Being a long term hot-rodder it bothers me that the rear gear ratio in The Beast starts with a 2.
2.92:1 to be exact.
I think this bothers me because I had 2.56 gears in my '79 Camaro when I got it and they did not play well with the 305 small block and TH350.
The final ratios were 6.45/3.89/2.56.
It got better when I dropped a 350 small block and found a 2.73 posi rear.
6.88/4.15/2.73.
And a bit perkier with the Jaguar rear's 2.88.
7.26/4.38/2.88.
The Biscayne SS, with a 5.7L LT1 and 4L60E and 3.08 gears got:
9.42/5.02/3.08/2.14
The first gear ratio was like having 3.73 gears in the Camaro, but better than the 2.56 for cruising. Everybody wins!
The Beast's final ratios are:
11.76/6.90/4.44/3.36/2.49/1.95
That's like having a 3.73 rear in the Biscayne or a 4.56 rear in the Camaro for the launch, plus extra gears for mileage. 70 mph highway rpms would be about 2,400 in the Biscayne and 4,200 in the Camaro versus 1,700 in the PPV.
A common mod for a PPV is to go with a 3.27 rear from a 5th Gen Camaro, it's stronger too.
Those ratios end up being:
13.17/7.73/4.98/3.77/2.79/2.18
To match that launch gear the Camaro would have needed 5.38 gears and would "cruise" at almost 4,600 rpm at 70. Yikes!
The Biscayne would need a 4.56 gear set. Cruise rpm would be just over 2,700.
The PPV would cruise at just about 1,900.
I kinda dig these new transmissions. Plus, it doesn't seem like many people are complaining about the 6L80's strength.
Playing with GURPS: Gun Stats has brought one stat to the forefront.
Rcl, or recoil.
At first glance, this is how hard a gun kicks and you'd think that the more it hurts your shoulder, the higher the Rcl should be.
But...
The game effect of the Rcl number is how hard is it to get a second shot on target.
A bolt gun is going to be harder than a double rifle because you have to work the action.
A semi-auto gun has moving parts that might make the gun move more and make it harder to get a second shot on target, even if the action absorbs some of the pain transferred to your shoulder.
I was calculating some of the big game rounds and noticed that a break open action had significantly lower ST and Rcl than a bolt gun.
Case in point: .375 H&H.
It's a good example because we can still get double rifles in it, as well as bolt guns.
A Winchester Model 70 Safari is 8.5 lb. loaded and has ST 11, Rcl 5.
A Chapulis Iphisi is 9.3 lb. loaded and has ST 10, Rcl 3.
The difference in mass is not the deciding factor, but the change in constant from 0.5 for bolt guns and 0.25 for break-opens.
Despite the RoF 1 for the bolt gun making it seem like there's no reason for the Rcl value, there are rules for firing faster than the Rcl number suggests. All that manipulation of the bolt comes to the foreground there.
A double gun, however, just needs you to pull the other trigger.
Gun Stats significantly alters the ST and Rcl requirements of some guns down to the point where it's conceivable that an averagely stat'd big-game hunter could fire two rounds with good effect.
Gun Stats is generating ranges that are more in line with what I've read about African hunting than what High Tech said they should be too.
I was watching Ron White and he talked about a record sized grizzly bear that a park ranger shot to death with a .357 revolver.
I know it was a .357 because it was a 7-shot gun and it worked to kill the bear.
That bear has a ST of 21, thus 21 hit points and we know this from its 1,200 lb. weight and two times the cube root of the weight.
A .357 Magnum round does 3d pi, so an average of 10 points per shot.
That's ball. Hollow points do 3d(0.5) pi+, so 15 points per shot.
But bears have DR 2, thick skin and fur.
That means ball rounds do an average of 8 (10 - 2 = 8) and hollow-points do 9 ({10 - (2/0.5)} * 1.5).
A grizzly bear's HT is 13 so they have, about, an 84% chance of making any HT roll.
It will take 21 points of damage to get them to make that first consciousness check, and 21 points again to start checking death rolls every 21 after that.
Ron says he hit him with 7 shots, reloaded and then seven more.
Ball rounds. 8 per shot.
Turn 1 Shot 1, HP remaining = 13. Shot 2, HP remaining = 5. Move and dodge are halved. Shot 3, HP remaining = -3. Consciousness check. Turn 2 Shot 4, HP remaining = -11. Consciousness check. Shot 5, HP remaining = -19. Consciousness check. Shot 6, HP remaining = -27. Consciousness check. Death roll. Turn 3 Shot 7, HP remaining = -35. Consciousness check.
