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Armalite was actively pitching the AR-18 to the US government at about the same time the paroxysms about the M14 program and the USAF adoption of the M16 were happening.
It, apparently, came >< that close to happening.
The Stoner 63 system was being troop and field tested in this same time frame.
The US Army was going to get a 5.56x45mm rifle; but which rifle was in play longer than I'd thought.
I am going to have to take the dash apart, again.
I need to remove and replace the stereo/HVAC faceplate because the knobs have failed.
I need to run power for a radar detector.
I need to find the dimmer wire so I can get the overhead console lights illuminated.
I want a warmer day than today, because it'd be better to have the car outside so I can open the doors all the way.
I installed the RCA ports into my car's head unit and now we can plug The Boy's portable DVD player in and have the sound come out the car's speakers and not just the tinny things that are built into it.
He thinks that's pretty cool!
The adhesive on my Caprice badge was losing the legs on the 'E' and one was already almost ripped off washing the car.
You can't easily get the stock badge anymore, but the Caprice V version is readily available.
Some pictures from the Pacific Palisades fire have been posted.
Burned and melted hot rods.
That hit me harder than I would have expected.
Especially after reading David Freiburger talking about how he's lived in the area his whole life and his reading about how California deserved it.
I replied to that thread telling him that we got the same shit after Helene and Milton and to keep his chin up.
I don't feel California had it coming any more than Sarasota or North Carolina did.
But there's definitely things California could have done that would have mitigated the fires, or even made them a non-event.
You have to cut fire breaks.
You have to make the roads that let people escape.
You have to maintain the infrastructure that keeps the hydrants flowing.
California failed to do that.
The people of California voted for the people who would neglect those things.
Did I say, "neglect?"
I meant to say actively destroyed and worked against policies that would have kept this from getting out of hand.
At one time California had the water thing figured out.
Environmentalists made sure that was undone.
Fire breaks are fundamental in keeping wildfires under control.
Environmentalists made sure none were cut.
Expanding roads to make sure gridlock doesn't trap people on the roads and prevent first responders from responding is part and parcel of an increasing population.
Environmentalists and NIMBYist combined to make sure roads weren't widened.
California voters didn't vote to stop or even slow environmentalists and have, thus, reaped the whirlwind.
Florida is about to enter its wildfire season. Wanna bet we don't make the national news. Again...
Some interesting changes have suddenly hoved into view here.
First was finally giving in and calling USAA's bluff about "you're pre-approved!"
Past experience has informed me that, no, I am not really approved and once I apply I will be declined.
Wrong.
They instantly approved me. For a limit that seems outlandishly generous.
We're going to use it to buy gas and beer and pay it off every two weeks like we'd just bought beer and gas with cash. That'll show 'em!
That made me realize that my credit rating must be better than I thought.
It turns out my bank will show me the Experian report.
727 is my credit rating.
It wasn't all that long ago it was 530.
Harvey checked hers and it's 680. 680 before her discharged loan hits her report.
Holy shit!
We're normal Americans again!
Next time we renew our insurance this will have a positive effect. And this is the only reason we really care.
The official GURPS stats for the 40x46mmSR round shows 30 yards minimum range.
Real rounds DO have an arming distance. It's a bit shorter than 30 yards.
M381 HE has an arming distance of JUST 3 yards. The later M406 arms at 15 yards.
They both do 4d-1 [2d] cr ex.
The person standing in the hex with the boom takes the listed damage.
Everyone in dice x 2 yards away can take some too. In this case, 8 yards.
So firing at minimum range of 3 yards with an M381 can be dangerous.
But you divide the damage by 3x the distance in yards, so... Divide by 9 at minimum range.
Maximum damage from the blast is 23. Dividing by 9 and rounding down does 2 to our grenadier. On average, though, just a single point will come back.
Fragmentation goes out 5x dice yards. In this case [2d] so out to 10 yards. The "skill" of the fragments is 15 and normal speed/range penalties are applied for distance. Fragmentation has an effective Rcl of 3.
3 yards is -1 for range for a "skill" of 14. On average that will give two 2d cutting hits.
That's less good than the blast with an average of 21 points done after modifiers. That will kill the average person.
Trump should use the justification of the USA needing "living space" for annexation of Canada as its 51st+ state.
The jokes write themselves.
They have declared today to be a national day of mourning for Jimmy Carter.
Fuck that!
To mourn, you have to miss the deceased.
I've been wanting this "person" to stop sucking my oxygen for decades.
Jimmah is the first president I had grievances with, and he was out of office before I even got to vote!
I learned about the depth of his failures later.
Then I learned that many of the failures weren't fails, but deliberate.
So I will heartily cheer his demise and my flag will remain at full mast.
