Month: December 2016

YouTube screen grab

Chances are that anyone in their 50s or older will remember watching Apollo 11 land on the Moon. And while younger people may not envy your age, many of us sure do wish we had witnessed that bit of history live—human beings landing on, then exploring another world, right before our eyes.

Thanks to documentaries and YouTube, the younger set can experience some of the flavor of the late 1960s today, as well as what the Moon landing meant at the time to America and the world. The zeitgeist of hope and possibility might perhaps best be captured in a CBS News discussion on July 20, 1969—Apollo 11 landing day. Hosted by the inimitable Walter Cronkite, the great newsman interviewed science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein about the implications of NASA's achievement. The program featured a discussion just after the landing, with a second segment following the first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

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There is one exception to the early history of GW licenses though: Space Hulk. Released a few months before Doom in 1993 on the PC, it was a visionary translation of the English tabletop company's board game of the same name. You controlled four genetically altered super-soldiers as they explored a massive, drifting spacecraft full of ravenous, purple Xenomorph analogues called genestealers. Space Hulk is still fondly remembered for being wildly ambitious, combining the nascent FPS genre with then-unheard-of real-time tactics, as players switched between space marines on the fly.

And though a forgettable turn-based tactical port of the board game was released in 2013 to the briefest of sighs from ageing fans, it's Space Hulk: Deathwing that's the direct successor of GW's formative digital bright spot, 23 years later. The hype, at least amongst the faithful, was high, as was the fear that the developers (a union between two French teams in Cyanide and Streum On Studio) would maintain the tradition of creating a mighty flop, a fear which worsened when the game's release date was pushed back by a week or so at the last minute.

Sadly, those fears were warranted. Deathwing is a huge missed opportunity of a game, one that's riddled with bugs, crashes, and unreasonably thirsty system requirements.

(credit: Don McCullough)

The French postal service has been given the go-ahead to start delivering parcels using drones.

France's airspace regulator, the General Directorate for Civil Aviation, cleared the drones for take off. But that doesn't mean French skies will suddenly be abuzz with unmanned aircraft—at present, the drones will only work on a prescribed nine-mile route once a week in the southern region of Provence, as a feasibility test for the tech and regulations.

The trial is being run by DPDgroup, an international subsidiary of French national postal service Le Groupe La Poste. The drone will travel from a pickup point in Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume to Pourrières in the Var department, a region that has been chosen because it hosts a number of start-up companies, including a dozen specialising in tech.

Enlarge (credit: European Space Agency)

The European Space Agency is trialling the use of a new always-on satellite-based system in an effort to modernise Europe's, and thenceforth the world's air traffic control systems.

Currently, depending on the territory and the aircraft, air traffic control uses a mix of radar, semi-regular location pings from the aircraft (ADS-B), and good ol' human-to-human chatter. This data is pumped into a computer system that calculates a path that each aircraft must follow to avoid collisions, obey any air space restrictions, and hopefully use as little fuel as possible.

Airbus, Inmarsat, ESA, and various other aerospace partners believe that an advanced satellite-based system could allow for a higher density of aircraft in the skies, and more efficient flight paths. Thus, Inmarsat and ESA announced today that it has begun testing the Iris Precursor, which provides a secure high-capacity data link between planes and satellites, and between satellites and ground control.

Fassbender ain't havin' none of your 'tude today.

The most telling line in the Assassin's Creed film, based on the video games of the same name, comes about midway through the film. Our hero, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender), is bombarded by nonsensical comments while trying to eat his lunch. After he's left alone for a moment, he chuckles to himself—the first and only time he does so in an organic fashion through the whole movie—before exclaiming, "What the fuck is going on?"

I'm shocked that the filmmakers left this moment in the film, seeing as how Assassin's Creed's every element—the plot beats, the characters' decisions, the logical leaps—begs such a question. Assassin's Creed has the dubious honor of combining ho-hum action sequences, half-baked characters, and a script no larger than a doctor's free pamphlet. The results leave both series fans and curious passersby with nothing to sink their hidden blades into.

Apple of no one's eye