Turn 4 and 5. We're assuming some fast-draw speed-loader here. Reload!
Turn 6 Shot 8, HP remaining = -43. Consciousness check. Death roll. Shot 9, HP remaining = -51. Consciousness check. Shot 10, HP remaining = -59. Consciousness check. Turn 7 Shot 11, HP remaining = -67. Consciousness check. Death roll. Shot 12, HP remaining = -75. Consciousness check. Shot 13, HP remaining = -83. Consciousness check. Turn 8 Shot 14, HP remaining = -91. Consciousness check. Death roll.
The bear only has about a 13% chance of making all them consciousness rolls, but a 49% chance of being alive at the end.
HP rounds. 9 per shot.
Turn 1 Shot 1, HP remaining = 12. Shot 2, HP remaining = 3. Move and dodge are halved. Shot 3, HP remaining = -6. Consciousness check. Turn 2 Shot 4, HP remaining = -15. Consciousness check. Shot 5, HP remaining = -24. Consciousness check. Death roll. Shot 6, HP remaining = -33. Consciousness check. Turn 3 Shot 7, HP remaining = -42. Consciousness check. Death Roll.
Turn 4 and 5. We're assuming some fast-draw speed-loader here. Reload!
Turn 6 Shot 8, HP remaining = -51. Consciousness check. Shot 9, HP remaining = -60. Consciousness check. Shot 10, HP remaining = -69. Consciousness check. Death roll. Turn 7 Shot 11, HP remaining = -78. Consciousness check. Shot 12, HP remaining = -87. Consciousness check. Death roll. Shot 13, HP remaining = -96. Consciousness check. Turn 8 Shot 14, HP remaining = -107. Auto death.
Look at the difference one little point in average damage can make! But it takes all 14 rounds at average damage to get the job done.
This GURPS.
Would a .38 Special do?
A .38 only does 2d pi, with a 7 average per shot, 5 penetrate. HP gets 3 to penetrate and does only 4 after we add 50% for the the pi+.
Ball rounds. 5 per shot.
Turn 1 Shot 1, HP remaining = 16. Shot 2, HP remaining = 11. Shot 3, HP remaining = 6. Move and dodge are halved. Turn 2 Shot 4, HP remaining = 1. Shot 5, HP remaining = -4. Consciousness check. Shot 6, HP remaining = -9. Consciousness check.
Turn 3 and 4. We're assuming some fast-draw speed-loader here. Reload!
Turn 5 Shot 7, HP remaining = -14. Consciousness check. Shot 8, HP remaining = -19. Consciousness check.
Bear arrives and you dead! This GURPS!
The bear has about a 49% chance of making all 4 consciousness rolls, and never has to make a death roll.
But we had 8 to get it done with the .357...
What about the mighty One Centimeter, 10mm ACP?
The ball ammo is 3d+1 pi+ so it averages 11 per shot, 9 penetrating for 13 per round. Hollow points are 3d+1(0.5) pi++, 7 penetrating for 14 per round.
Ball rounds. 13 damage per shot!
Turn 1 Shot 1, HP remaining = 8. Shot 2, HP remaining = -5. Move and dodge are halved. Shot 3, HP remaining = -18. Turn 2 Shot 4, HP remaining = -31. Consciousness roll. Death roll. Shot 5, HP remaining = -44. Consciousness roll. Death roll. Shot 6, HP remaining = -57. Consciousness roll. Turn 3 Shot 7, HP remaining = -70. Consciousness roll. Death roll. Shot 8, HP remaining = -83. Consciousness roll. Shot 9, HP remaining = -96. Consciousness roll. Death roll. Turn 4 Shot 10, HP remaining = -109. Auto-Death!
10mm ball ammo has been noted to work, so this GURPS.
I keep hearing that what you REALLY need is a 12ga 3" magnum slug.
That does 6d+1 pi++. Average roll of 22, 20 penetrate, 40 damage. Can't knock these out faster than one per turn, though, and we only get 8 shots.
Turn 1 Shot 1, HP remaining = -19. Move and dodge are halved. Turn 2 Shot 2, HP remaining = -59. Consciousness roll. Death Roll. Turn 3 Shot 3, HP remaining = -99. Consciousness roll. 2 death Rolls. Turn 4 Shot 4, HP remaining = -139. Auto-Death!
He's very likely to have made both rolls to stay awake with a 70% chance and prolly needs taken to auto death with a 59% chance of making all three death rolls.
I had to remember how to do "if the number is between two values, then..." with a spreadsheet.
