Inside Minimum Distance

A 40x46mm round that hits someone inside it's arming distance will still do some damage.

1d+1(0.5) cr dkb (double knockback).  Not a pleasant hit.

Not Quite As Bad

In 1972 the average price of regular gas was 36.9¢ per gallon.

With the 655.18% inflation since then, gas should be $2.789 per gallon.

Last time I filled it was $3.159.

Corrected for inflation, gas is about 13% more today than in 1972.

The $1.199 gas of 1991 should be $2.779 gas today.

But the $3.699 gas of 2012 should be $5.089 today, so something went right and gas prices broke from the rest of inflation.

Bloop

M79 ammo in Funny New Guys Vietnam.  Also for XM148 after 1965 and M203 after 1969.

See High Tech p.143 and p.145 and SEALs in Vietnam p.33 for stats.

M381 HE (1967) - 3 yard min distance.  32g Comp-B.  0.503 lb.

M406 HE (1967) - 15 yard min distance.  32g Comp-B.  0.503 lb.

M433 HEDP (1971) - 15 yard min distance.  45g Comp-A5.  0.507 lb.

M576 MP (Multi-Projectile) (1967) - No min distance.  20 #4 Buckshot pellets.  0.254 lb.

M583A1 White Parachute Star Flare (1972) - 600ft altitude, 40 sec, 90,000 candela.  0.49 lb.

M585 White Star Flare (1967) - 330 yard min distance, 7 sec, 55,000 candela.  0.41 lb.

M651 Riot Control CS tear gas (1967) - 33 yard min distance, 6.5 yard sphere, 20 sec burn time.  0.45 lb.

M661 Green Parachute Star Flare (1972) - 600ft altitude, 40 sec, 8,000 candela.  0.49 lb.

M662 Red Parachute Star Flare (1972) - 600ft altitude, 40 sec, 20,000 candela.  0.49 lb.

XM674 Riot Control CS tear gas (1968) - 33 yard min distance, 6 yard sphere, 36 sec burn time.  0.463 lb.

M676 Yellow Smoke (1967) - 150 yd. min distance.  90 sec burn time.  0.48 lb.

M680 White Smoke (1967) - 150 yd. min distance.  90 sec burn time.  0.48 lb.

M682 Red Smoke (1967) - 150 yd. min distance.  90 sec burn time.  0.48 lb.

There's a husha bomb "silent" HE round running around with the SEALs and some flechette rounds circulating too.
 

I Beg Your Pardon

Hunter Biden has gotten a sweet deal of a pardon!

Do not despair!

Biden the Younger may no longer plead the 5th if someone makes him testify now.

Everything has a silver lining!

Not that I expect anyone to supoena him...

That's Not The Official Loadout

With the idea of press-ganging Marv into making a Funny New Guys character, I decided to look up the loadouts for the various weapons carried in Vietnam.

I found this guy.

What I'd found in my research into the web gear made me think that 9 20-round magazines were carried for the M16.

He's saying they lugged around 20.

He's also carrying 200 rounds of spare ammo on 10-round clips.

Plus 200 rounds for the M60.

I'd encountered the carrying ammo for the M60 before.

I'd made characters who lugged around ammo in their packs to reload magazines later, an idea that Willard dissuaded me of, but it persists.

But, he was there, I was not.

Now I'm trying to figure out HOW he carried 20 magazines.  1 goes in the gun.  A magazine pouch will hold 4 each.  An ammo bandolier has 7 pockets and each will carry one magazine.  Three pouches and a bandolier will do it.

That bandolier came from an ammo can and was packed with 14 10-round clips.

I wonder if he was really carrying 140 spare rounds instead of 200 in clips.

Also of interest is the grenadier carrying 25 40mm grenades.  The standard bandolier carries a whopping 6. A vest would tote 24.  There are many bags available to carry them around loose though.

Most photos of grenadiers in 'Nam I've found are wearing the same LBE as the other grunts, and that makes me think that some were carried in the standard ammo pouch; 2 easily, maybe 3 but you'd need a DX roll or a Fast-Draw -4 to get just one out without pulling all three out.

