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For the next hour or so I will be attempting to purchase Star Wars Legos from Lego's web page.
They FINALLY released a new TIE Interceptor and I simply MUST have it because it appears to be to the same standard as the TIE from Solo.
The Lovely Harvey has a pile of things she wants too. Ahsoka themed this time.
Toodles!
Update:
This did not post on time, so I back dated it!
Tonight is consumed watching the only form of Sportsball that I even give half a fuck about.
Hockey.
The home team was eliminated Thursday.
But not all is lost!
Florida has TWO hockey teams!
Thankfully, the Panthers were able to knock Boston out in game seven! In overtime no less.
Since I'm backdating this, the Seattle Kraken were able to knock the defending Stanley Cup champs, The Colorado Avalanche, out as well. Also in game seven.
Forgotten Weapons had a raffle going to get a genuine, once issued to the 101st Airborne Div, surplus M17 pistol.
This was the link. <- Don't click that!
You buy an overpriced coffee cup and they put your name in the hat.
Except...
Marv bought himself a $50 coffee cup and an entry and now he's being inundated by spam and phishing emails.
From seconds after his confirmation email arrived, in fact.
It is out considered opinion that the value of the prize does not outweigh that Get Entered To Win is selling your information to scum, at best, or is so insecure that your information is freely available to the scum, at worst.
It really shows that Jim Sullivan was onto something when he figured the AR-15 out from the AR-10 with Mr Stoner.
It's important to recall Mr Sullivan when talking about what would Mr Stoner have done if he'd started today.
The number one goal was a weapon that would be adopted by the military.
Everything about the AR-10 and AR-15 were in support of that goal. With the deck stacked deeply against them because the M14 wasn't that long in the tooth when they started pitching their concept.
Abandoning steel and wood for aluminum and synthetics because technology had advanced thanks to WW2 wasn't taken as the reason for the development.
When they were up against the M14's prototype and the FAL contender with the AR-10 they even showed the problems with "lighter weight at all cost." They burst a barrel and were forced to withdraw from the competition.
Some of the ideas in AR's tend to ignore what would Stoner did?
The modular Cadillac Gage 63 system and the AR-18 say a great deal about where his mind was.
He abandoned advanced materials for designs which could be built with a lower level of technology.
WWSD is an exercise in making an AR light for lightness sake using the latest and greatest materials.
Bully for them!
But it comes with a terrible cost.
Costs that Stoner and Sullivan realized would keep their rifle from mainstream acceptance even if the customers accepted the space-age materials.
The two things remaining on the AR-15 from the advanced materials list were the aluminum receivers and the non-wood furniture. With specific materials chosen from a list of proven materials. Proven in aviation, not firearms, but well within a division of Fairchild Aviations ability to make.
The WWSD rifle uses a lot of new materials which are proven in aviation use too. But the prices have yet to come down.
A WWSD upper receiver on overstock clearance is still near a grand.
More than a complete rifle from PSA and a crate of ammo. And the PSA gun will come with a way to aim it!
So far, I'm just not seeing what the premium price gets you besides the lower mass.
And embracing the KE Arms KP-15 lower has the mass with a PSA upper well below the "good enough" line.
Perfect has long been the mortal foe of good enough.
That applies to accuracy as well. Especially since it's a rare AR, from any maker, that will not far outshoot the shooter. Most of us will be better served by using the difference in price between my Behind Every Blade of Grass idea and What Would Stoner Do? on ammunition and range time.
Or, dare I say it, taking a class on how to employ their new toy to its fullest!
But that's just me.
I once knew how to do calculus...
I have not used it in decades and never outside the classroom.
I suspect that it would take almost as much effort at this point to remember what I learned as it did to learn it in the first place.
Statistics, on the other hand, keeps coming up because of gaming and doing reality checks on GURPS.
Someplace I have my chicken scratching of figuring out the difference between 1d+4 and 2d and why a +4 is promoted to another die in GURPS. Hint: it's about the mean of a honest die.
I am very curious.
Except for COVID, what other disease still worries you once you're vaccinated?
I was vaccinated and exposed to measles. We didn't worry because I'd been vaccinated.
Mumps, same deal.
Polio.
Smallpox.
Diphtheria.
Pertussis.
Rubella.
Hepatitis A and B.
Even black plague.
Not one of them came with a "be sure to avoid people who haven't been immunized or are sick with the disease," like COVID does.
I see the hard sell, but the headline keeps recurring, "died from COVID despite being fully vaccinated."
Show me the headline, "died of smallpox despite being fully vaccinated."
I clear the land.
I plow the field.
I grow the crops.
I process the crops into ingredients.
I prepare the ingredients into a meal.
I bring the meal to your table.
I am a racist because you have to eat it yourself?
This is affirmative action in a nutshell.
As long as there's anything they have to do for themselves, they are being oppressed.
Stuttgart has a brewery named Hofbräu.
This is not to be confused by the more common Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München.
The local pico-brewery, Liquid Garage, makes a Czech pilsner named "Czech, 1, 2, 3," which tickles my taste buds the same way as the unobtanium in the USA Stuttgarter Hofbräu.
It could be time playing tricks on me, it has been 33 years, but this is nice.
Watching, "Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons and Dragons," and there's a section on inclusion.
OK.
Fantasy settings are myth parallels of Europe for the most part.
You want to play a character who has dark brown skin, because you have dark brown skin and you want a character that looks like you.
Thag Grok. Though Thag always thought the idea was to play someone who isn't you.
But let's unwrap this.
There's black people in Europe right now. There's black people in America right now.
There weren't in medieval and renaissance Europe unless they'd been dragged there to be an oddity. They didn't have communities there.
Europe wasn't sexually egalitarian either, and most D&D games are.
Well, there's a reason that we don't see more black people in historical Europe. They aren't from there.
A white person in sub-Saharan Africa is also pretty damned unusual.
So, how did they end up everywhere?
Well, for America, it's slavery. Spain and England dragged them from Africa and dropped them here to work for considerably less than minimum wage.
Considering that a medieval or renaissance Europeanesque society might possibly still have slaves, that's probably not a good explanation for their presence.
First, your world will need a place where people with darker skin evolved. I tend to keep the reasons for darker skin the same as history. More sun more often. That will be a different place from where white people evolved, less sun less often means less melanin. There's lots of real reasons for skin color developing.
Next we need a reason there's black people in our Europe analog (or white people in our Africa analog).
Well, most fantasy settings have something that Europe and Africa sure as heck lacked.
Magic.
It allows for much faster travel than state of the art walking or riding. That allows for faster communication.
That magic doesn't require a technological base that means the place where the darker skins evolved can, reasonably, be expected to be on par with the white people when they encounter each other.
Faster and farther communication and trade means that people will travel between the two regions and magic also prevents the mass transmission of plagues!
So, there's no reason your elf can't be black.
There should be a reason they are is all.
It's your world you're making from whole cloth, you can even have the reason be so far in the past that the cultural differences between the black elf's home culture and the culture of the setting no longer matter. The reason for their migration doesn't even have to be happy, the Irish sure didn't get a happy first few years in America!
Also, it's your world, you don't have to have racism unless you want it. I tend to skip it. When you have Orcs and genuinely evil mages who can summon the literal denizens of Hell, differences in skin color starts to matter a lot less.
But, remember that reason for there being black elves? It works best if that reason is there from the beginning. If there weren't black elves in the setting for, literally, decades your explanation had better fucking ROCK.
That's why my fantasy setting having black elves doesn't raise an eye and there suddenly being black characters in Lord of the Rings causes outcry. Especially since there's no explanation even hinted at.
Can an Imperial Marine take on an M1A1(HA)?
The 2,400L DR of the front turret armor is more than proof against the 6dx5(2) burn ex 6dx12(2) burn ex from an FGMP-14 fired from a battlesuit.
The DR 240 of the battlesuit is not stopping an APFSDSDU round.
But that Crunchie in a Can isn't coming alone.
