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Posts posted by Sturgeon
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On 4/8/2023 at 4:30 AM, tsv said:
I could never deny that Soviet artists had taste, though I had no clue it extended into their weapon procurement too. I don't know if I should ask this in the general firearms thread as to not derail this one, but I hope it wouldn't bother you to elaborate a bit on some of the things that Kalashnikov did to incorporate visual design into the AK. I'm terribly curious since I always thought it was an accident that the AK turned out to be a handsome rifle.
He did quite a bit, and it was deliberate. Making a handsome rifle was important to him. You can see this probably most clearly in the contouring of the bolt carrier and dust cover, which was unnecessary, but makes the AK look quite well sculpted. Obviously there's a lot of utilitarian decisions in that rifle as well but I don't think there's any denying the end result is iconic. -
On 3/24/2023 at 10:58 PM, tsv said:
I'm sorry to reply to such an old post, but I was reading through this thread and I can't help but catch on to you mentioning the AK's aesthetics.
I can't help but ask whether you mean that Kalashnikov intentionally made his rifle better aesthetically, or that the rifle simply accidentally ended up looking good?
I know less than nothing about firearms design and I assume that it is always form-follows-function, so the idea of Mikhail Kalashnikov (and the Soviet procurement system by extention) giving a damn about how their rifle looks sounds crazy to me. I can't imagine communists caring about how their rifle looks laying besides a corpse on a battlefield scorched by nuclear fire.
I am saying that Mikhail Kalashnikov very deliberately designed aesthetics into his gun. If you believe that the Soviet communists didn't care about aesthetics, you've never seen a Russian Great War-era propaganda poster:
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On 11/10/2022 at 1:55 PM, Lord_James said:
Question (probably for @Sturgeon), how does the trigger connect to the bolt in a bullpup rifle so it can shoot? Is there some kind of extension rod or a clever bolt design?
depends on the specific gun, but typically you have a normal rifle fire control group in the rear which the trigger is connected to by a long (and frequently unfortunately flexible) rod.
some bullpups are different, however, like the RDB, which has the fire control group close to the trigger, and actually telescopes the entire hammer around the bolt group. -
18 hours ago, Alzoc said:
Apparently^^
It's true that I hadn't heard of the project in a long time so I though it had been abandoned or was stuck in limbo.
They're using one of the propulsion props to counteract the torque from the makn rotor, which means one side of the aircraft has to be producing much more thrust than the other. They also are adding these propulsion props to a helicopter whose rotor will still will experience retreating blade stall, and you can only offload that so much. My guess is top speed will still be well under 300mph. Very lame!
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16 hours ago, Toxn said:
So I finally got a copy of X-plane 11 (thanks steam sales!) and have been looking through the plane designer that comes with the game (https://developer.x-plane.com/manuals/planemaker/).
Although I haven't fiddled around too much with it yet, it seems to be perfectly feasible to use it to design aircraft for competitions. I had hoped that we could run a competition on for paper designs, select the finalists and then build and compare them in X-plane (saving everyone the hassle of all having a copy of the game in order to participate), but looking into the details of how the plane maker works this probably won't be possible.
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On 8/28/2022 at 12:38 PM, Lord_James said:
So, to practice sending photos from my phone to the internet (in preparation for taking pictures of Artemis 2), I'd like to share some pictures of my most recent vacation to Mars. Yup, took one of Elon's rockets and blasted off! Utah is so damn beautiful.
I didn't want to derail looser's family photos thread, so I'll just make this new one.
Flying in
The first stop my family and I made on our trip was on the "wrong side" of Zion, or the less busy side. I loved the red rocks, and the sky was an incredible shade of blue; my phone camera doesn't quite capture that.
There's a whole lot of nothin' between towns and tourist stops, but the scenery is nice.
The next stop was Arches national park, which you need to make a reservation to get into. I took few pictures of the actual Arcs, because I cannot into be bothered.