Once I remembered, it turns out that LibreOffice wanted a slightly different syntax than I thought it should be.
Thankfully, the internet was there.
If the gun is heavy enough, and the round light enough, you can get a value that should round down to 1 for recoil. But! The motion of the action would make it recoil 2.
So you have to punch in that calculated values between 1.21 and 2.5 are actually 2. Everything else rounds to nearest.
I was struggling to find information on 8x50mmR Lebel as it changed over the years.
I glanced to my right a moment ago and realized that I had forgotten to check the definitive book on French military rifles!
Chassepot to FAMAS, by Ian McCollum, has the information I was seeking in it. I've only owned it for seven years!
It fine tuned my numbers and show that High Tech and Adventure Guns version of the Lebel are using the Balle M stats and the Pulp Guns 2 version is using Balle N.
The irony is I'd just looked up stuff about .280 British in Thorneycraft to SA80 which is right next to it on the bookshelf at my elbow.
Gun Stats gives formula to calculate the ST and Rcl.
Rcl = 1 + [(V*PW*Ar*Hl*Mb)/(Ewt+Sgr)]
V is muzzle velocity in fps PW is bullet weight in lbs Ewt is the empty weight in lbs
Ar is a constant based on the action. 0.4 for guns with reciprocating actions, 0.5 for not.
Hl is a high/low pressure constant. 1 for every gun except guns that use a high/low pressure round, like a 40mm grenade launcher.
Mb is a constant for muzzle brakes and recoil reduction systems. 1 for a bare muzzle.
Sgr is a constant for the stock configuration. 5 for stocks with pistol grips, 4 for Fudd stocks. 5 for normal handguns, 4 for handguns like old flintlocks.
I was not getting the numbers I expected and it was because I'd read the description of Hl wrong and used 0.1 instead of 1.
This feeds into the ST calculation which is the square root of the square root of Lwt*Rcl*1,200 for handguns or 300 for long guns.
I think they did the square root of the square root instead of ∜ because most people don't have a button for that on their calculator and don't know to enter ^0.25 to get it on a spreadsheet.
If you fail rinse, you're going to fail repeat in the lather, rinse, repeat test...
Revenues doubled in the past five years, but a 15% cut will eliminate everything they, successfully, funded with half the money previously?
I think we're in, "pull the other one, it has bells on it," territory.
The maths of the people crying about this tax cut aren't adding up.
BTW: If tripling the exemption on property taxes results in a 15% drop in revenue, then you should be fine.
What these governments are going to have to do is separate the "must have" from the "nice to have."
Two things they keep bringing up to scare the normies is schools, fire and police.
Schools are already lavishly funded from the portion of property taxes that are unaffected by the homestead exemption.
In too many cases the city fire and police services are a duplication of effort and the county, with it's more diverse funding, could take over the task.
But the giant, huge, thing they're missing is the voters have been demanding relief from the taxation of their property and, by extension, they are saying they want the cities and counties of Florida to figure out how to live more cheaply.
The voters are painfully aware that these same governments managed to provide all the services they threaten with half the money when there was just 45% inflation while the revenue increased 100%.
That means that the previous level of funding could survive a 28% cut in revenue.
The problem is the funding levels went up as the revenue did.
The voters get another chance to remind them in November by endorsing or rejecting the tax cut.
Plugging the, surprisingly hard to find, dimensions for Cartridge, .30 calibre, ball, M1906 and Cartridge, .30 caliber, ball, M1 into the Gun Stats formula gets different results.
I stopped rounding the length to diameter ratio...
M1 is a lot closer to the original published stats of 7d+1 pi, 1,100/4,500.
UPDATE
Remington Core-Lokt comes to 7d+1(0.5) pi+, 1,050/4,400. If this is typical of sporting rounds, the FMJ version is the exemplar round.
Being able to find a real round that mimics the published stats means that I will be able to allow stats generated with this book to be used in my game while still using the published numbers... With a lot of exceptions because I think that Pulp and Adventure Guns supplements are suspect. Those are fairly obscure, so I don't think they'll come up much.
I also think that giving round nose, heavy, bullets 80% the range and taking away the +1 to Acc from the Da for longer rounds.
Even though I'm not an accredited expert in the eyes of Steve Jackson Games, I was once dismissed as a hobbyist, I do know a thing or two about guns.
What exactly is a hobbyist?
They're the experts in a topic who don't make a career out of it and educate themselves on their own dimes.
I've been calculating various rounds with GURPS: Gun Stats and this book has been found wanting.
Sad trombone.
