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Things are getting strange out there in "retro" AR land.
That upper receiver is worth $400.
I paid $150 for it in 2008.
Apparently, nobody is making them any more.
The vintage uppers and furniture I got for $500 each for Roberta and Charlotte are running $2,000+ each now.
Wow.
I am so unused to things I buy becoming more valuable rather than depreciating.
Same damage, same max-range.
The Winchester reaches a bit farther before 1/2 damage range; is WAY lighter and a bit handier at the expense of magazine capacity, rate of fire and ease of reloading.
Oh, and it's readily available 65 years sooner and can be had without getting the law involved in the purchase in most gaming worlds.
Comparing four common thirty caliber hunting guns in GURPS.
It might get bigger if you click on it...
Lever guns get a slight edge in rate of fire.
They all weigh about the same and have similar capacities.
.30-30 lags in damage, but it's sufficient to snuff the white tailed hoof-rat. Or for social purposes.
We had a player who was a little slow and not making the transition from medieval fantasy to cliff-hangers pulp and only knew about one gun.
The AK-47.
We explained to him that the .30-30 was very similar in damage and range to the AK, just slower shooting and lower capacity.
He equipped every character from then on with a Winchester '94 if such was available.
It never failed him.
Of course, back then, I'd have never had made stats for a Savage 99 and .300 Savage.
Except for that one player, they'd have never taken a lever gun, or even a hunting rifle adventuring.
.30-06 was already done, as was 8mm Mauser. All I had to make for them were 7.65x53mm and 7x57mm Mauser, for resupply purposes in South America.
Fifty years ago this very minute, Gene Cernan removed his foot from the
surface of the moon and returned to the interior of Challenger.
He said:
I'm on the surface; and, as I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come — but we believe not too long into the future — I'd like to just [say] what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return: with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.
Something that's interesting about doing historical research for gaming is what's popular as opposed to what's available.
Also, what's available versus what exists.
The fact that three players could take all three guns which appeared in single numbers in one SEAL team in Vietnam says a lot about what happens when the list makes no distinction between there being a con-ex full of M16's and a special order R607 carbine.
The .30-30 and .30-40 are very similar and were introduced at almost the same time.
But the .30-30 was far more popular and available for a long spell.
I think two things contributed to .30-30 getting ahead.
First the customer base was familiar with lever actions with tube magazines, the second was the price of a Krag.
The Winchester was cheaper and readily available. Guns in .30-40 just weren't.
.30-40 really only becomes popular when the US Government dumps all those Krags on the surplus market. Nearly free guns and ammo hit the market.
But, still, the .30-30 maintained the lead. Americans loved their lever guns!
Hardly anyone made new guns for the Krag cartridge. Because of that, you can't hardly find .30-40 ammo regularly.
Even .300 Savage is available more often (itself being the second most popular hunting round in the US until .308 Winchester knocked it under .30-06).
I once expressed that the Stabilitrak system on the Vette caused my accident.
I was firmly informed, sarcastically, that I must be so much smarter than GM's engineers.
Like most people, an engineer is smart, a group of engineers are dumb.
A problem with lots of performance cars appears to be the traction control and a pilot-induced-oscillation that suddenly whipsaws the rear back and forth until traction control "wins" and puts the car into a roadside obstacle.
Over and over, the driver describes doing what you're supposed to do when the rear fish-tails, then the sudden terror that it was getting worse, not better.
My theory is the average person has no rear wheel drive experience and, worse, will steer opposite of what you're supposed to do in a fish-tail.
Most of these accidents like mine are people who are familiar with rear wheel drive and engines with excessive power.
I didn't think I was in trouble for the first two swings. Didn't seem any different than losing the rear on my old Camaro.
What was different is my inputs were making the swings worse, not better.
Ultimately, it was my mistake that got me into a situation where I'd have to fight the Stabilitrak, but I think that GM (and other auto-makers) are going to have legal problems over it eventually.
I am continually astonished at the number of people who "don't watch TV" who are nonetheless completely up to date with regards to what's on TV.
Especially people who "don't watch the news" who, somehow, know the narrative to seventeen decimal places.
Kids, you're getting it from someplace.
Getting it and not even being aware of the source.