He's bringing a buddy with a 2.3 gigajoule heavy fusion cannon.
6dx650(2) burn ex.
That does an average of 13,650 points of damage...
It's going out the back of the Abrams too.
The tank that fusion gun is mounted on has 25,000L DR on the front quarter. Even a max damage roll of the 6dx48(2) pi++ M829A2 round isn't going penetrate. That won't even penetrate the roof of the cupola!
Even the Imperial Army has a decent chance of taking out an Abrams with their APC.
With just 1,100 DR on the front, it's vulnerable to the 120mm gun, but the 10 megajoule rapid fire fusion gun delivers 5dx50(2) burn ex. On average, no penetration, but its RoF is 8 shots a second! It's going to erode the armor off the tank in a few shots.
I was rewatching Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and it hit me:
What kind of undead are the cursed crew of Black Pearl?
They clearly have not suffered any loss of intelligence or will.
Nearly all forms of undead do.
They seem to be driven to end the curse, but aren't being compelled beyond a reasonable desire to end the misery.
Obviously the authors weren't forced to comply with any given template, but I still wonder what kind of undead they are.
A chickenshit anonymous commenter got his comment deleted because they couldn't follow the simple posting rules.
They alluded that I would feel different about drag queens if it was my kid that got molested.
Well, The Boy has been molested.
Obviously I feel the way I do despite that.
The convict was a trusted friend and significant other of one of Harvey's co-workers.
We'd hired them to babysit.
Raising a child like The Boy is demanding and when someone volunteers to take some of that load...
Except for the betrayal...
The convict originally got busted in a sting where a detective was a portraying a 13 year old.
We were shocked. The Boy overheard us and... um... reacted.
Because if Uncle Scumbag had told him if the cops ever came he'd hurt The Boy and he was SCARED SHITLESS.
So we called the cops to add our experience to the charges.
Charges that stuck.
So, thanks, Anonymous Shitbag, for dragging these memories out again.
But I cannot bring myself to hate people who have not committed a crime.
Not even if they are gay, like Uncle Scumbag. Not even if they are male, like Uncle Scumbag.
Lots of gay men aren't molesting kids. Lots of drag queens will be perfectly happy performing at adults only venues (assuming that they can get permits).
The scum really are the minority, and it's time to stop letting them dictate the terms and define the language.
Because there's lots of fine people out there whose only crime is being strange and that by itself is harmless. But the scum have people convinced that the strange part is dangerous when it's the dangerous part that is, and it's an independent variable from being strange.
Because we're going to miss a scumbag because they can pull off the appearance of normal while we focus on the strange.
Widner's reached out and asked if I'd like to give them a review.
Since they let me pick my own ammunition to test, I'm thinking that there should also a be a review of the purchasing experience.
First, there's their web page.
It's clearly navigable!
I can't say that about every vendor I purchase from.
The left sidebar lets you narrow your choices down to JUST the ammo you want to look at in short order then it's a simple matter of adding it to your cart and giving them your payment information.
In this case, my payment information was mostly a gift code they provided, but after taxes I had to add a few bucks of my own. I could have bought less and put it all on their gracious gift, but that seems really skeezy.
Shipping is down to two choices, FedEx and UPS. Pick the one which does a better job in your area.
There's nothing to keep you from making a purchase.
That makes it difficult to review.
Reviews are based on what goes wrong, not from everything going like it's supposed.
Well.
One thing is wrong.
Not one round of 105x617mmR in stock from any manufacturer. :)
Remember Hydra-Shok?
Federal still makes it.
Lucky Gunner did a bunch of gel tests to the FBI standard.
124gr Hydra-Shok, with a mean velocity of 1,053 fps expanded thusly:
Penetration was:
The newer 124gr HST flying at a mean of 1,135 fps expanded more uniformly
Penetration was:
Make your purchase decisions appropriately.
Personally, I like bigger holes than smaller in the bad-guy.
Action.
Reaction.
I hear that drag performers are going to protest a done deal today.
Florida has passed and the governor is going to sign a law that makes drag shows adult entertainment and can affect the business licenses of venues where drag shows are performed.
It's probably an overreaction on the part of the legislature, but...
It's a reaction, not an action.
I've read interviews from some of the drag performers and it's apparent that they aren't the scumbags that should be punished.
There were drag shows here and there and hardly anyone gave a fuck.
Then the scumbags dragged the kids into it.
Dragging the kids into it definitely causes a reaction and scumbags immediately begin countering that reaction.
Measure.
Countermeasure.
Counter-Countermeasure.
Until, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and people who weren't causing the problem are punished right alongside the scumbags.
As gun owners, we should be familiar with this.
BUT.
Is this law really that bad? So far I've seen nobody cite the text and the author isn't coming across as someone who hates drag queens because they've got an invisible friend whispering in their ear.
Here's the meat.
827.11 Exposing children to an adult live performance.—
(1) As used in this section, the term: (a) “Adult live performance” means any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities as those terms are defined in s. 847.001, lewd conduct, or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts when it: 1. Predominantly appeals to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest; 2. Is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community of this state as a whole with respect to what is suitable material or conduct for the age of the child present; and 3. Taken as a whole, is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for the age of the child present. (b) “Knowingly” means having general knowledge of, reason to know, or a belief or ground for belief which warrants further inspection or inquiry of both: 1. The character and content of any adult live performance described in this section which is reasonably susceptible of examination by the defendant; and 2. The age of the child. (2) A person’s ignorance of a child’s age, a child’s misrepresentation of his or her age, or a bona fide belief of a child’s consent may not be raised as a defense in a prosecution for a violation of this section. (3) A person may not knowingly admit a child to an adult live performance. (4) A violation of subsection (3) constitutes a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 127 775.083.
It's mite subjective. Perhaps unconstitutionally vague.
Except. Click that link to 847.001. This is going to pass muster.
On the face, there's nothing that keeps a venue from having a drag show. There's nothing that bans drag queens from working at those shows.
What they need to do is keep the kids out.
Will that be hard? I do not know. I hope it's easy. I PRAY that it's easy to keep kids out.
The thing that needs to be addressed is this will have a chilling effect on places having drag shows which are fine with banning children and the proper licenses will not be sought.
Another thing that needs addressed is this will also be the excuse many religious kooks with government jobs will use to not issue the licenses in the first place.
The number of full-liquor bars, strip clubs and pawn shops are fixed in most Florida counties by the licensing agencies. You cannot open a new one unless an existing one goes away.
The drag queens protesting are correct, this is the end of their livelihood.
I do ask, though, where were they when the grooming scandals first hit? I don't recall a "drag queens against child molestation" organization or protest.
Shoulda got in front of this.
In the way back, I was playing an Arab in one of FuzzyGeff's Nexus worlds.
Said Arab bore little to no resemblance to the Arabs of today.
His flavor of Islam, likewise.
Near 200 years ago, both were different than today.
But those weren't the main defining characteristics of his being.
He was a gentleman. A right honorable one.
During one encounter, we found a giant spider threatening some innocent.
Firing his Martini-Henry at the spider would have been troublesome because the innocents were just beyond the attacking arachnid.
So he drew his scimitar and waded into hand to hand combat.
And promptly got bit and died from the venom.
I was thrilled!
I'd been playing forces of nature and to have a character get killed was novel for me.
I realized that I'd been missing the uncertainty of playing a character in danger.
The other players tried to get me resurrected, they even traded my Martini for it, but the spellcaster blew their roll.
I am still satisfied with the character's demise.
The backup camera was ever so slightly canted.
An hour later, it is no longer canted.
The side marked "top" was merely suggestive and not absolute, thus the cant.
Maybe about 2 degrees off, but really noticeable with the lines on one side hitting first because the lines are absolute to the screen and not the camera.
TTAG has an article about manual safeties and striker fired guns.
I have a couple.
All the M&P's have a manual safety.
None of the European guns do.