Getting the largest source of non-mortgage debt removed from my credit score last year should have had a positive effect on my credit score...
So I went to check.
Everyone wants a lot of information up front and once you provide it, they force you to make an account with them.
I'm not looking for a relationship, I just wanna fuck.
I get why they need to collect most of the information, but once they have it that should be enough to give me a result.
The way they're going about this reminds me of a lot of bait and switch free offers where it's easy to sign up, and nearly impossible to cancel and they have your payment information so you get to pay while you're trying to get it shut down.
It appears that the criminal enterprise that was Corinthian Colleges is finally being made to pay.
The Lovely Harvey got an email today about the discharge of her student loans due to the college's criminal malfeasance.
Discharge of loan. Removal of it from her credit report. Refund of any and all payments made.
Wowsers!
To be clear to the boomers who don't (won't?) understand; this is not related to the big student loan forgiveness that Biden was pushing. This is normal for when a college defrauds its students, the hold up was how damn BIG the department of education let the situation get and how much Corinthians tried to get away with.
It's taken almost two decades to get justice out of this.
Maybe it will make my car insurance go down with a better credit rating coming.
I do like talking about the implications of the existence of magic since 1945, but much of the speculation is covered in the source material.
Steve Jackson Games will sell you a pdf of both GURPS: Technomancer and Technomancer: Funny New Guys which you can get up to speed on what's changed and what hasn't since the hellstorm started spinning in Trinity, New Mexico.
For the most part, nothing changed between Merlin and our timeline.
The US winning in Vietnam is a, noted, exception.
The implications of how we did that weren't fully explored or considered by the authors.
Further implications of what magic means to politics were also not explored.
I made the outline of some of those implications with regards to Rhodesia.
Funny New Guys stresses, despite not understanding post-MacNamara designations, the combat use of magic carpets.
A Huey can lug 12 troops over 150 miles at around 100 miles an hour.
A UZ-23 can haul 13 troops an unlimited distance, but the speed tops out at 34 miles an hour.
Something occurred to me about the situation.
What keeps you from rolling up a carpet and tossing it into the Huey?
Get near the target, but far enough away that the distinctive sound of the rotors don't give the operation away and unroll the carpet next to the bird and have everyone step aboard.
It's similar to doing a parachute drop, really.
The carpets, while slower than helicopters, are silent in operation.
It could redefine vertical envelopment.
HMPV is spreading all around the world!
It cannot be told apart from the common cold and most people never know they had it.
The breathless reporting of, "there is no cure," is the height of why I despise the press.
The common cold has no cure either.
Every day flu has no cure, just a preventative.
This is a headline designed to scare people and it's exactly yelling, "fire!" into a crowded theater.
I'm a tanker. I don't know how the grunts organize themselves.
A late 80's tank company has 14 tanks in three platoons. 4 per platoon plus 2 for the CO and XO.
Plus a five-ton for supply and a couple of humvees.
Vietnam, if I am not mistaken, had 17 tank companies with 5 tanks per platoon.
I have no damn clue about how infantry companies or platoons are arranged, but I found this:
Things that I don't know (I'll bet Willard knows):
With everyone equipped with an M16, what makes the automatic rifleman different from a rifleman?
The movies (no shock) lie to us.
The M60 gunners and their assistant gunners appear to be in different squads from the rest of the platoon.
Are they assigned to a squad ad hoc or what?
I also wonder if the 90mm reckless rifles did much time in the bush in Vietnam.
DerpyPuter used to be one of FuzzyGeff's laptops.
He's upgraded at least once since he bought this one.
I got it for the princely sum of $1.
It's a Clevo W560RZ customized and sold by System 76 as a Gazelle G10.
Just a couple of years newer than the Lenovo T420s I had been using. Better processors, for one. Much better screen and wider keyboard with a num pad.
Of course, I need to start modding.
The battery is so dead you can't cast zombie on it.
A bit more RAM is always nice.
Definitely need to get a bigger SSD in there.
But it's happily running Ubuntu 24.04, just like Crispy IV is.
Also: Blogger is STILL fucked for linking pics.
The Chimera in Technomancer can all speak with animals to one degree or another.
The rules in The Basic Set don't say exactly how it works and there's no color notes in Technomancer or Funny New Guys.
The question is: Do I speak normally to the animal and they, magically, understand me and then when they reply I, magically, understand them?
OR
Am I actually speaking their language?
If I am actually speaking some canine language then fox and coyote people can chat without other humans being able understand.
That's the special effect I like, so I think that's how my version of Merlin will be run.
After making sure that everyone had a Funny New Guys character...
We didn't even manage to kill anyone we cared about in Interstellar Wars.
Despite the six year gap between sessions we managed to get it rolling and have a good time.