This dude can lug around 30 grenades with his vest and bandolier.

Running Out Of Time

In April, my "favorite" climate "scientist," Michael Mann, predicted 33.1 ± 5.8 named storms for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

The total stands at 18.

We have just under six hours to get to the low end of 27.3 storms before hurricane season ends.

That's about a storm and a half per hour.

This prediction was roundly mocked by several of the local meteorologists too.  They were saying 16-20.

Weathermen 1.

Climate scientists 0.

Just For The Brahs Here

This is a, finely crafted, link that I guarangoddamtee to be good at the time of posting.

From the EPFUCKINGA.

Notice: "Starting as soon as January 1, 2025, restrictions will take effect on the use of higher-GWP HFCs in new 1) aerosols, 2) foams, and 3) refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump equipment."

The EPA is enforcing it as a hard deadline rather than a soft phase in.

100 Year Old Cars

Sound on!

Also, not a bad rendition of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."

I Don't Remember Being Asked

On January 1st your air conditioner becomes obsolete.

Not by design.

Not because it doesn't work.

Not because a better system is supplanting it.

Because the government is mandating a change to a different refrigerant.

Again.

I am fascinated that with all the talk of democracy from some corners of politics they didn't even ask if I wanted the cost of a new system to triple.

They didn't even check to see if the average citizen could afford such a change.

I plan on writing my congress creatures about this passed-in-the-dead of night tree-hugger law.

Because we can still step back from the mandate, the companies are still allowed to make legacy components and refrigerants to get past existing warranties.

I don't think we will because the existing refrigerants are out of patent and the new stiff is still under one.

It's regulatory capture in the name of global warming.

Again.

Pics Working Again

 I didn't change anything, they just started working again.

Google is wonderfully inconsistent about how Blogger works.

I Admit I Wasn't Really Paying Attention

BUT!

I remember us pledging to defend Ukraine back when we encouraged them to give up their nukes.

I also recall that everything was going OK when the corrupt leader of the Ukraine was a Russian mouthpiece.

It also seems to me that we got involved with Ukrainian politics and got that corrupt mouthpiece replaced with a different corrupt politician who was more beholden to the Delaware Crime Family.

That appears to have triggered Russia a great deal and has led them to test the waters by annexing Crimea, waiting to see if the world would do anything, then going for the rest of the place.

That they did it when the Delaware Crime Family was in office was shitty timing for Russia.

No corrupt leader beholden to them in office, no carefully laundered foreign aid gets filtered back to "The Big Guy."

I think that is the crux of the matter.

Nothing I've read makes me think I want either side to win; but rather that it'd be best if they both, as nations, lost.

It'd really be best if it'd never started and all the innocent people caught up in it were spared.

But the innocent never do seem to avoid it, do they?

Just Fourteen ONLY Fourteen

When noticing that the average hit from a middling trained gunner only got 14 hits instead of the expected 28 when firing an M494 105mm APERS-T round at 50 yards with muzzle effect selected...

I have to also remember that the 3d cut per flechette will average 10 points raw damage each that becomes 15 once its through their uniform and that is 210 total points of damage.

The average 10 HP human is automatically dead after taking 60 total points of damage and cannot be resurrected past 110.

He's not less dead because he only took half the expected number of hits.

Prolly got a couple of his buddies too.

My Family Doesn't Talk To Me

If you were to observe my sister and my father, you would get the impression that she's the only child of his second marriage.

I don't exist to them.

My aunt has made mention of it several times.

It upsets her a lot more than me.

Willard Is A Draka!

Someone doctored this picture of Willard:

Into something from the SM Sterling Draka novels (Probably "Under the Yoke):

That's interesting!

Flechette Math

The M494 is a fletchette round that bursts like a shrapnel round making a cone of death.

A person's silhouette is approximately a square yard.

At 50 yards, with it set for muzzle effect, the cone of fletchettes has expanded to a circle of about 176.7 square yards.

