NBC Purge

Something I've noticed about using the internet to look up artillery rounds for Twilight: 2000 is how few write-ups on many weapons still include the chemical rounds.

In 1995, in the Home timeline, the Chemical Weapons Convention was drafted and signed already and well on its way to being put into effect.

The US and Russia had been happily destroying their stockpiles, informally, since the end of the Cold War™®.

Many of the weapons in service now, were in service then, so they get listed without their, now-defunct, icky chemical weapons.

In the OG T2K timeline, however, the Cold War™® was still in full swing in 1995 when what would be known as the Twilight War began and chemical weapons were still a thing, if only to keep the other side from using them with impunity.

You kind of have to dig to get information on the rounds. 

It should be noted that the Soviets were firmly convinced that we'd use chemical weapons first and lavishly and they only held their stocks for retaliatory purposes.

NATO had the same conviction about the Soviets... 

I've Talked About This Topic Before

A Gun for Dinosaur

L. Spraugue de Camp (1956)

.600 Nitro on T-Rex. 

Amended with Gun Stats...  .600 does 9d+2 pi++ now.

.375 H&H does 8d+1 pi.

Popping the Rex in the vitals with the average damage roll of  33.5 points gets 31.5 to penetrate for 94.5 damage.  A single consciousness roll from a HT 15 critter means you're going to have to keep shooting.

You need to do 106 to get a death roll out of one.

A second hit to the vitals gets you there.

The .375 rolls an average of 29 points, 27 penetrate for 81 points of damage.

Two, well placed, rounds of .375 H&H has enough medicine to take down the tyrant lizard.

SPOILER ALERT

I suspect the late Mr Holtzinger didn't hit the vitals even once.  A hit to the body would only do 27 points of damage and three such shots are the same as a single vitals hit.  A fourth would get to death rolls, but that HT 15 looms large if you're going for this big game at close range. 

1488? REALLY?!?

Is the inbred group of voters at WorldCon culturally appropriating Nazis with this 1488 shit?

 I've noticed that I have not read a Hugo award winner in a very long time.

I was half paying attention during the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies era and noticed that the point of the Hugo stopped being excellence in story telling but excellence in checking the progressive, minority, disability, LGBTQ boxes by the author regardless of the quality of the work.

Especially when there were Sad Puppy supporters saying things like, "I despise the author personally, but they wrote a really good story and should get your nomination and vote." 

I stopped reading at least one webcomic over the Hugo controversies.

Something this video made me notice is how similar the language is of the WorldCon nominating committee and Steve Jackson Games discussing inclusion with the upcoming GURPS 4eR.

Which makes me want to ask Sean Punch, "Are you actively happy with the Hugo Award?"

I think the answer matters because when we filter based on the attributes of the author and not the quality of the work, we will not be getting the highest quality work. 

I Had No Idea

A long, long, time ago: I borrowed a book from Gerb.  <-- He is missed every day.

I don't remember what about it made me ask to borrow it, but I did.

I remember enjoying it then returning it and, basically, forgetting all about it.

Only to be reminded of it in the comments at a political blog.

The book was "Tuf Voyaging" by George RR Martin.

Yes, THAT George RR Martin.

I can now say that I've read a GRRM book and enjoyed it.

This had been true for... uh... decades.  I think I borrowed it before I went into the Army.  I just didn't realize it because I never made note of whom wrote the book and I'd even forgot the title. 

Kinda Sad

On one hand, it's sad that a series I am enjoying will never have another book written by a dead author.

On the other hand, at least you can know you have all the books they wrote.

It's especially nice if they completed the series before they died.

Tolkien got out the whole Lord of the Rings.

Saberhagen got out the entire Empire of the East/Swords series.

I don't think that Rosenberg had finished with the Guardians of the Flame series, but he had not come back to it in the four years between the last book and his death; but he had been writing other things.

I don't know if Herbert got to the end of Dune because I didn't manage to finish the books he wrote, let alone the ones that come later by someone else.

Somewhere around here I have the compiled CoDominium book, "The Prince" which is supposed to have all those stories save the Motie books. 

We're on the clock with the Jhereg novels.  Stephen Brust is not a spring chicken any more and he's got two books left to write. 