I tend to prefer a manual safety for carry and demand it for pocket-carry.
On the bigger M&P it makes a handy thumb rest!
But I carried a Glock for a long while with the chamber loaded to no ill effect. The same effect, in fact, that carrying an M&P with a safety engaged.
It is a preference item, do what you want. Which is basically what the article says.
The SIG is likely going to grow a safety before long because it's a tar-baby project gun.
There's a bit of hullabaloo about "stand your ground" in cases that aren't "stand your ground" lately.
One in particular seems that it could have been solved by not opening the damned door for someone you don't know in the wee hours of the morning.
Some of the others, most in fact, aren't "stand your ground" but are still legitimate self defense cases.
The press still thinks that you need to run screaming until you cannot run any more before you can even try to defend yourself or that you're obligated to debate with a criminal until over the issue until...
I'm not sure what they're going for here except that they don't think defending yourself is ever legitimate.
There's a line-of-sight thickness on the M1A1 that's 880mm thick.
GURPS is DR 70 per inch of RHAE.
880mm is 34.64". If it were rolled homogeneous armor, it'd have DR 2,425.
I'd given the M1A1(HA) DR 2,400L in this facing.
It's my understanding that even Chobham armor is better than its RHA thickness.
It's kind of why we have the phrase RHAE where the 'E' means "equivalent."
Challenger 2's version is supposedly good for double it's thickness for RHAE. If the M1A1 is using the same blend, then the 88cm section should be DR 4,850L!!!
What they're NOT clear about in these speculations is if this is the effective thickness against a particular round or if that's against anything.
If we're talking about JUST HEAT rounds then this is exactly what the rules say laminate armor should do to a HEAT round.
For the record. DR 2,425L needs a 6dx23(10) cr ex HEAT round to start worrying.
The "Dorchester" version in the Challenger 2 doesn't have the depleted uranium the M1A1(HA) has.
Even so, this stuff appears to be better than normal steel of a similar thickness against KE rounds.
Ye Olde GURPS: Vehicles makes laminate armor lighter for the same protection, so I'm going to make it the same DR as its thickness in RHA.
The DU plates seem to me that it might make it hardened armor and that'd change the armor divisor of the KE round from (2) to none at all. That means it takes 6dx115 pi++ to punch!
I have no idea if this is even realistic. The DU armor hasn't been tested in combat by a serious opponent. The Iraqis didn't have the top shelf ammo for their tanks and the standard DR 2,425 is sufficient to stop 6xd58(2) pi++. The 3BM46 "Svinets" round is only good for 6dx37(2) pi++, 3BM42M "Lekalo" is 6dx48(2) pi++.
Note: these are all "average" hits were every die rolls 3.5 points. The lightest hit that can penetrate DR 2,425L is 6dx33.7(2) pi++ with a max damage roll. 6dx202.1(2) pi++ punches on a minimum roll...
If you are a resident of Florida a credit hour at Florida State will run you $215.55 plus books. Out of state tuition is $721.10, just for the record.
You need 120 credits minimum to get your bachelor's. There's some requirements for how many credits you have to have at FSU and how many credits have to be above a certain level.
That's $25,866.
Let's assume that your part time job is at someplace that's paying $15 an hour.
That's 1,724.4 hours.
Except... A place to live, food to eat, transportation, taxes, etc...
But let's assume you have a benefactor and don't have to pay taxes.
Most "part time" work is 20 or fewer hours a week.
86.22 weeks at 20 hours at $15 an hour.
More than a year of saving. 1.66 years of putting your entire income from this part time job into an account to pay tuition.
TUITION
Books will add another $4k plus to this. A gigantic scam of the education industry is to require a particular edition of a text book. For some reason a new edition always has different page numbers from other editions making them nearly useless for the current class, so you have to get a NEW book instead of saving a bit on a used one.
You're still going to starve to death in the street while your attending classes and fail because you don't have books and supplies because every penny you made went into tuition.
20 hours at $15 an hour is $15,600 a year. You lose $175 to income tax. $2,386.80 to FICA.
$13,038.20 left.
Considering that the average rent for a 1-bedroom in Talahassee is $1,100 a month... you're now short $161.80 for the year and you're still gonna starve!
But 2-bedrooms places are $1,200 so you get a roomie! Now you have $5,838.20 for food, clothes and transportation. That's $112.27 a week. $16.03 a day.
You are NOT saving up for tuition on a part time job unless you have someone else paying your bills for you.
Even so, it will take prodigious will power to do so.
To expect such will is unrealistic.
Science is never, truly, settled.
Climate science very often reminds me of the "spherical cows in vacuum" statement.
Cows aren't spheres, so any experiment that hinges on them being so is invalid on its face.
Neither do cows live in vacuum...
If your experiment hinges on conditions which never exist in nature, then your experiment is invalid with regards to nature.
While isolating the variables is important, it's crucial to remember that variables interact in complex and messy ways.
Messes that don't support the narrative...
That was easy! I had examples once I looked for them.
Gen 0 is Night Vision 1-3 but requires active IR illumination. Active IR boosts the bonus of any IR sight too.
Gen 1 is Night Vision 4.
Gen 2 is Night Vision 5-6.
Gen 3 is Night Vision 7-9.
Gen 4 is Night Vision 9.
M60: thinner armor, M48ish turret, external M2HB.
M60A1: standard armor, new turret, cupola with M85. Late versions have partial stabilization.
M60A1 RISE and RISE+: Many small improvements some even show in game terms. I'm going to have to assign Night Vision levels to distinguish between 1st and 2nd generation passive IR system. The RISE+ gets smoke grenade launchers.
M60A2: radically different version.
M60A3: Two versions Passive and TTS. Adds full stabilization, electronic fire control and a laser rangefinder. The TTS gets a thermal imager that is arguably better than the later M1 gets!
I've already mentioned the speculative upgrades.
When the outside temperatures are similar to the desired temperature inside, our air conditioner goes schizo.
When I am sitting at my desk, this manifests in a cold current of air that hits my right elbow.
The rest of me is comfortable, and my elbow is stiff and cold.
So I bought a deflector for the register.
It uses magnets to attach itself to the register.
My aluminum register.
DAMN IT!
Double sticky tape to the rescue.
If you start down the rabbit hole of tank variants, you're going to encounter dozens of variations which are indistinguishable from each other when distilled down to GURPS terms.
And GURPS sieves finer than Twilight: 2000 did.
T2K didn't really have a system for fire control computers and stabilization systems. GURPS does.
I am also finding that I need to up my game (pun) with regards to the descriptions. They get repetitive fast.
I made a connection today thanks to The Cat Rotator's Quarterly.
They're talking about the demise of pig latin and describe what pig latin is.
An argot or cant.
That got me to remember "thieves cant" from D&D.
That made the connection to Cockney rhyming slang because, "an argot, or cant, is an insiders dialect."
I think that's pretty neat.
I did the research to make GURPS stats for the M48A5 and M60A3 TTS.
I can't just stop there.
Now there's the M728A1, M60A2 and upgrades to the M60 that happen in T2K, but not in the real world.
Soon I will have the M60, M60A1 and two significant M60A1 upgrades.
Then I will wade into the M48's variants...
Then the Leopard 1.
Probably end up with ALL the T-54/55 and T-62s before long.
Never mind the T-72, 64, 80 and 90's.
Got the stats lines for the OG Leo and some Pattons.
It's interesting that the M60A3 doesn't get near the armor upgrades as the T-62 over the years, but I have still to get the likely for T2K variants nailed down.
Reminder of that those are:
Skirts and ERA added to an M60A1 RISE (USMC) or M60A3 (TTS) (Army) becomes an M60A1 RISE+ and M60A3 (TTS+).
Super M60 without the added armor is M60A4, but few are made because the engine and suspension upgrades are expensive compared to the GLDS M60-2000.M60-2000 is the M60A4. I might even go to the effort of figuring out the old M1 turret armor because the M1(IP) and early M1A1 have more protection (than an M60) and some of those old turrets would be available.
