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"If you look at my characters, you will find me. No matter what kind of character you create or assume, a little of yourself must remain there."
-Jack Kirby
I've only made characters for role playing games and some amateur science fiction, but it's true. You put yourself in your creations and there's always a little reflection that someone might spot.
I watched a few of the training films that are out there on YouTube for WW2 aircraft showing how to start the engine.
I don't know why I'm surprised that everything I did to start my car in winter in Iowa before computers ran everything is stuff you do when cold starting a P-47.
The big difference is there's no spring returning the throttle to idle and the throttle is hand controlled not foot. Oh, and an airplane has manual mixture control.
Otherwise, just your standard 4-stroke gas engine.
But it is kinda funny watching the instructor wiggling the throttle lever to "feather it" like I would tickle the pedal to get it to catch when it hasn't quite started.
It still kind of surprises me how fast and easy the knife's opener is.
While thinking about Twilight: 2000, I came up with a really good campaign idea for once things return stateside.
Now I cannot recall what I'd come up with.
I don't even have the excuse of not having a place to have recorded it because I was typing out shit for the equipment list.
Most times, these ideas come back.
Top row, L to R: Pyrite, Amethyst, Flourite.
Bottom row, L to R: Watermelon Tourmaline, Rhodochrosite, Tangerine Quartz
Remarkably complex and difficult builds.
Modular weapons are a pain to express clearly in GURPS.
A flat top AR has no rear sight.
What's the Acc of a rifle without a rear sight?
I have decided that it's 0.
A rear sight also adds weight to the rifle, so I've shown it without the weight of a rear sight and a note on the weapons table, "Acc 0 without rear sight or optic. No iron sights while an optic is mounted."
Then I listed the detachable carry handle on the table, and a common, issue, optic.
Clear and succinct.
It's important, I've found to be so because you need to waterboard most players before they read the descriptions.
I would have mentioned the anniversary end of Prohibition 92 years ago on Friday, but I was busy drinking.
Today is Pearl Harbor Day.
84 years since The Empire of Japan opened hostilities against the US and touched the boats.
NEVER.
TOUCH.
THE.
BOATS!
Cue the Beatles... Abbey Road, side 2, song 1.
In one of my nexus worlds I had a barbeque place called The Tall Hog.
It was popular with the Orc and Goblinoid crowd.
Because of this, it was also a "rough" place.
I don't recall any player character trying it out.
The Tall Hog specialized in serving people meat, it's a play on long pig.
Because the nexus was pure Barter Town, there were very few rules, but you could be assured that the "livestock" was not murdered in the nexus itself. I didn't go into how they sourced their meat.
I had not actually decided!
But I found a note today that suggested that they were serving pork and it was all false advertising!
But I still regret never being able to do the scene where the players have figured out that Soylent Green IS People and the "Try The GIANT Burger" sign doesn't mean a bigger burger.
This is the same nexus where I had a seafood place where the owner/proprietor/entire staff was a group mind of, what looked to be, Christmas Island red crabs.
It had a diving board above the cook-pot and an individual crab would make a great show of diving in to be cooked and served.
108 years ago Finland decided to stop being part of Russia and declined it's first invitation to be part of the Soviet Union.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has passed to the actors home in the sky.
His career had some surprising turns for me.
The G41 was a program that West Germany launched when the G11 program was showing all the signs of being an epic failure.
It's basically an HK33 that uses a normal STANAG magazine.
In the real world the end of the cold war killed the G11 project and German reunification delayed adoption of a 5.56 rifle for a few years; culminating in the G36.
In T2K, the G11's problems were solved, but it was still expensive, so the G41 was adopted as a secondary standard.
I'm having trouble finding the introduction dates for the folding backup iron sights the military issues.
I am thinking I will have to revise my T2K list, again, and make the detachable carry handle the default BUIS.
This is not to say that such sights weren't available, they just weren't issued.
I think that ARMS #40 was around in time for Twilight, but I am not certain.
Who offers the M16EZ to local governments?
I think the original game got it upside down.
But it depends on who controls the depots and the surplus.
If MilGov is offering worn parts as a kit to help local governments obtain fighting arms, that implies that CivGov controls the warehouses and depots where, literal, mountains of surplus small arms are stored.
I am thinking, in the T2K universe, that because The Cold War kept going, politics in the USA didn't go the same as our timeline. That means no Kap'n Krunch destroying mountains of M16A1's which makes them available to hand out as government aid.
