This guy seems to have earned his seat in Valhalla

 awesomeness, blather, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, religion, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 292019
 

The man who terrified synagogue shooter – and ended the attack

The rampage finally ended when Stewart charged the gunman, screaming so loud witnesses say it sounded like a “chorus of four or five men” – a sound so loud a priest at a nearby church heard it. A former army staff sergeant, Stewart served in the US Navy from 1990 to 1994, then enlisted in the Army after the September 11th attacks in 2001, and served in Iraq in 2003.

According to The Daily Caller, which spoke with Stewart and his wife, Stewart rushed the gunman, threatening to kill him.

“Get down!” Stewart screamed. “I’m going to kill you!”

Stewart says he “scared the hell” out of the shooter, forcing him to flee.

“I knew I had to be within five feet of this guy so his rifle couldn’t get to me. So I ran immediately toward him, and I yelled as loud as I could. And he was scared. I scared the hell out of him.”

Here’s the great irony: the genetic defective who thought it was a neato-keen idea to kill a bunch of Jews for the greater glory of the white race was chased away like a little b!tch by a Jewish feller who was a *far* better berserker than he would ever be.

Additionally:

Stewart said he chased him all the way out to his car and began pounding on it — the shooter had managed to lock himself in. When Stewart saw him reach for a rifle, he punched the side of the car as hard as he could, intending to figure out a way to drag him out of the car. That’s when a Border Patrol agent who attends the synagogue came running out to the parking lot, yelling for Stewart to get down because he had a gun.

Stewart says this man may have saved his life and pointed to his use of a civilian’s gun as evidence that gun control isn’t the answer to these kinds of tragedies. Stewart was off-duty and was apparently handed the weapon by someone else on the scene.

Now… here’s hoping it doesn’t turn out that this guy is making this story up. In the era of Hillary dodging sniper fire and Smollett and whatever Trump is on about today, ya gotta have some skepticism regarding any tales that don’t come equipped with video evidence.

 

 Posted by at 12:40 pm

Fat Man & Little Boy: First Reveal

 history, nukes, politics, weapons  No Responses »
Apr 272019
 

When the United States nuked Japan, President Truman was right up front with everybody in stating clearly that the new weapons used were atom bombs. What *didn’t* happen, though, was the publication of photos of the bombs themselves. As a consequence, films from the 40’s and 50’s that depicted the actual atom bombs – such as 1947’s “The Beginning Or The End” – showed rather fanciful bomb designs… because the film-makers had to guess. And surely (I have do doubt the logic went) bombs that are based on such an unconventional process must have unconventional configurations.

It was not until 15 years later that the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were actually shown to the public in the form of photographs. Now, of course, you can get up close and personal with any of a number of actual bomb casings scattered around in numerous museums, but up until the reveal in late 1960… the average person had no idea what those early nukes looked like. Below is the December 12, 1960 article in Aviation Week showing the first photos; it’s interesting to note that even 60 years ago there ere already stirrings of the ulcerating over sensitivities and feelings that now so dominate any discussion of nuclear technology.

 Posted by at 5:15 pm

Stoppable/Restartable solid rocket motors

 art, history, Hmm..., nukes, projects, rockets, weapons  No Responses »
Apr 252019
 

(I thought that I had posted something about this before, but an exhaustive five-second search didn’t pull it up)

In the mid-1960’s the US Air Force became interested in solid rocket motors that you could not only throttle on command but also stop and then start again. Motors like this would, it was assumed, be quite useful for ICBM upper stages, varying the range of the missiles as well as tinkering with the otherwise ballistic – and thus predictable and interceptable – trajectories of the warhead-carrying bus.

The usual accepted wisdom holds that solid rocket motors cannot be stopped once started. This is quite wrong: you can stop them by flooding them with an inert fluid such as water, but this of course requires a pretty substantial mass of an otherwise useless substance. Or you can “blow them out” by suddenly greatly increasing the total throat area. If you can drop the internal pressure by several tens of thousands of PSI per second, the combustion zone will lift off away from the surface of the propellant far enough that the propellant will cease to boil and combust, and the motor will shut down. It can then be restarted by firing off another igniter, similar to the one originally used to get the motor going.

Several US rocket companies responded the the USAF. Shown below are two small Aviation Week articles describing two motor designs put forward. Both operated using an adjustable pintle: basically a plug that *almost* fills the throat. When closed down the throat area is low, and the chamber pressure is high; as the pintle moves away from the throat, the throat area very quickly gets far greater and chamber pressure drops. Done quickly and with full contraction, the combustion should cease; done slowly, with shorter strokes, the throat area will change less drastically and the motor can be throttled up and down. Testing showed that the idea worked as advertised. But the motors had all the performance of a solid rocket with all the cost of a liquid, with all the weight of a forklift added on; it simply wasn’t a practical solution. Storable liquid propellant rockets are more typically used on the upper stages of ICBM for fine trajectory control. Pintle nozzles are, however, often used on solid propellant kinetic kill vehicles.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:26 am

Columbine

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, religion, weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 232019
 

The 20th anniversary of the Columbine high school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, was a few days ago. When it happened, I worked in Lakewood, Colorado, ten or fifteen miles up the road; as memory serves productivity that day kinda ground to a halt as we listened to events on the radio. But then, productivity was never really all that good at that place on days when the boss was in the office, since he made it kind of a “toxic” environment (i.e. he was a dick).

