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$15.70 for the special purpose whiz-bang armor piercing round.
$2.73 for the more conventional ball round.
Uckfay!
By way of comparison 5.56x45mm M866A1 is $0.47 a round.
Prices on 6.8x51mm is expected to get lower as economies of scale kick in.
I'd also like to point out that 113gr at 3,000 fps is NOT 2,700 ft-lb. It's 2,261.
I was looking at the dates and noticed that BAE should not have been able to buy H&K in the T2K timeline because H&K was going gangbusters in that timeline.
Even with the BAE buyout, the L85A2 and L86A2 dont' happen until 2000 or so.
Too late for T2K.
So the Brits go to war with the A1 version.
C'est la guerre.
The would be assassin of former President Trump was a felon?
Felons aren't allowed to possess firerarms.
I was assured by Sarah Brady on down that all we needed to do was pass laws and the criminal behavior would instantly stop.
Therefore Ryan Wesley Routh must be innocent!
It's impossible for him to have possessed the gun because it was illegal.
The magical aura of illegality should have prevented him from touching the gun, and burned his hands if he persisted. Sarah promised!
Unless...
Laws really only affect the law abiding who weren't a problem without the law already.
PS: It appears that his felony was even a gun charge. Man, I feel safer.
It was the 20th anniversary of the expiration of the Federal ban on cosmetic features in firearms.
It was also the 30th anniversary of the implementation of that ban.
When I say the USAF is not the military, I cite today.
15Sep47 is the Air Force's ETS date.
After your exit the service date, you are no longer in the military.
I have to admit, their NFA collection is way more impressive than mine.
Happy Birthday, Zoomies!
Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first use of tanks on the battlefield at The Somme.
Death before dismount!
The minimum wage is always $0 an hour.
It doesn't matter if your contract says you get $70 an hour plus benefits if you get zero hours because the plant is closed.
Title reference: Back when Caterpillar was almost the entire construction equipment market, the UAW demanded a big raise. The company said they could offer a raise, but only about a third of what was demanded.
So the union went on strike.
Caterpillar said to them, we can't afford what you're demanding, we'd go out of business.
So they started shutting down plants and letting orders go.
Pretty soon customers started buying imported construction equipment and once those companies got a toehold, Caterpillar's market share contracted dramatically.
The workers decided they'd starved long enough and accepted the 1/3 as big raise.
Caterpillar pointed out that market share contraction and offered them jobs at all at much lower rates than before the strike. With fewer hours and some plants would remain closed.
Bravo, UAW. Bravo!
Bonus: Try finding any information about this strike on the internet! I remember it happening because my step mother's brother was a union worker at Caterpillar.
When the company you work for is under a microscope about the quality of your workmanship, it's not a good time to demand a 25% raise.
IAMAW voted to strike at Boeing because they didn't get a 25% raise.
No word if the union is at loggerheads about the inclusion of "how to secure a plug door" class.
Quality control at Boeing is in miserable shape and that's the fault of the people on the production line who just decided to go on strike.
They don't deserve a raise. Honestly, I'll bet Boeing wishes they could fire a bunch of them, but once you're unionized the NRLB decides if you can shit can the dead wood.
"I'd do my job better if I got paid better," is bullshit. It's what they're saying.
I like to read Instapundit.
Apparently, I don't read it fast enough for their web designer, so about mid-page it auto-refreshes.
This reload would not be a problem if, once it had reloaded, I could keep scrolling down the page.
What it does is keep skipping around and jumping right where it refreshed and I'm trying to read.
Well, it turns out that I can disable auto-refresh.
That I have to do so means they need to fire their web designer.
Shadow has managed to activate sticky keys on the desktop and has discovered all manner of keyboard shortcuts on the laptop just by laying on the keyboards.
Sigh.
Sticky keys, now that I know what it is, is a stupid design. You get it active and the keyboard just makes a clicking noise through the speakers. A reboot fixes it, but there's no on screen indication that it's active and there's nothing to click to disable it and return function to the keyboard. Good job M$!
I just made a spreadsheet for keeping track of all my GURPS characters.
