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$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.
I keep trying to tell people where their shit is leading.
But, because I'm Cassandra, nobody will listen.
There's a megapost in drafts that isn't going to be published because I know that nobody will listen.
The people who want a fight are too eager to square off to stop now.
One side has utterly failed to read the situation and is going to lose in an epic fashion.
The other side is going to think their victory is from widespread support of their politics, but it's more an "enemy of my enemy" situation than actual allegiance.
They will be surprised to find they're not victorious in the end as the larger part of their alliance kicks them to the curb when the fight's over.
It will be far better to not have this get to a fight rather than an argument.
The Boy asked me to explain why Frodo wasn't in The Hobbit.
He'd missed that The Hobbit is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings.
I'm not sure he fully understands the timeline, but he's got the relative times now.
When you accumulate years you get to say things like:
I have seen the Blue Angels perform with F-4's, A-4's and F/A-18's.
Further...
F-4J, A-4F, F/A-18A/B, and F/A-18C/D.
I wonder if I will get a chance for the F/A-18E/F this year.
I've only seen the Thunderbirds flying F-16C's.
