From the “I wish I’d thought of that” file

 awesomeness, Hmm..., politics, weapons  7 Responses »
Mar 262016
 

The N.R.A. Reimagines Classic Fairy Tales, With Guns

This being  a New York Times piece, go on and take a guess whether or not wilting violet hoplophobes get a lot of space in the article.

Here are the new and improved fairy tales:

Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)

and

Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)

Along with the basic improvement that simply adding guns obviously adds, something I quite like is that the characters are converted from the victims they were in the original stories into, well, non-victims. Instead of just being dead or needing to be rescued by others, here the characters display a bit of self reliance. Compare that to the gormless chickenshittery  married to belligerent dumbassery described here:

What Went Wrong?
Campus Unrest, Viewpoint Diversity, and Freedom of Speech

 Posted by at 10:25 am

A thousand tons of ridiculousness, now in kit form.

 awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., history, models, projects, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  12 Responses »
Mar 222016
 

The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.

I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.

The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.

The Ratte kit is available on Amazon.

 

 Posted by at 6:44 pm

Techno Arms MAG-7

 history, Hmm..., Meh., weapons, youtube  2 Responses »
Mar 182016
 

A video explainer of a very unusual shotgun from South Africa. It was designed for 12 gauge shotgun shells that cannot be obtained; the only shells that it’ll run that can actually be purchased are quite weak, with the end result being that the gun… just ain’t that good.

 Posted by at 11:32 pm

“Free coffee for life” at the very least

 Crazy, dumbassery, news, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Mar 172016
 

So, there’s a 7-11 in White Center, Washington, where a 60-year-old feller comes in about every morning to get a cup of coffee. Sunday morning he was having his coffee when another person came in swinging a hatchet; he briefly attacked Mr. Coffee Guy, then went after the clerk. Probably shoulda spent a little more effort on Mr. Coffee Guy, because if you are a hatchet-swinging nutjob it’s unwise to turn your back on a guy armed with a gun and the caffeine jitters.

Customer shoots masked, hatchet-swinging attacker at 7-Eleven

 Posted by at 3:56 pm

Gauss Gun

 Hmm..., science, weapons, youtube  1 Response »
Mar 142016
 

Here’s a nifty little magnetic dart launcher. The velocity/muzzle energy seem to be pretty low for any practical purpose, but maybe with some scaleup – and maybe with some liquid nitrogen coolant, I dunno – it might be a nifty and cumbersome way to make a pest of yourself.

 Posted by at 12:59 am

Gyrojet Carbine

 awesomeness, history, rockets, weapons, youtube  10 Responses »
Mar 132016
 

And here’s the carbine version of the Gyrojet rocket gun (previously shown in pistol form). It’s one of those great ideas that really just didn’t work all that well. I still think a modernized version could be made into a practical and entertaining weapon, but as pointed out in the video the original Gyrojet carbine, if made today, would instantly get you in trouble with the feds. The rounds were 13 millimeters in diameter… 0.3 mm greater than anti-firearms laws passed in 1968 would allow (anything above 50 caliber is considered a “destructive device, except, somehow, shotguns).

A modernized Gyrojet in carbine form could probably be made to burn propellant fast enough to burn out just before the end of the barrel, so that it would have full velocity right at the muzzle. Or at least have a boost/sustain rocket grain to get a sizable fraction of the energy at the muzzle. And give it a decent replaceable magazine, for frak’s sake. And a solid-fuel ramjet sustainer…

 Posted by at 4:19 pm

So who got a Sanger report…?

 aircraft, awesomeness, books, history, Hmm..., projects, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, weapons  No Responses »
Mar 092016
 

Still slowly slogging through the process of cleaning up the Sanger “A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers” report scans. Some pages are easy… a few minutes and done. Other pages, specifically the ones from the middle of the book, can take well in excess of an hour. The problem is that the Sanger report is hard-bound, and the feller who scanned it didn’t want to break the spine. As a consequence, near the middle of the book, the inboard bits of text are smooshed and blurred. The only way to digitally restore these is to copy/paste bits of text and individual letters to replace the bad bits. *These* pages can take a lot longer.

Fortunately the whole book isn’t like this. Near the front and back, the scans are quite good and easy to deal with. This includes the last two pages… pages that list where copies of the report were to be sent. there are some *very* interesting names in this list…

S2 (128) S2 (129)

 Posted by at 4:09 pm

The benefits of political connections

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Feb 252016
 

Anybody else? Decades in the slammer.

Former state Sen. Leland Yee sentenced to prison

Yee was a gun-grabbing State Senator from California who was put on the “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll” by the Brady Campaign for, in part, co-authoring the nations first bill to require “micro-stamping,” where a gun would stamp an identified into each cartridge it fired. He tried to ban conversion kits. He was quoted as saying “It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear, there is no debate, no discussion.” He pushed bills to ban the sale of violent (read: fun) video games. 

Yee was also a gun-runner, nabbed trying to buy rocket launchers from Filipino Islamic terrorists to resell to someone who turned out to be the FBI. He has been sentenced to a whole five years.

Guess what his party affiliation he is. Go on, guess.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:32 pm
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