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Man, I loved Tom Clancy in High school, still have a majority of his paperbacks on the shelf. Not so much anymore, especially when you read Rainbow Six as a Right Wing masturbatory fantasy about getting to finally take down the terrorist Greens for hugging the environment with a GMO virus. Oh and Domingo violating Geneva by trying to cut off terrorist balls for attacking the hospital his wife works at. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 18:26
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Has anyone read any of the Steven Coonts "Jake Grafton" books? The first book, Flight of the Intruder was ok but I think by the third book the dude was like POTUS or something. Anyhow I used to love this poo poo when I was like 13. Don't think I could bring myself to read any now.
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Mar 5, 2018 18:50
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mods change my name posted:Has anyone read any of the Steven Coonts "Jake Grafton" books? The first book, Flight of the Intruder was ok but I think by the third book the dude was like POTUS or something. I read the second one. I was willing to press the "I believe" button on the dude surviving the previous book with no explanation, but the story didn't really reward my trust.
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Mar 5, 2018 22:02
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Madurai posted:I read the second one. I was willing to press the "I believe" button on the dude surviving the previous book with no explanation, but the story didn't really reward my trust. That would have been the third. The first was set during Vietnam, the second jumped to the "present day" mid-eighties, and then the third carried on from there. And the explanation was there, if somewhat thin: The disintegrating fighter kinda spat him out in the right way to be survivable, but with enough injuries and recovery that his flying days were over.
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Mar 6, 2018 00:05
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I was doing a compare and contrast of the F-117 and the 'F-19 Frisbee' (The secret aircraft that is the next major event in the novel), but I've come to the realization that they aren't even remotely related. Clancy must have been vaguely aware that stealth technology existed and perhaps had heard rumours of a new aircraft being developed, but the machine he invented is entirely a product of military fantasy. Unfortunately I'm off to play soldiers for the weekend so I haven't had time to write up that bit.
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Mar 9, 2018 00:23
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Mar 9, 2018 00:27
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Starting a Let's Read on Fire Lance, which was also published in 1986 and is basically the dark mirror version of Red Storm Rising. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3851258#post481986247
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Mar 9, 2018 00:34
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"Red Army" I remember mostly being alright
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Mar 9, 2018 00:36
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Jaguars! posted:I was doing a compare and contrast of the F-117 and the 'F-19 Frisbee' (The secret aircraft that is the next major event in the novel), but I've come to the realization that they aren't even remotely related. Clancy must have been vaguely aware that stealth technology existed and perhaps had heard rumours of a new aircraft being developed, but the machine he invented is entirely a product of military fantasy. Unfortunately I'm off to play soldiers for the weekend so I haven't had time to write up that bit. Well, he didn't exactly invent it. There were hints and whispers for years, and a lot of concept artwork in Aviation Week advertisements. Testors and I want to say Revell(?) both put out F-19 model kits before the book came out. Everyone assumed that the aircraft was a lot more fighter-y than it was revealed to be. Madurai fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 01:09
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Ha! I looked up where this came from, and the game (F-19 Stealth Fighter) based it's plane on a model kit made by Testors. So I looked that up:  Sloping down wings, bell shaped planform, I think I know where Clancy's idea came from e: ^^^ There you have it. Cheers Madurai  My previous working theory was that he just took the F-15, and added stealth and the latest technologies from whatever he was reading.
Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 01:16
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Another liberty the game took with reality is that it implies that this Osprey doesn't crash and kill everyone on board
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Mar 9, 2018 01:23
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Smiling Jack posted:Starting a Let's Read on Fire Lance, which was also published in 1986 and is basically the dark mirror version of Red Storm Rising. From the way you describe it, sounds like that rarest of things, a technothriller that rises above guilty pleasure. mods change my name posted:Another liberty the game took with reality is that it implies that this Osprey doesn't crash and kill everyone on board I dunno, that doesn't seem to be a stable hover attitude!
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Mar 9, 2018 01:28
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Oh poo poo, how did I miss this? I was one of the "gonna do a Let's Read" guys a while back and was going to start with Without Remorse. Actually, I still will. I'll edit in the thread link when I get everything together. If someone's gonna suffer Tom Clancy then I'll suffer in solidarity.
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Mar 9, 2018 02:30
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The sub sim game based on Red Storm Rising was/is pretty rad. It hits that old-school Microprose sweet spot of just enough detail to be engaging, but not so much as to be stifling.
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Mar 9, 2018 19:23
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The sub sim game based on Red Storm Rising was/is pretty rad. It hits that old-school Microprose sweet spot of just enough detail to be engaging, but not so much as to be stifling. I still routinely play it using dosbox
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Mar 9, 2018 19:26
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The sub sim game based on Red Storm Rising was/is pretty rad. It hits that old-school Microprose sweet spot of just enough detail to be engaging, but not so much as to be stifling. If you're trying to recapture some of that magic, Cold Waters hits it pretty hard.
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Mar 11, 2018 15:53
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"Colonel Douglas Ellington's fingertips caressed the control stick of his F19A Ghostrider attack fighter, while his other hand rested on the side-by-side throttle controls on the left-side cockpit wall. The head-up display projected onto the windshield in front of him reported 625 knots Indicated Airspeed, a hundred and six feet of altitude, a heading of 013, and around the numbers was a holographic image of the terrain before him. The image came from a forward-looking infrared camera in the fighter's nose augmented by an invisible laser that interrogated the ground eight times per second. For peripheral vision, his oversized helmet was fitted with low-light goggles." The frisbees penetrate at low level and pop up at five different points to shoot down the soviet Mainstay early warning craft with sidewinders (Doesn't seem to have occurred to TC that stealth aircraft need to carry their loads internally). Then 100 Tornados and F-111s attack targets over the border and air-to-air fighters have a turkey shoot of russian fighters who are lost without their comand and control. Ellington's frisbee then circles the double bridges at Hohenwarthe, designating the target for a flight of F-111s that fly up the river, bomb the bridges, dispatch a bunch of SAM batteries with shrike missiles and finish up by bombing the spare bridging gear that the russians have left nearby. "By the time the last aircraft recrossed the border into West Germany, Operation Dreamland had lasted a total of twenty-seven minutes. It had been a costly mission. Two of the priceless frisbees and eleven strike aircraft had been lost. Yet it had been a success. Over two hundred Soviet all-weather fighters had been destroyed by the NATO fighters, and perhaps a hundred more by 'friendly' SAMs." So yeah. I find it all to be a bit on the nose. It's easy to get on top when you have an invisible superfighter. To keep you current with the rest: The KGB blows up part of the Kremlin and blames it on West Germany. It's not entirely convincing to Bob Toland. They send all their missile subs to the White sea to free up their attack boats. Spetznaz Commandos begin the war by raiding NATO sites (Most of the narrative focuses on one raid which is betrayed when the officer commanding is hit in a traffic accident, the successful ones merit two sentences) and this brings us to Chapter Seventeen: The Frisbees of Dreamland
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Mar 14, 2018 11:26
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I’m the guy flying 115 feet agl at 600 knots plus, wearing night vision goggles for peripheral vision as I caress my stick.
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Mar 14, 2018 11:46
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One drink for an exact airspeed being given One drink for a weapon system working flawlessly on its first combat use
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Mar 14, 2018 13:20
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Madurai posted:One drink for an exact airspeed being given One drink for a book fantasizing about an Israeli Nuclear First strike gone awry. Like, the more I think about it, the more the intro of the Sum of All Fears is actually terrifying in how we're supposed to feel sad for the guy who was preparing to drop a nuclear weapon.
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Mar 14, 2018 13:37
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4:1 RUS:US casualty ratio where the casualties do not affect the mission in any way - Take a drink Allied losses exceed US losses - Take a drink
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Mar 14, 2018 23:17
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CommieGIR posted:One drink for a book fantasizing about an Israeli Nuclear First strike gone awry. Wasn't the entire point that they forgot to take the nuke off the plane and nobody was aware the plane took off armed with it?
