Book Review: Ramage's Challenge

There have been several commercially successful attempts to fill the niche left by C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels.
Most obvious these days are Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, which generally have a better period feel than the competition, but leave me wondering if they're actually really good or just horribly pretentious.
Alexander Kent's Bolitho novels are less ambitious in a literary sense, and cover our hero's whole career as a clone of Nelson, but are, err, not all that good.
Then there are Dudley Pope's Ramage novels, following the adventures of Nicholas Ramage, son of the Earl of Blazey, etc from lieutenant to skipper of a 74 gun ship-of-the-line. Although there was always a touch of Conan the Sailor in the Ramage books, and his merry crew of loyal cliches were notable for never taking any casualties, I liked it that the stories individually covered only short periods of time and were in themselved relatively unambitious. (Although the death toll in French frigates over the series is quite absurd).
Then, over the last couple of days, I read Ramage's Challenge, one of the later books in the series.
Seriously disappointing.
I'm wondering if all the others are really just as bad or if Pope was just off his game here. The infodump on Italian history, Italian geography, how to load a gun and whatever is painfully intrusive (the writer clearly loves this part of the world). The sheer wonderfulness of the hero (and the way nearly everyone, from lowest seaman to admiral, recognises this) is tedious. The story lacks anything resembling a surprise.
Maybe I'm just complaining that the book achieves nothing but what it set out to do, be a simple Napoleonic War naval adventure.

Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought

Well, this blog was to be about my hobby interests, mainly teeny little ships for wargaming purposes, rather than me oozing opinions and comment on everything that comes to mind.
But, here I am, fluffing on about something I found on the net and found to be rather cool. Fortunately, in all likelihood no-one but me and Google's webspiders will ever read this.
Anyway, not long ago, there was a civil trial in Britain where the writers of some "history" book claimed that the bestselling religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was ripped off from their work. I haven't read the books, and have no plans to, but was vaguely amused to read that the the judge, Mr Justice Peter Smith, had inserted a coded message in his judgement as a gentle piss-take on those behind the case. Which turns out to be naval in nature (the heading of this post) and so perhaps not entirely off-topic for my blog.
But that's not what caught my eye. A link I followed reading the article turned out to be the actual judgement. And, err, it was quite good. Despite having a typical sneering attitude to lawyers (1) I found it readable, sensible and interesting despite my lack of interest in the subject and it showed a pleasing willingness by Smith to allow his personality and interests show through. (And I share many of his interests, it seems).

(1) Why do they now use lawyers for scientific experiments? Because there are some things rats won't do.

"This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone..."

Not long after Dungeons and Dragons, in 1977 or so, came Traveller, a science-fiction role-playing game from Game Designers' Workshop, substituting adventuring across the stars for the D&D dungeon crawl. In time, over multiple editions and several publishers, it grew from a simple set of generic rules to detail the Third Imperium and its neighbours over thousands of years, and despite the occaisional nasty internal contradiction (never mind how this 1977ish world doesn't match the real universe) I remain fond of it.
Of course, I haven't played the game, or any of its wargaming spin-offs, for years. But this doesn't stop me buying the odd book and, this time, a starship miniature: a Beowulf class Free Trader, the sort of cheap and rugged transport Han Solo or Mal Reynolds might fly.
There have been Traveller miniatures before, even Free Traders, but this is a new model in (annoyingly) a new scale from Mega Miniatures. Mine came from Noble Knight Games, Mega don't sell direct, retaining a touching (and, I suspect, ultimately doomed) faith in the ability of the gaming distributors and stores to get their product out.
The master model is nice, casting is okay but slightly pitted in places and there is a slight miscast at the top of one of the fuel skimming intakes that will want puttying. And it's not particularly cheap at $USD11.99. But the Beowulf goes back to the original Traveller boxed set, with it's distress message "This is Free Trader Beowulf.." in white letters on the black box, and I wanted one...