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This is cheating a little bit because I just read it, but holy poo poo is it terrible. Our hero, "Rattler", is an E-2C Hawkeye pilot, on deployment aboard the USS Nimitz. The story begins with him suffering a massive hydraulic failure and having to land on the boat without the ability to turn left. He manages it, because he's the best pilot in the world, which we know because all the other characters are constantly saying things like "you're the best pilot in the world". Afterwards, he gets a mysterious note slipped under his door warning him not to dig too deep into the malfunction! Or maybe warning him that there's more to the malfunction than meets the eye and he should dig deeper; the mysterious notes don't really make a lot of sense. Then there's a stretch where nothing really happens and they go on a port call where he meets a hot Australian fight attendant and they bang because he's the best pilot ever. A brief interlude where two Hornets have a midair collision that damages both of them, and they have to launch a Hawkeye to assist with getting them back to the ship for... some reason that's never really explained, because there isn't one. Rattler is still grounded due to the mishap investigation from the hydraulic failure, but he's the only one available to fly, so dammit, he goes anyway. Somehow the Hornets manage to stay up for long enough that the Hawkeye runs dangerously low on fuel, despite the fact that that takes like 5+ hours and the Hornets would long since have either diverted to a shore base or fallen out of the sky. Rattler gets one try and one try only to land with nearly empty fuel tanks, which he does, because he's the best pilot ever. Then more irrelevant bullshit where he reads some emails and goes to midrats or something. Next he gets called in to fly a mission where some SEALs are recapturing an oil platform that was taken over by terrorists. Just before the SEALs manage to complete the mission, the terrorists launch a SAM at the Hawkeye which takes out one of its engines. Rattler manages to make it back to the ship and land safely because he's the best pilot ever, though clearly a poo poo-rear end mission planner for deciding to station directly overhead a known SAM threat. Then they get a port call in Australia where GUESS WHAT he meets the hot Australian flight attendant again and they bang because he's the best pilot ever. So now, like 3/4 of the way through the book, the plot actually gets started and the squadron maintenance officer gets murdered in his hotel room. Rattler and his friends see the shady CO of the squadron running away from the crime scene and chase after him, but he jumps into a van driven by sinister swarthy men wearing sunglasses and escapes. Rattler and friends get arrested by the Australian police, but it's okay because the air wing commander (CAG) shows up to the jail and explains that they know the CO is the bad guy and they need Rattler's help to take him down. It turns out that the CO has been working with terrorists to try and get a Hawkeye shot down, in order to demonstrate that the E-2 needs better defensive capabilities or something. The plan is that they'll play along with the CO's scheme, but they'll arrange it so that it's his plane that ends up in danger, which will cause him to immediately confess to everything in order to save his own skin. They do, and he does, and then when they land back on the carrier the CO tries to shoot CAG in the back on the middle of the flight deck. Rattler sees this and pushes the CO into a turning propeller of a nearby COD, which neatly wraps up that plot line. The book ends with Rattler getting orders for transition training to fly Hornets, because he's the best pilot ever. That's Treason Flight by T. R. Matson, who coincidentally was an E-2C Hawkeye pilot who later transitioned to fly Hornets before transitioning to fly Airbuses for Delta. It's like if Tom Clancy had a moderate amount of knowledge about one very niche area of the military and did zero research for anything outside of that, and also wrote at about the level of a middle school fan fiction writer. Chapters are rarely more than 3 or 4 pages long, and while most of the technical details about carrier operations are reasonably accurate, the characters and dialog are just empty piles of cringe-worthy clichés. Some of the guys in my squadron who read it said it's the kind of thing a high school student would eat up, but even then I feel like virtually any other offering in the genre would be better. I guess you can say it's the best novel about Hawkeyes ever written, until literally anybody else writes another one. Also, to its credit it's way less rapey than classic Clancy or Ringo, just embarrassingly cringey with any of the female characterizations. 
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Mar 2, 2023 14:29
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Night Train by Clive Cussler Does his authorial self-insert appear in all his novels or is it just the couple I ever read?
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Mar 2, 2023 15:12
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Deptfordx posted:Does his authorial self-insert appear in all his novels or is it just the couple I ever read? He started doing that later on.