I think I will skip the Super M60 as being too complicated and lacking customers due to the expense.
Are you speaking of slavery in America or slavery in The Americas.
Because if you mean America as in "The United States of America," it runs from September 17, 1789 to January 31, 1865. Even so, the issue was primarily thought of as a state issue until right before the war that settled the point.
76 years and change.
From April 19, 1775 to May 12, 1784 who's in charge is up in the air.
From May 12, 1784 to September 17, 1789 it's not the United States, it's that weird transitional confederation entity and it really can't be blamed for slavery in in the independent entities it composed of. The 1789 date doesn't even extend to slave holding places that were French or Spanish then, but are US now.
So prior to the ratification of the US Constitution, slavery is an English, French, Dutch and Spanish problem.
And it ran for far longer than the short seventy some years of US slavery.
Blame them.
I'd love to see Spain blamed for slavery as a whole in the US and be forced to pay for reparations under the same, tortured, logic that they've been hoovering up gold from salvaged galleons.
And if you REALLY want to pick at it, the American Indian practiced slavery until the end of the Indian Wars. Noble savages, indeed!
Everything I said about Kontakt-1 and Kontakt-5 assumes that the plates are metal and not rubber sheets and that the explosives are actually something that will go kaboom.
Several examples from the recent unpleasantness in Ukraine shows that Soviet quality control and corruption still rules.
THAT is a complex issue for a GM to decide.
GURPS puts the penetration values in terms of armor division.
That makes the effects of 2nd Gen ERA odd in game terms.
But since we have fractional divisors, then we can be realistic about it.
According to this article Kontakt-5 should change the armor divisor of a long-rod penetrator from (2) to (1.25).
That really affects penetration.
Reading between the lines is necessary. Then you fudge.
Kontakt-5 is an explosive reactive armor that actually works on KE rounds.
That's handy!
Kontakt-1 and Blazer sure don't.
The difference is that instead of a thin sheet-metal box with a thin plate at the bottom; Kontakt-5 uses a thick plate on the top.
When the nose of the KE round hits the explosive in the base of the box, it blows off the plate when the penetrator is about half way through it.
That does bad things to the penetrator.
Inferring the performance of this second generation of reactive armor comes from reading about the bragging about third generation reactive armor's performance.
From reading about 3rd gen stuff, it would nullify the armor divisor on AP rounds. Changing the (2) to (1). (1) is a normal bullet...
They phrase it as doubling the effective thickness of the armor.
3rd gen is supposedly twice as effective as 2nd gen... Or that the armor is, effectively, 50% thicker against KE rounds with the 2nd gen.
So, Kontakt-5 nullifies the special effects of HEAT and HESH, changes the armor divisor of KE AP rounds from 2 to 1.5 and changes the armor divisor of the second charge of a tandem warhead from 10 to 5.
There! Now I have a working rule.
I am happy!
The turret armor of a T-62M has DR 1,250!
That takes 6dx21(2) to punch.
The T-62MV is going to be harder because they stripped the BDD add-on armor for Kontakt-1 reactive blocks.
Twilight: 2000 gave an extra 400 points of armor against a HEAT round. This is a game where the frontal armor of a T-72 is 300. GURPS gives DR 1,130L for the hull and 1,695L for the turret of a T-72BV.
Reactive armor is meaningless to kinetic energy rounds with the ancient 3rd Edition's Vehicles.
Reactive armor is MENTIONED in the 4e High Tech, but not really detailed well enough to apply it to vehicles. It basically nullifies the special effects of HEAT and HESH rounds making them behave as if they were simply HE.
Kontakt-1 appears to be the kind of ERA that the books are talking about.
GURPS: T2K vehicles stats, so far...
There's a LOT of fudge factor going on with the armor bringing down to just a single value per facing.
The Soviet Union was hip deep in upgrading their T-62's to the T-62MV standard when The Cold War ended abruptly.
I don't think I've seen many pics of tanks going to Ukraine that weren't up to that standard, so even in our timeline they appear to have succeeded. Update: There's a few T-62M in those images...
 |
| T-62MV |
 |
| T-62M |
I think I am on firm footing making it the only variant I need stats for in Twilight: 2000.
The T-55 is a tougher nut. The Soviets were done with them by 1997, but just like today and the T-62 there were lots of them in depot.
I need to check what the other Warsaw Pact nations had done with them by then too. Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland tended to lag behind The Bear a bit in shedding old stuff.
 |
| T-55AM (It's even Polish!) |
Update:
Poland didn't shed their last T-55 until 2002 in our timeline! T-55AM was their standard.
Hungary was having problems buying T-72s all through the end of The Cold War and ended up keeping their T-55AM's 'til the end.
East Germany had a stable of T-55AM's too.
Czechs were running the production line on the T-55AM2 until 1999!
It looks like most of the Warsaw Pact transitioned from T-55 to T-72 and either skipped the T-62 or were never offered it.
Reading this story sure reminds me of stories Technomad told about his rental and the class of renters he had.
Landlords don't have property rights, they have property privileges.
The squatter thing is getting ready to come to a head and renter's rights will be dead for a very long time.
It's getting to the point of bulldozing a place is cheaper than renting it out and keeping a vacant place from sprouting squatters.
I also question the police position that this is purely a civil matter.
The fake lease is fraud.
They are literally stealing the house from its rightful owner.
Those seem like crimes to me.
This is just another example in a long list of where parasites are being protected from justice.
I have confirmed that my repair to the washer fluid line is the only way it could be repaired.
The factory part, 92203846, has been discontinued. Interestingly, it's the ONLY part of the wiper-washer system that is.
GM is strange.
While sitting here thinking about it, I realized that knowing how to figure out the problem and then fix it is a skill.
I learned this somewhere along the way.
I know people who didn't.
They irritate me when they insist upon talking about cars.
The other day I was coming home from buying beer and was struck at the light from the twilight.
Some nostalgia synapse was firing and the color of the sky and the intensity of the sun setting just reminded me of so many times in childhood.
It was still light enough to stay out and play, but we were playing chicken with the streetlights coming on.
It was a good remembrance.
Dear Bureau of Land Management Black Lives Matter.
The cops kill about 800 people a year, of all races.
About 60% of those deaths are white people.
So just 480 320 are minorities.
Just about 100 "unarmed" people are killed by the cops every year. Again, mostly white people. Like 90% this time.
So, 10 "unarmed" black people a year adds up to just about 100 in the past decade.
But 250 thousand black people were murdered in the last decade.
Since nearly all murders are same race, that also means that nearly all of those 250 thousand folks were the same color as their killer.
This is nearly all of the murders in the USA. If black people stopped killing other black people the murder rate wouldn't be worth mentioning in the US. But the honor-based sub-culture demands blood.
It seems to me that defunding the cops is the last thing you'd want. Especially since the number of murders in places that did went up dramatically. Places with large BLM protests, mostly.
So fewer cops means more murders and more dead black people than if the cops had not changed how they did things at all.
It seems counterintuitive if you can't do math.
Sadly, it appears that the same people doing all the murderin' and dyin' also shun the education needed to do this math.
Or be aware of the word "counterintuitive."
Fixing an enclave of a subculture is not pretty. It's probably necessary.
Sadly, even if we start the process, we will only get tantalizingly close to ending the racism bullshit by the racists themselves. They've got a grift they can't afford to lose.
An alternative is for the rest of the nation to revert to the overelaborate manners and politeness of a dueling society. Since the subculture's rules for manners are different from the primary culture, they will be involved in more duels. Demographics will matter here.
In the end the effect will be the same as the melting pot method.
Learn the rules of the wider society.
In the melting pot method, it's a lot more peaceful.
Being old and still not 100% from the accident means my chest hurts a lot after wallowing around under the dash.
I'm getting familiar with the soreness, it doesn't freak me out like it once did.
Hurray! No panic attack this time!
