Weird Wargaming: The Condor Missile

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Imagine a ballistic missile made by as close to as pure a League of Evil as it’s possible to get. Such a missile did not actually (to public knowledge) enter service, but it was worked on by several of the world’s most nefarious regimes. I speak of the Condor II/Badr-2000 (and undoubtedly many more names if it had spread) missile that was worked on by the Falklands-era Argentine junta, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Egypt’s military regime (which has been credibly rumored to have continued development on other long-range missiles based on it in secret by itself.)

In Nuclear War Simulator, if I want a basic strategic missile for a rogue nation I’m giving plausible nuclear weapons, I give them Condors. As a final version of the Condor II was never explicitly built and tested, exact figures cannot be determined. However, range has been stated at 500-1200 kilometers and circular error probable from 500-50 meters, with even the larger number being acceptable for a nuclear warhead aimed at a city. The UNMOVIC report on Iraq’s missile program stated that the Badr-2000 had more modest goals: 1 phase with a range of 620 km and a CEP of 6.2 kilometers, followed by Phase 2 (620 km/620 meters) and Phase 3 (750 km/750 meters). The ballpark is narrow enough for me to use a “considerably longer than INF limits, and not too inaccurate” judgement in individual cases.

The payload was about 300-500 kilograms, and the missile around 80 centimeters in width. This would require a small warhead to work properly, and a light one to push the missile to its intended range. The first-gen Iraqi warhead would have been too big, but it would not have been an insurmountable problem given enough time (or, in my backgrounds, an AQ Khan-style nuclear network providing the materials/documentation to build a ‘standardized’ warhead small enough to fit into a Condor II).

To have every regional nuke-seeker get Condors is still a bit of a stretch. Historically, the foreign components and shaky finances of the developments gave opponents leverage that they used to squash it. But to have some of them slip through is not entirely implausible.

Review: Children of the Night

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Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania

With All Union and my Soviet-Romanian War project, I figured getting a good one-volume history of the Southeast European country would be nice. And Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night delivers. It starts in 1442 with Vlad “Dracula”, or “The Impaler” Tepes, and more or less concludes with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. The book is a magisterial epic of Romania’s frequently bizarre and violent history.

One consistent theme is Romania being perched on an unsteady point and being tugged on in multiple directions for centuries. Whether it be the Hungarians and Turks, the Russians and Turks, or the east and west in the Cold War, Romania always feels like an odd one out, a Latin enclave in a Slavic realm. The most blatant example of this was Romania spending the first part of World War I figuring out who it should support (it sided with the Entente eventually), but this was shown throughout history. The most ghoulish is Ion Antonescu’s regime conducting some of the worst massacres of the Holocaust, but suddenly changing its mind on the deportation of Jews-conveniently right after the encirclement at Stalingrad.

But it’s its postwar history where the book shines. Ceausescu’s reign of terror is well documented, and the scenes of his fall and execution read like they could have come straight from The Death of Stalin. It also shows that his tendencies towards what can be called “independent totalitarianism” started under his predecessor, Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej.

If you could only read one book on the history of Romania, this would be a good contender for the choice. It’s definitely worth reading.

Review: Battle Whale

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Battle Whale

Alan Spencer’s Battle Whale is a parody of the “creature feature” monster thriller books that its publisher usually makes. Its premise and plot (to say nothing of its tone) can be described pretty accurately from just the title. It’s a spoof. But it’s not a very good spoof.

The first problem is that it’s very forced. A good spoof in my eyes needs to be deadpan. This just shoves the wackiness forward at every opportunity. The second is that the joke is repeated for a hundred and fifty pages, which is about a hundred and forty nine more than it would need to be fresh. Third-this isn’t exactly Douglas Adams or Mark Twain in terms of prose.

It does know the genre it’s mocking well. I’ll give it that. But only that.

Nuclear War Simulator is Out

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Nuclear War Simulator, a detailed simulation of nuclear war (obviously 😀 ) on any scale from “one missile” to “one destroyed world”, of any type from “meticulously placed real units and real locations” to “hypothetical custom clashes between two countries that never historically developed nukes at all” is now out.

It can be gotten here.

