psychophipps

The issue with governmental interdiction of corporate issues is one of...well, political momentum. If a group of Corps work together with NASA to put a multi-billion dollar Mars colony in place, there is a bunch of political momentum there just to get the project off of the ground, right? If the colonists freak out and mutiny, how are you going to convince Congress for permission and the House for funding to not only risk the lives of our own combat troops, but to actually get the money to build another series of transports to get those hideously-expensively trained troops there? I mean, every plan I have seen so far is based upon the colonists busting their asses and at least assisting in the building the necessary infrastructure to get people and/or material back to Earth.

Old Skool D&D used percentiles, d20s, and all sorts of other resolution methods, actually. This variance by individual types of actions (and the butt-ton of separate rules it created) is what led to the d20 system being developed.

Got to say that if I was a FBC, I would just wade right on in against fleshies as well. Look at the UFC as a great example. When someone wants to initiate a clinch, unless they completely suck, it's going to happen. The problem is...nobody in the UFC has a minimum grip strength of 2d6 damage. That FBC gets their mitts-equivalents on that meat bag just once and the independently mobile sack of puss, blood, and mucus is going to have to tear their own limb off to get free (or have the FBC do it for them). Add the minimum Body, Ref, and MA of 10 to the aforementioned SP minimum of 25 and that Mark 1, Mod 0 human is in for a bad day at the office.

BTW, that video is completely ass. All Briareos had to do was duck that head kick and bulldog that other dude into the ground. Plant his 350 lbs 'borg ass right on top of the meat puppet's chest in side control and start using those metal-supported fists to tenderize anything that is still struggling. Dancing around like a poof and giving your opponent room to work with will get your ass beat ten times more likely than taking some damage to deal way more damage. Make for a lousy fight scene, though...

While it's interesting to think that everything will be .gov based, I think that the push from NASA for more commercial exploitation and exploration attempts proves to be the better story maker. Imagine, if you will, a time when you can combine the robber baron-type commercial exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources since nobody really owns them and there's nobody to bitch when you rape it and leave it, and the New Wild West activities of the various Private Security Companies as evidenced during the WOT of the last decade. Space Pinkertons, anyone?

Remember kids, once you're in orbit then there are no governments to regulate you...

The main issue with TMA vs. systems like Krav Maga has nothing to do with the techniques. The difference is in the mindset during the instruction. Krav Maga has nothing mindblowing in it. There is no secret methodology to what they do. You take WWII Combatives, toss in a bit from some TMA systems, and you have Krav Maga on the mechanical level.

Krav Maga is very much like the stuff taught by many of the top-flight combatives instructors and a few other systems. Their take on the way things go during a violent encounter is that the best way to stop an attacker from harming you is to make them so busy defending themselves from your attempts at hurting them that they can't continue their aggression. It's really hard to complete a gun grab on a citizen that CCWs when you're getting your eyeball dug out of your head and catching a hook to the jaw.

Metric tons

This is just a really emotionally charged case and the media certainly hasn't been helping. People want a reason for it, why some kid had to die so needlessly, and they start thinking that Zimmerman must have been doing something illegal or the situation never would have gone where it went. People forget that bad things happen to good and bad people millions of times a day and that all it takes is 1/2 second of dumbass and you're up to your neck in a situation that is literally life and death.

There are plenty of folks that think that getting your head beat in while mounted and/or getting your head smashed repeatedly onto a concrete surface is just two people roughhousing and definitely doesn't give justification for lethal force. Of course, these people forget that adults drown in 4 inches of standing water, people die from hitting their heads while moving near cabinetry, and there are plenty of folks that have the IQ of a damp sponge after "taking only one punch" to the head.

I think that there needs to be a disconnect here between the situation before the physical violence and the physical violence that led to the shooting.

It's not illegal to follow people around, stalkers do it all the time after all, and police are all-to-freely telling the victims, "Until they threaten you, there is nothing we can do". You can't take a situation like this and magically make up some reason for it to suddenly be illegal when it's obviously not the other 10,000 times a day someone reports it. It's also not illegal to be on the phone when you're following people around.

False Imprisonment requires the threat of force or the actual physical restraint of the person involved. Following someone around that can talk to their GF on the phone, run away from you to where you can't see them anymore, and loop around to ambush you at your car does not False Imprisonment make. Get real.

I think that if Doomblade simply replaced "Zimmerman" with "a LEO", he would be singing a different tune, and I find that to be a sad state of affairs.

Zimmerman did a bunch of stupid things in this instance, he just didn't do anything outright illegal before he was assaulted. If stupid was illegal, I'd be in prison for life by now. Just ask my wife.

