ATTACK TERROR ZEPPELIN

I have no idea how long this will stay here, but for the time being enjoy a documentary on zeppelins.

I've always loved airships. So it deeply saddens me that the only form of air transportation today is stuffy, cramped airplanes. People flew in style in the past;  they had big, luxurious balloons to travel in, fine dining and spacious cabins. You didn't arrive as quickly as you would in a jet, but you didn't have to; not when the journey was half the reason for traveling.

While lighter-than-air vehicles are making something of a comeback, there's still plenty of bias against them. People hold onto this belief that zeppelins are just flying tanks of napalm, ready to go up in flames at a moments notice. But as that video shows that simply is not the case.

The problem is that the worst zeppelin disaster in history was probably also the most well documented. It completely transformed the public's perception of these machines, souring their opinion of them virtually overnight. Any mention of airships or zeppelins inevitably recalls it's name: Hindenburg.

Cruise ships are constantly coming back to harbor full of people suffering from food-borne diseases, but people still go on cruises. There are countless car crashes on the road every day, but we still use them. If your average passenger jet's engines fail it's going to start falling out of the sky. So why do airships get such a bad reputation?

If a zeppelin's engines suddenly fail it'll stay in the air. It will start drifting, but it's not like it's going to drop out of the sky. Because it's a zeppelin. It's buoyant.

The frustrating thing is that all the problems associated with the Hindenburg are easily rectified using modern technology: Don't use hydrogen gas, don't use flammable paint. Easy. Problem solved.

If the Hindenburg were rebuilt today using helium gas it would probably be the safest thing in the air (and that's including birds). Hydrogen was the fatal flaw in all old zeppelin designs. If they used slightly more massive helium they wouldn't have any problems with flammable gas leaks. To the contrary, they would be nigh-indestructible.

If you haven't seen the video all the way though, the British eventually learned how to destroy the German zeppelins using alternating explosive and incendiary ammo to punch large holes in the gas bags. This would let enough oxygen inside to start a fire. Using concentrated fire, they could ignite the hydrogen, resulting in the complete conflagration of the airship. You know what would foil that plan? Helium.

If they used helium gas it would be impossible to fill those zeppelins with enough bullets to bring them down. They would bomb all of London with complete impunity and no one could do anything to stop them.

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad London isn't a smoking crater. I just feel the need to point out a rigid airship full of helium is basically indestructible. Last time I checked, the 747 can't boast indestructibility.

Menaced Assassin

Ordinarily I try to avoid advertisements, going so far as to get AdBlock on my browser. But these simply cannot be ignored. I haven't bothered to check when these were created, but they're Volkswagen ads emphasizing the low fuel consumption of their car. Now there's plenty of ways to tell your audience how efficient your car is, most of them obnoxious. But thankfully whatever agency designed these decided to forgo the smarmy voice overs and wide shots of boring sedans and decided to make surrealist posters showing off this model's fuel efficiency. Doing so in probably the most roundabout and abstract way possible.

Imitating the styles of Salvador Dali and René Magritte no less.

I like how you don't even get to see what the car looks like, only a silhouette that suggests it. I wish more advertisements were this creative, especially car ads which seem to be exactly the same no matter what. They actually do a good job of imitating Dali and Magritte's styles too. The soft amorphous muscle texture and ants in the first, the repetitive clouds and blue sky in the second are all pretty easy to recognize.

Tower Power

As I alluded to about a month ago, I've been helping Ramzca design a tabletop role-playing game, which takes place in the mystical city of Adelphon. The goal was to combine film noir-style detective fiction with a setting similar to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. The result I was hoping for was a setting that was at once dark and brooding but almost paradoxically bright and colorful. In my mind I imagined Adelphon to be constantly sunny, every street was a winding cobblestone path and every building was a beautiful French villa, their facades covered in lush green ivy.

At least that's why I hoped for. But alas, Adelphon isn't so much a city as it is a war zone now. See, Ramzca has been playing a lot of World War II games recently and it's obvious from talking to him in Steam Chat that it's affecting his thinking. As a result every question he comes to me with about the setting isn't about local culture or the history of the city. It's about how many pieces of military equipment he can cram into the campaign and how many landmarks he can demolish. Every discussion we have devolves into talk about nebelwerfers or battleships appearing to destroy the city in one fell swoop. He's even alluded to actual Germans invading Adelphon, which really has nothing to do with the story as I understand it.

Basically, he's systematically ignored every suggestion I've made. Plus, I'm all but certain he's forgotten that the main characters were supposed to be telepathic (he's actually told me he's removed some elements of gameplay involved with telepathy in order to focus more on gunplay). The result is less "Quasi-Mystic Detective Fiction" that I was promised and more "Alternate History World War II". At the very least I was able to convince him to make our version of The Germans into giant inter-dimensional crabs so at least there's that small victory.

His strategic undermining of my work is never more obvious then what he plans to do to the setting as a whole. I don't mind telling you that I spent a fair chunk of time coming up with a rough cosmology for this game, drawing maps of this city according to his specifications and giving it a personality, a history. He plans to ignore all that, totally remove the city of Adelphon from the game and have it all take place inside a flak tower.

It goes without saying that this is totally outrageous.

Granted, while this change flies in the face of everything I planned for the setting it's at least a change with some serious potential. For those not in the know, the flak towers, or die Flaktürme, were truly enormous concrete fortresses built in Hamberg, Berlin and Vienna around 1940. As Wikipedia will tell you, the flaktowers were used by the Luftwaffe as defense against enemy bombers and served as air-raid shelters during the war, arguably doing their job too well.

Hitler himself was deeply involved in their design and construction, insisting that they be huge and well armored. In a mere six months the first flak towers were built. It was such a Herculean undertaking that the entire national rail system had to be rescheduled to divert concrete, steel and lumber to the construction sites. The result? Huge, diabolical towers with walls of 3.5 meter thick concrete, bristling with anti-aircraft guns that could fire at a rate of 8000 rounds per minute from multiple levels of the tower with a full three-hundred sixty degree range of vision. Under extreme duress, the towers could house around 10,000 civilians and even a fully stocked hospital ward. They were for all intents and purposes nigh-indomitable.

When the RAF flew bombing runs over Germany they did everything they could to simply avoid the towers altogether. It was simply futile to try and crack through their superior armor. When the Soviets invaded Berlin they had to maneuver around the towers because they simply could not inflict any damage on them, not even with their cartoonishly oversized 203 millimeter howitzer cannons. Plus, the soldiers inside the towers eventually turned their anti-aircraft guns to fire at targets on the ground, turning the ground around the towers to a blasted wasteland from which there was no escape. Eventually, their reign of terror did come to an end, not because the Soviets were actually able to break through the concrete, but because they finally ran out of supplies and eventually surrendered on their own volition. It could only be assumed that if they managed to start pumpkin farms on top of the towers they might still be there today.

In fact, the towers are still there today, simply because the effort needed to tear them down would be too much work. Theoretically, an RAF Grand Slam bomb would be enough to tear down the G-Tower in Berlin, but the sheer explosive yield from it's detonation would probably be enough to demolish the rest of Berlin with it.

They were nothing short of modern-day castle keeps constructed from sheer malevolence.



So yes, I stand by my opinion that moving the game's setting from a sunny sea port town to an irresistible tower of doom to be deviating from the original plan just a bit.

But I know what you're thinking; "Where would this impenetrable tower of evil be exactly?". Space apparently. Not anywhere in particular in space, just floating around in a nebular void of some kind. One can't help but feel like he hasn't exactly thought this through. Much like another totalitarian dictator I can mention.