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I mean, that book ARC LIGHT was pretty good.
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Aug 2, 2017 02:07
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Potato Salad posted:Old stuff like The Cardinal of the Kremlin can be great The lesbian subplot not well I'd imagine.
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Aug 2, 2017 02:16
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Mazz posted:You should read Red Storm Rising You could literally skip every part that starts with "Iceland" and lose nothing of value. Blind Rasputin posted:I mean, that book ARC LIGHT was pretty good. Except for the part where one of the wives stateside has to drive through an active fallout zone on a highway - in a Miata, as I recall - and CHiPS tells her "just close your A/C vents." Other than that, it has one of the best-written limited counterforce exchanges I've ever read in a technothriller. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 02:28
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Blind Rasputin posted:I mean, that book ARC LIGHT was pretty good. I just reread Arc Light and it is good. Protect and Serve and Invasion...not so much.
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Aug 2, 2017 02:30
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Tythas posted:None of these books are as bad a the wingman series by Mack Maloney where the main character flies the only modern plane left in the world which happens to be a Thunderbirds F-16 which he modified to have 6 guns and more missile pylons Come to the Let's Read thread. We have such wonders to show you. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3804298
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Aug 2, 2017 02:34
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BIG HEADLINE posted:You could literally skip every part that starts with "Iceland" and lose nothing of value. Nah while the side story is poo poo and dumb the B1s and MiG-29 parts are okay. It's not so long as to be problematic, I didn't even remember most of it until this thread discussed it one time.
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Aug 2, 2017 02:37
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If we're talking about bad books we should complain about Dale Brown. Pretty sure he had a book where they fitting lasers to drone b-1b's to shoot down north korean missiles or something of that nature. All I can really remember from when he went insane was the book where russia nukes the us and the LIBERAL president refuses to counter attack because they deserved it or something, and the couragous air force general and former president (or something equally dumb) have to invade russia on their own. Probably with drone b-1's and stealth b-52's or something. BIG HEADLINE posted:Except for the part where one of the wives stateside has to drive through an active fallout zone on a highway - in a Miata, as I recall - and CHiPS tells her "just close your A/C vents." Other than that, it has one of the best-written limited counterforce exchanges I've ever read in a technothriller. I guess i'm missing some context, but that's not terrible advice, so long as you never, ever open the vents again.
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Aug 2, 2017 03:33
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Mr. Despair posted:If we're talking about bad books we should complain about Dale Brown. Pretty sure he had a book where they fitting lasers to drone b-1b's to shoot down north korean missiles or something of that nature. Much like Clancy, Brown had several really good books before going off the deep end. In Brown's case, the issue was less liberals in general (one of the major antagonist Presidents out-Tea Parties the Tea Party years before the movement started) but isolationists. I stopped reading him after a certain point I don't quite remember (the last book I remember had a supergenius child and some sort of magic disintegrator bomb), so he may have gotten worse later on. Which is a shame - his early books were quite reasonable, and a few of his ideas wound up as actual proposals.
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Aug 2, 2017 03:40
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Mr. Despair posted:If we're talking about bad books we should complain about Dale Brown. Pretty sure he had a book where they fitting lasers to drone b-1b's to shoot down north korean missiles or something of that nature. I got Dale Brown and Dan Brown (of The Da Vinci Code) mixed up momentarily and got really goddamn confused.
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Aug 2, 2017 03:59
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Mr. Despair posted:I guess i'm missing some context, but that's not terrible advice, so long as you never, ever open the vents again. The Russians nuked March AFB and she had to drive up I-215, which goes *right through the middle of it*. Plus as I recall, she had her kid with her. And yeah, the full advice should have been, "close your A/C vents, then burn your car once you're through."
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Aug 2, 2017 04:03
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pthighs posted:Apropos of nothing, here's a link to the C++ coding standards document for the JSF project: http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf gently caress yes, tabs to be avoided, suck it Richard Hendricks!!
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Aug 2, 2017 04:16
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priznat posted:gently caress yes, tabs to be avoided, suck it Richard Hendricks!! God drat space people. This is why we can't have nice things.
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Aug 2, 2017 04:18
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Anyone who hasn't read Dale Brown should read Flight of the Old Dog and if you don't like it then you might as well not touch a single page of his other books. As airport fiction, and with an eye to high school nostalgia, read Flight first and then read: Day of the Cheetah, Sky Masters, Night of the Hawk, Shadows of Steel, Fatal Terrain. The Tin Man is where he starts to go into excessive crazy with tangents into non-flying things for the genre and would not recommend at all.