I shouldn't be surprised.
I remember a college level macroeconomics class where a 15 minute explanation of opportunity cost turned into a two week ordeal with both the professor and the students who weren't getting it just giving up and moving on.
Marv likes to tinker.
The SIG P320 series has all the hallmarks of something he can tinker with.
The goal of the trip to the gun shop yesterday was to look at all the choices available from SIG for the pistol.
In the course of this, I laid hands on an M17. The grip feels pretty damn good. The coon-finger display gun was busted, but the M18 next to it had a splendid trigger.
Bud's Gun Shop has them for a very tempting price... if I had any need whatsoever for another plastic striker fired gun.
But Marv, as I said, likes to tinker.
You don't even have to buy a single SIG part to make a P320 it appears. That's great news for the tinkerer.
It's even more options than the Not-A-Glock market.
Hopefully we'll get pictures of the project should it come to fruition.
We went to one of the gun stores yesterday and checked out the ammo selection.
Stocks seem to be recovering somewhat.
Even though .300 Blackout killed their chances at mainstream appeal, you can still get 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel ammo, but the choices are severely truncated from years ago.
6.5 is only on the shelves in the Wolf brand.
6.8 has two loadings from Hornady and a third from... Uh... I don't remember.
Used to be five or six choices for each.
The FN MAG and M3 can use the DM1 belt and M13 links interchangeably.
The M60 and M240 cannot use the DM1 belt.
Why?
The DM1 puts the rounds farther apart and the feed pawls on the 60 and 240 don't doesn't move far enough.
You can put a MAG top-cover and feed tray onto an M240 to enable use of the DM1, though!
The MAG (and M240) need a different feed tray to use DM1 belts. A 240 tray can be modified to work.
Yes, it was important to know this answer because of Twilight:2000.
It still messes with me that game went from a plausible future to an alt-history while I lived through it.
Last night I got Marv to spill about the "secret" gun Willard bought.
H&K P7M7!
.45 ACP staple gun!
Now we know why Willard was keeping it a secret.
Marv also related that Willard has a secret H&K room in the house.
All this time...
You think you know someone!
The above is a lie.
Marv is doing a good job of keeping mum.
I figure that the mystery will be revealed before too long because Willard appears to be getting recovered enough to go to the range with us soon.
We'll see his hidden love then.
FuzzyGeff remembered a reference to a book where someone predicted that, someday, hunting rifles wouldn't even have iron sights in preference to telescopic sights.
Turns out that prescient motherfucker was none other than Jack O'Connor, also known on this blog as the chief advocate for the .270 Winchester round.
Who knew?
If you don't want a 7/8 scale pistol grip:
Damage Industries is full sized.
Colt is full sized.
Brownell's retro line is full sized and lacks the finger rest.
Magpul is full sized.
Got the sewer bill today.
Same as last month, which means it's from pre-repair.
One more $400 water bill month before the reduced consumption from the repair kicks in.
UGH!
UN General Assembly votes that Israel should get rid of their nuclear weapons.
I am sure they are getting right on that.
But I am also sure they are looking at Ukraine and seeing that if Kyiv had kept their former-Soviet weapons that Russia would have been far more reluctant to invade.
I think it's interesting that Hollywood portrays things in movies as evil, but stands behind politicians who want to do those things in real life.
It's like they know what evil is, they just don't understand it.
The show that made me realize this was Star Wars: The Bad Batch when everyone's freedom of movement is curtailed by the necessity of having a "chain-code" or universal ID (which apparently includes DNA stuff).
No ID, no travel and that code has been shown to be detectable at considerable distances.
Conversely, they know what good is, and don't understand it when they show the hero toting a gun around which you or I would not readily be able to obtain because of the administrative burdens, let alone the price tag.
Not to mention how often they depict the hero stealing that gun from a government armory, underscoring that the good guy can't get a gun needed to take down bad-guys otherwise.
I wrote on this nine years ago.
I suspect that many people don't care for the M16A2 grip because they've never actually gotten one.
On the left is an "A2" from CMMG. On the right is one from Colt.
I don't like the 80% sized grips either.
Happily, Brownell's carries the Colt and the Damage Ind. grips are the Colt size.
