The Meandering of a Ballistics Oriented Mind

and, a short colloquy with the author.

To be quite honest, i struggled coming up with a statement as the first blog post — things i would like to blog about, well, comes pretty naturally to me, this blog being the product of my long-unsatisfied visceral need for self-expression after all. So the reader need not be too worried about the content.

There was a draft where this post makes a mockery of a professional CV by listing my all-too-few professional qualifications, which boils down to me being an undergraduate and inexperienced software engineer (let’s put a pin in here for the time being). That felt too self-unaware. I then redrafted this into a SEO¹-friendly summary of the content that will come and promise an update schedule, which is at the point I realized, the issue is not in re the content so much as the tone, which was being way too serious than i had intended.

As the first piece of content posted (or blogged?), it is only fair that this piece will at least set an expectation of what the “vibe” will be on the rest of this site. I’ve decided that me being able to use a more conversational tone while writing simplifies expressing certain ideas and getting to the point for me, a English Second Language whose primary (and daily) language is Chinese. As well, since i cannot say to be a field professional, a casual tone pays deference to the grave stakes that’s often involved in their field and signals the less than serious nature of this blog. I assure the reader the irony of which has not been lost on me.

That is not to say that i don’t value the reader’s attention span, of course. Reasonable effort will be made on my part to at least be succinct at key parts of the article, and i will try to indicate in text that a certain section may be more rambling than most. I intend to split blog posts on longer topics into more digestible, roughly fifteen minute segments. I only ask the reader to be so kind as to tolerate me as i improve in this regard.

So with that out of the way, allow me to finally get to introducing this blog (I can’t promise I won’t start future blog articles with a long introspection section though 🙂 ):

The Meanderings of a Ballistics Oriented Mind

Or tmoabom for short, also the domain name of this blog. This clever running of word is both a rather apt description of what i intend to do here, and also a nod to the original The Meanderings Of A Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied In A Vacuum Such As On The Moon, a rather fanciful 1965 pamphlet distributed by US Army Weapon Command, essentially a particularly dry science fiction novel (or in more accurate modern terms, a settings manual, or a world-building guide) published on taxpayer dimes, marrying the 1960s enthusiasm for anything space-related with the principled application of weaponeering analysis to spec-out arms of future void-combat. Here, I intend to blog about the same: principles and analysis.

I intend to have the exposition of various weapon system serves as a the setting, the context under which the guiding principles can be surmised. Thus equipped, the reader themselves can make their own judgement based on their information. This also helps me to focus on the analysis instead of getting deep into the weeds of following every latest development.

And I believe I am perhaps uniquely equipped to conduct such analysis, circling back to my background in software engineering. In fact i think its more fairer to say that my interest in examining and analyzing particular ballistic problem in the first place helped to bootstrap my interest in the computer science. With that said, the reader should expect a wealth of data, and rich visualization in support of any argument, and I will not shy from presenting code snippets and even share projects, where it serves a illustrative or demonstrative purpose.

Having taken enough of your time already, allow me to thank you the reader for reading all the way through a rather clumsily put together first blog. I hope to see you again soon.

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