Complete agreement, Hanns. I used to get pulled over from time to time when I was heading home at 4am on my way to Gresham. Once the police officers got used to seeing my buddy's truck around then, and they realized we weren't dirtbags, we had no issues.

Not to be morbid or anything, but did you have laparoscopy or did you get "the BIG zipper"? Sounds like the former.

I totally lucked out and ended up getting 'scoped. They were on the fence at first due to the Pancreatitis but once they had a look around in there it went really smooth.

Strangely enough, I'm just tired. I haven't had a pain pill since before 4 am this morning (just before 2pm now) and my discomfort is limited to little joint aches and muscle pains because my endorphine system is still all out of whack. I was walking around the hospital the whole time before and after surgery (it got my mind off of my pain for a bit) which got me more than few very strange looks from the nursing staff the night after my surgery. Can't say how many times I answered, "Umm...didn't you have abdominal surgery earlier today?" with a smiling nod and jaunty wave as I kept walking past. Once these sonofabitchin' back spasms die down completely, I'll be tip-top in terms of pain management.

Knocking around and doing the backlog of laundry, dishes, etc. today.

Yeah, I had a pretty good case of Pancreatitis rolling when I got there.

Was feeling "blah" for the last few months with some occasional back spasms, getting sick for 24 hours, always tired, etc and apparently my stomach decided that a Fire Sale was in order on the afternoon of the 23rd. That fired up a completely ridiculous set of back spasms and 11 hours later (on a total of 1000/10mg Vicodin and 1500mg Methocarbimol at this point) I finally tapped out and had the wife take me to the ER. Poke tests, vitals, blood work, "Your soul better belong to Jesus...because your ass belongs to me", and a five day wait for my Pancreas swelling to come down with continuing horrendous back spasms punctuated by short stints of pain-free bliss before 1 to 1-1/2 hours of sleep only to be woken up again by back spasms. Rinse and repeat every 4 hours over the next four-five food-free days.

Surgery went fine on Saturday, but I was so puffed up for so long that my lungs were partially collapsed at their bottoms. Wake up, KTFO doc is asking why my O2 levels are shit like I'd be privy to that info right after waking up from surgery. I'm too busy coughing up fluid and lung butter to answer or care anyway. Doc and wife are talking over me like I'm three and completely forgetting that I can't see a damn thing. So coughing, hacking, and gasping I'm trying to get their attention to get my glasses so I can at least get a bearing on my surroundings before I have an anxiety attack. Almost get into an argument over it, but the wife grabs my specs. They strap on a CPAP machine, not put on...they strap that mother to your face like an old WW2 air mask...and suddenly every time I breathe in I'm getting my lungs blasted into by compressed air. Snap, crackle, pop down in the lungs, a few massive coughing jags later as the affected areas are re-inflated, and my O2 levels come back to far more reasonable levels.

No discharge on Sunday because my K levels are low, so I get to have a few K drips that burn like the fires of Hades on my right forearm and left hand before being cut lose yesterday morning.

I did lose 20 lbs, though.

This has the problem of trying to figure out what weapon the player wants to use before the round even starts. And what if the player is using a camera? Is it Photo & Film skill?

Most armed professionals (and not so professionals) have a go-to tool/weapon for this purpose. This is exactly why they train to access the tool, draw/deploy, reload, fire, etc from their various pre-set tool positions. For a gangbanger it's the strap shoved down the front of their pants, for a cop it's the baton on their belt, for an armed citizen it's where they decide to put their particular tool for that situation. It's not a hard process, even under stress, to effectively select a viable tool because under combat conditions the most viable tool is all too often the tool you randomly have access to at the time.

Yes, it would be the Photo and Film skill in this case. Especially in situations where the cameraman is "groundhogging" for pictures by poking their camera and head out for a quick picture before getting back under cover.

Would have thanked you earlier, Mark, but I've been in the hospital for the last week getting my Gall Bladder hauled out. Just got home today.

Just what the title says. Trying to get the dimensions of a .223 cartridge (width of case, length of a complete cartridge, overall weight, etc) for some comparisons to use in a caseless ammunition weapon design. Any help from my fellow gun fans in this endeavor would be appreciated.

Copper and zinc are both getting much more expensive which is driving up the prices of brass-cased cartridges. Copper has gotten to the point that people are breaking into empty houses to pull all of the copper wiring to sell as scrap, which can lead to multiple felony convictions.

Looks good to me. Be kind of weird seeing it without the cheesy one-liners and the face exploding thing at the end, though.