Complete with Marv In Profile while he held the power leads to the battery while we finalized the camera mounting.
The punch list is getting short.
I have to wire the positive and negative leads to the car.
I have to route the RCA from the trunk to under the dash.
It is supposed to be cool enough tomorrow to do so!
Eyes crossed!
When I mounted the new camera, I changed where the plastic trim piece was situated to put the camera further aft to give it a better field of view.
I ordered a replacement back-up camera.
I connected it to the TV on the back porch and hooked it to a 12v scooter battery...
Unlike the other one, this one sends an image! It's a little hard to tell with all the reflections here, this camera appears to work.
Next step is to rig up the wiring in the car and see if it still works.
In anticipation of this being successful I added a rubber bellows for the wires to go from the trunk-lid to the trunk.
It amuses me that this is a BMW part.
Douglas Cole made a formula to calculate the damage if you knew the real world stats of a bullet.
The inputs are in inches for bore size, feet per second for velocity and grains for bullet weight.
A 115mm HE round is about 230 thousand grains going about 3 thousand feet per second.
I giggle about the big ass numbers I'm throwing around here.
I didn't save it, but I've used this formula to figure the damage for a 16"/50 Mk7.
A lot. Plus an explosion. 6dx62(2) pi++ and a linked 6dx26 [6dx2].
There's some tank rounds that are approaching the penetration, but none which have that explosion afterwards.
I got it.
I am not sure Harvey did.
The Bad Batch has a character sacrifice himself for the others.
It was a bit dusty when he did so, because, "one for all."
I Grok in its fullness.
Do you?
"All for one, one for all."
It's simple, complex and overpowering.
Do you Grok?
The 115mm 3BM36 APFSDSDU round for the T-62 is almost as good as the 125mm 3BM20.
I did not expect that to be true.
It's making me wonder if the Russians putting all them T-62M1's in the field is as stupid as some people have made it out to be.
Of course, how many 3BM36 rounds are there?
I am stating, for the record, that there's a lot of hyperbole that I have not posted here since Florida passed its red flag law.
Hyperbole meant in jest, but could definitely be twisted to "prove" I was someone at risk.
Because tyranny loves to take, "an extravagant statement or assertion not intended to be understood literally," literally.
My right to free speech has been chilled.
I am stating this, for the record.
I am uncertain how I get to to the point of nuking this damn ignorant law, but...
He sure says the right things.
And it would be racist to vote against him... ;)
I think this and Ron DeSantis are showing something we need more of on the R side of the aisle.
Candidates who fight.
The worst part of the gorram RINO's is the only people they seem to be willing to stand up to are their own constituents.
One of the huge down sides to the 152mm gun in the Sheridan and M60A2 was the range.
There was a bit of a gap between the max effective range of the conventional HEAT round and the minimum range of the Shillelagh missile.
I understood why the conventional round petered out, that's a stubby barrel with a low muzzle velocity.
But I didn't understand why the missile needed almost two seconds after launch to start guiding.
Height over bore!
The missile doesn't climb into the beam of the controller unit until it's gone about 800 yards.
Once it's in that cone it's pretty much the same control paradigm as a TOW missile.
Every once and a while I wonder if the TOW was being made as a back-up to the Shillelagh in the MBT-70 because it's got the same diameter. <-- Speculation not based on any facts!
When you have the M60 done, it's simple to make the M728 CEV.
Big damn HESH round!
Because it's slow, it doesn't seem impressive from the KE compared to other rounds, just 6dx7(0.5) pi++. It's the linked 6dx15 cr ex from 35 lb. of Comp A3 that makes this round shine!
Out to a max range of 3,600 yards... and a flight time of 4-1/4 seconds.
Hey!
I can play GURPS: Waco now!
Update: The average hit from a 6dx7(0.5) pi++ round still does 292 points to the typical unarmored person. Minimum damage is 82! 60 is enough to get to auto-death. 110 is enough to reach unressurectable.
Do not taunt happy pumptf ball.
Been chipping away at making GURPS stats for T2K tanks.
Got the M48A5 and M60A3 TTS done today.
The US did not subscribe to the German doctrine of thinner armor and higher speeds in the 1950's.
Frontal armor on the M48 is MUCH thicker than the Leo 1.
DR 606 on the M48 vs 385 on the Leo front slopes.
Surprisingly, the M60 is more lightly armored than the M48, except on the front of the turret.
DR 736 for the M48 turret and DR 981 for the M60. That sloped pinched nose really helps from the front.
I got to make stats for the, hated, M219 MG as well. It's the same stats as any other 7.62 NATO MG with it's own weight and RoF entries and a Malf of 16. That's actually an improvement over the M73's Malf of 14!
I am so happy I never dealt with them, the M240 was coax on all my tanks, M60A3 TTS, M1(IP) and M1A1(HA).
Since I statted out the M551 Sheridan and it's gun/missile system; just for giggles I might make stats for the M60A2 "Starship."
Twilight:1970 might be a lot of fun.
I definitely need to make stats for the old Soviet shit too. The first time I made a GURPS conversion I had enough on my plate with three T-72's, two T-80's, two T-64's and speculation about T-90 and or Black Eagles. Making the T-54/55 and T-62 was off the radar.
Most signs are pointing to crib death in the camera.
The company that made my kit sells a smaller version of that kit with fewer mounting brackets.
It should be here tomorrow.
I will hook it up right away so I can return it if it doesn't work.
The original camera sat around for near a year before I even tried it.
My windshield WASHERS decided to go tits up.
I dumped about half a gallon of fluid on the ground.
The end I could find didn't make sense for where the fluid was coming out because the reservoir is under the driver's side headlight.
The hose to the sprayers is under the driver's side corner of the windshield.
Holden routed the line under the radiator, up the passenger fender then under the cowl to the driver's side!
The line under the cowl was that motherfuckingcocksuckingratfuck brittle ass nylon shit that GM is in love with for small lines.
Unlike GM Norte America, Holden stuck to a common size for their nylon and it was the same OD as standard 3/16 ID brass.
That means I can use fuel line from the passenger side to the driver's side and since it's low pressure, some 3/16 barbs will connect them without clamps!
And so it is.
Function restored and better than new.
I even took the time to make it pretty.
It should have been a clue when the camera didn't work plugged into the RCA port of the TV.
I connected everything, but routed outside the car and it still didn't work.
I don't want to spend any more time or money on this.
Forgotten Weapons is raffling off a genuine M17 formerly owned by the 101st Air Mobile Division.
For just $50 you get a coffee cup emblazoned with "Death From Above" and a chance to win.
For every person but one, that means you get an expensive coffee cup.
I think I shall skip this one.
No link, you'll need to find the vid to enter if you're interested.
Reading about Floridawomen getting busted with a pile of pipe bombs and, essentially, walking on the charge because she's bug-nuts crazy...
Got me to thinking...
OK.
Drop the $200 for the tax stamp for a destructive device.
Wait six months to a year.
Drop the $40 to make a real nice one.
Blow myself up.
Prolly blow up Marv, who was innocently holding my beer at the time, too.
Go to the afterlife and have Newton explain where I screwed up the math.
Yeah.
Not a good idea even doing it legally.
Two things hit me over and over with Bud Light's chosen brand representative.
The first is they managed to expand their market to new beer consumers many times without offending their core demographic.
The second is when courting a new demographic you have to be certain that it will increase business.
I suspect it's willful ignorance that led to what's going on.
But they did it in the manner which would most offend the people who were literally their core market.
Now they have to figure out how to keep the lights on without it.
I doubt that the trans community is going to step up and buy that much beer.
In essence, the people pushing the grooming and radical transgender issues lied.
They lied to both sides.
They always meant to completely remake society to suit them, and them alone.
The problem they are having is that it's a familiar lie.
We got this lie from women's rights.
We got this lie from civil rights.
They complain about being or becoming second class citizens while trying to make themselves the only first class citizens. Equality was never the goal. Supremacy is the goal of all of these movements.