Since there's a "date created" line on many of them, I can even sort them chronologically.
My first, ever, GURPS character was a Car Wars character. December 26, 1986 for 1e.
I never played that character.
The first character I ever played was an elf when I cajoled FuzzyGeff to run the recently published Yrth (then GURPS: Fantasy).
Never looked back, honestly.
Even as early as 2e, GURPS solved problems I'd been having with made for the setting games. The one that really sticks out is getting a genuine sword in T2K.
LBB Traveller was an awesome setting with a mediocre system.
Generally, we simply liked the feel of the GURPS magic system over AD&D and there wasn't really anything special about the D&D rules to keep us using them with the worlds we were making ourselves.
The World of Greyhawk was the only published setting I knew anything about and we weren't dropping our hard earned on that when we could make up our own shit for free!
25 years ago, today, a massive explosion blasted the moon out of orbit with Earth.
Sigh.
No moon base.
No flying cars.
But we got smart phones!
Arfcom often gives us philosophical gems.
Is it better to starve under a communist dictator who's the same race/tribe as you than to live under a racist "democracy" and be well fed?
It's Rhodesia, again!
The argument being put forward by one poster is that a racist nation that keeps its people fed is worse than a non-racist dictatorship that doesn't.
They're not saying it exactly that way, of course.
They're arguing that since the government in Salisbury wasn't perfect, and could not be made perfect in a very short period of time then it needed to be completely discarded instantly.
Which is kind of what did happen.
What he's avoiding looking at is what was waiting to fill the power vacuum when the Salisbury government was discarded.
One man, one vote, one time.
He also avoids looking at things from a white perspective with regards to what happened in other African nations when majority rule was implemented without any kind of preparatory education of that majority.
The kind of massacres that wikipedia doesn't make note of because white people did the dying.
It can be debated if Rhodesia was going to actually educate the majority and, eventually, let them have proportionate electoral power. We don't know if they were just mouthing the words or not because they ceased to be the government before it could play out.
And majority rule of unprepared and uneducated people with no tradition of republican democracy got a choice between communist candidates; USSR supported on one side and West Taiwan on the other. Once.
Then what the whites feared was going to happen, pretty much did.
Forced upon them by decisions made by the US and UK while mouthing the words about stopping the spread of communism...
Slow clap. Just fucking walk into the gorram light already Jimmah.
I had money left over on the character sheet and realized that a ronin isn't going to have a lot of coin in his sleeve.
So I upgraded the wakazashi to very fine and both swords to +1 styled.
Then I made a note that they are a matched pair.
Omi used to be from a wealthy house, to be sure.
The swords were inherited.
I almost went with a tachi for the main sidearm until I decided to go with the matched daisho.
Then I reconsidered, he's a mounted archer after all, and changed the katana back to being a tachi. Tachi use the same stats as katana, so I don't even have to change them!
I even looked up a famous sword maker for them. Sadamune Hikoshiro. That makes the blades about 240 years old in 1570 where Omi is from.
Well, the anxiety is not getting better.
It's affecting my enjoyment of going out for a beer and that, in turn, is affecting the enjoyment of the people I'm out with.
The depressing solution is two birds with one stone and remove myself from the situation before I ram into it.
I'll prolly be missed... at least I hope I am... but it might be best for everyone.
I'm not quite to agoraphobia levels. I feel like I'm a long ways from THAT.
But I'm unhappy about it and very worried it's dragging friends down with me.
They deserve better.
President McThag, around noon on 11Sep01 would have been talking to a boomer captain and targeting a couple reentry vehicles to 21°25′21.0″N 39°49′34.2″E.
Then I would direct The State Department to ORDER the Saudi ambassador's ass to my office.
Whereupon I would inform him that he and his family had exactly 72 hours to gather up everyone involved or I would begin using my expansive nuclear arsenal on Islam's holy sites until there weren't any.
I checked, the oil is far enough below the surface that it will not be affected by radiation from the blasts, especially air-bursts.
I'd then have taken to TV and informed the rest of the world that, no shit, you're with us or against us.
