I remember the days when you could get a hundredweight of hand-picked sim and wargaming news delivered to your door by a man in a tailcoat and a velvet top hat for sixpence. Now look at us. You, peering into your digilink screen like a person who’s dropped their monocle into a bowl of consommé. Me, stripped to the waist in a bomb-damaged Pat Garrett, shovelling raw press releases into the maw of a humming Wordshine 6000. If this is progress, you can keep it! Want to know what 777, Panther Games, Old Brown Dog, and John Tiller Software are up to at the moment? Unplug yourself and head down to the abandoned liquorice processing plant on Canal Street. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. Read the rest of this entry »
A flurry of local airshows and BoB commemorative events meant Spitfires and Hurricanes were regular visitors to my corner of Southern England this summer. Seeing six Messerschmitt maulers fly over in formation on September 15 really should have been my aviation highlight of the season, but that accolade actually goes to an encounter a few days earlier when, tramping along a Wiltshire footpath, I was repeatedly buzzed by a P-40 intent on entertaining crowds at a nearby display. The sound of a Merlin in full spate is a wonderful thing, but the whistle-threaded roar of Lulu Belle’s supercharged Allison V-12 left me beaming like a lottery winner. Read the rest of this entry »
No man is a Britten-Norman Islander entire of itself; Every Manston is a piece of the continent, a part of the main plane; If a CLOD be washed away by the Sea Fury, Eurofighter is the less, as Wellington as if a promontory were, as Wellington as any manor of thy little friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes Me 262, because I am involved in Grummankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the Bell JetRanger VTOLs; it VTOLs for thee.
Forestry was one of the industries the Industrial Revolution forgot. The tools used by a British forestry worker at the start of the Twentieth Century would have been instantly recognizable to a forestry worker of 1700. It would be another two decades before the oil dripping, smoke breathing dragon of progress appeared in the UK’s pine stands and oak woods. First came the lumbering tractor, then the chainsaw, an increasingly portable petrol-fuelled marvel that quickly saw off the crosscut saw and eventually banished the axe too. Finally, in the 1990s, something truly remarkable arrived. A machine that, in favourable terrain, made a hard-working chainsaw flourisher look like a hopeless slacker, an anachronism, an irrelevance. Read the rest of this entry »
Are you ‘feature complete’ yet? Have you written that novel, made that parachute jump, found that special someone? By my calculations my own personal beta test still has about 250 years left to run. Circa 2264 the handful of people that backed my 1970 Kickstarter campaign will get an email thanking them for their patience. The email will include the following changelog.
Today’s column bestrides Europe like an unusually colossal colossus. Quite why an unusually colossal colossus would be standing with one foot on Fort William, Scotland and the other on Volgograd, Russia is, frankly, anybody’s guess. He could be doing his pre-breakfast callisthenics. He could be admiring the Northern Lights. He might have got a sudden urge to urinate on Finland or Algeria. There’s just no way of knowing for sure. Read the rest of this entry »