Columbine was perhaps the first of the “modern” mass shootings in America. It seemed novel at the time, but would seem kinda meh today. This is not due to the availability of firearms, which have *always* been available, but more likely due to the media. Prior to Columbine, the internet barely existed and the 24-hour news cycle was still relatively new and novel; if an event like this had occurred a decade earlier, it would have gotten coverage on the evening news and the next days paper, and that would have been about it. But in 1999, CNN was all over this, 24/7. So it became fodder for other messed-up whackaloons.

Sadly, the events of Columbine have generated a wide-ranging set of factually inaccurate mythologies, including just what kind of people the shooters were, what their motives were, what their actual plan was (bombings, not shootings.. the guns were just backup), and rather bizarrely, the existence and religious importance of “martyrs.” The video below, by the always interesting “Ask A Mortician” channel, covers a lot of these myths… and continues to trot some of them out in the process, such as blaming the ready availability of “high power guns” for the incident. The guns actually used were shotguns and nine millimeters (and cheap, crappy ones at that), not a rifle in the bunch; and as the prior Oklahoma City Bombing and the Sri Lankan Church bombings from a few days ago show, if you really want to rack up the bodycount, you use bombs, not guns. Had those behind Columbine actually been competent bomb makers (and they weren’t), the body count would have been far, far higher.

Many myths persist because they are useful to someone. The martyrdom story helped a family grieve, and helped a *lot* of people make bank. Blaming this on guns helps those who wish to disarm and enfeeble the citizenry. Blaming this on certain musicians or video games helps those who don’t like certain musicians or video games. Other myths are errors that persist, I guess, because they sound good: these guys were goths (they weren’t), or cheesed off at being incels (the leader of the two was apparently quite the ladies man), or were part of the “trenchcoat mafia” (they weren’t… and BTW I had *just* bought a $200 leather trenchcoat myself that I wound up almost never wearing again because of this).

 

 Posted by at 10:15 am

Dem 2020 field now includes the guy who wants to kill you

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 092019
 

California Rep Eric Swalell is entrant number 18 in the Democrat Presidential candidacy extravaganza. If you think the name is familiar, it may be because I’ve posted about him before. Back in November he threatened the use of nuclear weapons against American citizens who refuse to knuckle under to his gun-grabbing ways. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your modern Democratic Party.

Unsurprisingly, Obergunbanfuhrer Swalwell plans on focusing his plans for the Presidency on gun control “for the children.” This is a platform based on BS and fearmongering; the facts about gun violence and children are available here:

Eric Swalwell Claims Kids Live In A Bullet-Riddled Dystopia. The Opposite Is True

In other news, noted poor guy Socialist Bernie Sanders is a stinking hypocritical millionaire.

 Posted by at 3:15 pm

Now THIS looks like fun

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Apr 062019
 

A Russian VTOL tailsitting remote controlled airplane built around a 12-gauge shotgun, for blowing pesky drones out of the sky. Load this sucker up with Dragonsbreath rounds, and the fun would be complete.

Imagine the regulatory freakout if an *American* had the temerity to build something like this. Sigh.

 Posted by at 9:54 am

India “shoots down” a satellite

 Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, spacecraft, weapons  No Responses »
Mar 272019
 

Kinda hard to “shoot down” something in orbit (as the wreckage remains in orbit and unlike waht the movies show, doesn’t just immediately fall from the sky) , but it seems they bullseyed it with a ground-based interceptor.

India shoots down satellite in test, Modi hails arrival as space power

On one hand: congrats for the technical achievement.

On the other hand: this shows that such abilities are becoming more and more readily available. And while India is not an enemy state, the US *does* have both vital space-based infrastructure *and* enemies. Thus driving home the importance of developing a true Space Force capable of defending what we’ve got as well as replacing what we lose.

 Posted by at 10:35 am

We’re doooooomed

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, rockets, russian empire, ships, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 102019
 

And this time I’m not being sarcastic.

US ‘Gets Its Ass Handed To It’ In Wargames

In short: modern US Navy supercarriers are marvels of technology and engineering, and they are fantastically useful in peacetime. in wartime? Giant easily-sunk targets. F-22s and F-35s sweep the skies clean of enemy fighters, then get erased when they land back at the base.

The US goes for quality over quantity. The likes of Russia and China go for quantity over quality. But when it comes to offensive missiles, at a certain point “Chinese quality” is “good enough.” A relatively cheap ballistic missile can be produced in substantial numbers by the likes of China, and even without a nuclear warhead such a missile would be perfectly capable of holing a carrier or trashing an airbase. And the US has done fark-all about building up the sort of anti-missile capability that we need.

And then there’s the easily smashed command and control system, which the Chinese can likely turn into a vast field of blue screens of death with relative ease.

The Russians and the Chinese cannot conquer the US. But they could conquer, say, the South China Sea or Eastern Europe by taking America’s terribly expensive and terribly undefended local resources out of the fight in short order. If this is demonstrated *anywhere,* it is probably safe to assume that the whole world order will collapse overnight.

 Posted by at 11:56 am
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