Cavalry Mfg is the smaller size if I recall correctly and I only tolerate it on Linda for the color.
The pistol grip on an AR is a polarizing issue.
It's something I've grappled with myself.
I have loved and hated EVERY grip I've tried over the years, starting when I joined the Army.
The A2 grip was clearly superior to the original M16 grip then.
I tried to emulate it with my Mini-14 with one of those slide-over rubber finger rest thingies too.
The ACE grip for my Daewoo wasn't fish nor fowl for grips and I liked it just fine. It was sort of a meld of A1 and FAL.
But then I got into AR's, especially retro AR's.
But the modern guns were getting Magpul's MIAD grips. That gives an option for the finger rest, or not.
Suddenly the A1 grip was best. Then the MIAD... Then the A2...
Until I finally settled on the A2 because it was cheap and it works and... that's about it. Unless, of course, the gun is a clone which has a different grip.
YMMV!
Now, if the A2 don't work for you; by all means change it out and get something that does!
But don't think for a second that my (or your) grip choice is a moral crusade.
An interface's ergonomics are guaranteed to not work with some people even if they work for most people.
PS:
One thing steering my choice is using the M12 rack for added security. Most grips with extra material that climbs the back of the lower won't fit. The KP-15 lower doesn't and that bothers me some.
PPS:
7.62x51mm variants of the AR don't fit either, the extra receiver length interferes with the locking bar.
With the CRT advocate bigot professors talking about committing genocide openly it's time to point out that most genocides predate the word and were the norm for when two incompatible people started to butt heads.
Ask the Sioux how that works.
That we CAN ask the Sioux says a lot about the value of the Victorian mores espoused in the handling of the end of the Indian Wars.
But I suspect that the handling of the CRT wars will be more on the scale of Nazi Germany should these idiots finally light the candle. A fuse, I might add, that a good number of us are actively keeping damp!
They keep talking in terms which don't take a lot of rationalizing to see they mean to either murder or subjugate white people in a way that will demand a violent response from anyone wishing to remain free and alive.
Dammit!
I don't want this.
They don't want this, though they don't seem to know they don't want it.
81 years ago Imperial Japan dared to wake the sleeping giant.
Admiral Yamamoto warned against such an action and only survived the decision by less than a year and a half.
Once woken, the US invented an entirely new form of weapon and used it to end the war. In less than four years.
Since then we've not bothered to wake up for a war.
The Bell V-280 Valor appears to have won the contract to replace the UH-60 in Army service.
This will be the second tilt-rotor accepted into military service.
I expect to see more of this as time goes on.
I eagerly await the attack version as the utility birds outrun and outrange the Apache.
Commercial acceptance of the tilt-rotor concept is probably close, I've seen at least two proposals for executive tilt-rotor ideas.
The German MG3 and the Belgian MAG can use both M13 disintegrating links and the DM1 non-disintegrating belts.
Does anyone know if the old M60 can use the DM1 belts as well?
It looks like it should be able to, but I can't find a reference, including the FM, that admits to it.
While it might be perfectly legal for a private company to block speech it dislikes...
It is forbidden for the government to even request that a private company do so.
That's what the 1st Amendment is all about with regards to speech.
If the FBI and CIA demanded that Twitter suppress speech, we have a Constitutional crisis on our hands.
And it fucking sucks that nobody is going to do fuck all about it.
I remember getting fed up with a friend, Anglave, over his amazing ability to know nothing about a topic we were discussing, yet have all of the standard talking points at his fingertips.
Seeing how all I had was my own lying eyes against the power of Google and the mass media, I could never prove to his satisfaction that Google and the mass media were lying.
Now we have Elon Musk poking around under the hood of Twitter and we're finding that, yes, the places that I found to be biased and telling lies were biased and telling lies.
Well, Anglave, care to apologize?
Get ahead of the revelations that might be coming?
Like The Tea Party wasn't racist?
Like Global Warming Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Climate Change being a gigantic scam?
Like how the press buried dozens of stories about Obama and his terrorist buddy and racist friends?
Come, man up, admit you were misled and drove your friend away.
If your DR has a little * next to it, it's soft flexible armor.
