Gimme:
St. Louis police sell surplus weapons, including Tommy guns, for $1.2 million
Some of the 27 Tommyguns in question:
May 302017
May 132017
With the rise of rapid prototyping, the prospect of easy home-made pistols of some reasonable quality is rising. However, it has always seemed to me that the hardest part of making a decent pistol was making a rifled barrel. Most of the home-made pistols you’re likey to see tend to be smooth bore for the simple fact that that’s a whole lot easier than rifled. But as it turns out, rifling a pistol barrel seems to be a lot easier than you might suspect. This guy shows how to go about making a simple rifled barrel using nothing much more than a cheap drill press, a Dremel tool and a hydraulic car jack. Couple a barrel like this with the easy-to-manufacture parts of the rest of a pistol, and making guns at home becomes something virtually any amateur can do. And, perhaps, something any amateur *should* do, especially in uncivilized places where such things are legally frowned upon.
If you want better, cleaner rifling, more complex machines can be made. Even so, this should be well within the capability of a decent machinist.
These are two wholly different manufacturing methods to create the same thing. Both are, int he grand scheme of things, quite simple and straightforward. Certainly simpler than laws that pretend to ban firearms.
May 122017
An overly sawed-off shotgun:
A hand-held M2 .50-caliber machine gun:
A hand-held 7.62 mm minigun:
Note that neither of those machine guns is anywhere near on-target after about a tenth of a second of firing.
Basically… all kinda useless. And I’m glad I live in a country where people can make and fire such things.
And because why not… here’s a kludged six-barreled shotgun. There are some ergonomics issues.
May 122017
If I had five minutes, a modest camera and a tape measure, I could get the images and measurements I need off the MOAB on display outside the USAF Armaments Museum near Eglin AFB in Florida. Sadly, I’d also need to be *at* the museum, and that’s not likely to occur anytime soon. So… is anyone in the area, or going to be in the near future, and willing to take some photo-measurements?
Apr 302017
A clever solution to the age-old problem of how to make a fully automatic crossbow. Obviously external power (in the form of a cordless drill) is needed; the device is perhaps more of a slingshot than a crossbow since it uses rubber bands rather than a steel bow. Still, one can see how a true full auto crossbow capable of penetrating the armor of those pesky invading Mongols or Turks can be devised using this system as a basis.
What would be unrealistically spiffy: a system where each crossbow bolt had its own built-in battery or capacitor. Each bolt in turn would completely discharge its power supply into the crossbow; that power would be used to operate the mechanics. This way, the full weight of the battery needed to operate the system would not need to be carried at all times; the weight of the battery would form part of the weight of the bolt itself. But this might lead to excessively expensive bolts. And of course a true replaceable box magazine would be a good addition.
Plus, one can never get tired of the true supervillain laughter of a man who takes joy and pride in the construction of fully automatic deadly weapons that manage to circumvent the laws of his native Germany.
Apr 292017
The Magnus Effect is lift generated by a rotating sphere/cylinder/cone/spindle/whatever while in forward motion. Spin a spanwise cylinder properly, the relative airspeed over the top of the “wing” will be higher than under the “bottom,” with the consequent lift that would be expected from womens and gender studies basic aeronautics. People have been looking at building aircraft using rotating cylinders for the wings for over a century now; and while the idea is interesting, the weight and complexity, coupled with drag and other issues, have over-ridden any perceived advantages. Still, as this video showing the considerable efforts a guy went to to make an RC airplane using spinning Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets for wings shows, *if* you can make a functional Magnus Effect aircraft, you might be able to perform some interesting maneuvers. And possibly even intentionally
And because why not, here’s another Magnus Effect video. But this one… welll… it seems a tad lacking in the “wisdom” department, but definite winner in the “hold my beer and watch this” department.