Next came Dead Horse Point; it's called that because the cowboys use to drive the wild horses up onto the plateau to catch them.
We also visited Goblins state park, where part of the movie Galaxy Quest was filmed.
We went some other random places to. I don't remember which belongs to what, so I'll be lazy and put them all here
And our last stop was at Bryce national park, where I finally saw snow. I was ill prepared for such an event, however...
I would have posted this an hour or so ago, but I honestly got distracted by something on Imgur, which was a nice start to the day.
Nice photos, Utah is beautiful.
If you can, I'd get the most badass cameraphone (or, hell, DSLR camera) you can before Artemis II. I recently upgraded and the photos alone are well worth it. -
1 hour ago, Lord_James said:
Launch was canceled.
Scrubbed, not canceled. Trying again Friday.
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20 hours ago, Lord_James said:
I don’t usually wake up before 8, but I’ll get some, weather permitting.I wake up at 5 every day hahahah.
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1 minute ago, Lord_James said:
I do indeed live in south Florida; I’m at work that day but what time does she go up?A bit after 8 AM on the 29th, different times for the 2nd and 5th.
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Anybody here gonna be in town for Artemis I?
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5 hours ago, Kristof said:
When I say "for me to find only 3 cases in 16 years" it doesn't mean that I have been searching for 16 years, but that I looked at data from 2006-2022, which is when the war on drugs began in Mexico.
Fair enough! My mistake.
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11 hours ago, Kristof said:
I did look up various terms related to AP ammunition in both Spanish and English, but I admitted that it wasn't general enough. I do think that I'm fairly knowledgeable in armor related subjects, but this was simply a Google search that I didn't properly execute. I just don't understand how it warrants being called a "niggabitch" and a "blind hag".
Nah, it's mea culpa, I was getting too into it. Not your fault.
Having said that, presenting "a google search" as "16 years of research" is a good way to get dribbled and dunked like a Spalding in hood, around here.
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4 hours ago, Kristof said:
Although I can't clearly identify all of them as AP ammunition, it is interesting that the articles/tweets that the images came from don't refer to them as armor-piercing projectiles.
So you have no idea what you're looking at and rely on the authority of journal articles for your data.
4 hours ago, Kristof said:When I tried to look up ".50 caliber cartel", it seemed to exclusively be ball ammunition that the media called "AP" just because it's .50 caliber
Niggabitch, you can see the black and silver tips you blind hag.
4 hours ago, Kristof said:so I quickly dropped that route and focused on searching AP-related vocabulary in Spanish and English.
because you have no idea what you're doing
4 hours ago, Kristof said:To confirm, those were taken from Google?
Yes it's confirmed, I have eyes.
4 hours ago, Kristof said:It seems that some are from videos
and therefore obviously irrelevant
4 hours ago, Kristof said:I will also start compiling all the relevant images I can find into a list of some kind.
We must all bow in respect to the prowess of "compiling a list of some kind"
I eagerly await your "expert" input -
Another, very clear example:
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Grainy, but clearly another:
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And another (both M2 and M8 this time):
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16 minutes ago, Kristof said:
You would think so, but all evidence points to .50 AP/API being extremely rare. All weapons and ammunition eventually get captured by the police or at least shown online by the cartels for publicity, especially since we are talking about .50 caliber, so for me to find only 3 cases in 16 years means that it's simply not a concern.
You've only found 3? Here's one in the second row of the first page of GIS results:
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On 7/31/2022 at 7:33 PM, Kristof said:
I genuinely think that AP and API projectiles are extremely rare among cartel forces, since all videos, images and reports seem to show ball and, at most, tracer rounds.
If I can get the stuff, I'm sure the cartels can too.
Competition Suggestions
in Sturgeon's Contests
Posted
For the record, Flyout was released for Early Access recently and I have gotten ahold of it and it looks like even in its current state it will support the kind of aircraft competition we've always wanted to run. The detail is there, and the judges are able to import files and fly them off against each other. There is a sharp learning curve, but that's never been a problem before!