Review: American Secret Projects: Bombers

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American Secret Projects: Bombers, Attack, and Anti-Submarine Aircraft

One of the American Secret Projects series, this book looks at air-to-surface planes from the end of World War II to Vietnam. Covering everything from mammoth strategic bombers to light propeller planes, it’s an ideal aviation niche history book. With lots of illustrations, the obscure become visible.

With this book you can see all the bizarre and erratic 1950s designs. You can see how the AX project that became the A-10 started off as just a rich man’s Skyraider. This is an excellent book for any aviation enthusiast.

A Confession About TDGs

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I have a possibly unpopular confession about tactical decision games. I’m not the biggest fan of them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with them existing and I can definitely see their use. It’s ironically not in spite of, but because of my armchair enthusiast status that I’m somewhat wary of them. From the perspective of someone who isn’t potentially doing them in real life, it feels like couch coaching. You’re sitting on the couch telling the sportsball player to sports the ball in the right way, when you have past school experience at best.

And that of course assumes there is one right way. One thing I like about John Antal’s Choose Your Own COA-Adventure books is that doing counterintuitive things like charging up the middle can sometimes work.

That being said, it’s less a “down with TDGs” and more “I should like them more than I do”. Plus I’ll admit that I have a soft spot for converting fictional battles/actions into TDGs with just the right amount of modification. While it’d be outside the scope of a “TDG” per se, my dream is to do a simulated reenactment of Iron Eagle (imprisoned pilot, generic Middle Eastern OPFOR) using realistic mechanics and seeing what assets are needed to save Col. Masters.

A Thousand Words: Streets of SimCity

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Streets of SimCity

When I was young, one of my favorite games to play was Streets of SimCity, a car action game that could take place in actual SimCity 2000 maps. Unfortunately, my frustrations with it were there even then. And now? Looking back without rose-tinted glasses, I can say: It sucks.

Here’s the first thing that illustrates why it sucks: You have no turrets and have to turn your entire car to aim like it’s some kind of wheeled StuG. Second thing. You can’t run anyone over. Because Maxis didn’t want to be too violent, Sims are just these weird bald sprites that you can’t really interact with (a contrast to SimCopter, where you can land on or push people out of your helicopter). Even the story hedges, with you being a stunt driver and all the action taking place in-universe on shows-within-a-game.

That it’s a blatant ripoff of the far better Interstate 76 is another blow against it. Combine this with terrible performance and worse physics, and you get a spinoff that spins off the road.

The Atomic Trojan Horses

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Basically every piece of nuclear technology is advertised as being “proliferation resistant”, for obvious reasons. And in many cases that’s legitimately true (albeit that as an armchair non-physicist, I wouldn’t be the best at explaining exactly why ). But I’ve had a few hunches and read my share of case studies. And there are undoubtedly a few wooden horses with hoplites lurking inside (at least according to the Roman version of the story).

One is chemical enrichment, which has never been commercialized but has been demonstrated and proposed for decades. There’s actually a real case study of its role in a nuclear weapons program. For Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear infrastructure, it sought a chemical enrichment plant. To directly make weapons-grade uranium via the chemical method would be hideously impractical according to its proponents (argued as taking over a decade ), but to make LEU that would in turn be easier to further enrich (or use in reactors indirectly) is another story.

Another is small modular reactors. The suspicion I have is that unlike the eggs-in-one-basket normal sized ones, it’d be easier to have some units be used for normal power and others “throttled” (for lack of a better word) in ways that are far less efficient for electricity-but more so for weaponizable plutonium.

Of course, I know very little about the technical side of things so I could be totally off-base, especially for the modular reactors. But it’s still something I’ve thought about.

Review: Blood Brothers (Dallas Barnes)

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Blood Brothers (Dallas Barnes)

Not to be confused with the Black Eagle Force book of the same name I reviewed previously, Dallas Barnes’ Blood Brothers is the tale of Native Americans, casinos, and underworld intrigue. It’s also the book that, because of its subject matter, has highlighted the inherent differences between me as a writer and me as a critic.

Now the book itself is a 51% potboiler in a genre I’m not the most interested in. Yes, it’s full of cliches and doesn’t make the best use of them, but it’s also competently written. That’s what a 51% book is, basically. What separates it is the element that makes up the bulk of the plot, beyond the opening “publicity stunt gone wrong” incident that drives it.

See, it’s about the struggle to build a casino. Now the reader in me was thinking “is this really the best plot for a thriller? Something as low-stakes [no pun intended] and not really that economically beneficial as a casino?” But the writer in me went “Well, uh, you made an entire book where one of the main plots was about the establishment of an online casino. Clearly you thought it would be a a suitable plot point.”

I’ve said before that I don’t think being a critic has made me a better writer, but do think that being a writer has made me a better critic. This book is an interesting specific example of that. The critic part of me doesn’t think that highly, while the writer part of me can understand.