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Mar 2, 2023 15:19
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Cive Clussler
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Mar 2, 2023 15:31
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bulletsponge13 posted:It's a solid airport novel. I really enjoy it. I recall there’s a scene where he’s unarmed and cornered in a supply closet and quickly rigs up a bleach bomb, and after it detonates the bad guys can hear him laughing as he runs away. In retrospect that feels MacGruberish. Not in a bad way? I think near the end he’s dealing with some not-totally evil mercenaries and has one of them ingest sleeping pills to knock himself out? I don’t think I’ve seen that approach in other media although I guess it would work. Better than that Midnight Run movie where every other scene someone is being casually pistol whipped for instant sleepy time with no ill effects.
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Mar 2, 2023 15:34
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Dale Brown thinks airport security is too lax or: that weird Sea Patrol guy but for commercial aviation. What if terrorists used commercial American airliners to attack targets in the continental US? No, not like that, this is still the 90s, so what the terrorists are actually doing is disguising planes as commercial flights and then dropping bombs on airports. The terrorist mastermind I believe I remember as being South or Central American? Anyway, he carries out a bunch of attacks like this and so some of the protagonists from the book about stopping drug trafficking get called in to solve the problem. Side note: it's revealed that entire organization was shut down after an incident with a pregnant refugee being held at gunpoint (not because it was an insane way to do things but because of the optics). So this book is mainly about how the US doesn't have an air defense network inside the country and how this is a big vulnerability. Our Heroes get around to rectifying this and pretty soon Patriots are deployed to every major airport and commercial jets are kept to strict travel corridors. Anything deviating from their course gets shot down (see a pattern here?). No mistakes are made, no off-course civilian airliner or joyriding Cessna pilot get Patriot-ed, and a few terrorist attacks are foiled. BUT the villain has another nefarious plan: painting a 747 to be Air Force One so it can get close to Washington and then bombing the White House! Well not actually Air Force One since the president is in the residence but Special Air Mission 28000. I don't remember how they got the transponder codes or if they just bluff their way in but they get pretty close before getting shot down onto the Mall. There's a big fight between the hero, aided by his Secret Service girlfriend, and the terrorist leader in the flaming wreckage but they kill him and America never has to worry about commercial airplanes being used by terrorists ever again. Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Mar 2, 2023 |
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Mar 2, 2023 15:41
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown thinks airport security is too lax or: that weird Sea Patrol guy but for commercial aviation. He was a Belgian arms dealer that hated America, from what little I remember of it. God I read so much Dale Brown as a stupid teenager 
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Mar 2, 2023 15:54
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shame on an IGA posted:somebody in TFR did one a few years ago Goddamn.  I learned he'd passed recently. Always thought he was one of TFR's better posters. I'm going to bookmark this thread and read it in my spare time.
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Mar 2, 2023 16:15
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So, it's the 90's, the cold war is over, and technothriller authors like Harold Coyle need a new enemy for the United states, as was the style at the time. So we have a prologue to the end of WW2, where an insane Hitler youth tries to ambush some american soldiers from a basement with his family, and gets a grenade for his troubles. Cut to the 2000's, and he's the Chancellor of Germany. So, Ukraine has Soviet Nukes, and doesn't want to hand them over for decommissioning (Huh I wonder Why) and are instead trying to sell them. So an American task force deploys from the Czech Republic over the border to seize the nukes and gets into an engagement with the Ukrainians... who aren't just pushover technothriller enemies and put up a decent fight. There's a scene where the Rangers with a russian advisor are trying to capture the storage site itself, but the Ukrainians go "gently caress you" and detonate the tactical nukes to deny them to the enemy. This gets the rangers and their russian advisor irradiated. Fortunately the Americans capture the rest of the nukes and transport them back to bases in Germany for staging to be transported back to the US. The Hitlerjugend Chancellor decides to use the detonation as a pretext to seize every US military base in Germany and the nukes, and declare that Germany is now a nuclear power and that the US has to listen to it- and that all American forces in Europe must disarm and go back to the US. The US Army Corps in the Czech Republic goes 'rogue' with a plan cooked up by the President and an anti-war Democratic senator, and the book turns into a recreation of Xenophon's Anabasis, with the US Tenth Corps fighting the German military while most of the german military goes "What why are we fighting the Americans this is stupid" and engaging in sabotage. Edit: Also there's a subplot about how warhawk politicians jumping the US into conflicts without congressional approval is bad, another subplot about Scharnhorst's great grandson being a german tank officer, and another subplot about the commander of an American Company Team in a fully integrated US Military has to deal with an incompetent tank platoon commander who can't take orders from her because she's a woman and how loving stupid the tank platoon commander is for this. Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 2, 2023 |
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Mar 2, 2023 16:15
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Fivemarks posted:So, it's the 90's, the cold war is over, and technothriller authors like Harold Coyle need a new enemy for the United states, as was the style at the time. Oh man, I totally read that one too. I don't remember the Ukraine stuff at all and I only remembered the conflict between the male platoon commander and the female company commander after you mentioned it. What I do remember is them having a discussion about taking the long way around so that they go through the former West Germany instead of the more direct route through the former East Germany because the people had friendlier memories of Americans. Also pretty hilarious in hindsight given what we now know about the post-Cold War German military.