That makes me wonder if the M16EZ or LMR projects are needed unless MilGov doesn't have access to the depots where the M16A1's are stored.
The LMR is a fun gun for a player to end up with.
The big question is if the LMR barrels for T2K are 1:12 or 1:7?
Something I just noticed from Forgotten Weapons posting of the LMR's manual is that it takes the M14 rifle's M6 bayonet not the M16's M7 (or M9 or OKW 3S)!
You find yourself in Poland, near Kalisz, in the year 2000 and your commander has just said, "Good luck, you're on your own," just before a big explosion takes out the TOC...
After a few days of dodging Soviets and marauders you decide you're fed up with the 3-round burst mode of your M4.
You remember your dad talking about how they got authorization, during the Gulf War to "bend" something in the fire control parts that disabled the burst and allowing full-auto fire.
What are you going to bend?
Well, dad doesn't know the whole story.
The fast way to remove the burst mode is to remove the burst interrupter, but that will let the normal interrupter to slide too far left to right in the trough in the trigger, giving a Malf of 16 in full auto fire.
Inserting a spacer the same thickness as the burst interrupter solves this issue.
If you're never going to put the 3-round back in, you can use the burst interrupter as the spacer by simply filing off both hooks.
Knowing this and doing this is Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms). If you don't have this skill, the default is Engineering/TL8 (Small Arms) -5 or Guns/TL8 (Rifle) -5.
But there's another way!
If there's an M16, M16A1, M4A1, C7, C8, C8A1, or L119A1 laying around that's deadlined for some reason besides the fire control group; you swap all the trigger and hammer parts between them and et voila!
This will give a +3 to your Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) roll because it's so much simpler.
Please note that none of this will change a semi-automatic civilian version of an AR to a select fire weapon.
For that you need to do some drilling (and machining with some lower receivers). That's an Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) roll at -2 because of the precision required in modifying the lower receiver. Then you toss the semi-auto hammer-trigger-sear parts and plop in the full-auto or burst parts.
Even if you make a drop-in auto-sear with an Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) you're still going to need the full-auto or burst parts.
Changing semi-auto parts into full auto parts requires adding material to the parts and some finesse. Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) -5 and appropriate tools are required.
Neutering full auto parts to delete select fire is Armoury/TL8 (Small Arms) +5.
Doing all of this legally... If you already own a legally registered machine gun, you can swap parts to your heart's content.
If you don't have a legally owned machinegun, the police will want to have a chat and you will be booking a room in one of the worst hotels on the planet for an extended stay.
In the world of Twilight: 2000, all bets are off! There's a slim chance of coming back under control of the chain of command who will object to modifications you've made to your issued weapon.
Canada, when they changed to 5.56 NATO from 7.62 NATO in 1984 followed the US' lead and went with an M16 variant.
The C7 is very much like the M16A2 except they kept the rear sight and full-auto from the M16A1.
Also, like the United States, in 1994 they adopted a carbine version of their rifle.
The fixed rear sight C8 and the flat-top C8A1. The C8A1 got issued with an Elcan C79 3.4x optic.
Interestingly, the flat-top C7A1 rifle wasn't issued until 2005! Too late for T2K.
I've made amendments... again.
While the M4 carbine is the official service rifle for the US Army in Twilight: 2000 as well as the real world...
The M4 RAS doesn't happen in time and the SOCOM barrel is not standard.
Stats for this are easy because High Tech lists it in this original configuration.
The GURPS stats include the detachable carry handle... 7.3 lb. as listed. But the Army went with the Matech rear sight, which is lighter. 7 lb. with oval handguards, BUIS and no optics.
The listed weight for the M16A4 is all wrong though.
Without the M5 RAS handguards and with A2 handguards and a detachable carry handle it should come to 8.8 lb. With the Matech sight, 8.5 lb., with the KAC 600m sight, 8.4 lb.
While not period correct for Twilight: 2000, an M16A4 with the M5 RAS, detachable handle, some grip panels and vertical grip, 9.6 lb. With Matech rear sight, 9.3 lb. With KAC 600m rear sight 9.2 lb.
They even get the M16A2 weights wrong with the oft-quoted 8.9 lb. I get 8.4 lb.
All fixed now!
All weights include a bog standard, green follower, gray aluminum body USGI 30-round magazine, because Magpul isn't around for T2K.
I went to vote for the Gundie Awards and encountered a problem:
Fuck that.