I think it's devolving a bit because we're focusing on mil-spec items.

The thing is, this stuff is what drives the current US civilian market. Look at the AR explosion and Glocks are very popular with civilians because they're very popular with police forces. There is a bit of swapping back and forth now, like the optics to US troops coming from their use in competition, but the "tried and true" of military and police use is a large driving force in the civilian marketplace.

Nice info, but the US Army just started upgrading the M4 weapon system for the entire fighting force.

M4 Upgrade plans

The US Army and the USMC also just upgraded to the M9A1 pistol, so that 4.6mm PDW with 15mm rockets thingy isn't going to get any real traction for a while yet as well.

Probably not going to see a swap anytime soon...

Caseless seems like a nice fix for costs but the technical and mechanical aspects of a caseless ammunition weapon are quite daunting. You need a stable, consistent explosive that is oxidation resistant (the G11 used a relatively expensive modified RDX, a mil-spec plastic explosive), tight mechanical tolerances in the firearm as the caseless propellant blocks won't take slamming around from the magazine to the chamber like a metallic cartridge (the G11 had a chamber that did a 90-degree rotation from vertical insertion to horizontal firing to keep the caseless rounds from damage in chambering with higher manufacturing costs), and a way to rapidly dump the heat that usually is collected in the casing during firing to prevent cook-offs during sustained fire.

To give you an idea of why caseless sucks from a supply and implementation standpoint, just look at the history of pretty much the only seriously considered for service example of a caseless ammunition military rifle, the G11. It was slated to go into service back in the Cold War era of all but unlimited budgets and billions of US military aid to West Germany. Now the Germans are united, this free aid has largely dried up, and the G11 and its ilk hasn't been seriously looked at since...just over 20 years later. If caseless was the bees knees it was supposed to be, how come it hasn't been looked at in the new surge of cost-plus unlimited budgeting in the War on Terror? I have yet to hear about a single DARPA design built around a caseless ammunition weapon system except for the Metal Storm which is only used for very specific mission criteria.

Cased ammunition is tough, resistant to corrosion, can be stored easily, is easy and cheap to manufacture if you're just looking for a chunk of hard material to exit the barrel of the weapon when the pin hits the primer (it's more expensive the more you care about terminal ballistics and accuracy), and works as it's own heat sink during firing. To be short, it's damn near perfect at doing what it's designed to do.

Brass is rather expensive now, actually. Russian and other Com-block countries have long used steel as their casing material. The US has recently followed suit with top ammunition makers like Hornady making steel-cased "practice" ammo made to meet the requirements of shooting competition power factors so you can shoot on the cheap while having full felt recoil.

Again, that's a nice list.

Question: What are all these high-speed/low-drag customers doing with their great new Metal Storm game-changing super-fly, double-dong equipment that isn't being mentioned anywhere else but on this webpage?

Answer: In the grand scheme of things, "Jack" and "Squat" except for very specialized duties and/or missions.

Most of NIJ just bought a bunch of Sig pistols so that Metal Storm LE gun obviously didn't make anyone there cream their jeans. The USMC was a major contributor to the redesign of the M9 pistol to the A1 and just bought a butt-ton of those while also buying a modified HK416 as their new IAR so they aren't falling all over themselves for this "latest and greatest Metal Storm has to offer" either.

So yeah, they sold a few units as proof of concept but, again, the long-term prospects of this "game changer" to where Joe Blow will bother buying it versus a more standardized firearm are far from stellar.

Metalstorm has also been around for almost 20 years with an overall world startegic and/or tactical impact that is best summed up in two words: "Jack" and "Squat". It's cetainly interesting and fun, but not even one police or military unit has swapped to this "game changing" technology for it's primary or secondary weapon system since it's inception. The only use, and the only serious development, of the system is in very specialized applications.

You can innovate all you want. If you can't get anything done with it long-term, who frickin' cares?

I can see the "polymer one-shots" as the only place where proprietary ammunition would work. Anything even approaching professional use would require a readily-available ammunition supply to keep the interest of collectors and long-term durable goods users like firearms enthusiasts.

Glock Models - all common calibers (9mm, .357 SIG, .40 S&W, .45 ACP, 10mm Auto, .380 Auto)...60%+ of the LE market and they sell like hotcakes.

FN Five-seveN - 5.7mmx28mm...Pretty much nobody uses it, not even groups that otherwise use the P90. Glock put out a caliber called .45 GAP and it's pretty much been a flash in the pan.

There's your answer as to the proprietary ammo question, boys.