The first, gigantic, problem is that .30 Caliber M1903 ball out performs .30 Caliber M2 ball. It's like it was stupid for everyone to change over to spitzer rounds.
But spitzer rounds carry more energy farther than round-nose bullets. The 1/2D numbers generated are backwards of reality.
This fails the reality check.
Then I calculated a few pistol rounds.
9mm came out almost the same as published materials. .40 S&W was a bit worse than published and a bit better than my house rule... But .45 ACP was as good as the legends!
Way more range and +2 to the damage.
The old numbers were 2d+2 pi for 9mm and 2d pi+ for .45 ACP. This gives them almost identical damage to tissue (avg. 9 points vs 10) and reflects that 9mm is slightly better at punching things like car doors.
New numbers has .45 at 2d+2 pi+, so it will now punch car doors the same and do more damage in tissue (avg. 9 points vs 13).
This fails the reality check.
I missed something.
First, I had the wrong bullet diameter, copy paste error.
The ranges are calculated differently if the muzzle velocity is under 1,000 feet per second.
Now the damage is 2d+1 pi+ and that changes the average damages to 9 for 9mm and 11 for .45. .45 is slightly worse at car doors again!
While it seems to do fine with pistols, this book does NOT GURPS!
I got GURPS: Gun Stats in January, I didn't do much with it except notice that the formulas don't recreate the, already, published stats for the M1 Garand.
An M1, in GURPS: High Tech, does 7d+1 pi out to 1,100/4,500, as does the Winchester Model 70.
So, armed with real world numbers for Cartridge, .30 caliber, M2 Ball, I dutifully plugged information into the formula and got:
7d+1 pi (so far so good) out to 890/3,700 (whups).
So I did .270 Winchester, which, according to Pulp Guns Vol. 2 stats for the Winchester Model 54, should do 7d pi out to 900/3,600.
The formula says: 7d+1 pi to 1,150/4,800.
Then I remembered that M2 ball's pressure curve is atypical of .30-06 and plugged in the numbers for Remington 150gr Core-Lokt.
7d+1 pi out to 1,020/4,300. That's a lot closer to the published stats than what using the M2 ball figures gets you.
So I moved on to the AR.
An M16A1 (High Tech) firing M193 ball gets 5d pi; 500/3,200. Gun Stats calculates it as 5d pi; 440/3,100. Close.
An XM177E2 (SEALs in Vietnam) firing M193 gets 4d+1 pi; 420/2,700. Gun Stats calculates it as 4d+1 pi; 370/2,600. Also close.
So far the damages have been about right, but ranges differ greatly from published weapons.
But what really clonked me was calculating .30-40 Krag.
Adventure guns says the M1892 rifle does 6d+1 pi; 1,000/3,900. Gun Stats says 6d pi; 1,030/4,300. A round nose 220gr bullet at 2,000 fps outdistances a 152gr spitzer at 2,800 fps. Also notice, except for the damage, that it calculates nearly the same ranges as a modern .30-06 load!
Spain's 173gr 7x57mm loading comes to 6d+1 pi to 1,190/5,000 so the Spanish Hornet still outranges the boys on Kettle Hill.
.30 Carbine takes a big hit, going from 4d+1 pi; 330/2,100 to 4d pi-; 290/3,200.
Which brings us to the Big Huge Question™: With the disparity between published and calculated stats: do you use the calculated stats for unpublished weapons alongside the published weapons, or do you recalculate ALL the published ones?
Especially considering that the Douglas Cole calculations and Vehicles for 3rd Edition come much closer to the published stats.
The calculator says there was 483.1% inflation, that means a 1975 dollar is $5.83 in 2024.
$39,300 house should become $239,144.57. $14,100 income should become $82,212.17. $0.59 gas should become $3.44. $1,500 college tuition should become $9,057.31 $3,800 new car should become $22,156.47 $150 rent should become $874.60. $2.10 minimum wage should become $12.24 $0.28 loaf of bread should become $1.63 $1.55 movie ticket should become $9.04
Gee, you'd think the calculator might not be calibrated correctly. At least for those specific things.
A 23" Zenith TV was $420 in 1975. It should cost $2,599.78 today. They actually cost $99. A Colt Gov't model was $175.50. It should cost $1,086.34 today, but actually comes in at $970.99.
Inflation is not even across all things, but calculators try to make it so.
The invisible hand does not care if something is relatively more or less valuable compared to 50 years ago.
I remember $70 Mosin-Nagant 91/30's around 2004. Inflation says that should only be $123.41, they're selling in the mid $400's now.
A Glock 17 Gen 1 Classic loaded with 17 rounds of S&B 115gr FMJ weighs 1 lb. 15.9 oz.