I already delete about 200 emails from places I've done business with already and I don't want more.
Never mind the idea that there's terms and conditions to an internet popularity contest that's binding on the voters. Even more "fun" is the terms and conditions has links to the subsections with their own terms and conditions. You have to click to three levels on one to get the whole thing you're agreeing to.
Since I've made him a character in my scribbles, I've been reading about George Crook.
In particular the battle of the Rosebud.
This is where General Crook learned that the northern plains Indians fought a little differently from the Apache and Northwest Indians he'd been accustomed to.
But part of that difference was from a change in how the Sioux and Cheyenne were dealing with Whites.
They'd gotten new leaders who were aggressive, take-the-fight-to-the-enemy types.
And they took the fight to Crook at Rosebud creek.
I've read several accounts of that fight and the worst I can call it for Crook is a draw.
The outcome of the battle was not decisive for either side, but it did fix Crook in one spot for
Both sides apparently fought until ammunition levels were getting critical and the Sioux withdrew. Crook then sent riders to his supply dump and withdrew to a better position until fresh supplies arrived.
Those supplies did not arrive until after Col. Custer had met his fate.
Something I've not seen mentioned is I think the Indians had something of an after action review of the Rosebud battle and did a "this worked, this didn't" kind of analysis and applied it to the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
I think some historians forget that Indians are people too and capable of learning and changing their approaches to problems.
I also think a lot of historians keep missing that Rosebud and Little Big Horn are separated by about a week and how long it takes to move a supplies when it's carried by wagon or mule (or how far a wagon or mule can go in a day).
Someone mentioned that the pros study logistics, some obscure general I think.
I have also noticed that George Crook was an unpopular officer with his contemporaries who really only kept his job by being relentlessly successful... Until Rosebud.
There's a lot to unpack about the man, but history is written from what people wrote about someone and those someones hate you...
Since I have T2K on the brain, I was wondering if it was better to take an M4 or and M16A4.
Both guns are different from the present day's versions.
No RAS on either.
Both accept the same optics.
The M4 will have the earlier lighter barrel.
The M4 loses a bit of damage vs the A4. 4d+2 pi vs 5d pi. That's 4-26 avg 16 against 5-30 avg 17.5.
The M4 loses some reach. 750/2,900 vs 800/3,500.
The M4 is lighter. 7.3 lb. vs 8.9 lb.
The M4 has less Bulk. 4 vs 5.
The M4 costs more. $950 vs $850.
So the M4 does 91% the average damage per shot at 94%/83% the range for 82% the mass for 80% the bulk for 112% the money.
Looks like the M4 wins the min/max fight with the M16A4.
The M16A4 normally has a vertical grip.
I don't care for it, but...
It's not clone correct, but I'm OK with a representative example of the breed.
It's interesting to me that three companies still make the M5 RAS and none of them sell them to the unwashed public.
How can you tell someone is a bigot about straight white shit?
The word "cisnormative" comes up a lot. Said with all the tone and bile of a Klansman saying CENSORED.
The assumption that biological sex and gender being aligned is the default state.
That belies any statement of understanding.
Cisnormative white men deserve the bad things that happen to them because of their moral corruption.
Cisnormative white men are The Other.
The Other are not people, so they get to treat them as less than people.
Don't like me pointing out your bigotry?
Tough shit.
A real tell is the screaming that someone who's cisnormative can't speak about any situation where LGBT folks are involved, but they sure as fuck can speak about any situation where cisnormal white men are.
Even if speaking in favor of the LGBT folks!
How can you tell someone is a bigot about LGBT shit?
The word "degenerate" comes up a lot.
Morally corrupt and given to vice.
That belies any statement of mental illness and compassion for the sufferer.
Degenerates deserve the bad things that happen to them because of their moral corruption.
Degenerates are The Other.
The Other are not people, so they get to treat them as less than people.
It's their invisible friend in the driver's seat and in a nation with religious freedom, PEOPLE are free to ignore the diktats and dictates of other people's invisible friends.
Don't like me pointing out your bigotry?
Tough shit.
By the way, I've read the book attributed to your invisible friend and you idiots are completely misreading the section on pederasty and applying to homosexuality. The gay sex part is pretty mild.
But even accepting your invisible friend says no butt stuff, there's not a word about being generally weird.
And the constant mention of LARP and Furry says, to me, that the real issue isn't the buttsects but the being strange or different.
Andre Norton wrote a book, "Star Rangers."
I read it in junior high.
