Status Updates From Ring of Fire III (3) (The R...

Technicalities of fusing the bombs -- and the decision to go belt and suspenders.

The desperate effort to build bombs to fight a battle in which our heroes will be at a severe disadvantage.

Reflections on logistics. What marching to battle means in the early Seventeenth, vs WWII newsreels.

The problem of indiscipline in a military unit, and how it eats away at effectiveness -- but the man who needs to deal with it has no effective tools with which to do so. And now we know that yes, this is set after Tom and Rita's sojourn in England -- it's roughly contemporaneous with 1635: The Eastern Front and 1636: The Saxon Uprising.

A discussion of motivations

Tom and Rita make connections via radio, so they can coordinate.

The enemy realizes that the airship has gotten away.

Desperate battles, and the logistics of getting a blimp aloft -- which includes a few explicit tie-ins with "Upward Mobility" earlier.

The man they desperately need to help them escape has been badly injured, and its uncertain whether he may also have internal injuries.

Desperate plans are made. Fleeing puts them in danger, and remaining leaves them in even worse danger. The only hope is hillbilly familiarity with firearms, and strength in numbers.

A hopeful ending, and now a story by the master himself. More of a novella, it's a story of Tom and Rita in a pinch. At the moment I'm not sure whether it's before or after their travels to England and their stay in the Tower of London as guests of the Crown (a rather genteel form of imprisonment, in that day and age).

The necessities of aerodynamics and internal structure as related to airship speed.

The Venitian merchant and the uptime blimp-builder. Can they work together to fill a gap in transportation and communication needs.

Getting some of the smaller German principalities to pull together instead of pulling apart.

A hero's welcome. A story of an optician helping a poor girl get correction now so she won't have to go through life with blurry vision. and now what looks like a political soap opera. But it's one of the longer works, so I'm sure it's going somewhere.

Things turn ugly, and our hero awakens in captivity. His captors have removed the obvious weapons, but overlooked some tools that he makes useful. Like the ninja master in the one comic said, if you take their weapons, they will improvise and you won't know their capabilities. Hopefully this will prove an unpleasant surprise to the bad guys.

A little historical in-joke at the end of the story of the musician? Now an attempt to introduce modern archeology to the early 17th century -- and some dangerous people who are certain the dig must have found gold, not the far more priceless treasure of knowledge about how people in the past lived their everyday lives.

The desperate race to learn as much as he can before his money runs out.

A downtime Italian luthier discovering uptime stringed instruments, including a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, and the banjo.

A healing ritual that involves a rooster and a meal of chicken soup.

How the Salvation Army is reborn downtime, and now to the Ottoman Empire, and the role of the Jewish people there, particularly those who fled Spain.

A man with PTSD from what he did in the sack of a city, now trying to drown his memories in drink -- and finding he can't run away from them. Like any protagonist in a Ring of Fire story, he needs to roll up his sleeves and get to work -- but that may be easier said than done.

A surprise reveal, and then a story about the Iroquois and their dealings with Champlain. The author was one of the authors of The Council Fire, the second novel in the Arcane America series (which got off to a great start, but appears to have died with the third one, which had major problems of not fitting with the situation established in the first -- backroom politics appear to have been involved).

Turning a traditional pitch seep into an oil well -- and all the obstacles that must be overcome. Also a reminder that a certain name wasn't always associated with evil, and once was just another name.

Civil unrest turns to atrocity, and our hero and his family by marriage must flee to the Khmer kingdom (Cambodia). Interesting that while I know "Siamese" was the term for the people we know as Thais, to me it's still a breed of cat, so my mind's eye keeps seeing the protagonist fighting anthropomorphic cats. And Phnom Penh brings back memories of a book on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.