Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 16, 2019)

After the raging kegger we threw to celebrate the 50th WWRW, we needed a week off.

Actually, it was a busy week at work and I just forgot. Enjoy this special double edition.

Long Reads

Quiz of the Week

Defense

Sport

Science and Technology

Grab Bag

Spoiler for Guesses

My guess: A, on the grounds that on a (successful) offensive, you’d expect to see disrupted subordinate commands swept up by advancing superiors.
Parvusimperator: A, and is this the Civil War?
Spoiler for Answers

Here you go. Parvusimperator and I were both correct, but I was right for the wrong reason and Parvusimperator was right but wrong about the war.

10 thoughts on “Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 16, 2019)

  1. Chris Bradshaw

    Oof, I guessed B as the attacking org chart. The detached elements of A I interpreted as survivors of encircled units temporarily attached to a higher level because their parent corps were wiped out in a Barbarossa 1941 sort of way.

    Nifty news on the new Invictus chopper , although I do like the pusher configuration of the Sikorsky S-97 a lot.
    There was also a nifty reddit AMA about the gunship pilot mentality, from a marine AH-1Z pilot.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/deh9tf/iama_usmc_cobra_pilot_and_faca_and_back_to_answer/

    Reply
    1. Fishbreath Post author

      Good link.

      The thing I like about the quiz is that it’s like an inkblot test for defense affairs nerds. I might borrow some books from the Parvusimperator War College Library once I’ve returned my current loan and sketch out some other ones along the same lines.

      On Discord, Kilo Sierra proposed the same game reversed: given a list of units, devise a command structure for them.

  2. Chris Bradshaw

    That’s a neat idea for a blog series. I’ve been playing HOI4 multiplayer quite a bit recently, which (in decent historical servers) always comes down to who can do Eastern Front encirclements better, so that’s what’s been in my mind.

    On a completely separate note, have you seen the footage of Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts? It seems pretty nifty.

    Reply
    1. Fishbreath Post author

      I’ve been keeping tabs on it, yeah. The Winter Wargaming series this year is looking likely to be done with Rule the Waves 2, so that genre is one of my favorites.

    1. Fishbreath Post author

      Ultimate Admiral will have a much stronger claim for me when they fix turning in line. Such a simple thing, so often neglected.

    1. Fishbreath Post author

      I’m certainly looking forward to it once it’s fully baked.

      Same with Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail. Unlike Dreadnoughts/Rule the Waves, there isn’t even a claimant to the throne of ‘best current wooden ships wargame’.

    1. Fishbreath Post author

      I will defend E:TW as an unfairly maligned entry in the series to my dying breath, but it’s definitely not a very good naval wargame.

      The Petrel guys never sleep. I think we have the Kaga find on the docket for tomorrow’s WWRW already, so I’ll find an article about both.

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