I recognize the cover of the copy I got from ebay.
I remember a line or two, here and there.
But the book was as if I'd never read it.
If you wait four decades before you re-read it, it's gonna be fresh again!
Huzzah!
There's a second book set in the same universe, "Star Guard," that came in the same clump of Andre Norton books that I got "Star Rangers" with. I only found out about "Star Guard" when I started looking around for "Star Rangers.
Looking forward to reading it!
The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season is over.
It's been effectively over for some time as the weather cooperated and didn't spin up the normal Caribbean and Gulf storms in the latter half of the season.
The December 2024 prediction was 15 named storms, 7 hurricanes (3 being major).
The June 2025 prediction, as the season was starting was 17-9-4.
What we got was 13-5-4; and just one that was really bad.
Fish storms were the norm this year.
I'll take it.
Still thinking about the world of Twilight: 2000 and things that I never considered back in 1985 when I first got the game and started playing.
We didn't do mines, so there were no minefields. There should have been. There should, at least, be signage indicating minefields, even if they are fake, just to keep some of the marauders out of the crops.
Unexploded ordnance would be everywhere. The T2K world exists before agreements about cluster munitions were signed and Soviet bomblets had a depressingly high percentage that didn't go off on impact as intended.
Because of marauders and how the militaries generally treated the civilian populations, they should be a lot more hostile to the party escaping Kalisz. It makes me wonder if a re-writing The Seven Samurai for T2K would work... No, I don't wonder, it'd work great! The big question is whether the players would be the Samurai or the bandits. It works great both ways.
Because the characters are soldiers and the equipment list is, essentially, a weapons list; two big things get missed.
The Battle of Kalisz is the end of the war. The party runs for it, but the battle ends with both sides basically wiping each other out. WW3 is over except for the mopping up.
Because the war is over, they can participate in the rebuilding of society and having a part in how that proceeds. They can settle. They can try to get home. They can be part of a local warlord or town becoming a government or nation.
The vistas are wider than I would have imagined in 1985 when the Soviet Union was just a solid as the West and NATO.
Holdout is the GURPS skill that allows you to conceal things on your person.
A medieval crossbow is a -6 penalty to your holdout skill.
Being naked is a -7 penalty to your holdout skill.
That this means is a normally clothed person has an extremely good chance (74%) of concealing a crossbow on their person with a skill of 18.
It also means that a naked person with a skill of 18 has a chance at all (a bit less than 5%).
I wanted to post a picture to Facebook, but my phone doesn't have the login.
How do I get it to my laptop?
The phone, which took the picture, does have my Google Chat login.
So send the picture to Marv, copy it from the message, paste to Facebook.
Voila!
I have used that can opener to open cans and it mystifies some people.
Thanksgiving post at ¡No Pasarán!
My research has led to some awkward conversations with my Blackfoot wife, Harvey.
Nobody wants their ancestors to be the baddies.
This research has made it exceedingly difficult to make progress with my little Sabers and Sorcerers story because all the bad shit I'd planned for the Googoo to do to show how baddie they are... The Sioux did in real history!
Never mind the Sioux crossing to the alternate Earth, Maka Tanka, and doing unto the Googoo what white gold prospectors and the US government did to the Sioux in the Black Hills. For the Sioux it's kind of a repeat because they'd already done it to the Cheyenne and Pawnee.
SIGH
Thinking about sidearms reminded me of something that has failed in many game rule sets.
The encumbrance rules almost always just track the weight or mass of what the character is carrying and not the bulk.
The first time it came to a head was when I tried to railroad a player's character into being captured via their weapon, an M16A2, jamming in Twilight: 2000.
This gambit failed because they had enough encumbrance to have been lugging FOUR M16A2'a around with them.
I've carried four of those things around before, and you're not going to be very tactical while doing so.
Even slinging three of them across your back doesn't really get them out of the way.
There's nothing in GURPS that reflects the tanglefoot contraption that is a Stewart saber hanger.
This doesn't interfere while mounted, but even then you're supposed to unclip it from the chaff and attach it to the saddle in front of your left knee.
But even clipping the sword higher doesn't keep the bottom of the scabbard off the ground.
The rules don't account for this and a GM would have to do what I did and try to walk around wearing one to see what's wrong.
The rules also don't account for about 1/3 of those rounds being really hard to reach and half of them can't be reached unless you change hands.
Encumbrance does not GURPS.
A thread about swords on Arfcom got me thinking...