About The Incident: Blog Update

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So, the long-feared Russian all-out invasion of Ukraine has begun. I kind of suspected this would happen when A: 75% of the Russian Army, including units from Eastern Siberia, was moved to the border, and B: The Kremlin began making knowingly impossible demands. Frankly, knowing what I know now, it’s kind of miraculous that it took thirty years to get this far.

(And no, Ukraine couldn’t have kept its for all intents and purposes unusable nukes it technically inherited, and it still did the right thing in not trying.)

Fuldapocalypse will continue as normal, as fiction is not real life. I will refrain on commentary as even the well-informed and honest accounts can be subject to confusion. However, I will say that when it became clear that war was inevitable, I made the very deliberate decision to pivot away from my Soviet-Romanian “big war thriller”, and not just because of the general concept or even the area. Having a massive, high-tech, Russian-led army striking against a former client whose only effective resistance is urban and unconventional warfare is a little too on the nose-in fact, the scenario is so similar that you could basically do a find and replace for “Belarus” and “Bulgaria” and change nothing else.

Thankfully, I do have some very good news. The pivot away from that concept to a follow-up thriller involving gambling, mansions, nuclear weapons, and dirty black ops in Southeast Asia with aged characters from The Sure Bet King has gone beautifully. The plot for that has finally clicked, and I’ve been making excellent progress there.

Review: Parting Shot

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Parting Shot

Written by nuclear expert James Kunetka, Parting Shot promised a more grounded, realistic look at the infamous “The Germans have a nuclear bomb” World War II alternate history. When I saw the Sea Lion Press review, I knew I had to get it. So I did.

It’s indeed the most plausible “WWII German nukes” AH out there. In fact, it’s arguably too much so. This is a rare example of the kind of book that’s possibly too realistic for its own good. The Germans go with a gun-type device, because that’s the easiest to build. Although that arguably just shifts the bottleneck from the physics package itself to uranium enrichment-it’s why I’m certain that’s the reason the Iraqis went with a more complex but less U235-hungry implosion design. But then again, having a cheap thriller drag you into plausibility arguments isn’t the best itself.

And make no mistake-the final fight leaves no doubt that this is intended as a thriller. Only the contrivances of that (and other scenes) mixed with the intent to be more realistic leads to an awkward stumble. The very nature of a program that wasn’t even close becoming unrealistically successful is jarring in and of itself. And even the bomb proper didn’t really work for me, being a cheap thriller cliche just short of “HITLER LIVED!”

Finally, the structure of the book works against it being a good thriller. Having stuff told in the past tense and jumping between past and (then) present takes away a lot of the drama. This is still an ambitious book, but it kind of falls apart from that very quality. If it’s too realistic for its own good, it’s also too scattered.

Review: British Cruisers

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British Cruisers

Norman Friedman turns his knowledgeable eye to one of the most arbitrary ship classes in British Cruisers. Going from the early 20th Century to the Cold War, he covers the enigmatic ship type that can best be summed up as “bigger than a contemporary destroyer, but not too big”. From wartime workhorses to unusual goofy designs, Friedman leaves few Royal Navy stones unturned.

The final desperate attempts at large capital ships after 1945 are the most interesting to me. The large “escort cruisers” started off as ASW helicopter ships, then grew into the famed de facto light carriers they became and were later used as. Everything else was rightly shelved. But this is a typically excellent technical history of cruisers in all eras.

A Thousand Words: Doom

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Doom

For the 666th post on Fuldapocalypse, I figure I’d do a “suitable” piece. It was either than or something on the SS-18 missile, whose NATO designation cannot be a coincidence (18=6+6+6=designation name “Satan”.) But I digress.

The id Software masterpiece that popularized the First Person Shooter genre, Doom is the deep, complex story of a sole surviving spacesuit burly man against a giant horde of demons. Ok I kid. But it is still one of the most successful and influential games of all time, ported to a degree that it’s become a meme/security/programming challenge to see if a certain device can be made to run Doom.

What makes Doom interesting and effective even decades after its initial release is that it’s a movement game. The “Doomguy” can run around at massively high speeds, and most of the enemy projectiles can be dodged. Thus it’s about player movement skill. Later cover-shooters are more about player timing skill. And the awkward turn-of-the-millenium games that took place after hitscan and slow characters but before cover mechanics were mastered-

-Well, the only “skill” involved is knowing the layout and how many powerups are there. It’s a kind of deterministic rut that stands as one of those things that doesn’t bring nostalgia. But the rapid movement of Doom is one that definitely does. This is a classic for a reason.

Review: The Counter Terrorist Manual

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The Counter Terrorist Manual

I’ve had a soft spot for Leroy Thompson’s The Bodyguard Manual, simply because of its excess. Sadly, The Counter Terrorist Manual is not quite as well, excessive. The impression I got of this was, well, like one of those “here’s what happens!” picture books, giving a very basic history and overview of SOF units. So it’s not even a book for mall ninjas. It’s a book for wannabe mall ninjas.

But, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This does give the idealized basics of counter-terror special forces. Just take everything in it with a highway truck of salt and you’ll be fine. And don’t read if you desire the slightest depth or critical perspective.