Perhaps at the very start it wasn't, but it certainly is now.
They wish to fuck everyone but them.
But, for the first time, there's solid pushback.
The people most hurt will be the people who are trans and who only wanted equality.
They're going to be smushed like grapes.
I strongly suspect that there will be a lot of people who will fervently wish that the majority will go back to ignoring them, which is where they were before the radicals started after the kids. They might even find themselves wishing they were second class citizens, because it would be a definite step up from where they've landed.
Thanks to the radicals who went after the kids.
Slow. Clap.
$300 finds the leak.
Another $1,000 fixes the leak.
I have the $300...
Yes, Mr Plumber, Sir, I am aware that I should have the house re-piped.
We could save up to do that, except we keep having to spend $1,500 every five months fixing leaks.
We haven't got the front porch's tropical storm damage repaired for the same reason. We keep spending money on emergency repairs so we can never save up to do preventative maintenance.
Having the internet for real world performance instead of trusting calculations from GURPS Vehicles is nice.
Disappointing in some cases, but nice.
The MGM-51A Shillelagh can penetrate 600mm RHAE. That's 6dx8(10) cr ex with a linked 6dx4 cr ex.
The M409 HEAT round can penetrate 530mm RHAE. That's 6dx7(10) cr ex with a linked 5dx4 cr ex.
The fun round is the M625 canister. Ten thousand fletchettes coming from a 152mm short barrel shotgun!
I wonder what gauge 152mm is...
The initial M885 APFSDSDU round would have done 6dx19(2) pi++ inc.
That's good for punching DR 798.
Not near enough for the turret front on a T-80BV which is rocking DR 1,500S. S for 'spaced' or early laminate armors.
The delta six round was supposed to be more potent. It does 6dx28(2) pi++ inc.
That's good for punching 1,176 DR. Not enough to penetrate a T-80BV's frontal armor and barely better than the Sheridan's missiles.
This is kind of why the XM274 was abandoned and the M8 Ridgeway was developed.
The 105mm M900A1 round will do 6dx37(2) pi++ and punch 1,554 DR.
Just enough to gain entry into the turret...
Something the LAV-75 (or the Ridgeway, for that matter) never wants to be is caught where a T-80 can hit them back.
The thickest part of the LAV's armor is DR 150L on the turret. The 6dx33(2) pi++ punches that handily. It doesn't even need the armor divisor!
The Ridgeway will have one of three DR's. But even the Stage III armor only gets to 315L on the front of the turret... Not even as good as the obsolete Leopard 1.
The M551 Sheridan, that the LAV and M8 never replaced doesn't fare any better should someone manage to get some into service.
It's thickest DR is a mere 200 on the hull front and 150 on the turret front.
The 152mm gun doesn't fare a lot better. The 6dx9(10) cr ex 6dx7(10) cr ex linked 6dx4 cr ex of the conventional HEAT round only punches 1,260 980 spaced DR, so no good against the T-80BV's turret. The Shillelagh does 6dx10(10) cr ex 6dx8(10) cr ex linked 6dx4 cr exwhich gets through 1,400 1,120 DR of spaced armor. I still wonder what would have happened if the MGM-151 had been modernized and upgraded.
The Leopard 1 came out at a time when it was thought that HEAT would reign supreme and putting enough armor on to stop such a round was going to be too ungainly for combat because it sacrificed too much mobility.
So the Leo gets "thin" frontal armor.
It translates to DR 385 on the front hull and 358 on the turret front.
To put that in some perspective, a WW2 Tiger E has 400 on the hull and 425 on the turret. The Panther G has 540 and 600.
An M1A1(HA) has DR 2,000L and DR 2,400L on the front facings.
The L means laminate and that gives double DR vs HEAT and HEDP and cancels the special effects of HESH. Effectively that changes the armor divisor from 10 to 5.
The Leo's 105mm gun can fire a heat round that, on average, will punch right through 980 points of DR! The 125mm gun on a T-72 can, likewise, punch 1,470 (or 735 points of laminated armor).
Making the armor 5 times thicker would have made the Leopard 5 times heavier.
A 200 ton tank would not have worked in the late 1950's in Europe.
And then there's high-explosive squash head (HESH) aka high-explosive plastic (HEP) here across the pond.
The 105mm does 6dx16(0.5) pi++ with a linked explosion doing 6dx3 cr ex.
On average the projectile will punch DR 168 with the explosion getting past DR 108. You'd think the Leo would be safe from that, right?
HESH is designed to cause spalling. It knocks a hunk of the armor off inside the target to act as a projectile.
That does 1/10 the maximum damage of the HESH's explosion vs 1/100 of the target's DR. So 11 points against 4 on the Leopard. While 6 points of cutting damage doesn't seem like a lot, that's what everyone and everything in the turret gets.
You just can't make the armor thick enough when the average hit will punch 1,000 DR!
Laminate armor eliminates this spalling effect.
That leads to the return of kinetic energy to punch holes in tanks and things like the M1A1(HA)'s insanely protective frontal armor.
The T-72's APFSDSDU round does 6dx33(2) pi++ inc. That will punch 1,386 DR with the average die roll. That's going to go all the way through a Leopard 1 and (probably) get it burning.
General Crook was taken from us too soon.
I keep reading about his methods and I am reminded of a quote:
"Sirs, I am not here to dispense Justice. I am here to keep the peace, and peace is what we will have. I don't care which side has to be hanged to get it, but I will have it."
That might even be a Willard quote.
The LAV-75 or Rapid Deployment Force Light Tank is one of my favorite never-was vehicles.
Like so many things in Twilight: 2000 we know a bit more about it now than we did from articles in Popular Mechanics or The Army Green Book.
All sorts of ammo types were predicted by T2K.
Just two were ever worked on.
A modification of a Mecar proximity fused HE round, M884, and an armor-piercing-fin-stabilized-discarding-sabot-depleted-uranium, M885.
The M885 went through several developments with increasing penetration and increasing prices.
No white phosphorus.
No high-explosive-anti-tank.
But I finally have GURPS 4e stats for it.
What got this ball rolling was to look up the armor on a Leopard 1A3, then making stats for it...
I spent more time looking up the ammo that Canada would use in their C1 tank than looking up the armor thicknesses.
Interestingly, there's 105mm ammo for the L7 series gun that's almost as good as depleted uranium rounds at penetrating using just tungsten. No pyrophoric effect, but...
While playing with my stat conversion, it amuses me to think about the vehicle guides and how they gave us stats for obsolete vehicles.
The main game gave us the state of the art.
The obsolete vehicles were all pulled out of mothballs because of losses in the manufacturing base being unable to make new state of the art stuff.
Nukes be rough on the industrial base, yo!
Even the thin skin of an old Leopard 1 is proof against small arms and as tanks got rarer and rarer, it would be sufficient.
Heck, even anti-tank weapons are running out in T2K.
Somewhere I have rules about degraded performance, or outright dangerous fails from improper storage or even proper storage for far too long.
With the depletion of armor, those anti-tank weapons which can't be used on fortifications are being left laying around because vehicles of any kind are getting scarce and hard to keep running.
Skip to 11:20 for the spoiler...
The L32A1 on the Scorpion does 6dx10 pi++.
The M32 on the M41 Bulldog does 6dx18 pi++
"Florida police searching for male who attempted to steal weapon from Walmart Supercenter"!
"Upon review of store surveillance footage, a black male wearing a white tank top and a black mask covering his head and face was observed with a rifle-style BB gun from the sporting goods section of the store and was possibly loading the BB gun with BB pellets."A bb gun.
He'd taken a bb gun out of its package and was loading it with bb's from an adjacent shelf.
Yet, we're headlining it like he'd gotten an AR and was getting ready to go mass shootin' there in the store.
I know, why react when you can OVER react?
Put it full screen and crank the volume!
The GT-40 seems a very squirrelly ride, he's sawing a lot and understeering in a couple of places.