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Mar 2, 2023 16:47
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I don’t recall the title but I was flipping through a thriller at a book store and the poorly written plot involved a very thinly stand in President that was obviously Obama, whose plot to do something anti-conservative results in him being foiled by patriots who win because their movement is backed by gold. There was another one about a new civil war that was friendly to right wing views and I remember one main character mad at the liberal army because Jon Stewart makes fun of them a lot. It had the premise of in the event of a civil war liberals would immediately take up arms and drive slow moving convoys to be ambushed by heroic outnumbered Christians.
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Mar 2, 2023 17:59
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Dale Brown ... IN SPACE! It's the distant future of the mid-90's and the space race has continued with both the US and Soviets flying orbital space-fighterplane patrols. The US also has put a military space station into orbit and is working on equipping it with a laser to shoot down Soviet ballistic missiles. This and Flight of the Old Dog was written in the time of Star Wars (the program not the movies) and lasers vs missiles were very much in the defense zeitgeist. The Soviets are naturally not very happy about this development because they are getting ready to invade Iran and launch a strike against the station. This book was also written after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and a lot of western writers seemed to be convinced that they were going to keep going because it's not the first book I've read with just this scenario. The station is severely damaged and abandoned but our heroes return to get it back up and running. They turn the ABM laser onto the Soviet carrier battle group (did I mention that they have supercarriers to rival the US now?) in the Persian Gulf. Somehow this laser that was supposed to just fry missile guidance systems is also perfectly capable of serving as a particle beam cannon and the Soviets retreat and the West's oil is saved.
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Mar 2, 2023 18:04
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It's 1999. Wars have left the USA exhausted and bankrupt, and unrest is such that when Texas secedes, the US is unable to put down the rebellion unassisted, relying on mercenaries and UN Peacekeepers. In a surprise move for a setting like this, Our Heroes are mercenaries from Israel fighting against the Texan rebels. They form a tank unit with laser-armed Centurions (these are apparently the old British tanks, refitted, and not a hypothetical future tank of the same name) and they carve their way into the ReTex forces without pause, driving deeper and deeper into enemy territory. There's a noticeable holdup as the unit is briefly stopped on the Trinity Shipping Channel (which was, as of 1974 when this book was written, still an idea being toyed with IRL) by having to over come the major unit of the Texas Navy, a laser-armed cruiser named Judge Roy Bean.  Despite losses, the Israelis press on, encountering ever older and more decrepit units pulled out of armories and museums, before eventually running down Texan high command or whatever on the banks of the Rio Grande. That's 1999: The Texas-Israeli War by Howard Waldrop and Jake Saunders, and despite how absurd and sloppily-written it is, it remains a guilty pleasure.
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Mar 2, 2023 21:45
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown ... IN SPACE! Laser satellites, man. The 80s were sure the sky would be full of 'em.
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Mar 2, 2023 21:46
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown ... IN SPACE! I remember the Russians warcriming the space station's lifeboat after the initial attack and killing everyone who evacuated, and the lady scientist who made the laser (and maybe the radar on the space station too) had a dad who was a ship captain who was one week from retirement and too old for this poo poo and didn't really trust this newfangled space stuff with his daughter's safety. He got killed by the Russians during a naval battle and his ship (the California I think) was rebuilt to be a data downlink ship for the space station's radar at the end of the book. Also some stuff where the team who goes up to turn the space station back on gets in a fight with the attacking Russian spaceships and one of the civilians gets shot through the chest with a missile while trying to get the space station's defensive missile launcher working again, leaving a Looney Tunes hole in his corpse that his teammates can see through. There's also an American spaceship that ends up doing some stuff but crash lands, killing the pilot but not his high-ranking backseater. The male lead character ends up boning the lady scientist once they get home after the first attack. I think he was the space station commander, and accompanies her to help turn it back on.
