Rab's Geekly Digest

Oh my, how exciting is the new Star Wars trailer? The first new films set in a galaxy far, far away since 1983...


As a warm up, the two Academy Pilots and I had a dogfight through an asteroid field. I had Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon, with Chewie as co-pilot. They had five Ties between them, split into two flights (one of three Black Squadron pilots, one of two Obsidian Squadron). This gave them 61 points and me 51 points - a reasonable handicap as it would turn out. I had to collect three containers using the Steal action before leaving from my starting corner without being destroyed. To keep them interested, we decided that if all their own squadron was destroyed, they'd get two back at their original entry point as reinforcements.


Piloting was difficult (we had two starter sets worth of 'roids), and it was the first time I'd flown the Falcon, usually being relegated to the role of faceless baddies being vaporised by the named heroes of the Rebel Alliance. That big base makes skipping around obstacles rather tricky and I was rather embarrassingly grounded a couple of times.

"Alright, Chewie, pun...." *fizz* *crackle*

The handicap proved perfect, with only some expert and self-sacrificial flying from the sole survivor of Black Sqdn allowing the last Black Sqdn pilot to get the final shot required to blow the old girl to pieces.

Some good flying from the little tykes, over what was quite a long game, including a couple of really neat pincer movements. Next time's handicap will be smaller....

From reggiestake.com

May the force be with you,
Rab

Ok, three days late, but that's still under 1% of the way to the next one so I'm going to claim it anyway. I had a lot of fun, was the subject of much generosity, and generally felt feted, feasted and well-loved. Nice!

There was even a rare outburst of gaming giftage from my parents who got me the first hit of a new drug starter set of the Star Wars: X-Wing miniatures game. It. Is. Totally. Awesome! Seriously, I love it, and so do the two boys, despite them never having watched the films (the younger one isn't ready yet but it would cause more strife than it's worth to show it just to the elder). They picked it up quickly (the mechanics are simple) and even pulled off a frankly excellent feint and pounce manoeuvre between them in a pair of x-wings through an asteroid field that allowed them both to double-team and evaporate my lead TIE while remaining out of any return fire arcs. Curses!

The only downside to the game I have found so far is the delicacy of the laser cannons on the x-wings. I had a real scare when one of them got stuck on its peg and when it came off I'd knocked a cannon skew. Cannon duly fixed, I decided to "improve" the stands...

First, fleet and tools assembled - clippers, scalpel, superglue, and 2mm pin-vise.

Click play to hear Epica's soundtrack for this post...

 

As Molesworth and any other fule kno, space is really big. So big that any light we see from distant stars has been travelling a very long time. So when you look at the night sky and spy a cluster of stars, you're seeing a galaxy far, far away as it was a long time ago. And we all know what that means - lasers, spaceships, jedi, evil empires, pewpewpewpew!

There's a particularly beautiful swirl of stars that fall within what sailors and airmen in the northern hemisphere have often used for navigation called the "summer triangle" and looks like this when snapped by Hubble:

The brightest stars are between 16 and 35,000 light years away. I reckon 35,000 years counts as a long time ago. Perhaps if we all look really carefully....