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Mar 15, 2018 02:30
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Stairmaster posted:Wasn't the entire point that they forgot to take the nuke off the plane and nobody was aware the plane took off armed with it? In the book, yeah. But in the movie, it was implied the A-4 took off with every intention of using the device.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:In the book, yeah. But in the movie, it was implied the A-4 took off with every intention of using the device. In the book the original intent was also to use it (Likely based on factual threats the Israeli's made during the real Yom Kippur war). Regardless, remember that Tom Clancy also felt a Liberal president would be far more likely to launch a nuclear strike.
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Mar 15, 2018 11:02
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I've been nitpicking what annoys me about this chapter, but there's one thing that stands out, and it's not an extrapolated stealth aircraft or pedantry about unlikely airstrike results. The Soviets have absolute initiative here. NATO can do nothing until the USSR performs an act of war. They dictate when the war starts and have had half a year to plan. A single codeword could instantly activate the entire soviet air force in an enormous blow. They can coordinate operations to coincide closely with the special ops that begin the war. Yet here are the Americans performing a pre-emptive strike two hours before the ground advance begins, while the Soviet AF sits on their side of the border, waiting to get shot down. If you want to write a fiction where NATO wins a conventional war against the soviet, you don't need to do this. In fact it's a bit dull to give the west the upper hand and then keep on winning. I think Clancy just couldn't bear to write about Americans losing. In all his works I can think of, the American side never suffers more than token loses. Even the Denver nuke has significantly less effect on the american way of life than the 9/11 attacks had in reality, despite a much greater loss of (largely unimportant and unremarked upon) lives. It's this assumption that the US can do no wrong that pretty much puts me squarely on the side of the soviets for this novel (less so a certain megalomaniac Russian lizard person who's been in the news lately.) In lesser pedantry about airstrikes: The lead F-111 flies up a river, snap shoots off two shrikes which both hit (luckily pre-tuned to the correct frequencies of two different types of radar), busts the bridge with laser guided bombs and comes back around to lay down a few cluster bombs on the nearby truck park. I know the F-111 can carry a lot but give that man a medal. Or stick a defense suppression flight in there to make things more plausible. It's all happening less than ten miles from where they shot down the Russian AEW plane as well, which seems like kicking a hornets nest and then sticking around but I dunno, perhaps it's a way to take advantage of the chaos in the area. If the Russians were familiar with Vietnam war experience, they would also have known that their faster SAMs would hit first, allowing them to turn off their radars and break the lock on the Shrike, thus surviving and possibly even killing the attacking aircraft. But then again it wouldn't work against the newer HARM missiles coming in to service about this time. The Frisbee's also been circling at 1000ft using a pave tack system to designate targets, which doesn't seem a recipe for survival even in a minimum radar cross section aircraft. What about IR missiles? Anyhow, we finish the chapter and we see another common Clancy writing technique: the bad guys have a consolation prize! They manage to smack down an ocean reconnaissance satellite while the space command people await permission from those pesky NORAD bureaucrats to perform evasive manoeuvres. Then we can move on and see what Op Polar Glory is all about.
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Mar 16, 2018 23:39
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Jaguars! posted:
Not only tuned, but the correct selection from the ten different subtypes of Shrike, which could only see in their particular bands.
