Tag: Essay

The Alternate Airliner

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It can be fun to put an alternate airliner into service, but unless it’s really big, really fast, or both, a lot of people wouldn’t notice much difference. That being said, the same can be said about a lot of things and it’s never stopped alternate history writers before.

I’ve even made a couple “formal” tiers:

Tier 1: Barely Noticeable

Planes like these (in this case the MD-XX and the An-218 “777ski”), are going to be barely noticeable to non-aviation afficiandos, however different they may be on the inside.

Tier 2: Standing Out A Bit

The dreaded propfan is one instance of these airplanes having one obvious standout in addition to their other more subtle features. Others include a distinct shape like the 747 fuselage or even a “four engines all in the back” like the VC-10/Il-62

Tier 3: Really Stand Out

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

These involve strange but technically plausible shapes like lifting bodies or circular hulls of various nature. Their mere appearance makes them stand-out. This ironically applies to delta wings and civilianized early jet bombers.

Tier 4: Exotics

These are the ones that ascend into pure science fiction.

Squishy WW3 Issues Part 1

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So the World War III 1987 blog just posted “The Squishy Problem Facing World War III Writers“. And come on, there’s no way I can not write a post in response to that. Here goes. The original blog is in Italics. I’ll start with the opening.

World War III novels, movies and even blogs are as diverse and imaginative as their authors choose to make them. Even in instances where multiple works of fiction examine the same hypothetical theater or overall conflict there will not be many similarities throughout the bulk of the novels. Different writing styles, plots and points of view are guaranteed to keep the reader fixed on a uniquely original WWIII scenario brought to life in novels.

I would somewhat disagree with this. Yes, on a micro-scale they can be different on paper (ie, it turns out very few involve invading Iceland!). But even by the standards of cheap thrillers, it’s a very small and very narrow genre. This is not an insult. It’s just how it is and how a “normal” reader will look at them.

But when the final chapters and plot conclusions roll around, it’s a totally different ballgame altogether.  And so emerges the root of a squishy problem.

You see, the majority of popular NATO-Warsaw Pact, Cold War World War III novels, movies and other types of fiction end in either nuclear war or the overthrow of the Soviet general secretary and politburo just moments before the Kremlin decides to launch an all-out nuclear strike on the US and Europe. Other novels and fiction incorporate aspects of both options in their concluding chapters, creating an ending that is somewhat different from those above, but lacks the creativity to be considered entirely new and exclusive.

Ok. I’m going to argue that this is the most realistic and sensible part. Because the loser is likely to go nuclear. And if not, some plot contrivance is necessary to stop that. I guess you could have some kind of negotiated surrender, but I can understand why readers wouldn’t find that very satisfying. The alternative is either a Red Army-style clean OPFOR win or just making a horrible squash, the latter of which is not exactly appealing.

The squishy problem facing writers of the World War III genre is similar to what Zombie genre has found itself confronting in recent years: How to make an age old topic fresh and appealing when a good part of the audience or readership already has a good idea of how it is all going to end?

Good question and one that I will definitely come back to.

Wither Boeing

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So Boeing planes have been in the news for…. issues. What’s surprising about it to aviation observers is how unsurprising they consider it. And as for why? Well, here’s the oversimplified and likely wrong in a few ways explanation.

So Boeing seemingly was a legend of Engineers until the evil Finance People ruined it. Anyone who has looked at the history of the auto industry will find this familiar. And while there is truth to nickel and diming, the context both on and above the ground is always more complex. If you look at the types of cars produced on both sides of the Pacific before the oil crisis/bubble popped, yes, there was a time when engineering was obvious-and obviously excessive.

In short and simply: Boeing was/is the last of the big post-WWII dinosaurs to encounter serious competition. There was no need for it to shape up because of the lack of a challenge, buoyed by their spectacular good luck concerning federal policy. The 747 came and was snapped up by airlines just in time for the oil crisis. But since the airline industry was a symbotic pampered cartel then, it was just passed on to customers to bail them out. Then came deregulation after that, with Boeing taking advantage of the boom. Then came the opening up of previously closed-off markets after 1991, and then…

…then the low-hanging fruit already got picked and the guys in Toulouse figured out how to make good airplanes. Oops.

Naming a Submarine Class

On By coilerxiiIn Essay, Weird Wargaming4 Comments

I’m torn with submarine names for the MX-SSB class, a real proposed design that I’m using in All Union

(Bottom picture made in Stable Diffusion from the outline of the sub above)

The problems are:

  • The class is large at circa 50 boats, so the naming scheme needs to support such a large class.
  • There is no historical precedent since the US never used diesel missile subs, much less in large numbers.
  • Both fish and people just don’t seem right to me (subjective I know)

I’m leaning towards lakes (ie, the Lake Tahoe class with some/all of the Great Lakes thrown in), but am wondering if there’s something that just can click. Thoughts?

One Neat Trick to Lessen Supply Requirements

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What if I was to say that in certain theaters, your supply requirements can be lessened significantly? One only need compare built-up Iraq and not-so-built-up Afghanistan to see the different challenges. Or Vietnam vs. the Fulda Gap. But this is one that can best be used by an OPFOR against a wealthier foe-although rising global standards of living allow this to be applicable more and more.

Ok, so the US Army ranks different supply types by “Classes”. Now Class I, the one we’re focused on, is in short, food. Now one field manual, based on WWII experience, has it being about 7 pounds per person per day. Add that to a 20,000 strong division slice and you get 71 tons per division per day. But more room can be saved for other supplies if you adjust the Class I supply to a different amount, like say…

nothing.