The least support I would accept is staying out of the way.
Since the experiment of letting these places run themselves has spectacularly failed, every nation involved in this bullshit, who doesn't immediately get VERY cooperative, gets to be a province of the USA and once enough time and education is applied, perhaps their great grand kids could earn second class citizenship.
Lots of places would hate this, but I'm OK with hate, so long as they fear.
But that's just me.
I'm a vindictive cuss.
Back in 1980 a court ruled that the Black Hills were illegally taken from the Sioux in violation of the Fort Laramie treaty.
The Sioux, having won, refused the money granted them from the case because they wanted and demand the actual land in question.
So a trust was established and it's waiting for them to come get it. It's up to something like $1.3 billion now.
This is a fascinating legal moment.
You don't really get an appeal if you win. And they did win.
So their choices are sit there like it had never happened, or take the money.
Well, they didn't take the money and are holding their breathes until the turn blue waiting for...
A different legal system to come along?
Having studied this little piece of history and geography in moderate detail, I think the 1980 court is wrong and the Fort Laramie treaty was invalidated by the actions of the Sioux themselves long before settlement of the area by whites began in earnest and before gold was discovered.
Picking at this thread and demanding a better settlement might just get them facing a historian who will detail their unforced violations of the treaty they signed and invalidating the deal they'd made by not abiding by their side of the terms.
Plus, if they chose to go back to court they will be risking what they've already won.
That they don't makes me think they DO understand this and not getting everything they wanted and refusing what the did win is a badge they can wear and use to get sympathy from people who can't read this far in my posts, let alone more than one dry ass history book on it.
Even more fun. Let's say they get what they want.
It will establish precedent for the Cheyenne and Crow to sue THEM to regain the Black Hills!
Remember, the Sioux are originally from what's now Minnesota, they're not from the Black Hills.
Ever wonder why the Crow were such keen allies of the Army and why they constantly identified peaceful Sioux encampments as hostile when "scouting"? The Black Hills are at the core of the feud.
I stopped commemorating 9/11 when it became obvious that we were fundamentally unserious about keeping it from happening again or seeking retribution on the people who were responsible.
It simply pissed me off all over again to note the date and that leads to seditious thoughts along the lines of, "if they won't fix it, maybe we should..." then a list of illegal thoughts that lead nowhere good as I quote Martius, "O, me, alone?" when I start the rebellion and nobody follows.
It's not like I can follow someone else!
So we do nothing about any of it and I get to be bitter about that.
Worse, we've squandered the ability to do anything about it most places now.
Watching the 2024 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo...
My local tattoo shop plays totally different music and doesn't have dancers.
Just sayin'.
Were doggies the killer app of cro-magnon man?
It's strange to think of dogs as a technological development, but domestication is a technology.
There's evidence that suggests that a neanderthal did about 10% more calorie burn than we do.
If we're burning fewer calories doing the same things and dogs make it easier for us to get more calories...
Neanderthal gets out competed.
Then there's the interbreeding...
I've sometimes wondered if hybrid vigor is going on and the cro-magnon appearance is a REALLY dominate gene leaving us with a magnathal who looks a lot like a cro-magnon but out competed them all.
Kamala Harris (a known liar) has said she owns a gun.
First off, any politician must own more guns than me for that to matter.
Second, she keeps talking about bans and severe restrictions on ownership and purchase; so the fact that she owns a gun is irrelevant. Those bans and restrictions never apply to the politically connected.
Third, Donald was a gun owner too. So was George Bush Sr. It doesn't matter for us if a politician owns A gun.
Like I said, a politician cannot be reliably considered to be pro-gun unless they own more guns than I do and they MUST be used for something besides hunting.
The Beast is now clean.
I'm just making note to remind me to do this every week instead of every other month.
It will mean less than a 1/4" of brake dust on the front wheels.
Trying out a new to me product to attack that accumulation. Adam's Wheel and Tire Cleaner.
It works, but there's a learning curve I haven't mastered.
I'm too wiped from the heat right now to hit them again.
"There is no Sioux word for that. For owning the earth."
