This was a very active thread with several dozen comments. I am not attempting to summarize it all by any stretch because Eric can’t be any clearer, or more succinct, in the actual answer. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baen’s Bar Question: When will we see the first practical USE helicopter? 10 May 2010 16:42:12 GMT As it happens, my father pioneered the use of helicopters for commercial purposes after World War II. He’d been one of the first helicopter pilots for the U.S. Army Air Corps during the war. He was featured in articles written at the time in Readers Digest and the Wall Street Journal, and even today you can find any number of references to him online. Here are a couple of the links:http://new.rotor.com/AboutHAI.aspx http://www.verticalmag.com/control/news/templates/?a241 In addition, my wife worked for ten years assembling transmissions for army attack helicopters, which is highly skilled labor because the equipment is so incredibly complex and finicky. Despite making his money with helicopters — he became a multi-millionaire before he lost it all in foolish other investments — my father never liked the damn things. He was an expert pilot of all manner of aircraft, and he was very fond of the saying: “A plane just naturally wants to fly. A helicopter just naturally wants to crash.” The point of all this is that there is no way in God’s green earth that helicopters are going to appear any time soon in the 1632 universe. Not only are they far more difficult to build and maintain than fixed wing aircraft, they don’t have that many commercial uses. No, they don’t. You really need a HIGHLY developed industrial society before there are enough niches for helicopters to be commercially profitable. You want to know how my father made his money? And he was THE pioneer in commercial helicopters.As follows: 1) Crop dusting, initially. This only worked — and…
MIlitary
Eric rather famously relied on Larry Corriea to help him with more esoteric and detailed aspects of writing about firearms. If you haven’t read Larry’s books, you really should. You can even download the first book in his massively popular (for good reason!) Monster Hunter International series for free from Baen. Fair warning: once you start, you won’t be able to stop! Getting back to 1632, firearms are baked into the universe and have been since the start. Because he lived in WV, Eric understood the importance and centrality of firearms to life in the small communities Grantville is modeled on. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baen’s Bar 20 March 2015 09:54 I’m not going to get too far into this discussion because if I did it would turn into a long-running political wrangle which I don’t have time for even if I had the inclination (which… I might, depending on how pissed I got). But I will make a few points: First, on guns. People tend to obsess far too much on this subject, in real life as much as in fiction. That’s true no matter where they are in the political spectrum. Conservatives nowadays ascribe mystical and even religious significance to gun ownership. And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider the title of Mike Huckabee’s recent book: GOD, GUNS, GRITS AND GRAVY. I grew up in hunting county in the California mountains and I owned guns like every other male over the age of 10, and a fair number of girls. But I owned guns for practical reasons: a rifle to hunt deer and a shotgun to hunt birds. The only people I knew who owned handguns fell into two categories: men like my father, who had fought in World War II and kept their .45 service pistol, more as a memento than anything else; and bow hunters who might encounter a bear in…