Beyond what they have on their basic loads, the troops are to loot, plunder, and “requisition” food completely. Entirely. And remember: This is not neglecting enough food. This is a completely deliberate choice. What could go wrong?

(Answer: A lot.)

Cass the Heroes OC

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Cassia Orsellio from Rogue Trader is one of my favorite characters in it. Yet she reminds me a lot of a Fire Emblem Heroes character: Not (just) a Fire Emblem character but a Heroes OC. She shares the following traits with the new introductions from that mobile game:

  • Is a mysterious, powerful (literal and figurative) noblewoman.
  • Is humanoid but still not human in some ways.
  • Has a central gimmick (in this case her warp eye).
  • Has a sort of “overdesigned JRPG” style about her (looking a lot more like an eastern RPG character than the western fantasy/sci fi ones of the rest of the cast).

Weird Wargaming: Patton’s Division of the Future (of 1932)

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Then-major George Patton in 1932 made a long essay about the ideal army for the “war of the future”. Most importantly, it had order of battle charts. The whole thing is well worth a read, but some thoughts/highlights:

  • Underestimated motorization, saying you can have agility (professional army) or mass (conscript army) but not both. This was true in WWII (even for the Americans to an extent), but postwar motorization rendered that largely (if not entirely) moot. He proposed nationalizing civilian trucks for motorization in wartime.
  • Proposed a standing army of about 315,000 people. Which uh, isn’t actually that much less than the post-Vietnam volunteer army. Especially adjusted for national population size.
  • Patton is extremely Pattonesque. Believing his higher-trained army can always beat a numerically superior qualitative one (uh, not always the case), and being a grandfather of manueverism (not surprising). To his credit he does acknowledge the problem of keeping an elite army elite after attrition (and showing knowledge of how pre-gunpowder, almost all casualties were in the rout, whereas firearms made large losses inevitable against peer opponents)
  • The most unusual part is at the smallest level, which consists of a “section” built around a tripod-mounted belt-fed machine gun and has 19-20 men at paper strength. It’s divided into a rifle squad (fairly plain ten rifles) and an LMG squad (one LMG gunner, several assistants for it with pistols, and four riflemen) . Two such sections form a platoon.
  • Above that it’s a now-familiar triangular division. Three line platoons in a company, three line companies in a battalion, three line battalions in a brigade, three brigades in a division, a divisional tank battalion. Aka, by and large the standard post-WWII division.
  • Brigades would have a company of heavy machine guns (at the time an anti-tank weapon) and a battalion of three 75mm batteries (two field guns and one howitzer). Of note is no apparent organic division artillery, with it either being the brigade artillery or handed down by corps (the WWII Soviet prioritization taken to even greater extremes)
  • The 39-strong divisional tank battalion is mentioned as having tanks of the “Vickers-Armstrong or modified Christie type”. Tank platoons are a fairly unusual “vanilla and Firefly” type of having three “normal” tanks and one tank chassis with a larger-caliber cannon. At the time, this wasn’t unusual. Everything above platoon for tanks is conventional.
  • An infantry division has an organic paper strength of around 8,000 people.

All in all a very fascinating document. Patton may have been prescient in making a modern army, but I still wouldn’t want him commanding it (he would have been a good armored division commander, but deserved nothing higher). And of course, this army is easy to make and wargame in the underappreciated interwar period.

(Special thanks to the Tactical Notebook for its own analysis of Patton’s proposal which brought it to my attention)

The SI AI Scandal

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Many people don’t know that sports reporting was one of the first big ways that “modern AI” as we know it came into public view. Basically, if you had a box score for a game where you couldn’t or decided it wasn’t worth it to send an actual reporter, an AI could (and still can) extrapolate a game story based on it. Sure, you don’t get the “yes they sportsed but we sportsed harder” quotes from the participants, but is that really a big deal?

Of course, that assumes one admits to using it. In the case of once-great Sports Illustrated magazine, they tried to sneak AI in. With presumably machine-generated (and if not machine-assisted) articles and “reporters” who were the sportswriter equivalent of Aimi Eguchi , the institution that once gave us Rick Riley’s reports was reduced to the algorithm gaming self-publisher.

Now I have no problems with AI in creative endeavors, but if you want to make something completely with it, it should be labeled as such. (I’ll leave other legal concerns aside for now). I can think of ways to make an openly fake (for lack of a better word) recapper. But any technology can be used for bottom feeding, and this is no exception.

The Holzer Centrifuge

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The Holzer Centrifuge is a uranium enrichment centrifuge I’ve used as a Macguffin in various settings of mine. It is one of the smallest viable centrifuges and a simpler yet less effective design compared to its contemporaries. It has a maximum capacity of around 0.9 separative work units per centrifuge[1]. In practice with inevitable inefficiences and losses this leads to a mere 0.5-.6 in practice, one of the weakest individual centrifuges to ever spin in its hideous mission.

In All Union, the Polish Holzer centrifuge (named after the ethnic German scientist who led the program), served as one of the primary enrichment sources for the nation’s uranium path. The goal was ease of assembly with just domestic resources, hence why Holzer centrifuges were around 40-50 years behind their contemporaries and low-powered even by the standards of other first-gen designs. Nonetheless, they accomplished their goal.

[1]A napkin calc is as follows, with L being length in meters and V velocity in meters per second. Don’t really ask me to explain what an SWU exactly is.

Poland produced at least 50,000 Holzer centrifuges and operated 25,000 of them. Using an enrichment calculator and going by 0.6, the fully functional cascades would produce 77 kilograms of weapons grade uranium a year if working with natural ore to start, or 270 kilograms if working with reactor-grade LEU.