Swords are sidearms, not primary weapons most of the time. It's the weapon you pull when your main weapon goes tits up.
It's a weapon to show your status.
That's not how most of us gamers did it most of the time...
When we did, however, we hardly ever had cause to use them.
I've got so many character sheets that have secondary weapons that I never used.
Not a sword when I had a polearm.
Not a pistol when I had a rifle.
But... You never knew when the GM would decide to break your main weapon and better to have it and not need it that to need it and not have it.
Where have I heard that before?
Flickr adds a lot of extraneous stuff onto the end of the image links.
The full size photo link is:
Won't work to insert an image using the URL link with Blogger. You have to trim it down to:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54825718145_1d2ce9b74d_o.jpg
Even that doesn't always work... But selecting the 1024 image often
does...
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54825718145_5ff00e1a42_b.jpg
Manually copying the HMTL code always works! This is that overlong string.
The links are good, but Blogger refuses to fix their "what you see is what you get" editor.
It's recently come to my attention that Pam Bondi's office thinks that SBRs are just for criminals.
What a waste of $600 on tax stamps and being all law abiding and shit.
I guess I'm just a very odd criminal that lets the government know what I'm doing...
Not so odd in putting my "crime" on the internet. I've seen many real criminals do that.
There's a local gun shop that's doing door-buster Black Friday deals.
Among them are $99 Glocks.
Besides not being willing to engage in hand to hand combat to get close enough to the door when they open to snag one before they sell out...
My Glock itch is fully scratched.
The Glock 21 is my lesson to not trade off a gun for stupid reasons.
The two Glock 17's are nostalgia purchases to fill the holes left by my first two Gen1's.
The Glock 45 is my "modern" Glock, which I mainly got because Glock offered Blue Label guns to veterans.
S&W M&P are my plastic fantastics of choice.
The Lovely Harvey makes deviled eggs for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Far more often she makes egg salad.
She put the halves of the whites in the holder and started mixing up the yolks with the deviled egg ingredients.
Turns out there's a lot of overlap between what goes into egg salad and deviled eggs and while on autopilot she can add the stuff that's outside the overlap.
Like the dill relish.
Good news! If you've made this mistake, chop up the whites and mix with the yolk concoction and you've got egg salad!
Bad news! It's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and someone (me) needs to hit the grocery store for eggs.
Happily, everyone was focused and cheerful at Publix and the only thing the employees said was in short supply was gravy from the deli.
I got eggs, beer, chips and some Pubsubs with little drama.
The entire world was on the gold standard in the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of the reasons for the golden age of piracy was the massive devaluation of gold thanks to Spain massively increasing the supply of available gold in Europe because they were moving it from the new world.
It's a great example of how even gold can have inflation.
It seems unlikely that we're going to find a massive enough amount of gold to cause it to devalue like when Spain toppled all those kingdoms in the new world, but Elon is still working on super heavy launchers.
Who knows what's in the asteroids?
Got a link to this video in the comments.
It's 22 minutes of, basically, repeating the same thing over and over about each of the bad brands. Tedious delivery of good advice.
The bad brands listed are:
#11 Safeway
#10 7-Eleven
#9 Sam's Club
#8 Circle K
#7 Murphy USA
#6 Speedway
#5 Love's Travel Stops
#4 Amoco
#3 Pilot Flying J
#2 Sunoco Regular Grade
#1 Unnamed bulk suppliers, very unhelpful inclusion
Good brands:
#5 Chevron with Techron#4 Shell#3 Exxon Mobil#2 Costco#1 BP-Amoco Ultimate (Isn't it odd that Amoco is the #4 worst, but this sub-brand is excellent?)
I'm a devotee of the Top-Tier Brands, so this wasn't a shock to me.
The Lovely Harvey did an, unplanned, experiment with our 2002 Civic and got it to run like garbage because she'd fill up at the closest, handiest place like she had to WALK to get gas and carry it in red Solo cups. The car got carbon build up something fierce and we managed to correct it by putting Sea-Foam in the tank for several tanks.
I've two friends with Corvettes and both buy gas from 7-Eleven and it makes me twitch every time they get gas.
The local Shell stations are on my shit list. They're normally 5-10 cents more per gallon anyways, and they ALWAYS charge 10 cents more to pay at pump. Worse, their loyalty rewards program changed from 5 cents to 3 cents.
A nearby 7-Eleven, though, has Mobil gas and doesn't play games with the prices.