I don't even wanna talk about his legal case, except the press keeps using this pic when he's an NCO now and not a SPC.
What confuses me about this picture is the Stetson.
SPC Perry is wearing all the 11 series accoutrements, brassard, branch rings, hat braids; but a 2-Cav crossed sabers hat badge.
Back in the wild west days of the Reagan era there weren't official rules for when you got to wear a Stetson with your uniform like today.
We'd have been up in arms about some grunt wearing the hat at all, doubly so if he didn't wear crossed rifles up there.
We got all bristly about that because the crunchies have all manner of special badging and we armor folks got nothin'. When someone noticed the hat was authorized for 19 series, we jumped on it and defended our turf!
Things sure have changed. As I understand it, you now need to do a "spur ride" that's akin to getting an expert infantryman's badge.
The rules are rather vague, but there are more now than there were.
This is where "the rules" hit.
Every branch has its own badge and colored cords.
The US Cavalry Store (RIP) supplied us with our needs.
The non-19K types ordered different cords and a hat badge to match their dress uniform.
It would appear that the hat badge is now unit associated and not branch.
Interesting.
I'm not Catholic.
I'm not Christian.
Therefore, I'm not doing Easter.
I didn't do Lent.
You do you, but don't expect me to come along.
I think that Easter is about the last Christian religious holiday that hasn't been adapted to be a generic American holiday.
I know Jews who do Christmas, I don't know a one who does Easter.
Found this on Facebook and, apparently, got it wrong.
48÷8(14-8)
Never mind that the notation is jacked.
I PEMDAS'd it and got...
Thinking that M gets done before D...
48/8*(14-8)
48/8*6
48/48
1
But, according to spreadsheets and other comments it's.
48/8*(14-8)
48/8*6
6*6
36
This, apparently, is because the PE, MD and AS are grouped and go left to right.
This kind of confusion only happens when I get math in the abstract and never with a practical question.
Despite buy-one-get-one deals, the Anheuser-Busch products are sitting on the shelves at my local Winn-Dixie.
Other brands, especially the local craft beers, are severely depleted.
And I remember hearing that boycotts would never work...
The end of The Cold War and the signing of various treaties led me to remove the chem rounds from the stats for the D-30 122mm howitzer.
The entire plot of the adventure module centers around a load of 122mm blister agent rounds.
I've also managed to get the fuses for howitzers gelled down to a couple of types and they're shockingly similar in weight, so I just fudged them to be the same...
Probably end up doing much the same for mortars, especially since the fuses ARE the same for some of the heavier mortars.
Might have one more Soviet SPG to add.
2S19 Mtsa-S self propelled gun and it's attendant 2A65 152mm gun added to my GURPS: T2K conversion.
Prolly going to add the towed version of the 2A65 too.
Human + Elf = Half-Elf.
Human + Orc = Half-Orc.
It's clear that elves, humans and orcs are genetically compatible in fantasy worlds, but you never see what happens with Orc + Elf.
Or do we?
What if Elf + Orc = Human?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAHA!
ANOTHER fucking water leak under the motherfucking slab.
Can't even ask you to stab the donation button because PayPal went stupid.
FML, this has been the worst two fucking years of my life and that includes comparing to being in traction for six months.
We've got two problems in America that, if we could get rid of, we'd be set for a good long time.
"Stop liking what I don't like!"
and
"You must like what we tell you to like!"
If we were free to like what we like and dislike what we dislike freely and without interference from the outside we'd be doing pretty damned good.
This does not forbid convincing me that I should like or dislike something, your just not allowed to forbid me from liking or disliking something.
There's too many people who've got it in their heads that "convince" synonymous with "force."
Some printings of SLA Marshall's book "The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of the Nation" are selling north of $1,000!
!!!!
Check your printing date and compare with Amazon and Ebay.
Mr Harrel is at it again.
I've long maintained they are almost identical in terminal performance, but .25 is more reliable.
106 years ago, the US entered The Great War.
I've got a couple of rifles and maybe a pistol which were present for the fighting.
The primary arms of the US and Royal Armies.
I took this test back in 2013.
Back then I was a 6th level chaotic good human Sorcerer.
I lost some levels...
One of the wonderful things about tabletop role playing games is that once you've gotten the books, the only limit is your imagination and you can play them to the end of time without further expenditure.
Since GURPS 4th edition appears to be GURPS final edition, I don't need to pay attention to what Steve is up to anymore.
Ironically, most of my GURPS efforts have been with an even deader game; Little Black Book era Traveller. SJGames was kind enough to give us a GURPS 3e version of the setting that I've updated to use the 4e rule set. It works well.
There's a native to 4e Traveller set in the Interstellar Wars era too. I've played more recently than classic Traveller.
I'm constantly polishing the cannonball of Twilight: 2000 to GURPS.
But that's not where it ends.
I can play any D&D setting using the GURPS rules.
I managed to translate something as esoteric as a Wemic cleric from AD&D 2e to GURPS 4e.
It's not that difficult.
I'm chipping away at character templates for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e for Technomad. Another dead game.
And there's not a Gods damned thing keeping me from playing the original rules for any of these games than a preference for GURPS.
Traveller, T2K, AD&D and Warhammer settings all running under the same rule set you only have to learn once.
I'll even go out on a limb and argue that GURPS is a better system for playing despite having a cumbersome character creation system. And templates streamline that greatly.
I am in the happy place of not needing to spend another penny with any game company who thinks they need to inject their politics into their game system.
Even more fun: Everything is on pdf now. The dead games can propagate at the speed of thumb-drive if one is willing to ignore their copyright.
If you have a GM who knows the dead system and will share the pdfs... You can play for free!
Except for needing some dice...
None of these even scratches the surface of what I can create on my own. Sabers and... is a GURPS world.
FuzzyGeff's "Springfield" post apocalypse is a GURPS world.
Long lost friend, Carl, converted from AD&D to GURPS 3e without any issues. He kept on playing GURPS long after I stopped playing with him.
Ames icon, Standing Bear converted his sort-of-D&D home-brew to GURPS 3e.
We did all this without the official sanction of any company, corporation or sensitivity reader.
That's what really scares them.
We don't need them any more. We're not trying to make money, so they can't take anything away from us for ignoring their woke demands.
In fact, we've run more than a couple campaigns were exploring the ills of the human condition were the point of the game! You need to be able to have the half-orc child of a raped mother to examine the threads were exposing.
Yes, people might be offended. Sometimes people were offended.
At the end, though, we learned more about why something was offensive, and how to not offend unless we intended offense.
Wizards of the Coast is going to eliminate half-elves and half-orcs from future editions of D&D.
Because pure blood is inherently less racist than miscegenation?
I've been making full orcs in GURPS for a while...
I wonder what they're going to do about tieflings and aasimar...
Reading on this makes me wonder what the sensitivity readers are going do when they hit Traveller with its inherently racist Major Race and Minor Race humans.
A person who spent more than $2 million on an unrestored Maserati is taking flak over restoring it.
Two things stand out.
First, the condition of the car is deteriorating just sitting there as dissimilar metals go after each other. Fixing that will end the "originality" the critics are saying must be preserved.
Second, he tried to sell the thing to allow these people to have their way with the car.
They didn't pony up the funds, so the owner decided to treat it like he owned it, because he does.
I've watched this pan out in so many other areas, it's not even funny anymore.
If you want to decide how something is to be cared for or used, and you don't own it, you'd better get off your butt and buy it.
But I've noticed that a lot of people feel they deserve a say in how other people treat their property.
LibreOffice stopped opening files off the NAS on my laptop.
I could move them to the local drive, edit them and move them back; but I couldn't edit them on the NAS.
Something about ownership of the file and it being open already... when it wasn't.
Turns out that my copy of LibreOffice still thought it was running on 20.04 and not 22.04.
JT updated the files and all is, again, well!
Got him some Panda Express as a reward.
Plugging away on getting a back-up camera on The Beast.
