Anyone interested in the Knightly genre would do well to read Arthur Conan Doyle's "The White Company". An overlooked gem by the creator of Mr. Holmes.
And don't forget Conan Doyle's
Sir Nigel and the Professor Challenger stories including
The Lost World.
An interest and an uncle in experimental aviation led me to try Dean Ing's works. Most are well worth reading although fanciful at times. He, too, knows guns quite well and also how to fabricate things with his hands. He also knows hard science and his expertise shows in his writing. For instance he and the Rutan brothers run with the same crowd, the Society of Experimantal Test Pilots. Just FYI these are the astronauts among others and one of the Rutans (Dick?) holds the first non-stop global circumnavigation record along with his copilot, a female whose name has become lost in my CRS. BTW most of these SETP guys look down on Chuck Yeager as a jumped-up grandstander who, after first disobeying orders, then took credit for another man's prior accomplishment(breaking supersonic). That should give you some idea of their relative level of knowledge, experience and expertise. Dean Ing is one of them and writes a good thriller most of the time.
Kinda reminds me of Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle, all are/were hard scientists and libertarians. Pournelle hasn't written any fiction lately that I've seen, but many if not most of his older works are worth reading and reflect a hard-nosed libertarian attitude as well as a knowledge of guns, war and history. His sometime partner(!?) Larry Niven however is IMO a typical SoCal trust fund baby who's never grown up and knows next to nothing about guns. His (Niven's) works, although entertaining in a rose-colored way, IMO are more suited to gentle people like him.
Regards, Joe