So one would expect that person to absorb 1/177th of the 5,000 little bees.

That's around 28 fletchettes.

Many fewer than I expected!

Skill 11, 3-seconds of aiming.

That's a -8 to hit for range.

+11 for number of projectiles, +5 for Acc, +1 for Braced, +3 for the targeting computer.

23 or less to hit.

Average roll of 10 means that 14 hit.  Critical hit of 3 just gets 21.

About half of what you'd expect with the average roll.  75% with a critical hit.

GURPS doesn't simulate large numbers of projectiles well.

Ham And Turkey Day

It's the gut buster holiday, though we eat more on Christmas here.

The last three years we've pawned the cooking off on Bob Evans, and saved a little money and a LOT of time.

I'm thankful for the little stuff because the big stuff is, presently, handled.

Sadly.  There is no hockey.

Also:  So far I have not checked the mail box.  At some point I will forget, I am sure.

What About Flechettes?

Flechette rounds keep coming up in science fiction stuff, but they're an ammunition technology that keeps failing to live up to the hype.  At least in small arms.

Shortly after the introduction of the M79 grenade launcher, a round firing 45 of these teeny darts was fielded.

Notice the lack of even an XM number.

They didn't stabilize and would often hit sideways.  Their light weight meant that they barely raised a welt, let alone hurt anyone.

If they did land point first, they rarely did any substantial damage.

GURPS gives them 1d-3 pi-.  So whatever small amount penetrates gets halved!

The average hit will do a mere 0.25 points (min 1).  So you're going to need lots of hits for it to matter.

45 projectiles means you get a +6 to hit.

Using the same Skill 11 grenadier from last time...

At 20 yards they have a 11 to hit so, average 2 fletchettes scoring.  For 2 points of damage.

At 7 yards they tend to get 5 hits.  5 points of damage.

Not quite as good as a M576 buckshot round.

It's Liquid Bread It's Good For You

The history of beer!

I'll drink to that!

Beer is civilization and a polity that claims to be a civilization without beer is savages aping the forms of civilization.

Self Correcting

In the discussion about tariffs and Mexico, I am only seeing remittances being talked about in the comments sections.

Taxing remittances at some insane amount, like 90%, removes a gigantic incentive for illegal aliens to be here in the first place.

It's also around $65 billion a year removed from the US economy and injected into Mexico's.

Mexico stands to lose far more than we will in a protracted trade war; especially if we figure out that despite the price of goods here going up from the tariffs, so do wages and wages earned here get spent here and that spreads out to other parts of the economy.

The current system of cartelization does get cheap goods, at the cost of domestic jobs and stagnant wages.  Goods NEED to get cheaper in this paradigm because wages are, defacto, falling as inflation eats them before they're even earned.

If were to two-prong our attack on fixing the economy we'd talk about how the NLRB is unconstitutional too.  Breaking the unions would go a long way towards making manufacturing affordable again.

I Don't Necessarily Trust Him

Mr Musk might not be the paragon of liberty many people are making him out to be.

Being a car guy, I noticed another side of him with Tesla.

If you buy the top of the line super duper Tesla, get bored with it and sell it to someone else; Tesla will audit the sale and decide if the next owner paid enough for all the features and if they decide they didn't:  They disable the features.

That's at least adjacent to "you will own nothing and like it" territory.

I have a hearty mistrust of places that rent you something under color of selling.

Tricking The System

 

 HA!  Thag know some basic HTML and I can trick it into showing me the picture without using their interface!

Take that Google!

 

 

#4 Buck

#4 Buck does 1d-1(0.5) pi- and gives 27 pellets in 12ga 2-3/4"  00 Buck does 1d pi and you get 9 pellets.  For the record, a .22LR from a pistol does 1d+1 pi-

Coincidentally, the M576 multi-purpose round for the 40mm grenade launcher also uses #4 buck, but just 20 pellets.  40x46mm is a much larger round than 12ga 2-3/4"!

Despite the low damage, it was, apparently, very popular with shotgunners in Vietnam.