What that means is that every 10pts of cutting, impaling or piercing (or 5pts of crushing) damage when the attack fails to penetrate will do 1 point of damage via blunt trauma. Basic Set: p.379.
ARfcom News tested it!
The Hornady 12ga SST Sabot flings a 300gr .50 cal hollow point at 2,000 FPS.
That's 6d(0.5) pi++
That doubles the effective DR of the panel to 24* which will keep the average hit of 21 from penetrating, but will let 2 points of crushing through.
That's actually a solid hit. Pretty close to being hit by a night-stick swung by the average person.
GURPS passes another reality check!
Some people do Elf on a Shelf, we do Hulk in a Tree!
We try to be creative with our Lego Hulk.
I also get to stretch my photography skills.
I'm a true believer that an armed society is a free society.
A place where an oppressor need worry about being killed for oppressing.
With that in mind I've taught lots of potential victims how to shoot and even given a few their first gun.
Black people. Women people. LGBTQ people.
Because the people part matters, not the preceding part that's simply a description of the person.
Because if Jim Crow had not systematically disarmed black people, there'd have been many fewer lynchings and fewer racist lynchers too.
Because if women were encouraged to own a gun and carry, there'd have been many fewer rapes.
Because armed fags don't get bashed!
Genocide has recently been added to the anti-gun repertoire.
Whom?
The American-Indian, of course.
Completely wiped out, they was.
Wait a second... Checks sources... There are more Indians in America today than when the shooting finally stopped a hundred plus years ago.
Worst. Genocide. Evah.
What happened happened because a racist, militant, violent and expansive people got shoved up against... white people.
Did you know that the three worst "massacres" were caused by the hatred the Crow had for the Sioux and the deliberate misidentification of a peaceful Sioux leader as a hostile one? I put massacres in quotes because the massacre barely qualifies as a decimation most of the time.
It seems to me that if you take 80% of the victims of an attack prisoner you've failed in your massacre.
And the numbers are small. They make it seem like thousands were killed in the massacre when it was 10-20 killed in an encampment of 100-200.
It's nearly universally ignored that the noble savages were eagerly at war with each other and perfectly fine with wiping another tribe completely off the face of the earth.
What caused them to be subjugated was that they didn't understand what war meant to this new tribe to the East.
It never gets mentioned that the US spent the better part of a century trying to come to a lasting peace with the Indians.
Everything was tried, and failed until they went Curtis LeMay on them, "I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting."
The fact was the Indians didn't want peace. They wanted more land. They wanted the neighbors dead so they could take their land. Well, maybe not all dead, they wanted slaves too.
Did we mention how sexist the American Indian was? Chattel wife doesn't begin to cover it.
My how noble. In a feudal way.
PS:
It needs be noted that most any Indian who gives up on the reservation, gets a job and acts like any other American is just a successful as the self-same any other American with the same skills and work ethic. Some more than others, as with everyone. But very few who've left the reservations are worse off than before.
PPS:
It's often forgotten that just shy of half of the Indians in America didn't take the Dawes deal and decided to become normal Americans. They live among you to this day (Hell, I married one!).
I find myself having the same arguments again and again in the few places outside the choir I still go.
There's a song lyric to go with it!
For the life of me, I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise
And we'd never compromise?
Though the song isn't about being generally ignorant when you're young, it does touch on the idea that wisdom only comes with experience.
Every year we get a new crop of people who've just been taught THE TRUTH™ in college and are on their first long break from college and are spreading THE TRUTH™ on social media...
Where they encounter us ancient grognards of the gun control debate where they get told that not only is THE TRUTH™ a lie, but we have references that prove it.
Things like the prefatory clause being essentially meaningless to the effect the 2nd Amendment is supposed to have on Government.
That no study has ever been made on the association of gun ownership and the size of male genitalia. I looked that one up!
That gun ownership is a proxy for racism and genocide.
And so on.
I'm coming to believe that civics is no longer taught at any level and that English is being taught in such a way that even a lawyer is demanding clearer language to be able to say what they mean.
Spending a week on the meaning of 'is' probably warps your perspective.
Still the best part of these little fights is when they get exasperated and tell you that you're never going to change their mind and I get to reply, "I'm not trying to change YOUR mind. I'm showing the people who are reading us debate what a fool you are and convincing THEM to change THEIR minds."
