Terrible Swift Sword

by on March 14, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

It is difficult for a general history to maintain a central thesis and remain informative, and be entertaining. One of Catton’s gifts is that he does it quite well here.

Terrible Swift Sword picks up in the immediate aftermath of First Bull Run. Like The Coming Fury, it covers a bit more than a year of time (leaving the third book to do some heavy lifting). Overall, the focus remains on events and personalities, and gives good attention to many aspects of the war.

But from the first, it is obvious that Catton has something more to say. The particular period of time is chosen precisely because it is that period where the war aims of Lincoln shifted, clarified, and eventually expanded.

Lincoln, and most everyone else, would have been happy for the war to end quickly and with as little disruption to the country as possible. And the longer it went on the more disruption must inevitably follow.

Naturally, the biggest, most unavoidable disruption is to slavery. Lincoln disclaims any changes to slavery as a war goal, and has to override various field commanders who take matters into their own hands. But anywhere the Union army goes, slaves start showing up looking for protection. And the proximate cause of the war was the Republican promise to not let slavery extend into all the territories (an argument the South lost by the act of seceding). And one of the threads through the book is the move towards a bigger effect on slavery, and the book therefore ends shortly after Anteitam and the initial Emancipation Proclamation.

Along the way, we get all the major moves. We also get the smaller ones. Catton gives a good account of Island Number 10, which is too often overshadowed by Shiloh. We also see Lee’s first command in future West Virginia, and his time in charge of the coastal defenses south of Virginia. We of course also get the initial Union forays there. And we get some real sidelights. One entire subchapter is spent on smuggling and other activities transferring goods from the North to the South… and vice versa. He doesn’t try to get at any real numbers, but Catton points out that there had been one national economy at work, and suddenly declaring a border didn’t suddenly wipe out all the dependencies between the two. All the profiteering and such was inevitable when confronted with that reality.

Again, Catton does a great job covering the various parts of the war, and giving attention to all the major movements and the secondary ones as well. Combine this with especial attention to the tribulations of the government and McClellan, and that ever present pressure of what the government and the war is going to do about slavery, and you have a good book on a critical year of the ACW. Combine that with Catton’s excellent writing, and you have a great general-reader introduction to the subject.

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Beginning Bugs

by on March 10, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After fighting it out before Troy, Mark and I decided to try out the second Microgame, Chitin I. It’s a fragment of a larger project that was never finished, and sounds to me like kind of like a proto-Civilization (computer game), though certainly in a different form. The world of Hymenoptera has a large number of bug-like subspecies created through biological science. Chitin I takes a limited set of these, and presents fighting over the annual harvest.

We stuck with the learning scenario, which just uses the three central harvest chits and a fixed roster of three each of the main (non-flying) fighting types. The Vassal module give three different color sides, and Mark ended up going first with Wax from the top, while I went second from the bottom with Teal. Thanks to terrain, each side has easier access to one of the secondary harvest chits, and about the same to the center one (which is also worth more points, but in this scenario, all that matters is getting two of the three).

I got up to the central chit first, but Mark came up and retreated me away from it immediately afterward while grabbing his ‘easy’ chit. I came back and disrupted his Termagants on the chit, but they slid over, recovered, and forced my Gantuas to retreat, disrupted my Termagants, and eliminated a Low Render.

I had a heck of a time figuring out what to do, but grabbed the chit on my side, and got a worker into the center one. I killed two Low Renders, and disrupted his Termagants again, but lost one of my own Phlanxes.

Despite efforts to block him, Mark got at my workers and eliminated the one carrying my harvest chit, and eliminated one of my Gantuas. The good news was that he had split up his warriors to do this, but all I managed in my turn was force his Gantuas to retreat. Mark finished hauling off his chit and disrupted two stacks. I was hauling away the center chit and concentrating on his big Gantuas, but again only made them retreat while disrupting the remaining Low Render.

Mark killed a Phlanx, and suffered disruption on his own Termagants (as disruption goes away right before your attacks, disrupting the enemy mostly just makes them nearly immobile for a turn; attacker disruption is a lot more serious). This let me take out his last Low Render and two Termagants.

This meant that Mark was down to Gantuas and Phlanxes and workers. The bad news is that he had gotten workers up to the chit he’d made me drop, and I had to go racing after him as he hauled it through rough terrain. Along the way, he killed another Gantua with his. I caught up a few hexes short of the edge and disrupted his stack. They moved a hex, recovered and eliminated a Termagant. My next attack eliminated a Phlanx, leaving open a high-cost route. He moved adjacent to the edge with two workers (and the remaining Phlanx), and all my last attack could do was D1 to kill one worker and let the other move off map. Mark won two chits to one.

Afterword

It’s interesting seeing the origin of the three-pip stacking system in Necromancer. The fact that movement ignores facing, but combat does not is also nice streamlining.