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Aug 2, 2017 04:21
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Plinkey posted:God drat space people. This is why we can't have nice things. I'll see you burn in helllllll! (That doc is interesting btw)
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Aug 2, 2017 04:21
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Also to anyone who likes Red Storm Rising, and works in a job where you can listen to podcasts/audiobooks. The audiobooks version is 31 hours long and quite enjoyable. Good long use of Audible credit if you have one.
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Aug 2, 2017 04:25
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Probably one of the worst military fiction books I've ever read was "The Intruders," which was a *sequel* to Flight of the Intruder, and then, because I obviously hadn't had enough, I read "Fortunes of War," where Japan becomes a pseudo-Imperial fascist power again and decides to beat up Russia, and there are F-22s with ~chameleon skin~ against newfangled "Zeros." There's also a scene where the Russians sneak a Kilo-class submarine into Yokosuka and blow up an LNG tanker with an RPG (despite having, you know, *torpedoes*), as well as take 100MT bombs from a 'super sekret underwater sub pen' to generate a tsunami.
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Aug 2, 2017 04:27
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Probably one of the worst military fiction books I've ever read was "The Intruders," which was a *sequel* to Flight of the Intruder, and then, because I obviously hadn't had enough, I read "Fortunes of War," where Japan becomes a pseudo-Imperial fascist power again and decides to beat up Russia, and there are F-22s with ~chameleon skin~ against newfangled "Zeros." There's also a scene where the Russians sneak a Kilo-class submarine into Yokosuka and blow up an LNG tanker with an RPG (despite having, you know, *torpedoes*), as well as take 100MT bombs from a 'super sekret underwater sub pen' to generate a tsunami. So you didn't like The Intruders because Fortunes of War was terrible?
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Aug 2, 2017 04:38
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McNally posted:So you didn't like The Intruders because Fortunes of War was terrible? No, I read The Intruders well before Fortunes of War - the former came out in 1994 and the latter in 1998. They're both by Stephen Coonts. Fortunes of War had some interesting guesses at future warfare in it that proved slightly prescient, though. One of the more insufferable parts of "The Intruders" is Jake Grafton's new BN being a black guy with a chip on his shoulder who spends a quarter of the book acting stereotypically 'ghetto' to ~test~ Grafton, and when he finally drops the act, it's still an insufferable read. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 04:44
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BIG HEADLINE posted:No, I read The Intruders well before Fortunes of War - the former came out in 1994 and the latter in 1998. They're both by Stephen Coonts. Fortunes of War had some interesting guesses at future warfare in it that proved slightly prescient, though. My memory tells me that he just acted like a "Marines are second class citizens in the Navy" stereotype for one flight to test Grafton and his stereotypically ghetto act was just his actual insufferable personality and the book was pretty good if you ignored him when they weren't flying.
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Aug 2, 2017 04:50
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tangy yet delightful posted:Anyone who hasn't read Dale Brown should read Flight of the Old Dog and if you don't like it then you might as well not touch a single page of his other books. As airport fiction, and with an eye to high school nostalgia, read Flight first and then read: Day of the Cheetah, Sky Masters, Night of the Hawk, Shadows of Steel, Fatal Terrain. tangy yet delightful posted:The Tin Man is where he starts to go into excessive crazy with tangents into non-flying things for the genre and would not recommend at all.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:03
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tangy yet delightful posted:Anyone who hasn't read Dale Brown should read Flight of the Old Dog and if you don't like it then you might as well not touch a single page of his other books. As airport fiction, and with an eye to high school nostalgia, read Flight first and then read: Day of the Cheetah, Sky Masters, Night of the Hawk, Shadows of Steel, Fatal Terrain. Which book has a ship sunk by intentionally de-orbiting a surveillance satellite into it? Because that's the only one I read and all I remember is that, a character who drank pop by the gallon, and ballasting a 747 through a missile lunch with a rolling tank of jet fuel.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:08
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BIG HEADLINE posted:You could literally skip every part that starts with "Iceland" and lose nothing of value. Mr. Despair posted:If we're talking about bad books we should complain about Dale Brown. Pretty sure he had a book where they fitting lasers to drone b-1b's to shoot down north korean missiles or something of that nature. They said Mazda but not Miata, and mentioned her looking back at the child seat. E: Tabs in code are a scourge upon humanity only rivaled by mutable globals and the goto. goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 05:18
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FrozenVent posted:Which book has a ship sunk by intentionally de-orbiting a surveillance satellite into it? Sky Masters, except the ship wasn't sunk but merely crippled.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:22
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Dead Reckoning posted:
of course it makes sense once you find out it's all part of a secret plot to actually steal f-117s!