The #4 gets a +5 to hit from one shot and +6 for two; 00 gets +2 for one shot and +4 for two due to the number of pellets flying.

More hits could mean more damage despite the halving of the damage after penetration.  For a single shot the same roll means 3 more pellets hit.

Range is kinda pathetic, so let's keep it to 20 yards, -6 to hit.

A skill 11 shooter will have a 7 chance to hit with a single round and 9 with the RoF of 2 of a pump shotgun shooting 00 buck.  On average, they're gonna miss with both.

The same shooter will have a 10 with a single round and 11 with two.  On average, they'll get one pellet to hit with one round and two with two.

Our grenadier gets a +4 to hit with his single M576 round and will likely be missing...

Hits do more damage than misses regardless.  (1 point or 3 points is more than zero).

If we let the enemy get much closer, like say, 7 yards... it's only -3 to hit.

That means rolls to hit of 10 and 12 for the 00 and the average roll will now land 1 or 3 hits.

#4 needs 13 and 14 to hit and will land 4 and 5 hits respectively.

40mm needs 12 so the average roll lands 3 hits.

00 buck will do (on average) 3.5 hits per round; so 3 or 10.

#4 buck will do (on average) 1.5 hits per round; so 6 or 7.

40mm does the same average damage so 4 points of damage from its three hits.

At longer ranges #4 is going to work better because you're going to be hitting more.

Blogger Is Being Strange Again

 

For some reason I can insert this picture of The Beast with my laptop and Ubuntu, but not my desktop and Win7.

Odd.

Two weeks ago, the opposite was true.

Update: Now that I have inserted this pic with the laptop, it will recognize it and let me insert it again from the desktop.  This appears to be true of any photo that has already been linked.

Don't See These Much Anymore

 

Nice VW Type 3 wagon cruised past while I had my camera out taking pics of The Beast.

Big Brake Blues

Big brakes and multi-piston calipers often come with copious amounts of brake dust.

Big brakes also mean you can't really reach between the spokes to get the inside of the rim clean.

But boy howdy do they look AWESOME when you clean them up.

That means taking the wheel off.

I decided that was too simple and rotated the tires too.

I should have taken a picture.  Maybe I will later and edit this post.

Now That Gun Control Is Solved Eh?

Canada has stupid knife laws too!

I Knew It Was Simple

Figured out how to make the bar at the top of the blog to remember I was logged in.

Gotta make an exception for the enhanced tracking.

 It fixes being able to insert photos from Flickr too!

That's Mist and Shadow pausing just before play resumes.

Educated Guess

I read this article and am immediately struck with a possible cause.

Almost all of the recalled foods are in sectors where the food is handled extensively by human hands and those hands are attached to "migrant" workers.

Also known as illegal aliens.

Hygiene is not the same with those south of the border as it is with us.

Can't even suggest that cleanliness standards aren't even being given lip service because the workers aren't from around here.

E-coli in lettuce?  Can't be from the workers shitting in the fields!

E-coli in hamburger?  Can't be from workers not washing their hands!

Can't suggest that the owners and operators of the places with the problem are complicit in the crime of illegally entering the country.

It makes one wonder why we have an FDA if they don't randomly and frequently inspect the places making our food.

Did they spend their entire budget on DEI and LGBT outreach?

No Reloads

Ever since I read "The Caine Mutiny" I've been off and on obsessed with the US 1,000 ton/4-piper/flush-deck destroyers.

Those are Caldwell, Clemson and Wickes classes.

I used to watch a lot of World of Warship videos and noticed that destroyers and torpedoes could be devastating.

In the game, the tubes reload and you can try over and over.

In the real world, even if you had spares in the hold, there's no means to reload them.

So a flush-deck gets 12 torpedo shots then it's a gunboat.

Then it needs to get to a dock or a destroyer tender to get reloaded.

This might not be true of every destroyer class, but it's common.

Honestly, it surprised me.

Dark Days

2024 sees the departure of the guys from Top Gear/Grand Tour and the demise of Roadkill.

It's a sad time to be a car guy.