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Mar 19, 2018 17:01
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Operation Polar Glory is happening. The upshot of it is this. The dastardly Russians have taken a Barge Carrier called the MV Yulius Fuchik and stuck the 234th Guards air assault regiment into it, a light mechanized force with about 1500-200 men. While in the North Atlantic, the ship is disguised to look like it's American sister ship Doctor Lykes, fooling US Orion Patrol craft Penguin 8 and continues toward Iceland.  Above: Yulius Fuchik Below: Doctor Lykes  At Keflavik AFB in Iceland, Weather Forecaster Mike Edwards is coming on duty when raid warnings come in. Two E-3s are detect bandits at about the same time; TU-16 Badgers are coming in from the North while TU-22 Backfires are coming in from the Northeast. So the battle lines are something like this: The Russians have: 1 Barge Carrier 4 Lebed Hovercraft  234th Air Assault Regiment 24 TU-16  One of my favourite aircraft ever but as dated as the General Belgrano about the same in much better TU-22  The Americans have: 18 F-15 Eagle 57th Fighter Sqn (Some on CAP) 9 P-3 Orion 3 E-3 Sentry (one on the ground) 2 Companies security forces 1 weather forecaster Everything happens in a fairly short time and looks something like this:  The Russian Bombers are dispersed to prevent effective interception. The CAP F-15s destroy a few of them before running out of missiles. The Scrambled F-15s are vectored toward the TU-22 force but fail to close to contact and instead attempt to intercept the russian missiles with limited success. The Fuchik is about 25mi south of Keflavik when the bombers launch their missiles and unloads the Hovercraft which deliver four companies to Keflavik. It then continues in toward Reykjavik. Soon Penguin 8 spots it and fires a Harpoon missile into the port side, then calls in two F-15s who strafe it with their cannon, destroying a helicopter and killing most of the bridge crew. The mortally wounded captain brings it into harbour at Reykjavik, ramming the dock and running the vessel aground since no crew are left to dock the ship.  At Keflavik Airfield, the Missiles hit and destroy most of the buildings on base. Edwards wanders around for a bit and picks up a few marines. As the Russian landing forces arrive, he decides to run to Reykjavik to report the news and the group drive away from the airfield in his volvo. Somewhere on the way he decides instead to head into the boonies instead and ditches his car in the KFC parking lot at Hafnarfjiordur. They have with them a Hammer Ace Radio and some maps. They end up at Hill 152, four km east of Hafnarfjiordur.  Hammer Ace Radio  A Hill 152 that happens to be approximately in the right place. Harfnarfjiord on the left edge of the map Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 10:06
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I was always a little baffled by the Soviet captain being clever with the last-minute turn, the idea that the heeling of the ship would cause the missile damage to be farther from the waterline and thus somehow mitigate the damage. Not that 500 pounds of HE would be enough to put paid to a ship that size anyway, but shipping water would be the least of their problems from the hit.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:30
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Shipping water on a LASH would be a pretty big problem though. The free surface... ugh. Haven’t seen a lot of these ships actually, but if they’re anything like Ro/Ro, you do not want to ship water, ever. What I was taught was that if someone was shooting at me, steer towards them so the cargo section of the ship (usually forward of the accommodation) would absorb the hit while you abandoned ship. Never tried it.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:33
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Why is that? Unstable cargo? The Soviets had also launched a Nuclear Powered, ice Breaking LASH carrier earlier in the year. Seems to have been a perpetual white elephant for them right up to the present time. BTW, I know we've got a lot of subject matter experts here, so if you're curious about any particular aspect of the book, just let me know and I'll find the relevant bits.
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Mar 20, 2018 20:37
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Ro/ro have large open car decks, this allows any water on them to slosh accross the width of the ship. This effectively raises the center of gravity of the ship, and increases rolls. RoRo being fairly top heavy to start with... bad.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:42
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Col. Ralph Peters, who wrote the book Red Army and has been a fox news dude forever said gently caress it, he's out. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomnamako/ralph-peters?utm_term=.gk2Gw3Le4b#.ce3dmKo7QE
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Mar 20, 2018 22:23
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I think i meant that for ce but then thought of this thread and posted it here for some reason???
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Mar 20, 2018 22:24
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mods change my name posted:Col. Ralph Peters, who wrote the book Red Army and has been a fox news dude forever said gently caress it, he's out. Red Army was the superior NATO/Warsaw Pact war novel.
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Mar 21, 2018 00:49
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lol @ that guy. What happens in Red Army? Being better than Red Storm is a start, but does that mean it's any good?
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Mar 21, 2018 11:02
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Red army actually has the underdogs win for one thing .
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Mar 21, 2018 12:41
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Zeroisanumber posted:Red Army was the superior NATO/Warsaw Pact war novel. Concur.
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Mar 21, 2018 14:00
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Red Army is great but Vortex by Larry Bond is better guys
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Mar 27, 2018 20:41
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mods change my name posted:Col. Ralph Peters, who wrote the book Red Army and has been a fox news dude forever said gently caress it, he's out. Why I left Fox News, By Ralph Peters
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Mar 30, 2018 21:13
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heh quote:You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. checks out: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/979524174443053057
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Mar 30, 2018 21:19
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