Tanktober Begins!

Happy Tanktober everyone!

Tanktober is a month to zealously promote tracked behemoths.  Hard to argue with that really!

As I have no ability to model or build tanks in my current condition, I will be dedicating my Tanktober homage activities this year to publishing pictures of tanks, but only those which I have personally taken.

The reciprocal challenge to you guys is to identify the tank pictured each day.
I'll keep a tally and whoever gets the most points over the month will win a prize!
Bonus points for being the first to get the right answer and/or the location :-)

We shall start with an easy one to get you going:

The adventures of Captain Innocent Stryker

Long time without a post here I know, but no this project is not dead.  In fact, it is now confirmed to be on track to go into high gear in early 2016.  Excitement and purchases continue (though no actually modelling yet).    Hopefully the upcoming Hoby Challenge will see some brushes get dusted off, eh Alan?

Anyway, in the meantime I have been keeping my toe in the ECW period with a bit of fiction set during the war.  Namely, the adventures of Captain Innocent Stryker.

Captain Stryker is the creation of author Michael Arnold.  A reluctant Royalist Officer, he and his sidekick Sergeant are grizzled veterans of the continental campaigns of the Thirty Years War.  As such, they have a much more jaded view of the war and what it will do eventually to their homeland.  He is frequently compared to Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe - in fact this comparison is done with monotonous regularity by reviewers but notwithstanding this is a pretty accurate.

The series of books takes the main cast of characters through the opening battles of the ECW with an interesting plot line running throughout all the different books.  Though I think the first couple were the best, I quite enjoyed all of them.  They gave a really interesting perspective to the lifestyles and language of the period, as well as how the skirmishing and fighting tactics of the period worked.  While there is also a good measure of artistic license, it also gives a good perspective of how the command chains of both armies worked, the impacts of suffering from poor logistics processes, and the impact of certain personalities.


Overall, if you are an ECW aficionado and want some entertaining reading to immerse yourself in the period, then this series is for you!  But be warned, it will have you hankering to play some Pike and Musket skirmish gaming, which is the level that most of the books' actions is set.

The author's webpage also has some interesting resources which are worth checking out.
http://www.michael-arnold.net

I'm up to the sixth instalment now, which covers the Battle for Marston Moor. It will be interesting to see how the author tackles that engagement and what he will do with the series once this climatic event is done.

Any recommendations for other ECW era fiction?


[EDIT] Steve the Warmer has just posted a review of Marsten Moor at his blog here:
 http://steve-the-wargamer.blogspot.com/2015/10/marston-moor-review.html

Ivans have Landed!

This week I received a delightful package in the mail, courtesy of Steve from the Sound Officer's Call blog (here).  Inside was a wonderfully painted Soviet Command base for my Battlegroup Kursk Soviet force.  I'm really delighted to get such a thoughtful gift.  In fact, I picked up a macro lens for my camera to ensure the pics do it justice :-)

So I'm very pleased to introduce you all to Comrade Commander Stepan Patrovitch, who is destined to command all my Soviet Forces in theatres everywhere! Hard to believe this is a 15mm figure isn't it.

And just in case I ever forget whose generosity brought him to me, this is the underside of the base.  Thanks a lot Steve, very much appreciated.  Another stirling example of the fantastic Blogosphere community we have.

Book Review: Ghost Fleet

I'd been looking forward to this book coming out in July and just finished reading it.  Unusually, the Author Peter Singer is a National Security specialist with four other, non fiction books to his name and this is his first novel.  I heard him speak at the Naval War College earlier this year and his Biography (here) states:

Dr. Singer is considered one of the world's leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare. He has consulted for the US Military, Defense Intelligence Agency, and FBI, as well as advised a range of entertainment programs, including for Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Universal, HBO, Discovery, History Channel, and the video game series Call of Duty, the best-selling entertainment project in history. He served as coordinator of the Obama-08 campaign's defense policy task force and was named by the President to the US Military's Transformation Advisory Group. 

Ghost Fleet is a techno-thriller very much in the tradition of Tom Clancy, Larry Bond and Harold Coyle.  Set in an unspecified year a decade or two from now, China has thrown off its Communist regime and traded it for a co military-business tycoon presidium known as "The Directorate". In a bid to secure economic security, resource access and achieve hegemonic power they launch a blitzkrieg style offensive against US assets throughout the Pacific.  Chinese cyber capabilities are a key part of these attacks and in scenes reminiscent of the Battlestar Galactica pilot, many US systems are shutdown or severely degraded as the offensive operations.  America, left with very few allies, then tries to claw itself back from the devastation wrought upon it.

The book is Singer's vision of how current and emerging technologies will be utilised in future conflicts.  As an example, autonomous drones play a large part, both in an armed capacity operating with manned systems, as well as for remote surveillance and even working in close conjunction with SF team and ground forces.  At the same time, Singer makes some not so subtle commentary about strategic decision making and acquisitions programs in the US military.

Overall, its well worth a read and has some interesting aspects though some felt to be a bit of a stretch  At the same time, Singer is clearly a newcomer to fiction and his style is not as developed as others in the genre. Its good, but not great.  3 stars.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet