No losses, 3 points regenerated. 79 points.
  • Objective 6: 3: 5 losses, 3 regenerated. 77 points
  • Objective 7: 10: 11 losses, 3 regenerated. 69 points

Etc….

Figures of course can be changed depending on context.

On Star Wars

On By coilerxiiIn Essay1 Comment

Now I want to say that I’ve liked a lot of Star Wars stuff. I don’t mind the setting, I’ve seen 2/3s of the official movies. Like any big setting it has its ups and downs. But I definitely don’t hate this.

However, I feel obligated to say one thing about Star Wars that I believe. It is the most overrated work of modern fiction, and this overrating has made it impossible to judge. What you have is first a trio of fun sci-fi pulp movies that get treated as if they were more than fun sci-fi pulp movies, because they were a breath of fresh air in the pretentious dark tone of 1970s science fiction. Then you have a giant franchise.

Next you have the prequels, which are basically what happens when a Dunning-Krugered director gets free reign to run amuck. People nowadays are swinging towards defending the prequels in a dose of inevitable “defend midsize sedan cars the minute they stop being popular” hipsterism. Although I don’t blame them, because…

Then George Lucas cashed out and the Mouse Machine made the sequel trilogy. Now I had little desire to see them in full personally, and everything I saw and heard reinforced that desire. When I finally, recently looked at them in more depth, I was even gladder. At least the first six were works of genuine artistic imagination. These are just rehashed play it too safe mush piles that don’t understand the feel of their setting.

(Not so small side note: Devereaux’s excellent blog has the point in a review of fellow cash grab Rings of Power that authors are obsessed with winning battles via an unrealistic One Neat Trick. That plus “why didn’t they fly in on the eagles” ”’rationalism”’ leads to the infamous hyperspace ram.)