Four-sided rock-paper-scissors is okay enough, but one point extra doesn’t feel like much in an odds-based system. The fact that Gantuas are 4 in combat, and Low Renders and Termagants are fast seems more consequential. For the later scenarios, you pick units, and they are rated entirely off of combat factors. This feels like the same problem that first edition Ogre had; though the lower spread of capabilities means it probably works better.

Considering the small size, Chitin I is a good package. There’s enough going on that it won’t wear out after a few plays, and the wrinkles that are included add just enough to make the game feel complete.

The graphic re-do used for the Vassal module is nice, but there are problems. The effort to go full graphics on the CRT hinders rather than helps comprehension. At least to someone used to wargame mechanics. The module itself is also oddly unpolished: If you take a loss, you have to go digging through the counter palette instead of having a command to reduce the counter directly. Also, all the extra harvest chits are included, but rather than using a set of commands around a text field to write the value directly on it, there’s a set of off-map displays to keep track of their value.

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The Motion Picture

by on March 6, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

There’s a lot of different things to go into here.

First, this is a novelization of the first Star Trek movie. I do generally enjoy the film, but I’m certainly nowhere near agreeing with the people who celebrate it. It looks great, it sounds great, and we really need more stories the philosophical side of the franchise. But, it is a two-hour version of a plot used in TOS, and production was troubled.

It is interesting to see how work on the proposed Phase II series influenced this. For the series, they were not going to get Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner was asking for more money. So, there was going to be a new Vulcan science officer, who, not being half-human, would not be struggling to reconcile his divided nature, but would honestly struggle to understand humans. But they did get Leonard Nimoy for the film, Spock was back, and the new character, Sonak, is killed in a transporter accident. A new first officer, William Decker, would be in the first season of Phase II, and take over as Captain of the Enterprise if they couldn’t afford Shatner after that. He doesn’t survive the movie either. The Phase II cast would be rounded out by returning characters plus a new sexy alien (because Roddenberry never saw sexy shenanigans he didn’t like). Lieutenant Ilia also doesn’t survive, returning us to the original series cast.

All three new character concepts are revived and show up in The Next Generation a decade later as Data, Riker, and Troi.

Naturally, the novelization does go into more details than even a relatively long movie can. Most notably, we get internal thoughts and feelings of various characters, mostly Kirk, who is the the usual viewpoint character of the novel. This does help a lot, as much of the story is more ‘thinky’, and the script just doesn’t find good ways to externalize a lot of feelings in dialogue.

There are two other Enterprise casualties in the novel: Security Officer Phillips is killed/imaged by Vejur during the initial encounters, and apparently this was cut in the movie. Much more notably, there’s the unnamed woman who also dies in the early transporter accident. In the novel, this is filled out, and she is Vice Admiral Lori Ciana, aid to Admiral Nogura (who stays off-screen in the movie and the novel). It’s nice to fill that out a bit, give a more personal cast to the tragedy, but the motivation for why she was there is briefly wondered about and then tossed aside without answer.

So: okay plot, with some good, and needed, fleshing out.

Writing-wise, the novel is good. Mostly because of the inherent shortcomings of the plot, this will never be a high recommendation from me. I also haven’t seen the later versions of the film, but the novel is an improvement over the original cut. (Other than missing out on Goldsmith’s score, and the lingering beauty shots of the USS Enterprise. No matter what you think of that last—and I enjoy it—it sure beats coming out of First Contact and not being sure what the Enterprise-E even looks like.)

There have been suspicions that the novel was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster. This would be logical: He did work on a treatment of the movie, has written a number of movie adaptations, and ghost wrote the novelization of the original Star Wars movie for Lucas. But, people have looked at the prose and determined that is not true, and it is written by Roddenberry himself. I’m not nearly good enough to have an independent opinion, but it does feel like it matches what Roddenberry would consider important. Considering that this is his only long prose work, it might well have been polished by Foster with Roddenberry as the main author.

A final small warning: The 40th Anniversary ebook edition has a complete (and not well formatted) listing of all the various Star Trek books from Pocket, and this takes up the last quarter of the book. I was starting to think the last few chapters must be really long, but it’s just that so much space is taken by advertising everything else.

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J260 Retaking Hill 772

by on March 2, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

After trying out the strike cruiser, Patch and I looked at scenarios from ASL Journal #16. While we were interested in the Capriquet scenarios, the boards weren’t in VASL yet. We ended up with a North Africa scenario with the Americans attacking the board 25 hill. I’ve done this twice in the past, so it was time to get revenge and force Patch to attack into miserable terrain.