That's also a Hawker Hurricane sold to Finland by Great Britain while engaged in a war with National Socialist Germany.
Finland's roundel was a blue swastika in a white field since their first plane took to the skies.
In 1918.
At the end of WW2 they changed the roundel on the planes to concentric blue and white rings, but the Air Force badges and crests kept the swastika until very recently.
They almost literally said that they were sick of explaining that it predated the National Socialist Worker's Party of Germany and never had an association with Fascism in Finland.
It's an outstanding example of one side getting to define the meaning of a symbol without bothering to ask the user of that symbol what they mean by it.
The Confederate Battle Flag is such a symbol too.
We've made the decision that what matters is how something is taken rather than how it was meant.
That simply won't work for very long, because if you cannot mean what you say, you cannot say what you mean.
But that's the intent.
It's to have a means to punish the "wrong" people regardless of what they meant to do or say by applying meaning to what they say or do after the fact as if it was their intention from the beginning.
And that brings us to Ye and his current ban on Twitter.
Is combining the Star of David and a swastika an incite to violence? Mr Musk appears to think so.
Is it just inflammatory speech? I tend to think so.
I've found, in the long run, letting racists spew their idiocy wins more opposition to them than suppressing them. They're idiots, so we've nothing to fear from their idiotic words.
I'd have let Ye keep digging his hole and self-marginalizing until he disappeared from public view forever.
I've been saying that the stabilizing brace on a pistol was a stock since SIG first got their permission letter from BATFE.
If it is a stock, then a braced pistol is a Short Barrel Rifle.
Check the legal definitions. Black letter law agrees.
Another BATFE exception which is in violation of the black letter law is allowing curio and relic guns with a period design stock to skip SBR registration.
The ATF giveth and the ATF taketh away.
Sadly, that there are many disabled people who benefit from the use of a brace is irrelevant to the law.
Ultimately, the solution is making short barreled rifles normal firearms by law.
With the current resident of The White House and composition of Congress, that ain't gonna happen.
I worry that the present fight to retain ATF's ruling is wasting political capitol for a temporary gain.
Should we get a favorable wind in DC again, I think we can point that all these people with braces mounted who are using them like stocks proves that short barreled rifles aren't a criminal issue.
Which we also know is true because if criminals were being arrested with braced pistols we'd be seeing it in every news report supporting gun control and the suppression of braces.
A complete repeal of the NFA and GCA would also solve the problem. More unlikely than a piecemeal dismantling of them, but acceptable.
The normies are scared of machine guns, and we'd get our asses reamed proposing making them available for sale just like normal guns.
BUT!
We can show the normies that what amounts to an SBR is already out there, in the wild, unregistered and only as restricted as a regular gun and causing additional problems. If we dig hard, I suspect we're going to see that braced pistols are less of a problem than normal handguns.
ArachnoThag's EVA thrusters are going to be powered by hydrazine.
While it's nasty shit, it's got a lot of utility.
Not least of which is an 800°C plume from one of the thrusters consisting of unfriendly byproducts.
Or you could just vent it.
It's a powerful self defense item if your body is made from something that's immune to the corrosive effects and doesn't need to breathe.
I appears that literally days after I last posted about Mt Soledad's cross that the Mt Soledad Memorial Association was successful in their attempt to purchase the land from the government.
That did not end the litigation.
That took another year.
As of September 7, 2016 the 9th Circuit court ruled the matter moot since the land and cross were no longer owned by a government.
I tend to agree that the government shouldn't own religious symbols, but the decision about the meaning of a symbol should not be left to the people who hate religion.
That they hate the symbol was made evident in their repeated blocking of the sale to a private party who intended to keep that cross.
If the issue was actually that the government owned the site, then selling the site would have fixed the problem for everyone.
The problem for the anti-religious bigots was, and is, the fact that such symbols exist at all where they can see them.
Once someone stepped forward to make the site private and to retain the memorial, they demanded the site be sold to THEM so they could destroy it. Destroying the memorial was their preferred option in 28 years of litigation.
So, although I support the separation of Church and State, I also oppose fanatics on both sides of the religion in public debate.
