Sturgeon

I tried that shooting technique today with the AK. An article will go up tomorrow.

And, we're done!

Colli and Ensign could probably put their heads together for a guest post.

Guest post? Steve says I'm allowed to link to your blog once you do something small-armsy.

It's like splitting the difference between Avril Lavigne and Avenged Sevenfold. If that sounds terrible to you, it does to me, too. But for some reason it holds up. At least I think it does. I like it, but I want to hate it. It sounds like the sort of band created because his little girl wanted to be a Real Rocker, and daddy can't say "no", so he got all his musically inclined friends together and they get to suffer along in return for a fat paycheck. Enjoy the Taylor Momsen show. Or don't:

Sweet, a S&W 41!

Federal XM193F? That stuff is atrocious!

I always upvo-GOD IS GOD

Hit the nail on the head, Xlu (you will be called this from now on. In fact, I like it so much I am changing your profile name to it. I like that it looks sort of like the name of an alien emperor* but is pronounced "Lou"). What has me scratching my head is... Exactly what ammunition is the HCAR supposed to fire? I get that it's supposed to be a more powerful selfloading rifle (wait, isn't that like a Garand? Oh don't mind me...), but like, M2 Ball isn't any more powerful than .308. And M2 AP isn't being made anymore. And M61 7.62mm AP exists. And, and, and. Like, are you just supposed to shoot Federal soft-points out of the thing, or something? I don't get it. *Xenu, Lord Zed, etc; they all have short names that start with uncommon letters.

Trailer music provided by an awful-but-popular rock band? Check. Inclusion of a new-but-useless firearms design that's had more articles written about it than rounds put through it? Check. And finally, slow motion close-up of an incredibly lazy modeling/texturing job? Motherfucking CHECK.

It was only a matter of time I suppose until the appendix-esque OOW HCAR appeared in a video game: It even comes complete with a horrible theme song by The Worst Band!

My recent Joolian system flyby mission:

Pay attention, not only to the debate material, but also the format and methods used in it.

Now do an article on tank coaxes or something small armsy so I can link to your blog!

Delta IX needs to be an option.

And the US is still piddling around with the M1A3 program.

That's precisely the way I feel about things; we need to not let the other areas of the hobby slip past us.

That's an interesting perspective. To decide what shall go in the history books, you shall fight Collimatrix in the Deciding Pits.

Another typo. This is now my typo identification post.

Typo, mate. Rossmum's "Our Problem Child".

So I think you've taken what I said in a bit of a different direction (not necessarily a bad one). I'll try to be a little clearer. First, look at hunting legislation right now. It's going out of control, and hunting and other outdoors sports are steadily dying, starting with things like falconry and foxhunting. "The gun community" is doing basically zip about this. Second, look at where the marketing focus is right now (all tactical crap). Third, it's natural for a political issue to result in a "you're either with us or against us" mentality, which means that you not only had to support gun rights all the way, but it would behoove you to go hunting with an AR-15 or something. The end result of that is that nobody cares about hunting, everyone cares about tactical crap, and the Fudds who remain are left out in the rain. The South changed from Democrat to Republican with Nixon's Southern Strategy, BTW. I don't think gun control had a lot to do with it, but then there was the 1968 GCA, so I might be wrong.

They should have bought F4H-1s.

I would appreciate, for the time being, not crossposting from SH to the WoT forums. Copypastaing is fine, but for the time being I don't want too many links to here over there.

If I'm running a campaign, player death is always a normal part of the game.

Good start. I'm gonna make a lot of effort to give my feedback on this. I think it would be really cool to have an SH-designed game. I believe pretty strongly in merits and skills as being narrative items rather than mechanical items. Rolls should just be generated at the GM's discretion; if there are any "stats" at all, they are just for the GM's crib sheet. One thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the GM is overworked in a system that is heavily narrative-based. The less mechanical work that's delegated to the players, the more work there is for the GM. I've seen GM's get burnt out running D&D games, so we should be thinking about accommodating workload-reducing features. Way I figure it, reducing workload can be accomplished in 3 ways: 1. Having multiple GMs with their own hierarchy. Biggest downside to this is that you have a hard enough time rounding up just one GM, rounding up two or three sounds difficult. 2. Workload-reducing tools, such as Roll20.net. 3. Relying less on mechanics. Yeah, I don't see any reason to use hit points. There isn't anything preventing a sharp GM from saying "you've been shot in the arm, I rolled to determine the bullet's effect, it yawed early and fragmented, breaking your arm, you have X amount of time before you pass out from shock", etc. I think skill trees should be a GM crib sheet. In real-life, skills are inter-dependent on one another, and so a tree can help the GM determine how hard or easy it is for a character to learn a skill. The two things that must be avoided, however, are "backwards" skill learning (e.g., I leveled up and got 5 points and used them to learn how to shoot a rifle - skills should be practiced before they are mastered, but it should be kept in mind that this also increases GM workload) and character designing (I'm taking the feat "ham radio operator" because it's a prerequisite for "intelligence operative" - the extent to which this actually happens in real life - e.g., going to law school - is very limited). Cards have a lot of upsides. They also yet again increase GM workload. I think we're learning that the ideal RPG is one run by an omnipotent, omniscient GM. Relevant: Lindybeige rails on about D&D's initiative system. What does a "turn" mean? Really, I see no reason to use anything but D10s. It should be obvious by now but I rather liked White Wolf's (New) World of Darkness system. In it, you roll dice to attain a given number of successes. A success is always rolling above a certain value (7/10? IIRC). Tasks may take a certain number of successes to achieve (macguyvering a flamethrower out of spare parts may take six successes; someone very good at macguyvering things may find they are able to roll more dice per instance than someone who isn't, but at the end of the day it's still possible for a skilled attempter to take the same or more time to complete a task than a lucky novice.). I really like this task system, as it helps break the game out of the framework of "turns". If a roll represents 2 hours of work, and you need three rolls to complete the task, then it took you six hours. First two sound like NWoD. I don't think there should be turns. Read Erfworld to know why I don't think there should be turns. The whole "range" classification will become hilarious when applied to firearms. The basic concept is sound, I think, but it sort of assumes that a character is a series of square blocks always facing the opponent, with an equal chance to hit each part of the body. I think it would be worth investigating a more realistic system than that, but the workload level of what you have is good. I may take some time to investigate what can be done for melee and marksman combat systems to improve their fidelity. Sounds like a good start. Sounds like there's enough room there to with which to work.