A Glock 17 Gen 1 Classic loaded with 17 rounds of Hornady 135gr Critical Duty JHP weighs 2 lb. 0.6 oz.
Both of which round to 2 lb. for GURPS.
The loaded magazines are 9.8 oz. for the ball ammo and 10.5 oz. for the hollow-points.
0.6 lb. and 0.7 lb. when you get done rounding.
So you can take a 0.1 lb. heavier magazine and not change the weight of the pistol!
Remember pi is 3.00 in GURPS...
I tend to not bother accounting for the heavier ammo and just use the ammo table exemplar for all rounds; though I do have different weights listed for .223 Rem and 5.56x45mm NATO... Because they have two listings on the ammo table!
There's a meme going around about how the federal minimum wage was $1 an hour in 1960 and how that could be paid with four quarters and how much richer someone on minimum wage was in 1960 compared to now and why Boomers are so rich...
A 1960 quarter has 0.1808 ounces of silver in it. Silver was approximately $0.92 per ounce in 1960.
So a quarter was worth 16.6336 cents in 1960. If you paid in quarters silver, the minimum wage is 66.5344 cents an hour.
But, how much is 0.7232 ounces of silver worth today? Inflation suggests it should be $7.
Silver is $110.30 per ounce at the time of writing. So our four 1960 quarters are now worth $79.77 in bullion. The quarters are still worth $1.
The meme goes that our worker did 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year at $1 an hour and made $2,080 and because you could get that in silver then that wage was equivalent to $165,921.60 year.
A worker making a buck an hour in 1960 did NOT have as much money as middle management does today.
The official inflation number is closer. $21,902.40 is about right.
Gold was $35.50 an ounce in 1960, our worker was making 0.028169014 ounces of gold an hour.
Gold is now $5,064.10 an ounce so our worker should be getting $296,713.46
Gold was 38.59 times the price of silver per ounce in 1960.
Today gold is 45.91 times the price of silver.
There was once a time when the value of a dollar was a fixed fraction of the value of gold. There was once a time when the value of silver was a fixed fraction of gold.
X dollars bought Y ounces of gold. Z ounces of silver bought Y ounces of gold and X dollars.
The three things are no longer tied together.
While the dollar inflated 1,053%, gold inflated 14,265% and silver 11,989%. <- See what I did there?
There's gobs of exceptions to the inflation numbers that goldbugs like to point out, but the dollar did pretty well even so. Energy, cars and housing ARE more expensive than they used to be.
BUT!
An IBM 7030 was $7,780,000 in 1961. A brand new laptop from Wal Mart for $500 will outperform it on any metric you'd care to throw at it. A $1,200 smart phone, likewise will embarrass it. Considering that I don't have $81,041,666.67 for a computer, I will accept that some things get cheaper and somethings get more expensive.
I did a gallon of gas not that long ago. Gas was $0.31 per gallon, on average, in the US in 1960. Gas is $2.91 right now ($2.78 locally). It's not the $3.25 inflation predicts. Again, I'll take it.
A Colt 1911 was $17.50 in 1960 (according to AI) and will set you back $1,049 today. Inflation says that they should cost $184.28...
Prices don't go up evenly and everything is traded separately.
Ilhan Omar thinks we should have Federal gun registration.
Yeah, right. Let's ignore that the number of firearms is increasing steadily and the rate of crime done with them is falling.
As Fuddbusters points out, let's say the, ever efficient, Feral Gubmint can register a gun a minute.
There's 637 to 985 million firearms out there to register!
At one a minute... 1,215.28 to 1,897.2 years.
This assumes 100% compliance, and even traditionally polite and law-abiding Canada can't get that!
We're also seeing the effects of giving up personal arms in places like Great Britain.
Compliance is gonna be low.
Even saying, "we're gonna register all the new guns and not worry about the almost a billion already out there!" adds 47.7 years of registration at one gun a minute every year for the 25 million guns added to the supply.
I think they can record and register the new guns a lot faster than one a minute.
It's possible to register all the new guns.
It's not possible to account for all the existing guns.
When a gun is damaged beyond repair, there's no requirement to tell anyone about it. Some simple precautions and it's in the scrap bin.
Ten years later, what gun?
The non-compliant will simply say they had the proverbial boating accident and without a search of their residence you don't know if they're lying. You can't know!
This also assumes they hid it IN their residence to be found during a search too.
I think your average clumsy boater is smart enough to cache their accidentally lost guns off site.
Home Depot sells everything you need to hide a gun for decades.
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