When the anti-religion bigots can explain how their goals differ from State Atheism I will consider their bigotry cured. Do look at them hard and pay attention and see if you can tell the difference between what they ultimately want and the state religion being Atheism.
Another reason to hate them is they would not say a fucking peep if that giant cross on Mt Soledad was a giant crescent.
Bearing Arms mentions that several mass shooters had been subject to harassment or bullying.
They don't excuse their behavior in any way, they don't let being bullied be the justification.
Neither do I.
Bullied? Harassed?
Bitches, please.
I was bullied and harassed from my freshman through junior years of high school.
I had access to weapons.
I engaged in fisticuffs a couple of times in reply to fisticuffs and that ended the bullying.
There's nothing so awkward than sitting in detention with bully you'd just fought.
There's nothing so rewarding as sitting there in detention with him giving you the stink-eye and asking, "you wanna go again?" and having them find something else to stare at.
I've managed to put my bullied years behind me and, despite, having far more guns than everyone I know save one... I'm not out there murdering anyone.
The problem isn't me.
The problem isn't people getting bullied.
Being bullied might be a factor to keep an eye on, but it would be stupid and unjust to treat the victims of bullying as if they were sure to be the next mass murderer and truncate their rights somehow.
There are other indications which a bullied person will present which are more reliable. We should watch for that. I know we record them, because we've seen them in hindsight with a few of these shooters.
While I was supervising the bug bombing, Marv hit the range (full report coming).
He mentioned that the rifle range at the place is closed indefinitely.
They've gone from five lanes at 100 yards to just one and the person at the sign-in counter said there were literal fights over who got the lane.
All because the equipment keeps failing.
One time while we were there they had the covers off and it's a Rube Goldberg mess of stuff in there. Lots of circuit boards.
All to get a cardboard panel hanging from a wire out to a given distance.
We both looked at it and came up with several much simpler ways to do what the electronics were doing and our way of doing it would have been serviceable by the staff.
Keeping the mechanism from being serviced by the staff was the goal here, I think.
I am thinking a simple electromechanical deal with a stepper motor. If you know the diameter of your pulley, you know how far the target moves per step. An Arduino chip could handle this. Have a mechanical stop for setting the zero end and you're good to go.
The Lovely Harvey is presently doing the post-bomb cleanup.
As expected, the little fuckers were everywhere.
That's why we bomb, so they don't have a place to hide!
And, once they are dead, they can't scurry away at your approach so you don't see them.
I think we're doing Marv's place soon.
His is a little more awkward because he doesn't have a place to stash Trouble like we do. His is less awkward because he doesn't have to coordinate with two other people living with him.
If the cast of Harry Potter really wanted to show they believed their condemnations of JK Rowlings, they'd stop acting and distribute all of their wealth from the fame they accumulated by portraying Ms Rowlings' characters.
You either have to have the cake or eat the cake.
I'd say to hit the tip jar, but... Ain't one any more thanks to PayPal's intransigence.
The leak was in the same area as it's been the last four times we had one.
This plumber dug in from the side and replaced everything from the outside shut-off to the previous repair; tossing the first two repairs in the process.
None of the actual repairs failed, but copper that was installed with the foundations.
I dunno what it is about that corner of the house.
Looking forward to a few years without a leak!
I tell you, it must be nice to be independently wealthy.
Like plumbers in my area appear to be.
I'm on my third month of paying $200 extra for water I don't get to use because I cannot get a fucking plumber to call me back.
I'm about ready to pound on their office doors.
I've spent as much on the wasted water as the repair will probably cost so far.
Update:
The third place I called today (15th overall) showed up!
He promptly found the leak, about an inch from where it'd been repaired before.
That's good because we don't have to rip up the slab to get at it.
Even more fun is two other plumbers called after he got here. One said he understood first come first serve.
The other started to yell at me.
Once he'd run down a little bit I said, "You've had since September to call. I've been waiting that long."
"Oh."
No, shit, "oh."
"Let's pay the bills," I says.
Why is the internet bill suddenly so much larger than last month?
Because I'd managed to forget to pay it for two months!
How the fuck did I do that?
I don't know.
Caught up now.
