You may want to skip the following paragraph if you're just here for pictures of the stuff I do and care not to read my life story and, maybe, offer up some solutions.
So, as of this writing, I just finished a half-hour phone call with Autodesk, most of which was spent on hold. I don't know how many dinosaurs they deal with, but I can tell that we're not well-liked. See, I'm one of those insufferable cunts who doesn't update software unless absolutely necessary. The story is as follows: while attending Pennsylvania College of Technology, I purchased a copy of Autodesk Inventor 2011, which is what I was trained to use... sort of. If I ever make CAD tutorials, you'll see all manner of little tricks that I use to make my life easier, which I highly doubt are taught in ANY school. Anyway, one of my classmates told me that I should build my own computer if I planned to do anything serious with it. He even gave me tips for putting in a liquid cooling system, because he was (and probably still is) a serious gamer. I am not, and I did not want to double the cost of building this machine. After graduation, I got to work putting this thing together, and installed Inventor 2011 on it. This was in the summer of 2012, and the computer was running Windows 7. After a semi-productive spell that lasted a few months, the applications stopped working, one by one. Internet explorer? So what, Chrome is a better browser anyway (though I actually prefer Firefox, I couldn't get it to load at the time). Next was Windows Media Player. Well, VLC is every bit as good (for a freebie), but it doesn't have cool animations while playing music. The last straw was Microsoft Office, which I simply do not have a decent alternative for. Speaking of which, I still use Office 2003, because I like its layout far better than any subsequent versions. What can I say, I'm a 26-year-old dinosaur. Anyway, though I cannot emphasise how much I didn't want to, I didn't see an alternative BUT to "upgrade" to Windows 8. For the first few months, it crashed almost every day, sometimes several times. It has since settled down, inexplicably, seeing as I never COULD get 8.1 to load. However, Office was working once again, and Inventor 2011 still worked perfectly - even though it's "not compatible" with Windows 8. Fast forward to the beginning of this year, when I decided to duplicate my home-built PC so that I could have a fully-functional office in two places at once. My original idea was to build the same machine, and just move the hard drives back and forth, since they are mounted into easily-removable bays. Ah, the wonderful features of the Corsair Obsidian 800D! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a supplier that had one in stock, so I went with the 450D for the new machine. I could have gone for the 900D, but I would rather carry 7 kilos up a rickety, icy flight of stairs than 20 kilos. Sadly, the hard drives don't pop out of the smaller case quite so easily. No matter, that's what hard drive cloning docks are for! Then... I discovered that I had a faulty motherboard. When I finally replaced it, and fired up the new-and-improved (sort of, the old machine is much bigger, and has 6 RAM slots, while the new one has only 4; the old machine currently has 40GB, while the new one has only 32GB) machine, and discovered that the license was faulty, meaning that I was stuck with 7 days left on a 30-day trial period, because it took 23 to sort out the problem with the build itself. I looked all over for solutions, but nothing completely relevant to my issue other than "uninstall and reinstall." At first, I tried repairing the installation, which takes a lot less time. Still nothing. Finally, I did a clean uninstall, then reinstalled everything. Still nothing. That's when I made the irritating phone call, and spoke to a technician with an accent almost identical to my own, but a lot stronger, who took about ten minutes to explain to me in over a dozen different ways that Inventor 2011 is incompatible with Windows 8. I'm probably lucky that he kept running his mouth, because I was extremely tempted to scream "BULLSHIT" into the phone. Well, at least he gave me another number to call and a couple more options. However, my ear needs a rest. Too bad the call quality where I am is bad enough; speakerphone would be unintelligible. So, for the next two, or possibly three weeks, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to work on any models. On the bright side, I finally have the time to actually make weekly posts, which is what I originally intended to do here on Steemit.
