Gun Jesus and the Gauss Gun

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., science, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 112022
 

The one where Forgotten Weapons takes a mass driver to the range:

 

I think I’ve mentioned this “weapon” hereabouts before. It remains interesting-yet-meh, shooting a half-inch diameter slug of steel at seventy some meters per second. This is *really* subsonic (something like Mach 0.2) and unlikely to prove fatal barring a good head shot at close range. Still: it’s early days for this technology. Jack up the muzzle velocity by a factor of ten (require a factor of >100 more energy being dumped into the projectile, a non-trivial task) and they’ll really have something… a “firearm” capable of proper firearm performance, requiring no gunpowder and, by the time it becomes available, largely 3D printable by the average home printer… with the non-printable bits being distinctly non-firearm components, thus unregulated.

 Posted by at 2:33 pm

Funniest diatribe you’ll see all day

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., humor, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 112022
 

Where you get to be lectured by a seemingly unceasing string of woke talking points about how humans, who owe our usefully capable brains to eating meat, need to become vegans in order to not be racist and misogynistic because… reasons.

It must be *amazing* to live in a brain like the one on display below. Eating meat is white supremacy. Somehow. Apparently popular culture is filled with depictions of “sexy fish” who want to be consumed. Fortunately, a lot of her more insane gibberings are met with laughter.

 

 Posted by at 2:20 pm

The brightest of bulbs

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 102022
 

Behold Juliette Kayyem:

Juliette N. Kayyem (born August 16, 1969) is a former bureaucrat, author and host of the WGBH podcast The SCIF.[1] She serves as a national security analyst for CNN and is a weekly guest on Boston Public Radio. She is the Belfer Lecturer in International Security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts[2] and a former Boston Globe columnist, writing about issues of national security and foreign affairs for the op-ed page.

This genius, this pinnacle of human enlightenment and intellectual achievement, has this to say about Canadian truckers:

For starters, I’m not sure how great an idea it is for a US government lackey to be suggesting that a neighboring nation attack its own citizens. For second, she wants to slash the tires and drain the fuel tanks of trucks on a bridge… and *then* remove the trucks from the bridge.

Tell me you’re a fascist without telling me you’re a fascist…

 Posted by at 6:23 pm

Well, I’ve gone and joined Twitter

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah.  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

Weird thing is, apparently I did it before. I tried to sign up and was informed that the email address I planned to use was *already* associated with a twitter account. Huh. Musta been a good long while ago, as I have no recollection of that. (Anybody know how to figure out what the username associated with that might be?)

Anyway, my plan is to use it solely as a blog backup of sorts, and a way to maintain contact when next the blog goes belly up.

I guess this is me now:

Sigh.

 

And so the degradation begins. Soon, TikTok. And then an Only Fans. Uuuuuuuugh.

 Posted by at 6:10 pm

Luty: built and tested

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., politics, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

The “Luty” is a submachinegun designed by a British feller specifically as a form of protest… a protest against British anti-gun laws. The goal was to show that an average person with minimal skills and access to s basic workshop and some off the shelf hardware could make a functional 9mm  submachinegun. I’ve seen a lot of people talk  about this gun, but few actually go to the bother of building it. And it turns out that following the directions does result in a functional firearm, though not a particularly *good* one. It might be interesting to sic a decent gunsmith onto it, and modify the design to make it a better weapon. Better trigger, better magazine retention and basic rifled barrel.

As it is, it’s a poor firearm. But a poor firearm is better than no firearm in a situation where the badguys – criminals and/or oppressive government agents – are better armed than the citizenry. As with the old “Liberator” pistol, a Luty can be used as a way to shop for better guns.

 Posted by at 5:29 pm

Blog issues

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., Hmm...  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

A number of people earlier today noticed that up-ship.com and the blog both seemed to have vanished. This occurred promptly after IT fixed a *previous* issue, one where if you came to the site using “https” rather than “http” your browser gave you a security warning. Fix one problem, incur another, worse one. But things now seem to be back up and running.

But it will happen again. It *always* happens again.

So once again I’m faced with a dire prospect: signing on to some form of social media, such as twitter, as a way to maintain some sort of online presence the next time the blog goes kerblooey. Every time it happens, I get messages from people worried that I’ve yoinked the blog, or it has been hacked, or I’ve died. The second issue has happened before, and I do fully expect that one of these days I’ll die (I haven’t yet, but looking at the track record of humanity, the verified list of actual immortals is pretty thin)… but it’ll likely take more than a few days for my website to get scrubbed after I keel over.

So… anybody have preferences/suggestions as far as social media platforms? All I’m interested in is something where I can post links to the latest blog post, and “I’m not dead” updates when needed. Gettr? Gab? I tried Discord specifically for aerospaceprojectsreview blog alternative, but I quickly found that I didn’t much care for it. Twitter, irritating as it is, seems the most popular choice. Taking suggestions.

 Posted by at 2:42 pm

Elektra has three moons

 art, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., science, science fiction  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

Astronomers Discover First Quadruple Asteroid

130 Elektra is a potato-shaped rock about 160 miles along the long axis, and now it has been seen to have three moons, all a mile or more across, orbiting it. I’m not sure if that’s terribly useful from a scientific or industrial point of view… but long-term, it’d probably make the asteroid a neat place to live. A spherical transparent bubble around the asteroid, just very slightly smaller in diameter than the length of the asteroid, should hold in an atmosphere; where the asteroid intersects the sphere can be the polar airlocks for ships, cargo and people. The surface gravity would be a meager 0.001 G’s or so; probably enough to hold stuff more or less down on the surface, but certainly low enough to permit easy manual flapping-winged flight. The moons could be simply “art” in the sky, but they might serve a practical purpose: since the asteroid orbits between 2.5 and 3.8 AU from the sun, it would be cold and the moons, fitted with fusion reactors, could serve as small artificial suns to light and warm the place. The asteroid rotates once about every 5 hours; this could be slowed to a 24 hour day if needed, although if it has multiple mini-suns orbiting it, the length of the day would be pretty weird no matter what.

 Posted by at 1:45 am
 Older Entries  Newer Entries