I have to make a couple decisions about what part I wanna cut holes into.
The cleanest choice is to relocate the trunk release key tumbler to near the license plate... Or to put an extension for the in-trunk emergency release so it can be accessed from inside...
Both have security issues.
If you break a window you can get the extension and get into the trunk.
Putting it by the license plate puts the cable were some skinny motherfucker can wriggled under the car and yank on it where it goes up into the fender.
As I was typing this out... I had a vision!
There's already a hole in the cargo shelf the right diameter for a key hole!
Lord knows they gave me enough cable to route it anywhere I want it.
The next step is running an RCA cable from under the dash to the trunk then down to where the keyhole used to be.
Bustedknuckles links to a report that says that... The Dems done stepped in it big time!
Oh, wait.
Nevermind.
It's just the findings of several watchdog non-governmental groups who cried shenanigans over the last election.
Wake me when someone actually gets perp walked.
This is the same kind of breathless reporting that makes Gateway Pundit so hard to take seriously.
While they might be absolutely correct in their findings, what will it matter if nothing is done?
I want people to go to jail (or worse) for fucking with the elections.
But I don't see it getting any traction.
I own and have owned a "couple" plastic polymer framed, striker-fired pistols over the years.
They are, at the end of the day, amazingly similar.
Yet can be entirely different.
The differences are polarizing and people quickly fall into camps.
Of the above pictured, the Glock 21 is the one I shoot best. I've also owned it longer than any other gun I still own. It's a WIDE gun, so it doesn't get carried... anymore.
None have been unreliable for me. I shoot all of them acceptably well.
The Sheild Plus gets carried most because of its size.
I like shooting the M&P 2.0 9 Compact best, and it gets carried when I can wear enough clothes.
The rest? Because I am a curious and acquisitive monkey.
Some nostalgia too, I think I have owned almost as many individual Glock 17's as there are guns in that picture, so I have to have one example to actually keep this time.
Because there's so little to distinguish between them, I recommend to my friends that ask they get the gun they like shooting the most.
One even went with an FNS-9! Which, I have to admit, shot very nice.
Traffic at the blog is down by about 1/3 from 1,500 to 1,000 unique visitors.
C'est la vie.
I don't know if it's something I said or if it's because I've been slow posting of late.
I've dropped to this level before then bounced back.
I wonder if the reason that one side of the political aisle doesn't want us to have guns is because we've said, repeatedly, that we only want to defend ourselves from criminals.
Being criminals, they fear getting shot by us.
It makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it?
Governor DeSantis has signed the permitless carry bill!
It takes effect on 01JUL23.
It will not change a thing for me because I'm keeping my permit to dodge the waiting periods and to keep my Utah non-resident permit valid.
Not that I ever leave Florida for a place where having that Utah permit matters...
It's the principle of the thing!
Ruger is reintroducing the Marlin 336!
While that's great, the "you have GOT to be shitting me!" item is the MSRP in the comments.
$1,239.
Ye Gods!
Thinking that was way too high, I checked gun broker.
It's not out of line for JM marked guns.
That's a substantial price increase since I checked prices after getting my 30AS.
Even the 30AS has seen a huge price increase. The $300 I paid six years ago has become $600 to $900 depending on markings and condition. I think mine might be on the higher end of that.
Dayum.
A key comment policy is that you MUST identify yourself.
For people signed in to their Google account, it's automatic.
There's two other ways to get there.
The user name/URL path and just signing your work.
I rarely make an exception for anonymous comments and post them.
The format I prefer is:
McThag, you are a complete and total idiot who should not be allowed to post your incoherent rants in public!
--Mouthbreathing Moron
See how simple that is?
Give it a try and the world will get to see your insightful observations and critiques of my scribblings.
In fact, most of the pro-liberty people want to have adult conversations exclusively when talking about stuff like freedom.
We're not going to get it because one side can't even use the word genocide correctly.
They will probably be driven into a murderous rage and kill some more innocent children and staff if you were to point out that, in fact, the adult conversation about teachers teaching this has already occurred and the ruling was in the parent's rights column.
People who are trans are about 0.1% of the population. That number barely shifted when attitudes changed from suppression to tolerance.
When children start identifying as trans at a much higher level than the historical rate, something's afoot.
I don't like being the one to say it, but gender dysphoria is a mental illness. Someone suffering from this condition literally isn't seeing reality correctly.
There are varying degrees of severity, but can we, perhaps, also admit that, for some people with this condition, seeing the wrong gender in the mirror might be the smallest distortion of reality they are experiencing.
Some are definitely higher functioning than others.
What appears to be going on in the schools is a conscious decision to inflict a mental illness on children where no illness existed before.
The appearance of this has been reinforced by the reaction to parents asking pointed questions about things like the contents of the library and drag-shows.
Aside: I've no problem with drag-shows, but they're adult entertainment. I've no real problem with people who are trans and have locked horns with some you readers over how to show some basic, human, compassion towards someone suffering from the malady.
In short, the radical trans activists got busted for grooming.
Speaking of using words incorrectly, several activists tried to shift the term "grooming" to mean any teaching of a child about anything.
That screams that the parents were correct about what was going on to most people.
Even if we assume the best and that the trans-grooming was to create acceptance for the transgender (because acceptance would be better than tolerance) and not making children more vulnerable to pederasts, increasing the number of people with gender dysphoria means we're also increasing the pool of people who are very likely to kill themselves.
Either from an inability to find a groove where they can exist with themselves or from the condition clearing up later and seeing they can never return to being as they were; people with gender dysphoria kill themselves at a tragically high rate.
But, as I said, the argument was already settled in favor of the parents.
Public schools cannot teach religion in a manner which proselytizes.
Teaching acceptance of transgender norms is attacking firmly held religious beliefs and public schools are already barred from such education. The rulings, to date, have been primarily used to stop the teaching of religious dogma, but they are clear that they apply to secular positions as well. Read a couple, it's enlightening.
At the core, a parent has the right to decide what the state exposes their children to.
Exposing children to adult entertainment without regard to these parents wishes is wrong.
The retort that some parents DO expose their children to such things is irrelevant. That parent is exercising their right to decide, not having the decision made for them.
Having books with adult content in a library where children can gain unsupervised access to it is not censorship. Nor is taking those books out of the library "book burning." I am starting to think the real problem here is language dysphoria, look how many words are being used incorrectly here.
The reason all this is so damned important is that children do not have the capacity to truly Grok many of these topics. That comes with age and experience and the information has to be rationed out in small amounts as they prove they are capable of understanding.
It's why the answer to "where do babies come from" involves storks or cabbage leafs and not firing up PornHub when the kids are too young to understand.
Forcing someone to learn something they cannot understand creates its own mental illness as their brain attempts to assert coherence to something they, literally, cannot put into coherent context. During this, you can sure as fuck steer them into giving you a desired response.
When you combine that with how easily children were manipulated on the witness stand and the pure fantasy of "recovered memories" the scope of the problem becomes clear.
Doing this to a child is wrong and should stop.
I've heard from a couple of trans people that they've "always known" they are trans. Sadly, while they do believe it, it's most likely not true.
They're retroactively changing their memories to "realize" they've "always" been like this when, in fact, it didn't actually manifest until puberty started to creep in.
Aside: "But I've always wanted to wear girl's clothes! You're mistaken, McThag!" Prepubescent transvestitism is a separate thing and doesn't seem to have a real correlation to later dysphoria. That both things can be present in one person doesn't prove a causal relationship.
Not a single thing I've said should be taken to mean that we should discriminate against transgender people. I'm still in the compassion camp because what cannot be cured, must be endured. There's no reliable and universal cure. What works well for one person might be catastrophic for another.
The question remains about what age a child should be exposed to adult topics.
The answer is individual, and mostly private.
It is, also, certainly NOT the government's decision to make for a parent. Nor is it the purview of any group who happens to be in fashion with the teacher's unions at the moment.
