Commercial-grade railguns (though this is actually a coilgun) remain non-practical as true weapons, but they are reaching the point of being fun range toys. This thing shoots steels disks which are nowhere near ideal projectiles. The website does not seem to list prices, unfortunately.
… at K-Mart on Black Friday. I worked at a K-Mart decades ago during the Cabbage Patch riots… January 6 ain’t nuthin’.
This feller made himself some Gyrojet rounds. Their performance is… meh. I can see some clear ways to improve the design; lead weight in the nose of the case, nozzles swaged into the rear of the case rather than pinned, properly formed propellant, cast with a machined teflon mandrel to create a multi-fin grain for high initial thrust and very brief burn time. And use better propellant; the stuff he used is sugar-based… fine for amateur model rockets, but you want *good* propellant for this application. Ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, aluminum powder fuel, HTPB “rubber” as the binder. Throw in some iron oxide to goose up the burn rate, some superglue to speed cure time, and hey presto, about as good as it gets. Deployable fins might improve stability at the cost of additional cost and complexity.
Further: consider cutting down the case length and bonding a pointier brass, bronze, copper or steel nose to it to improve stability, aerodynamics and penetration. Other propellant grain options exist; one I’d like to see more work on is a thin sheet of propellant, perforated to turn it into a mesh screen, rolled into a tube with the layers separated by thin strips of bonded-on propellant. A whole lot of surface area, very fast burn, labor intensive to manufacture.
My next book is slightly behind schedule, but it is coming. I was recently sent the first “proof” of the book after the graphic artists laid it out; a bit of tinkering yet, but it is nearing completion. I thought it might be interesting to post a shot of the last page.
Despite what the media ran with, the results of the Arizona election audit demonstrated *serious* issues that should be investigated and resolved.
Will they be, though? Given that a rational examination of the facts show that Arizonas “election” of Biden should be decertified, putting the current resident of the White House in jeopardy of being shuffled off to Shady Pines, it seems unlikely.
I would 100% get behind “cancel culture” to end the careers of any celebrities who advocate for the release of this guy.
A reboot? Meh. JMS at the helm? Hmm, ok. On the CW, home of “Batwoman?” No thanks.
I’d love to be proven wrong, but I bet that the villains will prove to be thinly veiled white supremacists. Half of the characters will be gay/trans. The actors will all be largely in their 20’s and Hollywood-attractive (i.e. pretty but generic and forgettable). The production value will probably be good, but the acting will make original B5 Season One look Shakespearean. Lots of women with blue hair, shaven on one side of their heads, shrieking about patriarchy.
The below video takes a good long while to meander around to the point, and meanders around a good bit when it gets there, but the point is fairly simple: modern progressives in the entertainment industry are pushing stories of “magic” because progressive ideology is basically indistinguishable from magic. Both systems reject cause and effect and assume that the universe will bend to your will simply because you want it to. This is part of why many on the left are opposed to logic, reason, the scientific method.
I’m not opposed to magic in fiction. But I am uncomfortable with fiction that *pushes* magic as some sort of viable world view. Hell, even in the fictional worlds where magic users are the “heroes,” they seem to inevitably be dirtbags:
1) Star Wars universe: the space wizards think *nothing* of using magic to telepathically change peoples minds, to cheat them, to outright steal from them.
2) X-Men universe: in X-Men 2, Professor X freezes a whole mall full of regular people in order to chat with some of his students. Beyond the outrage on these peoples rights to go about their day without being frakked with, who knows what damage this does to them on the neurological level. At least “Logan” pointed out that this sort of thing was, indeed, A Very Bad Thing.
3) The Harry Potter universe: the wizards are *forever* screwing with the minds, senses and memories of regular people. People suffer and die in large numbers and the magic users don’t give a damn.
And magic in fiction is generally *lazy.* Magic works without rules, or at least whatever rules it might have are arcane and mutable. The best stories are those where not only the characters but the *author* are constrained by a strict set of rules (i.e. natural laws). The author and the characters then have to *think* their way to a solution. This might be a solution that the reader can look at and go “why didn’t I think of that” as opposed to “where the hell did that come from?”
And as bad as magic can be in fiction, when it’s applied in the real world it’s simply disastrous, whether it’s psychic surgeons, astrologers or wokies railing against phantom fascists as if they were demons or dementors, with solutions as divorced from reality as a Stalinistic Five Year Plan.
What’s better than an M41A Pulse Rifle that fires Nerf darts? An M41A that fires airsoft. And what’s better than an M41A that fires airsoft? One that fires 12 gauge and 45 ACP.
WANT.
A test fire without the furniture:
Not quite complete, and with a bit of a problem ejecting the shotgun shells:
And the final product:
That looks like the *perfect* home defense weapon. Small and maneuverable, it fires two rounds that are *fantastic* for close quarters discouragement of home invasion. It’s apparently heavy, but that would seem to be less of a problem for home defense than long-term draggin’ round for combat.
As with the M41’s used in the filming of “Aliens,” this one is based on an actual Thompson. Those are heavy machined blocks of steel, and of course marrying a shotgun to it is a whole lot of inefficiency. But it seems that a modernized Thompson could be designed to take advantage of modern materials and designs; make a lot of it from titanium, for instance. This uses the standard double-stack 20-round magazine; I bet that a quad-stack magazine of the same length could be produced to raise the capacity to at least thirty rounds while still fitting within the M41A form factor.