All Union February Update

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All Union, my alternate history novel project, is coming along very, very nicely. The first volume (yes, it’s grown big and ambitious enough to require multiple volumes) should hopefully release sometime in the spring. I’m very excited.

I’ve long since wanted to write a book like the one I’m making now, and I’m finally doing so. And yes, I’m doing things that the snarker me would have slammed several years ago. Oh well.

Review: Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40k Season 1

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Star Wars Vs Warhammer 40k, Season 1

Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000 combine science fiction with mystical fantasy, albeit the latter to a much larger degree. So it came as little surprise that one self proclaimed “fan with too much time” made an elaborate crossover audio drama of Era Indomitus 40k and prequel-era Star Wars. A large fleet from the Imperium of Man gets blown into the Star Wars galaxy at the height of the Clone Wars. Stuff then ensues.

An open-ended fanfic is always hard to review exactly, so I’m sticking with the first season in this review. And it’s excellent. First, the audio drama has some great written and voiced scenes, like describing what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an Astartes/Space Marine attack (hint: not very pleasant). Second, it manages to balance the factions well. The clash of Astartes vs. Jedi is balanced in an apples vs. oranges way, as they’re not symmetric superhumans the way that say, Astartes and SPARTANs from Halo would be. Finally the culture clash (as in, what happens when a sane universe meets a crazed one) is handled great as well.

This reminded me of Worldwar, with the Imperium as the lizard-race. It’s been a very fun way to pass the time.

Review: White Horizon

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White Horizon

TK Blackwood’s 1990s continued Cold War gone conventionally hot series continues in White Horizon, an excellent installment. The Fuldapocalypse not only continues apace but features the powerful but often overlooked country of Sweden as a major setting. Featuring everything that has made the past installments so good, this was a joy to read.

The only real “problem” was teasing a successor. But that’s a good problem to have. This shows that the “cold war gone conventionally hot” subgenre still has quite a bit of life in it.

A Thousand Words: Cave Dwellers

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Cave Dwellers

Officially, this was the second movie in the Ator series of Conan the Barbarian knock offs. But it’s as “Cave Dwellers” that it leapt into my heart as the greatest Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode I have watched. The small and sus company known as Film Ventures International took a questionable strategy of getting the rights to show clips from movies, changing the titles and credits, then calling the rest of the movie a “clip” for legal reasons. It only worked because they were small.

Anyway, the film started with an extremely blurry clip from a 1960s Italian Tarzan knockoff in its bootleg credits, and then only got crazier from there, following up with an action-packed climax featuring a hang glider and concluding with nuclear bomb footage(!). Joel and the robots excelled, especially because this is the kind of mock where the movie itself has enough great material to build on (for instance, it’s hard to do that much with a stilted, no-budget 50s movie).

Yeah. This is my favorite Mystery Science Theater episode of all time. It’s amazing, and the movie it’s mocking is amazingly bad.

The Vehicle Puzzle

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The GENFORCE-Mobile organizational chart got the then-still-in-development BTR-90‘s stats wrong. It’s both too light (at 17 metric tons compared to the 21 of the real one), and more importantly has too many dismounts (ten as opposed to seven I’ve seen in every real source). The real BTR-90 was cursed by coming right as the USSR fell, but in many ways it was also just a wheeled BMP-2, so its lack of entry into service is understandable.

But I thought (both for the All Union story and for my own fun) “Well, what if you could get a vehicle with ten dismounts?” The squad would grow to USMC size (two or three in the vehicle plus ten dismounts), and it presents a very tricky puzzle: Get a vehicle that is fit for a mobile corps (so it has to be viable in direct combat, both offensively and defensively), can carry ten dismounted troops as standard, and can’t be too big or heavy. If you want heavier weapons, it basically needs a remote uncrewed turret to not tip the scales. It’s not technologically impossible by a long short, but tradeoffs will have to be made.

Finally, the big squad means I can finally introduce my “eastern fireteam” concept I rejected for the next-gen BMP. Which makes more tactical sense, since doctrinally they’ll be fighting away from their vehicle more often, especially in rough terrain or as part of a tactical heliborne operation. So they need to be (theoretically) better in terms of both equipment and skill.

As for how it works, well, I’m writing right now a chapter where such a motorized rifle unit storms a Romanian town…