…Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Harvey has written a number of articles on airpower history, but this is something completely different. It’s a history of the notion that the organisation of human societies resemble human bodies, and in some way therefore work in the same way. Hobbes’s Leviathan is probably the most famous example, but it wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the last….
…pretty well, but I’ll add that it is illustrated throughout, and the ‘constructive details’ include, for example, pilots’ notes for Voisins, Shorts and Farmans, and there is an unsigned article on ‘Human flight from the military point of view’. Compiled by the staff of The Motor in April or May 1910, judging from a list of flights with a duration of an hour or longer at the back. Actually a facsimile edition published in 1972, which retains the or…
…war. My point here is a bit complex, and I will state it slowly: that all human endeavour is prone to be marred by sin; that even when that endeavour is justified overall, as I think the war against Hitler was, it will contain elements of immorality; but that those elements need not corrupt the enterprise as a whole. So when we come to commemorate the dead of the two world wars next month, we should allow ourselves to feel shame alongside pride….
…nt on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western Front battles of 1917: To Flanders Fields, 1917. It’s maintained by a group of AWM curators and historians: Peter Burness, Craig Tibbitts, Shaune Lakin and Anne-Marie Condé. That’s all I was going to mention, but I noticed that the AWM has set up a subdomain called blog.awm.gov.au,…
…omething a bit different. It’s a paper model aeroplane which I made from a design published on 30 June 1934 in “Boys and Girls”, the weekly children’s supplement to the Daily Mail. The claim is made there that it glides, but sadly all mine does is stall and then enter a tailspin … but perhaps somebody taking greater care in making the model will have greater success! A PDF of the plan can be downloaded from here (size 1.4 Mb) and then printed out…
…choices to be made about the maps, the counters, and most importantly the rules. How do this? While I have a reasonable amount of experience playing wargames, I have none designing them. One thing Sabin suggests is starting with an existing game on a related topic, and adapting it to suit or at least borrowing useful elements. Now, as far as I know, there aren’t any other wargames simulating the knock-out blow, or for that matter strategic aerial…
…ay in it, should be unambiguously and publicly stated. That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasised that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensi…
…fact, having just looked at “As Easy..” for the first time in years, I’m struck by how cruel the ending is. Another curious point is that Kipling’s airship is propelled by what seems to be a nuclear reactor… Brett Holman Yes, I can see the parallels with the empire, which was bound together with Red Routes, telegraph cables, railway lines. And the language of “Night mail” is pretty obviously meant to evoke both railways and shipping. But the ABC…
…eroplanes than with politics! (But the P.B.1 must have been about the only design of his which looked nice; everything else he designed was ugly as sin.) Jakob P-B is should be showing up in my masters thesis as one of the voices castigating the Royal Aircraft Factory for producing supposedly obsolete aircraft. I am probably biased and influenced by David Edgerton’s work, but it does seem that the far-right aviation enthusiasts were mostly absolut…
…ome’, ‘clean’ and ‘rocks’! Brett Holman Thanks guys (on behalf of Tarski’s designers!) Clean is definitely what I was looking for. There are still a few things I can play with, but only one thing that I really think needs to change — the way there is so much whitespace between the post and the comments, if the post is short (ie like this one). First time I looked at it I wondered where the comments had gone … hopefully there is a way around tha…
