Why I don't want to be Tom Clancy

(Concerning "Just 'cause", as it's playing out on my other blog...)

When I say I worry about realism, this does not mean that I have a team of military advisors on board sharing every little detail with me. Most of the time, I go by what info I can find quickly, by what I know. The rest I extrapolate or guess. I usually err on the side of competence more than technical capability - i.e. I have less of a problem letting people fire two handguns at once than with doing the Hollywood routine of blowing people across the room with a shotgun. I know both are unrealistic, the latter just bothers me more because it violates the laws of physics - I have less of a problem saying that a character is just that good.

That said, sometimes I dig myself into a hole when I write too quickly.

For example, the auction is for four R-39 SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles). The aircraft used to airlift them to the buyer's choice of location is an Antonov 124-300, a new strategic airlifter. (I haven't named it yet - this was a good bit of foresight as it left me wiggle room, the reason for which you'll see in a minute.) This is a near-future aircraft, proposed but not built yet, so I used one and used it like it was newly built to Dr. Krueger's specs - you'll see some of its features later in the story. Anyway, one R-39 missile has a launch weight of 90 tons.

No aircraft that exists today could carry four of them in that configuration.

So I began to look for things to shave off. First, the auction was explicitly not for the warheads - taking the payload section off reduces the missile length by about *half*, but does not seem to reduce weight enough. (No exact figures were available, but payload was listed as 2.5 tons. I assume it's a bit more if you take off the whole front section.) Dimensions were not the problem - the Antonov's fuselage is easily big enough to take on the missiles lying flat in two pairs with room to spare. Weight, however, still concerned me - again, no exact figures for the aircraft's max capacity, but extrapolating from the An-124 and the heavier An-225 (The -300 is a hybrid of both), I estimated about 300 tons of difference between a dry aircraft and max takeoff weight. Obviously, some of that weight would also be fuel, so I thought that you could probably make it take off with about 200 tons of cargo.

Four missiles were still too much.

But wait! I forgot that a significant part of ICBM launch weight is the fuel. The question was just, how much? Cue two hours of frantic Googling and book research, since nobody seemed to have any data on the fuel weights for ICBMs. Finally, in a Powerpoint presentation on future missile tech, I found some useful references, and using them, estimated that about 40 tons of the R-39s launch weight could be assumed to be fuel.

That way, I could *just about* justify having four dry missiles in the Antonov's cargo hold. For added safety margin, I'm having the Antonov start with a minimal fuel load and refueling in air - this is a system that would make sense for Krueger to have on his cargo aircraft that is regularly asked to make long flights.

Throughout all of this, I had little if any solid data to go on. But I'm satisfied that it's at least somewhat plausible.

Back to your regularly scheduled program...

The Death of the PC

The personal computer is dying.

On the one hand, we have console gaming. Granted, it's been around forever, but more than ever I can feel the push to get in on the trend. Full disclosure: I have never owned a gaming console. This is a state that I do not find regrettable. What I do find regrettable is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find PC games. What's the standard modus operandi these days? Multi-platform, which - translated from developer speak - means "We develop for console and if you're lucky, you get a PC port." Let's not mince words here: most of them suck. The controls in particular, the savepoint systems we get burdened with, all that legacy crap from the consoles. Even if the port happens to be good (like, say, Rogue Trooper), it's still bleedingly obvious that as PC gamer, you're second fiddle at best.

Consoles do not provide superior graphics power . I mention this in particular in conjunction with the PS3, which seems to have picked up the "cheap for the power!" tag that is, at best, totally divorced from reality when you consider that it's the most expensive console on the market. There's no denying that. Now, you might counter, it comes with a BluRay drive, which go for well over 1000 dollars. Hello? Do you think they'll stay there? (The whole HD market is a big fucking scam anyway, but I'll get to that another time.) And it doesn't have the near-miraculous computing power some people seem to believe it has. Repeat after me: The PS3 will not cure cancer, spontaniously develop sentience or do your taxes. It's just...different. And weird enough that it apparently requires a completely seperate development approach than, say, the X-Box 360. That it gets some big exclusives - like MGS4 - is more of a function of Sony going off on its own tangent again than any messianic amount of raw power.

The console developers are cooking with water, like everyone else.

Additionally, consoles are absorbing some bad habits from PCs, like not being uniform. What's that bullshit about the 360 Core? Or the "cheaper" PS3? (Cheaper in the same sense that launching a space shuttle is cheaper than building an orbital elevator.) Say what, homie? Developers now have an additional element of uncertainty there. Plus, you're getting patches. Yes, you heard me. They're patching console games. Because now that consoles can go online, the developers can sell you a game piece by piece, fix the bugs that got shipped because the deadlines moved up again, and generally make you pay for the benefit of getting to PC gaming ca. 1997. Yay! Sony's even calling the PS3 a "computer" instead of a console. How's that for a hint?

For added fun, Vista promises to fuck up the PC standard all in the name of copy protection. I marvel at the G-tolerance of the PR guys who spin that to be a good thing for the customers, but even if I assume that it gets cracked - and it will, sooner or later - the damage will probably already be done. "Robust" hardware, "trusted computing" and all those fun things, all trying to carpet bomb the jungle that is the open PC standard into a neat, orderly world of a few certified suppliers making their own prices. Let's not mince words: the PC got where it is today through third parties, gray markets and plagiarism, all driving prices down and development forward. It's been one of the greatest assets (for the consumer), and now they're looking to kill it. In other words, they're turning the PC into a console.

It's the worst of both worlds, and we're sitting right smack in the middle of it. Better lube up, ladies, daddy's gonna be rough with us.