So, what have I been up to? Well, since my last post, I've devoted most of my time to yard-work, but in my time actually WORKING (fuck off, mother, I DO have a job - just not one that pays as well as my last one), I've nearly doubled the size of the Avalon Hill section of my shop. Behold:
Let's look closely at a couple of these, shall we? Pity I can't even open Inventor right now, since I don't already have screenshots of my size comparison.
This is a fully-armed Roman quadrireme, a type of ship that first appeared (to the best of my knowledge) during the Second Punic War. I have doubts as to whether or not ships such as this were actually built with a tower amidships, but it certainly isn't very far-fetched. The corvus (raven) boarding bridge is stowed near the front, and although the game has it as an upgrade for all ships, it was never used by anyone other than the Romans for a very simple reason: Romans were rubbish at naval combat compared to the Carthaginians, but they had vastly superior infantry. Therefore, while the Greeks, Phoenicians, and later Carthaginians relied on ramming manoeuvres, the Romans won naval battles by boarding enemy ships and capturing them. All of the major Mediterranean navies had towers on their ships, but no-one made as much use of them as the Romans (in numbers - Alexander the Great used far bigger towers on his ships, as did the later Ptolemaic monstrosities).
You may notice that there are only two banks of oars on this ship. Wouldn't that make it a bireme? Well, I thought so two. See, the prefix corresponds to the number of OARS only up through 3. Beyond that, it applies to the number of ROWERS. This particular quadrireme has much longer oars up top, meaning that it would have three men on each upper oar, and one on each lower oar. Having two banks of oars with two men on each oar was a far more common configuration, and I built my model Carthaginian quadrireme that way. That one, of course, is much narrower. There were quadriremes built as triremes as well, with two men up top, one in the middle, and one on the bottom (no homo). So, with my newfound knowledge, a ship with four banks of oars would be called something else entirely. If it has two men on each oar, it would be an octoreme. Four banks, however, would be called something like "tetrareme," using the Greek prefix instead of the Latin. This may play into my steampunk fantasy world later, since I have a design in my mind for a glossarian airship (see my Wordpress posts titled "Airships of the Nine Empires") with four rows of levitators. I originally called it a "quadrireme," but I may change that to "tetrareme." It all depends on whether I make the language of the Arcadian Empire more like Latin or Greek. Anyway, MOVING ON!
This is a quinquereme. Some sources state that they first appeared during the Third Punic War, others claim that they appeared alongside the quadrireme, and others say that they didn't appear until the civil war/slave revolt period during the waning years of the Roman Republic, having their first true taste of combat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. I'm inclined to believe the first statement, given that Rome was simultaneously involved in the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars, and Macedonian ships were far larger, with heptaremes being commonplace. This particular model doesn't have a corvus, mainly because I just haven't uploaded it yet, but also because Roman ships were getting larger, and Romans were getting better at naval combat. The corvus itself actually makes the ship top-heavy, and the bigger it was, the more problems it caused. Therefore, the Romans began to abandon it, in favour of fighting like everyone else at sea - but with ranged weapons, such as scorpions, rather than rams.
From this angle, you can see the three banks of oars, in this case manned by two on top, two in the middle, and one on the bottom. A hexareme would be no different, save for longer oars on the bottom and two men on each of them as well. They were used as flagships, and I may eventually make a model of one. You can see in both pictures the beginnings of a quarter gallery as well, which was probably for additional lookouts or a place to signal other ships from.
Right, that's it for now. Maybe I'll be able to get Inventor up and running again this week. I have multiple requests for a model of the IS-4 (which I fully intended to make anyway), as well as some lesser-known vehicles such as the ISU-152M, which is a variant of the ISU-152 built on the IS-3 chassis. At least I managed to finally put the finishing touches on Object 901 and get that uploaded in 1/100 scale. I doubt anyone will be interested, seeing as the 1/285 scale models sell like hot cakes but the only tank I've ever sold in 1/100 scale is the KV-2 (hmm, I wonder why). Let me know what you'd like to see (and where I can post links, because I still haven't figured that out).