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Mar 2, 2023 22:03
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It is the 1980's, and David Drake is writing about a sci-fi version of Byzantine General Belisarius, The last of the Romans, and the Nika Riots. It is 1991, and David Drake and SM Stirling are writing about a sci-fi version of Byzantine General Belisarius, The Last of the Romans, and the Nika Riots. It is 1998, and David Drake and Eric Flint are writing about a sci-fi version of Byzantine General Belisarius, The Last of the Romans, and the Nika Riots.
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Mar 2, 2023 22:19
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Madurai posted:Laser satellites, man. The 80s were sure the sky would be full of 'em. That was a key plot point of the 1986 board game Fortress America.
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Mar 3, 2023 06:44
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Dale Brown has Opinions about women combat pilots (they're bad but not as bad as you might think) It's the mid-90's and Russia has an autocratic president who dreams of past imperial glory and has set his sights on Ukraine. Like most writers at the time, though, I believe Brown had this president come to power through a coup, not through elections and then slowly dismantling democratic institutions over the course of a decade. This all coincides with America's first female combat pilot graduating combat pilot ... school? She's going to fly F-111's for the Air National Guard but it's a whole Thing. Brown gleefully gives the backstory about all the "legitimate" concerns there are about women serving in combat and makes a big deal about how they all would have to agree to getting their tubes tied because you can't invest in a pilot who might suddenly be "combat ineffective" for nine months. Anyway the US sends this ANG squadron to Ukraine as I guess some kind of volunteer squadron? I don't remember how they got away with American pilots flying American planes in Ukraine and bombing Russian positions but that could just be the fact that we've seen this actual plot play out in real time over the last year. Turkey enters the war on the side of Ukraine and there's a whole part where the squadron has to rebase themselves in Turkey because most of Ukraine has been overrun. The Turkish pilots are huge jerks to Our Heroine but she earns their respect by being Just As Tough As The Boys. The book ends with them bombing the Russian president's bunker where he and his generals are plotting the invasion of Turkey, the Baltics, Kazakhstan, and Alaska.
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Mar 3, 2023 16:25
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Have you skipped "Dale Brown figures his contract is up, so he writes Firefox and just kills off most of his characters" and "Dale Brown doesn't know how Philippine Politics work and assumes ASEAN would let China nuke Palawan and get okay with it because of the US ambassador being a woman?"
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Mar 3, 2023 17:17
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I'm pretty much just jumping all over based on what I have the best memory of, feel free to chime since it seems we all read the same books as dumbass teens!
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Mar 3, 2023 17:55
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown has Opinions about women combat pilots (they're bad but not as bad as you might think) US gives Ukraine some of their nukes just for fun. Darren the navigator was in an F-111 that was tasked to drop a nuke in Desert Storm, he noticed all the allied planes that would be killed and figured they didn't get the cancel order and his pilot calls him a traitor for not dropping the bomb after they get shot down. Also Bill Clinton is just a puppet for his wife.
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Mar 4, 2023 00:02
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bulletsponge13 posted:Vertical Limit- a buncha bad guys take over an office complex- the only hitch? lol, is this Vertical Run by Joseph Garber? I loved that book growing up.
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Mar 4, 2023 00:55
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I had to go back and look, even if it is cheating. I forgot that not only did General Not-Patton know everything and make eggheads look like fools, but Slater literally made him look and sound like George C. Scott quote:“YOU TENSE, DOCTOR?” Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Lesand asked the chief scientist from DARPA, Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. A dozen military and civil VIPs had gathered in the open in the ice-cold, pine-scented fall morning for the final test of DARPA’s latest expensive and most secret equipment project. If the test was successful, it would save countless American lives and justify the American taxpayers’ unwitting subsidization of the multimillion-dollar program. If it failed, heads would roll.
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Mar 4, 2023 07:16
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The V-22 anti drug taskforce book was called Hammerheads.
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Mar 7, 2023 13:53
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Syrian Lannister posted:The V-22 anti drug taskforce book was called Hammerheads. Named after a Prohibition-era group that used sledgehammers to bust open casks of booze, no less. Because Prohibition is something to emulate, especially when taking on organized crime groups.