I don't speak Sioux.
It might be that they don't have a word for land ownership, but they certainly do have the concept in their culture.
All of the plains Indians understood territory and the idea of excluding others from theirs.
That's ownership of the earth, with or without a word for it.
You can measure it yourself.
Example:
If there's a 4% annual inflation rate then something that cost a dollar will cost $1.04 next year and $1.17 after 4 years.
If there's a 19% annual inflation rate then something that cost a dollar will cost $1.19 next year and $2.01 after 4 years.
Which of these inflation rates better corresponds to the prices you're seeing at the store?
There's two good things from converting Omi from 3e to 4e.
First is knowing that Sengoku Japan is TL4. That ups the starting wealth to G$2,000.
This is a good thing because they changed the cost of many things upward, I can still afford them.
That very fine Katana is G$13,000.
If he'd stayed the original TL3, with the G$1,000 starting wealth, my Very Wealthy would only have given me $20k to spend.
I'd have been about G$10k short for the character as written.
GURPS Japan's armor was already a bit more complicated than the basic set, but it went from five lines on the character sheet to 13!
This brings us to the second good thing.
The increase in wealth also let me take armor that was more appropriate to the time period I'd selected.
Lamellar armor has some issues that period writers made note of:
When soaked with water the armor becomes very heavy and cannot be quickly dried; so that in summer it is oppressive and in winter liable to freeze. Moreover, no amount of washing will completely free the lacing from any mud or blood which may have penetrated it, and on long and distant campaigns it becomes evil-smelling and overrun by ants and lice, with consequent ill effects on the health of the wearer.
– Sakakibara Kozan, Chukokatchu Seisakuben-- Taken from GURPS Loadouts Low-Tech Armor p.32
Different kinds of armor started to replace it by the Sengoku. More protection for less mass.
But, also, for more G$.
The armor I pieced together comes to G$4,220 and 52.4 lb. Protection is the same, or better than the 12th to 13th century ensemble from Loadouts which is G$3,615 and 81.2 lb. Protection is slightly better than the 14th to 15th century set at G$2,539 and 62.8 lb. Oh, and I remembered my mempo! The example sets don't have one.
I might have ditched lamellar altogether for mail and plates, but the example photo I was using still had it.
Although lamellar armor looks so very Japanese...
By the Sengoku period, plates were starting to come into vogue.
So Omi's haramaki-do has been replaced with a hotoke-do. This is the benefit of being a medieval Japan nerd.
Going from DR4 medium lamellar that's DR3 vs crushing to DR 6 medium plate that's DR6 all the time.
I saved over six pounds doing so and got better protection. For almost four times the money...
I realized that I inserted a joke into the character. The very-fine quality Katana is the least likely weapon to be employed. It's almost half of what I spent on equipment.
But having a real heirloom item is something this character would have, even if the naginata is every bit as effective in combat and FAR cheaper.
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| Art by Christopher Rich-McKelvey |
I'm accustomed to characters not being too different in 4e, but a Sengoku era Ronin...
There's been some changes from the old Japan book and the new rules.
The Katana is no longer a two-handed fencing weapon.
The Teppo is a much lighter gun. Though a tanegashima is more apt. I'm not sure I want to keep it, it's more of an ashigaru weapon.
All the special arrows have different names.
A couple of skills have been replaced with techniques.
Armor... Armor was expected to be difficult. But I have it figured out, the character drawing has always been wrong.
While Marv was wet sanding the headlight lenses, I suggested some music.
We're both Pink Floyd fans so I fired up The Beast's radio, cranked it to 45 and played Wish You Were Here off the thumb drive.
45 is the max volume.
It was sufficiently loud too.
Very loud inside the car when I played with some of the audio settings.
By the way, if you don't know where to set the volume to be audible outside the car, Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 1 is a bad choice because it starts so quiet and takes a bit to build to where you can set the overall volume. That's why I was cranked to the max!
Max output from the head unit is incapable of causing distortion in my speakers. Woot! Though the dynamic distortion limiter indicator did flicker on the screen a couple of times.
