Mélange II

The random thoughts must flow!

• Steve Kuntz Scott Kurtz, the guy what draws PvP and is collaborating on "The Trenches" with Gabe and Tycho, had a newspost recently about Captain America, and how he (being German-American) liked that the movie emphasizes the distinction between Germans and Nazis, epitomized in the line "People forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own."
  
  Now, my gut instinct (as a French-Czech stormcrow) would be to say "Well thank you Gunther Grass, but who invaded them in World War I, the Franco-Prussian War, the Seven Years War, the War of Austrian Succession, and the Thirty Years War?" But then I remember: Prussia. That's who invaded them, under the leadership of the Von Hohenzollern monster-clan.
• Speaking of Prussia, there's this idea out there called "Fourth-Generation Warfare", about how our approach to war is outdated and how, in the future, we're going to have to drop the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, among other loathsome ideas. Its proponents don't come right out and say we should march priests before our troops as a human shield, but I think it's implied.
  
  If that sounds familiar, it should—it was one of the atrocities of the Rape of Belgium. And no surprise: "fourth-generation warfare" is the misshapen brainchild of right-wing think-tanker William S. Lind, who is quite upfront about his admiration for Kaiser Wilhelm, the coiner of the concept of Schrecklichkeit ("horrificness"). It was originally coined in the context of some action the Prussian Empire was taking in China, and had to do with targeting civilians to cow the enemy.
  
  Go join your false emperor in the hell prepared for you, savage. This, like Rand, is the sort of idea the right embraces at its peril—unless they want to become the type of people the left says they are.
• Schrecklichkeit is a major theme in my SF book—it's a permanent risk of pacifism, see also William Tecumseh Sherman. One of my felinoids dispenses with the idea thusly: "We have no need to terrorize your populace. We find your soldiers are adequately terrified of us."
  
  Hey, remember how not even Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of Saddam, could get any of Iraq's pilots to take to the air against the USAF?
• Shifting gears—finally working the clutch properly—how come people don't understand that manga and anime aren't written according to Western mores? I mean, Japan's unofficial-official religion is ancestor worship, so if a ghost shows up and helps people, and yet you think it's atheist? Yeah, try again, thinktank. Of course, that was John C. Wright who did that (RE: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann), and, again, it literally took a miracle for that intellectual colossus to know there's a God.
  
  Or this other guy, who I won't identify, who thought moe anthropomorphism was a development of the robot-girl thing. Dude, come on! Japanese folklore is in the condition called "prehuman flux", where animals and sometimes other things can appear as people—fundamentally, OS-tans and the gun-girls from Upotte! are a product of the same worldview as tsukkumogami.
  
  To put it another way, everyone, somewhat simplistically, describes Shinto as animist. Did it occur to you animists might have a slightly different set of expectations about the world? See, to a Japanese person, the idea that someone you meet is secretly a fox in his private life, is basically in the same category as alien abduction—nobody actually believes it, but if you saw it happen, you'd say "Weird, so all that was real!" rather than "Holy crap I need to invent new mental categories to fit this into!".
• You know that perennial complaint about military SF, that it's written with World War II in mind? E.g., lack of air support? While there are exceptions (played Halo, especially the second level of Reach, my pet?), it's a legitimate complaint. Only, they're doing it on purpose: the ability to call in close air support is a drama killer.
  
  The trick is to come up with a justification for it, rather than act like it simply doesn't exist. In my books, since it's not actually during a war, and all the action takes place in cities that haven't been evacuated, they can't do it. It's actually quite realistic—the fact conflict takes place in the midst of population centers is a major factor of modern warfare, that's why the Iraq insurgency (which was largely not an Iraqi insurgency) lasted as long as it did.
  
  Gonna have to step things up eventually, though—there's the 24th-century equivalent of an Apache (or rather, again, a Mil Mi-28/Kamov Ka-50), in the one I'm working on now. Oh actually I had a scene with the 24th century's version of the Antonov An-8, in the first book. I forgot, and I shouldn't have, 'cause that scene also has a neat idea for sights I came up with, namely use a laser to measure the target's speed, then it gives you a ring of deflection points, and you put it on the appropriate one for the target's heading.
• Turns out I might not have to go with a radioisotope battery on my mechas, after all. Apparently alkali-metal thermoelectric converters, AMTECs, are projected to achieve a power density of 200 kW/m³, in the near future. The 253 kW of a Sherman tank motor comes to a mere 1.265 m³, which is a cube 108 cm on a side.
  
  Now I just have to figure out a way to heat the thing to 1100 K. Maybe they'll heat it at their base's reactor, which will tend to limit their range. But not by much; apparently current AMTEC designs can operate for a long time on a single heating—one source I saw said 14,000 hours (1 year, 7 months, 5 days).
• Have you read Final Crisis? Hot damn. Aside from the best line ever ("I am not averse to the taste of human flesh, sir!"—Vandal Savage), it has Captain Marvel's tiger-guy butler, in bowtie and quiet tweeds, kill Darkseid's son with his claws. Awesome sauce.
  
  Also, Batman kills Darkseid (you should know this, and it's not like it's a spoiler). With a gun. A real gun, with bullets. Batman. Gun. Bullets. It was mamma-jammin' Tantric, son (in the real sense of the term, look it up).