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Mar 7, 2023 17:13
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Moon Slayer posted:So, Dale Brown. He was an actual Air Force back-seater on B-52s in the late 70's-early 80's and clearly has a chip on his shoulder about never getting to actually drop bombs on anybody for real. His main series books almost always amount to "what if some ridiculous geopolitical crises could be solved by flying cool secret airplanes into enemy territory and bombing something?" I can't believe you left out the one where McLanahan puts on some sort of electrical forcefield armor to take out a biker meth gang
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Mar 8, 2023 00:25
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Basticle posted:I can't believe you left out the one where McLanahan puts on some sort of electrical forcefield armor to take out a biker meth gang The Tin Man! A book so weird and outlandish that even 15 year old me thought it was kinda crappy and excessive. Wasn’t the big bad in that book the Belgian arms dealer from another Brown novel?
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Mar 8, 2023 03:06
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A drunk officer sleeping with an actress, possibly a Marilyn Monroe insert; no pun, in a tank during the Korean War.
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Mar 8, 2023 04:19
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My dad loved absolutely wildly bad cross over WW2 fiction with scifi elements. I can't remember for the life of me what it's called, but a WW2 Era Clemson destroyer gets sent back (or forward?) To Indonesia in an alternate universe where the ontological bad is some kind of lizard race with roughly pre WW1 Era tech and the ontological good is some weird furbie looking things that are getting genocided. Anyhow, the WW2 Era destroyer triumphs over evil and the captain...fucks a furbie. I got about that far and then I put the book down because even my then 17 year old brain had a moment of "what in the gently caress am I reading"
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Mar 8, 2023 04:25
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A Festivus Miracle posted:My dad loved absolutely wildly bad cross over WW2 fiction with scifi elements. I can't remember for the life of me what it's called, but a WW2 Era Clemson destroyer gets sent back (or forward?) To Indonesia in an alternate universe where the ontological bad is some kind of lizard race with roughly pre WW1 Era tech and the ontological good is some weird furbie looking things that are getting genocided. Anyhow, the WW2 Era destroyer triumphs over evil and the captain...fucks a furbie. Ah yes, The Destroyermen.
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Mar 8, 2023 09:19
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I am equally a sucker for "modern X gets sent back in time to Y" which is why I've read every 1632/Ring of Fire book (West Virginia coal town gets plucked up and deposited in 17th-century Germany). Amazon keeps recommending me a German series about a WWI German cruiser that gets sent back to the Roman era that I've been curious about (it's almost certainly terrible).
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Mar 8, 2023 15:18
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A Festivus Miracle posted:My dad loved absolutely wildly bad cross over WW2 fiction with scifi elements. I can't remember for the life of me what it's called, but a WW2 Era Clemson destroyer gets sent back (or forward?) To Indonesia in an alternate universe where the ontological bad is some kind of lizard race with roughly pre WW1 Era tech and the ontological good is some weird furbie looking things that are getting genocided. Anyhow, the WW2 Era destroyer triumphs over evil and the captain...fucks a furbie. Yes but, importantly, Destroyermen is legitimately good. They literally go "No, people are not inherently evil just because of what they are born as, and you can't genocide people." Considering most Mil Sci-fi, A series going "no, genocide is bad" and "No, all people are People no matter what they look like" is pretty loving good.
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Mar 8, 2023 15:31
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Dale Brown vs Central America I don't recall precisely where this one falls in the overall Dale Brown-a-verse but it's one of the early ones if not the second book in the main series. We open with the usual description of a Soviet "charm school" where kids are raised in a perfect 1:1 recreation of suburban America. I'm not sure if these things actually existed or were an espionage urban legend but military fiction writers loving loved them. This particular school is training kids to kill and replace chosen counterparts in the west. The main antagonist here is told he is going to be replacing an American high schooler who just got accepted into the Air Force Academy. His handlers are naturally super excited as they thought they were just going to be inserting this asset into a random university to get a communications degree or something. Honestly this style of spying seems to be pretty scatter shot but I guess that's actually not to far off from how Russian agents really work. Long story short the spy goes on to work at Dreamland testing super-advanced airplanes with Our Hero Patrick McClanahan. They've built a thought-controlled fighter jet with reverse-curved wings. The spy steals it and takes it to the Soviet Air Force in Nicaragua, which just like in Red Dawn is now basically a colony of the Soviets. And ... that's pretty much all I remember of it save for a bunch of sub-Clancy espionage porn and then I think they fly an airstrike to blow up the stolen fighter jet.
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Mar 9, 2023 16:43
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown vs Central America Dale Brown thought that this was the end of his contract, so he basically kills off 90% of the cast through it. Its also non canon as gently caress.