Got the plot advanced a little bit too.
Still more to do there as well.
Plans to continue fell through with conflicting obligations and the reality that playing until our normal quitting time meant a zombie FuzzyGeff for his trek back to Ioway.
Better he get a good night's sleep.
A phobia is an irrational fear of something.
I used to be terrified of spiders.
It was irrational to be afraid a tiny arachnid that could do me no harm.
By this light, if you want to talk about Islamophobia, you're going to have to demonstrate how being worried about it is irrational.
Especially, now, when we just had an Islamist murder a bunch of people with a pick-up in New Orleans.
Being afraid that might happen to you isn't being irrationally afraid. It's being prudent.
Never mind that they appear to LIKE it when people are afraid. Terrorism doesn't work if people aren't.
Cries against Islamophobia aren't really against bigotry. They're, for some reason, trying to prevent a justified backlash against terrorists and terrorism.
When Western Civ gets its jackboots on, it no longer cares about such polite constructs of worry about the people it's about to kill think about them. It simply goes industrial murder for as long as it takes.
Sure, it feels guilty afterwards and the people who did it drink a lot and don't talk about it.
But it's done. And done for the good of their civilization. Their civilization that they chose over the intruding one that was trying to kill them.
Thus is always civilizational conflict.
Four years ago the media redefined "insurrection" like they do everything.
They redefined it down.
So I wonder how things are going at the capitol today while they count the electors.
Three people asking for directions might meet their watered down definition of armed insurrection now.
The spider people from Technomancer are chimera of humans and Mexican red leg tarantulas.
Don't they look soft and cuddly like a stuffed animal?
Well, they're not. They're bristly and the exoskeleton doesn't have much give.
A chimera is a mammal, not an arachnid. They just LOOK like spiders.
They have bones. They have skin. They have fur.
They're actually cuddly!
If you can get past the whole ugly and general aversion to spiders most people run.
Also note: The front legs are the arms on the human torso so the spider part only has six legs. The human torso rises from the black area on the thorax of the spider part, the human genitalia being where the pedipalps are. Clothing for these people must be interesting.
My little rule of thumb about spider and snake chimera's weight introduced a problem.
Spellborne troops are still paratroopers.
The max load for a T-10 parachute is 360 lb.
My spider is a svelte 320 lb. buck nekkid.
So he can jump in a 2.3 lb. uniform with a 12 lb. reserve chute and have 25.7 lb left over for gear.
If he were a normal human he'd have 185.7 lb. left over.
Traditionally the Army would declare these chimera unfit for airborne operations due to weight, but there's strong pressure from higher to fully integrate the services.
Chimera WILL be no different from other ethnic groups OR ELSE!
And with a Secretary of Defense like MacNamara issuing such diktats, the Army figures out a way to make it work. And they hate every moment because they're accommodating a very small percentage of the troops.
Happily, there's already a canopy in service they can use!
The G-14 has a max load of 500 lb. They're going to have to make a spider and snake specific harness anyways, so a cargo chute might be easier to adapt.
That'd allow for 140.7 lb of gear with the larger 37 lb. reserve chute. That's probably acceptable to the Army to get the politicians off their backs.
Two of the chimera from Technomancer aren't bipedal.
The spider person is kinda a spider centaur like the D&D drider; with the waist of the human part attaching about where the eyes are on the red-leg tarantula they're based on. It's a *BIG* tarantula.
The snake person is more like a naga.
The artwork shows some pretty substantial back ends on both of them.
That makes me think they're heavier than they would be if they were baseline H. Sapiens.
I've been rule-of-thumbing doubling the weights for both races over normal humans.
I might have to try dusting off my pencil and paper drawing skills.
PS: Despite appearances, the spider person is a mammal. That means the spider part has a skeleton inside and the "exoskeleton" is just skin.
PPS: Snake people are mammals too. Warm blooded and everything.
The M17 mask was issue in Vietnam.
Outside of a few photos in Hue, try finding anyone carrying or wearing one. Even then, you're just as likely to be looking at the older M9.
I remember that one of the reasons they stressed we shave and keep our mustaches severely trimmed was to be able to seal a gas mask against our face.
Funny New Guys raises a question. Except for the spider and snake people, there's fur and feathers on their faces. Never mind the shape of the skull and face differs from baseline H. Sapiens.
Considering how recent the decision to allow chimera into the Army was, it's doubtful new equipment to accommodate them has even started development.
But, back to the original point.
Soldiers ditch the masks as soon as they think they won't need them. Bill Mauldin even made a comic about it!
 |
| "I see that E comp'ny got th' new style gas masks" |
Being the kind of geek I am, I put together Vietnam era web gear to go along with my retro M16 clone.
