Nick Bradbeer

@nickbradbeer.bsky.social

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Associate Prof of Naval Architecture at UCL. Nerd, maker, gamer, wargame builder, UCL Submarine Design Course. He, him.

No idea how much I'll use this yet, but I may post about wargames, ARMA3, Traveller, gaming in general, and maybe some submarine design

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Oh no. Assassination attempts are the last thing US politics needs right now. Holy shit, things I never thought I'd need to say.

I'm no legal scholar....but isn't that Really Bad?

I'll be honest, this isn't making me want to attend your event...

Just popped by a classroom to find two students killing time before their SDX viva by playing Swarming Boats. For a game that was built in a week it's endured surprisingly well!

It's been a fortnight. But today I gave my paper and ran a participation game of ABF at the International Marine Design Conference, and now I can stop moving for a day or two, which is lovely.

I agree, this is a fantastic read.

I don't know if he's on here but in case he isn't, Nathan Goldwag wrote a blog essay on "The Moral Economy of the Shire" looking at how a society can function based on custom & clientalism rather than the state and you should read it, it's fantastic. nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/t...

The Moral Economy of the Shirenathangoldwag.wordpress.com Who paid for this? There's a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, an...

So far this weekend has been eighteen hours of laser cutting, gluing up, dremeling and heat-gunning on a secret project for next weekend. (Of which this is a small and relatively innocuous part.) And now we're drinking in the sunshine waiting for the pub to start serving dinner. Good times. :)

The Baltic continues on ever more complicated. Now with water depth, wind farms and a lot more airbases...

Feeling very fancy, in preparation for all the wargames I'm going to be running in the next month...

First, caramelise 1kg of finely sliced onions.

Is it actually illegal in the US to say "give me $1Bn to get myself elected and I will immediately repeal the following laws for you"? I thought that was more or less business as usual. Albeit with a bigger number attached.

A really enjoyable day yesterday at Kings College for their Wargaming Week - I ran a demo session of A Balanced Fleet, which has really felt like it's grown in complexity and usefulness over the last year.

#traveller "Can we dock with the platform to get the survivors out?" [twiddles models in Blender] "Yes, assuming you bring the ship in upside down right under the platform's reactor and propellant tanks. Which the fire is getting close to..." Engineering puzzles in orbit. I know what people want...

It's Blender time again - I have a SF universe to populate with stuff. #Traveller

Are you really even playing #Traveller if your players aren't marking up overheads of fictional locations with their intelligence analysis?

This was a fun little build - idea totally lifted from someone on Reddit, but the work of my own fair hands. A quick-and-dirty functional ejection seat switchbox for DCS. (I'm mostly just sad the Ender 3 is playing up so I had to fabricate the Leonardo's box out of MDF.)

Time for a retro gaming experience!

I always forget how long it takes to put expenses claims in. On average, I seem to leave it for three months and then it takes a whole afternoon.

Oh no.

Blue Sky doesn't do breaking news as much as other places, so you might not have seen the news coming out of Baltimore - a container ship has hit a bridge pier causing a total collapse. www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/worl...

Moment bridge collapses after being hit by shipwww.bbc.co.uk A large ship has struck the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, causing a major collapse.

After a few crazy weeks of scribbling papers, international travel and running/talking about wargames, I'm finally home with a little time to chill out. So it's time to start filling in background details for my ongoing Traveller game. And that means I get to doodle spaceships. The current WIP:

Well, wargaming a Baltic conflict was fascinating. Mostly because it highlighted all the things which are critically important to model in a Baltic conflict, which I don't currently model!

I have too much to do today. So naturally I am getting nothing done.

The Baltic is a really inconvenient shape for fitting onto mapsheets. #ABalancedFleet

Underrated science joke.

obviously it was pea-hacking

Alright, time to talk some nonsense!

This is a point I need to make in a conference presentation, and I don't think anyone has ever phrased it more clearly than this. SO. Can I get away with "Make sure every encounter especially trot of combat is more than just ONE thing" (Tingle, 2024)

instead from obvious 'have fun' that everyone says (which is very important) i will opt for this: make sure every encounter especially trot of combat is more than just ONE thing. if it is a battle against a flying manticore then put it on moving train. if it is chase put it during the town parade

...especially this one.

I love planes. :)

And so it begins! Off to San Diego to talk about wargaming hybrid warfare at sea. Hopefully it will be warmer than the 4 degrees here in Gloucestershire.

Paper manuscript submitted, as is traditional, less than two hours before the deadline. (If I were not flying to the US this weekend there's an excellent chance it would have been going in after the deadline, in full on Professorial "they won't look at them until Moday morning anyway" mode.)