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Mar 9, 2023 17:29
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Patrick mcclanahan lmao
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Mar 10, 2023 00:48
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Moon Slayer posted:Dale Brown vs Central America The series' wunderkind pilot is flying an F-15 in this one with canards and other goodies (the eponymous Cheetah, this book is Day of the Cheetah) against the thought controlled airplane. The book opens with a Dale Brown Sex SceneTM where he tells us how much Russian guys don't like to pull out after they blow a load.
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Mar 10, 2023 05:55
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Glad I repressed that memory. Too bad I can't also get rid of the passage in the Clancy China vs Russia book about how Chinese women don't shave their armpits and how fascinating the Japanese-American spy finds this.
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Mar 10, 2023 15:31
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After the generally excellent Red Army, Ralph Peters decided to do something a little more technothrillery, and so launches into the career of a tough-as-nails US Army airmobile officer who, after losing most of his command in an intervention action in central Africa to orbital lasers (again, the 1980s and their laser satellites), goes on a sort of walk in the wilderness to find themselves. And by "wilderness" I mean, "Mexico" and by "themselves," I mean "Mexican rebels backed by the cartels and also armed by Japan." (Another 80s-ism it might be difficult for younger folk to relate to is the idea that Japan was an unstoppable economic juggernaut). Our Hero gains some very war-crimy rep in putting down those darn rebels, bringing him to attention as just the sort of can-do officer to take charge of a new, experimental unit. There's a lot of hoo-ha about what air cav is and what it's for, but the nut of this one is tiltrotor gunships that are A) armed with a railgun and B) capable of hands-off computer controlled flying to lay said gun. The US goes back to Africa (I seriously don't remember which countries they were) for a proxy rematch with Japan again, who have updated their laser tech to put them on high-tech choppers of their own. Anyway, big aerial showdown, good guys win. This was The War in 2020 and it was such a letdown after Peters' first book. I meant to review it in 2020 but, 
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Mar 10, 2023 20:56
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I will defend Destroyermen and Artillerymen and 90% of Drake's work to the death. I will not defend Dan Brown, except in a "It's like a reading a lovely Ace Combat Game" sense
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Mar 10, 2023 22:32
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The 35th Maine Infantry regiment and the 44th New York Light Artillery battery are being shipped down to the Carolinas for an amphibious landing late in the civil war (1864ish?). A storm happens and they get Bermuda triangled to a planet tens of thousands of light years away. It might actually be in one of the Magellanic clouds because they can see the whole spiral of the galaxy laid out at night in the sky. Anyways, they're not the first to be transported here. Many populations from all over the world and history have been transported here. For example there are Roman and Carthaginian city states (still warring against each other). Mayan city states, and where the Americans happened to pop out, medieval Rus city states. Why only city states? Because the native species of this world does not allow human polities to consolidate. They're basically huge Wookie-like aliens who travel the steppe like a massive Mongol horde in a great twenty year loop. And when they arrive in a new human cultural area they demand a tithe. In flesh! Mwhahaha! They are carnivores who use humans as cattle. IIRC the Americans had like 6 months to a year to set up their own town, marry some locals and start industrializing. Windmills, waterwheels, primitive ironworks, trains, etc. They were already chaffing at the bit against the local Boyars, who are unsurprisingly for the most part tyrannical dicks. The nobles have also long since been beaten into submission by the aliens. After all, whenever a great leader had arisen in the past and united a human culture and rebelled, they were crushed and an even larger tithe levied as punishment. Once they find out about this the Americans flip their lid and kick their plans to a launch a widespread peasant rebellion into overdrive. They easily succeed, since they have rifles and artillery and the Rus only have knights and housecarls equipped with chainmail and such. However, the horde they're facing is 200,000 horse archers. (I forget if they had actual horses bred to be enormous, or some native animal to ride). Also, there's a smallpox epidemic sweeping through this horde's territory and the Rus get some Mayan refugees showing up telling stories of woe. The Americans vaccinate themselves and the peasants with cowpox to solve the problem. However, this does mean the horde is hungry and the Mayans have been absolutely devastated by the twin disasters of disease and tithe. The Americans set up a factory to mass produce smooth bore Brown Bess style muskets to arm the peasantry. They don't have time to do anything better. They train them as much as they can in like a month and build some fortifications. They're outnumbered and outranged by the aliens bows. They fight a series of hard fought defensive battles and are on the verge of getting overwhelmed when they blow up a dam and wash the aliens away. Come back for the next book where they have to fight the much bigger and meaner alien horde from down the road, ad infinitum... Charlz Guybon fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 05:04
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