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Aug 2, 2017 05:27
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goatsestretchgoals posted:They said Mazda but not Miata, and mentioned her looking back at the child seat. Given that I last read it in my sophomore year of high school, which was easily 20 years ago, I give my brain credit for remembering it was a Mazda *anything* and that there was a kid in the car. I checked it out from the local library and don't own a copy.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:38
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priznat posted:I'll see you burn in helllllll! I am like 90% sure that's the doc we used for B1 radar development. I read over the first 30 pages or so and it was all really familiar. Of course someone back in the day wrote the IDE and compiler as a custom job, so it was a huge pain in the rear end to use. e: Also basically it was all more or less refactored to the standards after it passed flight test, no one really wrote code that way from the get-go. (then obviously retested again) Plinkey fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 05:45
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I read all of Tom Clancy's books up to The Bear and The Dragon; I would say that man needed someone to teach him about Chekhov's Gun, but he'd probably just end up writing a four-page, borderline pornographic description of it as it hung on the wall. ...and was never fired.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:45
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Holy poo poo you loving nerds
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Aug 2, 2017 05:50
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I have only read Hunt for Red October and after reading this thread for many years I can say unequivocally that I made the Right Choice.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:56
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Plinkey posted:I am like 90% sure that's the doc we used for B1 radar development. I read over the first 30 pages or so and it was all really familiar. It was neat seeing references to Green Hills probes etc, we use those at work. Every once in a while myself or someone else who is feeling frisky tries to put together a coding standards doc but because we are mostly a hardware shop using TCL for automation it goes nowhere because lol TCL
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Aug 2, 2017 05:56
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BIG HEADLINE posted:No, I read The Intruders well before Fortunes of War - the former came out in 1994 and the latter in 1998. They're both by Stephen Coonts. Fortunes of War had some interesting guesses at future warfare in it that proved slightly prescient, though. I always found The Intruders to be an interesting book because it completely goes against the grain of the genre. It's not really a thriller, there isn't much action (except for some bit with pirates?). Instead you get the feeling Coonts was trying to write his great book about life in the post-Vietnam 70's malaise Navy, and didn't get there because he's Stephen Coonts.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:04
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priznat posted:It was neat seeing references to Green Hills probes etc, we use those at work. Every once in a while myself or someone else who is feeling frisky tries to put together a coding standards doc but because we are mostly a hardware shop using TCL for automation it goes nowhere because lol TCL oh my god, I'm so sorry for you.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:10
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I swear one of the Jake Grafton sequels had as his nemesis an evil Iranian F-14 pilot (like, he literally grabs random women off the street and rapes them for fun). It was too over-the-top for a Hot Shots movie villain for God's sake. Am I remembering that correctly? Also I suspect rogue use of tabs is the cause of F-22 oxygen issues as well as EMALS and probably the LCS to boot. Also lol TCL.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:26
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Seriously. Been a constant "well everything we've coded is in tcl so far and it would be a pain in the rear end to redo everything.." Pain now or pain later, I say..
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Aug 2, 2017 07:02
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Mazz posted:a missile defense shield that compacted the atmosphere into a wall of air or something.
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Aug 2, 2017 12:34
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Tythas posted:None of these books are as bad a the wingman series by Mack Maloney where the main character flies the only modern plane left in the world which happens to be a Thunderbirds F-16 which he modified to have 6 guns and more missile pylons It's an F-16XL now!
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Aug 2, 2017 12:44
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I only read 2 Cussler novels, I wasn't impressed. Does he insert himself as a character into every novel like the 2 I read?
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Aug 2, 2017 13:00
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yes
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Aug 2, 2017 13:04
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Let me tell you about my favorite military series by John Ringo...no wait, come back! I was only kidding. 
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Aug 2, 2017 13:07
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Back Hack posted:Let me tell you about my favorite military series by John Ringo...no wait, come back! I was only kidding. the linked thread to where that dude did an analysis of one of Ringos books was both one of the most hilarious and one of the most cringe worthy things I have ever read in my life
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Aug 2, 2017 14:46
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