Looking into things, and picking a date for it, led to some interesting choices.
First, I am using an M1943 entrenching tool and not the M1951 as one might expect from a 1967 recreation.
The Army did develop, and purchase, some M1951 entrenching tools. Production halted in 1953 until the supply of the M1943 model dropped below the needs of the Army... In 1968 when the familiar tri-fold tool we still use replaced both the M1943 and M1951.
It was noted that the M1956 universal ammo carrier was too deep for M16 magazines, so a shorter version was developed. Some may even have been issued before a nylon version with a plastic latch was developed. You can't find an M1956 M16 pouch, but the M1967's are almost everywhere.
Even so, the M1967 kit was thin on the ground until late 1969. By then 30-round M16 magazines were starting to show up, and that required yet another change to the magazine pouches. Going from 80 72 rounds to 90 84 rounds per pouch.
They were still issuing that pouch when I was in the Army at the end of the Cold War.
The front dome light in The Beast has been insufficient for reading a book while waiting for someone at night since I bought it.
LED bulb was better, but not enough.
Pontiac G8's use the same domelight, as do Holden Commodores.
I snagged one from a Commodore.
I can't use the whole assembly because the microphone faces the passenger in my car and can't be moved to the other side like mine can (different housings).
Install required depinning a 4-pin molex connector and installing a 6-pin.
It's got one little glitch.
The passenger side light doesn't like LED bulbs. JT thinks there's a resistance problem in the little board. But Harvey and I agree that incandescent is better on that side because it is less dazzling for the driver if the passenger hits the button while driving.
I still have the original dome light position.
Today I found out that the M1956 Universal Small Arms Ammunition Pouch (2nd Pattern) is not a two-magazine pouch for 20-round 7.62 NATO mags.
It's supposed to accept THREE M14 magazines!
It's a tight fit, but you can also stuff three FAL magazines in one as well.
You can also get it to latch closed!
Being able to close it is handy for keeping the gunk out of your magazines.
These same pouches will hold 4 20-round M16 magazines; but you have to remember to put a first-aid dressing or a sock in the bottom to keep them accessible.
The racial template for the spider chimera on page 30 of Pyramid vol 3, issue 115 is incorrect.
The bindings are both wrong and the extra arms are all fucked up, so the listed 30 points doesn't stand.
Corrected template below:
Chimera, Spider (Homo Sapiens Arachnae) (Pyramid 3/115 p.30)
44 Points
Attribute Modifiers:
Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: SM 0.
Advantages: Binding (Webbing) 15 (Accessibility, Target must be grappled, -20%; Engulfing +60%; Melee Attack, reach C, -30%; Sticky, +20%, Takes Recharge, 15 seconds, -20%) [7]*; Binding (Webbing) 10 (Rapid Fire 7, +70%; Retractable, +100%; Reduced Range, 1/10, -30%; Sticky, +20%; Takes Recharge, 15 seconds, -20%) [48]; Claws (Sharp Claws) [5]; Clinging [20]; Extra Arms 2 (Foot Manipulators, -5%; Accessibility, Extra arms only, Temp Disad, Ham Fisted, -5%) [18]; Extra Legs (Six Legs) [10]; Lifting ST 6 (Accessibility, only applies to lower “spider” body, -20%) [15]; Night Vision 6 [6]; Speak With Animals (Specialized, Spiders, -60%) [10]; Teeth (Fangs) [2]; Toxic Attack 1d (Poison, Cyclic, 1 hour interval, 5 cycles, +40%; Follow-Up, Bite, +0%; Resistible, HT-4, -10%) [6].
Perks: Climbing Line [1]†
Disadvantages: Appearance (Ugly to humans and other non-spider chimera) [-8]; Dependency (Mana, Constantly) [-25]; Lunacy [-10]; Social Stigma (Minority Group) [-10]; Vulnerability (Depleted Necronium or silver x3) [-30]; Weakness (Depleted Necronium or silver, 1d/minute) [-20].
Quirks: Bulky Frame [-1]‡
Features:
* Alternative Ability (x1/5 cost) to other binding advantage.
† As long as you have “shots” of the Binding advantage available, you can create a climbing line, allowing you to use the “rope up” or “rope down” options for climbing (p. B349)
‡ While spider people are technically SM 0, their large lower spider half means they find narrow spaces intended for upright humans awkward, imposing -1 to all tasks that involve fitting or squeezing into something.
I wish hot linking photos would get predictable again.
Mist is growing like a weed! 4 lb. 1 oz. is just less than triple her weight when we brought her in.
The head tilt is still somewhat present, but only occasionally when she's not paying attention to keeping it level. Reminds me of a lazy eye.
As long as she focuses on keeping her head level, she's fine.