Apr 222017
If there was ever a demonstration of the combination of “technical genius” with “wartime desperation,” it was the Bachem Natter from late in World War II. This German design was a point defense interceptor, from a time when B-17’s, B-24’s and Lancasters freely roamed the sky, laying waste to the German infrastructure. The Natter was a rocket-powered, vertical takeoff, partially reusable manned surface-to-air missile. It was to be armed with a multitude of unguided explosive-tipped rockets in the nose, probably to be launched as a single salvo. Reportedly, someone had the bright idea that the pilot would then aim his plane at another bomber for a ramming attack, bailing out at the last second. But since bailing out meant separating the nose from just forward of the cockpit aft bulkhead, the likelihood is vanishingly low that either the pilot would survive or that the Natter would continue forward in a predictable path. The more reasonable approach would still be for the pilot to bail out, but for both the pilot and the aircraft to pop chute and land safe enough to be recovered and reused.
The Natter was launched unmanned a few times and manned once, killing the pilot. It was *kind* of a neat idea, but the execution was not so good. The Germans would have been better advised to have worked on unmanned surface to air missiles than the Natter. But for all the claims of vaunted German efficiency, the Nazi regime was astonishingly inefficient, with many redundant and non-communicative programs.
Just as well, in retrospect.
There are many photos and illustrations of the Natter out there, but I figured these diagrams might be of interest.
Apr 192017
Coming in June to Japan: this $12 “Blade Runner” water pistol:
【展示会情報】アルゴ舎さんは、あの高木式ブラスターガンをまさかの水鉄砲化！？その名も爆水拳銃。これでこの夏は未来型ウォーターバトルが楽しめそうです。 pic.twitter.com/SzeB36nxAO
— 豆魚雷 (@mamegyorai_jp) April 18, 2017
Apr 132017
Explosives are, in a way, like rocket engines: they reached a certain plateau in performance decades ago and haven’t really gotten much better. This is not due to relevant people and organizations not caring to develop new ones; the problem is that there are just so many ways you can stick unstable molecules together in a cost effective manner. Some years ago while working ordnance systems (shaped charges for stage separation, rocket motor initiators, etc.) news came down that a new explosive (Octanitrocubane) was being studied. A *more* powerful explosive. Yay! Then the details came out: it was a *few* percent more powerful than HMX (the current gold standard in high explosive, and it has been since the ’40’s) and was expected to cost more than gold even after the manufacturing processes were worked out. Bah.
But there’s hope of new explodey-sauce:
Ground state structure of high-energy-density polymeric carbon monoxide
Links only to an abstract. But there’s a description HERE. Short form: at least theoretically, if you compress carbon monoxide, and compress it a lot, it seems it’ll form a polymer. It’ll turn into a solid. A solid that should remain a solid when the pressure lets off. But also… a solid with a whole lot of pent-up anger issues:
the team’s search found that the most stable cabon monoxide structure at ambient pressure and temperature would be a polymer, a repeating molecule with a backbone of carbon and oxygen rings called Pna21. But this stuff couldn’t form spontaneously—it needs to be made at high pressures, maybe around ten thousand times higher than sea level pressure. And unlike other carbon monoxide polymers discovered previously, Pna21 would be absolutely explosive, five to ten times more so than the same amount of TNT, thanks to the huge amount of energy it stores.
Five to ten times as explosive as TNT would be damned handy in an explosive. TNT is the standard; HMX has a “relative effectiveness factor” of 1.7. Octanitrocubane is the best at 2.38. But if polymerized carbon monoxide has an R.E. factor of five… that’s about three times better than HMX. Since HMX is what’s used to squeeze plutonium pits to make go “bang,” doing three times better would lead to the potential for smaller, lighter nukes.
Of course, this all depends on whether carbon monoxide really does form a metastable solid explosive at high pressure, and is stable enough to be safe. An explosive that goes off if it rises above, say, fifteen degrees kelvin is less than entirely practical.
Mar 202017
An article in dire need of an editor describing a 60 kilowatt laser system meant to destroy small targets such as drones.
The Army Will Finally Be Able To Blast Drones With Lasers Soon
Behold:
Hopefully, days in which the U.S. Army shoots down drones with $3 million Patriot missiles will come to an eventually end when the service starts using a 60-kilowatt laser system in a few months.
…
And, of course, the Army wouldn’t shooting down drones with something that costs enough to buy a mansion.
The short form: a single shot from a solid state laser system such as this would cost about a dollar. Anti-aircraft guns shoot rounds costing perhaps dozens to hundreds of dollars per round. Missiles cost hundreds of thousands to millions each.