A Thousand Words: The Starfighters

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The Starfighters

Generally speaking, to make a good Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, the movie itself has to have some redeeming qualities. Obviously not good qualities, but signs of basic competence and the ability to do something memorable. The Starfighters is the exception to this rule. For it is simultaneously one of the best MST3K episodes and one of the worst movies shown on the program.

The movie can be summed up as “lots of stock footage of F-104s, intercut with terrible stiff acting to fill out the movie.” Famously there are two long scenes of the planes refueling in midair. Which is about as exciting as it sounds. And stock footage of them flying. And stock footage of them bombing, as well as stock footage of them firing AGM-12 Bullpup missiles.

There is one genuinely interesting thing in the movie, and that is a line that accurately shows the 1960s approach to aviation safety. Given the F-104’s infamously high accident rate, it rings even more ironically. Basically, back then the dominant theory was that every crash was the pilot’s fault and the solution basically amounted to “git gud”. Said mindset is blatantly stated in one scene where people discuss the safety of the plane.

But other than that, this is a great mock of a bad, bad, bad movie.

Review: Stealing the Atom Bomb

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Stealing The Atom Bomb: How Deception and Denial Armed Israel:

I want to say that Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb does the story of a critical and underreported part of nuclear history justice. In the mid-1960s, Israeli agents swiped enough highly enriched uranium to make multiple first-generation warheads from an enrichment plant in Pennsylvania. As the subject matter is incredibly secret, Mattson had to wade through a massive jungle to find out more. To his credit, the book is well-researched and detailed.

The problem is that so much of the book is about how the investigations went. That could be interesting in and of itself, but it’s told in such a stilted, dry way. So I regretfully have to say that what could have been a great resource has become a niche topic for nuclear weapons historians.

Review: Shadows of the Empire

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Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

In the mid-1990s, an unusual multimedia product occurred. George Lucas and company released Shadows of the Empire, a Star Wars side story set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The results for Steve Perry’s primary novel were… interesting. First off, the book itself is not so bad that it falls into the tier of “horrible tie-ins”, but is nowhere near good enough to overcome the problems which every anime fan would know.

Yes, I said anime fan. Because this is like one of those movies that are based off a sequential anime (which is itself based on a sequential manga). In other words, everything has to be completely self-contained, every loose end has to be either tied up or cut loose, and the status quo for the series overall can’t really change. That every major character introduced in this book is killed off at the end shows the limitations it was working under, and Perry could not write his way past such a major obstacle.

I supposed it works if you just want Star Wars filler, but there’s better choices even in that regard.

Tactical vs. Strategic Nukes

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So it’s worth noting that “Tactical” and “Strategic” nuclear weapons are a vague comparison. There’s a saying I’ve heard that what defined a nuclear weapon as “tactical” in the Cold War was if it detonated on German territory or not. Certainly a lot of “tactical” warheads had/have more power than the very strategic pair of WWII bombs.

Now you can just say “use” and that’s a fair definition. But I like to define it as range of the delivery system. So even if say, the legendary “Atomic Annie” cannon’s shell is in the same yield ballpark as the Little Boy, its short range qualifies it as a “tactical” system while a bomb carried by a long-range B-29 or similar plane counts as “strategic”.

It’s as good a distinction as any.

A Thousand Words: Eco Fighters

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Eco Fighters

Capcom decided to make an arcade “shmup” with an environmentalist science fiction theme. The result was Eco Fighters, a very well made game with one massive flaw. And no, the massive flaw was not the environmental theme. The massive flaw has to do with how you aim.

See you control a spaceship that has a rotating arm/turret. It sounds good, but in practice it’s a gimmick that’s hard to work and control. This and the fact that you’ll often unavoidably run into a weapon change that you don’t want (which gets rid of something you do) sours it a little.

But only a little. It’s still a good side scrolling spaceship shooter, and the graphics and music are typically excellent for the time period. It just tried something distinct and fell short in that regard.

1000 Posts

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Fuldapocalypse has reached a thousand posts in five years. It’s quite the milestone. After Fuldapocalypse, I’ve gotten three full-length and two short novels self-published, and the broadening of my literary horizons has played no small part in that. After all, my SLP Smithtown books are based on the “men’s adventure” cheap thrillers I first saw with the Survivalist, and The Sure Bet King was inspired by the structure of Sidney Sheldon novels-both of which I didn’t get until after the blog started.

The funny thing is that none of them are conventional WW3s. Oh sure, I have the Soviet-Romanian War in All Union, but that’s far closer to the Gulf War than an even Fuldapocalypse. Kind of funny, when it comes down to it.

I’ll be honest, though. I’ve long had this idea kicking around in my brain, just as how I had a Soviet-Romanian War kicking around in my brain. And this does involve a conventional WW3-kinda. It’s more like a conventional World War III interrupted by someone else, hence why I’ve given it the working title Party Crashers. You may note the similarity to Turtledove’s WorldWar, which I’ll admit to being inspired by-and a lot of other things, of course.

But yeah, I may just crash the 198X Fulda Gap Party with some extradimensional invaders…

Review: Black Seas

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Black Seas

TK Blackwood’s 199X Fuldapocalypse (or should I say Yugoslavpocalypse) continues in Black Seas. Not surprisingly given the title, it centers around the biggest missile age naval battle ever. The centerpiece is an alternate history classic: The nuclear Ulyanovsk-class carrier (I’m still debating whether to have them be in All Union or not, btw…)

That alone makes it a guilty pleasure for me (I’m definitely including the slightly similar Kherson-class “Ivan Tarawa” large landing ships in that universe, btw…). It’s certainly able to juggle a ton of plot elements as well as any other successful technothriller. Plus it has an Iowa-Kirov showdown! (A sadly realistic Iowa-Kirov showdown, which is all I’ll say about it, but still)

So yeah, this is a worthy successor to the past entries in the series and a fun WW3 naval showdown in its own right. I highly recommend this.

Review: USS Stonewall Jackson

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USS Stonewall Jackson

The book USS Stonewall Jackson is about a submarine with that name as it battles the North Koreans. Leaving aside issues with the name (which was real ), it’s also a new-build American diesel submarine. (For those rivet-counters, it’s based on the new Soryu-class).

This is basically a run of the mill technothriller, only shortened. Actually, it feels like a minimum viable technothriller, where the plot elements of such a book are stuffed into as small a space as possible (in this case only over slightly a hundred pages). This makes the technothrillery-parts that do take up pages (I’m talking rivet counts, because of course) all the more jarring.

This book basically stands as an example of why you actually need “filler”. While it may seem to be (and often is) unproductive padding, without any of it you get a distorted work like this.