An interesting SSR has the cliff hexsides removed, and instead any move over those hexsides is an abrupt elevation change. Nice concept, but I would like a little more guidance. “Abrupt elevation change” normally just means you changed levels at least twice in one move (and then gives you the extra costs for the ‘intermediate’ levels). Moving from Y9 to Y8 seems simple enough – the cliff becomes a double-crest line, and you pay for going up two levels at once. Y9 to X8 is a little trickier: there is a cliff there, but the difference is one level. Do you just assume that there was a non-existent intermediate level, and pay as if you just went from level 1 to 3? (I think yes.) How about IN K5 to K6? Normally, removing the cliff, this is abrupt elevation change, going from level 1 (wadi) to a level 3 hex. But do you again ‘assume’ the cliff hexside (with only a 1 base level difference) is itself assumed to be a two-level change (or at least costs as much as one), and you pay as if you just went up three levels?

Most of the time, the complicated part doesn’t come up. And the Italians have five squads, a 75mm ART, and light fortifications (12 mines, two wire and a pillbox for the Gun). The ART must face west (towards the American setup) on level 4. Since the American attack comes down the length of the board, the Italians get a choice setting up forward with better LOS, or back, with not a lot of LOS outside of other level 4 Locations.

I went for a forward set up, hoping to force the Americans out of the center and out of CA, and then have to deal with the hill they just got off of.


First try.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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The Hussite Wars 1419-36

by on February 26, 2026 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I accidentally bought this from Osprey in the ePub format, and confirmed my suspicion that that is a poor choice for the heavily illustrated Osprey books. If you want electronic format, for them I recommend PDF so that the formatting is intact. (Especially when they make reference to an illustration ‘on page 30’….)

The Hussite Wars are a subject I’ve wanted to get a little more depth on since running across it in Terrance Wise’s Medieval Warfare. As to be expected, this is a nice step up from that, though far from any sort of in-depth study. First published in 2004, this Men-at-Arms volume feels like a much earlier release with nearly half the text being a history of the wars, and the reproduction of a single older map to show the area of the conflict.

Now, the history is a large part of what I wanted, so that’s actually the right call here. The general nature of the “heresy” is gone into, and the general groups that got involved. There’s a lot more background that could be given there, but it’s a very fine line between interest and overburdened, but I will say that Sigismund of Luxembourg needs more fleshing out as the opportunistic figure that much of this revolved around. Also, the chronology mentions George of Poděbrady as the one Hussite King of Bohemia (after the scope of the book), but he gets a bare paragraph at the very end of the history, mentioning another war (dismissed in one sentence), and not mentioning that he had taken part in earlier battles. The weakest point of the book is that all the battles and sieges are handled very briefly, with no diagrams for them, and just that one overloaded map to refer to (and a photograph of a display at the Hussite Museum of the Battle of Sudomer).

The military section of the book starts strongly by pointing out the various contingents inevitably brought in by the declaration of five different crusades against the Hussites. After that, it gets a bit general, but there isn’t a whole lot of direct evidence for what a lot of the troops looked like. It is pointed out that on the noble end Italian armor styles still held sway, and points out that the period covers from Agincourt (1415) to Jeanne ‘d Arc (1430s), and their changes in equipment. The Hussites had largely peasant armies, and a bit is gone into with their weaponry, and the expected discipline ordered by Jan Zizka. A couple of good pages gives what common peasant dress was like at the time.

There is of course a good section on the war wagons employed to great effect by the Hussites, and the main defining feature of the war. Photographs of a reconstruction of one of these are provided (along with one of a model), and a section view, all from the Hussite Museum in Tabor. I find it a bit hard to believe, mostly because it doesn’t look anything like the stereotypical “cart” fixed in the imagination that it presumably derived from. But, I’m sure there’s been lots of arguments on the way to this reconstruction, and frankly it would have to look something like this to do the things that it had to do (also, seeing one ‘on the move’ would have been a plus). There’s also a good section on guns and artillery, as this is one of the first wars in Europe where we know they were used. This section is decidedly informative, and though similar information on early guns is elsewhere, here it is in context of a war where they were certainly used.

This is one of the later volumes featuring Angus McBride’s art, and sadly has none of his more ambitious pieces. The cover uses a cropped version of one of the betters (as art), but they are all informative, including one giving an idea of a war wagon in use, which points up disparity in what it seems one would hold, and what sources say were assigned to it (I’d be willing to believe that the latter was more what weapons they carried, for distribution when setting up for battle). As usual, there’s plenty of well reproduced black-and-white photographs, and the commentary for the color plates are very informative on the visual end.

There’s a lot more that could be said, and no hints that any of it has been (of course it has, though probably not in English). But it’s not really the place of a 48-page book to go into it anyway. Overall, it delivers pretty much what you’d expect from a Men-at-Arms book: Enough history to get you going, and enough of the military details to get a sense of the fighting, and maybe do some miniatures gaming, if that’s your inclination.

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