I have never read a word of A Song of Ice and Fire, despite enjoying the first few seasons of Game of Thrones.  I think George RR Martin is gonna run out the clock on that one and it will be an unfinished series with a dead author.

That's Where We Lost You?

Harvey and I watched "Primitive War" tonight.

The Vietnam War with dinosaurs!

A couple of small things I noticed.

It's set in 1968 and the M203 wasn't fielded until 1969.

An XM177E2 shouldn't have a plastic stock.

A 1968 AKM shouldn't have a groove in the stock.

YOU NEED TO COCK A SINGLE ACTION PISTOL FOR IT TO WORK!

Interestingly, the people making the dinosaurs were using the latest scientific ideas for how they looked.  The CG wasn't awful, but they definitely needed more budget to realize the vision.

Nitpicks aside, the equipment was remarkably accurate for the period.

I wonder how many of the extras were recruited from Vietnam reinactors. 

The Tall Hog

In one of my nexus worlds I had a barbeque place called The Tall Hog.

It was popular with the Orc and Goblinoid crowd.

Because of this, it was also a "rough" place.

I don't recall any player character trying it out.

The Tall Hog specialized in serving people meat, it's a play on long pig.

Because the nexus was pure Barter Town, there were very few rules, but you could be assured that the "livestock" was not murdered in the nexus itself.  I didn't go into how they sourced their meat.

I had not actually decided!

But I found a note today that suggested that they were serving pork and it was all false advertising!

But I still regret never being able to do the scene where the players have figured out that Soylent Green IS People and the "Try The GIANT Burger" sign doesn't mean a bigger burger. 

This is the same nexus where I had a seafood place where the owner/proprietor/entire staff was a group mind of, what looked to be, Christmas Island red crabs.

It had a diving board above the cook-pot and an individual crab would make a great show of diving in to be cooked and served. 

New To Me

Andre Norton wrote a book, "Star Rangers."

I read it in junior high.

I recognize the cover of the copy I got from ebay.

I remember a line or two, here and there.

But the book was as if I'd never read it.

If you wait four decades before you re-read it, it's gonna be fresh again!

Huzzah!

There's a second book set in the same universe, "Star Guard," that came in the same clump of Andre Norton books that I got "Star Rangers" with.  I only found out about "Star Guard" when I started looking around for "Star Rangers.

Looking forward to reading it! 

How Big Is The Overlap?

Lego has just announced they're making a USS Enterprise NCC-1701D from The Next Generation.

Included is the main cast in minifig form.

If you act now, you get a minifig scale shuttle pod and a minifig of ensign Roh as a free gift with purchase.

$400.

Like Lego a lot.

I've spent some money on Star Wars sets.

But I don't think there's enough overlap on my Venn diagram between "Liked Next Gen" and "Likes Lego" to spend $400 on the Enterprise D.

I might be coerced into spending on the OG Enterprise and cast though.  Especially if they do the series and movie versions in the same scale.

Scale is a huge problem with Lego for a lot of sets.  They aim for the models to all be about the same size, which leads to them being vastly different scales most of the time. 

Update: An unsigned commenter says that making them all about the same size is called "box scale" and I remember the term and its usage in plastic models... but needed the comment to be reminded.  A pity they didn't sign the comment so I can thank them by name. 

It Was Science Fiction

I've been re-reading Twilight:2000.

Movie announcer voice:  "In a world where..."

The Soviet economy worked and their weaponry performed like the CIA thought it would.

The USA supplied Communist China like we're supplying Ukraine today.

You have to really hold your nose from today's perspective to get that willing suspension of disbelief going; though once you get the situation rolling it still holds together.

It's just the triggering events and the reactions that lead to the Twilight War are just so implausible in hindsight even if they were possible from a 1985 perspective.  Even making them possible is a bit of a stretch but...

The point was to have the conditions as declared at the start of the game and it didn't take THAT much handwavium to get there.

At least no laws of physics were broken...

Interlocks

We've all seen the scene in a movie where they space someone out an airlock.

It's been in a couple books too.

I've worked in a couple industrial settings and attended "lock-out, tag-out" classes.

I've been involved in builds where the premature opening of a valve means sewage gets into drinking water, so there's interlocks to prohibit that from happening.

Which makes me think the person being spaced will have a hell of a while to contemplate their fate as the executioner bypasses all the safeties to get the outer door open.

I can see vacc suits getting some form of RFID deal that transmits that the suit is sealed correctly to the airlock.

I can also see needing keys and passwords to work the doors at all.

Dicking around with the airlock is dangerous.  Someone could vent the compartment, or worse, the whole ship. 

A simple, mechanical, locking mechanism that keeps both doors from being open at the same time will probably be mandatory.

The execution, once the alarms are bypassed, will probably be less dramatic than the movies as well.  Vent then open is how it will likely work because pressure on the outer door makes the mechanism work much harder...

"Great, his body is halfway out because the door got stuck half open because of YOUR flair for the dramatic, Dave!"  If that's the ship's only airlock, you have a problem.

You did remember to put an emergency, portable, airlock in the ship's locker, didn't you? 

Scale

Lego Star Wars sets trend to being underscale compared to the minifigs.

Our reg from the 501st will act to show the scale problem.

Actually, It's two scale problems.

In one scene of "Attack of the Clones" the top of his head should come to about the center of that round joint.  In another, the top of his head should come just, barely, to the bottom of that disk.

The larger scale is closer to how it's shown, most of the time, in The Clone Wars series making it about 1/3 the size it should be.

Lego made a minifig scale AT-AT, so there's a bit of hope they're make an Ultimate Collectors Edition AT-TE for us Clone Wars fans.

Aliens VS Humans

 

Worth It

Progressing through Andor's two seasons then Rogue One is well worth the time.

It's the only Star Wars that acknowledges that the people who were there, in the theater, in 1977 are no longer nine year olds.

Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar

Reading about how Star Wars: Andor has an attempted rape in one of the episodes and watching lots of places trying to make it an allegory for... something.

Maybe they're just showing that the Empire is evil and employs evil people and there's no hidden meaning or equivalence to Donald Trump and illegal immigrants into the US.

Try to remember that this universe dates from when Jimmy Carter was president and if we're trying to make an allegory that the Empire is the USA then it's got to viewed from a 1977 lens as well.

FTL Speeds

In case I never calculated it before:

Jump 1 is 170.1c

Jump 2 is 340.1c

Jump 3 is 510.2c

Jump 4 is 680.3c

Jump 5 is 860.3c

Jump 6 is 1,020.4c

By way of comparison...

Larry Niven's Known Space quantum I hyperdrives are 121.75c.  Quantum II are 420,768c!

Star Trek speeds for the OG TV series were supposedly the cube of the warp factor times the speed of light or:

Warp 1 = 1c

Warp 2 = 8c

Warp 3 = 27c

Warp 4 = 64c

Warp 5 = 125c

Warp 6 = 216c

Warp 7 = 343c

Warp 8 = 512c

Warp 9 = 729c

Warp 10 = 1,000c

This is not consistent and several point in the various shows contradict it.

Lucifer's Hammer

A plot point from the book Lucifer's Hammer is the constant reassurances that the comet is going to miss... right up until it hits.

Every time I read the reduced chance of 2024 YR4 hitting I think of Niven and Pournelle's book.

Yay?

 

There Can Be Only One

They appear to be poised to remake Highlander.

Henry Cavill is a decent choice for Connor MacLeod.

There's two big problems.

Freddy Mercury be dead.

Who the fuck can top Clancy Brown for the Kurgan?

Illegal Aliens

Phil Foglio and Nick Pollotta co-authored an amusing science fiction novel titled "Illegal Aliens."

It was a book I gave away to people to share my enjoyment.

To my horror, I discovered that later editions didn't have the illustrations that Mr Foglio made for the book.

Thanks to the wonders of the intertubes, I have secured a first printing and I now have an illustrated copy again.

I wonder why the illustrations are omitted from current editions.

Prolly Just Me

Nothing makes me really look into a published setting like finding there's a TVTropes page for it.

There's a LOT about Merlin that the GM will have to fill in for themselves and the players.

The further I get into it, the more convinced that my vignette about Rhodesia for this world fits in without making an alt.

I'd forgotten the Argentinean Nazis completely as a change from Homeline...